Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  The teenagers were all too paralysed with terror at the unearthly transformation from beast to man they had just witnessed to care about the Native American’s frank state of nudity, which he covered up with one of the bathrobes.

  ‘No more of this Mothra and Godzilla business, my friend,’ he muttered grimly to Zakaria, who was still in his gorilla form and almost comatose on the floor. ‘I am glad I came prepared,’ he continued, glancing at the bonsai trees, ‘since three of you now need my skills. I will not ask questions; I will tend to those in greatest need first.’

  His manner of speech was deep, slow and considered; this was a man who thought a great deal before uttering anything, and each syllable was as finely crafted as an Old Master’s brushstroke.

  ‘The kid’s been shot,’ the woman yelled from the front. ‘William’s busted up bad too, but I think the kid’s worse.’

  The man looked at the reflection of her eyes in the rear-view mirror and bowed his head slightly, maintaining an intense eye contact with her; his appreciation of the value of silence and non-verbal communication was more than apparent. He then turned to Daekwon.

  ‘Child,’ he droned, ‘hand me one of those bonsai trees, please.’

  Daekwon, overwhelmed, frightened and confused, obeyed in nervous silence. Each of the bonsai trees was almost as large as a fully-grown person, and Daekwon was the only one of the teens strong enough to move them. He reached for the closest one and, grunting and straining, managed to drag it over to Jun. The boy was barely breathing now, his chest rising and falling only with the slightest of flutters, and his entire torso was a sticky mess of blood.

  ‘He’s gonna die,’ Paola wailed, her eyes puffy with tears and her lower lip quivering. ‘He’s gonna die, Jun’s gonna die, Mios Dio, oh my God…’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ the man said, shuffling over to position himself between the bonsai tree and Jun.

  He closed his eyes and placed his right hand over Jun’s forehead, and then dug the fingers of his left hand into the earth inside the ceramic bonsai pot. He swallowed slowly, and then drew in a long, deep breath. After this he began to recite an ancient chant in the language of his tribe, the Chimariko, who had long since vanished from the earth. His whispering and muttering and singing was in turns melodious and atonal, chaotic and structured, ear-splittingly loud and barely audible. As he sank ever deeper into the intensity and fervour of the incantation, a heat started to grow in the back of the van. The teenagers stared in overpowering awe and sheer fascination as the vehicle started to rumble and vibrate, the shuddering and creaking of the metal growing exponentially in intensity with every passing second.

  The man’s hands started to shimmer with a barely perceptible green aura as sweat beaded in gleaming droplets on his forehead and face, wrung from his tight skin by an apparently herculean effort. The glistening perspiration began to run freely down his face, which was contorted into a grimace that spoke simultaneously of a paroxysm of agony, an immensity of concentration, and something else entirely, something otherworldly. Tremors and shivers rippled through the shaman’s limbs, and every vein in his body bulged and pulsed, like writhing pythons being cooked alive on the hot stone of his rocky muscles, with only the tenuous membrane of his skin preventing them from exploding.

  ‘Come on Lightning Bird,’ the woman whispered, her fingers like throttling vines around the steering wheel as she stole glances at the surreal spectacle via the rear-view mirror. ‘Come on, come on, save him. Save him.’

  Around Jun’s forehead his hair began to curl and smoulder, and the effulgence from the green aura surrounding the man’s hand was now intense enough to illuminate the entire van, dousing everything in it in a fluorescent hue. The shaman’s prayer, chattering through clenched teeth, morphed into a moan, low and saturated with such a depth of crushing pain that it sent sizzling chills scuttling across the skin of everyone present.

  ‘Hold on brother, don’t let go, don’t let go,’ the woman urged.

  The moan bloomed into a shrieking wail, and the man started to rock on his knees, his entire body shuddering and heaving with the madness of one caught in the delirium of a fatal fever. The hundred-year-old tree was withering at a hyper-accelerated rate, and the rich topsoil in the pot, taken from an ancient forest, was starting to dry up and turn to barren sand. Small patches of Jun’s hair now started to catch fire, the tongues of flame flaring up and then dying just as quickly; lives born and at once extinguished, leaving in their wake only a foul, hanging smoke.

