Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Short on breath but fuelled by surging adrenalin, William raced up the final flight of steps. He burst onto the rooftop, spun around, and bolted the steel door shut behind him to buy a few more precious moments. It was at that moment that the strange sensation of recognition crackled again across his nerve endings; he had just detected the presence of another beastwalker.

  ‘William, my old friend. It’s been far too long.’

  William spun around to his right and gasped, shocked at the sound of the familiar voice, and saw a man step out from behind one of the large steel vents.

  ‘Abou!’ William stammered. ‘What … how?!’

  Aboubakar was attired in a traditional West African boubou – a perfect garment for a quick transformation of forms. Diamond earrings glinted in his earlobes, and his teeth blazed white as he beamed out a Cheshire cat smile.

  ‘It’s good to see you again after all these years,’ he purred.

  William’s jaw hung slack for a few seconds as he attempted to process what was going on here. Urgency spurred him on though, and he snapped out of this semi-daze.

  ‘Run you idiot!’ he shouted. ‘Huntsmen troops are right behind me!’

  Aboubakar boomed out a brash laugh before continuing.

  ‘I’m here to offer you a deal,’ he announced in his sonorous voice. ‘Come and join us. Save yourself from a world of pain and suffering and join with us.’

  The contorted knot of confusion and panic on William’s face melted into a dark scowl of realisation.

  ‘So, they’ve finally got to you, Abou,’ he snarled. ‘You’re here with those murderers running up the stairs, aren’t you?! I never thought that you would cross over, that you’d be a traitor to your own kind. Tell me brother, what did they offer you to betray us?! And how could you possibly trust them to deliver on it? How?!’

  ‘The Alliance is the way of the future, William,’ Aboubakar answered calmly. ‘Our kind has grown weaker over the centuries while the Huntsmen have only increased in power. There is no place for stale loyalties and naïve dreams of sentimentality in today’s world; there are only economies and corporations now. Indeed, the old dreams have finally been revealed as the childish fantasies they always were. Profit is what turns the world on its axis … nothing else. Surely you have seen this? Why expend so much time and energy in the futile endeavour of resisting this brave new world, in which the Huntsmen are boldly leading the way? Has your Rebel propaganda worked its deceptive magic so well upon your own mind? You must have realised by now that it is hopeless to resist the true might of the Huntsmen’s empire. It is a fool’s errand, a mission doomed to inevitable failure.

  Come, my friend, stop this foolishness and embrace the wonder and glory of the Huntsmen’s vision: a global, infinitely growing economy of power and profit that is now on the verge of expanding beyond the mere limits of this planet, and into the vastness of space! You, William, could be there on Mars, the red planet itself, when they open the first trans-planetary colony there in a few decades! Think of it! I offer you my hand – the hand of friendship, of trust, of safety and security – and with it, boundless prosperity. Those Huntsmen coming up the stairs right now will spare your life if you will just take my hand and join the Alliance. Think of it! You could lead the way. You could bring the wayward Rebels back to the fold and usher in a new era of peace, cooperation and prosperity for all. Not only would there finally be peace, but you would have power, real power, as well as limitless wealth, respect and prestige! Please, William, choose the way of peace. End this war now. Let there be no more unnecessary bloodshed.’

  William stepped away from Aboubakar, staring at the man’s outstretched hand as if it were a cobra poised to strike.

  ‘Tell me, friend … how many pieces of silver did they buy you for?’ William asked softly, ‘And was it worth it, to lose your very soul?’

  The broad smile faded from Aboubakar’s face, replaced by a snarl of anger.

  ‘This is your choice then?’ he spat. ‘Very well. I have my orders.’

  In an instant he shifted forms, his boubou exploding in a burst of fluttering fabric scraps as he transformed into a two-and-a-half-ton black rhinoceros. William responded by transforming himself into his tiger form, shredding his own clothes to pieces in the process. Growling menacingly, he paced back and forth as he prepared for combat.

  At that moment the Huntsmen troops burst onto the roof, their assault rifles shouldered and ready to fire. Two of them were about to unleash a volley, but the squad leader held up his hand to stop them.

