Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Roxana strolled calmly over to him, opened his jacket and removed his pistol. After kicking the firearm a safe distance away she turned to Mr Ma, who was scrambling for a panic button located on the right post of the bed. With effortless speed and precision, she plucked the scalpel from Mr Wang’s eye socket and flung it like a throwing knife. It transfixed the geriatric’s wrist and thudded into the wooden backboard of the bed, pinning his arm there.

  Gone from the girl’s face was the expertly rendered masquerade of helpless terror and naïve fear, and in its place was an expression of blank, automaton-like neutrality. As she slowly advanced on Mr Ma, his eyes began to register an emotion that had not entered those dark orbs for decades; raw animal fear.

  ‘I am AH-477,’ the assassin said flatly, dropping forever the fictitious ‘Roxana’ moniker and personality that had been her disguise over the past few weeks. ‘And I have come here to terminate your existence.’

  Mr Ma grunted and gasped, struggling to pull the scalpel out of his right wrist. AH-477, however, sprang lightly onto the bed, leaned over the old man and broke his left arm with casual ease and a blank expression on her pretty face, not registering an ounce of emotion as Mr Ma writhed and cried out in pain beneath her. She then climbed off the bed and pulled the silk blanket off of Mr Ma, exposing his thin, wrinkled body, leaving him naked and utterly vulnerable in the soft light. She dropped the blanket and walked past Mr Wang, who was convulsing in his death throes in a pool of blood on the floor. She paid no heed to his jerking body, but she did make sure that she didn’t get any blood on her bare feet as she strolled past.

  AH-477 headed straight to the bathroom, from which she emerged wearing Mr Ma’s black and gold silken bathrobe, and carrying a bottle of drain cleaner fluid.

  Mr Ma screamed when he saw what was in her hands – although the sound that emerged from his mouth was not so much a cry as it was a guttural, hoarse gargling. He tried to backpedal and aimed a feeble kick at the assassin when she climbed back onto the bed with him, but she blocked the weak attack and punched him with vicious precision in his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and incapacitating him.

  She then positioned herself over him and pinned him down with her knees and thighs, and her young face was as cold and devoid of emotion as any pharaoh’s death mask.

  ‘Sigurd Haraldsson sends his regards, evil one,’ she said, speaking flawless Mandarin. ‘It is his wish to send you to hell at this exact time, and in this exact fashion. He was very specific, in fact, about the manner of your demise.’

  She unscrewed the top of the drain opener bottle, and immediately its noxious, corrosive fumes began to fill the interior of the canopy bed. Mr Ma’s eyes bulged white in their discoloured sockets, and he writhed and wriggled with pathetic desperation, but the girl had him pinned down firmly.

  She cocked her head and stared with an almost reptilian fascination into his eyes for a few moments, and then poured some of the drain opener onto his wrinkled chest. The blue liquid hissed and bubbled, and Mr Ma started screaming hoarsely and struggling madly as the caustic substance burned through his skin and started eating into his flesh.

  AH-477 watched his struggles with detachment, and then poured more of the liquid onto him – this time all over his genitals.

  Now he really started to scream and howl and buck and writhe, and his distorted cries were saturated with a piercing and primal anguish.

  ‘You’re making too much noise,’ she said flatly. ‘Here, drink.’

  The girl leaned over his face, pried his lips open and shoved the opening of the drain cleaner bottle between them, emptying the rest of the liquid into his mouth. She held the bottle between his lips with one hand and pinched his nose closed with the other, keeping her fingers locked until the last of the terrible substance had seared its way down his throat into his insides.

  AH-477 then casually tossed the bottle aside, crawled off the bed and stood up. She retrieved Mr Wang’s pistol, which she tucked into a pocket in the bathrobe, and then she stared at Mr Ma for a few more moments. The old man was consumed by an unspeakable agony, writhing, flailing, howling and arching his spine as the drain cleaner dissolved his insides and liquefied his internal organs.

  ‘My mission here is complete,’ she said coolly. ‘Goodbye Mr Ma.’

  With that, she turned on her heels and walked on swift and silent feet out of the room as one of the most powerful men in the world lay dying in protracted and unimaginable pain behind her.

