Wolf's Bane td-132

by Warren Murphy

  The old Korean showed surprise. Just for a moment, he froze. It was such a brief reaction that the Romany beauty and the Cajun ugly missed it entirely. "Spoke?"

  "I forced it to."

  Chiun looked at him questioningly.

  "I knew the minute I saw them that they weren't natural dogs. Or wolves or whatever."

  "As did I," Chiun said, looking seriously at one of the beasts sprawled dead in the hotel room. "And yet I was not inclined to converse with it."

  "I wasn't after some polite chitchat. I was trying to prove something."

  "What?" Chiun looked at him.

  Remo switched to English without realizing it. "You know goddamn well what. That it was human."

  "You kill old loup-garou," Cuvier interjected, "he change back to what he was before."

  Remo shook his head morosely. "Don't count on it."

  "How could one of these things talk?" Chiun continued in Korean.

  "Well, it didn't do it very well, but it was good enough for me to understand," Remo insisted. "They used to be human, Little Father. Anyway, none of them was Leon Grosvenor."

  Cuvier stood up fast when he heard the very nonKorean name amid the otherwise unintelligible conversation. "Leon? You didn't tell me Armand got Leon Grosvenor after me."

  "You know the guy?" Remo asked.

  "I hear some story," said the Cajun, sounding even more depressed. "Reckon I'm dead." He turned to Aurelia Boldiszar.

  "That was no man," Aurelia said. "I saw it, felt it. We were in the presence of a devil."

  "Well, he ran like one," Remo said.

  Chiun made a small, exasperated clucking sound and shook his head.

  "What about them other wolves?" Cuvier demanded.

  "I took out a few before they slipped off. I don't know how many got away with him."

  Another cluck from Chiun.

  "Go shove it, Chiun, you couldn't have done any better," Remo griped.

  To Cuvier he said, "Get packed."

  "What?" Jean Cuvier had gone from frightened to confused, with no real change in his expression.

  "Get your things. We're clearing out before the cops get here."

  "Cops! Merde!" he blurted, and rushed to pack his suitcase.

  Aurelia Boldiszar had come to Remo with nothing but the clothes she wore. She was as ready to bail out, right then, as she would ever be. While the Cajun completed his hasty packing she stood over one of the dead creatures, staring at the lolling tongue and the half-open eyes.

  "These weren't ordinary wolves," she said. "They're not werewolves. Still, they may share the werewolf's spirit and commune with him in other ways. They are familiars."

  "Like a witch's cat, you mean?"

  "Perhaps."

  "So you think this is witchcraft, whatever made the werewolf?" Remo asked. "You're saying these are spirit wolves? I told you, they're science experiments. Laboratory freaks."

  "You are not listening," she said. "The loup-garou is closer to an animal than normal men. It doesn't matter what created them-he still may commune with others of his kind, draw strength from them."

  "Collaborate?"

  "Perhaps."

  "So, he's the alpha male? Top dog?"

  "The others followed him," Aurelia said. "That's all I know."

  Cuvier rejoined them then, his heavy suitcase dragging down one shoulder. "Where we going?" he asked.

  Remo had formed the answer in his mind already, without knowing it. "Your friend Lafite told me where we can find this thing," he said. He could have added, "more or less," but kept it to himself.

  "Where is that?" The Cajun sounded gravely ill at ease.

  "Where do you think? We're going on a camping trip," he said.

  Remo stripped the blankets off the bed Cuvier had used and quickly wrapped the wolf corpses.

  Aurelia asked, "What will you do with those?"

  "Present for a friend."

  ONLY WHEN THEY WERE safely back on the hermit's land, deep in the swamp with the rest of the wolves, did the leader howl with his pack. His grief was at last allowed to come out, and the sound of it echoed among the cypress trees for miles around.

  For almost a year his pack had lived and run and thrived together. None of them had ever been lost, no matter what the dangers. But tonight the tables turned. So many of his brothers cut down, dead, in a matter of just minutes.

  What had gone wrong?

  The old Asian should have been the first to die, an easy target, but he stood his ground as if the sight of hungry wolves in his hotel room was nothing new. When the little old man struck, it came with speed that Leon's eyes could barely follow, wielding lethal force the wolf man's brain still couldn't comprehend. Within a fraction of a second Leon saw his proud young brother stretched out dead on the floor.

  Another of the pack pursued the Gypsy woman as she tried to run away, when the Chinaman had struck again!

  Leon couldn't have honestly described the way the old man moved from one point to another, traveling some twenty feet to intercept the second wolf before it reached the woman. Another flurry of the old man's fists-or was it feet?-and Leon saw a second brother crumple lifeless on the hotel carpet. It was then that Leon knew fear.

  Before Leon could react to the old man, his warning instinct shrilled and he knew help was coming for the old Asian-someone else who carried death in bloodstained hands. Leon's nerve broke.

  He retreated, knowing that the bitch would blame him-possibly the others, too-and that they would be right.

  He led his brothers and the bitch in a coward's retreat-and they were struck down like cowards by a foe even more lethal than the Chinaman. Leon had caught a glimpse of the horror and still couldn't believe what he had seen. The younger man with the dead eyes had ripped the tail right off one of his brothers, then had launched the wolf into the side of the building. With one hand. And had done it with enough force to shatter the beast.

