Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  It was then that she saw the old man’s back, or, rather, what was on it: his entire back was inked with an elaborate but badly faded tattoo, done in the Japanese style that was popular with local gangsters. It was a red dragon against a stormy sky.

  As the old man shuffled into the bathroom again, he turned and stared at her, and then he subtly signalled to her to follow him. The Japanese woman’s words rang immediately in her mind.

  A man will come to you – look for a red dragon in a stormy sky.

  With a boost of new hope surging its caffeinated promise through her tired muscles, she sprang up from the bed, her heart racing, and hurried into the bathroom where the old man was waiting for her. He shut the door behind her and began to work on the pipe.

  ‘Well done, well done!’ he gnarled in his husky smoker’s voice, speaking fluent English. ‘You’ve never seen me before, but I’m always here. I’m the janitor of this section, you see. I was having trouble finding a way to get to you and I was becoming very worried about running out of time, but you’ve just provided me with a perfect excuse to get in here alone with you.’

  ‘Who are you? What’s—’

  ‘Shh my pretty, let me do the talking. It doesn’t matter who I am, but know this: I am Rebel, all the way. You don’t know what this means yet, but you will. I owe my own life and the lives of my wife and children to a man called Zakaria Alwa. He is like the Ice Bear – no, no, not like him at all,’ he added hastily as he saw fear flash across Adriana’s eyes. ‘What I mean is that, he, Zakaria, like Sigurd the Ice Bear, is not … not like you or me. He is one of them. A different kind of being, not a … human. But that is the only similarity he shares with the Ice Bear. As I said, he saved my life once, and the lives of many others, and this is the least I could do to pay him back.’

  ‘Zakaria Alwa? Not human?! I was told to listen for something to do with, um, William, William Gisborne. I’m sorry sir, but I really have no idea what’s going on here,’ she said, with a look of consternation crossing her face.

  ‘You don’t, yet,’ the old man replied, nodding in affirmation. ‘But things will soon start to become clear to you. It will seem terrifying and overwhelming at first, I’m afraid. You may well find yourself questioning your own sanity before you start to get to grips with everything.’

  ‘I don’t know how I can help you and, um, the Rebels, whoever they may be,’ Adriana said. ‘I’m not strong, I’m not brave, and I’m not a fighter. I’m a prisoner here, a helpless prisoner. I couldn’t even succeed in trying to … no, never mind…’

  ‘Couldn’t even what? Ah, that doesn’t matter anyway. You don’t need to be a fighter, nor do you need to be physically strong to play your part in this, but you will need a dose of courage.’

  ‘What kind of courage?’

  ‘The only kind there is, my dear; an unshakeable faith in the belief that you will succeed in your actions.’

  Adriana broke down; she collapsed, sobbing, against the wall, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and it was all she could do to stop herself from wailing. The old man put down his tools and shuffled over to her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I don’t know how you ended up in here,’ he said with a sad smile, ‘and it pains my heart to see you in such anguish and distress. But know this: the night is always darkest before the dawn.’

  ‘I just want to go home,’ she sobbed. ‘I just want to go home, and I want this nightmare to be over.’

  ‘My dear, there is only one way out of this hell: you have to help us.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know what all of this crazy Rebels and animals and war business is that you’re talking about! It doesn’t make any sense at all! I don’t want any part in any war, I don’t want any of it! I just want to see my family again, and to be free!’

  She buried her face in the crook of her arm and wept loudly and plaintively. The old man squatted down next to her.

  ‘I truly am sorry that fate has led you down this path, I truly am. But believe me, I know exactly how you feel. I too was caught up in a war, many, many years ago. I’m not Thai, you see. I’m Cambodian, and myself and my family were almost destroyed by Pol Pot’s genocidal “reform” program. I had a wonderful life before the Khmer Rouge regime took power – I was a professor of English studies, I had four bright and promising children, and a beautiful and loving wife; everything a man could want in life. Then war came to us, uninvited of course, but what can one do? I will spare you the grisly details, but let me just tell you that thanks to the horrors of what happened, I lost two of my children … and I was forced to watch them die before my eyes. That is an agony that no parent should ever have to endure. Myself, my wife and my other two children only survived because of the courage and selflessness of this, this … being, this being named Zakaria Alwa. He risked his life to save our lives, and those of countless other Cambodians, and he did not just do so once, but on many occasions.

