The dead farm animals grew plentiful as they went on.
"I guess this area was downwind of the gas," Remo muttered. "Those poor cows really got it."
"The only good cow is a dead cow," pronounced Chiun, who had no use for beef or dairy products.
"Tell that to the farmers."
Remo noticed a black flag by the road. He assumed it marked a rural mailbox and thought little of it.
But after the third black flag, he started taking notice. They flapped from narrow aluminum poles. The flags were entirely black. There were no mailboxes near any of them. They dotted either side of the road at regularly spaced intervals.
"I don't like the looks of these flags," Remo said. Chiun declined to reply. All through the trek west, he had selectively responded to Remo's comments, evidently reacting only to those he deemed part of the assignment.
The farms flew by. Although the terrain tended toward flatness, the land rolled gently, so it was impossible to see more than a half-mile ahead.
The road must have been a snake track originally, because it whipsawed unexpectedly. Thus Remo wasn't aware of the clot of people clustered at the roadside until he was almost on top of them.
They huddled under a spreading hickory tree, their hair matted, their bodies as ripe, if their body odor was any gauge, as thousand-year-old Chinese eggs.
"Chiun, check this out," Remo said when he saw them.
Grasping the front seat cushions, the Master of Sinanju pulled himself forward to peer past Remo's shoulder. His nails tightened and his tiny mouth dropped open in shock.
"Remo, look at those poor homeless unfortunates," he squeaked. "Reduced to dwelling beneath a mighty tree. Truly, a catastrophe had transpired here."
"I not only see them, I can smell them even through the maggots," Remo said grimly, coasting to a stop.
There seemed to be about a dozen of them, but it was impossible to tell because they blended together into a solid mass of multilegged dust bunnies. One of them pounded away with a hammer. The others held whatever it was they were nailing to the tree.
"Are you people all right?" Remo asked, rolling down the window. He almost gagged. "Can I give you a lift to a shelter?"
"No, we're not all right," the one with the hammer said in a whiny nasal voice. "The frigging pigs threw us out."
"Pigs?" Remo asked, trying to imagine how any barnyard animals-even if they had survived the gas-could have forced a dozen adults to vacate the town against their will. "Whose pigs?"
"The friggin' Army pigs," the leader snarled. "Who do you think's planting all those useless flags?"
Up close, they looked worse than from a distance. Not only did they resemble ambulatory scarecrows, but their faces were soot black. In fact, their clothes were literally caked with dirt. The man with the hammer turned around. Tangles of hair hung down to his dirty chin, so the front of his head was indistinguishable from the back.
"You're not gas victims?" Remo asked, dumbfounded.
"You hit it right, man. I'm a gas victim. You're a gas victim. We're all going to be gas victims if this friggin' country doesn't wake up to the environmental ecocide going down here! La Plomo is only the beginning. Pretty soon it will be Berkeley, then Cambridge. Then Carmel. Even Martin Sheen won't be able to protect us."
"Remo," Chiun whispered from in back, "drive on. These are not gas victims, but escaped lunatics. I can tolerate having one for a driver, but I will not allow any of these vermin to join me in this vehicle."
"Just a sec," Remo muttered, one hand on the window crank for a quick roll-up. "Did the Army bulldoze you people in a manure pile?" he asked the man with the hammer.
"This isn't manure," the man returned, slapping his khaki jacket. Dust erupted from it in a cloud. The man leaned into the newly formed cloud and snorted it into his lungs greedily. The others joined in, sniffing airborne dirt like dogs.
"Ah," he said. Then he began coughing. "Good clean dirt!" he hacked. "Mother Nature in her glory! Man, I love it!"
The others began chanting. "Mud is our blood! Our blood is mud!"
From the back seat Chiun's voice came darkly. "I take back what I said, Remo. These are gas victims. And it has damaged their brains. Drive on. They are not our concern."
Remo ignored the suggestion. He noticed for the first time that some members of the group wore T-shirts on which a clenched fist was raised in a single-finger salute dimly visible through years of accumulated grime. The shirts were also emblazoned with the words "DIRT FIRST!!"
