Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Everyone laughed, and Chloe flopped onto the sofa, grinning and thankful for the moment of levity.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she said when the laughter subsided, ‘let’s get back to like, brainstorming and stuff. These ideas we’ve been throwing around are great, and—’

  Her sentence was cut short by an unexpected interruption: thunderous claps and an ear-splitting, percussive hammering, coming from the building across the alley.

  ‘Damn!’ Daekwon yelped, jumping up from the drum throne. ‘That’s g-, g-, gunshots!’

  ‘Get down, get down!’ Chloe shrieked, scrambling to the floor. ‘Holy shit, oh my God, guys, fuckin’ get down, cover your heads!’

  Paola dropped to her hands and knees as the jackhammer thudding of automatic gunfire again ripped through the silence. Whimpering, she scurried over to join Chloe behind the sofa, while Daekwon lay down flat on the floor, covering his head with his hands. More gunfire boomed and rattled, and it sounded like it was getting closer.

  ‘Oh shit, oh my God, fuckin’ shit,’ Chloe cursed, tucking her hands behind her head. ‘What’s happening out there?!’

  Paola, wide-eyed, peeked out from behind the sofa and saw Daekwon lying on the floor. His eyes met hers, and despite the peril he flashed her an almost cheeky grin, to which Paola responded with a blush. She looked away, her face hot, feeling suddenly self-conscious – and that was when she saw a sight that boosted surges of icy fear through her veins.

  ‘Jun!’ she shrieked. ‘Jun, are you fuckin’ crazy?! Get off the fire escape!’

  Jun had run out onto the fire escape to catch a glimpse of the battle that had erupted outside. He ignored Paola’s shrill exhortations, and leaned even further out over the edge, desperately trying to get a view of the action.

  Daekwon looked up at Jun, glanced back at Paola’s terror-stricken face, and needed no further impetus to act. Even as another exchange of gunfire rent the silence with its rat-a-tat crashing, he sprang up and charged out onto the fire escape, scooping up the diminutive Jun to haul him away from danger, but as he was throwing the unwilling, feebly-struggling youth over his shoulder he froze, staring at the roof of the building just across from them, which this fire escape – and no other – happened to overlook.

  ‘They stopped!’ Jun shouted. ‘Put me down, let me go!’

  ‘Are you crazy?!’ Paola shrieked. ‘Get back in here, get down!’

  Daekwon, however, set Jun down and scrambled to get his phone out of his pocket.

  ‘Somethin’ real big’s about ta g-, go down,’ Daekwon murmured as he pulled up his phone’s video app, his gaze locked on the unfolding scene. ‘Somethin’ I gotta get on f-, film.’

  He held his phone up and started filming, pumping up the zoom setting to the max, even though this made the footage grainy and pixelated.

  ‘Are you two literally trying to fuckin’ kill yourselves?!’ Chloe shouted from behind the sofa. ‘There’s a gunfight happening!’

  ‘FUCK! WHAT THE F-, FUCKIN’ FUCK SHIT THE … FUCK! FUCK!’

  ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, no, no, no, oh my God, oh my God!’

  Daekwon’s hoarse cursing and Jun’s sudden jabbering of what sounded like paralysing shock and disbelief silenced Chloe midway through her yell.

  ‘What the hell is going on out there?!’ Paola demanded, half-frightened, half-curious. ‘What’s wrong, what’s happening?!’

  ‘G-, G-, G-, G- … GET YO’ ASSES OUT HERE! F-, FUCKIN’ HURRY!’ Daekwon howled.

  From the frenetic stumbling of his stuttering and the hoarse, frantic tone of his voice, which was on the verge of cracking, the girls heard that something either outlandishly extraordinary or sublimely terrifying was underway. But before either of them could say anything else, another sound – something that neither of them could have expected to hear – rumbled its booming threat through the aural chaos of the city. It was a roar, a mighty, primal roar … and it could only have come from a lion or a tiger. The girls exchanged a white-eyed look of utter disbelief, their eyes almost popping out of their sockets. Without saying another word, they scrambled to their feet and sprinted out onto the fire escape, and what they saw almost caused their knees to crumple beneath them with shock. There, just across the alley, on the roof of the adjacent building a few yards across from and below them, a tiger and a rhinoceros were circling each other. Men dressed in SWAT riot gear, armed with assault rifles, were presiding over the unfolding skirmish.

