Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Well isn’t that just lovely!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not a single can to be found in the whole bloody fridge! Darling? Darling?!’

  ‘Yes?’ came the muffled reply from outside the room.

  ‘Where are the extra cases of soda water?’

  ‘Next to the fridge, stacked up around the right side.’

  Ranomi’s blood froze in her veins. There, right next to her, bathed in bright blue light from a neon beer sign above, were the objects he was seeking. All the man had to do was to step around the corner and he’d see her standing there, damningly illuminated without a spot of shadow to hide even a finger or toe in.

  ‘Thanks doll, I’ll grab one now.’

  There was no time to plan or to panic; Ranomi’s reaction was instinctual in its rapidity. She shot her arm up, gripped a handful of the beer sign’s wires and ripped as hard as she could. With a loud bang and a shower of sparks the neon sign exploded, and in a hiss of acrid smoke and a low crackle of neutered electricity, the pool of light in which she was bathed faded rapidly into hollow black shadow. The bartender, meanwhile, shrieked with fright and sprang back.

  ‘Shit! Oh my God!’ he shrieked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The light in here just, just exploded! Just as I was about to get the soda water!’

  ‘Well we’ll call in an electrician tomorrow. Move it, just bring the water, there’s already an order for gin and tonic up north!’

  ‘Oh my, it’s just so … uncanny that it happened right now, right as I was going there. It’s almost like there’s a … a ghost in here.’

  The man tiptoed into the corner while Ranomi remained pressed against the fridge, camouflaged by the black intensity of the shadow. She held her breath and kept utterly still as the man fumbled around in the dark mere inches from her. For a second, his head passed so close to hers that she felt his breath on her cheeks.

  ‘Oh my, how creepy! I could swear that someone is staring at me,’ he muttered to himself as he picked up a case of soda water. ‘Good God, what if there really is a ghost in here! I’ve been watching too many bloody horror films. Oh my, oh my! Time to get back to the bar, fuck this!’

  He hurried out of the room with the soda water and shut the door behind him. Ranomi breathed out a long sigh of relief, thankful for both remaining undiscovered and not having been electrocuted when she had ripped the wires out of the sign. She glanced down at her smartwatch and checked the time; everything was still on track.

  With a few swipes on the touch screen she brought up the blueprint of the building and quickly spotted what she sought: the control room where the building’s air conditioner system was set up. She needed to get down two flights of stairs and head along a few passages, and then she’d be there. Once in the control room she would climb into one of the ducts and crawl along its length, and then make an ascent inside it, totally vertically, which she would do with the aid of a pair of hi-tech gecko gloves.

  Then would come the part of the mission that everyone was worrying about: whether or not the prostitute on the inside of the restricted area would actually complete her task and unscrew the grille, allowing Ranomi to get out of the duct and into the building, and thereby open the bulletproof, bombproof doors from the inside to let the others in. Without the girl doing her part though, Ranomi would remain stuck in the ducts, and the mission would be doomed to failure.

  ‘You’ve got a lot resting squarely on your shoulders, girl,’ she muttered to the darkness, not entirely sure if she was speaking to the unknown prostitute or to herself. ‘More than you can possibly understand or know. I can only pray that you deliver.’

  She checked her watch one last time, breathed in a deep breath of calming air and hurried off.

  ***

  ‘Hey! Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi?’

  Chloe turned around to glare at the young man who had just accosted her. She quickly realised, as her countryman, dressed in a Freddy Krueger costume, continued to grin stupidly at her, that her face and eyes were entirely obscured by her stormtrooper helmet, and thus any expressions of annoyance were completely invisible.

  ‘Come on girl, you gotta tell me!’ the young man insisted. ‘I’m an Empire man myself, like, last year I was totally in Japan for Halloween, in Tokyo—’

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Chloe hissed, jerking her arm out of his grip.

  ‘Whoa, back up, no need to be like that! Come on, we’re clearly both Star Wars geeks—’

  ‘I’m busy. Seriously, please just go away.’

  ‘Well shit, if that’s your attitude then you can go eat a bag of dicks! Bitch.’

