Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘The Mighty One will be most appreciative of your efforts,’ Mr Li said, beaming a glowing smile at the girls. They did not return his smile.

  Mr Li explained the exact details of the two missions that Sigurd had assigned to AH-1513 and AH-477 respectively. The girls, grim and stony-faced, made notes about the specifics of each mission on their phones, communicating only by nodding and grunting affirmations. After Mr Li had explained everything, and the priest had finished weaving the details of their respective missions into a religious crusade for each of them, Mr Li smiled and stood up as if to leave the room.

  Hrothgar, however, suddenly shot out an arm and grabbed Mr Li’s forearm, gripping it tight with his iron rod-like fingers.

  ‘Going somewhere, my friend?’ he asked with a vicious grin.

  Mr Li, alarmed, tried to jerk his arm out of Hrothgar’s grasp.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?!’ he stammered, his voice tinged with a sudden gush of both anger and anxiety. ‘We’ve concluded our business talks, so there is no more reason to be sitting in this room. Get your hands off me!’

  Hrothgar jumped up and shoved Mr Li back into his chair.

  ‘Sit the fuck down, shorty,’ he growled. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

  ‘Need I remind you of the two products who are in this room, across the table?’ Mr Li hissed, white-hot rage flaring in his black eyes. ‘If you raise one more finger against me, they will end your miserable life this instant! It is a sin of the highest order to lay hands upon the Patriarch!’

  ‘Not when the Patriarch has fallen so low as to become a servant of the Evil One,’ the priest said coolly, his eyes aglow with satanic menace.

  A mad flush of abrupt terror blazed across Mr Li’s face.

  ‘What!? You … you … what!?’ he gasped, stuttering and stammering with disbelief as AH-477 and AH-1513 raised their pistols and aimed them at his head.

  Outside the room the silence was shattered with a clattering hail of automatic gunfire, undercut by the baritone booming of a combat shotgun. Then, as quickly as it had started, the firefight ended.

  ‘What, what the hell, what?! What the fuck just happened?!’ Mr Li shrieked.

  Icy sweat was beading on his forehead and running down his chubby cheeks, and his hands were shaking with the violence of raw panic.

  ‘That was the sound of your protector being eliminated, Mr Li,’ the priest said. ‘You see, she was also possessed by the Evil One.’

  ‘That’s, you, you’re crazy, you’ve gone fucking insane! You fucking liar, you—’

  Hrothgar smashed a fist across Mr Li’s jaw in a brutal right cross, sending him tumbling over the back of the chair where he crumpled into a foetal ball on the floor, sobbing as blood began to trickle out of his mouth.

  ‘Ow! You … you b-, broke my j-, j-, jaw! Ow! Ow!’ he whimpered. After these pathetic words had dribbled out of his split-open lips he spat weakly, and a gooey slick of blood with two broken yellow teeth in it stained the floor.

  ‘I told you this liar would say such things,’ the priest said with grave sincerity to AH-477 and AH-1513. ‘You two may leave the room and begin preparations for your holy crusades. As for this servant of the Evil One, this devil from the underworld who has taken over the body of what was once the Patriarch … we will deal with him.’

  ‘Yes master,’ both of the assassins said in unison before they hurried out of the room.

  The priest stepped calmly up to the door and locked it behind them after they had left.

  ‘You … you…’ rasped Mr Li impotently, his lips flapping and mouth gasping mechanically like an air-drowning fish. He spat out another mouthful of blood-streaked saliva, and another broken tooth bounced across the stone floor.

  ‘Your era is over, uncle.’

  This simple declaration was as plain as it was violent. It was at this moment that the severity of Mr Li’s current position began to dawn upon him. Gripping the edges of the chair, he hauled himself up onto his knees, sweating, panting and gasping as he drooled out a slick mess of blood and spittle. He stumbled over to his nephew – the priest – and fell at the man’s feet, gripping at his robes and sobbing.

  ‘Whatever these Russian snakes have p-, p-, promised you, I’ll give you d-, double! No, no, t-, t-, triple! Wait, wait, quadruple! You know I’ve got it, you know, you know, you know, you know I do!’

