Chapter 15

“That slimy little weasel hopes we never come back,” Remo said. “Thinks that’ll put an end to his problems.”

“He is mistaken,” Chiun said, and sniffed low among a jumble of rocks. “It is very close to being man, but it is not quite like a man”

“A lot of not-men,” Remo said. “Lots of them, ripped to shreds by all the rotting little pieces.” He was trying hard not to step in the decaying shreds of flesh. “What do you think did this, Little Father? Even if that guy had a machine gun, he wouldn’t have made mincemeat out of them like this.”

Chiun found a particularly large chunk of discarded abdominal flesh and shifted his body so that the glimmering light of the faraway bulb could reach it. Despite the near blackness, his eyes could see well enough. “Eaten.”

“By what?” Remo asked.

“Each other. Look.”

Remo got as close as he needed, and no closer, to the chunk. He saw human teeth marks.

“Christ,” he muttered. “They turned on each other. Some of them get wounded, probably shot by the guard, and they go into a feeding frenzy.”

Chiun nodded grimly.

Remo sighed. “So what are they, why’d they come here and why are we the schmoes who have to go down there and find out?”

“We are not the schmoes,” Chiun said sharply. “You must retreat now.”

“No way.”

“You know what I fear. In the blackness of the earth below—”

“Shh! Stop. We go together.”

“I would keep you from relapsing.”

“Then don’t keep going on and on about it. Just pretend it’s not an issue.”

“But it is,” Chiun said with stamp of his foot.

“Not unless you make it one.”

Chiun and Remo faced each other, bathed in the hothouse of decay, and Chiun pursed his old lips. “You will go, regardless of my wishes.”

“I will.”

“You are a stubborn young goat, Remo Williams.”

Remo had the perfect response almost coming out of his mouth before he swallowed it and nodded “Let’s go.”

When they were well around the next corridor, the light of the distant bulb failed to reach them at all.

Aboveground there was almost always at least some glimmer of light, no matter how dark the night, and a little light was all the Sinanju Masters needed to see by. They would expand their pupils, seeing in the darkness better than any great cat. Here, under the earth, it was different. There was no moon or stars or other light source. It was absolute blackness, and their eyes could not make use of light they did not have.

“Turn on your light,” Chiun said.

“I’m starting with one of these deals to see how long they last.” Remo withdrew a plastic glow stick and bent it, cracking the plastic vial inside and mixing the chemicals to create a lime-yellow glow. It was dim by human standards, but bright enough for Remo’s eyes to see the extent of the tunnel. The mine shaft was a broken mess of fallen rock, and it soon petered out in a jumble of boulders. The blood trail led them through a narrow crevice, and they found themselves treading in a natural cavern in which Remo sometimes was forced to walk sideways and had to constantly stoop. They emerged a quarter mile later into a larger, descending cave, which was naturally stepped. A stream pooled on each level before cascading down.

Chiun sniffed distastefully at the water. “Poison.”

“Radiation taint,” Remo agreed. “Come on.”

Chiun sighed and followed as Remo led the way, leaping down die large steps until they reached a foul, steaming pond where the water evaporated and condensed the pollution into a near-toxic swamp. Remo and Chiun bypassed it swiftly, slipping into the corridor that extended beyond, but not before their eyes fell on the familiar shapes cooking in the miasma.

“Human Bones,” Chiun said. “Or close to human.”

“I don’t care how much Smitty bitches, I’m not sticking my arm in to get him a sample,” Remo said.

Down the tunnel they went, finding the waning blood trail easily enough. The temperature was reaching the extremes of the Sahara Desert, and the blood put out a potent stench as it rotted. There was no skill needed in finding the path. They went on for miles until, at the bottom of a sandy cavern, they found clear footprints.

“They look like people,” Remo said with a shrug. “Here are shoe prints of their captives.”

“How long have we been down here, anyway?” Chiun looked at him oddly, but realized even his sense of the passage of time felt blurry. “Three hours and twenty-seven minutes since we left the idiot miner.”

“These things are good for shit,” Remo said, displaying the glow stick, which was already losing its luminance.

“We should go back,” Chiun said.

“Forget it. We’ve got three glow sticks left, plus the flashlight.”

The corridors were descending only slightly for all their ups and downs, so Remo estimated they had covered just three more land miles before he and Chiun froze simultaneously, straining against the heavy silence, and heard sounds far ahead.

They were in a sort of grotto, with a forty-foot ceiling over an intersection of two narrow passageways. Remo tossed the glow stick far back up the passage the way they had come, then he and Chiun relied on their memory of the interior layout of the grotto, scaling the jagged walls and finding easy perches halfway up. They waited in blackness as the sounds came nearer.

“They move slow. Let us speak to pass the time while these man-eaters approach,” Chiun suggested.

“Okay,” Remo said. “But not about you-know- what.”

“Agreed.”

“Tell me about your travel trailer.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

So they didn’t speak again as the distant rustling and scraping sounds became distinct, then they made out the panting and grunting. The steady airflow from below brought them the odor of the creatures, a nightmare stench that was almost human, mixed with the decay of human flesh. The smell was overpowering as the scrabble of their feet came just outside the grotto, and then creatures emerged.

Remo realized what had been bothering him: as the band of almost-humans closed in he should have picked up the faintest glow of their light source, but there was nothing. The band was now in the grotto with himself and Chiun and still no light. He could hear the slapping of their bare feet and the snorting and grunting. Seven of them, he judged by their noise, and all adults.

The band came to a nervous halt just outside the grotto, making rasping noises that might have been speech.

Remo turned on the flashlight and wedged it in a crack in the wall, filling the grotto with a dismal yellow fight.

