The cast-off parts landed inches from the albino’s face and he devoured them in seconds.
“I may be fast, but you, my friend, ate fast,” Remo said, as he performed the operation again on the second fish.
“You failed to remove the skin,” Chiun sniffed.
“I failed on purpose.” Remo walked on the slippery boulders to the steaming hole that fed hot spring water into the lake. It was amazingly clean, with just a touch of sulfur smell. He quickly stuck the folded fillets inside on a natural rock shelf, waited a few minutes and snatched them out again.
“Steamed and clean,” he announced. “Now the skin comes off and you’ve a nice fish with only a trace of stinky stuff in it.” He deposited a cooked fish on a boulder near Chiun, who sniffed it, shrugged and ate the steaming morsels with his neat fingers.
“Not bad, eh?”
“It is acceptable,” Chiun admitted.
“It’s a trash fish pulled out of a cave pond and cooked in a hot spring. I say, all things considered, it’s not bad.”
“Palatable,” Chiun allowed.
“Whatever.”
Chiun awoke three hours later, when the smell reached him. Remo sat up soon afterward.
“More Whiteys are coming.”
“Many more this time,” Chiun said.
Remo considered it. Whitey was still sleeping, but soon the smell of his own people would doubtless wake him, too. Remo looked down the lake cavern, where a single corridor continued. That’s where the albinos would come from.
“Hey, Little Father, come on.”
Chiun looked at him suspiciously.
“Come on, Chiun, I have an idea.”
“Never a good thing.”
“Fine.” Remo slipped away on his own to the opposite side of the cavern, and he took the flashlight with him. His feet found the natural pressure of the lake surface, and he ran over the top of the lake. He was halfway across when he heard the near-silent slapping of Chiun’s sandaled feet alongside him.
They perched on the tumble of boulders against the far wall and waited. The flashlight’s jaundiced glow began sputtering, then faded to darkness.
“Time for more glow sticks,” Remo said, withdrawing one and cracking it carefully. The chemicals didn’t mix completely and the glow it gave was dim. “Maybe it will last longer this way.”
Chiun looked uneasy.
The glow was enough for them to watch the scene on the rocky ledge that was the far shore of the lake. First Whitey was aroused by the smell of his people approaching, then he sniffed around for his captors. When he couldn’t find them he began crowing.
“He’s a happy rooster.”
“Not for long,” Chiun said.
The albino, his head filthy with dried blood, looked as if he’d come to the same conclusion and scampered into a high rockfall, wedging himself in an alcove. Minutes later the albinos started pouring from the corridor and gathered at the base of the rockfall, yelping like dogs. They were stamped from the same filthy mold as Whitey: albinos with pasty flesh and eyes that had fused shut from disuse. Their hair and beards were all white beneath a lifetime of mud and slime. There were women in this group, with breasts and no beards, but still plenty hairy.
Remo listened for words in the racket, and he was finally rewarded.
“Come down,” someone growled.
Whitey barked a response that was wordless, but plain enough to understand. “No way.”
The mob became angry and agitated, until the one who spoke said sternly, “Shut up.”
The mob shut up.
“Where are your others?” grunted the speaker. He stood straighter, which made him look taller.
‘Whitey whined and growled.
“Killed by Bright Light men?”
Whitey confirmed that with a mutter.
“We will go and eat them.”
The talker granted an order, and the entire naked army marched out of the cavern.
“Well, we didn’t learn a heck of a lot,” Remo said when the albinos were gone. “So much for Operation Sit on a Rock and See What Happens.”
“We learned that some of them have more developed language,” Chiun said.
Remo shrugged. They already knew that. But the leader of the albino pack seemed to have a lot more to say than Whitey did.
Whitey crept out of his hole and descended cautiously, senses tuned for the return of his hungry fellow albinos. What he heard was a sound so alien he didn’t recognize it, but he could tell the staccato splashes were coming at him fast.
“It’s just us, Whitey,” Remo said, catching the albino by his greasy hair before he could bolt back into the rocks.
“You do not intend for him to lead us farther down?” Chiun said. “We have fight enough for the return trip only.”
“We haven’t learned anything, Chiun. We gotta find out what the deal is with these cave people.”
“And what if we are still many days’ journey from the dwelling place of these cave people?”
“We won’t know that until we get there.”
“Meanwhile, you will allow the army of cave people to enter the mines and kill the nuclear wasters?”
Remo considered that “They did say something about a big lunch. I guess we ought to stop it from happening. You’re off the hook, Whitey.”
Remo released the albino, who immediately crept back into the rocks. “Let’s go.”
Chiun said nothing as they started back the way they had come, their eyes finding more than adequate light in the green glow of the stick. Remo thought he knew the real reason Chiun was insisting on their return. Chiun was fearful that running out of light, being in utter blackness, would send Remo into a relapse of his episode in the car.
“Hey, Chiun, I think we’d do pretty well down here without lights. Better than the cavemen.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Wanna try it?”
“The cavemen are not completely blind, Remo.”
“Yeah, I noticed the talkative one said something about the Bright Light men. I bet their eyelids just grew over from lack of use. But shine a bright light on them and they’ll see it through that pasty skin of theirs.”
“I believe so.”
“But who are these people, anyway? They must have been down here for generations, right? So where’d they come from? Why do they speak English? What’s got them all ticked off at us surface dwellers all of a sudden?”
“I have none of these answers. Perhaps the talker in the group will be persuaded to answer your questions when we overtake them.” Remo didn’t think so. The albino had barely used complete sentences and he talked as though he had gravel in his cheeks.
Chapter 23
“Nice to see ya again,” Remo said to the guard at the desk at the Intersection.
The guard had his feet on the desk and was leaning back on the back legs of the chair, but Remo’s appearance sent him tumbling to the floor, shouting out a profanity that was cut off with the heavy clonk of his skull hitting the rock floor.
“You have a way with people,” Chiun observed. They walked into the outer perimeter of the work areas at the Pit. The control operator at the silent shipping dock was almost as surprised at the guard, but jumped to his feet instead of landing on his head.
“Is Wools around?”
“I’ll call him. Stay right here.”
“No, thank you. You’d better call the medic, too. Your guard at the Intersection just gave himself a concussion.”
“Wait, where are you going? You can’t just walk around down here!”
They walked, and weren’t surprised when the red lights began flashing in their wall fixtures and the alarm started blurting raucously.
Hal Wools couldn’t believe how his luck was flipflopping. First the NRC weirdoes show up, getting nosy, then they go for a little exploring into the Pit of No Return. Then, more than a day later, just when. he’s starting to breathe easily, the sons of bitches return.