Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘This big ol’ dumbass,’ Njinga hissed, her glower unrelenting, ‘decided to get a couple of mortal teenagers involved in our situation. Yeah, you heard that right, William. Now, in addition to havin’ to babysit your crackhead ass, I gotta worry about takin’ care of a couple of smart-mouthed, ignorant lil’ punks too.’

  ‘I had no choice,’ Zakaria countered, folding his powerful arms with quiet defiance across his barrel chest. ‘To have abandoned them would have meant death for all four of them.’ He squatted down next to William to explain. ‘They witnessed the battle between you and Aboubakar and got it on video. And, more importantly, the Huntsmen troops saw the unfortunate children filming the whole thing. We all know that any mortals who become aware of the existence of our kind and the Great War are generally condemned to death by the Huntsmen … as these teenagers were.’

  ‘I still think it was a stupid damn idea to bring them into this,’ Njinga muttered.

  ‘I said, as I’ve said a hundred times now,’ Zakaria growled through anger-gritted teeth, ‘that I had no choice. I will not condemn four innocent children to death, not for any sake.’

  ‘There’s almost eight billion a’ ‘em,’ Njinga snarled, ‘an’ how many a’ us left? A few fuckin’ dozen? I know where my loyalty lies.’

  With that she turned and stormed out, slamming the door shut behind her with enough force to rattle the walls.

  ‘Forgive her, my friend,’ Zakaria said, his anger fading into a calm mellowness. ‘You know how she is when her temper flares. And forgive me, for making your ribs worse. I am sorry for that, truly, I am, but I meant what I said. You are not going anywhere, not until we’ve purged your body, mind, heart and soul of all the cancerous venom that’s been poisoning you. It will be a painful process, but you know that thanks to your satyaduta blood it will, mercifully, be a far quicker journey than it would for a mortal. And as for the children, they are eager to meet you. Forget what Njinga said about them; they might be young in body and mind, but I suspect that they have old souls, all of them. They adhere to many values of which our old Council masters would greatly have approved.’

  ‘Are they … here? And speaking of that … where the hell … are we anyway?’

  ‘In mountain cabin in an old forest, in a remote part of Northern California. We drove for almost three days without rest to get here from New York, frequently changing vehicles. This is one of Lightning Bird’s many forest cabins … unfortunately, because he had not been here in years some criminals set up a meth lab here some time ago and caused a fair bit of damage. However, the children and myself have been working on making a few repairs.’

  ‘I … I see. Lightning Bird, where is he?’ William asked. ‘Is he still … has he been taking care of Parvati? Is she … is she safe?’

  ‘He has gone to move her to a safe location. Do not worry about them; they will be fine, at least for the time being. We have, for the moment, successfully thrown the Huntsmen off our trail. Just focus on getting yourself better. Remember, my old friend, while this may seem unpleasant, it is for your own good … and, as Njinga said, for a far greater good … even if the poison that has spread its rot through you has caused you to lose faith in all things.’

  William had no response to this. He simply rolled over, turning away from Zakaria, and stared numbly at the wall.

  ‘I am sorry, William,’ Zakaria said gently. ‘But when you emerge on the other side of all this pain and suffering, you will thank me.’

  The big man then left the room, closing the door softly and leaving William alone with a silently raging hurricane of memories, pain, regret and misery … and the soul-crushing anticipation of a process of withdrawal that was guaranteed to take him to the edge of hell and back.

  ‘I’d better strap in for the ride,’ he whispered to the empty room, as the first hints of tremors shivered in his limbs and the first stirrings of stomach-twisting nausea started to burble in his guts. ‘Aye … time to strap in for one hell of a ride.’

  Then the vomiting began.

  31

  WILLIAM

  Minutes swirled, rushing and dragging alternately, a spiral of black treacle in a whirling vat of white enamel paint of hours. Sometimes the unseen wheel spinning the gooey concoction would accelerate wildly, its momentum causing it to hurtle out of control, but other times broken bolts would drop into the machinery, jamming cogs and seizing pistons, and the whole thing would come to a cluttering halt. And when it did the purges came, furious, merciless and unrelenting.

