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Feast or Famine td-107 Page 15
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He had purchased the RV with the monthly dues from his loyal Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia, christening it the IDSM Mobile Guerrilla Command HQ and Recreational Center, and installed a close aide to drive it.
He was leading a convoy of pickup trucks, sport utilities and off-road vehicles-all made in the USA-to Washington. They were taking the long way around, because Mearl understood that taking the capital of the greatest nation in the world required more manpower than his thirty or so militia members, none of whom had actually served in a peacetime army or national guard, much less fought in an actual war.
After all, they were corn farmers mostly.
Their war fever was pretty high by the time they rolled out of the Corn State with its mysteriously precise checkerboard of desolation.
"When we get back, we're taking over the surviving farms," Mearl boasted. "Taking 'em back from the collaborators."
"We'll run 'em off," his aide-de-camp, Gordon Garret, called from behind the wheel.
"Naw. You can't merely run collaborators off. That's why I'm calling it Rope Day."
"You're going to hang farmers, Mearl?" Gordon asked in horror.
"No. But I am bound and determined to hang any collaborators and traitors to the Constitution of the United States that I find, agricultural affiliations notwithstanding."
"Oh, that's different."
Along the way, they kept watch out for the much-dreaded black rotary-winged aircraft of the New World Order, but no mysterious helicopters came into view.
They checked for bar codes on the back of highway signs, and when found, spray-painted them black because these were the guide posts by which the combined forces of the Trilateral Commission, the UN peacekeepers and ethnic irregulars pulled from the nation's worst ghettos, would use to find their targets on zero hour of H Day. They also defaced various billboards advertising the latest Meryl Streep film.
Along the way, they took in some mighty fine countryside, and Mearl got to swig a refreshing assortment of locally brewed beers. It was the good life in its way, and sure beat shucking corn.
When the Fox special entitled "The Death's-Head Superbee Report" came on, he immediately took notice.
A blond reporter with the suspiciously foreign name of Tamara Terrill started off the broadcast by asking some fascinating questions.
"Has a new species of killer bee been unleashed upon the United States of America? How many have died, and how has the United States Department of Agriculture covered up the growing threat?"
At the mention of the USDA, Mearl sat up straight. He never trusted the Agriculture Department, or any branch of the federal government except where it came to farm subsidies that he figured were his due. And the word cover-up was one of the most active in his vocabulary.
"More importantly," Tamara Terrill was saying, "has the federal government itself created this death bee in hidden USDA laboratories? And for what sinister purpose? Are these merely superbees or the vanguard of a new kind of bee destined to ravage the globe?
"For the answer to these questions, we begin with the strangely underreported death of insect geneticist Doyal T. Rand in Times Square several days ago."
At that, Mearl Streep hollered for his driver to pull over. Behind him, the Convoy to Freedom likewise pulled over.
"Hey, you men gather around. You gotta see this."
They clambered into the RV, hunkering down on the floor and open seats. Those who didn't fit, crowded around the outside, listening from the open windows.
There by the dusty dirt of the road in Pennsylvania, they watched in growing fascination as an unassailable chain of logic was woven from rumor, facts, innuendo and sloppy reportage. But to Mearl Streep and his Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia, it not only rang with truth, but it fit perfectly with everything they believed.
The clincher came when footage from Iowa was shown-footage of the bizarre hours-old ravaging of previously sacrosanct corn country.
"Is this, too, the work of the superbee of doom?" Tamara was asking.
Mearl brought a fist down on his padded armrest, crushing an empty can of Sam Adams. "As sure as the CIA has a surveillance microchip in my left butt cheek," he said, "it's gotta be. I can feel it in my bones."
The program grasshoppered from Iowa to Los Angeles and the successive deaths of two county coroners and "a brave but nameless Fox cameraman who dared to investigate the truth," according to Tamara Terrill.
Then came the portion of the program that made their blood run cold. The program had been hinting at USDA involvement and denials and was leading up to some incredible revelation. When it hit, it left Mearl Streep and his men sitting slack jawed in their seats.
