Parsons hurried from tent to tent, examining the bodies.
"Damn! What hit these people?"
At one tent he came upon a woman with some life still in her.
"Can you hear me, miss?"
The woman could manage only subvocal murmurings. Parsons knelt and lifted her eyelids. The whites of her eyes were a distinctive blue. Not the light blue of osteoporosis, but a livid blue.
The woman's pupils relaxed first, then the rest of her, and the air coming out of her lungs came slow and final.
Parsons straightened and finished his rounds.
There was no question. Every Harvester was dead. It was not HELP. They had not seemed ill the day before. In fact, they had been carrying on something awful when he had last seen them.
When he brought the word to the arriving news media, there was a mad rush for the Harvester encampment.
"Hey!" he called after them. "We don't know what killed them! It may be dangerous to go into the death zone."
"It was HELP, right?"
"I don't think so," Parsons said.
"Then maybe the ozone hole cracked wide open."
A number of photographers pointed their cameras skyward to catch the gaping hole they imagined was up there.
"I see it! It's pink!" one shouted.
Parsons said, "That's the sun coming up. You couldn't see the hole if there was one. Ozone is invisible."
"Just in case," a TV news producer said, "record every square inch of that sky."
Disgusted, Dale Parsons trudged back to his tent.
He came upon a food service truck, where two young men in white were spooning mayonnaise into great steel pots. He noticed that with every spoonful, they were sprinkling in tiny brown things that could only be thunderbugs.
"What are you making?" he called.
"Lobster salad," said one.
"For the press," added the other. They both wore guilty expressions.
"Since when are bugs part of lobster salad?"
"There's no bugs in here. Only shredded lobster."
"Guess I was mistaken," said Parsons, going on. "Something's sure fishy in Nirvana West," he told himself.
Returning to his tent, he discovered the flap was open. He had closed it. Rushing in, he was relieved to find all his equipment present and intact. He wouldn't have put it past those sneaks from the National Institutes for Health to have liberated his centrifuge.
Then he noticed the rosewood box on his workbench. There was a note attached to it. It read:
"ENCLOSED YOU WILL FIND THE SECRET OF HELP. TELL THE WORLD."
He opened the box. Inside, he was surprised to see a red ant. He grunted, looked closer.
For an ant, it was pretty strange-looking. And as he watched, it lifted its grotesque, many-segmented body up on its rear legs. Two eyespots at the end of its head seemed to glare at him.
Then Parsons noticed the thing had lifted itself up on four rear legs, and was waving four more in the air threateningly.
"An eight-legged ant?"
He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the picture was the same. It was not a hallucination caused by lack of sleep.
Then Parsons noticed the other set of black eyes dotting the second segment. He counted six eyes. Two great big ones and at least four smaller satellite eyes.
"If you aren't a spider, I'm an embalmer," he muttered, reaching for a pair of tweezers to hold the thing still while he got it under a lens.
He turned his head aside for only a second. He missed the switchblade action of the thing's separating head. When it sprang for him, fangs extended, it was already too late.
Chapter 22
Traffic was backed up between the town of Ukiah and Nirvana West. It wound between the piney hills like a torpid blacksnake and reminded Remo of the first time he had come here-except now they were north of Nirvana West instead of south.
Remo got out and walked up to the next car in line.
"What's the holdup?" he asked the driver.
"They're dying at Nirvana West," the man said excitedly. "It's the story of the decade!"
"The Snappers?"
"The Snappers and Harvesters, and even some of the feds."
"Feds?"
He nodded his head. "They're dropping like flies. People are saying, the ozone hole is cracking wide open."
"If it is, wouldn't it make sense to be going the other way?"
"You crazy? The other way is Ukiah."
"Nobody's dying in Ukiah," Remo pointed out.
"There's no story in Ukiah. It's all happening in Nirvana West. This is going to be great!"
And the man leaned on his horn so hard Remo gave up trying to talk to him. He retreated to his car.
