Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Outside the conference room, at the far end of the broad corridor, Joao, in his buffalo form, and Ranomi, in her rhinoceros form, clashed with a wall-jarring crash. The force of Ranomi’s charge was concentrated in the points of her nasal horns, and with the impact of a hurtling truck she smashed into Joao’s flank. The momentum of her charge managed to lift the bellowing buffalo right up off his feet and slam him into a wall, which crumbled inward. Joao kicked and writhed with mad fury as Ranomi continued to drive her weight into him, and using the half-demolished wall as leverage he pushed his body forward and hooked his horns in a cutting attack aimed at the underside of Ranomi’s throat; if he could slash through her thick hide and hit one of her major veins or arteries the battle would be over very quickly. Ranomi, however, saw the attack coming – despite her already poor eyesight in rhinoceros form being exacerbated by the red-tinged gloom – and she reared up and back on her hind legs to avoid the slashing attack. In a counterattack she lunged forward and slammed her horns into the side of Joao’s neck, the punch of the strike lifting him off his feet.

  Njinga, meanwhile, was finally able to breathe again. With a heaving groan she rolled over onto her side and scrambled with weak fingers for her sidearm. As she did, however, the assassin CC-105 pounced. The man’s body was spurting out blood from a number of wounds, and pieces of still-smoking shrapnel jutted obscenely from his flesh, but in his eyes a sheer and single-minded madness blazed: he would not stop fighting the servants of the Evil One until the very last breath of air left his body. Growling animalistically, with blood-thick spittle flying in grisly flecks from between his gritted teeth, he pulled Njinga into a choking jiujitsu lock, exerting extreme pressure on her arm and shoulder joints, which, despite the protection offered by her armoured suit, was putting such strain on her bones and joints that it seemed that her arm would break and her shoulder would be torn out of its socket at any moment. She howled with both pain and fury and writhed madly against the hold as she tried to fight back, locked, as her friends were, in mortal combat with a deadly foe.

  ***

  In the darkness of the elevator shaft, Adriana remained crouched on the precarious ledge where Zakaria had left her. Ranomi had given her a small LED light so that she would not be stuck in complete darkness, but in spite of the beastwalkers’ reassurances, Adriana could not help but feel terrified; panic held her fast in its scaly talons, and it was all she could do to try to breathe through the fear and crushing confusion of the present.

  Now, to add to her terror, coming muffled through the walls was the crashing symphony of gunfire. While she could not clearly discern each clattering or booming report, she could feel the vibrations from the sound waves as they rippled through the concrete beneath her bare, injured feet. Behind her back her wrists remained cuffed tight, and as hard as she struggled she could not contort her hands to the point where she could slip out of the cuffs, even as she pushed beyond the threshold of pain in a desperate bid to free herself; the steel was simply too tight around her wrists.

  What would happen to her, she wondered? Whatever else did happen, she knew that she would not be going back to her cell; if the Rebels failed and Sigurd and his forces prevailed, she would surely be killed as punishment for her part in the invasion. If the Rebels succeeded and defeated Sigurd, however, she had no idea what they would do with her. In spite of the short time that she had known Ranomi, she felt a genuine kinship with her. Regarding Zakaria, though, she had long since learned not to trust any man. As for his sidekick, the one called Njinga, she felt as scared of her as she was of him; both of them intimidated her with their propensity for violence and their cold, almost mechanical manner of handling things, along with their seemingly unshakeable distrust of her.

  Well, the feeling was mutual, she thought bitterly, especially when it came to Zakaria. She knew that men – almost all of them, it would seem – were ruled by two base and primal urges: the urge to fuck, and the urge to fight. She loathed them, and she hated and distrusted them all. Behind her back she curled her hands into tight fists, raging with impotent wrath and bitter disgust into the cloying darkness all around her as the battle raged on a few walls over.

