Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Um, not too clearly. Refresh my memory, why don’t you?’

  ‘He begins out by walking out of a Los Angeles traffic jam, abandoning his vehicle in the middle of the freeway. All he has with him at the time is a briefcase. He goes into a shop to buy a drink, gets into a tangle with the shop owner, and comes out armed with a baseball bat, which he took off the owner after the man attacked him with it. A few scenes later, he is attacked by gangsters. He defends himself again and ends up taking a flick-knife off of them. Now his arsenal is upgraded, you see – by a small degree, but upgraded nonetheless. The same gangsters come back for a revenge attack, hoping to kill him in a drive-by shooting, but they miss and crash their car, and he is thus able to take a bag of firearms off them. Once more his weaponry is upgraded merely by chance. The movie continues like this until eventually he is armed with a rocket launcher.’

  Margaret bit the corner of her lower lip as she considered this, dipping her left hand into the water and trailing it along as the boat traced a gentle passage along the river.

  ‘So what you’re saying is that you somehow accumulated these thousands of firearms by chance encounters, self-defence and, er, “upgrading” when circumstances made that possible?’

  The General chuckled again, but then crossed his arms across his chest.

  ‘It is not that simple of course, but yes, in a sense, it did happen somewhat similarly to how it is portrayed in Falling Down. You see, Doctor, I have been engaged in the war against the evils of slavery for centuries. I was one of the first to fight against the Europeans who came to the west coast of Africa hundreds of years ago to steal human beings for their vile slave trade. Long before that I fought against small armies of Arabs who captured and traded slaves up and down the east coast of this continent. And all through the course of those campaigns against European slavers on the west coast and Arab slavers on the east coast, I assisted African kings and princes in the interior who fought wars against more powerful African rulers who wanted to conquer them and enslave their people. Before then, in the times of the Dark Ages, I fought against Vikings who brought in slaves from the British Isles to be traded in the Middle East, or Mongols who transported slaves from the Rus to be bought and sold in Constantinople. I have travelled to the lands of the Far East and seen the horrors of slavery there, and witnessed the slavery and human sacrifice perpetrated by the Aztecs on smaller and weaker tribes of MesoAmerica, before the Spanish conquistadors and their local allies crushed them and took Tenochtitlan.

  You see, long, long ago, I was a slave myself. I was a fighting slave; a trained dog who both shed blood and bled my own blood to entertain the vicious and uncaring masses. I know that you will not believe me when I say this, but I was once a gladiator of ancient Rome, Dr Green, yes, once upon a time, a long, long time ago. And before that, I was a chattel slave in Egypt, where I was almost killed, nearly worked to death by a callous master who saw me as a sub-human life-form, below even the mules and donkeys he worked to death without a blink of pity or an ounce of compassion.

  I have personally known slaves, tens of thousands of them over the centuries, and I have been one myself. You must understand just how pervasive an evil slavery is, just how tied to every part of human history, to every group of people on every continent it is. Yet you cannot truly understand the depths of its malice, its hatred, its injustice and horror until you have lived it yourself. And lived it I did, and after liberating myself from those shackles I vowed to liberate all slaves, everywhere, from their chains. Little did I know, though, how daunting a task that would prove to be.

  Still, I tried. I fought, and sometimes I lost … but sometimes I won. Always, always, the forces of good were poorly armed and small in number against the tyrants, who usually had better weapons, superior technology and greater numbers on their side. Yet they – the monsters who fought only for greed and exploitation – they lacked something crucial that we always had with us: justice. On our side we had the roaring, inextinguishable flame of truth, justice and goodwill burning fiercely in our hearts. We knew that we were not fighting for selfish personal gain but for the freedom of all, for light and fairness to prevail over the forces of darkness. I can tell you this, Doctor, with absolute confidence: if you put a sword and money in a man’s hand, he will fight, yes, but not with the conviction and intensity of someone who is fighting for their very lives and the lives of those they love. Someone who is fighting for everything they hold dear, for every ideal that fires their blood, one fighter like that is worth ten hired mercenaries who believe in nothing but avarice and their own indulgence in base pleasures like drinking, gambling and whoring.

