Feeding Frenzy td-94

by Warren Murphy

  Chiun sniffed and said nothing. Cheeta Ching remained a sore subject with him. Don Cooder was one of the network anchor casualties and a thorn in their side for years, until they had pulverized him.

  A reporter they recognized as Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler was speaking into a hand mike and was staring into a minicam.

  "Here in the rugged wilderness of Mendocino County, California, a new breed of American environmentalists are taking a stand against the despoiling of nature. PAPA. People Against Protein Assassins. They don't eat meat or dairy products. Only pure, natural food enters their systems. Only the purest water, only foods harvested in their natural habitat. Here, in one of the richest breeding grounds of the thunderbug, a valiant band, ignoring the naysayers, are deep in an experiment more monumental than the much-maligned Biosphere 2 experiment. They are the vanguard, eating a natural insect, becoming human insectivores in their quest for purity and oneness with nature."

  "Stay low, Little Father," warned Remo. "This guy knows you on sight."

  Ned Doppler, his wealth of hair squatting on his head like some steroid-intoxicated fur, seemed oblivious to everything but his lines, which he was reading off cue cards.

  "Crap," said Remo. They moved on.

  Another live remote was in progress not much further along. Remo recognized the boyish-looking newsman as Tim Macaw, who anchored the MBC evening news.

  "The Thunderbug. Miracle Food or Menace? Who is to know? Who can know? The debate is already raging here in this mountain fastness between the legions of PAPA and the hordes unleashed by the Food and Drug Administration. Will right triumph? Will good be rewarded? Will the PAPA continue to nourish their bodies with Ingraticus Avalonicusor . . . or will we ever know? Can we ever know? Can we ever really, really, really, ever know anything?"

  "Not if we listen to dickheads like you," Remo yelled in a loud voice.

  A producer called, "Cut!"

  Macaw looked around angrily. "What jerk ruined my standup?"

  But Remo and Chiun were no longer in sight. They had drifted on.

  It was like that for the next five hundred yards. Reporters talking into microphones, giving opinions without foundation, speculating without sources, and clawing for a piney background that would make it seem as if they and only they had the exclusive story.

  It was impossible to get close to the podium where Theodore Soars-With-Eagles and his adherents were about to appear, unless Remo and Chiun wanted to insinuate themselves into a growing circle of media that resembled a fast-forming mold ring, which they could, and risk having their faces televised nationally, which they preferred to avoid.

  "Those big tents over to the south must be the Feds," Remo whispered. "Let's try them."

  "I do not see the bugs everyone speaks of," said Chiun, examining the bottom of one sandal. "What do they look like?"

  "Search me. All I know is that they're pretty small."

  Chiun stooped, brushing the dried-out grass with his long fingernails. "I see many bugs. Which are which?"

  "All bugs look alike to me. Just don't eat any, okay?"

  Chiun straightened. "Remo! I would no sooner eat a bug than I would go naked in public."

  "Do me a favor. Don't do either."

  On the other side of a stand of ponderosa pine that seemed to form a natural barrier, they found the big army-style tents.

  "Damn!" said Remo. "The media's all over this place too."

  "Why do you not beat them, as did the adherents of the last President?" wondered Chiun. "He would simply revile them before large crowds, and his followers would descend on the Philistines with hard sticks."

  "Pass," said Remo. He was looking around, thinking that this assignment, already a pain, was fast becoming a logistical nightmare. He was about to suggest they withdraw to the nearest hotel and wait for the feeding frenzy to subside when someone with a mircrophone suddenly shouted, "Hey! Isn't that Twin Peaks?"

  "You mean Capital Hills."

  Remo saw what the two meant an instant later. And it wasn't landscape.

  She came without a mike or sound man or minicam. She didn't need them to break a path. Her chest looked big enough to knock down an advancing skirmish line. It bounced.

  Remo had seen a lot of bouncing breasts in his time. Usually they bounced in tandem. These did not. One went up as the other was going down. Sometimes they collided in passing and caromed off one another.