Chiun did not object. They had both ascertained that these creatures were blind. Otherwise, why would they travel in the black earth without a fight of some kind?

So the glow stick Remo had tossed up the hall as a lure would be unseen, but if the creatures had enhanced sense of smell, which was almost a necessity, then they would return to the grotto soon enough.

They did, dropping their wordless jabbering to snakelike whispers. One of them ventured through the entrance into the grotto, sniffing with his head hung low, then following the scent, raising his head toward Remo and Chiun and growling hungrily.

Remo saw something that was almost a human being, with the bloodless white flesh of an albino. His hair was white where it wasn’t matted with mud, and a few wisps of white beard showed where they were not sticky with filth.

“Yuck,” Remo observed.

The albino dropped into a crouch, growling viciously, “Food!”

“What do you know, it talks,” Remo observed.

“And climbs,” Chiun added.

The albino’s fingers spidered on the rocks and quickly found strong handholds, carrying the creature up the wall as the others streamed up after him, joining the attack. Remo waited until it was within reach, then snatched the first attacker by the hair. The albino clawed Remo’s arms until Remo gave him a shake so hard his teeth chomped together and broke off in chips and shards. One of the other albinos came within arm’s reach, and Remo used the body of his companion to pound him. The figure toppled off his perch and landed on the rocky floor twenty feet below, motionless.

“Who are you?” Remo asked his captive. The thing growled and hissed. “C’mon, I know you speak English.”

Remo held his hand out experimentally, tantalizingly close to the attacker, whisking it away just before the jaws snapped down on his fingers. The clack of the teeth was tremendous. These were not warning bites; they were take-off-a-mouthful-and-eat bites. The attacker became angrier, like a terrier teased with a dangling hot dog.

“Come on, talk to me.”

“How long will you toy with him?” Chiun asked. One of the attackers came near enough to lunge at the old Korean, and Chiun’s hand sliced through the air, his scythelike fingernails passing without effort through the exposed throat of the animal creature.

Remo’s attacker was startled when he sensed the sudden eruption of blood smell and the crunch of the severed head, then the toppling body reached the rocky floor below. Immediately there was a riot of noise as the albinos descended upon their slain companion.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Remo grabbed his attacker by the wrist and held him out over the grotto, where the creature struggled in vain and slobbered.

“Look at him. All he cares about is getting in on the free lunch,” Remo said. “I have a feeling these guys aren’t going to be offering up a lot of good hard information.”

“And I for one have no desire to witness their feeding orgy,” Chiun added. He stepped off his perch and landed amid the frenzy of cannibalism, robe flapping and hands striking before his sandals were even in contact with the blood-spattered rock. Remo sighed and jumped down with him, lashing out with one hand here and there. In seconds the band of albinos was extinct, save for the sobbing, drooling survivor in Remo’s other hand.

“Boy, he really wants his lunch.”

“Like all whites, his behavior is dominated by his gluttony. Put this one inside a restaurant where fried cattle is served and he will arouse no special notice.”

“Yeah, well, this one might serve some other purposes, too,” Remo said. He released the albino’s wrist and pointed at the rear entrance to the grotto.

“Home, boy!”

The albino went in the wrong direction, making a dive past Remo at the strewed and bloodied corpses, only to find himself somehow back on his feet exactly where he had started. Remo snatched for the creature’s large earlobe and gave it a pinch.

The albino shrieked in pain.

“No din-din. Go home.”

The albino lunged again.

“Who would have thought your eloquent argument would fail to persuade him?” Chiun asked.

“C’mon, dude, I don’t have all day.” Remo gave the albino increasingly painful lessons. The banshee wails became deafening.

Chiun yawned loudly.

“You think you can do better?” Remo demanded. Chiun marched forward and snatched the creature by the neck, paralyzing him instantly. As the wide-eyed, O-mouthed albino toppled, Chiun snatched at its long and filthy mass of hair, twisted it into a rope and grabbed hold of it before the body cracked against the stone floor, then he marched off into the rear tunnel.

“What’s going on?” Remo demanded, following.

Chiun tossed the twisted rope of hair into Remo’s palm, then whisked his own hands together to fling off the detritus. “If there was a shark in a lagoon filled with chum, you would not get him to follow the inlet to the open sea, regardless of how many times you poked him with a stick.”

“Huh?

“But if you tie a rope to his tail and drag him away from the blood smell, he will be more cooperative.”

“Cooperative how?”

“It does not matter how. What matters is that he will no longer be inflamed with blood lust.”

“I don’t see why I would ever want cooperation from a shark.”

“Are you being deliberately dense?”

“Deliberately dense like a fox,” Remo retorted. “Okay, I get it. Whitey’s feeding drive is stronger than all his other instincts, even survival and the need to escape pain.”

“Yes.”

They followed the clear trail left by the band when they had come up, and when they were a mile from the grotto the smell of the blood was erased by the distance and the upwind airflow. Chiun released the albino from his paralysis with another pinch of the neck nerves, then pushed the groggy creature to its feet.

“Home, Whitey,” Remo said.

The albino lunged with two hands and his chomping jaws, brought up short when Remo ghosted out of the way and flicked him in the ear.

The dismayed albino dropped into a crouch, cranked his head back and forth, then sprang wildly at Chiun, who stepped out of the target zone at the last possible instant. The albino’s senses told him his prey was still where it should be until the moment he crashed into the rock floor. Then he was on his feet, howling in frustration.

Remo moved in and tapped him on the shoulder. “Here, Whitey.”

The albino attacked, and grabbed empty air. Remo tapped him again and again until the albino was a frantic dervish lunging in all directions. The dismayed creature finally collapsed blubbering.