“No, you can’t prove—”
“See it?” Remo asked, mashing Wools’s face against the plank.
“I thee it.”
Remo dropped Wools to the floor, relieving him of his flashlight in the process. “Your man got any glow sticks?”
The security guard was standing around looking worried, but he had wisely refrained from unslinging his automatic rifle.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Remo said, shrugging off the collapsed Wools. “We’re from the federal government. Got glow sticks?”
“In the emergency pack in the desk.”
“Get them.”
The guard handed Remo an emergency supply pack.
“You going in there?” Wools, asked in astonishment.
“Yeah.” Remo scrounged in the pack for other goodies and came up with a nonmilitary Meal Ready-To-Eat, featuring a menu of ham steak and au gratin potatoes. “MRE, Little Father?”
Chiun glared at him.
“Just trying to break the tension with humor.” They slithered through the wood planks and into the blackness.
Watching them disappear into the blackness, Wools wondered if those two were crazy. They hadn’t even turned on the flashlights yet.
“They’re dead meat,” the guard said.
“That’s okay,” Wools said, feeling a rising tide of optimism. “They’re with the federal government.”
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.