Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Chloe’s face fell, her shoulders slumped, and it looked as if consciousness was about to flee any second from her.

  ‘Think we’re … think we’re dead?! What the fuck, what the actual fuck?!’

  ‘That’s how the Huntsmen operate, kid. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. If they don’t catch y’all in the next couple days, weeks maybe, they’ll make it look like they did. They have to win, you see … they always have to win, by whatever means necessary … even if they didn’t really win. They’ll set up something juicy for the media to feast on, for the public to enjoy, for a good ol’ vicarious dishin’ out a’ vengeance. They’ll make it look like y’all were cornered in an abandoned house in, say, the desert in Arizona. There was a firefight. A brave SWAT team member took a bullet, yeah, but they got y’all in the end. There’ll be bodies, oh yeah, there’s gotta be bodies. Gory footage, lotsa blood, the worst bits blurred out for the news an’ the sensitive eyes of America’s nuclear families of course, but the uncensored pics will show up in the usual dark corners of the internet. Your families will grieve, they’ll be torn apart with shame and guilt; they thought you were such good kids. They had no idea. What did they do to y’all, or what didn’t they do, where did it all go wrong? They’ll blame your friends, the internet, school, video games, music … but most of all, they’ll blame themselves. They’ll have sad, quiet funerals, hopin’ that nobody comes along to spit in your coffins or piss on your graves, an’ make their terrible pain even more acute. Somebody like that probably will show up at your funerals, though; the Huntsmen’ll make sure of it. And someone will be there to capture it in all its disgusting glory, of course; maybe the hearse driver, maybe the gravedigger. He’ll just happen to have his phone camera ready at the exact moment that the “patriot” wearing an American flag as a cape, or a red cap or some shit like that gatecrashes your funeral and pisses on your grave, or throws his diarrhoea all over your coffin as it’s lowered into the ground. It’ll go viral, and people will cheer while your families weep. Justice for the terrorists, they’ll say … true justice for those who hated America. Maybe y’all will become memes. Your faces will be jokes that the rest of the world laughs at, your names used as curses. When I told y’all that your lives are over, did you think I meant anything less? I ain’t one for hyperbole, kids, remember that about me. When I say something, I always give it to you straight, I tell it like it is. And everything I just said, that’s exactly how it is. I’m sorry, it’s bad, it’s real bad … but y’all, like so many innocent people throughout history, were in the wrong time at the wrong place.’

  All of the teenagers were in tears now, even Daekwon. Even beings like the beastwalkers, whose lives spanned centuries, and whose life experience extended across countless human generations, were psychologically and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the collapse, in an instant, of their entire world, their whole existences … and these teenagers, whose life experience was but a blip compared to these beings, could do nothing but weep hysterically when confronted with this tragedy of gargantuan proportions.

  As tough and crabby as she came off as being, the woman had a deeply empathetic heart buried within the tough folds and coils of scar tissue in which she was entombed. She pulled the final shard of shrapnel from Zakaria’s back and then sighed, her own eyes glistening with tears, and sidled over to Paola, who was closest to her.

  ‘I’m sorry, kids,’ she murmured, unbridled emotion adding a raspy edge to her voice. ‘It’s a real shitty situation you’ve found yourselves in. I won’t lie to you an’ say it’s gon’ be all right, because I don’t know if it will be, or if it ever can be for y’all after today. But I will say this: my friends and I, we’ll do whatever we can to help you, an’ we’ll do our best to fix what we can of this.’

  Daekwon was the first to speak.

  ‘It might h-, help a lil’,’ he said, ‘if y’all told us your n-, n-, names, an’ who, or uh, wh-, what y’all really are, an’ just … just what the f-, fuck we stumbled into.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the woman said, her tone softening substantially. ‘This tiger here, his name is William. The gorilla, he’s Zakaria. The man who saved your friend, he’s called Lightning Bird, or at least that’s how you say it in English. It ain’t an exact translation of his Chimariko name, but it works, an’ we’ve been calling him that ever since I’ve known him. And me, my name is Njinga. I’m originally from what’s now called Angola, but I’ve been in America, well … a long time, a very long time, fighting the Huntsmen since way before they became a corporation.’