  For over a week William was a feverish mess, a knotted pretzel of writhing agony, sweat-drenched sheets, vomit, urine, bile, blood and faeces. From every orifice tainted liquids oozed, dripped, trickled, or exploded with muscle-searing, innard-churning force. Hallucinations, sometimes bold and jarringly real, other times translucent and phantasmagorical, alternately floated and stomped around the room, stampeding through his mind or howling their distant echoes through his fever dreams. Close to two centuries of memories, from ecstatic highs to soul-annihilating lows to bizarre, nonsensical sequences of pure delirium, ricocheted like a million machine-gun bullets around the inside of his pain-jarred skull.

  Sometimes it felt as if a vast army of microscopic and viciously malevolent imps had materialised inside him and were stripping his flesh from his bones from within, or dousing every muscle fibre with a caustic, burning liquid. Other times it felt as if this army of tiny demons had migrated to the inside of his skull and were crushing his brain with a tortuously furious pressure from all sides. In this agony he writhed and screamed for hours, for days, his back arched, sweat pouring from his skin, his eyes alternately wild and glazed, his face haggard, and his hair hanging in lank and greasy clumps from his scalp.

  Finally, though, he emerged from the madness of the detox process. His body was both weaker and stronger at once, as was his mind. His beastwalker blood had, while healing his broken bones, also largely exorcised the most debilitating physical cravings for drugs from his body, but it had not been able to completely erase a lingering need for them in his very cells, nor had it had the power to banish the psychological desire for them. That would have to be a matter of both willpower and conscious self-love on William’s part, and compassion and patience from his friends.

  Nevertheless, after a few days of hellish suffering William was back on his feet – dehydrated, weak, his mind a shattered wreck – but on the path to healing. When Zakaria and Njinga felt that he was no longer a flight risk, they unlocked the room that had served as his cell and allowed him free rein of the cabin and the surrounding forest.

  Shortly after emerging from his cell he introduced himself to the teenagers and took a measure of their personalities. Jun had become even more reticent, unreadable and automaton-like than ever, retreating into a cocoon of impenetrable silence and glumness, and most of the time he chose solitude over the company of both his friends and the beastwalkers. He barely ate, nibbling listlessly at his food at mealtimes, and often sat alone in the room he shared with Daekwon, doing nothing but staring blankly at the walls for hours on end, it seemed.

  Daekwon, on the other hand, was trying to handle things stoically, and he interacted frequently with the other teens, whom he tried to cheer up as best he could with jokes, witty banter and impromptu pep talks, although cracks were beginning to show in his façade of detached calm and unflappable determination. He found solace in the same place he always had: in gruelling, relentless physical exertion, but this time it was not in a boxing gym or on a running track. Instead it was with Zakaria, the old master of combat and countless styles of martial arts, who took with vigorous enthusiasm to the task of instructing the boy in the arts of war.

  Paola was an absolute wreck, inconsolable with grief and consumed by gut-wrenching sorrow, spending her time either weeping, moping in sullen silence away from the others, or curled up in a ball in bed in the room she shared with Chloe. Both Chloe and Daekwon had been trying their best to raise her spirits, but even her
crush on the latter, combined with his obviously reciprocal romantic interest in her, had little effect on her mood, and the dense, gloomy fog of sorrow and grief in which she was enshrouded could not be lifted.

  Chloe, unlike the others, had not only taken the tragedy that had befallen them in her stride, she had eagerly embraced her fate, seeing it as a manifestation of some sort of divine destiny. On the cross-country trip that had taken them from New York to Northern California she had mourned briefly for the loss of her old life, but to her, it hadn’t been much of a life to grieve. Unlike Paola, who came from a large, close-knit family, Chloe had spent her life being shuttled from foster home to foster home, and with one parent dead and the other estranged and in prison, which had been how things had been since a very tender age, she had nobody in New York, aside from her close friends, whom she considered family. She knew that she would miss aspects of the city itself, for it had been the only home she had ever known, but from a young age she’d always felt that she had been drifting inexorably towards some sort of higher purpose, a undefined but undeniable calling, a grandiose mission she’d been destined from birth to fulfil. Falling by fate or accident into this secret war – this global conflict between a ruthlessly exploitative and destructive system and a group of apparently supernatural beings who claimed to be fighting for the living world, for Nature Herself – clicked with her sense of purpose in a way that nothing in her life ever had. The revolutionary fire that had simmered and hissed in her belly for so many years had, after she had come to terms with everything she’d learned in the past few days, become a glorious, furiously raging inferno of passion and inextinguishable drive.

