by J M Hemmings
And with the crushing hopelessness and despair of it all, of the brutal end of all life and all living things that the men and their ilk would surely bring, she briefly lost her grip on the web-strands of cosmic power. In this instant she could not prevent that single atom of rage, of despair, of fury, of tragedy, from flying forth from her mind … and like a lone spark in house crammed full with flammable gas, that stray ember of uncontrolled emotion detonated an explosion that was like a million lightning bolts all striking one spot simultaneously. All the energy streams, tethered and woven in too intricate and complex a web for any mortal mind to even begin to comprehend, became unravelled in a chaotic molecule of a microsecond, and the fabric of space and time was ripped to shreds as godlike forces were suddenly loosed in a world-shaking cataclysm.
***
A few miles away from the sacred cave, Ao, sweating inside his furs from the exertion of bending his limbs like a contortionist and stretching his muscles to near tearing point, finally freed himself from the tangle of ropes that had bound him so tightly. Panting, he rolled himself over a few times until he came to rest against the trunk of a spruce, and, gripping the rough bark of the tree for support, he managed to stagger to his feet. Finally he was free, and he took a moment to savour this new liberty.
It was as he was leaning against the trunk, gradually catching his breath, that he felt it: a deep rumble beneath his feet, like the first stirrings of earthquake.
Then, in an instant, there was a titanic boom. It was not just the clap of some sort of thunderclap, though; no, something infinitely more powerful than that. The monstrous sound of it demolished his eardrums, and this stab of pain was accompanied by a tremendous, terrifying lurching sensation and a blinding flash of light … and then a strange, rushing sensation of speed beyond speed, and the surreal sight of the earth suddenly far, far below, with tens of thousands of uprooted trees and clumps of soil travelling upwards and outwards alongside him, hurled into the deep blue heavens in a bizarre inversion of a storm. In the mess of hurtling debris, Ao realised, with a gush of horror, that he could see his arms, legs and torso, all blown to shreds and scattered over many yards, flying upward and away from him at impossible speed. But as soon as this realisation hit, all thoughts of flight and gravity and terror were purged from his mind, and everything – even the Armageddon unfolding all around him – faded out into the warm, blissful oblivion of an all-encompassing white light that whispered to his very soul a gentle promise of eternity.
And down below, despite the greatest unleashing of destructive force in all of recorded history, the earth somehow kept turning … and elsewhere, life endured.
PART ONE
1
WILLIAM
16th September 2020. New York City, USA.
Of the countless predators who prowled the geometric jungle of light and shadow that was New York City, one was more deadly than any other. His savage roar tore through the concrete-entombed land, but those who had last heard such thunder had slept beneath the soil for ten thousand years. But on this night, a sliver after midnight on a Friday evening in the year 2020, the monstrous snarl resounded in these parts once more, bouncing from wall to crumbling wall in a Brownsville alley and scuttling past a dozing vagrant. Coughing and shaking, he raised his head, unsure whether the roar had come from this world or the parallel universe of waking dreams and ever-melting illusions. When he was satisfied that the sound had been conjured by an imp of the latter realm, he began hobbling through the alley, dragging the stench of his unwashed skin and greasy rags behind him.
It was then that he heard the voice of the predator once more, but this time it reverberated with a clarity that placed it firmly in the realm of reality. This was a sound he had not heard for many decades, since the long-gone days of his childhood in a jungle village in rural Nicaragua; the baritone V-twin rumble of a jaguar.
With protruding, fear-darting eyes he peered through the veil of gloom.
Roar!
Yes, there the sound was again, as unmistakable as it had been when it had sent dread coursing through his veins as a boy, many decades past. It seemed as if the beast was only a few paces upwind of him; he could almost smell the earthy muskiness of the great cat on the chilly night breeze and sense its wild heart pulsing in the shadows. However, all he could discern through the shredded wisps of fog was the unthreatening stillness of trash cans, garbage bags and a pile of recycling waste.