  ‘Y-, you don’t look that old.’

  Njinga chuckled, genuine mirth sparkling in her hazel eyes.

  ‘Still gets me every time I hear that,’ she said, shaking her head, the corners of her lips creeping up into the curve of a smile. ‘Even after three centuries.’

  ‘Three … centuries?! You can’t be s-, serious. Three h-, h-, hundred years?!’

  ‘Three hundred and fifty-four years, to be exact. I was brought to America as a slave three hundred and twenty-seven years ago … and here, in the New World, as those assholes called it, I became … beyond mortal.’

  ‘Holy sh-, sh-, shit! Are you for real?’

  Njinga leaned back against the wall of the furniture truck and released a protracted sigh, staring up at the steel ceiling. Her focus was not the rust and dents there, though; instead she was gazing through a madly spinning cine reel of memories; colours, scents, sounds, images and sensations, all blended together in a chaotic, ever-tumbling chamber of a million living, breathing photographs.

  ‘We gon’ be in here a while,’ she murmured, her voice barely clearing a whisper. ‘And this whole thing, this mess, this war that y’all have become entangled in between The Hunstmen an’ … well, everything that’s alive on this planet, it’s a long an’ complicated story. I guess I’d better start at the beginning. What better place to start, huh? Just a warning though … y’all might wanna buckle up for what you’re about to hear.’

  21

  CHLOE

  ‘Holy shit,’ Chloe murmured, after Njinga finished her long and complex story. ‘Holy fuckin’ shit.’

  For a few drawn-out moments nobody spoke, and the inside of the truck was silent but for the slow, rhythmic breathing of the unconscious animals and Jun, and Lightning Bird’s occasional snores as he slept.

  ‘There ain’t no way I’d believe anything you just said,’ Paola said softly, ‘if I hadn’t seen what I seen with my own eyes. Even so, it’s … it’s hard to like, wrap my head around it and stuff. I mean … it’s seriously like, the craziest story I ever heard … but it’s real. I don’t understand how, but it’s real, I seen it.’

  ‘There’s only one thing you didn’t explain,’ Chloe said. ‘Well, a few things I guess, but there’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. You explained about the word “satyaduta” and what it means, and the old Councils and stuff, but what about the word “beastwalker”? I heard you guys use that word too, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, “beastwalker”, it sounds like, I dunno, some cheesy old eighties or nineties retro stuff, like Dino-Riders or something.’

  ‘It’s a literal translation of an ancient Egyptian term,’ Njinga answered, ‘which was translated into a bunch a’ other languages, and then, after thousands of years, into modern English. We have the Huntsmen to thank for that; those assholes use the term as an insult. But we owned that shit, and now we call each other beastwalkers just to piss our enemies off. The original ancient Egyptian term, though, meant something like “someone who walks in both the skin of a man and the skin of a beast”, so you can see why it was appropriate. It’s just that over countless centuries and hundreds of retranslations, it eventually became the word “beastwalker” in English. Get it?”

  Chloe nodded. Daekwon, meanwhile, leaned back and released a long, slow sigh, and then spoke.

  ‘Man, I wish I’d never gone t-, to that stupid Environmental Club m-, meeting. All I wanted to
do was h-, h-, help save the planet … an’ now my whole life is over. I’m f-, fightin’ in a war I didn’t even know existed. An’ the most p-, powerful people in the world want me, want all a’ us d-, dead. Shit. Shit!’

  ‘If you ever were sincere about wanting to save the world, kid,’ Njinga commented dryly, ‘you would have understood exactly what you were getting into. Make no mistake, regardless of whether you knew about the war or not, steppin’ up to fight against the people who stand for profit an’ power, who hate Nature an’ the living world … that shit was always gonna be a fight to the death. It was always gonna mean uprootin’ your entire life, upendin’ everything you ever believed about the world an’ the way it works, an’ unpluggin’ your damn self from the Matrix, like that movie said … an’ yeah, layin’ your life on the line. Being willin’ to take a bullet for a cause far greater than your mind can even begin to wrap itself around. I don’t know if you believe in fate, kid … but if you do, an’ you sincerely, genuinely do want to save the world, well then, maybe fate took you exactly where you were supposed to go. What is it that all those self-help guru assholes say all the time – ah yeah, that’s it: don’t look at a disaster as a tragedy, look at it as an opportunity. Yeah, a huge part of your life is over, but now you’re on the front lines, kid, the front lines. You have a chance to really make a difference, in ways your lil’ high school club never could have.’