  It was clear the woman was not wearing a bra. She wasn't big on shaving her legs either. She wore khaki shorts that left her legs bare. Or as bare as the legs of a tarantula could be. They were that hairy.

  And Remo had a deep suspicion that she dispensed with underarm deodorant too. The cool California air was becoming acrid.

  The woman carried a stubby pencil and a frayed spiral notepad, so Remo took her to be a print reporter.

  "Is anyone here not with the feds?" she bellowed:

  The electronic press lifted their hands. Their eyes stayed on her chest.

  "Not you idiots!" she snapped. "I know who you are. I'm looking for someone from PAPA."

  The hands went down.

  "Anyone here from PAPA?" she repeated.

  Suddenly her eyes lighted on Remo and Chiun.

  "Uh-oh," said Remo.

  "Remo," Chiun said worriedly. "It is coming this way."

  "I know it."

  The woman bounced up, seemingly oblivious to the uppercuts her mammaries were trying to give her pointed chin. "You! Are you the People Against Protein Assassins?"

  "No," said Remo. "Go away."

  "You can't tell me to go away. I'm from the Boston Blade."

  Remo groaned. It was worse than he thought. The Boston Blade was notorious for the political correctness of its reporters. Although they had another phrase for it: moral rectitude.

  The woman marched up to Remo and came to a dead stop. Her breasts continued forward, stressing the thin fabric of her peasant blouse beyond reason. Through the gauzy stuff, her nipples showed as big as cow teats mounted on lopsided aureoles.

  Remo and Chiun took a unified step backward.

  "I'm Jane Goodwoman," the woman announced when her chest stopped rebounding. "And when I write things in my column, great Americans from Senator Ned Clancy to the Reverend Juniper Jackman pay attention. Sixteen column inches of my copy in tomorrow's Blade will have America's best and brightest politicians swarming all over this place."

  Remo turned to Chiun and said, "Maybe we should just get rid of her now."

  "You can't get rid of the press," Jane Goodwoman snapped, "and you know it. We're eternal, the permafrost of American society."

  "That explains the cultural Ice Age," said Remo.

  Jane Goodwoman narrowed her thin eyes. "So who are you two?"

  Sighing, Remo dug out an ID card and lifted it to her face.

  "Remo Cougar Mellencamp," he said in a bored voice. "With the Food and Drug Association."

  "You mean 'Administration.' "

  Remo pulled the card back real fast, palming it so it couldn't be read. "No, I mean Association."

  "I understand it's Administration."

  Remo decided to bluff his way through this bullshit conversation. "The new Administration changed the name. Claimed people got it confused with the executive branch. Guess they were right."

  Jane Goodwoman's face lost its tension. "Oh, if the Administration says it's all right, then it's all right, right?"

  "Right," said Remo. "Now we have work to do."

  "Well, I'm here to help," said Jane Goodwoman, who was looking at Remo's pants zipper.

  "By hauling every congressman and senator from the fifty states into this?"

  "How else are we going to solve America's problems?"

  "It is not a problem, according to Thrush Limburger," squeaked Chiun.

  Jane Goodwoman blanched. She swayed. For a moment, she looked like she was about to faint or throw up, or possibly do both.

  Remo's instinct was to reach out to prevent he
r from falling on her face. The thought of touching her repelled him. Then she leaned forward and her breasts popped out of her blouse and he realized her face was in no danger at all.

  She hit the dirt with a mushy splat. Her pointed nose bent to the left, but only because it struck a stone.

  Remo called over to a crew of workmen pitching tents.

  "Hey, we could use some help over here."

  Their eyes went wide and their faces paled. "Did you say HELP?" one croaked.

  "Not that kind of help," said Remo. "We need a tent pitched right here."

  They came bearing rolled canvas, pegs, and tent poles and nervous twitches.

  "Put it over her so she doesn't draw flies," Remo suggested.

  The workmen noticed Jane Goodwoman's pallor. "Is-is she contagious?" one asked shakily.

  "Only if you read her column with your brain turned off," said Remo. "Come on, Little Father."