  He turned around in a huff and tramped off the dancefloor, heading towards one of the bars. Chloe, meanwhile, began pushing her way through the seething mess of bodies, who were all gyrating, grinding and twisting to the deafening music in a Boschian tumult. As she navigated the churning horde, she caught a glimpse of her wristwatch, and a surge of adrenalin, mixed with quick fear and a hefty dose of panic, ripped through her veins. It was time.

  She fired a glance across the room at William, who saw her, examined his own wristwatch and then gave her a subtle nod. Both of them looked up at Sharaf, who acknowledged them without making it too obvious. He was about to hit the button on the remote that would detonate the explosives they had planted on the transformer outside.

  Chloe needed no further impetus to act; she turned and pushed through the crowd, spurred on by a throbbing anxiety that seemed to grow in obscene, suffocating power with every step that brought her closer to her destination.

  After what seemed like a mere few seconds of walking, in this strangely time-accelerated state of fear, she reached the broad spiral stairway that would take her to the underground level. Upon reaching the bottom she walked a little too briskly over to a section of the club that was cordoned off with velvet rope, behind which stood a burly Thai bouncer in a black suit, his heavily muscled arms crossed intimidatingly over his chest.

  ‘This is the Platinum-level VIP section,’ he grunted. ‘Card.’

  Chloe pressed a button on her thigh armour and a flap opened, revealing a small compartment containing some money and a perfectly forged Platinum VIP card. She gave it to the bouncer, who scanned it and then handed it back. His broad face was now all smiles, and with a toothy grin he parted the velvet rope to allow Chloe to enter.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said in as suave a tone as he could put on. ‘If you’d like you can head on over to the bar for complimentary Cristal, or we can arrange other delectable treats for you. A bowl of the finest cocaine, perhaps?’

  ‘Uh, no thanks.’

  ‘If you need anything, the waitresses are the girls dressed in white. And I do mean anything. Call on them and they will see to your every need.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Chloe mumbled as she moved off.

  She strolled through the VIP area, the subdued and distinguished décor of which was entirely at odds with the garish loudness of the palatial nightclub upstairs. Here and there rich businessmen, minor celebrities and other powerful people – all of whom were attired in tailored suits and extravagant designer eveningwear – lounged on plush leather sofas, where they busied themselves quaffing Glenfiddich 50-Year-Old whiskey and Cristal champagne, snorting cocaine off black onyx tabletops, and feigning polite hyena laughter at each other’s hollow jokes and trite anecdotes. The too-broad grins on their faces, revealing artificially whitened teeth, did little to disguise the freshly sharpened daggers in their eyes. Hovering around them like sirens, their deathly song temporarily drowned out by the cacophony reverberating through the bar from the vast dancefloor above, a bevy of half-naked beauties fawned over their every need. The serving girls, a uniformly stunning young women of a variety of ethnicities, were dressed in white, and were attired only in lacy white thongs and nothing else. Chloe couldn’t help but stare, slack-jawed at the topless women – she was, after all, attracted to both girls and boys – but despite the sudden surge of hormones, she could not overco
me her revulsion at this scene of hedonistic decadence, and the ugly smiles and hideous laughter of the ultrarich clientele turned her stomach. She turned her eyes away from the grotesque spectacle and checked her watch. The appointed time was drawing dangerously near.

  Two bare-breasted Arab girls sauntered up to her, their sultry almond eyes heavy with mascara and eyeshadow.

  ‘Hi there,’ one of them purred, taking Chloe’s right hand and stroking her gloved palm suggestively. ‘What can we get for you this evening? We have everything you might want.’

  Struggling to maintain her focus, Chloe swallowed a mouthful of dry, sticky saliva and used all of her willpower to jerk her hand away, even as the other topless girl pressed her full, pert breasts against her left arm.

  ‘I don’t need anything,’ she managed to utter, staring at the floor. ‘I’ll um, get a drink after I go to the bathroom.’

  ‘It’s at the end of the room next to the bar.’

