"I told you why. Ants respect the Master of Sinanju."
"That, I don't buy."
There was another ant on a tree trunk. They passed it on the right, which meant Chiun walked between it and Remo.
As they drew near, the ant sprang across their path to light on another tree. Then it jumped at Remo.
Remo caught it with the back of his hand and batted it away. It went ticking through the evergreen leaves.
"These guys definitely have it in for me," he muttered.
They came to the Snapper's pasture.
Chiun halted abruptly. He began tasting the air with his tiny nose, his mouth tightening into a concerned knot.
"What is it, Little Father?"
"I smell death."
Remo tasted the air. It was there. The gases of decomposition, the stale stink of sweat and stagnant blood.
They advanced, making absolutely no sound despite the dry underbrush. It was as if their feet knew exactly where to plant themselves.
And in the dry weeds, they found the first dead Snappers. They seemed to have died seated in the weeds, where they had been contentedly eating thunderbugs, and simply fell backward, their legs still folded. They wore pleasant smiles on their gaunt faces.
"Looks like they died happy," Remo muttered, kneeling to feel their flesh. Warm, but cooling. "And they didn't die all that long ago," he added.
Chiun nudged a body with a sandled toe. "They died of the dunderbug disease?"
"Sure looks that way to me," said Remo. "Come on."
They found more bodies further along. They too had died sitting in the weeds eating to their heart's content.
"I guess that cinches it," Remo decided. "You eat the bugs raw and you die. It just takes a little longer to get some people."
They crossed the Schism Line to the Happy Harvester Hunting Grounds. There, the Harvesters were gathering thunderbugs, of which there seemed an inexhaustible supply, and dropping them into the simmering communal pot.
"Anybody know where Theodore is?" Remo called.
"Sometimes he flies with the eagles, and can be seen wheeling in the sky above," a buckskin-clad blond girl called back.
Chiun looked up and said, "I see only crows."
"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles would not be caught dead flying with crows," the blonde said unconcernedly.
"That was my guess," said Remo.
"Therefore, he must be in his wigwam, thinking wise thoughts," she added.
"I'd bet on the former, but I have doubts about the latter."
They found Theodore Soars-With-Eagles in his tepee, his warbonnet and toupee askew. They seemed to be of one piece. He had collapsed in a seated position, and only the tepee wall kept his balding head from slipping to the grass floor.
His eyes were rolled up in his head, and the whites were blue.
"Remo!" squeaked Chiun. "Look at his eyes!"
"I see them. They're all blue."
"This man is not yet dead."
"Yet?"
"He is dying."
Remo knelt and shook the man.
"Magarac, can you hear me?"
Theodore Magarac stared sightlessly at nothing. His thin lips began to writhe. "She came . . ."
Remo knelt to catch the dying man's words. "Who is she?" he asked.
"Eldress. She . . . did . . . this . . ."
"What did she look like?"
"Didn't . . . see . . . her."
Then he died. He had been breathing in and out shallowly. Then the air began coming out of his mouth and nose in a long, slow exhalation, like a balloon slowly deflating. Ten seconds after his lungs went flat, Remo and Chiun heard his heart skip a beat, then stop beating altogether.
"Gone," said Remo, coming to his feet. "And I don't see a mark on him."
The Master of Sinanju began looking around the inside of the tepee. They found a modest cache of junk food, three back copies of The Girls of Penthouse, and not much else.
Remo heard a crunching sound and lifted a foot.
"What did I step on?" he asked.
Chiun looked at a mushy spot on the rug.
"A bug."
"Musts been a loose snack," Remo said. "I don't see much here." He stepped out of the tepee and looked around.
The Harvesters were busily cooking thunderbugs. They seemed oblivious to the death of their leader. In fact, they seemed oblivious to everything but thunderbugs.
Grabbing a passing Harvester, Remo asked, "Anybody visit Theodore lately?"
The man frowned and brushed back his pigtails before speaking. "There was a woman at the tepee."
