Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Kimiko then fired a third arrow. This one tore through his stomach.

  Sharaf stumbled back; his strength was failing in abrupt bursts, like a sputtering machine running unexpectedly out of fuel. Two more of Kimiko’s arrows slammed into his torso, and he dropped to his knees, swaying back and forth as his near-immortal blood, running freely down his front and thighs, began to sink into the thick carpet beneath him, mingling with the young, cold blood of the dead Huntsmen and assassins. He felt more arrows thudding into him, but strangely enough there was no pain, just a gentle impact with each shot to remind him that yet another length of steel and aluminium had pierced his body. There were so many things he wanted to ask Kimiko, so many questions about why she was doing this, what she hoped to achieve, and why she had betrayed her brothers and sisters and turned instead to the darkness.

  He knew, on some level, that he should be thinking about the mission, about his friends – but somehow none of that mattered any more. Nothing did, in fact. A curious warmth was spreading throughout him, like hundreds of hands gently transferring their heat to him through fleeting touches; delicate and ethereal caresses brushing his skin.

  With a steadily drooping head, his chin eventually came to rest on his chest. His neck had no more strength to hold up his skull, which seemed to have transmogrified from meat and bone to a ponderous weight of cast lead. Through blurry eyes he found himself staring at the crimson carpet, glistening here and there with motes of light dancing on the wetness as it became more and more sodden with blood – his blood.

  How much more blood could possibly come out of me? I never knew there was that much of it inside me.

  The carpet was changing from crimson to yellow, the texture of moist, matted fibres morphing into powdery desert sand, sand so real that he could almost feel the heat shimmering off the grains. A crude wooden scimitar dropped at his feet, and he saw his hands reaching down to pick it up – although, strangely enough, they were the thin, hairless arms of a young boy, arms he had last seen over a thousand years ago. He then heard a voice that he had last heard well over a millennium ago, a voice he had missed so much.

  ‘Pick it up Sharaf, pick it up! We’re still playing, you’re not really dead, silly!’

  ‘Asef,’ he heard himself whisper, his voice simultaneously that of the man he was now and the boy he had once been. ‘Asef, my friend. My best friend. I never told you that … that I never forgot this day. I don’t know why, but I have never, ever forgotten it.’

  The desert sand was growing steadily brighter, as if it were soaking up and then amplifying the light of the scalding white sun above. The salt-heavy scent of the ocean filled his nostrils, and in a rising roar the cannonade of the deep blue waves pawing relentlessly at a nearby shore boomed in his chest.

  ‘I’ve had enough of the soldier game Sharaf,’ Asef said, the eight-year-old’s too-large eyes bulging from their shallow sockets in his thin, angular face. ‘Let’s go swimming.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sharaf whispered. ‘Let’s go, Asef. Let’s swim.’

  The sand blazed in a blend of all colours, spinning at a speed that was beyond speed – everything was white now, everything. Undefiled light and loving warmth abounded, driving out pain, driving out fear, regret, anger and hatred, bleaching away a thousand years of memories and experiences and leaving behind only a beautiful nothingness.

  A gorgeous, all-consuming nothingness.

  ‘Yes Asef. You and me … my friend … let’s … goooo…’

  ***

  At the end of the corridor Ranomi and Joao squared off, facing each other in animal form. Each was breathing hard from the effort of the battle thus far, and each was bleeding in many places from wounds inflicted by the other. The two were roughly evenly matched in terms of strength, but Joao’s natural ferocity, imperviousness to pain and dogged tenacity had given him the upper hand. He bellowed and lowered his head for a charge while Ranomi, breathing in short, shallow gasps for air that simply refused to stay in her lungs, gritted her teeth and prepared for impact.

  The morbid silence of the moment was, however, smashed to splinters by the floor-tom drum solo of an M-16 assault rifle shaking the walls with its rage. Njinga was bloodied and exhausted, but bright flames licked the rims of her dark irises. With a wordless howl of wrath, she emptied the M-16 into Joao’s buffalo body, peppering the huge animal with searing lead missiles. Joao bellowed in pain and swayed on his legs as blood washed in great, bright swathes down his flanks. Njinga kept firing until the trigger clicked with empty impotence, and when it did, she threw the rifle down and scrambled for another, cursing with naked fury and frustration, utterly caught up in the brutal hysteria of battle.

