"Yeah," said another. "And that skinny guy's doing the same. Look."
"Hey," the first fireman yelled at Remo. "What you're doing is impossible."
Remo shrugged. "Get ready to rush in when the dust settles."
"Sure. But do you mind telling us how you can do that? I've been a fireman seventeen years. What you're doing isn't normal."
"Rice," Remo said. "I eat lots of rice."
The firemen looked at one another blankly.
In a matter of minutes, the gutters ran brown with dust-laden water. The air became breathable once more. Ambulances and rescue equipment advanced into the area of destruction.
Remo and Chiun followed them in.
"Emperor Smith will be displeased. We are being very public."
"Can't be helped. Besides, it's gotta be done."
"Agreed."
The work went on with numbing repetition. Remo and Chiun reentered the shattered spire, whose interior was a jumble of smashed and upended furniture. They brought many bodies out-few of them alive. Where the rescue crews could not penetrate, Remo and Chiun cut through twisted girders and blocked concrete.
Hours later, they were still at it. The few living victims they found dwindled with each new limb they dug from the rubble. The rescue people, asking no questions, simply carried the bodies away.
When night fell, Remo and Chiun entered the Magnus Building, whose twentieth floor was now its top floor. They went up the stairs and forced open a stairwell door. They climbed over the tumbled furniture that blocked the doorway and emerged into open air.
The twentieth floor lay open to the sky. A biting wind came from the east, carrying the bitter tang of the winter ocean. Mixed with the salt air was another scent, also salty. Blood.
Around them, the spires of Manhattan looked almost normal. But the twentieth floor was anything but normal. It was a platform of rubble and half-collapsed partitions. "Let's get to work," Remo muttered.
A hand poked up from under a splintered desk. Remo lifted the desk free and reached for the hand. It felt cold, like a clay model. Digging at the debris, Remo found that the arm had been severed at the shoulder. Though they unearthed the remains of a dozen other people, they never found the rest of the body.
There were no survivors on the upper floor. Dejectedly they descended to the street. They were covered with powdered plaster, like two dusty specters.
"You know what I wish?" Remo said when they were back on the street.
"What is that, my son?" asked Chiun, turning to look at his pupil. Remo's face was a mask of powder. Two channels ran down from his eyes, where the tears of frustration had started.
"I wish the bastards who did this were right here. I'd sure make them pay."
"Will you settle for those?"
Remo looked where Chiun was pointing.
"Yeah, they'll do just fine," Remo said, seeing a pack of street punks slipping through the police lines. They went from body to body, fishing into pockets and pulling out whatever they found. Remo saw a teenage boy in a hooded gray sweatshirt take a dead man's shoes off his feet. Remo took him first.
"Put them back," he said, his voice as gritty as his face.
"Buzz off, chump. He won't need 'em any longer."
"I can appreciate your attitude," Remo told him. "Now, here's mine."
Remo took the shoes from the boy's hands with a quick grab. His foot stomped down on the looter's instep. "Yeow!" The punk started hopping on one foot, clutching his shattered other foot.
"Understand?"
"No. What'd you do that for?"
"He is obviously slow," Chiun said, watching.
"I guess," Remo said. He stomped on the boy's other foot. He got a satisfactory scream as the teenager went down on his butt, clutching both feet like a baby in its crib.
"Now do you understand?"
"You're angry, Jack. I can dig that."
"It's a start," said Remo, looking around. A pair of older men were stripping a woman of her jewelry. The fact that the woman's body had no head seemed not to bother them at all.
Remo walked up to them and took each by the scruff of the neck.
"Hey! What gives?" they yelled.
"I want you to know one thing," Remo said between tight teeth.
"Yeah?"
"It's not the jewelry. It's the desecration."
And Remo slammed their heads together so fast that their faces fused into a single jellied mulch. He let the bodies drop. Immediately other looters descended upon their fallen comrades and stripped them of their belongings.
"I don't believe this," Remo said. "Didn't they see what I just did?"
"You obviously did not make a lasting impression."
"What am I supposed to do? Set them on fire and wave them in the air?"
"A good idea, but neither of us carries matches. Your one mistake, Remo, is that you did not capture their undivided attention."
"Too bad I left my gold chain at home," Remo said dryly. "That would do it for sure."
"Watch," said Chiun, walking toward a knot of looters. They were carrying off a body, a woman's body. Something was said about the body still being warm enough to get some use out of it.
Chiun placed himself in front of the men.
"I choose you!" Chiun said loudly, pointing at the man carrying the woman's shoulder.
"Move aside, old man," the looter warned.
Chiun lashed out with a single finger. The nail touched the man in the small of his back. The man keeled over. Chiun whirled in place, catching an outflung wrist with one delicate hand. The man's falling body jerked as if he had been caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine. He flew out, then up.
The others, still holding the woman's body, watched their friend rise into the air some thirty stories. The body seemed to hang motionless for a long time, then started to fall.
The body broke the concrete when it landed. The others felt the crunching impact in their own bones.
"What happened to him will happen to you all if you do not begone this instant!" Chiun proclaimed.
"Okay if we keep the dead bitch?" one of them wondered. Hearing that, Remo stepped up to the man. He placed one foot on the man's sneakers to keep him anchored. He grasped the man's neck, his thumbs stiffening under the jawbone.
Remo pushed up suddenly.
There was an audible pop and the man suddenly had a neck that was three times its original length. He closed his eyes slowly.
"That man died because he asked a stupid question," Remo said, letting the body fall. "Anyone else have a stupid question?"
The surviving quartet looked at Chiun, at Remo, and then at one another. Gently they set the body down. They started to back away. Those with hats doffed them politely. There were mumbles of "Excuse me" and apologies.
Remo looked around. All of a sudden, there were no looters anywhere in sight. He placed a sheet over the woman's body, shaking his head.
"We should have wasted them all. Animals."
"Another time. There may be more good we can do." It turned out there was none. No one expected to find any survivors in the pulverized North Am complex. A new building, it had shattered like the glass house it appeared to be.
Remo and Chiun attacked one side of it anyway, plucking away shards of bluish glass. They unearthed a blackened tangle of metal.
"Looks like the furnace or something," Remo muttered. Chiun sniffed the air delicately.
"No," he said. "Smell it. It is burned. And a boiler would be found in the basement, not above the street." Remo reached out to touch the mass. Chiun suddenly got in his way.
"Remo, do not touch it. It may be kinetic!"
"Not anymore," Remo said. "Kinetic isn't what you think, Little Father. It's not like being radioactive or something. It means something that moves."
"I can feel its terrible heat still."
"Reentry heat," said Remo, clearing away more debris. "Whatever it was, it's a mess now."