  ‘Hold your fire, boys! Let’s watch Aboubakar put this pussycat out of his misery. This here’ll be a fight you’ll be telling your grandkids about.’

  The hulking rhinoceros snorted and pawed with primeval aggression, while William paced to the left and right in his tiger form, snarling with bristling fury. This time he was the one who was outweighed, by almost tenfold in fact, and against the rhino’s gargantuan bulk he looked decidedly small. It did not matter, for he had but one choice now: fight or die.

  William circled his opponent, waiting for the charge that would explode within the next few seconds … and surely enough it happened. Abou barrelled headlong at William, his head down with both scimitar horns aimed at his opponent. As the van-sized hulk bore down on him at speed, William tensed and then released his muscles in a mighty burst, and with a roar he sprang high into the air, dodging Abou’s scything horns and landing on the rhino’s back. William dug his claws into his armoured hide, snarling as his weapons sank deep into the beast’s flesh.

  The rhino bellowed beneath him, bucking and kicking, but William held fast and lunged a savage bite at the beast’s shoulders. Blood gushed from the wounds his fangs inflicted, but his tiger strength could not match that of the rhinoceros for brute power, and with a half-jumping lunge Aboubakar spat him off of his back.

  With his preternatural reflexes William twisted his body in the air and landed safely on his feet, but as he spun around the charging rhino careened headlong into him. With a flick of his mighty neck Aboubakar tossed him up over his shoulder. William, airborne, spun out of control, flailing in his descent like an aeroplane plummeting earthward, and he hit the ground with a heavy impact that knocked the wind out of his lungs.

  Aboubakar showed neither mercy nor restraint, and he spun about and charged again, while William struggled to get back onto his feet. The rhino’s horns crashed into his flanks, ripping through both his coat and his flesh and slamming into his ribs, three of which snapped with a sickening crack. Aboubakar’s power and force dragged William across the concrete, tumbling and snarling, until the rhino crushed him against a wall. Aboubakar snorted and bellowed, bucking his head down to stab at William and once more dig his terrible weapons into the tiger’s body.

  But through the agony and tempestuous violence, William fought desperately on, and despite the searing pain in his ribs he spun and ducked and rolled with his feline agility, managing to latch himself onto the underside of Aboubakar’s throat and chest, where he dug his forepaw claws in to secure his grip. He then began kicking and slicing with the claws on his back legs, while the rhino bellowed and bucked in an effort to trample him beneath his massive forelegs. William gripped Aboubakar’s throat with all his might and dug his talwar canines deep into his flesh, hoping and praying that he would hit the jugular vein or crush his windpipe, for that would be the only way to win the fight against this behemoth.

  Hot blood spurted from the wounds, but William did not hit the jugular, nor did he destroy the windpipe, and with his flagging strength he could no longer maintain his grip in the face of the powerful struggles of the rhino. When he finally lost his hold he was pulled under the beast’s hooves and trampled with a terrible fury. Still, his survival instincts prevailed through the pain and chaos, and he pulled himself out from under the rhinoceros and aimed a flurry of slashes from his forepaws at his opponent’s eyes and face. His claws rent a series of deep gashes across Aboubakar’s rhino fa
ce, and he squealed in pain and backpedalled away from the raging tiger.

  William took this opportunity to scramble back as far as he could, putting some distance between himself and his enemy. He struggled to his feet, his breathing ragged and his limbs weak. Blood was dripping from his lolling tongue, and with every heaving breath a shooting pain blasted through his body. Aboubakar was only in slightly better shape, and he too was panting heavily, unsteady on his legs, and frothing at the mouth with telltale pink foam.

  Abou pawed the ground and prepared for one final charge; the charge that would end this fight. William knew that if he failed to evade this attack it would be the end. Without warning his hindquarters collapsed beneath him and black spots started to appear across his vision, even as the rhino hurtled with lethal intent towards him.

  No! Don’t give in!

