“It’s not that big,” announced a woman with a battery-powered boom box who was listening to talk radio. “Just a twenty-mile radius.”
“They got power in the city?” Paul Pirie asked. The city of Wichita was nearby. “They know what made us go black?”
The woman grinned. “They got no clue. They just said it’s major.”
Pirie liked the sound of that. If he was real lucky, the power would stay off for the rest of the shift. It was time to sit back, relax and have some grub. He wandered over to the buffet, where the cafeteria staff was serving up midnight lunch over little fire pots to keep it hot. The labor contract stipulated that, regardless of the catastrophe, there had to be food for the idled personnel.
Pirie filled his plate with mashed potatoes, stew and gravy, and only noticed the heavy silence as he took a seat at a cafeteria table. There had to have been thirty, forty employees sitting around, and none of them said a word.
“What’s going on?” he asked a woman at his table. The woman, by way of answer, started screaming. She flung her arms up, spattering Pirie’s face with blazing-hot beef stew. He ran around the cafeteria shouting in pain while she ran around saying, “They’re coming! It’s the apocalypse! I don’t want to be left behind!”
More people panicked, and when Paul Pirie got the beef stew out of his eyes he saw what all the excitement was about.
It was about albinos who killed people. Gaunt, naked, filthy rat-people with pink eyes, who swatted at the plant workers with casual ferocity. Pirie saw heads smashed and chests caved in.
The killing died down abruptly when the albinos discovered the beef stew, which they ate with enthusiasm.
Amazingly, if Pirie’s stewed eyeballs could be trusted, the albinos were interested in factory equipment, as well as people.
One of the albinos spoke to him. It took him a while to figure out that the grunts and hacking coming out of the creature’s mouth were actually words, but a few fists in the gut improved his hearing. The albino was ordering him to dismantle some of the machines on the assembly line.
The albino gave him a sheet of paper printed with a fist of equipment—mostly it was small, specialty stuff used in the engineering lab. Pirie didn’t ask questions, just got his shift personnel to work tearing down the machines. The albinos opened up expandable, bullet-shaped sleds with heavy-gauge wire sacks suspended inside the framework. The parts had to fit into the sleds.
“We don’t know how to take these things apart,” hissed Alma, one of the senior assemblers.
‘They don’t know that,” Pine whispered. “Just keep taking apart until they’re small enough to fit in their sacks. The sooner we’re done, the sooner they leave.”
The dismantled components were stuffed into the suspended sacks and wired closed. Other sleds were filled with high-grade steel sheets and plastic blocks used for prototyping.
“What are they gonna do with all that stuff?” Alma demanded.
“I couldn’t care less,” Pirie said. “I just want them to go away.”
The albinos did go, but they took the entire night shift with them.
“Why?” Pirie cried. He was hitched to an equipment sled and had marched for an hour in the blackness of the cavern.
Everybody in town knew about the cavern. The Boy Scouts explored it every summer. You couldn’t get lost because it was only a hundred feet deep. Who’d have thought it contained an access crack that led into a cave that was miles and miles long?
“You to put this back together,” grunted the albino who did all the talking, and he waved at the sled full of components.
Alma, who was tied up alongside Paul, cackled joylessly. “You want to tell them or should I?”
“Shh!”
“Hey, you, what if we can’t put them back together?” Alma asked. She clearly felt she had nothing more to lose.
The albino shrugged. “If you got no use, then you get eated.”
Alma laughed again. She’d lost her mind. Pirie envied her.
“What are you planning?” Chiun demanded over the noise of the rotors.
‘I’m not planning anything.”
“Do not use that tone of voice with me, Remo Williams,” Chiun snapped. “I see your brain working.”
“My brain works?”
“Infrequently and poorly, so it is like a poorly kept automobile that functions loudly and with much gear grinding.”
“I’ll try to hold it down. Yippee, we’re back in Kansas.”
Smith had called in an Air Force helicopter to transport the Masters of Sinanju to the nearest of the incursions from below. It was a measure of his concern that he had allocated military resources even as the U.S. Military secretly mobilized itself to carry out the largest domestic defense operation in the history of the country. To further speed up their deployment, Smith had Remo and Chiun take a chartered jet from the Rye airstrip. That was far too close for security in Smith’s eyes. The jet put them in Wichita, then the helicopter took them at top speed over the suburbs. They would be at the entrance site in minutes, and Remo still wasn’t telling Chiun what he had up his sleeve.
Green County State Forest passed by under the chopper. The overnight campers who survived the attack were gone, and the park rangers had been escorted firmly away. Now it was a staging ground for military operations, with vehicles and troops swarming around the entrance to a rocky hole in the ground.
Their Air Force pilot, as ordered, landed long enough to have his priority shipment of supplies offloaded and he kept his eyes facing forward at all times.
He didn’t know who his passengers were and he didn’t care. All he knew was that when he was on his way back to Wichita and he glanced in the back, the passengers were gone.
The cordon around the cave entrance was fifty men strong. Somehow, they never saw the two new arrivals. The heat sensors missed them. The motion detectors decided the readings it got were far too fast to be animal, too slow to be airborne munitions.
“Why have they not come inside?” Chiun demanded after he and Remo had entered the small cave. “They wait outside like frightened villagers sitting in ambush around a wolverine den.”
“They don’t know how to come inside,” Remo said. “Junior says they’ve never simulated this kind of military operation on this scale. They’re waiting for the official plans, I guess.”
“Plans made by men who weren’t forward thinking enough to anticipate this? They are doomed.”
“You got that right. No matter how many men they send in, they’ll be able to attack two or three at a time at best. Those poor schmucks try coming down here and they’ll be dead ducks.”
Remo felt the weight of his responsibility on his shoulders and increased his pace, coming to the freshly chopped gap in the rocks where the Green Cavern had once dead-ended. Beyond it was an endless variation of rocky rooms, halls and pits. The narrowest passages had been widened with hammers. By the light of a glow stick, Remo and Chiun descended with the speed and smooth motion of slippery cave salamanders.
The trail was unmistakable. There was blood and worse on the cave floor. There was discarded clothing and wallets and keys. There were bodies, some with big mouthfuls of flesh missing.
They found one of the bodies alive, and she lived long enough to babble about a forced march, about being chained like a beast of burden to help haul the invaders’ booty. “I wasn’t fast enough. They had a bus to catch.” She had been abandoned—but not before a few of them chewed open her stomach. A quick snack before they moved on. “They wanted to keep eating.” She chuckled, blood coming from her mouth.