  She’d been spending many hours conversing with Njinga, who she was fast coming to both idolise and view as a mentor, and the latter’s disdain for William’s cowardice and his drug habit had rubbed off on her. Chloe thus acted cold and somewhat dismissive when it came to interacting with him, something that he found annoying, but which Njinga was rather amused by. There was also, of course, the fact that Chloe knew that he was a tiger and had seen him in his tiger form, which was a form of minor kryptonite for her since she’d been fairly besotted with big cats from an early age. Thus she was presented with a bit of a conundrum when it came to William; on the one hand, she wanted to impress Njinga by expressing disdain for him, but on the other she couldn’t help admiring the fact that he was a tiger as well as a man. She reacted in her usual manner when faced with an internal conflict of this nature: she overcompensated in one direction. Her attitude towards William, particularly when Njinga was around, had degenerated from mildly dismissive to outright caustic on occasion, and she had taken to dropping comments that were basted with the kind of biting venom that came so easily to young women of her age.

  William, congenial and affable by nature – characteristics of his that had remained in place despite the long-term jadedness of his spirit and the extended hangover-like state through which he was suffering as his heroin withdrawal came to a close – was continually frustrated with and perplexed by Chloe’s flippant antagonism towards him. Not one to keep bashing his head against a stubborn wall when something obviously wasn’t working, though, he soon gave up on getting through to the feisty teen, and simply avoided her when he could.

  William felt that bad blood continued to linger between him and the other beastwalkers, and despite their willingness to forgive his past transgressions and welcome him back into the fold, his own guilt – and the unshakeable feeling of hopelessness and despair in the face of an unwinnable war and an unfolding catastrophe of planetary proportions – led him to avoid the company of his brethren almost as frequently as he dodged conversations with Chloe. He therefore spent most of his time alone, walking in the forest, meditating, doing yoga, swimming in the nearby river, and reading; the cabin, thankfully, had a fairly extensive library.

  It came as something of a surprise when Jun, of all people, sought him out and asked to speak to him one afternoon when he was sitting on the riverbank, reading a novel.

  ‘How’s everything with you, lad?’ William asked, lowering his dog-eared copy of Steinbeck’s East of Eden and eyeing the rail-thin teen with a hefty measure of suspicion.

  ‘Not particularly good,’ Jun answered in his usual robotic tone, his face as blank and unreadable as ever, his new clothes – picked out for the teens by the beastwalkers at thrift stores in small towns along the way – looking mockingly crisp and cheerful in the naked sun, especially when juxtaposed with the glumness on his face. ‘Um, I thought that maybe you could give me some, um, advice about my current condition.’

  ‘Your current condition, lad? And what might that be? Lightning Bird healed that bullet wound you got, you should be right as rain now, yeah?’

  ‘The injury has healed completely,’ Jun answered. ‘There’s nothing left except a scar. But that isn’t what’s troubling me. What’s bothering me is something that maybe you could help me with … or at least give me some advice on.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll do that if I can. Go on, come have a seat and tell me your woes,’ William said, patting a smooth rock a few feet away from him. He couldn’t deny that it felt good to be asked for help instead of being offered it for a change.

  Jun walked over to the rock and sat down, his countenance remaining inscrutable, and for some time he simply stared out at the broad expanse of ice-blue water as it tumbled with gleeful abandon over rocks. Finally, however, he spoke.

  ‘You’re an addict, William.’

  ‘I am,’ William admitted. ‘A recovering one, but an addict nonetheless. I won’t deny that.’

  ‘So am I.’