  Joao, grievously wounded now, had had all of the fight knocked out of him. The instinct for self-preservation pumped out one final surge of adrenalin, and in a bid to avoid the certain death that would arrive should Njinga grab hold of another firearm, he turned on his heels, swaying and lurching, and stampeded off into the smoke-choked darkness as fast as his failing strength would allow him to.

  Now only Hrothgar remained against the three Rebels. His counter-ambush had failed, but he did not yet know this, for his attention was focused on the furious single combat in which he was engaged with Zakaria as the two of them exchanged, blocked and dodged blow after blow. Now was the perfect time to finish Hrothgar off, but just after Njinga picked up another M-16 from one of the dead troops, an ominous rumble groaned from the wall to her right. The series of impacts from the fighting rhino and buffalo, as well as the explosions from the grenades and the barrage of gunfire, had weakened it to the point of collapse, and that collapse was dangerously imminent. Njinga only just had time to dive out of the way before the wall, and a heavy row of shelving and files behind it, came down in a billowing cloud of grey dust. She scrambled to her feet, peering through the choking clouds and the gloom, and quickly saw, with a stab of dismay, that she and Ranomi had been cut off from Zakaria and Hrothgar by an impassable wall of rubble and debris. They could only hope that the knight could defeat the Viking in single combat.

  Beyond the wall of rubble, Zakaria and Hrothgar exchanged another flurry of blows, with Zakaria beating the Viking back and forcing him onto the defensive. Zakaria grinned, whirling his longsword in his gauntlet-clad hands in a flamboyant flourish.

  ‘It’s all over for you, Hrothgar,’ he growled. ‘Justice has finally caught up with you. You should have known that you could not escape it forever.’

  He switched to a single-handed grip and lunged with a stabbing attack, which Hrothgar was only just able to deflect as the sword passed his guard. Hrothgar launched a quick counterattack off the parry, but Zakaria was prepared for it and dodged it with ease, and with a rapid dash forward he thrust his sword through the gap left by Hrothgar’s counter. He pressed the tip against his opponent’s throat, while slamming his open left hand onto the haft of the axe and immobilising it. He fixed an intense stare into Hrothgar’s eyes as both men stood frozen in this moment of time, in which destiny was balancing on the fine edge of a scalpel blade; just one more move remained, and thereafter the wheels of fate would shunt one of these beings into the abyss of oblivion.

  ‘The game is finally up for you,’ Zakaria rumbled. ‘And I want to you to know that I have defeated you, that I am the bringer of the death you have deserved for so long. I want to see in your eyes the look that says that I am the instrument of your undoing.’

  Even with death drawing its sickle blade across his skin, Hrothgar did not reveal the slightest hint of fear. Instead of cowering he cracked a smile and then threw his head back and laughed. In response, Zakaria snarled and moved to end the fight.

  ‘If that’s all you have to say, I will let that be your last word. Off to Hell with you then, slaver—’

  ‘You can’t kill me,’ Hrothgar muttered, smiling grimly.

  ‘Oh yes I can. Not even you can survive your head being separated from your body, I assure you that.’

  ‘That�
��s not what I mean, crusader. You see, if you kill me you die. You all die.’

  ‘What are you talking about?!’

  ‘Attached to my heart is a transponder; call it my insurance policy. You didn’t think Sigurd and I would be stupid enough to not have insurance policies, did you? In short, if my heart stops beating, this building explodes. Do you know how much C4 is packed inside these walls and attached to the supporting pillars? If I die this little device will send out a signal, and that signal will detonate every fucking package of C4 in here, bringing the entire place down in seconds. You and your friends will be blown up or crushed, as will the thousands of people downstairs. Tell me, Zakaria, do you really want the blood of that many innocent souls on your hands, for the sake of just one life? Do you?’

  Zakaria’s hands started to shake; it was as if his muscles were trying to contain the immensity of the volcanic pressure of Vesuvius on the eve of its eruption.

  ‘No … no … NO!’ he roared.