  The shaman dug his fingers deeply into Jun’s face in one final burst of intensity, screaming out the terminus of all his pain and agony in a brutal howl that reverberated through the truck and almost blew the back door out with its volume. With that he collapsed, slumping into crumpled heap of quivering limbs and dripping perspiration, his bony chest heaving as he sucked in huge lungfuls of air with the thirst of a drowning man pulled fresh from the waves.

  ‘Is it done?!’ the woman asked, her eyes afire with a strange and eager madness. ‘Is it done Lightning Bird, is it done?!’

  Through his shivering, sweat-drenched agony, the shaman managed to nod.

  ‘It is done,’ he rasped, his breathing ragged. ‘He is brought back … from the Shadow Forest, back … into the world … of the living. He must rest … for a long time … but he will live.’

  The woman turned to blaze a glance of awestruck wonder over her shoulder, staring for a moment at the man called Lightning Bird.

  ‘I felt what you did, brother, I felt it all right. My whole body, my soul is on fire, Lightning Bird, on fire with your energy!’ She turned her attention to the road again but continued to speak. ‘That was the light against the darkness,’ she whispered, cracks of bright flame shining their writhing brightness through gaps in the mummy wrap of jaded cynicism in which she was so tightly cocooned. ‘Fuck yeah … that was the light against the darkness.’

  ‘I’m not done yet,’ Lightning Bird groaned, shivering as if overcome by hypothermia. ‘There is still William, and Zakaria. Child, another tree, please,’ he said, looking at Daekwon, who nodded, wide-eyed, and retrieved another tree.

  This time the shaman placed his right hand on the tiger’s blood-soaked flank, with his left fingers again dug in the soil of the bonsai pot, and once in position he began to chant. As he did this, the woman pulled into a scrapyard, rumbling over the uneven ground and gravel, and drove to the rear of the lot, backing into a space between two stacks of half-crushed vehicle hulks. The attendant at the gate, a grizzled Hispanic man in a grubby uniform, watched dispassionately, chewing mechanically on a stick of gum. Once the furniture truck was parked, he quietly locked the gate, trudged over to the electromagnetic crane, climbed in, and used the machine to begin piling compressed hulks on top of the truck, burying it under a pile of twisted, rusty steel.

  ‘I hope y’all kids went to the bathroom before we left,’ the woman muttered, transfixing the teenagers with a withering gaze, ‘coz we gon’ be here a while. A long while.’

  ‘Is Jun,’ asked Chloe, her voice tremulous with fear and anxiety, ‘my friend, Jun, is gonna be—’

  ‘Your boy will be fine,’ she snapped. ‘You fuckin’ blind, girl? My friend just gave your friend his life back … and if the energy he used to do that means that one a’ those two dies,’ she continued, pointing at William and Zakaria, ‘then I’m gon’ be pissed. I’m gon’ be real pissed.’

  Chloe’s mercurial temper flared up with the fury of a slick of gasoline kissed by a naked flame, the abrupt inferno searing away her trauma and fear with its hungry flames.

  ‘We didn’t ask to get involved in this, this … whatever the fuck insane shit is going on, lady!’ she yelled. ‘And it’s you people, it’s your fault my friend got shot in the first place! Don’t tell me that you’re gonna get pissed with us, fucking don’t! That’s fucking bullshit! It’s your fault that all of this is happening, not ours! We’re just, just innocent fucking bystanders!’

 
; ‘Nobody in this world is just an “innocent bystander”, kid, nobody,’ the woman growled. ‘Y’all are mixed up in shit y’all don’t know the first goddamn thing about. Fuckin’ First Worlders, thinkin’ y’all are innocent victims. Ha! That’s rich, that’s real rich, when y’all are eyeball-deep in blood! Every single a’ y’all got blood on your hands, whether you acknowledge that shit or not. Don’t get in my face you lil’ bitch, coz you don’t know a fuckin’ speck a’ jackshit about nothin’!’

  ‘Hey!’ Daekwon shouted, his voice loud and sharp like an unexpected gunshot. ‘S-, stop, just stop! Stop arguing, dammit! We all s-, stuck here together now, l-, l-, like it or not. So p-, please can we just stop fightin’, please!’