  He and his brothers bullied their way through the crowd, but the mass of normals slowed them down. The one with the dead eyes caught up in seconds. Another wolf dead from a single blow to the spine. Another wolf snatched up by the scruff of the neck like a housecat!

  That was when a lucky break in the crowd allowed Leon to streak back to the van. He was already blinded by his own tears, which blurred the shapes of the people that got in the way of his vehicle. He simply drove through them and remembered feeling the thump of bodies bouncing off the van. Screams followed in his wake, but all Leon could think of was that his brothers were dead.

  Another crowd. He didn't even try to slow. Just let the van slam into the mass of costumed humans and come to a stop-then he and his companions emerged and fled through the city of horrors.

  He had taken fully half the pack with him on this trip, and now there were just two wolves remaining-the bitch and the guard wolf he had left with the van during the hotel incursion.

  It took the pathetic trio twenty minutes more to find another vehicle, because most Mardi Gras participants were roaming aimlessly on foot. At last they came upon a normal in a Toyota Tercel station wagon, just emerging from an all-night liquor store. He had a paper bag in one hand, a twelve-pack in the other, and he never knew what hit him, dying on his feet before he had a chance to be afraid.

  They were too frightened to feed. They scrambled into the car and raced back to the bayou to mourn. Those were his brothers-dead!

  More than that-those wolves were his children. He had created them.

  THE WOMAN WHO CAMPED on the Hermit's land, who called herself Thena, had asked Leon to come visit her laboratory on wheels.

  Leon liked Thena. She didn't flinch from him. She had something of the animal in her, too. He had begun thinking that maybe, somehow, he and the woman...

  Was such a thing totally out of the question? He, Leon, the loup-garou, the killer and hunter, was shocked when he entered the laboratory. Thena had been busy collecting animals of all shapes and sizes from the bayou, and parts of them littered the int
erior of the laboratory. Many parts were stored in glass laboratory freezers. Other parts were chewed to the bone and tossed in plastic bins or simply scattered on the floor and the counter.

  That was when the woman, Thena, made him the offer he couldn't refuse. With one simple sip of a solution, she could make him into a true hunter-a genuine, more-than-human loup-garou.

  Leon accepted the offer without hesitation. Thena laughed delightedly, showing her strong white teeth, and then she made him something to drink.

  She took a small glass laboratory bottle from one of the little refrigerators-the one with the label 942 Solution-and poured the contents into a paper cup. "Just drink," she said.

  So Leon drank.

  "What's the matter?" she asked as he sat heavily down on one of the folding chairs.

  "It hurts," he said.

  She looked confused. "Bad?"

  "Not too bad."

  But it lasted a long time. Hours. And he felt sore for weeks afterward. His face and his arms. His very bones hurt. He didn't know it that night, but his bones were changing. Lengthening.

  But that night he became a true loup-garou. He and the woman hunted together, and she was delighted with his new strength and speed.

  "My wonderful wolf man!" she exclaimed happily when he emerged from the water with a struggling gator draped over one shoulder.

  Together they feasted on the gator, still weakly struggling as they tore it apart with their talons and teeth. Thena, he found, might look entirely normal, but she could kill and devour prey like a tigress.

  On the way home, she told him to kill the hermit. Then the bayou would be all theirs.

  "It already is," Leon argued. "He'll let us do as we please."

  "I can't allow him to know what has occurred," Thena said with a heartless shrug.

  Leon Grosvenor wanted very much to please her. But kill the old hermit, the only father he had ever known? "Never," he declared.

  "You will do as I command!" Thena snapped, suddenly furious.

  "Not that," Leon responded. They argued, but Leon stood his ground.

  Thena became very quiet the rest of the way home.

  THEY PARTED COMPANY that night with short words, and Leon waited in the woods a few hundred paces from the RV laboratory, then realized she might smell him. He moved into the nearest body of water, a stagnant pool of murk, and sank almost completely.

  Near dawn he heard the woman emerge from the laboratory and scamper off into the bayou.

  When Leon entered the laboratory, he found her notes. "Canis lupus 942 standard dilution too potent. Subject improved to dangerous extremes. Physical traits outstanding but diminished obedience and enhanced self-control characteristics make subordination of subject inadequate."

  There was much more that Leon couldn't understand. Latin phrases, something about genetics, but the phrase "termination of subject" caught his eye.

  What angered him the most was that she had never liked him. She had just used him. For a damn experiment. And now she was planning to kill him. Leon had thought that he had finally found companionship-someone like him. But every word she said was a lie.

  Then Leon got a brilliant idea.

  He would make himself some companions.

  HE LEFT THE LABORATORY With a specially insulated pouch filled with glass bottles from the little refrigerator. Dry ice packs fitted inside to keep the bottles cold.

  Heading for the hermit's cabin, he smelled the blood a half mile away. He found Thena squatting on the sagging porch with a chunk of red, bloody meat in her mouth.

  "Join me," she called from the porch.

  Leon stood in the trees, great sorrow over the loss of the hermit competing with a savage desire to join the feast. The blood scent called him like a siren song.

  Then he saw Thena freeze, her eyes locking on the insulated pack. She knew at once, of course, what Leon had done.

  "Give that to me." Her voice was cold and commanding.

  "Never."

  "Give it to me now!"

  Compelled by his need to obey this strange woman, and burning with desire to sink his teeth into the fresh, warm kill, Leon did the hardest thing he had ever done.

  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.