by J M Hemmings
The teenagers were not given any time to respond or ask questions. The beastwalkers dropped their bathrobes and for half a second all four stood nude before the teens, who were stuffing their ear plugs into their ears. In the next half-second, though, all four beastwalkers’ bodies transformed, in a fur-sprouting hyperspeed flurry of grotesqueness, in which torsos were distended, jaws extended, limbs swollen and stretched, heads and extremities elongated and colours changed. Then, where William, Zakaria, Njinga and Lightning Bird had been, there now stood a Bengal tiger, an Eastern Lowland gorilla, a puma and a grizzly bear.
Even though the teens had witnessed the beastwalkers shifting forms before, seeing it again – especially with all four doing it simultaneously, combined with their mounting fear and anxiety – struck them all temporarily catatonic with shock. Daekwon was the first to regain his composure, and quickly asserted a measure of authority.
‘C’mon, y’all heard Zakaria!’ he yelled. ‘G-, get up on ‘em!’
The animals turned and faced away from the teens and lowered their bodies so that the teens could mount them. Zakaria, however, picked up the M60 machine gun in his right gorilla hand and slung the ammo bag strap over his shoulder and across his chest. Then he patted his shoulders with his left hand, indicating to Paola that she should climb up.
‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit,’ Paola whimpered, on the verge of hyperventilation, the bulginess of her eyes emphasised to an almost cartoonish degree by her soda bottle spectacles.
Jun’s wan cheeks creased into a rare smile, and he clambered up onto the Njinga’s puma back, straddling her as he would a miniature pony. At a shade over sixty kilograms, she was by far the smallest of the beastwalkers in her animal form, but even so, she was easily able to carry Jun, whose meagre, almost emaciated-looking body weighed in at little more than forty-five kilograms.
Paola, for all her debilitating fear, had an easy enough time climbing up onto Zakaria’s gorilla back; it was just like getting carried piggyback by her older brothers, which she had done many a time.
Daekwon, the most athletic and agile of the teens, scrambled onto Lightning Bird’s massive bear back and shoulders, and felt a charged thrill of exhilaration coursing through his veins as he got into place; riding a massive grizzly like this, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a couple of grenades hooked around his belt, it was difficult not to revel at least fleetingly in a heady rush of godlike invincibility.
‘Aw hell yeah!’ he whooped, giddy on this swell of thrilling power.
Chloe, meanwhile, was spellbound, standing with her mouth agape and staring at William’s tiger body with quiet awe. The last time she’d seen him in his tiger form had been when he’d been close to death in the back of the van on that fateful day in New York, and despite her mixed feelings about the man, she was absolutely smitten with the tiger. Before she could gawk too long, however, she heard William’s voice inside her mind – a strange, almost dizzying sensation – and it was both stern and urgent.
‘I know you like tigers, lass, but please, this is a matter of life and death! Get on my back right now, or we’re leaving you behind for the enemy troops.’
A curious cocktail of reactive anger and frightened desperation gushed through the girl’s veins, but as odd as it was, it gave her enough of a jolt to spur her into action, and she swung her leg over William’s back and dug her knees and thighs into his flanks. It felt strangely natural. She’d spent one summer as a child in rural Texas on a ranch, and while she’d loathed the experience almost as much as she’d hated the foster family who had taken her there, those distant few months had provided her with a skill that was quite applicable to her current situation: the ability to ride a horse.
It had been ten years since that summer, and Chloe had sworn off horse riding on an ideological basis many years ago, but the memories of riding horses on the ranch came flooding back to her the instant she mounted the tiger. The position was completely different, of course, but she guessed that the fundamentals were close enough.
‘Just like riding a fuckin’ bike,’ she muttered, grabbing a fistful of his orange and black ruff and gripping it as if it were a short rein. ‘Just like a goddamn bike.’
