"Uh, Pop, aren't you forgetting that there could be people, people who are still human beings, alive in there?"
The elder Fing scowled at what was, undoubtedly, his only surviving son. "There's nothing we can do for any of them," he said. "Anybody left in the medical wing is in very small pieces by now. We've got to concentrate all our efforts on containing this thing. That's the key here. If we can keep a lid on what's happened in the last twenty-four hours, at the very least we still have a chance of doing a nice piece of business in the Third World. At best, we may be able to proceed according to our original plan. But if we can't black out the news of this disaster, it's all over for Family Fing. We'll never survive the bad publicity. Imposter Herbalistics will go down the drain, too."
Even Farnham was taken aback at this. "Jeez, Pop, you mean we'll go out of business?"
"I mean, we'll go straight to jail, if not the gallows," Fillmore said. He glared at the phone in his hand. No one was answering. He hung up and speed-dialed the number for the plant's technical center.
Something else suddenly occurred to Farnham. Something important. "Uh, Pop, Fosdick is in there, too."
"Goddammit, what's happened to the night shift?" the patriarch cried. "Has everyone gone home for the day?" He slammed down the phone, then said, "Come on, Farnham, we'll have to do the job ourselves."
Fillmore took the lead, cautiously exiting his private office. Seeing no one in the reception area, he moved quietly to the arched entrance that opened onto the hallway. When Fillmore poked his head around the arch, he saw a hulking dark shape about a hundred feet down the corridor. The elder Fing ducked back so quickly he practically knocked Farnham down.
"Can't go that way," he whispered to his son. "The American computer guy is outside."
"Oh, shit," Farnham groaned softly.
Fillmore was already heading back for his office. When the doors were safely locked once more, he went into his mahogany-paneled private washroom. When he came out a few seconds later, he had an automatic weapon in his hands, and the side pocket of his suit jacket was bulging with extra clips.
"Whoa!" Farnham said, stepping lively to one side and out of the line of fire. "Hey, do you really know how to use that thing?"
The elder Fing gave the M-16's cocking handle a jerk, chambering the first bullet in the 30-round magazine. Then he flipped the fire-selector switch to full auto.
"Now," Fillmore said with a smile, "I'm ready for bear."
"I hope you don't get any of that gun grease on your suit, Pop," Farnham said.
Fillmore took a seat in the throne chair behind his enormous desk. He propped the autoweapon up on the butt of its magazine, with the muzzle aimed between the silver handles of the suite's massive doors.
"First," he told his son, "I'm going to shoot the hell out of Mr. Billionaire, then I'm going to hunt down the skinny white bastard who got us into all this trouble in the first place."
"But Sternovsky tried to warn us what would happen, Pop. Don't you remember? While Fosdick was pushing for us to go ahead with the program, Carlos kept telling us we were in for it. He's been ranting about terminating the human trials for days. Long before any of the real bad stuff started going down. He also said we should kill the test subjects before they woke up, that it was our only chance. Don't you remember? That was right before he walked out."
"He should have made us listen to him instead of taking off like that," Fillmore insisted. "If he had done his job, maybe we wouldn't be in such a godawful mess now."
"Actually, you had already fired him by then, Pop."
"He doesn't know what fired is," Fillmore said. "But he's sure going to find out."
Farnham Fing knew better than to try to reason with his father when he was in this kind of mood, and heavily armed. Instead, the heir apparent to the Family Fing fortune edged himself along the wall, moving as far from the doors as he could get. Out of range of both the hormone-crazed American and his naturally crazed old man.
DEWAYNE KORB, the new and improved Dewayne Korb, was not the least bit alarmed by the sight of dense brown fur sprouting all over his body, nor by the perky little tail that was fast emerging from his backside-he was, in fact, looking forward to his tail growing long enough for him to chase. To make room for its full extension, he had already torn off all his clothes.