  The priest shook his head and stared down at Mr Li with an expression that was pure contempt. Sigurd, beaming out his vulture’s grin, rumbled out an interjection.

  ‘Remember the deal. We want the two assassins we’ve already ordered, and four adult models.’

  ‘And you shall have them,’ the priest said calmly, before turning to speak again to Mr Li. ‘They offered me something that you would never give me, uncle.’

  Desperation seized the older man, and like a cerebral parasite it hijacked the electrical signals that controlled his muscles, causing his limbs to jerk, stiffen and flop alternately. Somewhere in this tangle of spasms and weeping yet another signal misfired, and he lost control of his bladder. A patch of warm, humiliating wetness spread across his crotch and his upper right thigh.

  ‘I told you, I’ll triple, no, quadruple whatever sum they’ve offered, I’ll do it! F-, f-, five times the amount! Will that do?! Six! No, no, s-, s-, seven! Seven!’

  Unmoved by his uncle’s pleading – and, indeed, rather disgusted by it – the priest simply shook his head and crossed his arms. Cackling out a dry laugh, he glared down at the sobbing man at his feet.

  ‘No.’ This single syllable was as a hefty club striking Mr Li’s skull. ‘You see, I don’t need your money, uncle. Hell, I’ll be a billionaire in a few short years anyway. There is something that I want more than money, though. Way more than plain, vulgar cash … and that, uncle, is power. That’s what I want. And that’s what I have now. More power than I ever could have dreamed of. The power of a fucking god. This company is mine now. From this moment on, I’m the majority shareholder.’

  ‘Impossible! My s-, son, the company will go to him when I die, you know that! It will never go to you! N-, n-, never!’

  ‘I know that. But there’s a clause in the contract that maybe you’ve forgotten about: should all of the members of your immediate family somehow expire, both the traditions of our culture and the legally binding contract stipulate that the next in line for control is … me. That’s why your son, his wife, your two grandchildren and your wife have all just perished in a freak automobile “accident”. Their SUV “crashed” on the freeway just outside of Shanghai. There was a fire in the vehicle, and for some reason the central locking system “malfunctioned”, and they were all trapped inside the vehicle as it burned. What a tragedy, and what an awful and painful way for an entire family to die … but what fortunate timing for me, don’t you think?’

  Every drop of blood drained at once from Mr Li’s face.

  ‘You’re my nephew! My fucking nephew! How could you?!’ he screeched, blood and spittle flying from his broken mouth. It seemed that he had finally found a sliver of courage within the lump of jellyfish sludge into which he had begun to melt.

  This little spark of resistance was quickly extinguished, though, as Hrothgar silenced him with a vicious kick to his ribs, while Sigurd looked on with remorseless eyes, cold as polished zircon.

  ‘Exactly, uncle. That’s all I ever would have been. Your fucking nephew, having to be content with little table scraps from this enterprise while your family took the lion’s share. Did you really think I’d settle for that?! My family has lived in the shadow of yours for two generations now, even though General Li was as much my mother’s grandfather as he was your grandfather! You see, my ambition was far greater than simply accepting that sort of lot in life – that of a lower relative, bowing and scraping before your fucking family, even though we share the same venerated ancestor! I couldn’t possibly settle for it. No, no. I wanted it all. And now … now, I have it.’

  ‘You … you...
’ Mr Li gasped, choking on his rage and terror and helplessness. A burning, urgent pain shot through his guts; now that he had already suffered the indignity of wetting himself, it seemed that involuntarily voiding his bowels was next.

  ‘I’ve had enough of your whining, uncle,’ the priest muttered. He turned to Hrothgar and spoke. ‘Silence him.’

  Hrothgar nodded. With his left hand he lifted Mr Li up by his collar, and with his right he planted a savage uppercut onto Mr Li’s chin, hurling him instantly into the all-encompassing blackness of deep unconsciousness.