  They started making the rounds of tents. Signs were hung on all of them. Remo saw that the Department of the Interior, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Federal Emergency Management Administration were on the job, among others.

  "Is anybody in charge here?" Remo called into open tent flaps as he came to them.

  "No, we're just trying to help," a voice from the first tent told him.

  "Then why are you all hiding in your tents?"

  "Are you crazy? There's a hole in the ozone right over our heads. We're waiting for the sunblock and aluminum umbrellas to arrive."

  "And you are?"

  "Environmental Protection Agency. We're here to see if the bug belongs on the endangered species list."

  "And if it does?"

  "America faces the hardest choice in its history-to protect the thunderbug or feed the starving millions of the world. It's a choice I wouldn't want to have to make."

  "Amen," added a voice from the next tent. A sign in front said Federal Radon Testing Administration.

  "That's probably why you get paid the big bucks," said Remo, rolling his eyes.

  At the next tent, he was asked if he was the press. When he said no, the tent was zipped up in his face, and a whining voice complained, "How are we going to get our federal grant without press?"

  Remo got similar answers at almost every tent.

  "How do you know which of these people can help us and which cannot?" Chiun asked as they walked along.

  "I'll know it when I hear it."

  At last they came to one that was sealed. Remo looked for something to knock on and settled for slapping the tent flap hard.

  A voice said, "Go away, I'm working in here."

  "Bingo," said Remo.

  Just then, one of the tent pitchers came over and said, "She's calling for you. Ms. Goodwoman is calling for you, sir."

  "Let her call," said Remo.

  "She says she has something to show you that will explain everything. I suggest you placate her. She's very powerful."

  "Watch this tent," Remo told Chiun.

  He followed the man to the newly erected tent and slipped in.

  Jane Goodwoman was alone in the tent. It was dark.

  Remo's eyes adjusted to the lack of light, got a good look, and decided that darkness was preferable.

  "Okay, let's hear it," he said.

  "I like you," said Jane Goodwoman in a suddenly husky voice.

  "I'm politically incorrect. Honest Injun."

  She came closer. "I like a challenge."

  "Try mounting a giraffe."

  Jane Goodwoman approached with the languorous sway of a net bag crammed with assorted misshapen muskmelons.

  She reached behind Remo and zipped the tent flap closed.

  "You had something to show me," Remo reminded.

  "And here they are!" said Jane Goodwoman, pulling down her blouse front. "Check out these casabas."

  "Sorry. I'm not working on the problem of bad silicone implants."

  Jane Goodwoman's face sagged almost as much as the rest of her. "Back in Boston, they don't react like that. You're not, you know-"

  "Yes. Definitely. Whatever you mean, I'm it."

  Jane Goodwoman brightened. "Really? I've always wanted to make it with a gay male."

  "Try Rock Hudson. He probably won't even put up a fight. I will."

  "I want your lean tigerish body."

  "I'm opposed to date rape."

  "I insist."

  "This is sexual harassment, isn't it?"

  "Screw sexual harassment. Take me now or you'll never eat lunch in this town again."

  "Lunch in this town is ladybugs, remember?"

  "Consider me your ladybug," said Jane Goodwoman, lunging with her arms outstretched and her breasts like twin battering rams.

  She was as easy to dodge as a Nerf ball swinging on the end of a string, but Remo preferred not to have the tent come crashing down on his head so he caught Jane Goodwoman by one outstretched wrist and applied enough pressure to lay her flat on the floor, quivering in all directions.

  He got out of the tent as fast as he could and almost collided with a pimple-faced teenager carrying a boom mike. He had shiny ears and innocent green eyes.

  "There's a woman inside who needs your help," Remo told him.

  Moaning came from the tent. "Oh-that was the best-foreplay-I-ever-had!"

  The boy hesitated. "What-what do I do?"

  "Zip up afterwards," said Remo.

  Chapter 6

  The Master of Sinanju was waiting for Remo at the closed tent.

  "You are improving," said Chiun.

  "Improving how?" asked Remo.

  "Once there was a time when you would have rutted with a woman with such udders without respect for yourself or her."

