by J M Hemmings
William chuckled and squeezed Ricky’s shoulder playfully.
‘Well, just between you and I, there may have been a few cosmetic surgical procedures over the years,’ he said with a wink and a smile.
‘You old dog!’ Ricky whooped. ‘So that’s how you’ve kept those looks!’
At this both men roared with laughter, and with a smile William draped an arm over Ricky’s shoulder and led his friend over to the chess table.
‘Just as we left it from last time, my friend. I have a feeling this session is going to be the one that finally ends this battle.’
‘Yeah, yeah, pal. And it’s gonna be your king stuck in checkmate, I personally guarantee that!’
‘By the way, I thought you might fancy a tipple,’ said William as he hauled out the whiskey bottle.
Ricky’s jaw dropped at the sight of it, and William’s eyes sparkled with unabashed glee.
‘Jesus Christ Ben, is that what I think it is?’
‘Thirty-year-old single malt, yes. Let me check the label quickly … yes, yes it most certainly is!’
‘Oh my God Ben, this is freakin’ insane! What’s the occasion? Has one of those fine young dames finally ensnared you with her feminine wiles?’
William chuckled.
‘No, nothing like that, Ricky, just that…’ He paused as a stab of pain sank its burning wasp sting into his throat at the anticipation of telling his friend that this would be the last time that he would ever see him.
‘Uh, just that what, Ben?’
‘I, er, nothing my friend, nothing,’ William stammered, lacking the courage to break the news to Ricky. ‘I was just clearing out my liquor cabinet, you see. I’m planning on giving up boozing altogether soon, you know, pursuit of this eternal youth thing I’ve got going and all that. So I thought that before I put down the bottle for good, I’d share this special rarity with you.’
Ricky grinned with childlike delight, his bristly cheeks ruddy with joy.
‘You sure picked the right guy to share it with, pal!’ he spluttered, unable to contain his excitement.
‘Well what are we waiting for?’ William asked, desperately trying to conceal the sadness that was lodged tight his throat, like a jagged stone. ‘Let me fetch the tumblers and we can get this battle underway.’
A few minutes later the two friends were engaged in a joyous conversation about shared reminiscences as they savoured the dry, smooth decadence of the vintage whiskey. Just as William was about to position his knight and set up a five-move trap, though, another of his personalised ringtones cut through their conversation.
‘Christ, who’s bothering me now?’ he complained with a sigh of exasperation. He answered the call and spoke for a while, and then turned to Ricky. ‘It’s my mechanic. He’s sorted my bike out sooner than I’d thought. Listen, I need to pick it up before we drink any more of this fine scotch. If I leave right now, I’ll be back in around an hour. Will you be all right here on your own, mate?’
‘Sure Ben, although I can’t promise that there’ll be much of this fine scotch left when you get back! But yeah go on, go get your ride, I’ll be here when you get back.’
William gathered up his things and strolled over to the kitchen, where he covertly slipped his revolver into his pocket when Ricky’s head was turned.
‘I’ll see you in an hour,’ William said as he walked out of the apartment.
At the table Ricky finished off the final sip of his glass of whiskey, and he then stood up to stretch his legs. He ambled around the apartment, enjoying the mild buzz of fresh inebriation as he admired the expansive collection of antiques, books and artworks.
‘Christ, look at all this stuff! I’m surprised Ben’s collected so much crazy shit in the few years that we’ve been on this planet,’ he mumbled to himself as he carefully removed a Zulu assegai from its wall mount. ‘Jesus, I wonder if this thing ever killed anybody over there in Afric—’ He jumped with fright and dropped the assegai on the floor as a ringtone cut with accusatory suddenness through the silence. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, ‘perfect timing, as usual!’
He shuffled over to the bookshelf, picked up Hernández’s phone, and answered the call. ‘Hello, Ben’s phone.’ His voice was met with a few seconds of silence and then a curious beep. ‘Yo, hello? Anybody there? Hello? Hey, is this a prank call or some shit?’ There was another strange beep, and then the call ended abruptly. ‘Sheesh, some people,’ Ricky sighed as he placed the phone back on the shelf and shuffled over to the kitchen.