The program cut to a weird mud hive of a building in God alone knew where. And it showed a long drink of weird with the alien name of Helwig X. Wurmlinger denying all manner of schemes and horrors.
The capper came when the TV screen filled with the image of a big dragonfly with red eyes everywhere except on his head. When it took off, showing it was alive, the assembled militiamen jumped in place and began scratching themselves as if feeling vermin on their patriotic hides.
There were other things glimpsed through the window of the "laboratory from Hell," as Fox was calling it.
Roaches with prosthetic limbs. Two-headed spiders. And other things God never meant to be.
And over these accusations came the disembodied voice of Helwig X. Wurmlinger protesting his innocence over and over again, as the evidence of his ungodly tampering with nature filled TV screens all over America.
After the program ended with the promise of further reports from Fox, Mearl Streep sat in his cammies, oblivious to the spilled can of Sam Adams in his lap, and said, "You freedom fighters listen up now."
They perked up.
"Washington can wait. That tall glass of bug juice is responsible for the plague that descended upon God-fearing Iowa. And we as the lawful Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia are duty bound to find, interrogate and squash him and his traitorous works flat."
They locked and loaded, piled into their respective vehicles and right-turned toward Maryland and righteous revenge.
Chapter 31
An Iowa National Guard helicopter ferried Remo and Chiun from the Des Moines airport to the affected area. They were not the only helicopter in the sky. News choppers were everywhere, like noisy crows.
The Guard pilot was ordering them to keep the airspace clear. He wasn't being ignored. Not at all. In fact, a lot of the news teams flew in tandem pointing their glassy-eyed cameras his way and tried to interview him by radio.
The pilot ignored all entreaties to offer a semiofficial opinion of the blight that had descended upon central Iowa.
In back, the Master of Sinanju looked down at the wavy rows of growing corn and made a disgusted face. "Corn. It is a pestilence."
"Get off it, Chiun," Remo said.
"You have tasted its forbidden grains. You are prejudiced."
Remo tried changing the subject. "What do you think caused this, Little Father?"
"A plague. Of course."
Remo looked interested. "Locusts?"
"A plague. More I cannot say until I have stood amid the terrible yellow stalks that have conquered the white world."
"Are we talking about corn?"
"I am talking about corn. You are only listening."
The helicopter descended upon a ruined cornfield, and Chiun stepped out. Standing with legs apart, he girded his kimono skirts and surveyed the damage.
Remo got out on the other side, ducking under the still-turning main rotor. It made his short dark hair ripple anxiously.
Not a cornstalk was standing. The ground was littered with immature yellow kernels and shredded golden cornsilk. The air smelled of fresh-picked corn.
Remo inhaled it with pleasure. Chiun cast a disapproving eye in his direction. Remo had developed a taste for corn a year or so back, something Chiun violently disapproved of. No grain but pure whi
te rice was permitted in the Sinanju diet. Remo had protested that there was nothing wrong with corn.
"I ate some and didn't get sick," he had said. "American Indians eat it all the time."
"I care not with what the red man filled his lazy belly," Chiun had replied. "You are Sinanju. You are of the East now. Not of the West. You are forbidden corn."
"According to the best experts, American Indians came from Asia. They're a mix of Mongols, Chinese and Koreans."
"South Koreans, perhaps," sniffed Chiun, whose ancestors came from the cold, forbidding north. "Our blood is northern. We do not pollute it with yellow grains."
And that had been the end of the discussion.
As they stood on the black Iowa loam, Remo decided to pick up the argument. "I don't see what's so terrible about corn," he muttered.
Chiun considered for a time. Whether he was considering Remo's question or the fragrant desolation about him wasn't clear at first. Finally, he spoke. "It is too sweet."
"It's a nice change of pace from rice," Remo said.
"Rice is sweeter than corn. Rice is sweet in a clean way. Corn is heavy and starchy and honey sweet."
"Nothing wrong with honey," remarked Remo, kicking at a well-chewed ear of corn.
"Honey is permissible in tea. You would not honey your rice."