"How long ago?"
"Ten or fifteen minutes."
"See what she looked liked?"
"I only saw her back."
"How was she dressed?"
"Like an Indian."
Remo looked around at the Harvesters dressed in their buckskins and growled, "That narrows it down a heap."
Remo returned to the tepee.
"Guy says there was a squaw hanging around not fifteen minutes ago," he told Chiun.
The Master of Sinanju lifted a wizened claw. "Look what I found in the man's hand, Remo."
Remo looked. It was a carved rosewood box covered with ivory inlays and lined with white velvet. Otherwise it was empty.
"He clutched this as he died," said Chiun.
"Mean anything?"
"I do not know . . ."
"Well, someone murdered this guy."
"I see no marks on him," said Chiun.
"Yeah. But he's not wasted enough to be a HELP victim. Besides, he wasn't sick when we saw him yesterday."
"We will extract the truth from the others."
The Harvesters were only too happy to answer their questions, even with their mouths full. They couldn't seem to stop eating thunderbugs.
"Yeah, I saw her too," a youth in a mohawk haircut admitted. "But only from the back. She had on a nice dress."
"Ever see her before?" Remo asked.
"I don't think so," he said, picking black bug meat from between his teeth with a toothpick. "She's probably a Snapper."
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know. It was just a feeling. But she wasn't a Harvester."
"That's right. She wasn't one of us."
"I got news for you," Remo told them. "The only difference between you and the Snappers is that they're dead from eating bugs and you're not. Yet."
"Only Snappers catch HELP. And if they are dead, it is because Gitchee Manitou had decreed it. We will give them a proper burial once we are full of his children."
Remo asked, "If only Snappers catch HELP, what killed Theodore Magarac?"
"Who?"
"The Latvian Chinchilla. We just found him keeled over in his wigwam, scalped."
Assorted confused expressions crawled over the faces of the Harvesters. Disbelief won out in the end.
"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles is eternal," one shouted.
"Yes. Gitchee Manitou would not take him from us on the eve of a Chinchilla rebirth," insisted another.
"It can't hurt to look," prompted Remo.
The blonde in buckskin did look. She pulled aside the tepee flap and let out a screech.
"Brother Theodore is dead!" she cried.
Between mouthfuls, others took up the cry. "Oh, this is terrible!"
"Woe, we are leaderless!"
"The last of the proud Chinchillas has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground. It is the end of an era."
Through their plaintive cries, they kept stuffing bugs into their mouths.
"It might be a good idea to lay off the bugs until we know exactly what killed him," Remo suggested.
"We know what killed him."
"Yes, it is the hole in the ozone layer, created by the white man's inhuman progress."
"What if it was the bug?" Remo countered.
"Heresy. Don't let Gitchee Manitou hear you slander his powerful but humble creatures."
Remo looked at the thunderbugs a
s they were dropped into the boiling pot water. They immediately curled their inchlong bodies into tight brown balls, as if death relieved the tedium of their mundane existence.
"One last question," he said. "Ever hear of someone called the Eldress?"
No one had. Then someone remembered that in the days before the Great Schism, Brother Karl Sagacious spoke of the prophet he referred to as She.
"She?" said Chiun.
"That is the only name Brother Karl gave to her. We think it is one of the goddesses of his Greek ancestors."
"Sagacious was no more a Greek than I am," Remo said.
"You are too pale to be a Greek."
"Greeks were as pale as Americans," said Chiun.
"Pale as African-Americans, you mean."
The Master of Sinanju turned to Remo and undertoned, "These people are demented, Remo."
"Must be something they ate," Remo said, eyeing the contentedly boiling thunderbugs.
No one appeared to be lying-their pulse rates and respiration cycles were audible to both Remo and Chiun, and neither betrayed telltale nervousness-so there was no point in extracting any more information by force. Remo took Chiun aside and said, "Something's going on here. First the Snappers keel over, and now Magarac."