34
ESCAPE PART II
Once the teens were all mounted the beastwalkers took off at a spirited run. Of the beastwalkers, Njinga was the fastest in her animal form, followed by William and then Lightning Bird. Zakaria was by far the slowest, but the advantage he held was in his opposable thumbs, and his ability to operate a firearm while in his animal form. The beastwalkers had made contingency plans for a situation like this, and Zakaria, as the slowest moving of them, was to serve as the rear gunner, covering their retreat.
‘Hang on tight, kid,’ Njinga said to Jun, via mind-to-mind communication. In response he dug his skinny knees into her tawny flanks and wrapped his arms around her neck, pressing his chest into her shoulders, his position almost like that of a jockey crouching low on a galloping racehorse. Jun had never even ridden a bicycle before, and both he and Njinga understood that there was little he could do but hold on; if they encountered any threats, he would hardly be able to counterattack, which would also have been the case if he were on foot, given how poorly he’d performed in firearms training, and how much of a struggle it was for him to hold, let alone aim an AK-47. Njinga prayed that she could rely on her speed and agility to get them out of trouble, and that William could keep up with her as well; Chloe had turned out to be a crack shot, which had surprised the girl as much as it had any of the others, and this, combined with her prior experience in riding horses, made her the most effective of the armed riders.
Njinga raced off at speed, with William storming after her. Jun clung in silence to the puma’s back, his whole body a tight knot of anxiety, every muscle clenched with frightened tautness. William was sprinting along few body lengths behind Njinga and Jun, but Chloe’s reaction to the ride was quite different to her friend’s. She let out an involuntary whoop of exhilaration, recalling with a thrilling glut of adrenalin-laced memories just how much she had once enjoyed riding horses. Riding a tiger was something else, though; being much lower to the ground than a rider on horseback made the heady sensation of speed even more potent and immediate, and this was coupled with a feeling of primal power, enhanced, she felt with a stab of guilt, by the fact that she had an assault rifle hanging from her shoulder. Behind her Lightning Bird ran, thundering along with Daekwon clinging to his furry back, and bringing up the rear was Zakaria, who was quickly falling behind, unable to run nearly as fast as his friends.
All around them, adding to the sense of unfolding anarchy, birds of all sorts were tearing like a blind machine gunner’s bullets through the air in all directions, and panicked deer and other creatures were stampeding through the forest; erratically moving obstacles that the beastwalkers had to dodge and evade.
There was an overgrown trail heading north-east from the cabin up to the peak of the forested mountain they were on, but the beastwalkers had not planned on sticking to its winding passage; the enemy would surely have reconnoitred the area via satellite prior to their attack, and would be covering every trail with troops. To avoid them, the beastwalkers stuck to the areas where the undergrowth was thickest. One thing they at least had on their side was the fact that they were running away from, rather than into, the setting sun. The low rays, combined with their uphill path, would give them a measure of visual cover by making it more difficult for their enemies to see them clearly.
Njinga streaked on ahead, slaloming at a blistering pace around trees, hurdling with ease over thick shrubs and fallen logs alike, and leaping over small gullies and watercourses. William wasn’t far behind her, his feline speed and agility, combined with his prodigious strength, enabling him to make the same jumps that she did. Lightning Bird, though, soon started to fall behind; even though he could run almost as fast as the big cats, he couldn’t jump nearly as well as them, and had to scramble through the gullies
and ditches, although when it came to shrubs and bushes, he was able to plough straight them like a tank. As for Zakaria, what he lacked in outright speed he made up for in agility, and he was able to use low-hanging branches to his advantage, gripping them with his free hand and swinging over obstacles and holes in the ground, or vaulting over large rocks and fallen logs.
Njinga was the first to sense an immediate threat, although she smelled it before she saw it. The Huntsmen soldiers had tried to obfuscate their human scents by applying pine scent hunting spray, but while this might have fooled a wild animal into thinking that nothing was amiss, it only served to further warn the beastwalkers of the imminence of danger. Carving through the chilly air at speed, Njinga caught a suspiciously strong scent of pine on the rushing breeze, tainted with a subtle lick of artificiality and chemicals, and knew at once that there were troops close by. With her ears pricked as she sprinted, she did her best to sift through the barrage of thousands of sounds that were catapulted in relentless waves against her puma eardrums – which were vastly more sensitive and more perceptive than the sharpest human ears by a magnitude of thousands – for evidence of the creeping soldiers’ positions.