  Daekwon was filming the whole thing on his phone, his eyes wide and white in their sockets, and his jaw slack with sheer incredulousness.

  ‘Th-, th-, th-, the t-, t-, tiger is a, a, a, man,’ he managed to gasp, ‘a-, a-, an’ so is th-, th-, th- rhino! Fuck me, f-, f-, fuck me sideways yo’, I ain’t never s-, s-, seen nothin’ like this! Fuck, fuck me, I can’t fuckin’ believe dis’ shit, I must be trippin’, I must be fuckin’ trippin’ or some shit, fuck, fuck me!’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?!’ Chloe yelled excitedly, staring with slack-jawed astonishment at the wild beasts just below them.

  ‘The tiger is a werewolf. Weretiger,’ Jun answered calmly. ‘So is the rhinoceros. Wererhinoceros, if you will. I don’t understand how … but I saw it. We saw it. We both saw them … transform.’

  Paola tore her eyes from the astounding spectacle for a few seconds to stare at Jun, her face crumpled into a messy mixture of confusion and disbelief.

  ‘What?!’ she almost spat. ‘Werewolf?! Weretiger?! Are you crazy?! What the hell are you talking about?!’

  ‘It’s on my ph-, ph-, ph- phone,’ Daekwon stammered, his gaze locked on the spectacle. ‘He ain’t l-, l-, lyin’, I told you, those animals … they p-, p-, people! They fuckin’ people! Werewolves! Real fuckin’ were … weretigers! Fuckin’ … it’s t-, t-, true, we ain’t lyin’! It’s on my fuckin’ phone! On video!’

  ‘Oh my God, no!’ Chloe shrieked, turning away as the animals – were-animals – began to fight. ‘Why aren’t those men stopping them?!’

  ‘Holy fuckin’ shit!’ Daekwon cried. ‘Did y’all s-, s-, see what the rhino just did to the tiger?! Holy shit!’

  ‘Oh my God, I can’t watch this, I can’t watch,’ Chloe gasped, tears streaming from her eyes and smudging her eyeliner as empathy twisted a fistful of rusty razor blades through her tightly-coiled innards and caused an icy sweat to break out across her skin. ‘We have to, we have to stop this!’

  ‘C-, call 911, somebody call 911!’ Paola yelled.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Daekwon muttered, both horrified and spellbound as he watched the two huge animals fighting to the death on the rooftop below him. ‘Holy fuckin’ shit.’

  ‘The tiger is going to die,’ Jun whispered. ‘There’s no way he can survive after that. The rhinoceros is going to … he’s going to kill him … now.’

  Chloe was fumbling with her phone, struggling to punch in the three digits of the emergency number with her madly trembling fingers, while Paola was staring with a horror-stricken face at the fight, her heart pounding surges of frigid, trauma-chilled blood through her veins. Daekwon was still filming the whole encounter, stuttering and muttering, while Jun’s hands were locked white-knuckle-tight around the balcony railing as he waited for the rhinoceros to deliver the killing blow.

  Then, however, one of the armed men on the rooftop spotted the teens on the fire escape. He grabbed the arm of his superior and pointed up at them.

  ‘Oh no guys, they seen us!’ Paola wailed, her voice low with sudden dread. ‘Shit, they lookin’ at us! Shit, oh shit!’

  The commanding officer caught sight of Daekwon filming, barked out a rapid order, and quickly spoke into a mic taped to his chin … and then he and three other troops swung their M-16 rifles up to their shoulders and took aim at the four children.

  Before the teens could even react, or the soldiers could fire, though, an immense boom resounded with the brutal potency of an immediate thunderclap, splitting the very atoms of the air, it seemed, with its fo
rce … and that instant the teens were hurled back against the wall, and every window of the apartment exploded in a shower of glass shards.