  And that is how I arrived at this point, with my army here. I have won countless battle victories, utilising small and poorly armed but intensely motivated forces, who defeated far larger and better-armed forces. And after these victories, we took the arms and equipment from the vanquished, from the cowards who dropped their arms and fled so that they could save their own pitiful lives. We took the cowards’ weapons and thus upgraded our own inventories, whilst simultaneously becoming battle-hardened, and bolstering our own courage and motivation to win more victories.’

  A shadow crossed the General’s face now, and storm clouds brewed their bulbous black bulk in his irises. Margaret could not help shrinking back in fear, for she could sense his immense powers beginning to swell, fuelled by a bottomless and righteous wrath, as he carried on with his story.

  ‘That is how the Antidote began, against this background of mine that has spanned centuries. It started with me – only me – taking on a gang of human traffickers. A band of disgusting rapists who kidnapped, drugged and gang-raped hundreds of teenagers before smuggling these broken children away to live the rest of their tragically short lives in a haze of never-ending sexual abuse, drug dependency, illness and untimely death in the worst brothels imaginable.

  I took on this gang on my own, Doctor – decades ago, mind you – and I killed every last one of the thugs. What was left behind after I had taken care of the scum was a warehouse full of weapons, and some still-living teenage victims of extreme violence and multiple gang rapes. The children I could save I did, and I can tell you this of the survivors I rescued: all that those poor, broken souls wanted was to get revenge. Revenge on the world that had made their lives an tortuous, unending voyage through the darkest levels of all the hells imaginable. So I harnessed their anger, their rage, their disgust at the cruelty of indifferent, uncaring and greedy humankind … and I yoked it to my own darkness. Yes Dr Green, inside me is a shadow that has grown larger and larger through countless centuries of observing the worst that humanity has to offer. And believe me, you have not seen anything. Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. Those women and children you have helped here in the Congo, with their limbs hacked off by machetes? That is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to what I have seen.’

  He paused here and stared out over the water, brooding in silence and turning his face away from Margaret. When he faced her again, however, she saw that some of the darkness had subsided from his eyes. He released a protracted sigh, and then continued.

  ‘Do not think though, with everything that I am telling you, that I see only the darkness of humankind. There is good, there is empathy, there is compassion in humanity, yes. I will admit that freely enough. But, on the other end of the scale there is a greed that is boundless, utterly boundless in its capacity, a dark greed that enables the worst and most unimaginable of evils to be perpetrated. And on this continuum, this line that stretches from the shining light on one end of the spectrum to the crushing darkness of the deepest shadows on the other, lies the great mass of “normal people”. Normal people, Dr Green, who believe themselves to be good, decent beings. And to be sure, they do not generally possess in them an active malice. No, they are not evil, not actively … but they are something far worse, in the greater scheme of things: they are indifferent. They are apathetic. They are, without a doubt, callous and self-servi
ng. While most will balk at this suggestion, it does not take much beyond the most cursory of examinations to see that this is true. They live to consume, and only to consume. Restraint, critical thought, self-examination, reflection, inconveniencing oneself to help others, sacrifice for the greater good … these concepts are not simply unknown to them, no. On a deep, secret level that they do not like to acknowledge or even think about, these concepts actively disgust them.

