“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.
The band came to a nervous halt just outside the grotto, making rasping noises that might have been speech.
Remo turned on the flashlight and wedged it in a crack in the wall, filling the grotto with a dismal yellow fight.
Chiun did not object. They had both ascertained that these creatures were blind. Otherwise, why would they travel in the black earth without a fight of some kind?
So the glow stick Remo had tossed up the hall as a lure would be unseen, but if the creatures had enhanced sense of smell, which was almost a necessity, then they would return to the grotto soon enough.
They did, dropping their wordless jabbering to snakelike whispers. One of them ventured through the entrance into the grotto, sniffing with his head hung low, then following the scent, raising his head toward Remo and Chiun and growling hungrily.
Remo saw something that was almost a human being, with the bloodless white flesh of an albino. His hair was white where it wasn’t matted with mud, and a few wisps of white beard showed where they were not sticky with filth.
“Yuck,” Remo observed.
The albino dropped into a crouch, growling viciously, “Food!”
“What do you know, it talks,” Remo observed.
“And climbs,” Chiun added.
The albino’s fingers spidered on the rocks and quickly found strong handholds, carrying the creature up the wall as the others streamed up after him, joining the attack. Remo waited until it was within reach, then snatched the first attacker by the hair. The albino clawed Remo’s arms until Remo gave him a shake so hard his teeth chomped together and broke off in chips and shards. One of the other albinos came within arm’s reach, and Remo used the body of his companion to pound him. The figure toppled off his perch and landed on the rocky floor twenty feet below, motionless.
“Who are you?” Remo asked his captive. The thing growled and hissed. “C’mon, I know you speak English.”
Remo held his hand out experimentally, tantalizingly close to the attacker, whisking it away just before the jaws snapped down on his fingers. The clack of the teeth was tremendous. These were not warning bites; they were take-off-a-mouthful-and-eat bites. The attacker became angrier, like a terrier teased with a dangling hot dog.
“Come on, talk to me.”
“How long will you toy with him?” Chiun asked. One of the attackers came near enough to lunge at the old Korean, and Chiun’s hand sliced through the air, his scythelike fingernails passing without effort through the exposed throat of the animal creature.
Remo’s attacker was startled when he sensed the sudden eruption of blood smell and the crunch of the severed head, then the toppling body reached the rocky floor below. Immediately there was a riot of noise as the albinos descended upon their slain companion.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Remo grabbed his attacker by the wrist and held him out over the grotto, where the creature struggled in vain and slobbered.