  5

  ADRIANA

  27th August 2020. Somewhere near the Thailand/Laos border

  Sweating under the tarpaulin, the young Moldavian and Romanian women who were sandwiched between crates of liquor in the back of the truck sat in grim silence, rocking back and forth as the vehicle lurched and skidded over the bumpy dirt track. Adriana peered through the murky gloom at the odd one out of the group: a Japanese woman. She looked to be in her early to mid-thirties, and thus around ten or fifteen years older than herself. This made her by far the oldest woman present; the others were all in their late teens or early twenties. The Japanese woman could speak fluent Russian; she was obviously an educated individual, yet she had ended up here with the rest of this unfortunate working-class bunch. The colourful tattoos that peeked out from under the sleeves of both arms and which, Adriana had seen, covered most of the woman’s body, hinted that there was more to this mysterious stranger than met the eye.

  The Japanese woman intercepted Adriana’s gaze and flashed her an intense look in response. Adriana couldn’t tell if it was menace or sympathy that sizzled in the woman’s eyes, but it wasn’t the first time that she and her had exchanged glances. They had only had one conversation over the course of this journey, but that was because the women had mostly not been permitted to speak to one another at all. The Japanese woman had been rather guarded about herself but had seemed quite interested in Adriana’s story.

  Adriana glanced at a reflection of herself in a sliver of broken mirror. Staring back at her was a face that was a collage of features both bold and delicate; in deep sockets two large, striking eyes were set like polished jewels, and the dark, long eyebrows above each topaz orb sat like twin sabre blades, almost straight but with a subtle curve to them, and pleasantly sharp at their outer edges. Softening the visual impact of these attention-snaring eyes was a nose that was as long as it was unobtrusive in construct, and suspended below it a small but full-lipped mouth, placed as if carved in this exact spot by the precise calculations of a master mathematician who had measured every other of her features and worked out that this was exactly where a perfectly proportioned pair of lips should sit. The arrangement of her features gave her resting expression a look of approachable amicability, and her curved mouth seemed ever on the verge of breaking into a radiant smile.

  She could not smile now, however, and for all the natural pleasantness of her neutral countenance, a haggardness had come over her face, a wan weariness that seemed to harden the angles of her full cheeks and sharpen the soft curve of her jaw. Indeed, she had not smiled for many days now.

  The vehicle rumbled to a stop, but the grease-slicked bed of the truck continued vibrate beneath them as the clattering engine idled. The stink of diesel fumes was intertwined in an odorous cocktail with the pungent aroma of bodies that had been unwashed through eight days of hellish overland and air transit, a journey that would culminate in their arrival in Bangkok.

  A voice speaking broken, heavily accented Russian crackled through a tinny speaker.

  ‘We stop for two minutes. Police come look in truck. You hide, no move or speak! Remember, police catch you, you go jail twenty years. No speak, no move!’

  The women pulled the tarpaulin over themselves and huddled tightly together. The scent of fear was pervasive and almost tangible. Adriana peered through a hairline gap between the crates and watched as two Thai police officers swept their flashlight beam across the stacked goods, perusing the merchandise with suspicious eyes. One of them hauled out a crate, levered off the top with a crowbar and started digging around in it. He stepped off to the side, outside of Adriana’s scope of vision, and started arguing with the truck driver. Adriana listened with increasing alarm as the confrontation became more and more heated, and with every curse and yell her heart hammered faster while an insurmountable dread swelled with the persistence of rising flood waters within her.

  A small hand groped softly for hers in the dark, and she gripped it with trembling fingers. It was Roxana, the fourteen-year-old, who throughout the journey had been in a constant state of fear and anxiety. Adriana, only twenty-three years old herself, and likewise awash with worry and apprehension, had nonetheless taken it upon herself to comfort the girl, and for her young companion’s sake she had attempted to maintain a façade of bravery in the face of the horrors that had unfolded before them on this trip.

  She looked up and noticed the Japanese woman staring at her through the gloom again. The woman mouthed the words ‘don’t worry, stay calm,’ at her, and for a second it seemed as if her eyes lit up in the dark with some sort of ethereal fire – ghostly flames that snaked and weaved like dancers behind Adriana’s eyes, inside her mind. At that moment a strange and warm-spreading calm fell upon her, almost as if a shot of morphine had been injected into her veins.

