Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘I guess they don’t teach much about it in history class huh,’ Njinga said, ‘which don’t surprise me too much. Anyway, it ended a couple years before you were born. During the war Joao was a commander of one of the most notorious RENAMO units. There’s this beastwalker called Ayanda Dlamini, a real asshole who’s been getting filthy rich on the backs of all sorts of human wars for centuries. He’s an arms dealer. So our boy Joao set up a deal with Ayanda to buy some guns an’ RPGs, but it actually turned out to be an ambush; Joao tried to kill Ayanda so he could take the weapons without having to pay for ‘em. Ayanda shifted forms an’ defended himself in his hippopotamus form, killing a number of Joao’s soldiers as well as Joao himself before fleeing … well, the idiot thought he had killed Joao.’

  ‘But instead, Joao became one of you.’

  ‘Yep. An’ after he underwent the transformation from human to beastwalker,’ Njinga continued ‘the crazy sonofabitch began to believe he was a living god. Before his transformation he was already a brutal an’ vicious war criminal, an’ after he became a Cape buffalo he ramped up his evil to even greater levels than before. It wasn’t too hard for the Huntsmen to find him, coz he didn’t make no effort to disguise his newfound abilities. Instead, he revelled in ‘em openly, as he an’ his squad terrorised rural villagers, who came to think a’ him as a demon sent from the depths of hell itself. The “Demon Buffalo with Eyes a’ Flame”, is what they called him … it’s got a better ring to it in Swahili, a’ course. The Huntsmen found him quickly enough, an’ realised what a valuable asset a psychotic warlord could be for the Alliance, so instead of exterminating him, they recruited him.’

  ‘Jesus. He sounds like he’s, like … literally evil incarnate.’

  ‘He sure as hell ain’t far from it.’

  Both of them stood without speaking for a few minutes, their innards vibrating from the boom of the club bass, their eyes following the anarchic passage of the dazzling lasers as they sheared meteor-like trails through the darkness. After a while, though, Njinga pulled up the right-hand sleeve of her robe.

  ‘I hope you’re ready, kid. It’s almost time. I’ll see you in there … good luck.’

  She turned from the bar and melted into the rolling ocean of bodies, swallowed up by the seething turmoil of bacchanal madness in seconds, and Chloe was left alone with the dull roar of the music in her skull and the icy sickness of anxiety, swirling and lacerating her innards like jagged shards of swallowed glass, in her belly.

  ***

  With one last nervous glance over her shoulder, Adriana, moving with painstaking caution, pried open the top of the toilet tank, praying that Roxana, who was asleep in the room, would not wake up. She had managed to keep the secret of the watch and the key from the girl for the past few weeks, but now the night of the mission had finally arrived, and the appointed time was drawing nearer.

  With trembling hands she set the porcelain cistern cover down on the toilet mat so that it would not make a noise against the ceramic tiles, and she reached inside and retrieved the watch, which told her that there was half an hour to go.

  ‘Oh no,’ she whispered to herself as dread crept with icy insect legs all along her skin. ‘It’s almost time. It’s almost—’

  Adriana? Are you in there?’

  Roxana’s voice blazed like an accusatory jolt of electricity through Adriana’s body.

  ‘Um, y-, yes Roxana,’ she stammered. ‘Just a minute, I’m uh, on the toilet.’

  ‘Okay. I need the bathroom too when you’re done.’

  ‘All right, I won’t be long.’

  Adriana tiptoed over to the door and pressed her ear against it. She listened intently and heard Roxana plop down on the mattress again with a muffled thud, so she hurried back to the toilet and carefully replaced the cistern cover. She kept the watch and key out now; there would be no time to come in here again and repeat this procedure.

  She felt a terrible sense of guilt about not trusting the girl with this secret, but the janitor had been extremely specific about keeping smuggled items a complete secret from everyone, even Roxana, her only friend in this awful place. Now, however, the moment of truth was about to arrive, and there would be no way to sneak out without Roxana noticing. Of course, if Roxana saw her using the key to escape the room, she would want to come with as well. And there would be all of the questions she would have to deal with from the girl, as well as the worst issue, in her opinion: that of shattered trust. While Adriana had not been forced to have sex with a client yet, Roxana’s virginity had been taken by that evil, decrepit Chinese geriatric who even Hrothgar seemed to fear. Indeed, it seemed as if he had made Roxana his personal concubine; thrice more his bodyguard had come to their room and hauled Roxana off, screaming and weeping, to do whatever unspeakable things that wrinkled pervert forced her to do.