It was as he turned to limp away that something large and fast-moving flashed across the farthest periphery of his vision. He spun around and stared with terror-dilated pupils at the roof of a nearby building just as a shape, silhouetted against the night sky for a fleeting millisecond, disappeared from sight. The image lingered behind his eyes, for it had been unmistakably recognisable; it had to be, against all odds, a jaguar. With a flush of fear throbbing hot anxiety in his temples and spurring urgent momentum into his limbs, he hurried away to seek refuge, finding it in a burnt-out wreck of a nineteenth-century building, tattooed with graffiti and gang tags; a haven for drug dealers, gang bangers, junkies and hookers.
A few minutes after he disappeared into the oil-slick darkness of the derelict building, two rather different figures emerged from the rear entrance of the ruin. Attired in grimy jeans, jackboots and sleeveless tee shirts, the pair of skinheads were passing a bottle of cheap spirits back and forth, swigging on the fiery liquid as they cursed and joked.
When they passed by the alley they paused, both noticing a figure materializing from the drizzle of fog and neon light, which stained the ghostly swirls with hues of red, pink, purple and blue.
One, a strapping young man with stone-chiselled muscles straining taut against colourful tattoo sleeves, pointed at the figure.
‘Piece ‘a shit spic,’ he grunted.
His friend, an obese youth clad in a black leather vest covered with Neo-Nazi pins, grinned evilly, revealing a rack of half-rotten teeth as he rasped out a reply.
‘I think we need to teach this border-hoppin’ prick a lesson in American hospitality.’
They slipped behind a dumpster to wait for their target, a Hispanic man in his mid-thirties, dressed impeccably in a charcoal business suit, tailor-cut for his powerful, broad-shouldered physique. His dark hair was slicked back from his forehead, and a meticulously trimmed goatee, together with his lupine eyes, proud nose and strong, almost geometric jawline, gave him the cast of a Spanish warrior of old.
When the man got to within a few feet of them, the thugs stepped out to block his passage. He stopped, entirely unintimidated, and flashed them a disarming smile.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, his voice lightly coloured with the hint of a Latin-American accent, ‘I would appreciate it if you would allow me to pass.’
The tattooed goon whipped out a butterfly knife.
‘“Gentlemen”?’ he scoffed. ‘Okay asshole, okay. But, see, this here’s our city, and our country. And if you wanna walk these streets, you pay us a toll. Your bean-eatin’ ass don’t belong here, so if you wanna be here, you pay for that privilege. You fuckin’ pay.’
The man stared coolly at the pair, locking his unwavering gaze into each of theirs in turn, and then a sudden gas-flame ignited behind his eyes.
‘Gentlemen,’ he repeated, every calm syllable oozing with unmistakable menace, ‘I will not ask again. Stand aside … now.’
The larger skinhead burst into a bout of obnoxious laughter.
‘You speak English pretty good … for a dirty-ass wetback!’ Abruptly his laughter stopped, and his sneer twisted into a savage snarl as he whipped out a chrome-plated nine-millimetre pistol. ‘This ain’t no joke, you foreign faggot,’ he growled. ‘Pay or die.’
The well-dressed stranger’s composure remained unflappable, his cold smile frozen in place. When the muzzle of the pistol was shoved into the man’s cheek, however, an eerie grin spread beneath his waxed moustache.
‘That was the last mistake you’ll ever make, boy,’ he whispered.
Deep within the chilly depths of the ruined mansion, huddled beneath a pile of rags that stank of rancid sweat, crusted faeces and stale piss, the vagrant cowered as a series of bloodcurdling screams, through which jaguar snarls hacked and sawed, split the droning hum of the city night. With this satanic symphony ringing in his ears, he sobbed his madman’s tears into the rags and pulled them over his head, trying in vain to seek refuge in the darkness.
In a room two floors above, three rather different figures were sprawled on a ratty sofa. A deluge of light from a neon sign across the street from the shattered floor-to-ceiling window painted their comatose, mostly nude bodies with tones of blood-red. All three were tragically young in appearance … but one was far older than he looked.
