He hadn't drawn his pistol yet, preferred to wait until he had a target or the stampede of humanity required more drastic handling than mere fists and elbows. As it was, Merle took a few knocks going in, but he was gaining ground. He guessed that there were other exits at the rear or to the sides, draining a portion of the crowd. That meant his targets could have wriggled through some other loophole, but he wasn't ready to give up on them just yet. He had to find his shooters first, and try to figure out exactly what was happening.
In fact, he literally stumbled on the first one, several yards inside the main room of the auditorium, where total chaos reigned. Merle caught himself before he went down on his face, and recognized the ape mask Terry Joslin had been wearing to disguise himself. Still, there was something odd...
It took Merle Bettencourt another moment to decipher what was troubling him. His soldier lay facedown, arms splayed as if to clutch the earth, but the ape mask he wore was facing upward, toward the ceiling. Reaching out to prod the rubber with a shaky index finger, Merle could feel his supper coming back as he discovered that the shooter's whole damn head was turned around like something from The Exorcist.
Merle drew his pistol then, stepped back from Terry Joslin's corpse and started looking for his other boys. Where were they, damn it? How could they have missed their targets, even in a zoo like this, when they had been so close behind them and the marks wore no disguises?
The crush was clearing out where Merle stood, and he spotted two more of his boys where they had fallen, not just side by side, but one atop the other, stacked. Benny Foch and Gilles Petiot, he recognized from their respective masks. A skull and a long-haired Fabio, for Christ's sake, stretched out dead together on the concrete floor.
That left three to do the job, if they were still alive. Merle didn't know if he could get to them in time, if they were even still inside the auditorium, but he couldn't cut and run, no matter how he longed to do exactly that. Rank had its privileges, but they were balanced by responsibilities.
He started toward the nearest aisle that led between the rows of seats, down toward the pit and stage, sidestepping as an old man charged directly at him, wild-eyed, running for his life. More panicked Christians followed, jostling Merle, unmindful of the automatic pistol in his hand. He slashed at one of them, a farmer type, opened his cheek and sent the damned hick reeling off into an empty row of seats, where he collapsed.
Merle was suddenly alert to a snarling sound that emanated from his left. He turned in that direction, toward the stage, and found himself confronted with a canine apparition from his wildest nightmares.
It was larger than a German shepherd, smaller than a Dane, with blood smeared on its muzzle and its matted, tangled coat. Bright eyes regarded Bettencourt as nothing more than food, lips curled back from a set of yellow fangs streaked crimson from a recent taste of flesh and blood. Behind the monster, he saw bodies scattered-two, three, four of them, all missing pieces of their throats and faces, crimson spilling from their wounds onto the sloping floor.
"You wanna piece of me?" the Cajun mobster challenged, but his voice cracked and he felt his bladder straining toward release.
The wolf-thing snarled again, in answer to his question, gliding forward with a click-click-click of claws on concrete, picking up its pace. Merle tried to raise his pistol, but it seemed to weigh a ton all of a sudden, and he knew he was too late as the demented hound from hell sprang toward his throat.
AURELIA BOLDISZAR was worried. There had been no warning this time that the loup-garou was coming, and she wondered if her powers might be failing her, perhaps disoriented by her feelings for the man called Remo. Or maybe she had been distracted by the fear of being shot by those who hunted her contemptible companion, the crude Jean Cuvier.
Whatever the excuse she chose, this time the wolf man had surprised her absolutely. She hadn't been listening attentively to Reverend Rockwell, but rather feeling out the crowd, wondering what had distracted their Korean baby-sitter and where he had gone off to after warning them to keep their seats. When the crowd started screaming, scrambling from their seats in panic, she turned once more to face the stage.
And saw a nightmare in the flesh.
It had been dark the first time, in the Gypsy camp, and she was fleeing for her life at the hotel on Tchoupitoulas Street when he had come for her the second time, but she saw every detail of the monster now. He was indeed a wolf in human form, the denim overalls and boots he wore looking ridiculous with hairy shoulders, chest and arms exposed. And then there was the face-the hideously distended muzzle and the snarling fangs.