  It was dark when Mr Li awoke. Pain throbbed with dull persistence inside his head, sending its seismic waves rippling out from the epicentre, located on the right side of his jaw, where Hrothgar had broken it. Dried blood cracked and flaked from the edges of his swollen mouth when he opened it, and a bitter chill had soaked through his skin and had burrowed like a legion of termites into the very marrow of his bones. Peering through the gloom, he found that he was clad only in his underwear. Ants were crawling all over his flabby gut, and some other sort of insect was biting at the skin of his thick right calf. He reached down and swatted feebly at the pest as he tried to sit up, shivering uncontrollably against the cold, his broken teeth chattering like slipping gears in his mouth.

  With blurry vision he tried to scrutinise details in the darkness, but it was as impenetrable as the dense foliage around him. Fear saturated every cell of his body, and panic lashed its whip against his bare back, alternately freezing and scalding his skin in turns. Mustering up what seemed to require a herculean amount of effort, he crawled on his hands and knees through the damp carpet of leaves to the nearest tree. Gripping its trunk with unsteady, shivering hands, he managed to eventually raise himself up to his feet, after which he leaned against the rough bark for a few moments, grateful for the stability it offered. As an icy breeze whipped through the forest, he tried to peer up through the canopy of leaves above, but he could see nothing but shadows and blotches of inky blackness. He listened intently to the symphony of the wild night, battling to sift through the shrill whine of billions of insects, the radar-blip beeps of bats, and the haunting hoots of owls for some sign of a more comforting human sound.

  What then cut through the night orchestra, however, froze the blood in his veins and caused his knees to crumple instantaneously beneath him: the roar of a bear. It was just upwind from him.

  He clamped a clammy hand over his mouth to suppress the scream that was desperately struggling to escape from it.

  Run, run, flee, now! NOW!

  Somehow strength came flooding into his limbs with the urgency of a glacier collapsing, and Mr Li bolted blindly into the darkness. As he took off, however, another bear roar blasted brassily through the night. This one was immediately to his left. His attempt at flight was as blind as it was ineffectual, for even sprinting at full tilt he could hear the huge beasts crashing through the undergrowth alongside him, running parallel to him at an unrelenting pace. He shrieked and wailed as he ran, tripping and stumbling over roots as thorny branches and clawed vines ripped and slashed at his skin.

  It was then that a blinding and percussive flash exploded somewhere between the centre of his eyes, while a shock wave tore through his body. For a half-second the lurching sensation of being airborne turned his stomach – and then he hit the ground with a slamming impact that expelled all of the air from his lungs. Somehow Mr Li realised, through the daze in which his mind was now swimming, that he had run directly into a tree branch.

  It was as he lay gasping for breath that he saw them, pushing through the screen of boughs and leaves like two ghosts materialising from the aether: two enormous white bears. They looked like polar bears, but how was that possible? Two polar bears in a forest in the Hengduan mountains in China…

  Mr Li tried to scream, but his empty, winded lungs allowed nothing but a plaintive wheeze to escape from between his lips. The bears walked up to him, staring coldly at him with their obsidian eyes all the while. He whimpered and sobbed as they sniffed at his body with what seemed to be a morbid curiosity.

  And then they started to eat him.

  One bear gripped his right hand between its massive jaws, and the other bit down on his left foot. With a sickening crunch the beasts clamped their mouths shut in unison, breaking his bones as their hydraulic-press jaws and dagger teeth tore through skin, muscle and sinew. A burst of agonising pain shot up his arm and leg, and through the gloom Mr Li saw that his hand and foot had both been bitten off, and that the bears were chewing on them. Air rushed back into his lungs and he screamed hoarsely with maddened, horrified desperation … again, and again, and again.

  The bears did not care. After they had swallowed his right hand and left foot, they took turns to bite off and devour his remaining appendages, ignoring his screams and howls of anguish all the while. When they were done with his limbs they wandered off into the darkness, leaving him to convulse and wail in the night.

  Time oozed by like the dragged-out minutes of a nightmare, and through the silently howling wall of pain Mr Li heard footsteps approaching, crunching ever so softly upon the mess of dead leaves.

  ‘Hello uncle.’

  The half-eaten man looked up and tried to say something, but all he could manage was a pitiful gasping.

  ‘Let’s insert the bile extraction tube,’ another voice said, this horrifying suggestion delivered with clinical impartiality.

  ‘Yolkov…’ Mr Li whispered hoarsely.