"What news?" asked Chiun.
"They're dropping like flies," said Remo, climbing in. "And it's not just the Snappers. It's the Harvesters too. Just like we figured."
Chiun regarded the line of cars visible through the windshield with doubtful eyes. "Then why are these people so anxious to go to the place of death?"
Remo shrugged. "I guess they wanna drop like flies too."
"We will walk," said Chiun, stepping out.
Remo started to get out and almost lost his door to a speeding line of limousines that came flying up the other lane, going in the wrong direction. He ducked back behind the wheel, pulling the door after him.
There were three limos. A white one trailed by two black town cars.
"Damn! That's gotta be Clancy," Remo said, getting out. "Get back in, Little Father. If he can go that way, so can we."
They piled back in and Remo pulled into the other lane.
The press had the same idea. They started pulling into the other lane too, blocking Remo's rental car.
Instead of one blocked lane, now there were two. And nobody was going anywhere fast. Horns started honking again.
"I'll bet Nalini was in one of those limos," Remo said bitterly. "We could have nailed her right here."
"We will walk," said Chiun. "And then we will nail her."
So they walked.
Twenty minutes later, they reached Nirvana West, where Senator Ned Clancy had seized the podium that was still there from the day before.
"I vow on the sacred memory of my dear departed brothers," Clancy was saying, his voice ringing with righteous indignation, "to do all I can to rid the world of the curse of Human Environmental Liability Paradox in our lifetime. No price is too high to pay. No cost too burdensome. No-"
"-tax too outrageous," grumbled Remo, watching from the shelter of some evergreens. "I don't see Nalini anywhere," he added.
"I do not see the other limousines," said Chiun, his hazel eyes raking the jam of still-arriving press vehicles. "Only the white chariot of Clancy."
"We gotta get close without being seen," Remo said, starting off.
They moved in on a pair of cameramen who were filming establishing shots from a distance, and as if their plan had been worked out beforehand, Remo and Chiun slipped up behind them and found nerves in the back of unwary necks with their fingers.
Both cameramen buckled at the knees, and after they had collapsed on the ground, their equipment was in Remo and Chiun's hands.
"How do you operate these contraptions?" asked the Master of Sinanju.
"Just carry them on your shoulder and close to your face," said Remo. "That way no one is liable to recognize us who shouldn't."
Cameras high, they advanced toward the media circle, and gravitated to its outer edges.
Clancy continued speaking.
"I have come to believe that there is no hole in the ozone," he was saying. "My dear departed blood brother, Theodore Eagle-That-Soars, the great Mohair Indian warrior, was wrong in his assumptions. Whatever is visiting the HELP virus on innocent, environmentally aware Americans, it will be unmasked for what it is. Whatever it is."
On the other side of the gathering, Remo came upon a chauffeur trying to get his feet untangled from a knot of remote cables on t
he ground.
"We're looking for Senator Clancy's mother," he said.
"She went on ahead," the chauffeur said, without looking up.
"Ahead where?"
"To the SF Airport."
"Damn!"
Remo rejoined the Master of Sinanju.
"We missed her, Little Father."
Chiun's face darkened. "What do we do now? We are forbidden from harming Clancy the clown."
Remo looked around. "I dunno, but follow me."
They worked their way from the press conference, toward the area where federal agencies had set up operations-such as they were. Not much was going on. Except breakfast.
The federals were eating, of all things, lobster salad sandwiches and packing them away as if there were no tomorrow.
"These people are pigs," Chiun observed.
"They're acting like PAPAS, all right," muttered Remo.
Abruptly, the Master of Sinanju flitted to the nearby food service wagon. He disappeared behind it. Frowning, Remo hurried to catch up with him.
He found the Master of Sinanju squeezing the earlobe of a man in cook's whites. The man was dropping to one knee and he would have howled for his life, but the pain was already too intense. Remo knew that there was a nerve cluster in the earlobe that Chiun had trained him to find.