  ***

  William winced instinctively as he heard the gunfire breaking out two floors below him. Despite the knowledge that he was safe from the hail of bullets that were flying, protected up here by many layers of concrete, he could not suppress a feeling of panicked anxiety for the safety of his friends. A powerful urge spurred him on, driving him to charge down the stairs and join the battle – especially since his archenemy, the object upon whom all of his hatred and desire for vengeance was so vehemently centred, was down there. It took every ounce of self-control he possessed to refrain from doing this; indeed, it took even more willpower than it took to resist a hit of heroin. He knew, however, that he had a very specific and a very important role to fulfil in this mission, and that part would be coming into play in the next few seconds, when the Huntsmen Board Members would come scurrying around the corner in their panicked flight from the attack. It was a flight path they thought would lead them to the secret door, which in turn led to a self-powered elevator, which would drop them down a shaft to an impenetrable bomb shelter ten metres below the ground, where they could hide until reinforcements arrived to wipe out this motley band of Rebel fighters.

  With the switching up of the Rebels’ plans, however, this flight path would lead them not to safety, but directly to William, waiting in a crouch in the shadows with his AK-47 pressed firmly to his shoulder and his finger resting on the trigger, ready to spit out a storm of death-fire lead as soon as the devils rounded the corner. He had been practicing for weeks for this moment; hundreds of hours and thousands of bullets had gone into training for this exact juncture. William had always been a fairly decent shot, but now, for this mission, he had attained the same level of accuracy as that of any professional sniper.

  Something seemed wrong here, however; the board members should have come at least a minute ago, yet there was no sign of them at all. Having blown up the doorway two floors below, this was the only flight path now open to the Huntsmen, so where were they?

  Anxiety was building with mounting pressure inside William’s head. What was going on here? Why was this taking so long? He swallowed slowly, acutely aware of how dry the inside of his mouth felt. A bead of sweat inched a tortuously slow passage down the side of his neck, and it took a tremendous strength of will not to pull his left hand off of the stock of his rifle and swat at it, as if the salty liquid were a biting fly or mosquito.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered under his breath, as the seconds seemed to drag, gum-sap like, into hours and days. ‘Damn you devils, where the hell are you?!’

  He waited in the shadows, the weight of the rifle increasingly ponderous in his hands, doing his utmost to maintain his focus and keep his concentration levels at a peak. For all his effort and determination, though, his resolve was beginning to falter.

  Minutes that felt like hours passed, and eventually he slackened his grip on the stock of the AK-47 and glanced at his wristwatch. The sounds of firing had long since stopped, and still there had been no word from anyone. The walkie-talkie remained dead, and the fate of the mission was a complete mystery. His wristwatch told him that seven minutes had now passed; something was very, very wrong.

  With his heart thumping like distant cannon fire in his chest, pumping a potent concoction of raging emotions through his every vein and artery, William stood up and lowered his firearm; for whatever reason, the Huntsmen were not coming. He pulled off his bulletproof helmet and dropped it onto the floor; as foolish as it was to remove it, he was feeling suffocated with it on, and it had started to feel like a cage closing ever tighter around his skull. He could not continue to wait here any longer; if his friends were dead and the mission had failed he had to flee, and he had to flee immediately – and he knew exactly where he needed to go to get out of this place as quickly and safely as possible
.

  With his heart thumping in his chest, pumping a torrent of fear, panic and crippling anxiety through his veins, William took off at a jog down the corridor, heading straight for the elevator shaft.

  69

  BATTLE PART II

  The noises of Ranomi and Joao snorting, grunting and slamming into each other were reverberating loudly through the corridor, but all Njinga could hear was CC-105’s breath, hissing in and out through clenched, blood-browned teeth, while the assassin tightened his chokehold with ever-increasing ferocity. As tenacious as a rabid bullterrier, the dying man held fast, the whites of his eyes popping in the gloom with murderous fury. Njinga struggled with all her might, yet she could not fight against the precision of the jiujitsu hold; the more fervently she railed against it the more agony it caused her, and the closer it took her to a broken arm and torn-out shoulder.