***
As William walked into his building, an unexpected surge of anxious panic hit him, and with frantic hands he patted the back pocket of his jeans, sighing with relief as he felt the little bulge there: the packet of white heroin he had just purchased.
He almost started drooling as he thought about the high that awaited; sweet oblivion, a slow-motion swan dive off the precipice of the present into a land of soft clouds and low gravity, soaked all the while in the warmth of an all-loving sun deity. He stopped as he reached the stairs, pausing to breathe in and compose himself; it would not do to get too excited about the hit, not yet. He knew how preoccupied his mind would get when it came to the anticipation of a high, so he concocted a hasty plan to get the heroin out of his pocket and into a safe spot in the apartment as soon as he stepped inside, so he could get back to his chess game. And then, later, he would lose himself in oblivion … and then Ben Young would be erased from existence.
It would be a process, of course – a new city, a new apartment, a new name, a new identity, and all the bureaucratic hassle and monetary expense that came with such things, especially when all of it had to be forged and counterfeited – but he had been putting it off for far too long now. Indeed, he had lingered for such a dangerously extended period of time in this identity and this space that he wondered how it was that the Huntsmen had not yet caught up with him. Certainly, since he had started using heroin again, after years of being clean, he had started to get sloppy with things like secrecy, alertness, thoroughness … and being who he was, what he was, any sort of carelessness with these sorts of things could have lethal consequences.
On a purely rational level he understood, of course, that he could not continue this downward spiral, that he could not allow opioids to seize complete control of his life again. Not after the havoc they had wreaked before, and especially not with the Huntsmen on the verge of picking up his scent.
They will find me, and indeed, with Hernández on my tail here, they may already have; there’s no way I can continue evading them. I’ve been too careless recently, far too bloody careless. Well, no more of that. I’ll just have this one last hit, just one more to ease the pain … and then I’ll go. One final goodbye to my medicine, then I’ll get back on top of things.
When William reached the flight of stairs leading up to his floor, though, he realised that something was dreadfully wrong. As he paused for a moment to analyse the situation, the first stirrings of adrenalin began scraping their fiery bristles along the inside of his veins and arteries. His enhanced senses sprang immediately into action; his acute sense of smell quickly informed him of the presence of enemies, although their diluted scent did not place them too close at this moment. With an anxious glance up and down the dingy hallway to make sure he was alone, he dashed over and turned off the passage lights before stripping off his clothes, which he hid behind a bin before transforming into his tiger form.
As soon as he shifted into his animal form his brain was inundated with a glut of data, with his super-senses flooding his mind with a deluge of detailed information. His precision-dialled sense of hearing picked up the sounds of the elderly couple wheezing behind their door at the end of the hall, and the moans, gasps and grunts of a porn video came to him through two sets of walls, originating from a young lawyer’s apartment. An argument between two lovers from two floors up rang in his ears as clearly as if it were happening alongside him.
Filtering out these irrelevant
distractions, he crept up the staircase on his tiger paws, his ears pricked and his eyes peeled in the gloom, his cat senses illuminating every shadow with their night-vision capabilities. He paused on the stairs before he reached his floor, sniffing at the air and in a nanosecond drinking in the symphony of scents that filled this place, instantly dissecting and analysing every molecule that passed through his olfactory filter. Like a gold prospector sifting through a pan of dense river sediment, he picked his way through the scents of a hundred different foods – some cooked, some raw, and some in varying stages of decomposition – as well as the ubiquitous odour of rats, mice and cockroaches and their waste. He kept on sifting and sorting, sorting and sifting, picking his way through the myriad smells, trying to find that elusive scent that would allow him to hone in on the location of his enemies.