By the time the monster rushed at Reverend Rockwell and swept him off the stage, Cuvier was on his feet and shoving toward the nearest aisle, elbowing frightened Christians left and right. She caught him by the shirttail, yelling at him, "Wait! Chiun told us to stay here!"
Rounding on her furiously, Cuvier spit back, "You stay here, then! Be damn dog food, all I care. I'm gettin' out while gettin's good!"
She followed him unwillingly, as much in fear of staying where she was as from a need to see that he was safe. She had distrusted Cuvier on sight, despised him since he made his clumsy move on her, back at Desire House, but if Remo wanted him alive, she was prepared to help the Cajun stay that way. Aurelia only hoped it wouldn't cost her life.
She slipped in behind him as he started bulling through the crowd. One thing about the Cajun, she decided: he made a fair human battering ram. It made no difference if the individuals who blocked his way were men, women or children-he shoved them to the side to save himself.
Twice in their stampede toward the street, Aurelia paused to help one of the people Cuvier had toppled in his rush. The first one was a little girl, no more than six or seven years of age; the other was a woman old enough to be his grandmother, who may have tipped the scales at ninety pounds if she had weighed in with her cane and orthopedic shoes. Aurelia mumbled vain apologies but kept moving in the Cajun's slipstream.
They were within sight of the lobby doors, and there was still no sign of Chiun, when suddenly Aurelia glimpsed a door off to her left. It stood in shadow, with no Exit sign above it, and incredibly, it seemed that no one in the crowd had spied it yet. Once more, she grabbed at Cuvier's loose shirttail. "What now?" he snapped.
"This way!" she urged him, pointing toward the other door.
"We at the lobby," he reminded her. "It's this way to the street."
"And anyone who's looking for you knows it," she replied. "They'll be expecting you, but suit yourself. I'm going out this way."
With that, she turned her back and heard the Cajun cursing, screwing up the nerve to follow her. She glanced back once, to make sure he was coming, and it cost her, as she stumbled over someone's prostrate body, stretched out on the floor.
Aurelia caught herself, face inches from a leering vampire mask. It was an incomplete, almost pathetic costume, worn as it had been with a sport shirt, windbreaker, denim jeans. Not that it mattered to the man behind the mask what other people thought, since he was clearly dead or dying, his head cocked at an impossible angle, fresh blood leaking from one ear she could see.
Aurelia was recovering her balance, scrambling to her feet, when she saw the shiny automatic pistol tucked inside the dead man's belt. She grabbed it without thinking twice-he wouldn't need it now. She identified the make and made sure she had the safety off.
There was a great deal more to being Gypsy than just reading tea leaves, after all.
Jean Cuvier was past her, almost to the exit, as Aurelia scrambled to her feet. The bastard would have left her, she was sure of it, but he wouldn't get rid of her so easily. In fact, if he had any plans for ditching Remo and Chiun, she now had means to stop him and make sure he didn't slip away.
She was perhaps ten feet behind the Cajun when he reached the door and threw his weight against it.
Nothing. With a curse, he seized the knob and shook it, shouldering the metal door again.
"T
ry pulling," she suggested.
"Merde!" He pulled, without result. The door held fast.
"They can't do this!" he raged, and pointed at a message stenciled on the flat gray steel that barred their way: This Door Must Be Unlocked At All Times During Business Hours. "Jesus, man! They breakin' they own rules."
Aurelia thought about blasting the lock with her liberated pistol, as Cuvier started back to the lobby, then froze.
"Shee-it!" the Cajun blurted.
Before him stood a wolf-dog like the ones that had attacked her family's camp and the hotel suite. This one was smeared with blood, its muzzle gleaming crimson. Dark eyes shifted constantly between Aurelia and the Cajun, watching both of them at once, deciding which of them it should kill first.
Aurelia wondered if she ought to fire, risk missing, maybe hitting someone in the crowd still shoving, milling at the lobby exit. It was a long time since she had actually fired a gun, and if she didn't score a vital hit with her first shot.