  ‘How?’ Chloe demanded, her eyes puffy and red with the aftermath of tears, and her face sporting a bedraggled look from all the smudged makeup and running eyeliner. ‘By fighting, by literally killing people? That makes us just as bad as the Huntsmen! I can’t, I won’t, I refuse, I fucking refuse to touch a gun, to pick up a weapon, to, to have literally anything to do with fucking violence!’

  ‘Listen, kid,’ Njinga began, but Chloe was on a roll now, and she refused to be silenced.

  ‘No!’ she snapped, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks – tears of passionate fury. ‘You just spent an hour or whatever telling us your story, and now it’s time to give me a chance to speak! My whole life I’ve hated violence more than I’ve hated anything! And believe me, I’ve had a bunch of things to hate. But violence … it’s why I grew up without a mom. When I was five years old, my dad, that piece of shit, he literally beat her to death when he was drunk. Then in my first foster home, I was physically abused – and no, not by my foster dad, who was actually a half-decent human being – but by my foster mom, who was a bitch from hell. I went vegan when I was old enough to understand where meat and animal products came from, when I was maybe four years old. My mom, my real mom, she was vegan too, and she told me about the reality of animal agriculture. Well my first foster mom, she just could not accept the idea that I was vegan. She used to literally force me to eat meat, to eat animal products, because she was a Christian, and “that’s what God put animals here for”, and if I was gonna live under her roof, I was gonna eat whatever she put on my plate and be grateful for it. My foster dad, he was actually cool with me being vegan, but my foster mom, well that bitch just couldn’t handle it. If I refused to eat the eggs and meat she cooked, she’d slap me around and literally shove my face into the meat. And the kids at school, back in those days when most people didn’t even know what a vegan was … they were real fuckin’ assholes about it, most of ‘em. If it wasn’t my foster mom literally shoving meat into my face at home, it was the bullies at school literally shoving it into my face there. And people have the gall to say that we vegans “shove our opinions down their throats”, ha! Shit, try talking to people about animal rights, uh, other kids I mean, when you’re a kid. Fuck, the amount of mockery and bullying I’ve had to deal with my whole life … and that’s just the tip of the goddamn iceberg! But that’s just me. Violence … it’s what people do to animals, the ugliest, most horrible thing they do. On factory farms, fishing trawlers, whaling ships, hunters, poachers … I’ve seen it all, thousands of videos online. And that’s why I never felt too sorry for myself, even with all the shit that was happening in my own life. Because I knew that the animals always had it way worse than me, and literally the saddest thing, the absolute fuckin’ saddest thing, was that they didn’t understand why it was happening to ‘em. That’s why I never backed down, never shut up, never turned away to save myself from a beating or getting yelled at. I have to draw the line somewhere, though. Literally using violence, that ugly, disgusting thing that took my mom from me, that wrecked my life, that’s been used to beat me down and torment me, as well as literally torture and kill billions of animals? Fuck that. Seriously, fuck that a thousand times over. I won’t stoop to their level, I won’t.’

  Njinga nodded slowly, her eyes locked on Chloe, her expression intense but unreadable. Suddenly, she drew one of her pistols and tossed it to the teenager. Chloe’s naturally quick reflexes kicked in and she darted her hands out. Although she fumbled the catch, she managed to hold on to the firearm. She extended her arm out in Njinga’s direction, dangling the gun from her hand as if it was a piece of foul refuse she’d been forced to pick up.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ she hissed. ‘Take it back. I don’t want this, this disgusting thing. Just, just get it away from me.’

  ‘Hold it,’ Njinga insisted softly. ‘Curl your fingers around the grip and rest your forefinger against the trigger. Don’t worry, the safety’s on.’

  ‘No! Fucking no, I won’t hold it! Take it back, I don’t want to hold it, I don’t even want to see it!’