"These ones do not appear ill. Only hungry. Do they never stop eating?"
"What I want to know is how they stay so thin when all they do is eat bugs by the carload?"
"I do not know."
"Maybe they're bulimic."
Chiun's sparse eyebrows crept up his forehead. "What tribe is that?"
"Bulimic means they eat like pigs, throw up, eat some more, and throw up again so they can keep eating. It's called binging. Or purging. Maybe both."
"It sounds very Roman.," Chiun mused. "Romans would often eat and drink until their stomachs rebelled. Once emptied, they would resume eating. Between you and I, Remo, I think there was something in the water that made them demented."
"The Romans or the PAPAS?"
"Whatever," Chiun said vaguely.
Remo looked around. He saw no one throwing up. Just gorging. "We'd smell vomit if they were bulimics," he decided aloud.
"I would gladly inhale vomit if it would mean I no longer had to endure the stench that woman has attached to you."
Remo lifted his arm. He sniffed. "It's practically gone now." But a contented smile quirked his thin mouth.
Chiun made a disgusted face. "You reek and you do not even care. All my training, it was for naught. I have given a white man the sun source, and alas, he is still white."
"Forget it. Let's see, Brother Karl Sagacious is dead. The coroner is on ice. The Snappers have snapped their last. Theodore Magarac is now Theodore Worm-Food. And Thrush Limburger is nowhere to be found. It's gotta be Limburger behind this."
"Ridiculous," sniffed Chiun.
"Who's left?"
"We are. And as long as we remain upright while others recline, it will be recorded that we were the victorious ones."
"I mean who's left that could be behind this?"
Chitin looked skyward. His eyes tightened. "Perhaps there is a hole is the sky after all."
Remo threw up his hands. "I give up."
"But I do not," said Chiun, starting off.
Remo followed. As they passed from the Harvester area to Snapper turf, he noticed the parched grasses were springing up and down and he saw the rust red ants bounding from weed to weed just like grasshoppers. And like locusts on the march, they were hopping in their direction.
"Let's cut around," Remo said quickly. "Call me a fraidy cat, but I don't like the way those ants coming our way keep looking at me."
"Fraidy cat," said Chiun. "Had you bathed, you would have nothing to fear."
"What makes you say that?" asked Remo as they floated into a stand of evergreens.
"It is obvious that your unappetizing odor is attracting them."
"Oh," said Remo, suddenly realizing the Master of Sinanju was probably right.
When they got into the trees, Remo watched for lurking ants. There were none. Looking back, he saw the dozens of them leaping from weed to weed, and even the lethargic thunderbugs were compelled to get out of their way. The slow ones-which was most of them-were pounced upon.
Remo didn't wait to see what happened next. He was sick of bugs by now.
Chapter 16
Dale Parsons was puzzled.
They had brought the body of the Ukiah coroner Lee Esterquest to him because they feared he had died of HELP.
As a federal pathologist, Parsons was not licensed to autopsy people in Mendocino County. Drawing blood was another matter. He had done that, taken tissue samples, and was looking at them under the electron microscope powered by a portable gasoline generator. The generator whine was enough to permanently injure his hearing, but Parsons was so deep in his work he was barely aware of the racket.
He almost didn't hear the impatient slapping on his tent flap either.
"Go away," he snapped. "I'm working."
The flap was swept aside and a familiar face poked in.
"Remember me?"
"Salk. FDA, right?"
"You got it."
Parsons grunted. "Whoever named this virus got it exactly right too."
Remo Salk stepped in, followed by the Korean Japanese beetle expert. The old man simply stood there, stony and wordless, his long-nailed fingers clapped over his tiny ears.
"Paradox?" asked Remo.
"Here, take a look."
Noticing the draped form, Remo asked, "Dead Snapper?"
"No. That's the local coroner, Esterquest."
Remo's face grew sad. "I met him. He was a nice guy. Took a lot of pride in his work."
Parsons nodded. "I'm kicking myself for not talking to him before this. He tell you anything about the autopsies?"