The junkie on the far right of the wrecked sofa was an African American in his early twenties. Dressed only in soiled white underwear, the dreadlocked man had once been a towering colossus, but now his muscles looked as if they’d had all the tautness and potent volume vacuumed out of them; they hung like deflated balloons from his limbs, while ribs that looked too large for the sunken torso in which they were imprisoned strained against his dull skin. Festering wounds peppered his arms, and his eyes – stark white and rolled back in their blackened, sunken sockets – twitched as he shivered through a feverish dream.
In the middle of the sofa was a Hispanic girl who was barely out of her teens. Her long hair, voluminous and healthily buoyant in former years, now hung greasy and limp about her bony shoulders. Dressed only in a pair of grimy red panties, she had passed out with one tattooed, trackmark-scarred arm cupping the back of her head, and her other arm hanging limp. Like the young man next to her, her body seemed to have had most of the life drained from it, as if infested by youth-devouring parasites.
Few traces remained of a figure that had once been voluptuous, and her ribs and hipbones pushing so harshly through her tea-coloured skin, along with her gaunt, skull-like face, now swung the pendulum bob of her appearance to side of the god of death rather than that of a primordial fertility deity.
The man on the far left of the sofa cut a very different figure to the others, and his pale skin glowed with a radiance of vitality and potent life that had long since deserted the bodies of his companions. Although a little older than the dreadlocked fellow– late twenties, perhaps – he was in peak physical condition. While his build was on the slender side of athletic, the taut muscles of his bare torso, which bore scars from what seemed like hundreds of wounds, exuded a subdued strength. The tight black jeans that covered his legs were ripped and torn, but this was because this was fashionable, not because they were rags, and unlike his companions’ smelly clothes, his were freshly washed, and his red trainers were brand new. His medium length, sandy blonde hair was thick and full-bodied, and while a little messy, it had recently been styled and washed. His strong, almost angular jaw was coated with a heavy shadow of dark stubble, and the symmetrical arrangement of his features on either side of a high-bridged, long nose split his face into two perfectly mirrored halves. Each featured a full cheekbone and a soulful eye set in a deep socket beneath a bold, hard-angled eyebrow.
The instant the jaguar roar and the screams of dying men tore through the foggy silence, the man’s eyes flickered open, and they were bright with alacrity. He plucked the dirty syringe from his arm, flung it to the floor, and jumped up from the foul sofa. Within the steel-grey orbs of his irises his pupils dilated, adjusting to the gloom and allowing him to see quite clearly through the shadows, far more clearly than any normal human could, for a mystical potency enhanced the blood that flowed through his veins … blood that had been flowing through them since before either of his companions’ great-great-great-grandparents had been born.
While the heroin high still ensnared the other two in its blissfully warm cocoon of oblivion, it had long since dissipated from the blonde man’s system. His nostrils flared as he sniffed at the air, and he narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, his ears pricked as he listened for the sound he thought he had heard … knew he had heard. And then, alongside a howl of raw terror and agony, the sound cut through the night air again: the raspy growl of a jaguar.
‘Immortality’s a shitshow, a bitch from the blackest depths of hell,’ whispered the man to the damp-ridden wreck of a room and the passed-out junkies, ‘but for you, Hernández, that long and lonely ride ends tonight.’
After one last glance at his companions, the man pulled on his white tee shirt and black motorcycle jacket, and then raced off into the shadows.
***
While Pedro Hernández crushed the bones of a disembodied human arm between his jaguar jaws he stared at the corpse of the larger skinhead, observing with clinical calm the gushing of blood from the man’s torn-out throat as it slowed to a trickle. The other’s screams of agony, meanwhile, reverberated through the alley and, amplified to an immense din within Pedro’s jaguar skull, incised his ear drums with the sharpness of a scalpel blade. In a second of grotesque contorting of limbs, sucking back of golden fur beneath human skin, retracting of claws into flesh, and a shrinking of his skull and a flattening of his dagger-fangs, he transformed back into his human form, at which point the sound became a lot less piercing. With a sadistic chuckle he watched the panicking man attempting to stuff his eviscerated intestines back into the gaping maw of his abdominal cavity.