"No," Remo admitted.
They walked. Remo picked up pieces of fallen cornstalks and examined them. Chiun's hazel eyes raked the surroundings, taking everything in. He seemed uninterested in the details.
"No twister did this," Remo remarked.
Chiun nodded sagely. "A plague. It has all the earmarks of a plague."
"Speaking of ears," said Remo, "I still don't see what's so terrible about corn."
"Your foolish question reminds me of Master Kokmul."
Remo made a thinking face. "Kokmul. I don't know him."
"He lived long ago. But you and he would have enjoyed one another's company," said Chiun.
Remo brightened. "How's that?"
"He was very much like you-foolish."
Remo's shoulders fell.
They continued walking.
"Kokmul lived after the unthinking Columbus came to the so-called New World and brought back to Europe the pestilence called corn," Chiun said slowly, his eyes roving over the fields as if expecting the dead corn to rear up and jump them.
"Pestilence?"
"Corn grew in the Spain of the spend-thrift Isabella, from there spreading east and west until it reached Cathay," said Chiun in a doleful tone.
"China, huh? Funny, I never saw corn in Korea."
"Corn did come to Korea, thanks to Kokmul the Foolish. But it was cast out by his successor."
"I guess I'm about to hear another legend of Sinanju," said Remo, his feet tramping corn leaves without making them rustle.
"Then listen well, for this is a lesson the House cannot afford to learn twice."
Chiun's voice became low and grim. "In the days of Kokmul, there was work in Cathay. The nature of this work was unimportant. It is only important to know that from time to time, Kokmul ventured north of Sinanju on foot to ford the river known today as the Yalu and performed certain services for a certain prince of Cathay.
"On one occasion, Kokmul came to a grove that he first took for young sorghum. Except it was not the season for young sorghum, but tall sorghum. But these green plants, which grew in orderly rows, were neither."
Remo looked around. The corn had been planted in orderly rows with the stalks well-spaced before they were cut down.
"Now, farmers tended these plants that were sown in rows, and it was harvest time," said Chiun. "Weary from his journey, Kokmul stopped and asked a farmer about his unfamiliar crop.
"The farmer, honoring the Master of Sinanju, snapped off the top of one plant and stripped it of its green leaves, exposing a vile yellow thing like a demon's smile with numerous blunt teeth protecting it."
"An ear of corn," said Remo.
"Yes."
"Never heard it described in such appetizing terms," Remo grunted.
Chiun waved the remark away into the corn.
"The farmer showed Kokmul how to boil the yellow thing in water so that its hard teeth did not break human teeth when bitten, and how to eat it safely, as well as how to prepare it as bread or meal. And Kokmul, being an innocent in the ways of corn, became hooked by the wondrous ways in which corn could be eaten."
Remo cocked a skeptical eyebrow. "Hooked?"
"You would call it hooked. Kokmul became a slave to corn, is the way it is inscribed in the Book of Sinanju."
"Okay..."
"So taken with his new addiction was Kokmul that instead of venturing on to the princely court that had summoned him, Kokmul gathered up ears of hard corn and bore them back to the unsuspecting village of Sinanju, then a paradise of rice and fish."
"And laziness," added Remo.
Chiun said nothing to that. He went on. "As you know, Remo, the ground around our ancestral village is not the best. Little grows, except rice in paddies, and often not even that. It was thought by Kokmul that this new thing called corn would grow where other plants did not. So, planting the corn as the Chinese farmer had instructed, Kokmul brought the demon corn to Korea."
They walked along, their feet seeming to float over the loose black loam. At least they left no footprints, though they walked with a firm tread.
"In time," Chiun resumed, "the green stalks rose up. Thick they became. Heavy they grew. The sinister Gold threads that made more corn grow showed themselves like painted harlots peeping out from their hanging tresses. It was much work to raise corn. Not so much as to harvest rice, which is backbreaking work. But it was difficult nonetheless.