  Just as she closed the doors behind her, the lights went out.

  ***

  It was a surreal moment; one minute the enormous dancefloor was all floor-rumbling bass and soaring synth keys, the aural morass manipulating the seething horde of costumed partygoers like a modern day snake charmer presiding over an army of warm serpents, with the blinding laser lights and strobes firing in every direction adding psychedelic visuals to the orgiastic chaos – but then, out of the blue, it all just stopped, and an oppressive darkness billowed like a thick cloak tossed over an anthill. A few inebriated patrons continued flailing about for a good few moments after the music had died, but most people simply stopped what they were doing and stood in stunned silence.

  It was an eerie silence; the swathe of sound had been so overpowering that it had been a gargantuan physical presence all on its own, yet now it seemed as if that very entity had evaporated at once into thin air. It was much like watching a magician make an elephant vanish before one’s eyes, except in here it was as if you were not only seeing the vast beast disappear into nothing but feeling it vanish as well.

  Floor managers began scurrying about in a panic, screaming for technicians and wondering why the backup generator hadn’t yet kicked in. Someone knew why those generators hadn’t kicked in though. Beings, rather, for these creatures were beyond human.

  At one of the bars William’s heart rate began to quicken as the first hints of adrenalin probed their electric tentacles though his veins, charging his blood with a heady thrill.

  ‘Sorry love,’ he muttered to the Australian girl next to him, with whom he had been making conversation, ‘I’ve got to hit the men’s room.’

  ‘Right bloody now?!’ she spluttered.

  ‘When you gotta go, you gotta go,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders apologetically, but then quickly realising the futility of the gesture as he stared at her through the green and yellow filter of his night vision goggles. The blackness that had enveloped the club was opaque, impenetrable in its denseness, and even with his tiger eyes he would have had difficulty seeing without assistance from technology. To combat the fog of black, people started pulling out their phones to use as flashlights, and soon thousands of little beams of light were punching through the inky blanket.

  William pushed and shoved through the mass of people, using both his tiger senses and the night vision goggles to direct his movements. A tide of collective panic was rising by the second, and a stampede appeared imminent. Indeed, it certainly would happen when Yi-Wen and Awang’s tear gas attacks kicked in, and getting caught in that was the last thing that William wanted. Time and absolute punctuality were of the essence here; to arrive at the specified point late would not only doom the mission to failure, but possibly cause him to lose his life and forfeit the lives of his friends, and alter the fate of humanity itself. Growling and gritting his teeth, he forced his way through the throng, only too aware of how dire the circumstances were.

  ***

  Njinga reached the entrance hall to the back area of the club a few seconds before Zakaria did. Everything was dim and dingy; blackness dominated the expanse of these subterranean tunnels, broken in regular patches by pools of hellish crimson from the emergency lighting system. With her heart hammering in her chest and pulses of iced blood carrying nerve-tingling fear through her veins, she paused upon reaching the final corner before the two bulletproof doors that stood between the Rebels and Sigurd’s headquarters. She had discarded her Witch-king props, cloak an
d helmet when the power had failed, and beneath this she was attired in a suit of glossy black armour, made of the same bulletproof composite of which most of the other Rebels’ armour was constructed. Included in her cache of weapons was a helmet, and while it provided supreme head protection it felt brutally stifling and hot, and with her entire head encased in it a sense of crippling claustrophobia was coiling its ghostly fingers around her throat. A suddenly crippling sense of self-doubt and terror wrenched her intestines into a tight knot, and nausea barrelled the bitter taste of bile up the back of her throat. Her tongue felt obscenely swollen in her mouth, and an uncontrollable urge screamed within her to tear her helmet off and gulp in mouthfuls of the musty air – but then the sensation that heralded the presence of another of her kind gave her a shot of brief confidence.

  ‘Are you ready, my sister?!’ a familiar voice enquired from behind.