  Just as the huge beast was almost upon him, he roared and burst liquid electricity through his muscles, launching himself into a vertical jump in an attempt to vault clear over the charging rhino.

  And he would have made it … had Aboubakar not reared up onto his hind legs and flicked his head, his horns catching William’s airborne body with an uppercut. William careened wildly, smashing into the ground and rolling like a crashing motorcyclist, ragdolling and tumbling until he came to rest against the concrete barrier at the edge of the roof.

  In a daze of fading consciousness, from a bright, dreamy fog billowing around the edges of his vision, her voice called out to him – she who had been ripped so cruelly from his grasp all those years ago. In the blink of an eye she was standing before him, aglow with a dazzling ethereal aura, a beguiling smile radiating from the lips and eyes that had been the alpha and omega of every one of William’s hopes, dreams and desires. There she stood, as real and tangible as the rhinoceros that was now turning around to make his final, killing charge.

  I’ve failed, my love. I’ve reached the end of the line, and I’ve failed. But it’s okay, because now we’ll be together again, together for all eternity, just like I promised you.

  ‘We will be together again,’ she said, her voice crisp inside his head. ‘But not yet. Use the power, William, use it!’

  As she vanished from William’s vision, his almost glazed-over eyes lit up with one last burst of iridescent fire, and with a growl he staggered to his feet. In a split-second he tapped into the deepest core of his being, and his mind began to warp the unbendable cage bars of time-space. As milliseconds rushed past in the bullet-train present, minutes trickled languidly by in the realm to which his consciousness was travelling.

  There he was, abruptly, in the mountain monastery, back in a time and a place that had both vanished long years ago. A storm was raging across the craggy peaks and dragon-tooth spires, and blinding bolts of lightning and earth-rending claps of thunder were shaking the walls and the very foundations of this ancient and holy place. However, as William sat in the lotus position, perfectly still in a state of deep meditation, the cataclysmic booms and searing strobe-flashes of purplish light went by almost unnoticed.

  ‘Catch the lightning, Tiger!’ whispered that familiar voice, that gentle yet immensely powerful voice, hoarse and gravelly yet regal and majestic, saturated with all the wisdom of many lifetimes of study and meditation. ‘Catch the lightning … catch it, bend it to your will, meld it with your spirit, let it course through your veins and fire up every single atom of your being, and then focus it into a singularity and redirect it.’

  The words passed through the conduit of his ear canal and then rippled into a fading and disparate echo inside his mind, morphing into little bursts of electricity that divided themselves up with the frenetic chaos of primordial amoeba. These particles of energy began spreading like a glorious virus through William’s entire body, binding themselves to blood, bone, muscle and sinew. Through the cannon-roaring thunder and lightning of the tempest, a power started to crackle and hum deep within his core, like the coughing to life and first testy rotations of some incomprehensibly vast engine. As the power spread its heat through every cubic inch of his being, William levitated, floating above the wooden floor of the monastery cell. A streak of lightning blasted through one of the windows, shattering the ornate wooden shutters into a million blackened splinters, and the beam of hyperfocused heat and unbridled strength rocketed into William, forking into twin beams just before it struck him. One hit his heart and the other struck the invisible third eye between his eyebrows. As the titanic fusion of heat, light and power smashed into this fragile entity of meat and bone and blood, the lightning met a force that it had not expected to: a great wall, as vast as the Himalayas yet as smooth and round and unending in its sphericity as a precision-machined titanium orb.

  In a sliver of a millisecond every particle of magma-heated electricity dissipated and spread throughout his body, travelling along the millions of pathways that spread outward from his core to each of his extremities. There all the electrons reconvened, focusing their strength into a singular, viciously crackling ball of blinding blue energy, tethered by the most tenuous of bonds to the fingertips of William’s right hand.

  He opened his eyes, and with a deafening roar howling in his ears and a hypersonic boost of acceleration yanking his body like the snapping shut of an impossibly-stretched elastic band, he was hurled back into the present, into his battered tiger body, with the hurtling rhinoceros about to deliver the coup de grâce.

