And he felt a tiny sting over his left carotid artery, and a very cold sensation began to well up inside him.
Chapter 17
At first, it sounded like a tornado.
Gordon Garret heard it as he walked between the corn rows.
The corn was coming up. Last week, there had been a goose-drowner of a rainstorm in this fertile corner of Iowa. That helped some. Not like it was down in the Southwest, where they were suffering from drought. In Texas and those parts, the winter wheat hadn't come up at all. There was a lot of suffering.
Gordon Garret understood suffering. His patch of earth, Garret Farms, had been in Garret hands going clear past the forgotten depression of the 1850s to before the Civil War. There had been a lot of hard times since then. It was a constant battle with corn borers and funguses and the like.
And, of course, there was the weather. Some years, it didn't rain, but it poured. Others, the fertile earth fell apart under the broiling sun. The Great Flood of '93 was still fresh in Iowa minds.
Tornados weren't that common. They happened, sure. But the last thing Gordon Garret expected to hear was the dull roar of an approaching twister.
For a moment, he froze, his boots sinking into the heavy soil. He felt no wind. That was peculiar. There was that dull, distant, freight-train roar, but no breeze.
On either side of him the rows of the new Super Yellow Dent corn-guaranteed to resist corn borers by fooling them into thinking corn smelled like uninteresting soybeans-three months from tasseling, just stood there like so many dull students with their long green-turbaned heads held up off the earth.
But the roar was the roar of a twister. So Gordon shook the fear out of his coveralls and made a dash for the barn.
He ran like the wind, boots crunching dirt. But the roar was moving faster. It was the wind.
The roar swelled. Weirdly, it didn't become that full, big-train roar he associated with twisters. It stayed low. Had a metallic kind of sound in it, like heat bees in summer. But this was April.
Flinging a glance over his shoulder, Gordon expected to see a funnel cloud. But there was no funnel. It was a cloud.
What he saw made him stop, stand stock-still and scrunch his seed cap in his uneasy hands.
The low sky was a mass of gray, hazy blackness. It hummed. Weird, that hum. Spooky. Not loud. Just insistent. Angry, maybe. But all hell-winds sound angry.
It looked like a dust cloud, but there was still no wind.
Then it hit.
Like a fury, it hit. The noise was the worst of it. It came churning in, all rage and viciousness. The fury of it dropped Gordon to his knees. He threw his arms across his flinching face and pushed the front part of himself into the dirt.
A whining buzz roared over and across him. The sound of it assaulted his ears. The sound changed as he cowered for protection in the good earth that supported him.
It chewed and ripped and tore, and it seemed to go on forever in its voracious frenzy.
Then, like a miracle, it passed.
Like a train moving down its assigned track, it had passed on by.
Fearfully, Gordon Garret uncrossed his arms and lifted his body.
The air was settling down. There was no dust, no grit-none of the airborne debris the natural wind stirred up.
Yet green things were falling from the sky. Green, and the smell was the smell of corn-shucking time. A fall smell. Here it was April and the air smelled of autumn.
Gordon looked to his left and to his right. And that deep, cold fear that comes to every farmer in his lifetime settled in his empty stomach.
The corn. The young corn was falling from the sky in tatters. Cornsilk drifted down like thin golden tinsel. The baby kernels were scattered like yellow hail. The green protective leaves were only now coming down on the quieting air. The stalks were gone. Chewed to ribbons as if by buzz saws.
That was what Gordon thought of right off. A million tiny buzz saws. Hungry, vicious buzz saws. They had sickled the new corn into so much fragrant trash.
Climbing to his weak-kneed legs, Gordon turned around on dull, heavy feet like a wooden Indian.
The dust cloud was moving on, having eaten him into bankruptcy.
That was when total understanding took hold of Gordon, and he threw himself to the useless soil and bawled his brains out.
Chapter 18
Remo Williams had been schooled by the Master of Sinanju to dodge bullets, arrows, spears and even thrown rocks. It was not enough, Chiun had told him, on that day many years before when the elderly Korean sullied his pristine hands with an old Police Positive revolver and emptied its chambers at Remo, who successfully-if clumsily-evaded every snarling slug.
"You must learn to evade the flying teeth you cannot see coming," he added after Remo caught his breath.
"How is that possible?" Remo asked, already full of himself because up until that time in his life, only Superman could dodge bullets-and he wasn't real.
"You must learn to feel the breeze the flying tooth pushes before it as it seeks your life," said Chiun.
"Let me get this straight," Remo asked incredulously. "I gotta feel the shock wave coming?"
"Yes."
"Im-freaking-possible!"
But he had learned. Week by week. Month by month. Year after year, Remo had learned how to slow time in his brain and speed up his supercharged reflexes so that a bullet fired at his back, moving ahead of the sound wave of the exploded gunpowder, couldn't catch him off guard.
He learned to feel the approaching shock wave on the exposed surfaces of his skin. The delicate hairs on his forearm became like sensitive antennae. Remo had always thought they were just hairs-remnants of mankind's primitive, hairy ancestry. But he understood they served a sensory function, too.
Later, after he had become attuned to his body hairs, Remo learned to sense the presence of a threatening mind. And to anticipate the firing of the shot or the throwing of the blade before even the attacker had made the decision to kill.
Nothing could touch Remo after that. Not guns, not exploding shrapnel, not anything other than Chiun's own remonstrating fingernail. Remo never learned to evade Chiun's blows.
As the lumbering 727 skidded to a sloppy stop, its wheels awash in fire-dampening foam, Remo experienced a moment of combined fear and shock.
I should have felt the little bastard's legs on my neck, he thought.
I should have felt the stinger pressing into my skin.
And, I'm dead.
Eyes sick, Remo turned to the Master of Sinanju and voiced the fear that was in his mind. "I'm dead, Chiun."