"What's the problem?" Remo asked Chiun.
"This man has been collecting dunderbugs."
"So? It's a fad."
"And feeding them to the unwary," Chiun added.
Remo blinked. He noticed then the stainless steel pot that was filled with mayonnaise. There were thunderbugs in the mix. They moved their hairlike legs sluggishly as if enjoying the prospect of becoming food.
"Whose idea was this?" Remo demanded.
Chiun eased up on the pressure so the man could speak.
"That Chinchilla," the man gasped. "He set up the food concession. We're just hired hands."
"Food concession?"
"After this, we were going to go national. We'd have cleaned up."
"Probably would have too," Remo muttered. "Okay, forget him. He's small potatoes."
Chiun gave the man's lobe a final squeeze and the pain was obviously too much because he fainted dead away.
Back at the press conference, Senator Clancy was still going strong.
"And if it should turn out that the thunderbug, the Miracle Food of our age, should harbor the HELP virus, I pledge to you my fellow Americans to lift any rock, to move any mountain, to find some way to allow Mankind to consume this wonder bug in complete safety."
Remo lifted his voice.
"You better hope it's not the bug because you've all been eating it."
Clancy tried to locate the voice in the sea of media faces. "Who is that? Who is speaking?"
Keeping his minicam up to his face so no one would see his mouth move, Remo added, "Those lobster salad sandwiches you've been wolfing down? It only tastes like lobster. It's thunderbug."
"What!"
"If eating thunderbug gives you HELP," Remo went on, "you're all overdue for a dose."
At that, the food service truck's engine started and began backing out toward the highway.
Its erratic behavior was not lost on the press, some of whom clutched lobster salad sandwiches.
A few brave souls ventured toward the spot where the truck had been set up and came upon the stainless steel mixing pot and its wallowing thunderbugs.
"It's true!" Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler cried. 'We've been eating the bug all along!"
"But it tastes exactly like lobster!" MBC News anchor Tim Macaw screamed.
"Thunderbug is supposed to taste exactly like lobster," Remo shouted, after shifting position.
"How do we tell?" a voice wondered.
Just then, a woman came stumbling back from the far side of Nirvana West. Her chest bounced with every halting step. It was Jane Goodwoman. Her face was as white as a sheet.
"I think I'm dying!" she moaned. "I think I'm dying!"
Jane Goodwoman was immediately surrounded by whirring videocams. "Why do you say that?" a reporter asked.
"Because the others are dying too, you idiot!" she snapped, dropping to her knees.
"What others?"
"The other reporters. We went to look over the Harvester encampment, and they started to drop in their tracks."
"The Harvesters?"
"No. They're already dead. Other journalists! It was awful. It was as if their cameras and press credentials couldn't protect them."
The woman's eyes suddenly rolled up in her head and everyone noticed that the whites were turning blue. Jane Goodwoman slumped forward on her face.
Another reporter started to ask, "How does it feel to know you're dying from HELP, Ms. Goodwoman?"
There was no response, so a line producer gave the body a push so the camera could film the columnist's dying face.
"What does it mean?" someone asked.
And not far from Remo and Chiun, Tim Macaw intruded his boyish face between his cameraman's lens and the scene being recorded.
"What does it mean? This is the question of the hour as America asks itself if dying Americans is too high a price to pay in return for a chance to eradicate the specter of world starvation."
The dying columnist was asked, "Did you eat any of the lobster salad sandwiches?"
"Yeah . . . ," she gasped. "They were . . . delicious."
"They weren't lobster," Remo called out. "They were thunderbug."
"The . . . sign . . . said . . . lobster. . . ."
Then, all over the place, reporters, cameramen, and other journalists inserted fingers down their gullets and started retching.
"Our cue to exit, Little Father," said Remo.