  She breathed deeply, appreciating the calming sensation, but then shuddered abruptly – something about the uncanny feeling of quietude sat ill at ease with her. What had just happened? It was almost as if she had been temporarily drugged, and she had a feeling the Japanese woman had something to do with it. Feeling uneasy, she looked away from her and peered out through the gap, noticing then that the police officers and the truck driver had stepped back into view. She saw the truck driver – a squat Thai man whose long hair was pulled back into a greasy ponytail – counting out a stack of bank notes, which he handed over to the officers with a stormy scowl. They double-checked the amount, beaming with smug, toothy smiles all the while, then slapped him on his back, muttered a few words and shoved him back toward the truck. When one of the police officers closed the back doors of the vehicle, the thin sliver of light that had briefly illuminated Adriana’s piercing amber eyes vanished, and darkness again blanketed everything. Roxana let out a barely stifled sob, so she squeezed the girl’s hand a little tighter as the truck took off.

  ‘Where are they taking us now?’ the girl whimpered. ‘I want to go home, I want to go home, I wish I’d never done this…’

  ‘Shh little one,’ Adriana whispered. ‘This will all be over soon, and we’ll be working in the restaurant and making good money to send back to our families, just like they promised us.’

  She tried to brace her words with conviction, but now it was all too easy to see through the hollowness of the lie, and after everything that had happened over the past few days she doubted that the girl still believed any of the empty reassurances that she spouted. How could she, how could any of them, after first having had their passports taken for ‘safekeeping’ by the Albanian thugs, and then being groped and harassed by every group of men with whom they had interacted on this journey through – or into – hell itself.

  She thought wistfully of her home in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, and now toiling in the fields to scrape a living off the cold soil didn’t seem so bad any more … at least not in comparison to whatever nightmare awaited them at the terminus of this purgatory. She missed that plot of land and that quiet village with an aching pain that seemed to grow ever more acute. Her existence there had once seemed so banal and uninspiring, and she had yearned with a ceaseless desperation to break free from it, but now that she had, she regretted that decision more than anything she had ever regretted before.

  She missed her parents, grouchy and aloof as they were. She missed her siblings, her gossipy neighbours, the old man who sat and chain-smoked his days away on a weather-beaten chair on the side of the dirt road near her house, and the haggard, toothless hag who drove a smoke-belching two-stroke trike through the village once a week to peddle her vegetables.

  And, more than many things, Adriana longed for her guitar. She had known that she would miss playing, but she didn’t realise just how badly she would miss it. That smooth neck with its worn-flat frets, the way those nylon strings eroded the tips of her fingers, the notes that rang out into eve
ntual silence as the beautiful vibrations rippled their melodies through the air…

  She rubbed the hard, smooth fingertips of her left hand together absentmindedly and began to reminisce about how proud she had been of developing those calluses, when other girls her age had been trying to keep their own fingers as soft as possible. These leather-tough fingertips of hers were her medals, her certificates of merit; evidence of the depth of her dedication to her passion. And passion it was – no, had been, she immediately thought, correcting herself with a bitter despair. There would be no guitar where she was going.

  Still, she could buy one with her first month’s pay, she hoped. No, not hoped – needed. How else would she be able to release these feelings of such immense intensity that built up like volcanic gases beneath her quiet exterior but through music? Her guitar had been the conduit through which she had channelled the fires of her soul as they had fused with those streams of pure energy that was the life-stream of the universe itself. That’s how she had seen it, anyway. Now, though, like every other element of her past existence, it was no more.

  She swallowed the pain that was bubbling up from within and forced it down, down, down into that deep, dark place where she would not and could not ever speak of it. The future was almost here, but she could not help but feel an iciness of terror at what it would be.

  The next morning, after having had to sleep in the truck, locked down under the heaviness of the tarpaulin and sweating like pigs in the stifling heat and oppressive humidity, without so much as a drink of water let alone a morsel of food, the women were awoken at dawn by the truck driver. He leered at the women with those porcine, bloodshot eyes of his, and handed them a grimy bottle filled with greyish water.