Warren Murphy - Ground Zero

"This isn't manure," the man returned, slapping his khaki jacket. Dust erupted from it in a cloud. The man leaned into the newly formed cloud and snorted it into his lungs greedily. The others joined in, sniffing airborne dirt like dogs.

"Ah," he said. Then he began coughing. "Good clean dirt!" he hacked. "Mother Nature in her glory! Man, I love it!"

The others began chanting. "Mud is our blood! Our blood is mud!"

From the back seat Chiun's voice came darkly. "I take back what I said, Remo. These are gas victims. And it has damaged their brains. Drive on. They are not our concern."

Remo ignored the suggestion. He noticed for the first time that some members of the group wore T-shirts on which a clenched fist was raised in a single-finger salute dimly visible through years of accumulated grime. The shirts were also emblazoned with the words "DIRT FIRST!!"

"You people belong to Dirt First?" Remo asked politely.

"And proud of it, man." "The same Dirt First!! that spikes trees so that lumberjacks wreck their saws and lose fingers?"

"A finger lasts, what, seventy, eighty years?" the man said, pushing long strands of hair from his face with his grimy thumbs, the better to see. "But a redwood goes on for centuries. Groove on that! Centuries! If that isn't righteous, I don't know what is."

"Believe me," Remo told him, "you don't know wrong from righteous. I notice a hammer in your hand. Don't tell me you're spiking that tree behind you?"

"What's wrong with that?" the stringy-haired man asked belligerently. The others joined in. They sounded like a pack of raucous crows.

"This isn't exactly lumber country," Remo pointed out.

"This oak tree has as much right not to be chopped down as any redwood you could name," he was told. "It's easily a hundred years old, and could live three."

"It's a hickory tree," Remo pointed out. "And what happens if the farmer who owns that tree decides to chop it down?"

"We spray-paint the spike head Day-Glo orange so people know it's spiked."

"That's fine for the next hundred years, but what about after the bark grows over the spike?"

This possibility had apparently never occurred to the members of Dirt First!! They blinked in surprise, causing their eyes to disappear in their blackened faces.

"By that time," the man with the hammer said, "we won't be around to be sued by anybody."

"There's a responsible attitude," Remo said, rolling up his window. He put the car into drive.

"Hey, you reactionary piece of shit!" the Dirt Firster called over. "What about our friggin' ride?"

"Put a tree to good use. Hang yourselves."

Remo put as much distance behind him as fast as the car would take the curves. His last sight of Dirt First!! was in his driver's-side mirror. They were dropping to their hands and knees to suck up his road dust.

"Only in America . . ." Remo muttered.

"Hear, hear," Chiun added, assuming this was a rare acknowledgment of the superiority of Korean culture from his pupil.

"Are we talking again?" Remo asked hopefully.

"No!"

Next they came upon a man urinating into his hand.

He was an Army officer, Remo saw as he slowed the car. He stood at the side of the road behind a long carbon-monoxide-belching line of olive-drab Army trucks. The trucks blocked the road, forcing Remo to stop.

Remo rolled down the window again and tried not to inhale as he called out to the Army officer.

"Hey, pal, when you're through watering your hand, could you have the trucks pull over so I can get by?"

"You can't get by," said the officer-he was a captain, Remo saw from his collar bars-as he switched hands. He did it without wasting a drop.

"Spoken like a guy with yellow fingers," Remo growled. In a louder voice he called, "I know I can't get by. These trucks are in my way!"

"That's the idea. No civilians allowed. Can't you read the signs?"

"What signs?" Remo asked.

The captain shook a last droplet into his palm and zipped himself up. He rubbed his hands together briskly. He pointed back down the road with a dripping finger.

Remo got out of the car and looked back. He saw no signs. Just one of the black flags lifting and falling in the intermittent breeze.

"All I see is a line of black flags," Remo said.

"Dammit, man. Don't you know an NBC contamination-warning flag when you see it?"

"No, but I know the CBS eye when it's staring me down."

"The black flag," the captain said, "is an NBC contamination warning."

"I heard the media are thick as crows at the attack site, but what good will flags do? They don't frighten that easily."

"NBC," the captain said in a tone of voice usually reserved for potty-training three-year-olds, "stands for Nuclear-Bacteriological-Chemical. Dammit, don't civilians know anything?"

"Just enough not to piss into our hands," Remo said dryly. He noticed the stenciled name on the captain's blouse read: "HOLDEN."

Captain Holden looked down into his hands. He started shaking them dry. Remo took several quick steps backward. "The manual says I gotta do this," Holden muttered. "So what do I do?"

"I'd get a new manual. That one sounds broke."

"Ah, it's all the fault of those Dirt First loonies. They were trudging up the road and I mistook them for walking wounded. When I tried to hose them down, they ran like they never heard of clean."

"New experiences are usually scary," Remo remarked.

"I accidentally sprayed my hands with DS-2," Captain Holden said, jerking his thumb to the stacked cans in the open back of a canvas-covered truck. "The manual says to avoid contamination, you gotta wash your hands quick as you can. When you're in the field without water, the recommendation is to piss on 'em. I know it sounds goofy, but it's the Army way."

"Well," Remo said, gesturing to the tall grasses around them, "you're certainly in the field. One question, though."

"Yeah?"

"If you're carrying poison gas away from the town, why are the trucks pointing toward the town? Or is driving backward as Army as whizzing on your fingers?"

"We're not taking gas from the town. Are you kidding? I wouldn't get near the stuff."

"Then what's in the cans?"

"We're hauling decontaminant solution into the town. Take a look."

The captain went to the open gate of the last truck. As Remo approached, he saw that the stacks of olive-drab canisters were all marked in broken stencil letters: DS-2.

"DS-2?" Remo asked.

"Decontaminant solution two," Holden supplied. "Take a whiff."

The captain unscrewed the khaki cap from one can. A chemical odor roared out, hitting Remo like a freight train. He raced backward to the car before the first cough exploded out of his lungs. He jumped in, saying, "Hang on, Little Father!" Throwing the gears into reverse, he put a good eighth of a mile between him and the corrosive cloud. He screeched to a ragged stop.

"Are you crazy?" Remo shouted through a tiny crack in the window.

The captain replaced the cap and sauntered back, still shaking off his glistening hands.

"Cure's almost as bad as the disease, huh?" he grunted. "Now, if you know what's good for you, you'll skedaddle. We're clearing all civilians out of the decontamination zone."

"Can't. I have business in town," Remo said, sliding a card through the crack. The captain took the card. It read: "REMO BERRY, CRISIS MANAGER, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY."

"FEMA, huh?" Captain Holden said. "Thought you guys weren't due until our job was done." He offered Remo's card back. It was turning yellow around the edges.

"Keep it," Remo said. "Look, I need to get in there."

"Well, I guess we can let FEMA through," Captain Holden said slowly. "But take my advice. Don't stay too long. When we uncork this DS-2, La Plomo ain't gonna be a fit place to breathe."