"You people belong to Dirt First?" Remo asked politely.
"And proud of it, man." "The same Dirt First!! that spikes trees so that lumberjacks wreck their saws and lose fingers?"
"A finger lasts, what, seventy, eighty years?" the man said, pushing long strands of hair from his face with his grimy thumbs, the better to see. "But a redwood goes on for centuries. Groove on that! Centuries! If that isn't righteous, I don't know what is."
"Believe me," Remo told him, "you don't know wrong from righteous. I notice a hammer in your hand. Don't tell me you're spiking that tree behind you?"
"What's wrong with that?" the stringy-haired man asked belligerently. The others joined in. They sounded like a pack of raucous crows.
"This isn't exactly lumber country," Remo pointed out.
"This oak tree has as much right not to be chopped down as any redwood you could name," he was told. "It's easily a hundred years old, and could live three."
"It's a hickory tree," Remo pointed out. "And what happens if the farmer who owns that tree decides to chop it down?"
"We spray-paint the spike head Day-Glo orange so people know it's spiked."
"That's fine for the next hundred years, but what about after the bark grows over the spike?"
This possibility had apparently never occurred to the members of Dirt First!! They blinked in surprise, causing their eyes to disappear in their blackened faces.
"By that time," the man with the hammer said, "we won't be around to be sued by anybody."
"There's a responsible attitude," Remo said, rolling up his window. He put the car into drive.
"Hey, you reactionary piece of shit!" the Dirt Firster called over. "What about our friggin' ride?"
"Put a tree to good use. Hang yourselves."
Remo put as much distance behind him as fast as the car would take the curves. His last sight of Dirt First!! was in his driver's-side mirror. They were dropping to their hands and knees to suck up his road dust.
"Only in America . . ." Remo muttered.
"Hear, hear," Chiun added, assuming this was a rare acknowledgment of the superiority of Korean culture from his pupil.
"Are we talking again?" Remo asked hopefully.
"No!"
Next they came upon a man urinating into his hand.
He was an Army officer, Remo saw as he slowed the car. He stood at the side of the road behind a long carbon-monoxide-belching line of olive-drab Army trucks. The trucks blocked the road, forcing Remo to stop.
Remo rolled down the window again and tried not to inhale as he called out to the Army officer.
"Hey, pal, when you're through watering your hand, could you have the trucks pull over so I can get by?"
"You can't get by," said the officer-he was a captain, Remo saw from his collar bars-as he switched hands. He did it without wasting a drop.
"Spoken like a guy with yellow fingers," Remo growled. In a louder voice he called, "I know I can't get by. These trucks are in my way!"
"That's the idea. No civilians allowed. Can't you read the signs?"
"What signs?" Remo asked.
The captain shook a last droplet into his palm and zipped himself up. He rubbed his hands together briskly. He pointed back down the road with a dripping finger.
Remo got out of the car and looked back. He saw no signs. Just one of the black flags lifting and falling in the intermittent breeze.
"All I see is a line of black flags," Remo said.
"
Dammit, man. Don't you know an NBC contamination-warning flag when you see it?"
"No, but I know the CBS eye when it's staring me down."
"The black flag," the captain said, "is an NBC contamination warning."
"I heard the media are thick as crows at the attack site, but what good will flags do? They don't frighten that easily."
"NBC," the captain said in a tone of voice usually reserved for potty-training three-year-olds, "stands for Nuclear-Bacteriological-Chemical. Dammit, don't civilians know anything?"
"Just enough not to piss into our hands," Remo said dryly. He noticed the stenciled name on the captain's blouse read: "HOLDEN."
Captain Holden looked down into his hands. He started shaking them dry. Remo took several quick steps backward. "The manual says I gotta do this," Holden muttered. "So what do I do?"
"I'd get a new manual. That one sounds broke."
"Ah, it's all the fault of those Dirt First loonies. They were trudging up the road and I mistook them for walking wounded. When I tried to hose them down, they ran like they never heard of clean."
"New experiences are usually scary," Remo remarked.
