Jekyll’s entire body swelled up as if someone had hooked an air compressor to his nether orifice and inflated him like a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. His shoulders expanded, his chest puffed out, and his shirt split into frayed tatters. His previously bald head sprouted thick shocks of wiry black hair. His eyes became huge, and his mouth sprouted square crooked teeth.
It didn’t take a private detective to figure out that this was the violent brute that had caused so much mayhem around the city.
Not one to call a committee meeting before making a decision, McGoo pointed his service revolver and shot Jekyll full in the chest. I didn’t blame him—this thing had torn the young Straight Edgers to pieces and staked Sheldon Fennerman to a brick wall.
Despite being shot, Jekyll kept growing and kept coming toward us. McGoo had fired the revolver loaded with normal bullets, which he’d just fired at Brondon Morris, but I doubted the silver-jacketed ammo in his other pistol would have had any greater effect.
I drew my own .38 and started shooting. Getting into the spirit of the celebration, Sheyenne joined in with Brondon’s gun.
The bullets didn’t bounce off Jekyll’s hide, but were simply absorbed into his swelling flesh like raindrops in a mud puddle. The monstrous creature’s biceps bulged, and his fingernails turned into thick talons. Warts the size of hard-boiled eggs popped up on his leathery skin.
“That thing is ugly!” McGoo said.
No wonder the witches’ protective spell hadn’t been good enough to save Sheldon; this brute would have gotten over a bit of cockroach-enhanced indigestion without any trouble at all.
I’d caught only a glimpse as this creature had bounded out of the alley behind the Straight Edge headquarters, climbed to the rooftops, and sprinted away into the moonlight. The monster had bashed Hope Saldana’s mission, probably because the old woman aided and comforted unnaturals; he had ripped the four Straight Edgers into little pieces, no doubt because they were incompetent.
Or maybe he had other reasons. I didn’t see the point in psychoanalyzing a loose-cannon monster to figure out logical explanations for his actions.
And he had murdered Sheldon Fennerman.
With Jekyll’s transformation complete and his muscles as hard as braided steel cable, the slugs we had fired into him popped out of his body and pattered onto the factory floor. Sweating bullets, you might say.
The huge creature slammed a meat loaf–sized fist into the churning chemical vat beside him, puncturing it so that noxious fluids spewed across the floor. Then he tore down the metal staircase that ran up the side of the vat, bending the framework and hurling it across the factory floor with a loud clatter.
I kept firing until my pistol was empty. When Sheyenne had also emptied Brondon Morris’s gun, she dropped the weapon, and her ghost swooped into the Jekyll monster and passed entirely through his body, much to her frustration. Backing away, McGoo shot two more times.
His glowing eyes fixed on his first target, the monster came straight toward Robin.
I was not going to let this nightmare juggernaut harm a hair on her head. “Robin, get out of here!” I charged into monster Jekyll like a kid from a peewee football league trying to derail a locomotive—and I was about as successful.
I punched him hard in his cabbage-sized nose, which seemed like a good idea when I thought of it. Jekyll didn’t care which victim he got his huge paws on first. Since I was within reach, the brute grabbed my right arm. I struggled, but couldn’t break free.
With a merciless motion like someone tearing the wing off a roasted chicken, the monster yanked my arm out of its socket, pulled it free, and threw the limb aside like a used toothpick.
Sheyenne screamed.
“Dammit!” I reeled. That wasn’t going to be easy to fix, but at least I’d bought them a second or two. “McGoo, get her out of here!”
McGoo hauled Robin toward the exit next to the dismantled scaffolding and the sign on the wall that politely cautioned JLPN workers about the hazards of chemicals. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here!”
For some reason, I heard howling outside the factory.
Yanking my arm off wasn’t good enough for Jekyll. He lifted me bodily and hurled me against the giant chemical vat. I slammed into the curved side, leaving a man-shaped dent like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, then sprawled into the gushing Compound Z chemicals that continued to vomit out of the tank. I was drenched and disgusted, but fortunately the dissolvogen had no effect on me.
Leaving me behind, Jekyll bounded after McGoo and Robin. Even if they managed to get outside, this huge beast would catch up with them in only a few steps.
I tried to pick myself up. Lopsided and off balance without my right arm, I slipped in the oozing, steaming liquid and fell on my butt. A severed hand—not mine—plopped out of the punctured vat into the puddle beside me. Well-manicured … no doubt Brondon Morris’s.
Across the room, reenacting a scene from a bad horror movie, my detached arm flopped about, the hand clenching and unclenching, trying to finger-walk along the concrete. That’s the thing about being undead: After coming back to life, the pieces are very persistent.
McGoo threw open the door to get Robin outside, but before they could escape into the moonlit night, a Tasmanian Devil flurry of fur, muscles, claws, and fangs bounded into the factory, snarling and thrashing.
McGoo instinctively grabbed his other sidearm, the one loaded with silver bullets, and aimed at the vicious wolf-woman. But I saw the line of pearls that ringed the werewolf’s neck like a very expensive dog collar. “Don’t shoot, McGoo! It’s Miranda—Miranda Jekyll!”