  She turned and saw Zakaria jogging through the darkness in his gothic armour, the reflections of the emergency lights gleaming like daubs of fluorescent paint on the burnished steel. His two-handed sword was sheathed on his back, and in his arms he carried an M-60 machine gun with a large steel appendage attached to it, along with two full belts of ammunition that were slung over his shoulders and across his chest. An Uzi submachine gun was strapped to each hip, and the firearms and ammo combined with the medieval armour gave him an intimidating if curiously anachronistic look. Trailing along the floor behind him came a spider-drone, scuttling frenetically with its eight metal legs across the carpeted floor.

  Njinga nodded in response, although ready was the absolute last thing she felt.

  ‘Where’s the girl?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s not with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then … I don’t know.’

  ‘We have no time to wonder or worry about her now,’ Zakaria muttered. ‘She should have been here by now, but she isn’t; all we can do is proceed without her.’

  ‘I know,’ Njinga murmured, Chloe’s absence only intensifying her sense of worry and fear.

  ‘Before we do this, let’s see what’s waiting for us around the corner,’ Zakaria said as he directed the little robot to the corner, around which it peeked a sneak glance with its night-vision camera.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he rasped sarcastically. ‘Twelve guards armed with M-16 rifles. They’ve got night vision goggles too. Two of us versus twelve of them. Still, I’ve faced worst odds before, my friend!’

  Njinga shook her head, wondering with a madly-hammering heart how Zakaria could sound so optimistic in the face of overwhelming odds.

  ‘Why the hell are there so many of ‘em?’ she asked. ‘It’s almost like they were expecting us.’

  ‘Some of the most powerful people in the world are meeting behind those doors tonight,’ Zakaria answered. ‘I was expecting more soldiers, to be honest. We can handle these ones, trust me.

  ‘Okay man … if you say so. I still think it’s weird that so many of ‘em assembled in such a short time … but we gotta do what we gotta do, I guess.’

  Zakaria could sense her apprehension, despite not being able to see her face behind the helmet.

  ‘Relax, old friend,’ he said, unclipping a device that looked like a large flashlight, and attaching it onto one of Njinga’s shoulder pauldrons. ‘When those bastards get hit with fifteen thousand lumens of light, especially with those goggles of theirs on, they’re going to be blind for long enough for us to pick them off one by one.’

  He then opened up the metal contraption attached to his M-60, which turned out to be, after it had all been unfolded and locked into place, a number of thick steel panels that made up a shield that was five feet tall and three feet wide. This served as a bulletproof barrier that covered most of his body. Once it was set up, he glanced at his digital wristwatch.

  ‘It’s time,’ he grunted grimly. ‘I know it’s terrifying to have to step out there, directly into their line of fire, but the light and your armour will protect you, as will I, and the power of the Five Flames and the Great Mother. Stay close to the walls, but keep moving, and remember, your combat shotgun is loaded with alternating armour-piercing slugs, incendiary rounds, buckshot and exploding rounds; in short, my friend, you’re a walking tank. Pick your targets, but not too carefully; speed and intensity of fire is what we are after. I’m going to be going all out with this M-60, with the idea being that we’re going to make it a “mad minute”, just as we discussed. We step out there and we don’t stop firing until all our ammunition is spent. And remember, amid all the fury and the chaos, what it is we’re fighting for. Always remember that.’

  Njinga nodded, but inside her suit her limbs had started to tremble with a terrible violence. She felt an irresistible urge to empty both her bladder and her bowels all of a sudden, while pulses of icy cold alternating with searing heat kept on washing through her every vein and artery. However, there was neither time to hesitate nor to doubt; Zakaria whispered a quick prayer and then closed the visor of his beautifully ornate helmet, which was fashioned in the baroque style of a lion’s face, and then he cocked the M-60. He slipped a pair of high-tech wraparound sunglasses, which would shield his eyes from the incapacitating light, over the eyeholes of his helmet.

  ‘The battle begins when I say “one”,’ he growled. ‘Is your shotgun ready?’

  Sweating profusely inside the suit and trembling with an almost crippling apprehension, Njinga flicked the safety catch of the combat shotgun off.

  ‘Ready,’ she whispered hoarsely, the word forcing its way through a barrier of chattering teeth.