  "If I have any respect for Jane Goodwoman, I haven't noticed," said Remo, slapping the tent side again.

  "Who's out there?" an annoyed voice demanded.

  "Food and Drug Association," called Remo. "Open up."

  "You mean Administration."

  "Have it your way. Who are you?"

  "Centers for Disease Control and I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger in here."

  "How come you're the only one?"

  "Because I have a public to protect. Those other idiots are just concerned about turf, ink, and their reputations."

  "Then you're exactly the person we want to talk to and we're coming in."

  The man was on the rotund side with squinty eyes behind big glasses. He did not look entirely pleased to see them, but after a few moments his more genial side came through.

  "I'm Dale Parsons with the CDC," he said.

  "Remo Salk."

  Parsons blinked. "Any relation?"

  "My mother's cousin's father's son," said Remo, who had gotten the name off the ID card.

  "So what's the FDA's interest in HELP?" Parsons wondered, eyeing Remo's casual black T-shirt and matching chinos.

  "There's a California candy company looking to market chocolate-covered thunderbugs and we gotta approve it as safe."

  "Only in America . . ."

  There was not much in the way of equipment inside the tent. A folding card table, racks of test tubes and specimen bottles and test equipment Remo did not recognize. Not that there was much in the way of test equipment he would recognize.

  There was an array of covered petri dishes on the table, and each of them was dotted with sluggish bugs that reminded Remo of elongated ladybugs, but without the pleasant orange coloration. These bugs were mud-colored.

  "Are these the terrible insects of doom?" asked Chiun.

  Parsons seemed to notice the Master of Sinanju for the first time.

  "Friend of yours?" he asked Remo.

  "Japanese beetle expert," said Remo without thinking.

  Chiun puffed out his wrinkled cheeks. His eggshellcolored face began turning a smoky red.

  "That is, Chiun's an expect on Japanese beetles," Remo said hastily. "Not a Japanese who's a beetle expert. He
's very sensitive about that. He's actually Korean."

  Parsons's eyebrows lifted. "My father served in Korea."

  "So did my father," said Chiun aridly.

  That made Parsons laugh and the tension went out of the air.

  Parsons said, "If these things are related to Japanese beetles, it's news to me. But I'm not an expert on bugs. I specialize in food-transmitted diseases and this has me stumped."

  "What can you tell us?" Remo prompted.

  "Well, it's not an autoimmune disease. Whether or not it's a virus, I'm not ready to say. But there are already thirty dead and not much time to get to the bottom of it if this is another AIDS."

  "Are you saying it's like AIDS?"

  "Well, HELP is like AIDS in that its chief symptom is a wholesale wasting of the victim's body. No question of that. Whether it's a virus, or if it is a virus of the same family as AIDS, is another matter. But it has the potential to be very dangerous."

  "Only if people eat bugs, right?"

  "If it is Ingraticus Avalonicus that's causing it."

  "You think it isn't?"

  "I can't say either way. I do know that viral infections are hard to get from eating an infected host. Often, the stomach acids destroy a virus before it can be absorbed into the system."

  "Then it's not the bug?"

  "Well, it could be. These people handle the thunderbugs before they eat them. They could become infected in the food preparation process. Or if they chew the raw bugs while they have a cut or sore in the mouth. It all depends on what my tests determine."

  Chiun was examining a petri dish critically. The thunderbugs under the glass stood about like contented buggy sheep.

  "They look too lazy to be dangerous," he murmured.

  "They don't have a lot of energy, that's for sure."

  "Maybe they're sick," said Remo.

  "They are the wrong color to be dangerous," Chiun said.

  "What do you mean?" asked Parsons.

  "Venomous creatures always show their true colors. This bug is neither as green as an adder nor blue as blue cheese."

  Dale Parsons cocked an eyebrow. "Blue cheese is venomous?"

  The Master of Sinanju waggled a remonstrating finger. "Blue is a color not appropriate for food. Avoid blue cheese as you would the pit viper or the scorpion. No good can come from any of these things."