  This admission from the taciturn teen caught the beastwalker off guard, but he quickly regained his composure and did his best to convey a sense of compassion in his approach.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Jun. Well, as someone who’s been to hell and back a good few times with this terrible affliction, I’m happy to offer what advice I can.’

  ‘You’re addicted to chemical compounds,’ Jun said, his eyes still locked on the churning water, ‘like I am. The difference is, though, that you physically inject them into your veins. I produce them in my own brain via certain actions. Dopamine. Technology. My addiction, I’ve come to realise, is just as severe as yours, but in a … different … way. Yes, similar, very similar, but different in the end. I don’t know how you got into yours, but mine has been lifelong. My short life is a mere blip on the radar compared to yours, if your friends’ claims about your lifespans are to be believed, but in relative terms, my addiction has been just as intense as yours. My earliest memories are of screens. Interacting with screens. Staring at screens for hours. Touching screens, holding screens. Swiping, tapping, clicking, typing … but always staring. Always passive, always … an empty receptacle, with a leak that could never be patched. I’ve researched it, you know. I came to understand that every interaction with technology I’ve ever had has triggered the production of dopamine in my brain. Dopamine is—’

  ‘I know what dopamine is, and what it does, lad,’ William interjected gently. ‘And how it works with addictions.’

  ‘Then you will know how severe this addiction problem is.’

  ‘Aye, I do. I can sympathise with what you’re going through, Jun, I truly can. As you said yourself, our addictions are different, aye, but more similar than different, to be sure.’

  ‘The others think that I’m withdrawn and grumpy and depressed because of the loss of my old life, because I’ve been branded, in the eyes of the media and all of America, a domestic terrorist, a potential school shooter. Because I’ve been ripped from my family, who I’ll likely never see again. And … it’s true that those things make me feel upset … but not as upset as everyone thinks. Certainly not anywhere near as upset as Paola feels. In fact, my feelings about this situation are closer to Chloe’s than Paola’s.’

  ‘I’m a little surprised to hear that.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jun said in a matter-of-fact voi
ce. ‘How could a boy my age feel such a way, after having had so much taken from him, after being framed for crimes he did not commit, after being informed that he’s one of the most hated people in the nation, and after being told that he cannot ever see or contact his family again?’

  ‘Sometimes we’re forced to grow up far more quickly than we ever could have imagined we’d have to,’ William commented. ‘I wasn’t much older than you when I first went to war. And I’ll tell you what, lad, I had to do a lot of growing up very quickly … and, to tell you the truth, after what happened in those strange, terrible years, I’ve never been the same.’

  ‘For me, it isn’t about “growing up”, though. It’s about … a lot of things. Would you think I’m a monster if I told you I was happy I’d never see my parents again?’

  William chuckled gently, but there was neither mirth nor mockery in his soft laughter, only sympathy.

  ‘I learned long ago not to judge anyone for expressing such sentiments. I myself never knew the love of a parent, having grown up an orphan, although for a time I did have a fantastic father figure in my life. I imagine that it’d be a lot more painful than being an orphan, though, to grow up with parents who were physically there, but with whom there was no loving relationship.’

  ‘I don’t think my parents ever even liked me, let alone loved me,’ Jun declared flatly. ‘And I never loved them. I sound so … so cold, like some sort of psycho, saying that, don’t I? But to them, I was an inconvenience. Sometimes a trophy, when they boasted to friends and relatives about my grades and academic achievements, or when I won piano and violin contests. Do you know that I actually hate classical music? I hate it with, with a burning passion.’ As Jun said this, rare traces of emotion started to show on his usually blank countenance. ‘And I hate the fucking violin too. And math. And everything else my parents forced me to study. They never once asked me what I wanted to study, what I dreamed of doing with my life. I was only ever told what to do. Commanded. Ordered. They beat me, often. But the physical abuse wasn’t as bad as … as … their coldness. Their complete detachment. Them treating me like a prizewinning show dog, and nothing more. No, not a dog; I wasn’t ever even a pet to them. Pets are loved. I was just a trophy, a medal in a frame.’