Warren Murphy: American Obsession

Chapter 33

Jimmy Koch-Roche didn't wait to see what the thing that pursued him looked like. By the time it had passed over the duct vent, he was around another turn, crawling as fast as he could go. His bare knees were scraped and bleeding, but that was the least of his problems.

As Koch-Roche fled in panic, somewhere in the back of what remained of his rational mind, it occurred to him that whatever the snuffling, scrabbling thing behind him was, it wasn't a hormone-enlarged human. It was something small enough to get into the duct, something small enough to move quickly and easily through it.

Then, from some hidden juncture along the winding black passage, the air pumps kicked in, blowing hot wind against his sweating back. And along with the heat, an odor swept over him.

Musky, fecal and ever so nasty.

The smell made him whimper and crawl even faster.

If he didn't know what it was, he knew one thing for sure-it was gaining on him. Over the thunk of his knees on the steel and a rasp of his own breathing, he could hear the clatter of its claws drawing nearer and nearer.

A plan, he thought. He had to have a plan. As the attorney scrambled along, he racked his brain for a solution. He certainly couldn't fight the thing in the closed confines and darkness of the air duct and hope to come out on top. But if he could get to the next vent, if he could through it, get down into a room or a corridor, even if the thing jumped down after him, he would stand a chance of escape. In a room or a corridor, there would be somewhere to hide; if he couldn't lock the thing in a room, he could lock himself in one.

The plan was feasible. The problem was, the duct ahead him was dark as pitch. A long straight stretch with no exit.

Don't look back, Koch-Roche told himself. For Christ's sake, keep on moving. His knees banged harder against the inside of the duct, making echoes boom before him.

In the darkness, he didn't see the T-branch of the tunnel. The top of his head rammed into the unyielding surface, making him see stars. He refused to let himself black out.

To black out was to die.

Shaking off the shock of the impact, the lawyer started frantically stripping off his shirt. He couldn't count on the beast not being able to locate him by smell-although how it could smell anything but itself had to be the eighth wonder of the world. But he could try to confuse it. Koch-Roche tossed his shirt as far as he could down the right arm of the duct. Then he turned the other way and hauled ass.

If his trick slowed the creature down even a few seconds, he told himself, it might be enough.

What had eluded him, due to his fear and the stress of the moment, was that his battered knees were leaving a blood trail everywhere he went. And it was his fresh blood that the creature was tracking.

The attorney's heart leaped when he saw the patch of light filtering up through a grate in the floor just ahead. Reaching it, Koch-Roche hurled himself at the mesh, ripping the grate out of its track and letting it drop through onto the floor of an office below.

At his back, the growling, snarling, scrambling thing was coming his way, fast.

If Koch-Roche hadn't looked up, he might have gotten away. But look up he did. The sight of the experimental-subject wolverine filling the duct, its multicolored electric-wire wig flopping as it bore relentlessly down on him, froze him in place.

For forty-five of his forty-nine years, Jimmy Koch-Roche had had a secret fear that something huge and hairy and powerful would get him. Get meaning grab, hurt, stomp, tear, punch, cut, even kill. This nameless thing had taken many forms in the real world. The junior-high-school gym coach. A senior classman at Hami High who used to confiscate his lunch money daily. Various thugs and toughs who, when they saw his size, thought easy pickings. Even as late as law school, he felt at times threatened by those bigger than him. It was only after he'd made his mark on the national legal scene that the terror took a step back into the shadows.

It was not gone, though.

Even though he was rich, a man of influence and authority.

It waited in the wings.

It was a curious irony then, that when James Marvin Koch-Roche finally came face-to-face with the beast that would in fact kill him, it was actually much smaller than he was. He outweighed it by seventy pounds.

What the wolverine in the heating duct lacked in size, it more than made up for in pure, kill-crazed frenzy. Its first vicious bite took him high in the shoulder. The fangs were like red-hot irons piercing his flesh. The bones of his shoulder cracked. As the attorney screamed, his heels drumming on the duct, the wolverine shifted its fangs to the side of his neck. Once its grip was solid, it went to work on his belly with its claws.

Chapter 34

Fillmore Fing brought the golf cart to a screeching halt outside the ornately carved ebony-and-ivory arch. With Farnham hot on his heels, he ran into the lobby area of his executive suite. The receptionist was long gone; the trail of debris she'd left behind-sheets of bond typing paper, a lipstick tube and a roll of breath mints-led to the door marked Emergency Exit. After father and son had rushed into Fillmore's private office, Farnham slammed and securely bolted the double doors behind them.

"What now, Pop?" he said.

"We've got no choice," Filimore told him as he snatched up the phone from his desk. He punched the speed dial for the warehouse. While the phone rang at the other end, he said, "We've got to kill all of the human test subjects."

"Yeah, sure, but how?"

"We've got enough cyanide gas stockpiled in our warehouse to wipe out a small city," Fillmore said. "It's simple, really. All we have to do is drill a little hole through the bank-vault door and pump the poison into the medical wing until they're all dead."

"Uh, Pop, aren't you forgetting that there could be people, people who are still human beings, alive in there?"

The elder Fing scowled at what was, undoubtedly, his only surviving son. "There's nothing we can do for any of them," he said. "Anybody left in the medical wing is in very small pieces by now. We've got to concentrate all our efforts on containing this thing. That's the key here. If we can keep a lid on what's happened in the last twenty-four hours, at the very least we still have a chance of doing a nice piece of business in the Third World. At best, we may be able to proceed according to our original plan. But if we can't black out the news of this disaster, it's all over for Family Fing. We'll never survive the bad publicity. Imposter Herbalistics will go down the drain, too."

Even Farnham was taken aback at this. "Jeez, Pop, you mean we'll go out of business?"

"I mean, we'll go straight to jail, if not the gallows," Fillmore said. He glared at the phone in his hand. No one was answering. He hung up and speed-dialed the number for the plant's technical center.

Something else suddenly occurred to Farnham. Something important. "Uh, Pop, Fosdick is in there, too."

"Goddammit, what's happened to the night shift?" the patriarch cried. "Has everyone gone home for the day?" He slammed down the phone, then said, "Come on, Farnham, we'll have to do the job ourselves."

Fillmore took the lead, cautiously exiting his private office. Seeing no one in the reception area, he moved quietly to the arched entrance that opened onto the hallway. When Fillmore poked his head around the arch, he saw a hulking dark shape about a hundred feet down the corridor. The elder Fing ducked back so quickly he practically knocked Farnham down.

"Can't go that way," he whispered to his son. "The American computer guy is outside."

"Oh, shit," Farnham groaned softly.

Fillmore was already heading back for his office. When the doors were safely locked once more, he went into his mahogany-paneled private washroom. When he came out a few seconds later, he had an automatic weapon in his hands, and the side pocket of his suit jacket was bulging with extra clips.