She let out a low growl as she picked it up, through the chaotically rolling wall of sound: the faint crunch of heavy boots taking slow, deliberate steps on the carpet of dead leaves and pine needles, and the rhythm of calm, controlled breathing, muffled by the thick balaclavas the troops wore. A waft of the fake pine scent trickled in a lazy current along the currents of air from the north, and, in a weaker concentration, from the east. The passage north-east was still open by a thin margin, but the soldiers were closing in fast, and tightening the net of their formation.
Snarling and fuelled by a boost of adrenalin, Njinga veered sharply to the east, almost throwing Jun off her back. He clung fast with the tenacity of a barnacle, though, his muscles and joints aflame with pain, but his will stronger than the agony.
William too caught a whiff of the hunting spray and knew right away what it meant. Following Njinga’s scent, which was as vividly clear to him in his tiger form as the sight of her, plain as day, would have been in his human form, he too surged off to the east, running at full tilt and clearing, in a spectacular leap that had Chloe’s stomach feeling as if it were lurching up the back of her throat for a terrifying second or two, a deep thirty-foot-wide gulley.
The Huntsmen had not yet detected their fleeing quarry, but they would soon enough; the beastwalkers knew that their enemies would surely have brought with them the most sophisticated technological equipment, from which there could be no hiding.
Then the first shot rang out.
William did not know whether it had been fired by a Huntsman or one of the teens, but the sharp crack of it resounding through the trees spurred urgent speed into his steps and potency into his burning muscles, tired lungs and aching joints. Seconds later, there was a burst of M-16 fire, coming from around a mile behind William and Chloe.
‘Oh my God!’ she screamed, her left hand almost ripping a chunk out of William’s ruff with her death grip. ‘No, they’re on us, oh my God, oh my fuckin’ God!’
The M-16 fire was answered by a deep chattering of AK-47 fire; someone from the beastwalkers’ group was shooting back. Since the firing was not accompanied by the frenetic and thunderous hammering of Zakaria’s M60, William guessed that it was Lightning Bird and Daekwon who had run into the Huntsmen, which was bad news; since the two of them were already so far behind William, with Zakaria and Paola even further behind them, there was a very real possibility that Zakaria and Paola could be completely cut off and surrounded.
There was no time to pause and worry, and no time to turn around either, though. For the moment, it was every beastwalker for themselves, at least until they reached the temporary refuge of the north-eastern peak.
‘If you see any hint of a soldier, lass, you let rip with that AK,’ William said to Chloe, communicating to her via her mind. ‘Don’t give the bastards the chance to shoot, you do it first.’
‘I’ll literally blast the fuck outta ‘em,’ she growled, the wind whipping through her hair as William coursed through the long shadows and blasted across patches of golden, late afternoon light. The old Chloe of Eisenhower High’s Environmental Club in New York City would never have imagined she’d be saying such a thing, given how fiercely passionate her loathing of guns and weaponry was … but then again, the old Chloe could never have guessed that she’d be fleeing on the back of a weretiger from the ruthless troops of a secret global cabal.
A few hundred yards behind William and Chloe, Lightning Bird and Daekwon were engaged in a skirmish with two Huntsmen troops, who were around fifty yards from them. Lightning Bird was zipping between trees, while atop his enormous shoulders Daekwon, aflame with the raging adrenalin of combat, was firing fully automatic bursts in the soldiers’ direction as they dashed from cover to cover. Although Daekwon was a decent enough shot while standing, there was no way he could achieve any kind of accuracy from the bear’s rolling shoulders, and the bursts of fire from his AK-47 only served to force the Huntsmen to duck behind cover whenever he fired.
