Warren Murphy: Killer Chromosomes

"It's been going under since we climbed out of the trees," Remo said.

"Worse this time. Those animal genes shouldn't have affected her. But they did. Somehow there was an unlocking process which enabled different genes to mix. Now if that can be done, then there's no telling what might happen. There might be a disease for which man has no immunity. Or there might be a race created much stronger than man. Remo, I mean it. This whole thing is perhaps more menacing to mankind than anything that's ever happened in the history of the species."

"You know they put sugar in that tomato sauce." said Remo, pointing to the white strands of pasta buried under a rich red mound of tomato sauce.

"Maybe you haven't heard what I said but you two should know this thing could destroy the world. Including Sinanju," said Smith.

"I beg your pardon, I didn't hear you," said Chiun. "Would you repeat the last sentence, please, oh, Gracious Emperor?"

CHAPTER THREE

Captain Bill Majors had heard propositions before but never one so direct from someone who looked so unprofessional.

"Look, honey," he said. "I don't pay for it."

"Free," said the woman. She was skinny, closing in on forty, and pretty well level from shoulder to navel. But she had big, brown, catlike eyes and she seemed so intense. And, what the heck, Bill Major's wife was back in North Carolina. And Bill Majors was one of the top men in Special Forces which meant, to Captain Majors, experienced at hand-to-hand combat, he had nothing to fear from anyone. And besides, he might be doing the girl a favor. She looked as if she really needed a man.

He whispered in her ear, "Okay, honey. You can eat me if you want. Your place or mine?"

Her name was Sheila, she said, and she seemed quite furtive, looking over her shoulder every few moments, hiding her face from policemen who passed, letting the captain pay for the hotel room at the Copley Plaza with her money. She just didn't want the clerk to see her.

They got a room facing Copley Square. Trinity Church was on their right when they looked out the window. Captain Majors pulled the shades.

He took off his clothes and rested his knuckles on his bare hips.

"Okay," he said. "You said you wanted to eat me, now go ahead."

Sheila Feinberg smiled.

Captain Bill Majors smiled.

His smile was sexual but hers was not.

Sheila Feinberg did not take off her clothes. She kissed Majors on his hairy chest, then she put a tongue on the chest. The tongue was moist. The skin of the chest was soft. It covered bone and muscle. Bone rich in marrow for tooth cracking, and rich, red human blood. Rich like fresh whipped cream over warm cinnamon apple used to be.

But this was better.

Sheila opened her mouth. She licked the chest, then ran the edges of her teeth along the flesh.

She could restrain herself no longer. Down came the teeth with a beautiful mouthful of human flesh. She yanked it free with a snap of her neck.

Bill Majors suffered immediate shock. His hand went down on her neck, but it was a reflexive and weak blow. He beat at her hard but one did not generate much strength when incisors had gone through one's ventricle valves.

From hip to sternum, Bill Majors' stomach cavity , was cleaned out to the last spinal lick.

In an elevator going down in Copley Plaza, someone saw a woman whose dress was covered with blood and offered to help her. But the woman refused.

Sheila ducked through a basement into an alley.

She knew she couldn't continue like this and yet she knew she could not stop going on like this.

She was quite rational, having developed that talent in lieu of the beauty which she knew she would never have.

She was no longer the biologist, no longer the daughter of Sol and Ruth Feinberg who had gone out on hundreds of blind dates on which she had been described as "a nice girl." A "nice girl" in her social circle was someone who didn't put out and whose looks made that job easy.

She was no longer the brilliant director of Boston Biological.

She was no longer the resident of Jamaica Plains with the new two-bedroom duplex, the Mediterranean furniture and the big couch overlooking the Jamaicaway, that she thought Mr. Right might use when he came along to begin that first beautiful seduction.

Technically, she was not a virgin, having experienced a man once. For Sheila Feinberg, it was a messy experience and she knew that great big wonderful excitement she had been promised was over when the man kept asking, "Was it good for you? Was it good?"

"Yeah," Sheila had said. But it was not good. And she did not like herself afterward. And later, while she continuously thirsted for the release of sex, she accepted the fact that, barring some miracle-hopefully with the pediatrician in her building who had just gotten divorced and smiled at her every morning-she would thirst until her body wants dried with age. Perhaps that was why she was drawn to genetic research and the coding that made one sperm into man and the other into tiger.

Now, as she padded through the alley, her dress front bloodied, she felt the release of not wanting a man sexually. And, having that release, she understood how the previous person, the one called Sheila Feinberg, had suffered from the want of a man. It was like a tight shoe being taken off; it was not the sexual release she had read about; it was simply no longer a desire.

She was not in heat.

She just didn't want it anymore.

She wanted to eat and sometime, in the proper season, mate and bear children. But her children. Not the grandchildren of Sol and Ruth, but the litter Sheila. They would know how to stalk their prey. She would teach them.

Boston in the spring, she thought. So many, many delicious people. She had not returned to her apartment, nor had she phoned her co-workers at Boston Biological. They were people. They would, when they understood who and what she had become, try to destroy her. People were like that.

And her mind, still inordinately rational, told her the human race would send its best hunters after her. And with the instinct of everything from man to amoeba, that one element shared by every living thing, the instinct of survival of the species, Sheila knew she must first live and then reproduce.

People on the street offered to help her and she realized she had been too slow in recollecting that a dress front covered with blood was different and drew attention.

Was that changing in her head also? Was she losing the human sense of propriety? She would need that to survive among humans.

Just as she would need her experiments.

She ducked into a small antique shop. The owner offered to call an ambulance. She said she didn't need it. She cuffed the owner into unconsciousness and locked the door. She heard a baby cry and she did not think of swaddling it. Instead, she thought that she was not hungry at the moment.

And, realizing that, and not feeling for the human baby, but with concern only for the new species that she had become, Sheila Feinberg realized in the dusty antique shop with the owner unconscious behind the counter that the last link with people had been severed.

She made a list of how to survive. Individually, people without weapons were generally defenseless. As a group, the human had no match on earth.

Until now.

Her features could very easily be identified.

She needed new features.

In the human, the male was usually the killer. She would give herself features that would disarm him.

Her hand was still steady and she was pleased with her thinking which she had feared she would lose. But as the list grew and darkness descended on Boston in the spring, she realized she was even more cunning than she had been.

Breasts. She underlined the word. Hair: blonde. Waist: slim. Hips: ample. Legs: long. The big breasts would be used to lure the male of the human species.