The beast made the decision for her, yelping furiously as it sprang to tear the Cajun's throat. Aurelia raised her gun and fired once while the wolf was in midair, then saw its jaws clamp onto Cuvier's right arm, raised to protect his face. The two of them went down together, thrashing, with the animal on top.
Recovered from the first explosion of the pistol, fired by reflex more than anything, Aurelia Boldiszar lunged forward as the wolf-dog sank its fangs into Cuvier's arm and shook him as a terrier might shake a rat. The Cajun was screaming, his face flecked with blood, raw panic in his bulging eyes.
Aurelia dared not risk a head shot first, for fear of hitting Cuvier by accident. Instead, she moved to skin-touch range and fired two rapid shots into the creature's rib cage. The explosive impact blew her living target sideways, spraying blood from ugly blow holes, its fangs releasing the Cajun's arm.
Mortally wounded but still primed to fight, the savage canine turned on Aurelia, lunged for her on wobbly legs, jaws gaping. When the beast was three feet from her outstretched hand, she fired twice more into its gaping maw, slamming it backward like a tumbling sack of rags:
"Get up," Aurelia said to Cuvier when she could find her voice. "We're getting out of here."
REMO KNEW he had been suckered when a mob of screaming Christians started pouring through the front doors of the auditorium. Nothing in the preacher's repertoire would prompt such a reaction, even if he passed the plate three times instead of two. And then there were gunshots audible in the crowd noise.
No one had even sniffed around Justine's while he stood waiting on the sidewalk. Somehow, the enemy had zeroed in on Cuvier and Aurelia Boldiszar in the auditorium with Chiun, and now the racket from across the street told him that death had found them there.
Remo sped across the street, avoiding the sluggish traffic and finding a path through the panicking crowd.
Inside the auditorium it was a battlefield. Remo saw the first body as he cleared the threshold from the lobby, entering the main room of the auditorium. A gunman with an E.T. mask lay stretched out on the floor, the fingers of his right hand curled around a weapon he had never found the time to use. No blood was showing, but Remo didn't have to guess about the cause of death.
Off to his left, some thirty feet away, Chiun was finishing the last two members of the Cajun hit team. Remo might have reached the scene in time to help the Master of Sinanju, but no help was necessary. Chiun demolished his hulking adversaries with sublime economy of motion. Both of them were down and dead as Remo turned to scan the auditorium, ignoring scattered bodies and the walking wounded, searching for Aurelia and Jean Cuvier.
The howling told him where they were.
Remo slipped around a corner and down a narrow passageway that led him to an exit on the north side of the auditorium. Aurelia and his witness huddled back against the door, not using it for some reason, a bulky figure looming over them and snarling like a rabid dog.
This wasn't another of the Cajun shooters in a Halloween mask. The creature had a hairy back and shoulders, dark fur covering a power lifter's arms, long blackened talons at the tips of clutching fingers.
About time, Remo thought, and whistled like a man calling his dog. "Hey, Bigfoot! Someone forget to lock the cages at the zoo, or what?"
The loup-garou swiveled to face him, dark eyes blazing in a countenance as shaggy as the creature's arms and shoulders. The snout was distended just enough to be unnatural. The eyes were animal eyes. Dark, thin lips curled back from yellow fangs, as crooked and rotten as a long neglected picket fence.
"No orthodontists back in Transylvania, I guess."
The wolf man snarled at him, then spoke. "You wanna die before these two, it make no never mine to me."
"Use caution, my son. He is more than the others." It was Chiun who spoke, several feet behind him.
Remo nodded just barely in understanding. He sidestepped to see Aurelia, standing firm with both hands clutched around a semiautomatic pistol with the slide locked open. Empty. Cuvier was crouched behind her, fingers clawing at the concrete wall as if he longed to tunnel through it and escape.
"I hear you talking, Leon," Remo told the wolf man, pleased to see the savage eyes blink in surprise. "Is talking all you do? Or do you save the muscle for the ladies?"
The loup-garou sprang at Remo, arms outstretched to seize his throat. There was no planning to the move, and precious little skill, but there was animal speed and agility that shouldn't have been present in a brute that was six foot five or six and way better than two hundred pounds.