  All three times the fourteen-year-old had come back from these encounters catatonic, pale as a corpse, and covered in bruises and bloodied cuts, taking tiny, limping steps on trembling legs. Every one of these excursions had left her with hot welts across her buttocks, while the inside of her thighs had always been wet with dark blood. Often she had not been able to sit down for days after these encounters. She had stayed in a state of catatonia for a week after the first time, but after each subsequent rape it seemed as though larger and larger pieces of her soul had been destroyed, leaving behind nothing but an emotionless shell of pallid skin and dead, dull eyes.

  Tears stung at Adriana’s eyes as she thought about the girl’s tragic fate. The last time the old man had used Roxana she had staggered back into the room silent and bloodied, as she had before, but instead of falling down on her bed and sobbing, as she usually did, she had simply limped into the bathroom, cleaned herself up and walked right back out. She had started chatting to Adriana right away, in fact, and the words that she had said had chilled her to her very core.

  ‘I now know that I won’t see sixteen, much less twenty-one,’ she had said, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’ll die here. My friends and I had a running bet, a joke really, about who would live to see the age of twenty-one and who wouldn’t survive until then. We’d laugh about it, we’d joke about all sorts of ridiculous deaths; having a piano dropped on one’s head while walking on a sidewalk, getting hit by a bus while crossing the road, and all of those silly cartoonish clichés … but now I know: it’s me. I’m the one who’ll die first. I’ll never see twenty-one. My life is over already, and I’m not even close to sixteen yet. But the worst thing about it, Adriana, is that I just don’t care. I’m so numb now that I can’t feel anything anymore. I just. Don’t. Care.’

  The words hadn’t been the worst of it though. Words spoken or written could lie easily enough, but a person’s eyes always told the truth, and when Adriana had stared, teary-eyed, into the child’s irises, probing with her hazel orbs into the depths of Roxana’s soul, she had found a blankness, an emptiness as sheer and devoid of light as a crack in a bottomless crevasse in a deep ocean. In those eyes she had found death; waiting, incubating, gorging its bloated parasite corpse on what little life remained in the teenager.

  It had terrified her to the core of her being.

  Since then she had been desperately trying to awaken some sort of vitality, some sort of hope in Roxana, but her efforts had been in vain; the girl had long since abandoned any hope she might have had in freedom or escape, and had resigned herself to the terrible fate that awaited her at the end of this nightmarish journey.

  Now, for Adriana to reveal to Roxana that all along she had had a key to the room, that she had held in her very hands an opportunity to escape from this hell – that would crush to powder any last trust the teenager may have had in her, the only person in the world she did still trust.

  ‘I’m so sorry little one,’ Adriana whispered to herself, guilt pulsing in searing hot flushes through her system. ‘There would have been no chance of escape for you. Even if we had used this key to get out, how far could we have gone? There are
armed guards everywhere and cameras all over the place. The man assured me that doing this at the exact time he told me to would be the one and only chance there would be at escape. We couldn’t have done it ourselves, we just … we couldn’t have. Lord, I had the chance to free myself when that guard left his gun on the bed, I had the chance to get out, but I couldn’t even do that! There’s nothing I – we – could have done to escape before this.’

  She tried to convince herself of the veracity of these words, tried her absolute hardest to believe in the rationalisations she was spouting … but ultimately, she could not.

  ‘But … but you won’t see it like that, will you?’ she murmured. ‘You’ll just see it as me being selfish, me keeping it for myself, me trying to save only my own skin. And perhaps … perhaps that is the ugly truth of the matter. Perhaps I am selfish, perhaps I should have sacrificed this opportunity for a chance to have got you out of here before that disgusting monster did all of those nightmarish things to you. But I couldn’t, little Roxana, I just couldn’t. I’m weak. I’m a coward. I don’t even know if I can go through with this plan that all of these people, these Rebels, whoever they are, are counting on me to do.’