"Just that he couldn't make heads or tails of it. But he found something strange in the bloodstream."
"He did? Now that's very interesting. Take a look through this microscope."
Remo put his eye to the eyepiece. Parsons said, "What you're looking at is a blood sample magnified ten thousand times. See those spindle-shaped things inside the blobs?"
"Yeah?"
"Protein particles, embedded in the cytoplasm of white blood cells. Dead matter that has lodged into the bloodstream after doing its work."
Remo looked away from the lens. "That what's been killing people?"
"Probably. But those aren't virus particles."
"What are they?"
"I don't know, but here comes the paradox. They match nothing I find in the thunderbugs I've autopsied."
"You autopsied bugs? With what-safety pins?"
"Very funny. What I found in the bug is interesting. An enzyme harmless to people. It's not poison, it's digestible and excretable. But it does have an interesting property."
"What?"
"Remember that the thunderbug is high in protein, nutrients, and carbohydrates, is easily digested, and even causes people to lose weight the more they keep eating them."
"Yeah?"
"Well, apparently this enzyme chemically bonds with receptors in the small colon, blocking them from absorbing the nutrients and proteins and carbohydrates."
"You can tell that from cutting open a little bug?"
"Actually, I couldn't make heads or tails of the enzyme itself. But I was walking around this place and happened upon the latrine. I noticed the awful smell."
"It's hard not to," Remo said dryly.
"When I looked in, I noticed almost all the stools were yellow and greasy-looking. A sure sign of steatorrhea-undigested fat in the stools. I took a few stool samples back and ran some tests."
"You're a braver man than me if you climbed into that mess."
Parsons nodded unhappily. "It's a gross job, but someone had to do it. My tests showed that not only was fat passing through the PAPA people's intestines unabsorbed, but so were carbohydrates and proteins. The way it works was the chemical re
ceptors would latch on to these enzymes, thinking they were real food, and they'd get clogged up like the wrong key stuck in a lock. The poor proteins and carbohydrates would go marching past untouched. The human body extracts the value of food through the intestines, not the stomach."
"In other words, they were getting nothing out of eating?"
Parsons nodded. "You can eat thunderbugs all day long, and none of the nutrients are going to get into your system. You might as well be eating cardboard. Hell, cardboard would be a step up from thunderbugs."
The old Korean approached, his hands coming off his ears. "What is this you are saying?"
"Those people out there gorging themselves? They think they're eating well, but they're not. They're actually starving themselves. That's why they keep eating and why they keep wasting away. They're fooling their stomachs into thinking they're eating but their bodies keep demanding more and more nourishment. Not getting it from their diet, the body draws it from stored fat and muscle tissue. If they go on long enough, they end up looking like Somalis."
"So that's what's killing them, huh?" said Remo.
"No. Eventually, maybe. But none of the PAPAS ever reached the point of starvation. Yet they die. Before they starve."
"Of what?"
"I have absolutely no idea. But the same particles I found in the HELP victims are in Esterquest's bloodstream."
"If he ate any thunderbug," Remo said, "so will I."
"Reenter, the paradox. And here's another thing-the stuff in their blood doesn't seem connected with the thunderbug enzyme. More blood to test will verify that, but right now I'm leaning toward that theory."
"Well," said Remo, "you have a lot more of blood to draw."
"What makes you say that?"
"We just came from Snapper land. They're all dead."
"All?"
"Every finger-flicking one of them. But the Harvesters are still munching away. Except for Theodore Soars-With-Eagles. He's dead too. We found him in his tepee with the whites of his eyes all blue."
"Blue?"
"Robin's egg blue. Mean anything to you?"
Parsons pointed to the sheeted figure. "Yes. This man's eyes were blue when he was discovered in his embalming room, dying. But look-"
Parsons lifted the sheet and digitally opened the dead man's eyes. The whites were perfectly white.
"It's the only pathological clue and it goes away within minutes of death," he said.
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