  He was operating on his own, and helped smuggle us across the border into Thailand, after weeks of hardship and close calls with death. He did not ask for anything in return, and it was quite by accident that I found out who, or rather what he was … which is, as hard as this might be for you to understand right now … not human.’

  Adriana looked up at the old man, and both fear and confusion shone in her eyes.

  ‘I’m really … I’m frightened and confused. None of this is making any sense.’

  The old man’s face folded into a sad, sympathetic smile.

  ‘War never makes sense. And like the pestilent plague it is, it is indiscriminate in the places it ravages and the lives it swallows. None of us ask to be drawn into such things; all of us, well, most of us I should say, most of us at heart desire a life of quiet contentment and peace. But it is the way of the world that wicked men like Sigurd, Hrothgar and their Huntsmen friends not only exist but thrive, and they will stop at nothing in their relentless pursuit of power and wealth. It is from such desires that war grows, and the rest of us cannot help but be swallowed up by the tsunamis unleashed by such villains.’

  ‘And here I am, as the wave of war is about to break on me and swallow me forever,’ Adriana murmured, her almost inaudible uttering laden with despair and hopelessness.

  ‘No,’ the old man said firmly. ‘That is not the only way. You could be swallowed by the churning flood … or you could swim, and kick as hard as you can against the current, and rise above the waters, and chart them to freedom.’

  ‘How? It seems so utterly impossible. Completely hopeless, in fact.’

  The old man reached into his toolbox and pulled out a plastic jar filled with nails and screws. He dug around in it for a while before retrieving a key that had been hidden inside.

  ‘Take this,’ he said, pressing it into her hands. ‘This is the key to your room. I smuggled the original out and had it copied, at great risk.’ He also took out a smartwatch, which he handed to Adriana. ‘You’ll also need this to monitor the time and date. This is very, very important. Also, when you press this button on the side, it will bring up a list of directions that will take you from your room to the place you need to get to. Obviously you can’t wear it for now, so I think the safest place for it will be in here.’ He took off the top of the toilet cistern. ‘The watch is very well-made, and completely waterproof. It will be fine in here, and safe from discovery. Go on, put it in. On the day that the operation is to take place, you’ll need it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Adriana murmured, looking wary. She examined the key in her hands and noticed that it had a star screwdriver head welded onto it.

  ‘Why is the key like this?’

  ‘You’ll need to use it to unscrew and remove an air-conditioner grille.’

  ‘I’ll … what? I don’t know how to do something like that.’

  ‘You have to, my dear. The success of this entire operation depends on it. Indeed, your life itself depends on it.’

  ‘How so? And what if
I fail? What if I don’t do what you ask of me?’

  ‘Then you die.’

  ‘What?’ she gasped, her face a wreck of horror and dread. ‘How?’

  The old man sighed sadly.

  ‘Sigurd is planning on celebrating the ancient feast of his ancestors, Vetrnaetr, called Winternights festival in English, on the evening of October 31st. Traditionally, there was a blood sacrifice made on this festival. Usually it was an animal that was killed. But for this one, he is planning something special. He wishes to invoke a dark and potent power, and is thus going to make a human sacrifice.’

  ‘A … human sacrifice?’

  A chilling numbness washed across the surface of Adriana’s skin.

  ‘Yes. He wishes to spill the blood of a virgin: you.’

  A roaring tumult of chaos blasted through Adriana’s skull with all the force of a rampaging herd of elephants.

  ‘I…’ she gasped, unable to respond with anything else.

  ‘This is why you must do exactly what I say, my dear. Exactly what I say.’

  19

  CHLOE

  17th September 2020. New York City

  For a few moments the teenagers simply lay on the floor of the fire escape in a heap, groaning, each feeling as if he or she had been kicked in the gut, a sensation to which only Daekwon, the boxer, was accustomed. He managed to stagger to his feet before the others did and brushed the glittering pebbles of broken glass off his clothes with shaking hands.

