Warren Murphy: Unnatural Selection

"Maybe a few," Remo said, "but not all. The two they chowed down on here were cops. We'll be okay."

"Said the mouse to the cat," the old man sniffed. Hems of his black robes twirling near his bony ankles, he swept past Remo out into the hall.

Alone in the office, Remo bit his lip thoughtfully as he glanced at the bodies one last time.

"It can't be," he insisted.

But even he could hear the soft strain of doubt in his own whispered voice.

Chapter 8

The PCP craze back in the seventies had been bad. Back then they'd had to peel angel dusters off the ceiling. Bones in hands and wrists were shattered as fists that could not feel pain pounded over and over against cinder-block walls. One junkie had broken all his teeth trying to chew his way through the iron bars of the lockup.

That was bad.

The rest of the time was regular assorted hopheads, winos and psychos. Some of those were real humdingers. The Bellevue Express hummed night and day from the station filled with your general order of whacko. They were bad, too.

But in his more than twenty years on the force, Sergeant Jimmy Simon had never seen anything like this.

The creatures that had been brought in that morning were not human. Whatever they had sniffed, smoked, shot up or swallowed had turned them into ranting, snarling, growling, snapping animals. Cannibals. Honest-to-God New York City cannibals. These fruitcakes hadn't been arrested; they'd been caged. Booking them in the traditional sense proved impossible. Simon already had two men in the hospital with severe chest and neck lacerations. They had made the mistake of trying to fingerprint one of the original Vaunted Press pair.

They'd all been Mirandized through cell bars. There was no way to mug shot them. A Polaroid was brought to the cells with special instructions to the photographer not to get within an arm's length of the cages.

Sergeant Jimmy Simon had been relieved at the main desk of the South Precinct Midtown station more than half an hour before, but had yet to leave. As the day wore on and the crisis worsened, the order came for everyone to stay put until further notice. Men were being called in from home.

Jimmy Simon had always thought the place was a zoo. But now it was...well, a zoo.

"A zoo. A goddamn zoo," Simon muttered to himself.

Simon sat in a wobbly chair behind the on-duty desk sergeant, filling out paperwork. As he spoke, a terrible roar rolled up from the depths of the station.

The new desk sergeant wheeled, startled at the sound.

"What the hell was that?" Sergeant Jeff Malloy asked.

Jimmy didn't look up from his paperwork. "Must be feeding time," he replied. "They been doing that all day."

The noise came again. A tiger's roar.

Sergeant Malloy felt the short hair on the back of his neck stand on end. "Jesus," he swore.

"Tell me about it," Simon grunted.

Simon doubted he'd ever get used to the sounds that had been coming from downstairs all morning. Every time someone went to check on the more than two dozen prisoners, the commotion got worse. It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon and Sergeant Simon still got chills from the roars and snarls that had been rolling up from downstairs for the past three hours.

"A freaking goddamn zoo," he muttered to himself.

Another roar. So loud Jimmy Simon jumped, dropping his Bic disposable.

He couldn't take it any longer. Simon spun in his chair. "O'Reilly, go see what the hell's going on down there," he hollered across the room.

A young officer looked up from where he had been filling out a report. "I told you an hour ago," O'Reilly complained. "They're mostly just sniffing and stretching. They looked at me like I was a T-bone or somethin'."

"Just go," Simon barked. "And watch your Irish ass."

Grumbling, the patrolman got to his feet. O'Reilly was disappearing down the back squad-room staircase when Simon caught sight of a pair of new arrivals coming up the main stairs from the street.

"What now?" he muttered.

One was young, the other ancient.

The Asian looked to be a hundred years old and moved with a gliding shuffle that barely stirred his black robes. The young one wore a black T-shirt and chinos. Wrists as thick as small trees rotated absently as the two of them approached the desk.

The young one was about to speak when the old one bullied his way in front.

"We would see the beasts caged in your menagerie," the Master of Sinanju demanded of Sergeant Malloy.

Jimmy Simon was relieved these two hadn't come in during his desk shift. "Gotta be a full moon tonight," he grumbled.

"Tend your own affairs or invoke the Master's wrath, doughnut gobbler," Chiun spit at the seated man. "Show us the beasts," he ordered Malloy.

Behind the Master of Sinanju, Remo could see the color rise in Simon's flabby cheeks. Before the sergeant could say something he would have plenty of time to regret as a team of surgeons worked to unplug his badge from his sinuses, Remo hastily interceded.

"FBI," he said, waving his phony ID. "We want to see the people you brought in today."

"They are not people," Chiun corrected.

"Yeah? Well, you got that right," Jimmy Simon said from his chair. "But no dice."

"We're just going to take a quick look," Remo said.

"No, you're not," Sergeant Simon replied, standing. He hitched up his belt under his sagging gut. "I've got a city-wide panic going on out there, and those nutcases downstairs are in on it. They're already wired up from missing breakfast. Listen to the roaring down there. You get your ass too close to a cage, and they'll have both of you for lunch. And I'm not mopping up the mess."

He tugged at his belt again. It felt good to throw his weight around. Especially after a day like today. He waited for this FBI agent to argue.

But the Fed didn't argue. He just got a funny look on his face. So did the old coot in the black pajamas. "What roaring?" Remo said.

Sergeant Simon's broad face grew confused. "Huh?"

"That's funny," Sergeant Malloy said. "They stopped." He glanced beyond Simon to the stairs at the rear of the squad room. Silence rose up from below.

Jimmy Simon listened. He heard only the normal bustle of the busy station house.

"That's weird," Simon said.

Remo and Chiun were no longer listening to the police officers. Hearing more acute than any other human ears on the face of the planet was trained on the building's lower floors, filtering out the noise, absorbing the soft sounds. All at once, both men snapped alert.

"They are attacking," the Master of Sinanju snapped.

A sudden blur of movement, faster than the naked eye could perceive.

One moment they were standing in place; the next, both Remo and Chiun had vaulted over the desk. Sergeants Simon and Malloy spun a stunned dance around them as they flew past. Before Sergeant Simon could voice a protest, a fresh sound erupted from beneath his feet.

Gunfire.

"Oh, God," Simon said.

Remo and Chiun were moving swiftly across the squad room toward the rear stairs. Belly jiggling madly, Sergeant Simon sprinted to catch up. His gun was out of its holster.

"I just sent a man down to check on them," he huffed.

All objections to Remo and Chiun's presence were gone. Other officers were running for the narrow stairway.

"How many are there?" Remo demanded.

"Twenty-seven," Simon replied.

More muffled gunshots. Firing wildly. The kind of crazed shooting that indicated panic.

When they reached the basement level, they followed a short, gloomy corridor to a closed steel door. Remo, Chiun and the crush of officers massed outside the door. One man was already there when they arrived. His face was ashen.

The gunfire had stopped.

"What's the situation?" Simon demanded, panting.