  You have surely seen cartoons in which someone asks the question, “who wants to change the world?”, which is met with a sea of enthusiastically raised hands. The next panel usually asks the question, “good, so who wants to change themselves?”, and this question is met with a mass answer of deafening silence. It is a simplistic representation, but it is the core of the problem. Indifference acts as a brake, as an insurmountable obstacle in the path towards true self-reflection, compassion and empathy. It is far easier to swallow a bunch of new-age nonsense about hugging people and smiling at strangers and holding hands and working on your own “unique journey” and “self-love” than it is to actually critically examine one’s own habits and addictions, and how immensely destructive to the rest of the living world they are. This is because you can spread inane messages of vague inspiration and fluffy happiness – or spew righteous indignation about a group to which you do not belong, but which, for this reason or that, you can gleefully vilify – without having to actually sacrifice any of your addictions, without having to hold yourself, naked and exposed, up to the glaring and unflattering mirror of self-examination, and thereby admit that you too are complicit in all sorts of evils that exist and fester the world over behind closed doors. Behind high fences, behind barbed wire, inside filthy sheds, factory farms, slaughterhouses, cosmetics laboratories, brick factories, textile warehouses, electronic equipment dumps, landfills, trawler ships, in brothels, in deep quarries and mines, in holes torn in the skin of the Earth Mother to rip out her treasures: in these hellish places lies the silent guilt and damning complicity of the human race. There is a complete unwillingness on the part of most human beings to acknowledge the plight of billions upon billions of enslaved beings – human and nonhuman – upon whose immense and indescribable suffering vast swathes of humanity live lives of hollow comfort and empty luxury, and dance in swirling waltzes of addiction and consumption. And it is through this mass of indifference, this apathetic yet iron-armoured indifference, that true evil prospers, swells and thrives.

  And it is against this evil that I have fought for centuries, and against it I will always fight. It is against these evils – and the cruel apathy of the vast majority of humanity – that my troops and I rail.’

  Margaret could think of nothing to say in response to this; all she could do was to stare, somewhat guiltily, at the pacifically rippling surface of the river. How could one respond at all to something like this? It was all too much to even begin to contemplate.

  The boat soon pulled into a small harbour area, built into the river with huge round rocks of stone. In the water, near a wall of rock, floated dozens of large plastic barrels.

  ‘What are those?’ Margaret asked, thankful for an opportunity to change the topic.

  ‘Those are used for a multitude of purposes,’ the General, who seemed to have become calmer, answered. ‘Each of those barrels is insulated and waterproof, and very buoyant. They can be filled with up to five hundred kilograms of liquid or solid materials, and still float upright, in fact. They are also built to withstand shock and impact. So, for the few substances we require that we cannot manufacture ourselves, we have them airdropped in using these barrels. The drops happen, of course, very far away from this city and my other bases in this area, and the barrels are then brought through the jungle by my, how shall we say, heftier troops – the ones who can transform into animals such as rhinoceroses, buffaloes, hippopotamuses and other such creatures, who are able to carry great weight.’

  ‘That makes sense. But how come they’re in the river here?’

  ‘For two reasons. The first is that these containers are very expensive, and it would be wasteful to purchase new ones every time we need supplies. They are extremely durable, so it makes sense to keep reusing them. Secondly, we actually do produce a great surplus in many of the crops we raise, more than we can consume before they rot. So instead of leaving excess fruit and vegetables to decompose, we send them downriver in these barrels. There are isolated rural communities all along the river to whom we donate our produce. You can see that each barrel has a different symbol painted on top, yes?’

  Margaret peered over the shimmering surface of the water at the bobbing barrels and noticed that each one did have a different symbol emblazoned on it – a monkey on this one, a parrot on that, a broken tree on the next one.

  ‘Yeah, what are those for?’

  ‘Each one is an emblem of a certain tribe. The tribe sees that barrel as it floats past them on the river and takes it. In exchange for the produce we give them, they transport the empty barrels to our business associate near the Ugandan border, and then, when we need to, he sends barrels to our suppliers, and they refill them and repeat the airdrop, thus completing the circuit. It is a rather efficient process, is it not?’

  Margaret nodded, staring at the barrels as they bobbed lazily in the water. In her mind though, gears and cogs started to whir at an accelerated pace, and she felt her pulse and her breath beginning to quicken as the possibilities of what these empty barrels could mean for her started to cascade with dizzying speed through her head.

  ‘How long,’ she asked, trying to keep her tone as cool and seemingly indifferent as she could, ‘does it take for these barrels to reach their destinations downriver?’