Remo had battled the mutated, half-animal creature created by Judith White, and he knew their capabilities.
Leon was better. Leon was faster.
Leon came at him like a bolt of hairy lightning. Remo watched him come and waited until the final instant, then stepped to the side and struck with his right hand, fingers rigid, hooking solidly into the wolf man's side.
Leon reacted with inhuman speed, twisting in midflight to dodge the blow. But he couldn't avoid it. Remo felt ribs snap on impact, heard the grunt of pain and saw his adversary stagger as he regained his feet. The loup-garou pivoted to face his enemy, returning to the fight with greater caution, snarling as he came.
Remo dropped and spun, lashing out at Leon's right knee with a kick and heard it snap. The wolf man clawed at the empty air where Remo had been, then yelped in pain and flung himself down, hoping to trap his adversary beneath him.
Remo was gone.
The wolf man pushed up off the floor, craning his head to find where his enemy had gotten to.
Remo was coming at him from behind, and he planted a palm on the wolf man's back. Leon Grosvenor was slammed to the floor with such force he felt as if a concrete wall had come down on him.
"Okay, dog-face boy," Remo said. "Time to talk."
The wolf man struggled weakly for a moment, dazed. "Fu-!"
Remo pushed harder. The wolf man's entire rib cage compressed, his lungs being squeezed into a smaller space as his ribs creaked like the timbers of an overloaded pirate ship of old.
"Speak, Fido," Remo commanded.
Leon wheezed and struggled. "It was Armand Fortier. Merle Bettencourt. Them's the ones that hired me."
Remo felt the stall. There was still a massive ripple of strength alive in the wolf man's body, and Remo knew Leon was talking while he got his wits together. But talking was necessary.
"I don't give a fur coat for those two losers," he said. "It's you I'm interested in."
"Me?" Leon grunted.
"More precisely, your maker. How did you get this way?"
"I was born this way, you stupid son of a-" There was a nerve in the neck. People had it. Leon probably had it, too. Remo felt around.
Leon howled.
"Yep. You got it," Remo said. Then he released the nerve. "Now, listen to me, you stupid piece of dog shit, and listen good. I want straight answers from you, and I want them fast. Because good answers is all you've got right now that makes you worth keepin
g alive."
"I'll talk," the wolf man moaned, long and low. Remo pressed Leon Grosvenor a little harder into the floor, just as a reminder. Leon grunted. Remo wanted to keep pushing. He wanted to do things to Leon Grosvenor that would make a werewolf killing look tame. And for a moment the Reigning Master of Sinanju was surprised at the depths of his rage. "Who made you, dog?"
"A woman," Leon said. "She came to the bayou."
"And?"
"She asked me if I wanted to be a real loup-garou. She gave me something to drink."
"What did she look like?"
Leon described the woman.
Remo glanced at Chiun, who stood impassively watching. Chiun nodded and asked, "What about her arm, mongrel?"
Leon turned his head in surprise. "Her arm?" Then some sort of understanding opened on his face. "Her arm. It was smooth. It had skin like a baby's arm."
Remo breathed. There was the evidence. That was the kind of unusual detail that proved it. Judith White had lost her arm when she first encountered Remo. But by the time they had met the last time, she had managed to grow it back. The skin on the new arm was pink and new. "Even Smitty can't deny it was Dr. Judy."
Chiun nodded.
"How many others did she make?" Remo demanded.
"I made them. She ran away. I was too strong and she became afraid."
"How many?"
Remo knew the question wouldn't be answered when his hand detected the surge of impulses in the wolf man's muscles. Leon twisted violently to free himself-and Remo let him do it. One taloned claw slashed at him and Remo slapped it aside, shattering the bones. The other hand groped for him, weak and wounded, and Remo squeezed it into pulp.
The wolf man howled with rage and pain, and his eyes flashed to the left and right.
The wolf man's sanity had fled him.
He rose to his knees without warning, with the power of the insane, the speed of an unnatural creature and the adrenaline rush of a dying lunatic. His teeth gnashed at Remo's throat with dizzying speed.
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