It waited in the wings.
It was a curious irony then, that when James Marvin Koch-Roche finally came face-to-face with the beast that would in fact kill him, it was actually much smaller than he was. He outweighed it by seventy pounds.
What the wolverine in the heating duct lacked in size, it more than made up for in pure, kill-crazed frenzy. Its first vicious bite took him high in the shoulder. The fangs were like red-hot irons piercing his flesh. The bones of his shoulder cracked. As the attorney screamed, his heels drumming on the duct, the wolverine shifted its fangs to the side of his neck. Once its grip was solid, it went to work on his belly with its claws.
Chapter 34
Fillmore Fing brought the golf cart to a screeching halt outside the ornately carved ebony-and-ivory arch. With Farnham hot on his heels, he ran into the lobby area of his executive suite. The receptionist was long gone; the trail of debris she'd left behind-sheets of bond typing paper, a lipstick tube and a roll of breath mints-led to the door marked Emergency Exit. After father and son had rushed into Fillmore's private office, Farnham slammed and securely bolted the double doors behind them.
"What now, Pop?" he said.
"We've got no choice," Filimore told him as he snatched up the phone from his desk. He punched the speed dial for the warehouse. While the phone rang at the other end, he said, "We've got to kill all of the human test subjects."
"Yeah, sure, but how?"
"We've got enough cyanide gas stockpiled in our warehouse to wipe out a small city," Fillmore said. "It's simple, really. All we have to do is drill a little hole through the bank-vault door and pump the poison into the medical wing until they're all dead."
"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.