  Lightning Bird, meanwhile, was completely absorbed in his singing, chanting, whispering and muttering, oblivious to the unfolding argument. As the ritual grew more intense, though, neither the woman nor the teenagers could maintain their focus on fighting, and they stopped, staring in awe as the shaman’s hands shone in the gloom. The old bonsai tree started to wither, crumpling into itself as its rich green leaves abruptly turned brown and dropped in swathes from its gnarled, rapidly cracking branches. The tiger’s bloody fur, meanwhile, began to curl and smoke, with tiny tongues of flame sprouting and hissing and dying in spans of half-seconds. Once more the healing process rocked the entire structure of the van with a pulsing, almost tempest-like force, and again, when the tree finally died and the soil in the pot became dry, lifeless dust, Lightning Bird collapsed against the side of the truck. This time, though, his symptoms of extreme fatigue were worse; soaked with sweat, he was convulsing and frothing at the mouth, his eyes stark white and rolled back in their sockets. A long, wordless wail oozed from his chattering jaw, and his spine arched backwards, almost to the point of snapping.

  The woman scrambled into the back and knelt down next to him, squeezing one of his trembling hands in hers, and stroking his wet forehead and perspiration-soaked hair with her other.

  ‘It’s gon’ be all right,’ she whispered, ‘don’t worry brother, you gon’ be all right. Just rest, just rest now. I’ll take care a’ things from here. You can’t afford to do that again, you just rest up now.’ She breathed out a long sigh and then looked at Zakaria, who had slipped into unconsciousness. ‘Looks like I’ll have to do what I can with a field dressing for now. Won’t be the first goddamned time I’ve had to pull shrapnel out a’ somebody,’ she murmured, retrieving a first aid kit from her combat jacket.

  While she retrieved the items she needed from the kit the teens huddled together around Jun, who was still unconscious, but breathing in regular intervals at a steady, healthy rhythm. Daekwon placed a ginger finger on the side of the boy’s throat and held it there for a few seconds before withdrawing it in surprise.

  ‘His p-, pulse is strong,’ he said, a look of amazement radiating from his face. ‘I think he’s g-, gon’ be okay.’ He lifted up Jun’s shirt, and gasped when he saw that the bullet wound had closed up.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Chloe said, her voice cracking under the weight of a chaotic jumble of emotions. ‘We need to get away from this, this craziness. I can’t deal with this, I literally can’t deal. I mean, I love animals, I really do … but this, this, this werewolf stuff, with, with guns and people trying to kill us, and—’

  ‘You kids ain’t goin’ nowhere,’ the woman grunted flatly, straddling the gorilla’s back and digging in his shrapnel wounds with a pair of tweezers. ‘Y’all just stepped in front of a speedin’ bus. I’m sorry to break it to y’all, but your lives are over.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Paola whimpered, cringing with terror. ‘Are you gon’ … gon’ kill us?’

  ‘Jesus H. fuckin’ Christ,’ the woman muttered, adding a melodramatic eye roll for effect. ‘How fuckin’ dumb are you kids? Why the hell would my friend half kill himself to save your lil’ buddy if we were just gon’ kill all y’all later? Shit, haven’t you worked out that we’re the good guys? No, dumbass, we ain’t gon’ kill any a’ you. But your lives are over, finished. I’ll do what I can to get y’all new identities, maybe smuggle y’all out a’ the country—’

  ‘What?!’ Chloe gasped, rage rising like an abrupt gust of storm wind within her. ‘New identities?! Smuggle us across the border?! We literally didn’t do anything! We’re not criminals!’

  The woman laughed humourlessly and shook her head as she carefully extracted a twisted shard of steel from the gorilla’s back.

  ‘Y’all saw something y’all weren’t supposed to see,’ she said. ‘This man – this gorilla – he wouldn’t have brought y’all along on this ride if your lives weren’t in serious danger. I dunno what you saw—’

  ‘We s-, saw that tiger change into a m-, man,’ Daekwon interrupted. ‘Um no, m-, man into tiger … you know what I mean. An’ another m-, m-, man changed into a rhino, an’ they fought, an’ these g-, guys like the SWAT team or some shit, they was w-, w-, watchin’ … an’ they s-, saw us an’ tried to kill us.’