The world's richest man, aka Billionaire Blubberboy, had become Korb the Transcendent. Abstractions like software systems, like management flowcharts, like ten-figure mergers, which had featured so large in his daily life, no longer preoccupied him. Korb simply did not have room in his head for such things. In his former existence, he would have categorized the problem as an extreme case of information overload.
Along with the startling increase in his muscle volume over the past ten minutes, he was experiencing changes in the quality of his five senses-particularly in smell, sight and hearing, which suddenly seemed able to pull in staggering amounts of data from the surrounding space. There was so much sensory information coming at him from so many directions that he could hold it all in his mind for no more than a fraction of a second. Then it was gone, displaced by volumes of new data. As detailed as this instant-by-instant picture of his immediate environment was, the former boy genius couldn't remember what he had smelled, tasted, seen or heard even a few seconds before.
Instead of feeling buried under the weight of this constant flow of sensation, Korb was elated by it, profoundly relieved to be fully in the present moment, at one with the all-embracing Now.
Sniffing the air, and finding it lacking, the billionaire hurriedly marked the corridor wall next to the watercooler. For good measure, he sprayed the ornamental broad-leafed plant in a Chinese vase, as well. That was better.
Dropping to all fours, Korb pressed his nose to the floor. Inhaling, he knew that he'd walked down this hallway before. He could make out the trail of his own footprints. He could smell the footprints of others, too. Those that had intruded upon his territory. They were not creatures like him.
The billionaire beast took a moment to more fully demarcate his turf, sending a stream halfway up the wall, then set off in pursuit of the intruders.
Though his prey had attempted to mask their secret body odors with flowery perfumes, Korb was not fooled. To him, smells were signposts. They led him past the parked golf cart, which he recognized only as a thing not living. It might as well have been a rock or a pile of dirt-this despite the fact that for six years he had used just such a vehicle to get around his 150-room mansion at the heart of Korbtown. When he entered the reception area, he put his nose flat to the carpet. Amazingly, he could tell which of the scent footprints was the most recent by the intensity of the smell. He could also tell male from female, although in his current state, the distinction between the sexes had no real meaning.
The smell trail led him to a pair of big doors made of highly polished wood. He put his ear to the hairline gap between them. Holding his own breath, he could hear the heartbeats of two living things on the other side. He jammed his wet nose against the crack and sniffed, drawing in a great volume of air, and with it billions upon billions of molecules from inside the room.
Oh, yes, they were there.
Korb the Transcendent didn't think of his quarry as humans anymore. Only as not-Korb. And though the not-Korb were only sometimes eaten, they were always killed.
Wiping the slobber trailing from his chin onto the matted hair of his chest, Dewayne Korb prepared to spring.
Chapter 35
As the bank-vault door swung out and the rank odor intensified, Remo considered what Chiun had just said. And he decided that knowing that there were "too many" on the other side of the door did actually make him feel better. It defined the rules of engagement in no uncertain terms: every strike had to be perfectly timed and executed, since there would be no second chances. No time to worry about being overmatched physically. Remo's survival depended on concentration, which in turn depended on relaxation.
But
he found it very difficult to relax as he watched the door arc back against the wall and saw the space between the doorjambs more than filled by two monumental brutes. The coarse fur on their chests was encrusted with blood; their arms glistened with it, up to the elbow, and so did the shaggy, wet hair that ringed their dripping maws.
Looking at them, Remo guessed their weight at around seven hundred pounds apiece. There was no clue who they might have been before, when they were human. Because they weren't human anymore.
Seeing pupil and Master as new potential victims, the beast who was also the author of more than forty romance novels, including the genre megasellers Let's Love and Let's Love, Love, tipped back her gore-drenched head and, spewing a gust of foul breath, released an earth-shaking bellow.
Her test-subject companion had a much more luxuriant and remarkable tail, which he lashed back and forth as he leered eagerly at Remo and Chiun. The former sumo wrestler known professionally as Toshisan sniffed the air like a gourmet about to partake of some rare feast.