  ‘Shit just got r-, real,’ he gasped, awestruck. ‘Fuck me, shit just g-, g-, got fuckin’ real. Did y’all s-, see that shit?!’

  ‘They were going to shoot us,’ Jun groaned, fighting to force the breath that had been knocked out of him back into his lungs. ‘The soldiers … they were aiming their weapons … at us.’

  ‘Fuck, shit … fuck, fuck, oh my God,’ Chloe panted, scrambling to her knees, her chest heaving with panic, the heavy eyeliner that rimmed her eyes making them look even wilder as they strained to break free of their sockets, while her hands flapped about madly; panicking birds tied to her wrists. ‘Those soldiers … shit, shit, they wanted to … Jun’s right, oh my God, oh fuck, what do we do, what do we do?!’

  Daekwon, shaking a little less intensely than the others, leaned over the edge of the fire escape and peered down at the rooftop below.

  ‘The s-, soldiers, they all, th-, they got KO’d!’ he yelled. ‘And the rh-, rhino too!’

  Chloe staggered over to the edge of the fire escape just in time to see the badly wounded tiger tumble off the rooftop and plummet down into the alley below. The beast landed on top of a parked car with a resounding metallic crunch, flattening the vehicle.

  ‘The tiger!’ she shrieked. ‘No, no! It can’t be dead, it can’t be dead, the poor tiger, oh my God oh my God!’

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Jun murmured, strangely calm and collected despite the circumstances. ‘The soldiers … they were going to shoot us. They saw us, and they know we saw … the werecreatures. We have to get out of here, quickly, before—’

  A furious hammering on the door cut Jun off.

  ‘Open the fuckin’ door, NOW!’ a deep voice bellowed, harsh and throaty with naked aggression. ‘You have five seconds to comply!’

  The teens froze, their eyes stark white with fear, their blood icy with panic. Daekwon stared down at the many flights of steel stairs leading down to the ground, and then shot a panicked glance over his shoulder at the front door of the apartment. Whoever was outside yanked a few times on the doorknob and hammered again on the door.

  ‘You have three seconds to comply! Open this fuckin’ door or there will be serious consequences!’

  As a young black male, Daekwon knew that there was only one way this encounter with law enforcement goons was going to end for him, and it took him less than a split-second to make up his mind about what to do.

  ‘Sh-, sh-, sh-, shut the fuckin’ w-, w-, window an’ go down the f-, f-, fire escape!’ he screamed, shoving his phone into his pocket. ‘Run, run!’

  Daekwon’s frantic urgency spurred the others into action, enabling them to break free of the paralysing dread that had frozen their muscles, joints and tendons. Jun was the first to scurry down the fire escape stairs, followed closely by Chloe. Paola was only just coming to, but Daekwon helped her to her feet and assisted her down the first few stairs. Just as he did, a deafening blast rocked the apartment as the soldier outside fired his combat shotgun through the door.

  ‘Fuck!’ Daekwon yelped, ducking instinctively. ‘Go, go, go!’

  The others needed no further encouragement; the sound of the shotgun blast got their adrenalin racing – a rare sensation for any of the teens except Daekwon – and within seconds they were sprinting at full tilt, jumping multiple steps in their panic-driven haste to get to the alley below. As they ran, the sound of Paola’s window shattering emphasised the immediacy of the threat.

  Another booming shotgun blast then rent the air with its thunderclap bang, this time fired from directly above them. Sparks flew from the inner rail of the stairs as balls of buckshot smashed into it, but none of the teens were hit.

  ‘Faster!’ Chloe screamed. ‘Go, go, faster, run!’

  Again the shotgun clapped, and another shower of sparks doused the fleeing teenagers, but again they miraculously escaped injury, but they knew that their luck wouldn’t last forever. From above the sound of furious footsteps thundering down the steel stairs in pursuit injected urgent speed into their flight. There was no shouting from the man, no yells for them to stop and put their hands up … and they all knew that he did not simply want to arrest them. No, his goal was far more sinister than that.