  ‘Like I said,’ the woman said, ‘y’all saw somethin’ y’all weren’t supposed to see. An’ now they want you dead for that. We’ll do what we can to help y’all, but we can’t make no promises.’

  ‘Who wants us dead?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘Them S-, SWAT guys, girl,’ Daekwon said, his shoulders slumping. ‘One a’ them did try to k-, kill us in P-, Paola’s apartment.’

  ‘The Huntsmen,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t know if any of y’all have heard of the Huntsmen Corporation, but—’

  ‘Oh my God, the Huntsmen Corporation?!’ Chloe gasped. ‘Are you fucking serious?! That’s who those armed men were?! I mean, I’d heard that they had a paramilitary wing, even a private army, but I always thought those were rumours or conspiracy theories.’

  ‘Girl,’ the woman said as she extracted another sliver of jagged steel from the gorilla’s back, ‘the Huntsmen Corporation has the biggest private army on the planet. By far. And they don’t only fight wid’ guns an’ missiles an’ attack choppers. Use my phone, open whatever news site you want, or YouTube. Have a look at breaking news … an’ don’t be too surprised when you see your faces there.’ With her free hand she reached into her pocket, pulled out a phone and tossed it to Chloe, who caught it with surprised but nimble fingers.

  With a few frantic swipes across the phone screen Chloe brought up the CNN homepage.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she murmured, her eyes locked on the screen. ‘Oh my fucking God, oh my God…’

  ‘Wh-, what does it say?’ Daekwon asked, shuffling in closer.

  ‘Just, just listen. I can’t, I literally can’t believe what I’m reading. “Ecoterrorists carry out biggest terrorist attack in America since 9/11. Four American high school students, who have been linked by authorities to an international ecoterrorist organisation, have assisted a group of foreign terrorists in carrying out the biggest terror attack on American soil since the September 11th attacks of 2001.” Guys, they’ve got our Facebook and Instagram pictures on the page and everything. It’s … it’s us, it’s fucking us!’

  ‘B-, b-, but we ain’t no goddamned t-, t-, terrorists!’ Daekwon spluttered. ‘We didn’t do nothin’!’

  ‘How can they say that?!’ Paola gasped. ‘We didn’t do anything!’

  ‘Shit guys,’ Chloe murmured, mesmerised by the horror-inducing words splayed across the screen. ‘It gets worse, way fucking worse, listen: “The ecoterrorists, aided by the high school students, detonated a bomb in downtown New York City that has resulted in the confirmed deaths of at least five American military personnel, with the number of wounded civilians, police officers and military personnel currently at twelve and counting. The FBI has also revealed that the students, operating under the guise of a high school environmentalist club, had been planning on carrying out a mass shooting at their school, New York City’s Eisenhower High. CNN has received a number of screen shots taken from the students’ private social media messages, in which they meticulously plan out
the details of the massacre. The students’ homes were raided, and illegal firearms and chemicals used in the manufacturing of explosives were seized. The students and their terrorist allies are currently at large in the city, and both the New York City Police Department and the federal government have launched a massive manhunt to apprehend them. The terrorists and students are armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. Anyone who sees them should contact authorities immediately.” Oh my God oh my God oh my God, I literally can’t even fucking breathe right now, I can’t even think … this is so fucked up, this is beyond fucked up, this is—’

  She dropped the phone and started sobbing into her hands. Paola quietly picked it up and continued scrolling through the article with trembling fingers.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Paola murmured. ‘They got our pictures here and everything. Screenshots from Whatsapp conversations that we didn’t even have. Fake Facebook messenger conversations too. Damn, I never said any of this stuff! They just straight up typed this up in Photoshop or something. They … they framed us. They hacked our profiles and framed us.’

  ‘I’m sorry, kids,’ the woman said, ‘but when I told y’all your lives were over, I wasn’t joking.’

  ‘Wh-, wh-, what are we gon’ do?!’ Daekwon gasped.

  ‘Like I said, kid,’ the woman answered, ‘we’ll do what we can to help y’all. We can get fake IDs and passports easily enough, and it won’t be too hard to get y’all out of the country. Y’all will need to get haircuts, serious makeovers, anything you can do to change your appearances as drastically as possible. As for your friends and families … it’s probably better if they think you’re dead.’