  ‘That’s who you thought I was,’ Sigurd said. ‘But when you reach the gates of hell, tell them that Sigurd Haraldsson sent you there.’

  Hrothgar pulled a carpet knife and a length of dirty rubber tubing from his coat.

  ‘Not quite ideal surgical tools, but it doesn’t matter, does it? I’m sure we can get to his bile duct with these.’

  ‘I’m sure we can,’ the priest smirked.

  ‘No … please, no…’ Mr Li wheezed.

  ‘Come now uncle,’ the priest said, his tone mockingly jovial. ‘The bile of a rich, powerful man is potent medicine! It’s far stronger than mere bear bile. You’ll be providing someone with a wonderful and wealthy future. It is a worthy sacrifice, is it not?’ The priest’s expression then hardened into a carved demon mask, and he spoke one last, icy sentence before turning and walking off into the gloom. ‘Goodbye uncle. See you in hell.’

  Then the cutting began.

  8

  NATHAN

  30th June 2020. Elderwood Plantation mansion, near Napoleonville, Louisiana, USA

  Two figures strolled along the mile-long avenue, which was lined on either side by sprawling two-hundred-year-old oaks. In the expanse of leaves cloaking the ancient trees, the golden light of the late afternoon sun danced and shimmered, its brilliance draped over the boughs and across the trunks, and gilded upon every leaf; the toil of a detail-obsessed artist working in bronze and copper.

  One of the figures traversing the falling dusk walked with a cane in his hand and a slight limp; a persistent souvenir from a war fought many decades ago on foreign soil. The other hopped and skipped on stumpy legs and giggled with delight at the sight of fireflies igniting their magic glow and drifting their neon green luminosity in languid paths through the whispering grass. Up ahead, the lights of the three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mansion began to flicker on, warm tungsten beacons at the end of the darkening path.

  The child looked up at his grandfather, and sudden fear flashed across his face.

  ‘Grandpa, grandpa!’

  It was the sound of the unbridled urgency of burning childhood curiosity; the unwavering faith in the mouths of the elders to utter nothing less than the incontrovertible truth of all things. The old man stopped walking and leaned on his narwhal-tusk cane, taking his weight off his aching left leg. The embedded shrapnel shards were becoming agitated in their pockets of scar tissue; the length of this walk had been a tad too ambitious.

  ‘What’s got yer goat, young Samuel?’

&nb
sp; The crisp smoothness of his tone, delivered in a rich Southern accent, belied both the man’s seventy-three years and his penchant for pipe tobacco.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  At five years of age the boy was too young to know that, in males of the human species at least, and especially with the rigorous honour culture of this particular region and his class of society, admission of fear was considered shameful; this unspoken code had not yet been cemented in this pliable mind. A solid hand, thick and wiry, ruffled the boy’s ash-blonde hair with reassuring gentleness and sympathetic compassion.

  ‘Now what out there is frightening you, Sam? These itsy bitsy fireflies, floating around like lil’ ol’ Christmas lights? The buzz a’ the straggler bees in the fruit orchards over there, who’ve forgotten t’ get back t’ their hives? Or—’ The old man ducked and chuckled as a pair of bats, flitting rapidly in haphazard flight paths, zipped past them and hurtled through the avenue. ‘Or is it the bats that’re giving you the willies, little Sam?’

  The boy stood on tiptoes and beckoned with a cupped hand for his grandfather to squat down so that he could whisper in his ear, for he was afraid that to mention his fear too audibly would be to summon it from the dark depths in which it lurked. The old man capitulated to the boy’s demands, and with a creak in his bones and a shot of pain through his knees he bent down low, trying his best to hide the grimace on his face.

  ‘Monsters,’ Sam whispered in as low a tone as he could.

  The old man smiled with reassuring benevolence.

  ‘You don’t really believe in monsters, do you? Who’s been telling you tall tales, now? You mustn’t believe everything people tell you, you know.’

  ‘Well, I…’

  His voice trailed off as he realised that what he was about to admit would incriminate him, and for a few brief seconds a fierce debate raged beneath that thick mop of blonde hair. Fear, of course, won; its immediacy was far closer than the distant threat of punishment for the transgression of certain boundaries.