  ‘Well, the closest village is two days away downriver, and it is a leisurely two days because there are no waterfalls or rapids before that first village. After that though, the barrels speed up, as they tumble over a few sets of waterfalls and surge through a series of rapids. They reach the next few villages within hours of one another.’

  ‘And uh, what is the first village they get to? The one before the rapids.’

  Jesus H. Christ Margaret! You’re making it too blatant! He’s going to read your mind again! Keep it subtle, keep it subtle for God’s sake! Do not let him know what you’re thinking about these barrels! You’ll be signing your own death warrant!

  If the General had any inkling about the thoughts running like frenzied, caffeine-fed rodents through the maze of Margaret’s mind, he did not show it.

  ‘The first village the barrels reach is called Bafa. It is a tiny settlement, with only a few dozen people – pygmies, in fact, who have lived in this area for thousands of years. Perhaps you may be interested in visiting it sometime; they live a very traditional lifestyle, unencumbered by the burdens of industrial modernity, and the remoteness of their location has ensured minimal contact with outsiders. There is though, I believe, a team of Canadian anthropologists currently studying them. We’re actually going to be filling the barrels tomorrow and sending them all off around midnight tomorrow evening. We do not have any means of communicating directly with the people we send the barrels downriver to – to do so would be to compromise the secrecy of our location – but they know on which day of the month to expect the barrels to float by, so we have to stick to a very regular schedule. That barrel, with the monkey on it, that’s the one we’re sending to Bafa. And see, here comes a barge filled with some of our jungle produce!’

  The General pointed at a paddle-powered barge coming up the river, with four teenagers pumping on bicycle pedals against the current. He began speaking about the varieties of vegetables and fruits that were piled high on the back section of the barge, but his words did not register in Margaret’s mind; all she could think about was what he had just said.

  Bafa village … Canadian anthropologists … I know them! I know that team of anthropologists! They were at the hotel in Kinshasa when I first landed in this godforsaken country! God, we had dri
nks together that first night, and they talked about going to study those exact pygmies in Bafa! What the hell were their names … Simon, yes! Simon and, and, Marty. Right! Oh Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, this is it Margaret! This is your chance to escape! This is your chance! You have to do this, somehow. There will not be another chance. You have to do this!

  PART THIRTEEN

  43

  WILLIAM

  24th October 2020. Dângrêk Mountains, Cambodia

  A wisp of semi-translucent smoke snaked from the hot muzzle of the pistol in a languid curl, its fading twist caught in a ray of sunlight that had broken through the shadow-thick mesh of the jungle canopy above.

  William clapped a congratulatory hand on Chloe’s back, but his stony face was as bereft of joy as hers.

  ‘Excellent shooting, lass. Your aim’s bang on at twenty yards,’ was all he said.

  Chloe stared for a while at the paper target. She had emptied the entire pistol in only a few seconds, and every round had been either a head shot or a chest shot. Grim-faced, she popped out the empty clip and with the slick fluidity of a seasoned professional she slapped a fresh one into the firearm.

  ‘William, Chloe, coffee’s almost ready!’ Zakaria shouted from a position further down the hill.

  ‘I’ll finish up here, then I’ll head back,’ Chloe muttered, her eyes never leaving the target.

  ‘As you wish, love,’ William said, before turning and heading off down the narrow trail, leaving Chloe alone among the dense-packed trees and steaming vegetation.

  She calmly raised the pistol, her every movement smooth and controlled, and took aim. A flicker of suddenly rapacious emotion twisted in her core like a starved parasite, abruptly awakened from a coma and ravenous for food. The loss of Paola had hit her hard, harder than anything else that had happened since that fateful day when William had fought Aboubakar on the rooftop across from Paola’s apartment. The entire sequence of events that had followed that battle had felt like a dream, an unending and intricately detailed conjuring produced by some sort of psychotropic implant in her brain. She barely recognised reality anymore, and the dull, dead eyes she saw in the mirror every morning were those of a stranger, an imposter who had somehow taken possession of this formerly familiar body. Grief, fury and an unquenchable desire for vengeance; this was the tripartite occupation of foreign powers that now governed her mind, body and soul.