The she-wolf hurled herself upon the bloated monstrosity that had been her husband. Jekyll twisted from side to side and swung at her, but Miranda sank her fangs into the rope-cable muscles of his neck. Her she-wolf body was covered with hair, made out of solid muscle, more sleek and attractive than her normal form.
Jekyll knocked his wife aside with an arm the size of a bent telephone pole and sent her sprawling across the concrete floor. She landed on all fours, and her paws skittered on the sealed surface. She just barely managed to keep herself from tumbling into the Compound Z–laced puddle.
Now we could add spousal abuse to her case against her husband.
Ignoring Miranda, the brute lurched toward my two friends like a poor man’s King Kong. Robin picked up one of the steel pipes from the scaffolding and brandished it to defend herself against the oncoming monster. “I have had a very rough night already!” She swung the pipe back and forth, but didn’t manage to look threatening.
I finally got to my feet and went after Jekyll with weaving footsteps. Armless and off balance, I must have looked like one of those clichéd Walking Dead zombies.
My severed arm crawled toward the door, working its way toward the monster. It was disorienting to try to move a part of my body from ten feet away, but the arm couldn’t wait for me to catch up. It had nearly reached him.
The chorus of howls outside grew louder—a whole pack of werewolves closing in.
Miranda bounded forward to join Robin and McGoo, her lips curled back, fangs bared. She plucked the metal pole out of Robin’s hands and faced Jekyll. The monster would tear them all to pieces in just a few seconds.
“Harvey!” I shouted. “For all your big talk, you’re just as unnatural as the rest of us!”
He turned his head to snarl at me. Jekyll wasn’t expecting my severed arm to grab onto his ankle with a grip like a ferocious poodle. He roared, looked down.
In that instant of distraction, Miranda swung the heavy steel pipe with all her lupine strength, like a golfer trying to make the longest drive on a championship course. She cracked him solidly between the legs. And regardless of how massive and muscular the Jekyll monstrosity was, he did not have testicles of steel.
Six bristling werewolves bounded through the door, letting out angry howls—Miranda’s friends from the full-moon party, I assumed. They loped forward, some walking on two legs, others reverting to a more animal form.
Preoccupied with his own agony, Jekyll didn’t even notice. His groan sounded significantly higher pitched than before. He bent over and seemed to fold down and shrink in upon himself. With a long, miserable whimper, he curled into a ball on the floor.
“That worked better than Kryptonite,” McGoo said, breathing hard.
“Bastard deserved it.” Miranda growled and slavered onto the moaning man on the floor, who reverted to his former mousy physique. “I have wanted to do that for years.”
Her werewolf friends prowled the factory floor, and Sheyenne circled, warning them to stay away from the deadly chemical puddles. I was surprised to see that one of the hairy man-wolves was Larry the lycanthrope hit man the Ricketts heirs had hired to harass me. Panting, Miranda smiled at the whole pack. “Thanks for coming, sweethearts.” She had unlocked the fence gate to let her werewolf friends in.
Finally, in the better-late-than-never department, we heard sirens in the distance. Taking no chances, McGoo slapped handcuffs on Harvey Jekyll’s wrists, although he had some difficulty prying the man’s hands away from his crotch.
Robin looked at the torn sleeve of my shirt and the empty socket where my arm had been ripped away. “Oh, Dan, your arm!” She retrieved the limb from the floor and carried it to me—although I don’t know what she expected me to do with it.
“My souvenir from the case,” I said, taking it from her with my remaining hand. The arm kept twitching in my grip.
Sheyenne was distraught and indignant. “We’ll get you to the Patchup Parlor. Miss Eccles can stitch you back together again. After what she did for Wendy, reattaching a severed arm can’t be beyond her abilities.”
“It’s obviously still functional.” I concentrated on my detached limb to make the fingers curl in the “OK” sign.
The sirens grew louder. McGoo went to stand outside the door, waving for the police. “How did they know to get here? I didn’t call for backup.”
“I did—after I set you loose,” Sheyenne said. “I can use a phone, you know. Wouldn’t be much of a receptionist if I couldn’t.”
By the time the cops rushed into the factory, guns drawn, the crisis was already over.
Miranda Jekyll paced and prowled around the factory floor, a mass of feral energy. “I wish we could plug that vat. Nasty stuff.”
“It’s draining into the floor grates,” Robin said. “What if Compound Z gets into the groundwater?”
Miranda’s snout curled. “The factory has holding tanks before any effluent is released into the sewer system. Environmental requirements.” She growled in frustration. “This is so not how I intended to spend my full moon.”
I held onto my right arm with my left hand. “Not how I expected to spend mine, either.”
Robin, though, was smiling. “We won’t have any further trouble litigating your case, Mrs. Jekyll. In fact, I have no doubt that all JLPN assets will belong entirely to you. Your husband is going to trial for multiple counts of murder, conspiracy, terrorist acts, attempted genocide, assault, felony property damage. Give me a few minutes—I can come up with plenty of other ideas for the district attorney.”
Miranda sniffed, and her fur started to look less ruffled. “Thank you, sweetheart. I feel better already.” Contentedly, she groomed the silky hair on her forepaw. Her werewolf friends let out a chorus of howls.