That seemed to be Ned Clancy's idea too. Without concluding his remarks, he allowed his press aides to hustle him into the waiting white limousine.
"Let's find Parsons," Remo said.
They found Parsons in his tent. It was the Master of Sinanju who discovered his inert, blue-eyed body. Remo came up in response to Chiun's call.
Remo saw the man's dead face and said, "It got him too?"
"Alas, yes," said Chiun sadly.
"Now there's nobody credible to tell these people the truth about the thunderbugs."
Chiun looked over to the press, who were now in full flight.
"They would not listen to him or anyone," he said thinly. "Not even to the illustrious Thrush Limburger."
"What's that?" Remo said suddenly.
The Master of Sinanju went to the ornate rosewood box on the bench.
"This is the same box that the false Indian clutched," he intoned. "And here is a note, promising the secret of the dunderbug disease if one opens the box. The Eldress murdered this poor man."
"Damn!" said Remo.
"What?"
"Last night over dinner, I let slip to Nalini that Parsons figured out the thunderbug was harmless."
"And she slipped away to silence him."
Remo was looking around the floor, his face tight. In a corner, something skittered. He stepped on it, hard.
"That's what I'm going to do to whoever killed Parsons," he promised.
"We will see," the Master of Sinanju said thinly.
When they emerged from the tent, Nirvana West was a ghost town. All that remained were the dead.
Remo and Chiun were sweeping the area when Remo noticed something red moving on the branch of a tree.
"Hey! There's one of the spider things."
"I see it," said Chiun, edging closer.
"Notice something?"
"Yes, it is very ugly, even for a spider."
"No. It isn't trying to jump me."
"Perhaps it has heard how you slew its brethren."
"Not likely." Remo stepped closer. The reddish spider lifted up on its rear legs and waved its long bulbous nose at Remo. The nose split and out unfolded the dark fangs that were so deadly.
Remo set himself to dodge, but
the thing remained on the branch where it sat.
"Why isn't it trying to jump me?" he muttered.
Chiun regarded the thing curiously. It shifted slightly, waving its fangs at him. Its black eyes stared with an alien malevolence.
The Master of Sinanju lifted his right hand. The spider shifted again, prepared to defend itself. And a single curved fingernail sliced both poison fangs off. The spider leapt away, and because they were looking for it, Remo and Chiun both saw the thin strand of spider silk spinning out behind it.
Chiun dismembered the spider with fingernails too fast to be seen. It fell in three sections.
Chiun stroked his wispy beard thoughtfully. "Perhaps it did not attack because you no longer smell of the Ganges."
"Huh?"
"The scent that Hindu harlot placed upon you. You have washed it off?"
"Yeah. I showered before we left the motel."
Chiun nodded sagely. "That is how it was done. The Spider Divas would place their scent on their intended victims so their tools would know whom to bite."
"There was no scent on Magarac when we found him."
"He was in a confined place with no place to hide. No doubt the spider that was his end fell upon him the very moment he opened the box that contained death."
"And the other HELP victims didn't smell either," added Remo. "Parsons too."
"Perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye, Remo, but it is clear now how the Spider Divas worked their wicked will in days gone by."
"Makes sense," Remo admitted. "Sort of. But I still can't figure out how some people buy it as soon as they're bitten and others take forty-eight hours to go out."
Harold W. Smith could not understand it either, when they reached him by phone. He listened in tightlipped silence to Remo's report.
"Much of what you have told me has come over the airwaves, Remo," Smith said. "However, the death of Dale Parsons is a serious setback. He is the only one who could prove the thunderbug is not the source of HELP."
"So what do we do now?"
"One moment," said Smith.
Remo heard the clicking of computer keys as he waited. They had commandeered a cellular phone at another federal tent. In the distance, sirens wailed.
Ambulances and other official vehicles had been summoned from surrounding towns. There were a lot of dead. The ambulances had been coming and going for the last hour.
Feeding Frenzy td-94 Page 17