In terms of more human smells, he encountered the rankness of unwashed clothing and bedding, as well as the musky and sour smells of sweat, urine, faeces, vomit, menstrual blood, semen, and vaginal fluids, and wafting above all of this was a cocktail of aromatic perfumes and colognes, all scattered throughout the building, some mere traces of presences now twenty years gone. While mentally picking through this landfill-like miasma of smells, though, something specific jumped out at him and he paused abruptly in his efforts: the unmistakable smell of fresh human blood.
A lot of it.
The instant William detected this last scent, a wave of panic hit him, and he quickly transformed back into his human form. He hurried back down the stairs, dressed himself with alacrity, and then pulled out his revolver, which he cocked and readied for action. Flattening himself against the wall, he crept up to his apartment, his heart hammering and his breath coming in short, shallow jots. Pausing outside the door, which had been left slightly ajar, he sniffed tentatively at the air. His sense of smell was nowhere near as accurate now as it was when he was in his tiger form, but it was still far more developed than any human’s. There was no hint that an intruder was currently present, but William nonetheless retained his vigilance. With a wordless shout he kicked open the door and swept his revolver in an arc over the space, his eyes taking in every nook and cranny as he processed the visual details at light speed. There was nobody there but Ricky sitting at the chess table, his back to William. Sitting still … ever so still.
Deathly still.
Blood surged with panicked violence through William’s temples, and liquid heat drenched his body as he dropped the revolver and bolted over to the table.
‘Ricky!’ he screamed, his voice cracking. ‘Say something, oh Jesus, say something!’
It was as he reached his friend that he noticed the trickle of dark crimson running from under the unkempt grey curls on Ricky’s head, trickling down the back of his neck. With horror, William’s eyes followed the blood trail up through the hair to a single bullet wound at the base of his friend’s skull. With tears welling up in his eyes, he forced himself to peer over Ricky’s shoulder, and at once saw the unspeakable abomination of gore sprayed across the chessboard from the projectile’s exit wound. Ricky’s hand still clutched a glass of whiskey; he had never even known what had hit him. This thought did little to comfort William, for once more he had seen a beloved friend die, and he had had yet another companion taken from him. This time, though, William’s friend had died because of his actions, and this realisation unleashed a staggering wave of nausea. Unable to hold back, he dropped to his knees and emptied the contents of his stomach onto the floor, heaving and coughing the last of it out as tears streamed down his cheeks.
‘Ricky,’ he sobbed, ‘I’m so sorry my friend, I’m so sorry. Christ, I never even had the chance to say a proper goodbye. I’m so sorry, so very, very sorry…’
There was little time for mourning or remorse, for through his weeping and warring emotions William detected something else amiss; a foreign entity was entering the building. In fact, there were many entities entering the building. Hostile entities.
‘Huntsmen!’ he half-growled, half-gasped.
He sprang to his feet and raced over to his writing desk to turn on his multiple CCTV monitors, and immediately saw that eight heavily armed men dressed in SWAT riot armour had stormed the front door and were charging up the stairs. Two of them split off from the main contingent and crawled out onto the fire escape to cut off any possibility of flight via that exit.
It was a matter of a minute, maybe sooner, before they would reach him. He cursed his own stupidity in bringing Hernández’s phone here instead of hiding it in a distant location and checking it later; this lack of foresight had cost Ricky his life, and may well be about to cost him his own. Regardless, he had to focus on the immediate present; once he had escaped this life-or-death situation he could try to rectify the mistakes he had made, but for the moment staying alive was his first priority.
In a brief flurry of panic, he considered transforming into his tiger form and leaping out of the window. He would be injured by the impact of the six-storey drop, but would most likely survive intact enough to escape with his life, albeit with a broken bone or two. He quickly discarded this idea, for the Huntsmen were ruthlessly efficient; his windows would almost certainly be covered by snipers who would put a bullet through his skull the second he parted the heavy drapes.
No, the only way out of this was up … somehow.