The two soldiers quickly realised, though, that the teen’s shots were flying far off the mark, and that they would not have to duck the next time the bear and his rider ran out from behind a tree.
One of them, the taller of the two, growled in a gravelly voice to his companion, his words muffled slightly by the black balaclava that covered his head.
‘Next time the fuckers make a run for it, you take the boy. I’ll cut the bear down. Take your time and aim good; the kid’s shots ain’t going nowhere near us.’
‘Fuckin’ A,’ the other soldier grunted, slapping a fresh ammunition clip into his M-16.
Once more Lightning Bird and Daekwon, who howled out a guttural roar of wordless wrath and vengeful defiance, charged out from behind the pillar-like trunk behind which they’d been taking shelter, making for the cover of the next large tree. Daekwon dug his knees into Lightning Bird’s flanks as they ran and unleashed another burst of wrathful but hopelessly inaccurate fire in the direction of the Huntsmen troops – but this time the pair of burly soldiers did not drop and flatten themselves to the ground to take cover. Instead, each man calmly rolled into a kneeling position, pressed the butt of his M-16 into his shoulder, and took careful aim at his target, his finger resting lightly on the trigger of his rifle.
Before the soldiers could unleash their deadly horizontal hail of lead, though, the ear-splitting roar of a silverback gorilla boomed through the forest from the troops’ left, sending flocks of panicking birds fluttering in maddened flight from the foliage, and seeming to shake the very trees themselves with its awestriking vociferousness. The startled soldiers had about a second to spin around before Zakaria, with his huge M60 machine gun gripped in his right hand and the ammunition belt in his left, opened fire.
The percussive jackhammering of the M60 resounded through the forest as the machine gun spat out multiple bullets per second, its thunderclap pulsing drowning out the sounds of the wild, the dazzling tracer rounds, interspersed with ball and armour-piercing rounds, streaking like fire arrows through the falling dusk.
Daekwon’s aim may have been wide of the mark, but Zakaria’s was not. Marksmanship was one of many martial skills he had polished to perfection over centuries of battle and war, and the Huntsmen troops didn’t have a second to duck before dozens of M60 rounds were peppering them, the machine-gun bullets twisting and jerking their bodies and limbs in a St Vitus’ dance of brutal gore.
As the soldiers dropped dead, Zakaria bellowed out another tree-shaking roar, this time one of triumph, and Lightning Bird rumbled a throaty growl in response. The two beastwalkers took no time to revel in this small victory, though, for all it was, really, was a minor escape, a temporary reprieve, and now that the shooting had started, every other Huntsman soldier in the vicinity knew exactly where they were. Any chance of a stealthy escape had go
ne out the window; it would be a desperate fighting retreat from this point on, and their only hope of escaping alive depended on them reaching the north-eastern peak of the mountain.
Ahead of them, William and Chloe had fallen behind Njinga and Jun by around fifty yards. They heard the firefight erupt behind them, and the instant the sonorous barrage of M60 fire reached William’s ears he knew that he and his friends were in dire straits. Already, he thought grimly, the other Huntsmen troops had to be heading their way, drawn by the sounds of the gun-battle like moths in the night to a naked lightbulb. Even though his limbs were burning with exertion and his breathing was ragged, he had to push harder and run faster; stopping now would mean death. Rumbling out a snarling growl, he injected desperate speed into his weary muscles, surging forward as more bursts of fire started to pop and chatter from all sides.
A stag, his eyes white and wild with fright, burst out of a thicket to William’s right, and upon seeing this terrifying foreign predator, mounted by a human being, no less, he froze in his tracks. William’s tiger reflexes were as sharp as any surgical instrument, but even so, he almost crashed into the large creature at thirty-five miles an hour, which would have been enough to seriously injure or kill Chloe. Reacting almost instantaneously to the sudden appearance of the large obstacle, though, William jumped over the fear-paralysed deer, sailing through the air a couple of feet above the bewildered stag’s antlers. Chloe’s previous horse-riding experience was the only thing that allowed her to stay mounted during this manoeuvre.
