He left.
Because to stay, he knew, would somehow mean his death.
The woman came after him.
Leon ran, and he was faster than she was. He laughed at her from the distance. "I am stronger than you are!" he taunted.
He left her behind in the night, running miles into the bayou. Cautiously he returned in the daylight to find Thena and her mobile laboratory were gone. He had scared her off.
The hermit was no longer so attractive a meal. He was cold and growing sour, but Leon filled his belly anyway and put the remains in the water where the gators would dispose of it. Then Leon went looking for campers.
He knew of a university field camp where the grad students spent their weekends taking samples of the water and plants and bugs. They made measurements of the depth of the bayou, set up no-kill traps, set up nets with lights to trap night insects. It all looked pointless to Leon.
Somehow, he liked the idea of using these brainy types for what he had in mind.
He found their camp deserted in mid-morning. A collapsible five-gallon water jug was in the shade. Leon emptied it.
The bottles in the insulated pack were a little different from what he remembered, but the label still said 942. He poured every last drop of the stuff into the water jug.
The students returned, dirty and hot from a morning of toiling in the swamp. There were more of them than he had expected. Mostly men in their midtwenties. Two older men were addressed by the others as "Professor." One beautiful young woman stayed close by the side of a strong, bright-eyed young man.
One by one they began to help themselves to the water. It took fifteen minutes before the first one fell to the ground, screaming in agony. Soon they were all stricken, on the earth writhing and moaning, racked with monstrous pain.
Leon ran through the bayou this way and that, whimpering and whining in panic. By the time he returned to the camp the old men were already dead, their bodies locked in tight, contorted balls. The others were helpless in their agony-or unconscious from the pain.
It had not been like this for him! There was some pain. He still hurt, in fact. But nothing like this! Only then did he bother to consider the labels on the bottles he had emptied into the water jug. They said 942, just like the bottle he had drunk from in Thena's laboratory. But his bottle had said "solution." What did that mean? Why would the word "solution" be on a bottle?
Then he remembered what the word "solution" might mean in that context. What he had consumed was a diluted solution of the 942. And what he had put in the campers water jug was plain, pure 942. Full strength.
What would undiluted 942 do to them? Would it kill them all, like the old men?
Over the next few weeks, a couple more of them did die. The rest of them were in such constant agony that they certainly wished they were dead.
Leon carried them to the hermit's shack, two pain-wracked bodies at a time. Soon the tiny structure was filled with moaning human worms too intoxicated with misery to even get to their feet.
Those who died were fed to the gators.
The screaming really started when their bones began to push through their skin. That was about the second week. There would be blood and thrashing and finally merciful unconsciousness. The wound would close in a matter of hours, but soon another bone would penetrate to the outside world.
The screaming never stopped. Leon thought he was going as insane as the students. He fed them with all the fresh meat he could find. He bathed them with buckets of swamp water to wash away the blood and their own waste.
It was only in the third week that he began to see clearly what was happening. The students were changing, just as he had changed, but they were changing faster and they were changing completely. They were becoming true wolves.
The bitch was the first to be done with it, six weeks after the metamorphosis commenced. She was a real wolf now. She went to her still-prostrate lover, gave him a sniff and then walked unsteadily to Leon.
She licked his foot.
The next day, she went into the bayou with him and they hunted together for less than an hour. She was exhausted and invigorated when she came back with her hare, and she devoured it in front of the others.
Over the next several days, they all began to find their strength. The hunting parties became larger. And then one day the entire group of transformed creatures left the stench-filled hermit's shack all together.
They were a wolf pack.
And Leon was the alpha wolf. And the bitch was his bitch. Life was good.
He had been happy then, and he foresaw a long lifetime of hunting and running with his pack.
But less than a year later, much of his pack was dead, and the others no longer looked at him with the adoration and obeisance he was accustomed to.
Revenge would be sweet, but more importantly revenge was absolutely necessary if he intended to regain the trust of the pack.
The Chinaman would have to die. So, too, the woman who had managed to elude them at Desire House, the malicious Gypsy witch. And especially the younger man who ran faster than a wolf and killed with a touch.
He and the Chinaman were of a kind, but what that kind was Leon Grosvenor did not know. One thing for sure. Those two weren't normals.
REMO STOPPED at the first gas station outside town. It was a huge, brightly lit complex with something like eighteen gas pumps. Several of them were being used by rowdy partyers who shouted and whooped as they gassed up.
He found the pay phone at the far side of the parking lot and leaned on the one button. Somehow this connected him to Folcroft Sanitarium and the offices of CURE.
"Lucky Dollar Store and Incense Emporium," said a voice in heavily accented English.
Remo looked at the phone. Looked at the keypad. Had he accidentally held down the wrong button? "Hello?" the voice said.
"Hello?"
"Is Harold home?" Remo asked.
"Remo, it's about time," Harold W. Smith said suddenly.
"What's with the hired help who answered the phone?" Remo demanded.
"That's a new automated system for weeding out undesirable calls," Smith explained quickly. "Believe it or not, there are people out there who have nothing better to do than see what happens if they hold down their 1 button. The system will let you through as soon as you speak and it recognizes your voiceprint. Now give me your report."
"Fine, thanks," Remo complained. "The report is I just spent my evening chasing wolves around N' awlins."
"Yes, we've been getting the reports of several wolf attacks in the French Quarter," Smith said. "Also about the attack on the Romany camp. I spoke with Master Chiun about that earlier. I wish you would have phoned more quickly, Remo. Master Chiun is not, er, precise when it comes to details."
"Yeah, well, I was busy." Remo quickly ran down the events that had occurred since arriving in New Orleans. He ended by describing his questioning of the last wolf.
"You questioned it?" Smith asked dubiously.
"I tortured it, if you must know," Remo said.
"And?" Smith asked noncommittally.
"It talked."