  ‘C’mon, d-, don’t make her do that,’ Daekwon protested. ‘She d-, don’t want to hold it, so why—’

  ‘Because I’m trying to show you something,’ Njinga answered sternly, ‘something really important. Do you think I like weapons? Do you think I like violence an’ fighting an’ guns?’

  ‘You sure as hell l-, look like you do,’ Daekwon muttered with a snicker and an eyeroll, his remark prompting a sputtering of uneasy chuckles and chortles from the other teens. Even Njinga cracked a smile, rare delight sparkling in her eyes; she, like the children, was grateful for this moment of levity, fleeting as it was.

  ‘I may look like a warrior, yeah,’ Njinga said when the laughter died down, ‘an’ I have had to learn to fight an’ use weapons over the years … but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Listen, I may look like a badass fighter in this getup, an’ I can defend myself if I have to, but the truth is, I’m like you, kid,’ she said, pointing at Chloe. ‘I know, I know,’ she continued, pre-empting an indignant response from the teen, ‘you think I’m nothing like you at all, huh? I’m all about weapons an’ killing an’ blowing shit up, an’ you’re a peace-loving animal rights hippie – we ain’t got a single thing in common, right?’

  Chloe, frowning, nodded uncertainly, understanding that this was a setup for a counterpoint.

  ‘Girl,’ Njinga said with a long, slow sigh, accompanied by a slackening of her entire body, ‘you an’ me have way more in common than you realise. You wanna know why I’m makin’ you hold that .45? Why I put that cold, hateful instrument of violence, that travesty of an invention, that mechanical distillation of every one of humankind’s worst impulses an’ most despicable urges in your hand … you wanna know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s how bad things are. That’s the position we’ve been forced into. That’s how tiny the corner that we’ve been backed into is. And when I say we, I’m not just talkin’ about us beastwalkers, I’m talkin’ about everythin’ that’s left a’ the natural world, all wild, free things … everything that’s been here on this amazin’ planet for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, hell, millions of years. All a’ that soul-soaring beauty an’ wonder, girl, the complexity an’ interconnectedness of which y’all can’t even begin to comprehend, not even a fraction of it … it’s all disappearin’. No, no, I ain’t gonna say “disappearin’”, because the implication a’ that word is that it’s a passive process. It’s an active process all right, it’s real fuckin’ active – an’ it’s be
ing carried out by entities like the Huntsmen Corporation, an’ all their subsidiaries … an’ the killing an’ destruction is supported by the billions of people who mindlessly buy not only the products that these clowns sell ‘em, but the fake dreams an’ destructive lifestyles that companies like the Huntsmen, an’ everything they represent, have slammed into seven an’ a half billion human skulls like poisoned bullets.’

  ‘I … I know how bad things are,’ Chloe murmured. ‘We’re not as ignorant as you think we are. We’ve done research, literally a ton of it, and—’

  ‘Look, kid,’ Njinga interrupted gently, ‘I ain’t saying y’all are ignorant, an’ I don’t mean to suggest that y’all don’t know that things are bad, that the natural world is being killed, that millions of species are bein’ systematically exterminated. I’m just sayin’ that y’all are too young an’ too inexperienced to grasp the scale of it. An’ that ain’t your fault; hell, a hundred-and-twenty-year-old person who’d spent their lifetime travelling the length an’ breadth of the world would have trouble graspin’ even a fraction a’ the destruction, even a sliver of the true scale a’ the devastation an’ loss that’s going on. Do y’all know that thousands, no tens of thousands of the animals, birds, insects an’ plants that are going extinct haven’t even been named by scientists yet? Y’all know about the more obvious issues, the big animals that are disappearing all over the world; tigers, rhinos, elephants, polar bears, an’ maybe some of the little ones, like pangolins, an’ I’m sure y’all know a lot about the plastic crisis in the oceans, the imminent collapse of fish populations an’ all that … but what I’m trying to explain is that those things are a speck on the tip of a fuckin’ iceberg. So much is vanishing, so very, very much … an’ I don’t mean hiding out, waiting for this storm to pass. I mean gone forever, lost eternally. Extinct. Can y’all, who have only been alive for a couple of years, even start to comprehend what that word means?’