"And when the corn was sufficiently tall and ripe, Master Kokmul summoned the villagers and showed them how to strip and shuck the ears and how to store them for the long winter with the winter cabbage. That autumn and winter, the bellies of the villagers were heavy with corn, Remo. And they grew fat."
"Not to mention dumb and happy," said Remo.
A withering glance from Chiun's closest eye stilled Remo's grin. This was serious business to Chiun.
"The First Corn Year passed peacefully. There was no trouble. The second was not so bad, for the corn grew steadily, but not consumingly. Then came the Third Corn Year."
"Uh-oh. What happened? The crops failed?"
Chiun shook his aged head. "No, the pestilence began."
Chiun walked along, narrowed eyes taking in minute details of the ruined corn in his path. Where he could step on a loose kernel, he did. The old Korean seemed to take special delight in extinguishing the half-ripe grains.
"I have warned you, Remo, that corn is not as good or as pure as rice. I have told you it is to be avoided. I have never told you why it is a plague and a pestilence to be crushed wherever it rears its lurid, toothsome head."
Remo grinned. "As they say, I'm all ears."
"You will not laugh when my story is over." Chiun kicked a corncob out of his path. "Rice, when it is digested, nourishes. No grain of rice enters a man's stomach that is not consumed. Not so the sneaky and insidious corn grain."
They came upon a herd of spotted cows busily munching the fallen cobs. The cows hardly took notice of them.
"The corn kernel is hardy and stubborn," Chiun continued. "It cries out to be eaten, but once digested, it does not always surrender its nourishment to the consumer. Some kernels survive, to pass undigested from the body of man and beast alike."
Chiun stopped and gazed down at his feet.
Remo looked down, too.
"What do you see, my son?" asked Chiun.
"Looks like a meadow muffin to me," Remo said.
"Look closer."
Remo knelt. It was cow dung, all right, already dried by the sun. Peeping from the dark mass were glints of smooth golden yellow.
"What do you find so interesting, Remo?" Chiun asked in a thin voice.
"I see the cows ha
ve been at the corn."
"Yet the wily corn has escaped the cow's diligence."
"Cows don't chew their food as thoroughly as they could, I guess," said Remo.
"Nor do people. Not even the villagers of Sinanju."
Remo got up. Chiun met his gaze with his thin hazel eyes.
"In the Third Corn Year, Remo, the yellow heads reared everywhere. Where it was planted. Where it was not planted. The villagers ate it in great abundance, with shameless relish, and whenever they squatted in their laxness, they released undigested corn kernels, which took root and grew.
Chiun closed his almond eyes and all but shuddered.
"Before long, the horrid eyesores were everywhere. Even in the rice paddies," he said.
Remo made a mock face of horror. "Not the rice paddies. No."
Chiun nodded grimly. "Yes. By the Third Corn Year, there was no rice. Only corn. This was all right for the villagers, but the Master of Sinanju, on whom the village feeds, required rice to sustain his skills. But there was no rice. Only corn. Kokmul began losing his skills and grew fat and sated on corn."
"What brought him out of it?"
"A simple thing. Death. He died, and his successor took his place. That was Pyo, who went out into the cornfields and with his flashing noble hands decapitated the archdemon's offspring, restoring the bounty of rice to the village of Sinanju and exiling the demon corn from Korea forever. To this day, in the north, it is a crime punishable by death to willfully and knowingly plant corn."
Remo grunted. Looking around, he said, "Well, it's a safe bet Pyo didn't come back from the Void to lay waste to Iowa."
"No, it was not Pyo. It was a plague of another kind."
"What kind?"
"That, we must determine," said Chiun, starting off to a farmhouse beyond the cows.
Shrugging, Remo followed. If Chiun could figure out what happened here, it would have been worth listening to that cockamamy story.
Remo still didn't see what was wrong with a Master of Sinanju eating corn. As long as he chewed his food thoroughly.
Chapter 32
There were no satellite trucks or reporters, no sign of life surrounding the mud-dome laboratory of Helwig X. Wurmlinger as the Freedom Convoy wound its dusty way to the place Commander Mearl Streep of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia called "the center of the USDA plot against the heartland."