Warren Murphy: Killer Chromosomes

The room number was 221-B. She went down another corridor and found a stairway that opened onto a fire escape leading down the outside of the building. At the corner of the building, the fire escape platform split and ran all around the outside of the patients' rooms on the second floor.

Perfect, she thought. Perfect, and she went back to the psychoservices department in the main building to kill some time and draw a plan.

In room 221-B, Chiun said to Remo, who was puffing gently on a cigarette, "They are here."

"Now how do you know that?" Remo asked. He was a little weary of Chiun's alarms about tiger people. What would be nice, he thought, would be a Caribbean vacation. And a large piña colada.

"The same way you would have known it but a week ago," Chiun said. "With my senses."

"Forget it," Remo said.

"They are here nonetheless," Chiun repeated dully. How could he save Remo from the tigers when Remo was not only unable to protect himself, but didn't even seem to care? Moments ago, footsteps in the hallway moved toward the door, stopped, then retreated rapidly. They were not the footsteps of a normal human. Instead of the infinitesimal time lag between putting down the heel and putting down the sole of the foot, these footsteps had come down with one faint, but continuous sound, as if the bottom of the foot were round and padded. Like a tiger's.

"You take care of them," Remo was saying. "I'm thinking about pork chops. And applesauce and mashed potatoes. Yeah, pork chops."

Three members of Sheila Feinberg's pack who had accompanied her to Rye, New York, entered Folcroft that night by going over the wall she told them at precisely the time she told them. Eight P.M., sharp.

At 8:12 P.M., they hit the corridor leading to Remo's room. The guard who had been stationed inside that hallway had been pulled off duty by Smith, at Chiun's demand. No one was there to stop the three as they sniffed and growled their way down the corridor toward Room 221-B where Remo lay in bed, his belly full of lobster and pork chop.

But the three were not unseen or unheard.

In Remo's room, Chiun rose from his small grass mat and moved so quietly toward the door, Remo did not hear him stir.

Dr. Smith in his office directly below the corridor, glanced at a television monitor and saw two women and a man walking down the hall. What he saw gave him a chill, the kind he had not felt since witnessing the results of Nazi atrocities in World War II.

The three tiger persons hunched over, their fingers almost touching the floor as they moved from closed door to closed door, sniffing. One turned, directly in front of the stationary, hall television camera. Her lips were pulled back exposing her teeth. Her eyes glinted inhumanly. Smith realized for the first time just how much animal and how little human these tiger people had become.

He yanked open his center desk drawer, grabbed a .45 caliber automatic and ran from his office to the flight of stairs leading to the upstairs corridor.

Chiun waited inside the door of the hospital room while Remo started to sit up in bed.

"They are here," Chiun said.

"I gathered that," Remo said.

"So what are you doing?" asked Chiun.

"Going to help."

"Help who do what? Rest your bloated belly."

"Just because I ate something good doesn't mean I can't help you," Remo said.

Chiun turned away in disgust, dismissing Remo with a wave of his hand.

Outside the door, the three tiger people scratched on the fire-retardant metal covering the wooden door. All they had to do was turn the knob to enter the room, but they did not. They scratched at it. Their fingernails made a soft insistent noise, like the mewing of cats left outside by mistake with night coming on.

They purred.

Smith pushed through the set of double fire doors leading to the corridor. He choked back a gasp at the sight of three persons scratching on the door. He moved to the corner of the hallway where he could not be surprised by anyone who might follow him through the doorway. He raised his gun and called out, "All right, all of you. Away from that door. Down on the floor."

The three turned to him. The expressions on their faces would have been appropriate only if Harold W. Smith was a lamb chop.

Inside the hospital room, Chiun and Remo heard Smith's voice.

"What is that idiot doing here?" Chiun said.

The three members of Sheila Feinberg's pack moved away from the door toward Smith, their arms raised over their heads, fingers curled in imitation of deadly claws, mouths open and drooling.

"That'll do," Smith said coldly. "Hold it right there." The gun was unwavering in his right hand, near his hip.

The two women and a man kept moving toward him. Smith waited until they were away from the door and repeated his command.

"The three of you. Down on the floor."

But instead of dropping, the three separated and came at Smith, breaking into a run, charging, growling. Smith fired a shot which hit the man's chest and lifted him off his feet before plunking him back onto the marble floor.

In Room 221-B, Remo started up again from bed.

"That's Smitty. He needs help," he said.

"Get back in bed"

"Screw it, Little Father. I'm helping."

"You?" said Chiun disdainfully. "I will go." He pushed his way out into the hall, and left Remo sitting, strangely tired and empty, on the edge of the bed.

On the fire escape outside Remo's room, Sheila Feinberg rose to her feet from the position in which she had lain for the last four hours. She stretched once. Her muscles were loose and ready.

She looked through a tiny scratch she had found in the corner of the mirrored window in Remo's room and saw Chiun going out into the hallway.

As the door closed behind him, Sheila, with a running start, threw her body against the window, crashed through it, and landed gently on her feet alongside Remo's bed.

Remo looked at her with shock.

She purred at him.

"Hello, sweet meat," she said. "I've missed you."

In the hall, the two women crouched in front of Smith, separated from each other and from him by five feet. Smith seemed reluctant to fire. He covered first one, then the other with his automatic, and again ordered them to lie flat on the floor. They hissed.

Chiun saw tensing of the calf muscles protruding from under the women's skirts. The attack leap was impending.

Like a cold blue wind, he moved between the women and Smith.

He slapped the gun away from Smith's hand. It hit the floor with a loud metallic clank, like a hammer dropped onto ceramic tile. The women leaped at Smith but Chiun was between them and their target.

A raised left hand stopped one of the women as completely as if she had impaled herself full speed on a spear. The second woman turned her head to give her open mouth a clean bite at Chiun's throat. He merely slid below the woman's head and came up, almost casually, with an elbow into a point slightly above the pit of the woman's stomach. The air went out of her with a sibilant hiss and she fell onto the other woman.

Smith brushed past Chiun and knelt over the two women.

"They're dead," he said.

"Of course," said Chiun.

"I wanted them alive," Smith said.

"They wanted you dead," said Chiun. "Maybe they were wiser than you." He looked at them. "Neither is the one who was here earlier."

Chiun ran toward the hospital room, Smith following at his heels.

When they entered the room, it was empty.

Broken glass from the window cluttered the floor. Chiun ran to the window and looked out. On the ground below, running toward the docks behind Folcroft, was a woman. She carried Remo's body over her shoulder, seemingly without effort, like a big man carrying a small rug.

"Aiiiieee," Chiun screamed and leaped through the jagged glass of the window.