  The girls slipped back into the shadows, two sylphs half-materialised from heaven, or hell, and Chloe half-walked, half-stumbled along a subtly lit path that led past the bar towards the far end of the VIP room. One side of the room consisted of a thick glass wall, which featured, along its entire height and breadth, a view into an enormous aquarium. Chloe jumped back in surprise as a six-foot hammerhead shark appeared from behind a multicoloured dome of coral and drifted with dispassionate languor along the edge of the glass, mere feet from her.

  ‘Jesus!’ she gasped, her nerves on edge.

  She looked down and saw that her hands were shaking, and she wished she had pockets in this suit into which she could stuff them. Without another glance at the shark, as wondrous a creature as it was, she made a beeline for the corridor that led to the restrooms, where, worryingly, another stoic-looking bouncer was stationed.

  ‘Platinum card,’ the man growled.

  Chloe presented him with the card, which again was scanned and then double-checked under an ultraviolet light.

  ‘Come on in.’

  Chloe hurried past him to the women’s bathroom. Once inside, she exhaled a sigh of relief; it was empty. The room was small, with only four stalls, but the place shone with luxurious splendour, with every aspect of the décor dripping in opulence, right down to the gold tap fittings. Chloe glanced at her watch one more time, and then locked herself into a stall to wait for the power to go out. She closed the toilet lid and sat down, and then pulled her helmet off to suck in a deep breath, feeling a sense of immediate but fleeting relief when she filled her lungs. The removal of the helmet and the rush of cool air against her sweaty cheeks did little to assuage the maggot-mass of ravenous anxiety and venomous fear that was squirming in her guts, and it could not still her violently shaking hands. Everything felt beyond surreal, and for a few moments Chloe was convinced that she had long ago lost her mind, and that in reality her body was strapped tight in a straitjacket inside some sort of mental hospital, and this was all some impossibly elaborate illusion, a chaotic nightmare conjured by a mind that had long since shattered into a billion crystal-shard splinters. How could this dreamlike, bizarre hell be anything but a moving imprint of an unending hallucination? Beastwalkers – semi-immortal beings who could quite literally change forms from human to animal in an instant – how on earth could she believe any of this? It couldn’t be real, there was no way this could be real … yet it was.

  Up until this moment, the minutes had been speeding by with the bullet-like speed of trains hurtling past each another in opposite directions, but now their passage seemed to slow down to a treacle-thick, stretched-out dripping.

  ‘Come on,’ Chloe muttered to herself, her voice as shaky as her hands. ‘One minute.’

  Thirty seconds passed with the slowness of a geological aeon.

  Thirty … twenty-seven … twenty-five … twenty-three…

  Icy beads of sweat had beaded on her upper back, and these maddening droplets were running down her spine to pool in a humid, itchy mess around her midsection, the irritating intensity of which grew in exponential leaps with every passing moment. All she wanted to do now was to scratch her back, to relieve herself of the itching, but the impenetrable armour that encased her entire body was keeping her eager fingertips with frustrating tenacity from her burning skin.

  ‘Shit!’ she spat in frustration. ‘Dammit!’

  The seconds marched on with unrelenting speed.

  Three … two … one.

  Exactly on cue everything was plunged into darkness. The cloying blackness was almost tangibly dense for a second, after which dim red emergency lights flickered on, bathing the restroom in a blood-tinged hue.

  It was on.

  With her heart jumping in her chest, Chloe slipped the helmet back onto her head and clipped it in place, and then stepped out of the stall. With the helmet’s night vision, Chloe’s surroundings were almost as clear and visible as day. She popped open the compartment on her wrist, whipped out the key and then hurried over to the janitor’s closet at the back of the restroom. With adrenalin gushing like a spring melt through her veins, a dull howl roaring in her ears, and a scuttling of a swarm of rodent claws around the region of her diaphragm, she fumbled briefly with the lock before throwing open the door.

  The sight of the weapons stashed therein smashed the reality of the unfolding situation home with the force of an axe to her sternum, and the blood-slicked gleam of the combat shotgun in the emergency lighting was a sight that pierced her eyeballs with hypodermic needles of fear.