He snatched his revolver from the floor and dashed over to his bedside table, where he ripped out the top drawer and grabbed the small waterproof package that contained his collection of passports and credit cards for his various identities. It was attached to a strong elastic collar, so that if he had to transform into his tiger form these vital documents would remain safely secured around his neck. William knew that he could never return to this apartment, and that he would probably have to flee the country as well – if he survived the next two minutes.
With his pulse racing and adrenalin storming through his veins he slipped the collar on and burst out of the door … and froze immediately, finding himself face-to-face with three Huntsmen troops, who had just got to the top of the stairs, and who now had their M-16 assault rifles aimed squarely at his chest.
‘Don’t fuckin’ move, you piece of shit,’ one of them growled, his voice muffled by his SWAT mask. ‘We’ve got you, Gisborne. Drop the gun, kick it over to me, and get the fuck down on your knees.’
William knew what would happen to him if these men took him alive … and he wasn’t about to let that happen.
‘Okay,’ he said calmly, ‘just relax, just relax, everything’s cool, everything’s—’
Without aiming he fired his revolver from the hip, and the booming clap of the shot – which missed – was enough to make the Huntsmen jump back with fright, giving William just enough of a gap to dive to the floor. In response, the Huntsmen soldiers unleashed a barrage of M-16 fire. The hail of lead tore through the space that William’s head and torso had just occupied, the bullets smashing through walls and doors in billowing plumes of plaster dust and showers of splinters. Lying flat on the ground, William counter-attacked, squeezing off three shots from his eight-shot revolver, with each mighty round resounding like a clap of thunder through the hallway, leaving his ears ringing with a high-pitched whistle. The third shot struck home, and with a stabbing blaze of brief triumph William watched the first of the charging Huntsmen crumple to the floor as the bullet tore through the man’s riot gear and shattered his ribs. He fell back ponderously, bowling over the next trooper, who was just behind him on the narrow staircase. This gave William the split-second gap that he needed, and he jumped to his feet and sprinted like a man possessed up the staircase to the left, with a burst of hot lead peppering the walls mere inches behind him.
The shouts of the Huntsmen troops behind William echoed through the corridors as he raced up each successive flight of stairs, his heart thumping frenetically in his chest and his muscles aflame with the exertion of his panicked flight. Just as he reached the top floor, a burst of gunfire erupted
from his right as one of the Huntsmen troops, who had gone up the fire escape, fired on him through a window. As the glass exploded in a shower of diamond-glistening shards, William spun about on his heels and fired off three shots at the man, who dropped to the floor to take cover.
‘Shit!’ William cursed through his panting. ‘One shot left!’
Without giving his opponent the opportunity to fire on him again, he dived across the hallway and scrambled up the narrow stairwell that led to the roof. As he did, an uncanny tingling stirred abruptly in his bones, but his inner tempest of adrenalin quickly overrode that sensation. Just behind him the two Huntsmen troops were scrambling through the broken window into the building, hot on his heels. Hoping to slow his attackers, he poked his arm out into the passage and blindly squeezed off one last blast of wrathful thunder. A howl of pain announced that the chance shot had struck home, but William took no time to relish in his luck. He flung his gun away, and with all his might he heaved the steel door closed as the snare drum pitter-patter of combat boots swarmed across the passage behind him.
Before he could lock the deadbolt in place, though, a heavy shoulder barged the door half-open and almost sent William sprawling, but he recovered from the initial shock with a guttural roar, throwing his body with furious violence against the door in retaliation, in the process sending his adversary tumbling back from the impact. He braced himself against a stair behind him, locking his muscles tight as another one of the troops crashed against the door. Again William almost lost his footing, and the door opened slightly, but he forced it shut once more, crying out from the burning effort, but this time he managed to slip the deadbolt into place. As he ran up the stairs to the roof, booming thumps followed him up the stairs, the sounds of the Huntsmen hurling their bodies against the door; it would only be a matter of seconds before the bolt gave way.