  Hrothgar chuckled darkly, keeping his eyes locked into Zakaria’s and injecting his mamba poison into Zakaria’s mind and soul through the medium of this invisible conduit.

  ‘Go on. Cut my chest open right now to see if I’m bluffing.’

  Hrothgar slackened his grip on his axe with his left hand, and raised his right hand, palm up, to his chest.

  ‘Here crusader, I’ll even take this bulletproof vest off for you. I’m sure your sword is sharp enough to cut through my sternum to have a look inside.’

  ‘You … you…’ Zakaria croaked, his voice hoarse with pent-up wrath and a crippling frustration.

  ‘What are you going to do? Take my head off and sign the death warrants of all of your friends and all the innocent people downstairs? Or will you do the sensible thing and lower that fucking sword and let me walk away?’

  Zakaria gulped down a slow, dry swallow of emptiness, trying to overcome the anger that was shaking him to his very core, the wrath that was as a seismic force rocking a great skyscraper. He was beyond words now; he could not communicate the frustration that was boiling his blood within his arteries and veins. He had waited so long for this moment, so very long – and now the culmination, the finale of everything had been snatched so cruelly from within his grasp.

  ‘Your choice, Zakaria. Make it … make it now. Make it NOW!’ Hrothgar roared, spittle flying from his lips and blood pumping from his wounds, while hellfire raged an unearthly inferno in his eyes. ‘Do it!’ he howled again. ‘Make your choice! Make your choice, crusader! MAKE YOUR FUCKING CHOICE!’

  Zakaria’s hands were trembling with the violence of night leaves shaken by a storm-driven gale. He drew his sword back from Hrothgar’s throat, pausing for a split-second with maddening indecision.

  It was just enough of a hesitation for the Viking. In that nanosecond he abruptly tightened his grip on his axe, whipping it up and out of Zakaria’s temporarily loosened grasp, and with a vicious, trap-snap blow he slammed it into the side of the knight’s helm. The axe crunched through the steel and smashed into Zakaria’s skull, burying itself in his head. Hrothgar held both his axe and his gaze firmly in place, his eyes locked with fervent focus on Zakaria’s seeing eye, watching that single orb rolling up into the top of its socket as his opponent’s limbs became limp. Zakaria’s hand opened and his sword clattered on the floor, but Hrothgar did not look down; instead, he kept his eyes on Zakaria’s as the huge man’s knees buckled beneath him and his torso slumped. His head lolled on his neck, with only the deeply buried axe, still gripped tight by Hrothgar, holding it upright.

  Finally, Hrothgar moved. He released his grip on the axe haft and watched as Zakaria’s body crumpled to the floor, limp as a clubbed fish. He stared for a while at it, with the weapon protruding obscenely from the armoured head as if it were some sort of grody bionic deformity.

  ‘You gullible idiot,’ he whispered to Zakaria. ‘Did you really think we’d be suicidal enough to fill this building with C4?’

  Then he reached down, picked up Zakaria’s sword and strode into the red-pulsing shadows.

  ***

  On the other side of the wall of rubble Ranomi and Njinga had already fled; their part in this mission was over, and although Zakaria should have been with them at this point, they trusted that he would be able to deal with Hrothgar on his own and then make his way to the rendezvous point for their exit.

  Ranomi was still in her rhinoceros form, while Njinga was running alongside her in her combat suit, carrying an M-16 from one of Joao’s fallen soldiers. Both were bleeding, wounded and breathing hard, with only their final reserves of strength pushing them through the fog of battle-fatigue that was making their limbs more leaden with every step, and sapping what little energy they still possessed, each beastwalker feeling as if she was encased in a living cocoon of greedy, sucking mosquitoes, draining her of life as she struggled onwards.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Njinga urged, her voice cracking. ‘We gotta move, we gotta move!’

  Their exit point was two floors below, where their inside contact, the Cambodian janitor, had strung a zipline from this building across to the next one. Via the zipline the Rebels would land on the balcony of an apartment they had rented out. From there they would race up to the rooftop of that skyscraper, and again take another zipline – this one much longer, at over three hundred metres – over an entire city block to another apartment building, in the basement of which they had two getaway cars and a few getaway motorcycles ready to go. The ziplines had only just been put up this evening, before authorities could notice their presence; Njinga prayed that they had been constructed in time.