  She slumped back against the wall and ran her quivering fingers through her long, thick chestnut mane, trying to keep the need to hyperventilate and curl up into a ball of helplessness on the floor at bay.

  ‘Come on Adriana,’ she said to herself, trying to will some strength and courage into her shaking limbs. ‘Come on! This is your only chance to get out of this hell! You have to do this, you have to. Come on, come ON!’

  A knock on the door jarred her back to the present and sent a gush of icy fear rushing down her spine.

  ‘Adriana? Are you done yet? Sorry to rush you, but I really am bursting!’

  ‘Okay, hold on, I’m coming,’ she said, hoping that Roxana couldn’t hear the fear in her voice.

  She pulled a few pieces of toilet paper off the roll and bundled the key and watch inside the crumpled ball of tissues, which she gripped tightly in her fist as she flushed the toilet. Beaming as broad a smile as she could manage, she opened the door and allowed the girl to slide past her.

  ‘Thanks,’ Roxana said as she slipped her panties down and sat on the toilet. ‘Sorry about rushing you.’

  ‘No problem,’ Adriana replied, a thin porcelain smile on her lips, her tense hands keeping the bundle of toilet paper behind her as she closed the door.

  One hurdle had been cleared, for it seemed that Roxana had not noticed what Adriana had had in her hand. There remained, however, the problem of getting out of the room without the teenager noticing. Panic began to strike her mind with its flurry of wing-chun fists. Thinking rapidly, she stared down at the bathroom door handle. If she yanked at it hard enough, she could break it and possibly lock Roxana in there. Or could she? Would that even work? Perhaps she could offer to give the girl a massage and do it so well that it would put her to sleep.

  She unwrapped the toilet paper, took the watch and key in her hands and glanced at the numbers on the watch face. There were only twenty-seven minutes remaining.

  Could she convince Roxana somehow to take a long bath? No, the teen wouldn’t fall for that, and she didn’t even like taking baths anyway. She was a fan of showers, but it was highly unlikely that Adriana could convince her to take a half hour shower. No, there had to be some way, some—

  ‘Storm! We’re coming in!’

  Tippawan’s harsh voice jolted its menace through her ramble of panicked thoughts.

  Oh no! What does he want? I’m not scheduled to dance until much later this evening!

  With panic throbbing its jungle drumming through her temples and ears, Adriana stepped away from the door to allow Tippawan to enter. Not content with this gesture, he shoved her aside as he barged his way in, followed by Mr Wang. The bodyguard’s presence could only mean one thing.

  ‘Where the fuck is the child?’ Tippawan spat, bristling already with impatient rage. ‘Mr Ma wants to use her, and he wants to use her right fucking now!’

  ‘Sh-, she’s in the bathroom,’ Adriana stammered, wilting in the face of Tippawan’s naked aggression, and the silent yet potent ferocity that was simmering in Mr Wang’s eyes.

  It was then that an icicle of sheer panic stabbed its freezing paralysis through her core – Adriana realised that in her open hand, in front of Tippawan and Mr Wang, she was holding the watch and the key. Her heart almost stopped, and her eyes bulged in their sockets.

  ‘Well get her out of the bathroom then, you stupid cow!’ Tippawan snapped, cocking his arm for a backhand blow.

  He hasn’t seen the watch and key. He hasn’t noticed.

  Adriana nodded and slowly retracted her arm behind her back, locking a defiant stare into Tippawan’s eyes as she did; she had to distract his eyes from the movement of her hands. He met her gaze with a look of furious anger and lunged forward to grip her face with rage-trembling fingers.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?! Don’t you dare look me in the eye, you cockroach!’ he spat. ‘You’re asking for a slap, you bitch! Don’t you fucking dare look me in the eye, ever!’

  Adriana breathed out a sigh of relief, despite the immediate trauma of having Tippawan threatening her and screaming in her face. Her diversion had worked; he hadn’t noticed the watch.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Mr Wang said in a calm but chilling tone as he stepped closer to her, staring intently into her eyes with an accusatory gaze. ‘What’s going on here? You had something in your hand.’