"I accidentally sprayed my hands with DS-2," Captain Holden said, jerking his thumb to the stacked cans in the open back of a canvas-covered truck. "The manual says to avoid contamination, you gotta wash your hands quick as you can. When you're in the field without water, the recommendation is to piss on 'em. I know it sounds goofy, but it's the Army way."
"Well," Remo said, gesturing to the tall grasses around them, "you're certainly in the field. One question, though."
"Yeah?"
"If you're carrying poison gas away from the town, why are the trucks pointing toward the town? Or is driving backward as Army as whizzing on your fingers?"
"We're not taking gas from the town. Are you kidding? I wouldn't get near the stuff."
"Then what's in the cans?"
"We're hauling decontaminant solution into the town. Take a look."
The captain went to the open gate of the last truck. As Remo approached, he saw that the stacks of olive-drab canisters were all marked in broken stencil letters: DS-2.
"DS-2?" Remo asked.
"Decontaminant solution two," Holden supplied. "Take a whiff."
The captain unscrewed the khaki cap from one can. A chemical odor roared out, hitting Remo like a freight train. He raced backward to the car before the first cough exploded out of his lungs. He jumped in, saying, "Hang on, Little Father!" Throwing the gears into reverse, he put a good eighth of a mile between him and the corrosive cloud. He screeched to a ragged stop.
"Are you crazy?" Remo shouted through a tiny crack in the window.
The captain replaced the cap and sauntered back, still shaking off his glistening hands.
"Cure's almost as bad as the disease, huh?" he grunted. "Now, if you know what's good for you, you'll skedaddle. We're clearing all civilians out of the decontamination zone."
"Can't. I have business in town," Remo said, sliding a card through the crack. The captain took the card. It read: "REMO BERRY, CRISIS MANAGER, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY."
"FEMA, huh?" Captain Holden said. "Thought you guys weren't due until our job was done." He offered Remo's card back. It was turning yellow around the edges.
"Keep it," Remo said. "Look, I need to get in there."
"Well, I guess we can let FEMA through," Captain Holden said slowly. "But take my advice. Don't stay too long. When we uncork this DS-2, La Plomo ain't gonna be a fit place to breathe."
"Unlike now," Remo said sourly. He closed the window as the captain trudged back to the column of trucks. After a few minutes in which the stink of carbon monoxide from the idling engines insinuated into their car, the trucks started to lurch along, clearing a narrow path.
Carefully Remo slid past them. The captain shot them a hearty wave in passing, sending golden raindrops spattering onto the windshield.
The Master of Sinanju was not silent for long, just as Remo had guessed from his half-baffled, half-horrified expression.
"Remo," Chiun asked in a dim voice as they put the column behind them, "could you explain what that Army man was attempting to accomplish?"
"Gee, Little Father," Remo said airily, "you saw everything that guy said and did. Couldn't you tell?"
Chapter 4
The town of La Plomo surprised Remo when he laid eyes on it minutes later.
He was expecting desolation or ruin. But the residential section lay pristine and idyllic under the noonday sun, like a brand-new stretch of tract housing awaiting occupation. The maggoty smell was less strong away from the surrounding farmland. The ammonia tang of disinfectants hung low in the air. Although there was a dangerous faint undersmell that might be residual nerve gas, Remo judged the air, if not breathable, nonlethal.
Which was more than the National Guard thought of it, he saw. They stood before a stretch of barbed wire that bisected the road, enveloped in rubberized outer garments, their breath fogging the lenses of their gogglelike gas masks.
Remo pulled off the road and onto a trampled-down cornfield under the shadow of a globular water tower bearing the words "LA PLOMO" in yard-high black letters. On both sides of the road the field was littered with vehicles of all descriptions, from National Guard APC's to mobile TV vans. There was even a limousine with a liveried chauffeur standing by.
Remo turned to the Master of Sinanju, fuming in back.
"Care to chance it?" he asked. "I think it's safe."
"There is no safety in a land where grown men breathe dirt and others urinate into their hands," Chiun intoned. "This is an absurd assignment."