‘You should have just let me pass, hombre,’ he remarked coldly, detached wholly from the spectacle of gory death before him. ‘Now you’ve watched your friend die in agony next to you, and you’re about to leave this world screaming like a pig in a slaughterhouse, slipping around in a pile of your own blood in this stinking alley. I don’t imagine it’s the end you pictured for yourself.’
All the man could do in response was gasp and whimper in wordless horror, convulsing and coughing up blood. Pedro watched the process of dying dispassionately; it was a spectacle he’d witnessed countless times before, over many centuries.
‘Idiot mortals,’ he growled when his victim finally expired, the dead man’s blood wet on his lips and glistening in globules on his moustache and goatee. ‘Now I’ll have to get rid of this mess.’ He glanced down at the pile of torn fabric that had been his suit, before his transformation into a jaguar had destroyed it, and shook his head. ‘And these fools made me ruin my suit. At least the pants are still usable,’ he muttered as he pulled the trousers on.
It was at that moment that an uncanny sensation rippled along his spine and sparked every nerve-ending in his body with sizzling static electricity. This was no passing chill; rather, it was an imminent, dire warning. In one swift movement he grabbed the dead skinhead’s pistol and spun around on his heels, aiming the muzzle at the neon-tinted mists that swirled their liquid dance between the streetlamps.
‘Gisborne!’ he called out. ‘It is you, isn’t it? I knew I’d eventually find you in this shithole of a city. Come out amigo, come out and play, eh? Just you and me, come on!’
When a clatter of tin cans rattled with the explosiveness of a snare drum roll just ahead of Pedro, he sprang nimbly to his left and fired a shot into a rolling bank of fog, the report echoing with a thunderous boom between the closely packed buildings. When he saw that it was just a terrified stray cat, he spat with angry frustration.
‘Damn you Gisborne!’ he roared. ‘Show yourself!’
As he noticed another stirring to his right, he stepped quickly to the side and fired two more shots into the darkness, the sharp cracks bouncing like frenetic pinballs through the spaces between buildings and then fleeing into the omnipresent aural chaos of the city. Still seeing no sign of his foe, he snarled and pressed his back up against a nearby wall, scanning the alley for a hint of his enemy’s presence.
‘Come on Gisborne, come out into the open! Come out, you coward!’ Pedro shouted as he advanced slowly down the alley. ‘Have you become so weak, such a shadow of who you once were, that you have to cower like this?’
Despite his aggressive
words, a mite of fear was burrowing through his outer shield of bravado, and its bites stung more fiercely with each successive step. Raising his nose to the air he sniffed at the breeze, for even in this form his senses were far stronger than any human’s. He smiled as the scent of his enemy slithered up his nostrils, and he kept the firearm aimed ahead of him. If he transformed himself into his jaguar form at this point he would be able to pinpoint Gisborne’s presence immediately, but he did not want to relinquish the advantage that the gun gave him. No, he would stay in human form for this fight, for as long as was prudent, at any rate.
A maddeningly itchy bead of sweat trickled from his temple down his cheek as he crept forward, its tortuously slow passage down his skin amplifying his frustration; the scent was growing stronger with every step he took, yet there was still no sign of his enemy.
‘Gisborne, I’m right on top of you!’ he shouted. ‘You’d better start counting the seconds, because they’re gonna be the last few seconds that you—’
Pedro’s words were cut short as something enormous pounced on him from a shadow-veiled fire escape directly above. The impact sent him careening, and as he hit the concrete the pistol clattered from his hand and disappeared into the dark void of a sewer grate. Struggling to suck air into his winded lungs, he twisted his head to the side where he saw, stark and solid against the arterial red of a neon sign, the massive outline of a tiger.