  They rounded a corner, whereafter a long, empty corridor was splayed out before them, but after they had taken a few steps into it both felt the familiar tingling that revealed the presence of another beastwalker.

  ‘Damn, thank goodness,’ Njinga said, exhaling a sigh of relief. ‘Zakaria made it. Come on, let’s…’ She trailed off as she saw a familiar figure step out on shaky limbs from around the far corner. The acquaintanceship of that hulking figure, however, was not of the positive kind.

  ‘Time to die, whores,’ Joao Pelembe rasped, dark blood dribbling from his mouth and dripping from his chin as he swayed and lurched like an inebriated lush. He was back in his human form, barefoot and shirtless but wearing combat trousers and a bulletproof vest. A throbbing lust for violent retribution shone like a dope fiend’s desperation for a hit in his eyes, and in his blood-slick hands were the instruments via which he intended to exact his vengeance: in his right was one of his Desert Eagle pistols, and in his left a rocket-propelled grenade.

  ‘Fuck that,’ Njinga growled, raising her M-16, taking rapid aim and then squeezing the trigger. The distance between them was a mere thirty yards; even though Joao was wearing a bulletproof vest, it would be easy enough for her to get a shot or two aimed at his head on target, and that was all that was needed to deal with him.

  The thundering chatter of automatic assault rifle fire, however, was not the sound that came from the rifle. Instead, there was only an impotent click and a refusal of the trigger mechanism to engage, accompanied by a calamitous gushing of icy panic through Njinga’s entire system; the weapon, at this crucial moment, had jammed.

  ‘I’m gon’ fill you bodies wi’ hot bullets,’ Joao growled, leering demonically at them through the red-tinged gloom, ‘an’ then I’m gon’ fuck you while you dyin’, so the last thing y’ ever feel is me big cock in you pussy, an’ the las’ thing you ever see is m’ grinnin’ face when I’m cummin’ inside you.’

  As Njinga threw down the jammed rifle and scrambled for her sidearm, Joao raised his Desert Eagle and started firing, laughing maniacally as he did. The heavy rounds slammed into her chest, torso and shoulders, each bullet punching her with the force of a strongman swinging a sledgehammer. Although her armoured combat suit deflected the rounds, the impact of them hitting it was enough to knock her off her feet and leave her stunned.

  Ranomi bellowed wi
th fury and launched herself into a charge – a charge with which she intended, finally, to end her adversary’s life. He, however, was determined to do the same to her, and, realising the futility of shooting a charging rhinoceros with a handgun, even one as powerful as a Desert Eagle, he tossed the weapon aside, dropped down onto his knees and swung the RPG up onto his shoulder, taking aim at Ranomi’s barrelling form. While pistol rounds wouldn’t stop her, a rocket-propelled grenade certainly would, and he had plenty of time to take aim to make sure that his shot was on target, the rocket-propelled grenade guaranteed to turn her head and most of the front half of her body into a grisly mess of pulverised meat and shattered bone.

  ‘Fuck you, bitch,’ he hissed as he moved to fire the RPG.

  That was when a jackhammer-pounding boom of a semi-automatic combat shotgun blasted its cannonade through the corridors. The first shot took Joao in his side, and the slug smashed through the poorly protected flank of his bulletproof vest and tore an anarchically destructive passage through his torso. The shock of this caused him to drop his RPG before he could fire it. The next projectile slammed into his left thigh, shattering his femur into a few dozen shards before exiting his left leg and mushrooming in his right. The next ripped his whole right foot off, and the one after that destroyed his left shoulder. The next one tore a football-sized chunk out of his buttocks, but he was already too far gone to even feel that shot. The final slug, squeezed off only two seconds after the first had been fired, hit him in the side of his skull, and before the thunderous report of the shot had even echoed down the corridor Joao Pelembe’s entire head had disappeared. All that was left was a gruesome mess of meat and shattered white bone, and jets of arterial blood spurting up from the red ruin of his neck and throat. His mutilated, blood-gushing corpse flopped to the floor, and Ranomi skidded to a halt just in front of it.