Under the layers of blood crust, of fur and underfur, Remo sensed the coiling of vast muscle groups. "They're going to charge," he warned.
And they did. Both at once.
The two huge bodies hurled themselves at an opening barely large enough for one. The impact of 1400 pounds smashing against the door frame shook the floor and sent a crazy spiderweb of cracks running along the hall's ceiling.
Bouncing off the steel doorjamb, the authoress immediately grabbed the sumo wrestler by the ears and tried to flip him over her shoulder. Because of his tremendous weight and the elasticity of his ears, this proved impossible.
The attempt on her part did, however, make him very, very mad.
Toshi-san threw a wicked elbow into the writer's midsection, then lunged for the doorway and the unmoving, apparently helpless victims. His blow had no effect on his rival. She reached the door frame at the same instant he did.
Remo could not have possibly anticipated what happened next, but because he was centered, grounded and open, he was able to take advantage of the situation.
In their frantic need to be first through the door, and therefore the first to kill, the two beasts thrust themselves through the opening. They hit with enormous force again, this time managing to wedge themselves together in the narrow gap.
The authoress ended up with her head outside the medical wing and her arms trapped inside. The sumo wrestler got one leg and a hip out, while his head and shoulders remained on the other side of the door.
For Remo, it was a green light.
Spinning to build momentum, he hurled himself at the exposed head. As he left the ground, he coiled, drawing his limbs tight to his body. He wasn't thinking about anything as he flew through the air. The only thing on his mind was the target. A place unprotected by dense layers of hormone-enhanced muscle. When the moment of truth came, he combined his forward speed with a front snap-kick.
The blow caught the authoress between the eyes, snapping her head back and into the edge of the steel door frame. The sole of his Italian loafer made solid contact with the front edge of her brainpan. And his follow-through caught the head again as it bounced off the unyielding metal. Which caused yet another impact to the back of the head. Remo's first doublestrike broke the animal brain loose from its moorings, while the second turned it into so much mush.
As Remo dropped to the ground, so did his opponent, who fell across the threshold. Which gave the other beast room to operate.
With a roar, it burst through the doorway. And as it did, something light blue seemed to rise and flutter around its head and shoulders. A bright butterfly swooping and diving. But the sounds that accompanied the blur of movement were not the least bit springtime warm and fuzzy. They were the sounds of tremendous blows being landed.
Logs smashing against logs. Tree limbs snapping.
The sumo beast lunged past Remo, staggered and fell. Only then did the picture come into focus. Chiun stepped off the monster's neck and dusted off his hands. Though there was not a speck of blood on his blue robe, the beast's head was virtually pulped, reduced to little more than a mass of bloodsoaked hair, the skull shattered in a thousand places, like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.
"Now there are two less too many," the Master said, as they stepped over the threshold and into the wrecked medical wing.
"Actually, there's three less too many," Remo told him. He nodded over at a huge hairy carcass that lay rolled up like an old shag carpet against the foot of the wall. It was what was left of one of the hormone users. The body had been torn inside out, and what had been removed now decorated the back side of the bank-vault door. Remo guessed it was over some kind of territorial dispute between beasts. "That one didn't make the cut," he said.
"Aieee!" Chiun exclaimed, hopping elegantly to one side of the overturned golf cart. "What have I stepped in?"
"'Who,'" Remo corrected. "Who have you stepped in. From what's left of the uniform, it looks like that particular heap once belonged to a nurse."
As they advanced down the corridor, walking over drifts of broken glass without making a sound, Remo could see evidence of the same decorators' hands at work everywhere he looked. Walls. Ceiling. Countertops. Floors. Decorators with an abiding passion for red. Nothing that had once been alive in the Family Fing medical wing was in one piece.
Even the pieces weren't in one piece.
"There are more," Chiun said, on point like an English setter. "And they are close...."
THE BEAST FORMERLY KNOWN as Norton Arthur Grape likewise froze, his dripping brown nose tipped up to sample the faint breeze coming from down the hall.
He smelled not-meat.