  ‘You can do this, you can do this,’ she hissed through clenched teeth that were on the verge of chattering uncontrollably. ‘Come on, you gotta do this, you gotta do this!’

  First, she grabbed the bandoliers of shotgun shells, slinging one over each shoulder so that they crossed over her chest. Next, she strapped on the thick mesh belt that had the grenades clipped to it, along with extra ammunition clips for the nine-millimetre pistols. After this she grabbed each of the pistols and strapped their holsters around each of her thighs. Before continuing, she whipped out each firearm and flicked off the safety switches, and then slapped them back into their holsters, leaving them somewhat loose so that they could be drawn rapidly if needed, pausing, in a moment of cutting self-reflexivity, to reflect on just how bizarre her relationship with firearms had become; from hater to expert markswoman in weeks. Snapping herself out of the sticky trap of chaotic thoughts, and doing her best to both fight back the rising tide of terror and panic and to hone her focus, she then pulled out the combat shotgun and slung it over her right shoulder, where it hung close to her right hand for easy access.

  She was now ready for battle, at least in terms of equipment. She drew in a deep breath and spun around on her heels, the merciless momentum of the clock driving her on, but when she tried to take a step forward, towards the unfolding battle, she simply couldn’t move. An invisible wall had been thrown up in front of her, as if by the sinister hand of some hidden magician. Terror and panic, paralysing in their ponderous, bone-chilling iciness, doused the entirety of her being. To even continue to breathe, to merely regulate the ongoing beating of her heart, seemed like impossibly complex conundrums. The task of putting one foot in front of another seemed to require a herculean effort, and even remaining upright and retaining her balance began to seem insurmountable.

  ‘No, no … no, no, no’ she gasped, drowning in the perfumed air like some deep-sea creature hurled by a violent storm onto a rocky, waterless shore. And then she could no longer do any of it; she couldn’t stand. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t do anything. With her wildly-hammering heart drumming its mocking rhythm into her ears, she collapsed into a heap on the floor, hyperventilating.

  It was over. She had reached her breaking point and could do no more. And there, on that bathroom floor, she began to weep, with bone-pulverising, muscle-shredding sobs of sheer helplessness tearing through her body. There was only one path open to her now; the precipice of failure, at the bottom of which lay dea
th, waiting with open jaws.

  ***

  Ranomi crawled through the duct, inch by tortuous inch. The metal was cool against her skin, but the tight confines of the space, constrictive even for her diminutive body, made progress slow and difficult. Straining with effort as she pushed through the pain of aching joints and burning muscles, she managed to free her left arm to check the time.

  She breathed out a sigh of relief; she was still on schedule. With a few swipes across the touchscreen of the smartwatch she pulled up the blueprints of the air conditioning system and quickly perused the maze of pipes and ducts. She made a note of her current position in relation to where she needed to end up, and saw, with much relief, that she was almost there. Now the only thing standing between her and getting into this part of the building was the woman who was supposed to remove the duct grille.

  ‘I hope you haven’t deserted us, stranger,’ Ranomi said to herself. ‘I really hope you haven’t deserted us.’

  Not wanting to waste any more time, she grunted wordlessly and continued pulling herself through the duct. Her entire upper body was aflame with the effort of dragging herself onward, and every pull of her gecko-gloved hands sent a fresh wave of fiery pain through her arms and shoulders. She knew, however, that she just had to press on a little further, so she gritted her teeth and tried to drown out the discomfort.

  The hi-tech night vision goggles she wore had provided enough illumination to get through the black labyrinth of ducts, but now, as she approached yet another right-angle corner, she saw a blaze of light crackling white pixels in her goggles from around the corner. She had arrived.

  With a protracted sigh of relief, she flipped up her goggles and waited for her now-naked eyes to readjust to the darkness. When her eyes felt as if they were comfortable with the light level, she drew in a breath of chilly air and continued edging onward, breathing slowly and rhythmically in time with the pulls of her arms, as if she were swimming through a soupy sea of mercury. With a steadily increasing sense of anxiety, she approached the ninety-degree bend in the duct.