  Oh no. Oh no…

  Liquid ice coursed through her veins, while her face was flushed with the hot, incriminating blush of discovered deception.

  ‘I, um, I—’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ Tippawan roared, grabbing her wrists and ripping her arms out from behind her back.

  Adriana’s hands were empty.

  ‘Are you trying to fuck with me?’ he snarled. ‘Is that what you’re trying to do?! I’ll make you regret the day you crawled out of your mother’s disease-ridden cunt, you shit-licking little cocksucker!’

  Shaking uncontrollably, as tears burned their salt-sting in her eyes, Adriana revealed her other hand to Tippawan. It too was empty.

  ‘Why you—’

  ‘I’m sorry I kept you waiting, master,’ a gentle and almost barely audible voice announced.

  Roxana stepped out of the bathroom and stood in her flimsy shift before Mr Wang and Tippawan, keeping her eyes downcast and twisting her toes on the tiled floor with childlike innocence. Another interruption then came in the form of a voice – inaudible, speaking only in a guttural grunting and rasping – crackling in Mr Wang’s earpiece. He replied briskly in Mandarin, and then stepped forward to grab Roxana by one of her stick-thin arms.

  ‘Mr Ma is upset,’ he said in a low, urgent tone of voice. ‘Hurry up whore, come with me. And Tippawan, you’re needed upstairs to deal with some clients right away. Discipline this animal later.’

  ‘Goodbye Adriana,’ Roxana murmured as Mr Wang pulled her out of the room.

  Tippawan released Adriana’s face from his grasp, but he followed this action up with a vicious slap that left her cheek stinging with a sharply burning pain.

  ‘I’m coming right back, Storm,’ he hissed. ‘Whatever the fuck is going on here, I’m going to find out what it is. You’re fucked, you idiotic slut. You’re truly fucked when I get back here, I promise you that.’ He grunted and shoved her forcefully onto the bed, and then spat onto the floor and pointed a rage-quivering finger at her. ‘You’re dead Storm, dead. Mark my fucking words: dead.’

  He spun on his heels and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Adriana exhaled a sigh of temporary relief as she heard the key turn in the lock from the outside. She unclenched her buttocks – between which she had sandwiched the key and the watch – and the package of tissue paper came free. A swathe of guilt scythed through her; here she was, feeling relief at not having been caught with t
he watch and key, yet what had saved her from this was Roxana, who was being taken away yet again to suffer unspeakable acts of vileness at the hands of that sadistic, claw-handed monster. Tears bit once more at her eyes and shame flooded her face with burning crimson, but at the same time a firm voice spoke its resolution inside her mind.

  Stop wallowing in guilt and self-pity. There’s nothing you could have done to stop them taking Roxana. Had you confessed they would have taken her anyway, and they probably would have killed you.

  Gritting her teeth, she steeled her will and did her utmost to swallow the bitter tonic of guilt, apprehension and fear. Another thought then entered her mind; getting past the crippling negativity of these emotions was one thing, but now just over twenty minutes remained until she needed to sneak out and remove the air conditioner grille. This meant that another problem was looming: Tippawan had said he was coming right back, but when would that be? In five minutes or in an hour? He could thwart the entire plan completely if he arrived at the wrong moment.

  This was her only shot at freedom; the janitor had been very clear about that, and she herself understood this well; she was locked up in this place as securely as any maximum-security prisoner in a jail, except the only end to her prison sentence would be death, when she was riddled with disease and too broken and worn-out from the ravages of this reprehensible industry to continue drawing breath.

  No.

  She would not go out of this world like that. Come hell or high water, she was getting out of this room in twenty minutes, and Tippawan would not stand in her way. She hurried into the bathroom, her mind awash with a scramble of thoughts.

  Come on, come on Adriana, think, think!

  Both the room and the attached bathroom were bereft of everything but bare essentials. There was a closet in which the girls’ few clothes hung on plastic coathangers, a bedside table with nothing but condoms, lube and wet wipes in it, and the bedding on the beds; there was nothing else the room. The bathroom contained towels and toiletries, but nothing else.