Chiun wondered who would vote for such a man to lead them, and the answer came to him at once: Americans.
New Orleans, Chiun decided, was far too American.
Despite the revels that continued incessantly in the streets, Chiun heard the approaching pack long before they reach the room. He knew that they were not human.
"Get to cover!" he barked. Cuvier and the woman, wrapped in their own thoughts, looked at him bewildered.
"They come!" Chiun said sharply.
The pair of imbeciles scrambled for cover. Chiun heard the rush of flesh and positioned himself in the middle of the room when the door burst inward, dead bolt shattered, pieces of the locking mechanism hurled across the room to scar wallpaper.
A gray wolf lunged into the room, immediately followed by another and another. To Chiun's left, the Gypsy woman screamed again and took off running for the nearest bedroom, with a snarling canine in pursuit. The white man yelped, his wind pipe closing on him, hastily retreating to the balcony, where he would soon be trapped.
A manlike shadow loomed behind the wolf pack, filling up the doorway, but Chiun had no time to examine the intruder. A stocky canine rushed at him, leaping furiously toward his face.
REMO SMELLED TROUBLE, literally, when he walked into the lobby of Desire House. It was too subtle to have been noticed by the few jabbering guests or the night clerk nodding at his post, but Remo caught a whiff of it instantly. It was the smell of animals. Canine. A lot of them.
He took the stairs in lightning leaps and picked up the first sounds of combat when he tore through the landing for the second floor. A woman's scream, a crash of furniture, mixed up with snarling and the snapping of fangs.
Remo reached the third floor a second later. He was at the west end of the hall, perhaps one hundred feet from number 304. In the dim lighting he saw the door to his suite of rooms was open, spilling light into the corridor. The crashing continued but the snarling had turned to animal yelps and whines, and then a hulking man-shape cleared the threshold, followed rapidly by one, two, three sleek canine forms.
Remo never slowed, tearing after the fleeing attackers, but glanced through the open door of 304. The smallish parlor was totaled, furniture upended, stuffing ripped out of the sofa's lacerated cushions, coffee table halved as if by an ax-wielding lunatic. A large dog, charcoal gray, lay stretched out near the center of the room, unmoving, obviously dead.
Jean Cuvier was gaping at him from the balcony, crouched and peering through a small gap in the curtains like a Peeping Tom. Aurelia Boldiszar stood in the doorway to her sleeping room, with Chiun beside her. At their feet, another lifeless canine, this one with more brown than gray to his untidy coat.
The attackers had speed. Animal speed, goaded by blind panic. The man-thing in the lead was faster even than the others.
But not faster than Remo Williams.
The man-thing looked over his shoulder and barked an order. One of the beasts skidded to a haft at the bottom of the stairs and stood his ground, baring his teeth and growling menacingly. He started the growl, anyway, and then realized the human wasn't showing fear. Wasn't even slowing and was coming at him with the speed of an avalanche.
Then the avalanche hit him. The creature barely had time to think about snapping at the human before the human brought a fist down hard on his canine skull, reducing it to jelly.
Remo was back in the lobby. The wolf man got lucky. A couple was coming in at that moment, the doors open wide. If the wolf man and the pack had slowed enough to open a door or even to crash through the glass. Remo would have been upon them.
As it was, he was just inches behind them as they slithered between the entering couple and into the thick of Mardi Gras. Remo made a bounding leap and caught the last of the beasts by the tail. And pulled hard, pulled fast. Between the beast's forward momentum and the strength of the yank, something had to give.
Remo quickly came upon the yowling, wounded beast in a rapidly clearing space in the street. The thing turned to face him.
"Looking for this?" Remo held up the bloody tail. "I think I'll use it to make a hat."
The beast's growl became a leopard screech, and it came at him in a bound that was fast. Very fast. Remo knew in that instant that he was facing no ordinary dog.
That confirmed his suspicions. And it pissed him off.
The dog was airborne and homing in on his throat with fangs like saw blades, but the teeth never connected with living flesh. Remo grabbed and flung the creature, which found itself flying way beyond its planned trajectory.
Up over the soaring crowd and onto the balcony of a hotel room that faced the street. It took Remo less than one second to shot put the beastie, but for a moment he thought it had been too much. The pack was gone.
He continued moving fast, slithering through the masses like some impossibly quick serpent, and his senses fanned out. He struggled to identify the countless sounds around him. Hundreds of human beings with noisy heartbeats and thunderous breathing, not to mention the miasma of intoxicated chatter.
But through it all he heard one unique sound. Panting.
He concentrated in vain to pin down its precise location.
Time to use the old noggin. Not his. Everybody else's.
Remo took a step up, and the step carried him six feet off the ground, where he began running along the heads of the revelers. Without thinking about it, his feet found the correct pressure level of each head of hair they landed on and used it to support him momentarily before he moved to the next.
Nothing to it. As easy as walking on water. From his elevated vantage point it was easy to find the scattered bodies his adversaries left in their wake. The beasts and their werewolf leader were intent on getting away fast and muscling anyone and everyone out of their path. Remo stepped back onto solid earth-in his own wake he left several drunks scratching their heads and wondering what had just brushed over it.
Remo suddenly had the advantage, using the path through the crowd that the werewolf's pack was clearing, which slowed them. In a flash he came alongside the last dog in the pack and gave him an open-handed shove just between the shoulder blades. The beast was crushed into the pavement like a bug under a shoe, his spine a shambles.
The pack was veering into an alley. Remo snatched the next dog by the scruff of the neck and lifted it to shoulder level.
The dog flailed his powerful canine legs and craned this way and that, snapping his powerful jowls. It was all wasted energy. He couldn't reach far enough to sink his great canine fangs into his captor. He was helpless.
Remo didn't even notice his prisoner's struggles. He was too pissed off.
Because the alley was empty. The wolf man was nowhere to be seen.
Then he heard the squeal of tires and he sped off in search of it, into the street and then another alley. He was behind the Desire House.
There were human bodies scattered at the far end of the alley where a vehicle had gone through the crowd. Some of those people looked like they wouldn't be getting up again.
Remo had a new path to follow and sprinted along the trail of victims around another building. Another narrow street.
There had been revelers in the street, but the werewolf's vehicle hadn't even slowed. There had been nowhere for the revelers to run. Remo saw an astronaut and a green alien and a belly dancer, their costumes making a mockery of their crushed and lifeless bodies.
Remo found the werewolf's vehicle a block later, but the werewolf was gone.
There were people dead underneath the van. People were screaming and shouting while only twenty feet away the drunk partyers were oblivious to the horror. A wounded woman wearing a coconut bikini top and a grass skirt was sobbing over a pair of man's legs that were attached to a pelvis that was pinned and flattened under the front tire of the van. Remo smelled the animal odors from the vehicle. He reached out his senses fervently again, and for a moment, through the steady clamor of voices, he thought he heard the canine panting. Then it was gone.