  Zakaria gripped the machine gun loosely in his armoured hands and stood with his feet planted and wide apart.

  ‘Three … two … ONE!’

  With both fear and dark excitement blitzing like veins of lightning through her nervous system, Njinga sprang out into the corridor, where just twenty metres away the amassed Huntsmen troops were waiting. Before she even stabilised herself or took aim she started firing madly at the wall of soldiers, who were crouched behind improvised shields like sofas and overturned tables and desks.

  ‘Light cannon on!’ Zakaria shouted in the lost language of the Kingdom of Alwa as he too burst out into the open.

  At the very moment that the Huntsmen troops opened up with a withering barrage of counterfire, the voice-activated light cannon turned on, and entire area was lit up with what could only be described as the light of an exploding supernova, with its millions of beams somehow condensed into the space of this corridor. Everything was coated in a film of blinding white, as if a stick of dynamite filled with dazzling paint had just detonated, drenching every molecule of every surface with light. Njinga’s rapid-fire shotgun blasts boomed with wall-shaking intensity through the confined space, while the jackhammer thundering of Zakaria’s M-60 added to the cataclysmic symphony of chaos, against which the jabbering splutter of submachine guns and assault rifles raged.

  For Njinga, it felt as if time was slowing down drastically. Her vision stretched out in the front and blurred at the sides as tunnel vision took over, and she was able to pick up crisp, ultra-focused details of the carnage unfolding before her; the glinting of shells catching the light as they danced their haphazard jitterbug on the ground, and a spurt of blood spraying upwards in a grisly arc as a human skull exploded, struck by one of her shotgun slugs. The muzzle flares of many gun barrels, all flashing and flickering virtually imperceptibly against the tide of sun-like white light. A soldier covering his eyes while popping out random, stab-in-the-dark shots. A torso sliced near in half from a scything arc of heavy lead sprayed out from Zakaria’s relentless automatic fire.

  The fight seemed to go on forever, and yet it simultaneously felt as if it had lasted but a mere fraction of a second. As she fired madly, Njinga felt the enemy’s bullets peppering her armoured body. She knew that the impacts were hurting her – the rational part of her brain was telling her this – yet even as the thumping force of the bullets pushed her back and s
he found herself almost losing her footing and being unable to breathe, somehow her arms, her shoulders, her eyes, and her coordination remained absolutely focused on the task at hand.

  The task of killing, of slaughtering.

  Of ending lives.

  And end those lives she did. As soon as she saw one man fall, she would swing the sights of the combat shotgun onto the next target, not bothering to lock down her aim before squeezing the trigger again. Half of her shots missed, but those that hit tore with a horrific force through battle armour, flesh, muscle and bone. Muffled, as if through the thick cotton of a dream, she heard herself roaring inside her helmet. It felt now as if pure, thousand-degree liquid magma was filling her body, engulfing the entirety of her system in flames of phosphorous that burned white and pink and violet, far beyond the temperature of any forest fire. No, this heat that blasted through him was as the heat of an ancient earth-goddess’s celestial forge, as this primeval super-being hammered out before her furnace the crudeness of thick rocks, sludgy water and jagged mountains that were to be the foundations of a planet.

  The cries Njinga bellowed were beyond language; no words, no stretching of vocal cords or manipulation of the human tongue could come close to conveying the rawness of her emotion, the depth and intensity of the fury and terror and madness that howled through her core with the darkly beautiful anarchy of a hurricane.

  These were the howls of ancient beings, of species long extinct, of fragile paradises ruined forever, of countless billions of innocent beings tortured to death for humankind’s trivialities, and they were belted out with vociferous violence and spat at the enemy with the same vehement velocity as the shotgun rounds she was blasting out of her weapon, again and again and again. Against all odds, in the face of the concentrated firepower of emotionless, brainwashed soldiers who were more machines than men, the tiny group of Rebels surged forward in this skirmish, this speck of violence in a blood-spatter of gore and skull fragments and globs of brain and purple and grey and crimson viscera, slick and slimy, this single droplet of resistance in this millennia-long war against the forces of a relentless and nearly incomprehensible evil.