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 though 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.
The Master, deeply affronted by the very idea of being touched by such a creature, let alone being almost throttled to death by it, proceeded to break every bone in the beast's body, starting with the toes and working up. And only when this task had been satisfactorily completed did he serve up the killing stroke to the huge shambling thing that, in a former life, was known for putting the best face on a rotten weather forecast.
As Chiun stepped away from the body, he announced, "There are no more creatures here."
"Then it's time for us to find the head man," Remo said as he referred to his map.