  ‘Oh my God oh my God oh my God,’ Paola whimpered, weeping hysterically as she fled, ‘I don’t wanna die I don’t wanna die I don’t wanna die!’

  ‘Faster, f-, faster goddammit! Fuckin’ run, run!’ Daekwon roared desperately. He could hear the soldier gaining on them, and as he was the rearmost one, he knew that he would die first when the man caught up with them.

  In the front of the pack, Jun, leaping entire flights of stairs at a time, was almost on the ground. He, like the others, was so fired up with adrenalin and terror that he hadn’t noticed that a black van had screeched to a halt just a few yards from the foot of the stairwell. With a terrifying sensation of racing in his diaphragm, his heart jackhammering in his chest and his lungs on the point, it felt, of bursting into tattered shreds within his breast, Jun hurtled around the final corner of the fire escape stairwell – but he let out a little squeak of surprise and skidded to a dead stop, for a fresh jolt of terror flash-froze the blood in his veins.

  Behind him Chloe came careening around the corner, and then she too came to an abrupt, terrified halt, while Paola, half-blinded by tears and steaming on in confusion, careened into both of them, knocking them over like bowling pins. All three of them rolled in a tangled mess of bodies, shrieking and grunting with pain and fright, down the last few steps and spilled chaotically onto the rough concrete surface of the alley. Daekwon too came veering around the final corner, with the soldier in hot pursuit, but when he reached the last few steps he too froze with abrupt and unexpected horror, for standing at the bottom of the stairs, aiming an AK-47 assault rifle at his chest, was another man dressed in combat gear.

  This one, however, did not look anything like the soldier behind him, or the ones he had seen on the rooftop. He was a large, powerfully built African American man; middle-aged, it seemed, from the grizzled salt-and-pepper tone of his balding, close-cropped hair and the twin grey patches, one on either side of his protruding chin, marring his otherwise dark, neatly trimmed beard. What remained of his springy hair was buzzed close to his large, round skull, which was covered with an assortment of keloid scars which bore grim testament to a long life of seemingly ceaseless violence.

  Overeager cheekbones strained against the gash-scarred mahogany cheeks of his broad face, and beneath them the almost comically massive j
aw, all angles and iron-like bone density, may as well have been a steel accessory, grafted bionically to his human skull to replace an inferior, weaker biological part. Dark, small eyes, radiating aggression, were set below black smears of eyebrows in the battered sockets of a professional pugilist, but only one of these onyx orbs shone with life; a long, knotty scar ran from the man’s forehead over his left eye, which was milky with blindness. This was not his only prominent scar; across his throat were not just one but three grotesque slash wounds, while a mess of badly burned skin, like molten wax, covered a lot of his neck.

  With his statuesque build and blacksmith’s shoulders, his combat gear and his oaken muscles, this new arrival cut an imposing figure. Over his black tactical gear he wore a bulletproof vest and other items of body armour, and his utility belt and bandoliers were laden with an array of military accessories; a bowie knife, a multitool, a coil of rope, stun grenades, smoke grenades, assault grenades, and a .45 calibre pistol … but what drew the teens’ eyes to the centre of his broad body was the AK-47 assault rifle he was gripping with both hands.

  ‘Get down boy, now,’ the enormous soldier rumbled in a distinctly foreign accent, his tone even but unmistakably authoritative.

  In the face of such a potently intimidating figure, Daekwon, his mind a madly whirling tempest of confusion and panic, could do little but obey. He scrambled down the final few steps and threw himself down onto his belly, tucking his hands behind his head.

  The soldier behind them came hurtling down the stairs, murder blazing bright and savage in his eyes, which were stark white against his black balaclava, his combat shotgun shouldered and his finger brushing the trigger with a ravenous hunger, only barely restrained … but when he rounded the final corner, he did not find four teens to massacre. Instead, he was greeted with a burst of fully automatic AK-47 fire to the torso, throat and face. The bullets punched him back and threw him over the railing, and he toppled to the ground, dead before he hit it.