  With his free hand, CC-105 grasped for the only weapon in reach: a bowie knife sheathed on the hip of a dead soldier nearby. His fingertips brushed the handle, but it was just too far for him to grip. He continued choking Njinga out and tried to lean closer but found that it was physically impossible; if he wanted to grab the weapon, he would have to loosen his chokehold.

  CC-105 only had a second in which to make the decision; his strength was failing rapidly as blood leaked from his grievous wounds, and it was becoming ever more difficult to maintain his jiujitsu hold. With a grunt of effort, he released Njinga from the chokehold and lunged for the knife, gripping it and then swivelling around to aim a quick stab at the base of Njinga’s skull, where the first vertebra was located. Njinga, however, knew that the assassin had to be going for the knife when he relinquished his jiujitsu grip, for she had seen the weapon too, so at that instant she lurched backwards and up, rolling onto her back and causing the stab to miss its intended target. The knife glanced instead off the top of her skull, opening up a long cut in the process that quickly started staining her neon afro with dark blood.

  Undaunted, CC-105 stabbed again, now going for Njinga’s throat, and she was only just able to raise her left hand to block the thrust, which stabbed through the palm of her glove and impaled her hand. The blade would have continued through her hand and transfixed her throat had it not been for the bulletproof armour on the top of the glove, which stopped the deadly trajectory of the knife. Njinga screamed with pain, but even as agony blitzed through her hand and arm she snatched at and grabbed CC-105’s wrist, preventing him from pulling the bowie knife out of her hand. CC-105 reacted with another jiujitsu grip, this one aimed at levering Njinga’s hand off of his wrist. Another wave of pain seared a crippling boost of debilitating agony through her arm, but adrenalin and a desperate urge to survive kept her fingers locked around her adversary’s wrist. At that moment, at the height of their mortal struggle, a realisation hit Njinga: she did actually have one more weapon on her that she could use. She jerked her left hand back, freeing it from the impalement of the steel, and then reached down with desperately fumbling fingers towards her hip.

  However, now that she had removed her left hand from the equation, only her right hand, upon which immense pressure was being applied, was keeping the assassin from plunging the knife into her throat, and the blade was inching nearer and nearer towards this vulnerable area. As it did, the assassin’s bulging eyes began to shine with an ever-maddening fervour.

  The point of the knife crept closer, ever closer, until the metal was pressing against Njinga’s skin, exerting an increasingly deadly pressure on the hollow at the base of her throat. This urgency heightened her panic, and she began to hyperventilate as her fingers scrambled below, around her hip, seemingly unable to locate the object they so desperately sought.

  The assassin, growling and spitting blood all over her face, pushed harder, expending the final reserves of his strength in this final task of his, and his blade broke the skin of her throat as it pressed relentlessly downward. The sharp point slid into Njinga’s throat, the steel penetrating her flesh millimetre by agonising millimetre; soon it would cut into her windpipe, and once that had been opened the game would be over. The immediacy of death spurred one last boost of strength through her exhausted muscles, though. Screaming hoarsely, she stretched her arm and hand as far as it would go, and finally her fingers tightened around the object they had so desperately been seeking: a small gas-powered cigarette lighter. With one deft flick of her fingers the gas hissed and then roared flatly as the spark ignited it. Njinga wasted no time; she immediately thrust the blue flame into CC-105’s face. The gas fire was small but ferociously hot, and despite the assassin’s rigorous conditioning against pain, he could not resist this level of intensity; with a howl CC-105 jerked his head away from the lighter, and in that brief window of opportunity Njinga was able to snatch the bowie knife out of CC-105’s hand, spin it around, and then plunge it into the soft flesh under his chin. She kept shoving, screaming wordlessly like a madwoman caught in the throes of a psychotic episode, until the steel sank into the depths of the man’s skull. Finally, it penetrated his brain, and, panting with exhaustion, Njinga watched her adversary’s eyes roll back in their sockets. She did not, however, relinquish her pressure on the knife even as her enemy’s body became limp on top of her.