"It can only go uphill from here," Remo said, stepping from the car. The sound of the car door slamming behind him caught the attention of several dozen people doing their best to trample the remaining corn.
Remo was immediately surrounded by a shouting, jostling crowd. Half of them tried to thrust business cards into his hands. The rest shoved microphones into his annoyed face.
"How does it feel to have lost dear loved ones to the horrors of gas warfare?" a man asked.
"Are you going to sue the U.S. government, sir?" inquired a woman.
"If you are, here's my card," a man snapped. "I'm with Dunham and Stiffum, Attorneys at Law."
"Never mind that ambulance chaser," another barked. "Take my card. We're launching a class-action suit."
"Back off," Remo warned, slipping between microphones.
When the crowd only squeezed tighter, Remo began stepping on toes. His right foot snapped out like a jackhammer. Toes crunched and withdrew. Microphones and business cards dropped from fingers. Remo watched as a dozen or so adults suddenly started hopping on one leg, going "ouch, ouch, ouch" in quick, surprised voices. A few fell on their behinds. One man ripped off a shoe and began sucking on a broken toe, cursing and vowing to sue everyone in sight. A dozen business cards settled around him.
"I'm a lawyer myself, idiots," he snarled.
"And I'm with FEMA," Remo said for the benefit of those remaining on their feet.
The microphones snapped back in his face. Instead of business cards, thick folded sheafs of paper were jammed into his hands.
"Here's a subpoena."
"See you in court, murderer."
"You'll rue the day you committed genocide on my client's family."
"Does FEMA have any official reaction to being blamed for this gross miscarriage of trust?"
Remo shredded the subpoenas and shoved the remains into the mouth of the newswoman who had asked the last question.
"Chew on that," he barked.
"Is that a no comment?" she asked, confetti leaking from her too-perfect red lips.
"I don't know, what do you think?" Remo asked acidly.
He stormed off. The crowd parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses. The lawyers especially gave him a wide berth.
Remo looked back to make sure he wasn't being followed and saw the pack regroup
and descend upon the Master of Sinanju as he emerged with stately elegance from the car. Remo grinned with expectation.
"Chiun'll send them fleeing for their lives," he chortled.
Instead, the Master of Sinanju tucked his longnailed fingers into his kimono sleeves like an Oriental wise man and began answering every question put to him.
Remo's face fell. "I don't believe it," he growled. "He's holding a freaking press conference."
Remo decided that was a problem for Smith to sort out. He started for the barbed-wire perimeter, where a lone National Guardsman held his rifle across his rubberized-fabric chest like a half-melted toy soldier.
"Who's your commander?" Remo asked, flashing a spare FEMA card.
"What say?"
Remo raised his voice. "I said, who's in charge?"
"I can't hear you," the Guardsman said in a muffled voice. "This mask blocks my ears."
"Then take it off!" Remo shouted.
"What?"
Remo reached up and yanked the gas mask off the Guardsman's head. The face beneath turned white. His eyes bugged out.
"My God!" he wailed. "I'm breathing the air!"
"The poison gas is long gone," Remo said impatiently. "Believe me, I know. If it wasn't, I'd be the first to keel over."
But the Guardsman wasn't listening. He made a balloon of his lower face as he desperately tried to recover his mask. Remo dodged his frantic, grasping hands on light feet.
"The air's fine," he repeated.
"It's the smell! I can't stand the smell," the Guardsman gasped. His distended cheeks starting to redden, he shut up.
"Tell me what I want to know and the mask's yours," Remo promised.
"Muff-muggy," the soldier said frantically, pointing to a clot of nearby Guardsmen huddled in conference. They were making wild gestures in a vain effort to communicate with one another.
"The commander's over there?" Remo prompted. "Yes or no?"
"Yes!" the Guardsman gasped. He fell onto the ground, hyperventilating. Remo tossed the mask on his head. Desperately he pulled it over his head and began gulping filtered oxygen.
"What the hell are you going to do if you get into a real combat situation?" Remo asked as the man clambered to his feet.
"Never happen," the Guardsman gasped. "I do this only on weekends. Days, I'm a graphic designer."
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