In his previous incarnation, he would have further defined the odor as fish, or fishy. Even when served up in a heavy cream-based sauce, he had found the stuff barely palatable and had partaken of it only on those rare occasions when concerns about health and obesity, or career, overcame his lust for well-marbled red meat. Even as a human being, Grape liked his foods hanging with fat he could actually see, and therefore sink his teeth into.
This unpleasant smell-stark, without savor, fat free-was coming from just outside the room in which he crouched. Behind him, in tatters beneath a hospital bed, was what was left of the media personality, cooking-and-decorating guru known as Moira Maillon. In the confines of the Family Fing experimental ward, she was also known as Test Subject One.
While a human being, Maillon had been the perennial Miss Bossy Boots, always telling people how to arrange their lives with her Seven Rules of Baking, of Wallpapering, of Carpet Cleaning, of Upholstery Fabric Selection, etc. As a hormone beast, she had brought some relic of her former control-freak personality along with her. She couldn't seem to leave the others' territories alone. She was always trying to mark inside the lines already drawn, to increase her own turf at the expense of her fellow test subjects. In the human world, such misdemeanors could be overlooked, but not in the medical wing of Family Fing.
For urinary crimes against the body politic, Grape had ripped her a new one.
And a new one was precisely what he intended to give whoever, whatever was creeping so quietly along his section of hallway. As he hunkered down, he caught hold of the end of his tail to keep it from swishing involuntarily and giving him away. He watched as the pair of frail figures moved past his doorway, probing deeper into the wing.
A smile twisted his moist, hair-fringed lips.
Not the capped, perfect smile that had been such an integral part of his network weatherman's song-and-dance act. All those high-priced white caps had been pushed out of his mouth as the shaved tooth stumps beneath them had started to grow. And grow and grow. The teeth that Grape now sported would have not been out of place on a mountain lion.
REMO AND CHIUN had proceeded about twenty more steps down the hall, when at the far end of the corridor, a large, dark figure appeared from a doorway. The figure let out a warbling yell and charged them.
Prepared tho
ugh Remo was for what he had to face, it was still daunting to watch seven hundred pounds of enraged killer barreling at you, full tilt. The arm span of the thing could almost reach all the way across the width of the hall. As she bore down on them, she spread her arms to make sure they wouldn't get away.
When Chiun moved to the center of the corridor, Remo did the same. They stood shoulder to shoulder. The beast was coming very fast. Too fast for her to stop or even change course more than a few degrees. And as she came, she snuffled and snorted, her eyes wide with glee. In a second, the thing that had once sung the lead in Madam Butterfly would have them.
At the same moment, Master and pupil lowered their heads and dived forward, under the straining fingertips of the onrushing creature. As they tucked and rolled to their feet, the beast tried to put on the brakes, skidded through the broken glass and crashed onto her face.
Okra managed to push up to her knees about the time Remo ran up her back. Before she could throw him off, Remo dropped a meaty forearm in front of her throat and, using the power of his wrists, squeezed shut the creature's airway.
Failing to toss him, the beast stood up and threw her back against the wall. Remo took the shock with knees braced against the creature's spine, and kept on squeezing. He endured two more jarring impacts. The third was noticeably less powerful. And on the fourth both he and the beast slid down the wall. Remo didn't let go until he could no longer feel a pulse in the beast's throat.
As he straightened up, behind him he heard a rush of heavy feet and a shrill cry of surprise, suddenly cut off. When he whirled, he saw yet another monster, but this one had caught Chiun from behind by the neck. The Master's face turned the color of a ripe pomegranate as the beast tried to tear off his venerable head.
Remo leaped forward, intending to come to Chitin's aid. But before he could enter the fray, the tide of battle changed.
The hairy arm that gripped the scrawny neck of the Master of Sinanju became the target for a flurry of too-fast-to-follow blows of fists and feet. Shattered in dozens of places, the arm instantly lost its strength and rigidity, and the hand released its grip on Chiun's neck.
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