  ***

  Sharaf checked the map as he stood pressed up against the wall. He knew something was wrong; the Huntsmen Board Members had neither come his way nor, presumably, William’s, since he had heard no firing from there, but there was no way he was going to allow them to escape. Whatever else happened, he was determined to make sure of one thing: tonight, he would pump some Huntsmen bodies full of jagged lead. The battle-wrath was boiling inside him, caustic and hot, despite not yet having fired off a single round.

  That, however, was about to change. His AK-47 held thirty bullets, thirty little lead missiles, each longing for the warm body of an enemy into which it could burrow at hyperspeed, bouncing about in a gleefully destructive pinball hammering of broken bones and torn up vital organs.

  ‘You fucks aren’t escaping this place alive,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Not on my watch, not on my fucking watch.’

  He shouldered the rifle as he prepared to step around the corner, and then breathed in a deep breath, which he held in his lungs. This was it – he was mere few feet away from the room in which his enemies had held their banquet. The ebb and flow of the emergency lights revealed no sign of life, and the silence here was as thick and present as liquid cement, dripping and oozing in a slow trickle. Something was wrong, very wrong, but Sharaf wasn’t going to just wait around to see what it was – he was going to investigate on his own.

  Crouching low, with his AK-47 shouldered, he darted around the corner into the open corridor.

  There was no reaction, nothing. Neither sound nor motion were present. There was only a pervasive, treacle-like silence. A growing sense of unease was now working its way through Sharaf’s system, like a colony of writhing parasitic worms inching a passage through his innards.

  ‘What in the fuck is going on here?’ he whispered as he approached the open doors of the conference room.

  With his heart in his mouth he stepped through the doorway, out of which a light was shining, and when his eyes fell on the sight within, he could not help but release a gasp of both horror and surprise.

  As mutilated and damaged as the bodies were, he had no trouble identifying the corpses of the Huntsmen Board of Directors. He noted that their bodyguards had been executed as well, along with some other unidentified young people who were, curiously, completely nude. The room looked and smelled like the killing floor of a slaughterhouse; whoever had done this had made sure that absolutely every person in this room was dead. But who? Who on earth could have done this? It had certainly not been any of the Rebels, of this Sharaf was sure. But then who else could it have been? And why?

  He walked around the room and assessed the extent of the carnage, keeping his rifle shouldered. Both his animal senses and what his human eyes could se
e told him that there was nothing but death in this room; not the faintest of pulses stirred, nor did any hint of breath from any of the gaping mouths mist up the chilly air. He knew that he had to tell William immediately, but had no idea how to do this now that his equipment was dead.

  ‘Shit,’ he hissed.

  As he took in the scene of carnage before him, his mind awash with both morbid fascination and suspicion-laden confusion, he felt the familiar flurry of goosebumps that announced the presence of another beastwalker. Right away he dropped to his knees behind the antique table with his rifle aimed at the doorway, ready to unleash a storm of heavy bullets.

  A silhouette presented itself, cutting a familiar outline against the pulsating red glow.

  ‘Kimiko,’ Sharaf murmured, the uncertainty in his voice revealing a blend of surprise, relief and confusion, for she was not supposed to be in this part of the building, at least not according to the plan. Still, he thought, perhaps the details of Plan B had dictated that she come here.

  ‘Sharaf.’

  Her tone was strange; something was off about it, but he could not pinpoint what. Still, it was of no consequence; all that mattered was the fact that she was a friend, not a foe. Sharaf lowered his rifle and smiled as he stood up from behind the cover of the table.

  ‘I don’t know what happened here, but someone’s already done our work for—’

  In one swift motion Kimiko raised her bow, pulled the string back and loosed an arrow. The broad-bladed, armour-piercing head sliced through Sharaf’s right Batsuit pauldron, skewering his shoulder and severing a number of tendons, causing him to involuntarily drop his AK-47. Kimiko loosed another arrow, and this one punched through his breastplate, impaling him through his chest. He did not attempt to go for his backup gun; instead he merely stared at the arrow shafts protruding from his torso with a look of complete confusion contorting his handsome features.