  Now, however, the power was there, crackling its world-splitting intensity at the end of William’s right paw. With a roar he lunged forward, swiping at the rhino with his power-charged paw, and with an earth-rending boom the balled-up lightning was released. Aboubakar took the brunt of the explosion, and it punted his body backwards and up, and not only did it completely shatter the momentum of his furious charge, it also threw his massive bulk forty feet back. The shock wave of the gargantuan electrical explosion flung the flimsy human bodies of the Huntsmen troops with violent force against the walls, plunging half of them into unconsciousness with its intensity, and dazing those who were not outright knocked out.

  Using this power, however, came at a great cost, and as soon as William loosed the ball of lightning he felt something inside himself rupture. Bright blood gushed in sudden torrents from his mouth and nostrils, and he stumbled backwards as consciousness crumbled into darkness. On crumpling legs, he tripped and lurched, and then, as his vision began to black out and his lungs collapsed, he stumbled backwards over the edge of the building and plummeted ten stories down, destroying a number of awnings on the way. With a ground-rumbling metallic crunch his tiger body obliterated a parked car, and then everything turned black.

  4

  CHLOE

  17th September 2020. New York City

  ‘How do we achieve immortality?’ Paola González asked. Her big, dark eyes, drastically enlarged by the soda bottle spectacles she wore, shone with an earnest sincerity and the gasoline-fire keenness of youth. ‘I mean, like, how do we really, truly become immortal?’

  The three teenagers contemplated this question, with just the echo of the Billie Eilish track staving off the silence, the tinny reverberations of the four-on-the-floor rhythm struggling for aural dominance against the tempest of warring sounds spilling in through the open window of the twenty-first floor apartment from the city below. From the top of a nearby bookshelf, sun-bleached and covered with two generations’ worth of peeling stickers, serene statues of the Virgin Mary and a gaudy portrait of a beatifically smiling crucified Christ watched over the teenagers.

  Paola waited in silence, twirling a strand of her shoulder-length hair, kinky and ink-black, around her coffee-coloured forefinger, upon which fluorescent yellow nail polish blazed like molten drops of neon light. Nodding her head in time to the beat, she shifted her weight on the chair – a clapped-out typist’s model, salvaged from a dumpster – and as her heavy thighs spilled further over the edges, the chair groaned with a protracted creak. The embarrassing sound triggered a hot blush acro
ss Paola’s chubby, heavily freckled face. Instinct catapulted her hand up to her face, and those neon-tinted fingertips, adorned with too many cheap rings, wormed their way through burgundy-painted lips while two dozen bracelets jingled. Grinding teeth began their habitual, anxiety-ridden work, adding further jaggedness to fingernails that never needed cutting. Her upturned nose, with its wide, flared nostrils wrinkled as a nervous tic darted blips through her facial muscles.

  ‘We can’t. It’s impossible,’ Chloe O’Connor answered, her voice bolstered with the unwavering conviction of hormone-gushing youth. At seventeen, she was the oldest member of Eisenhower High’s Environmental Club and its unofficial leader, even though the structure of the club was based on a strictly egalitarian, non-hierarchical model. ‘Seriously, we just can’t,’ she continued, driving the point home with force, as she usually did in debates. ‘Death is the one thing we’ll never be able to overcome. It’s just, like … the primary law of the universe.’

  ‘The, uh, um, the second law of thermodynamics,’ Jun Chen murmured in his freshly broken voice, almost too deeply sonorous for his diminutive, emaciated form. Cringing immediately, as if he expected to be chastised for interrupting, even though he was among his closest friends, he stared at the floor, fidgeting frenetically with hyperactive fingers as he continued. ‘Entropy increases when, um, energy is transferred. Everything living thing … has to die.’

  Chloe nodded in agreement, running a pale hand – sprayed with a heavy smattering of freckles, like the rest of her body – through her multicoloured hair, dyed in hues of electric blue, neon pink, shimmering violet and radioactive green, which hung thick and shaggy about her shoulders on her left, but which was buzzed down to a number two grade on the right side of her skull, where her mousey brown roots showed.