by J M Hemmings
Then, lurching; an abrupt, sickening sensation.
Falling.
Plummeting.
Accelerating.
Hurtling earthward.
Terminal velocity.
Impact in seven, six, five, four…
‘No! Nooo!’ William screamed as the ground rushed to meet him with its irresistible solidity.
Death in three, two, one, zer—
The instant before impact, William awoke with a violent start.
‘Aurora … Aurora…’
The whisper crept from his lips like a sluggish insect emerging from the dank shadows of a rotting log. Aurora was gone, and no trace of her presence remained. Reality came rushing in with the terrible force of a collapsing skyscraper, and as William came awake his tiger senses immediately flooded his brain with information.
Pain was the first thing his mind registered; bayonet-stabs of agony, lunging and impaling every time he tried to breathe. Broken ribs, he surmised. Some sort of half-nightmare, half-memory started to worm its way through the passageways of his mind, formulating a fragmented image, like a series of half-done puzzles hung with haphazard disarray on the walls of a long and dark corridor, with each disambiguated picture featuring too many missing pieces. William struggled to make sense of what these images meant.
Ricky, with a bullet through his head. Aboubakar, turned traitor. Huntsmen troops, swarming up a stairwell. A gun battle, a rooftop, a bloody fight.
He could remember flashes of something like that, images that seemed to make no sense when he tried to cobble the ragged patches together into some sort of cogent memory in his mind.
Trying to piece together the fragments of memories was proving hopeless, so he focused on the present. He was in a cabin, he could tell that much, and also that it was night. William’s tiger senses began to mould in his mind a fairly complete image of his outer surroundings. Gone was the omnipresent hubbub of New York City; the tireless, smoke-belching machines of humankind did not engage in their ceaseless toil here. No, only the sounds of the deep forest burbled outside, densely alive with glorious chaos. The air was overpoweringly fresh and clean, and the deliciousness of this tree-filtered delicacy was splendidly delightful; in his years in the city, William had become accustomed to the ubiquitousness of foul air – air saturated with the by-products of petrochemical combustion, off-gassed chemical compounds, damp concrete and ever-festering mould and mildew, too-potent perfumes, acrid colognes, and sour refuse piled in eye-melting technicolour mountains of filth that would endure for thousands of years. A million different meals cooking, marinating, rotting … the stink of human bodies packed too close, the pervasive, inescapable wafts of what oozed night and day through the sewers; New York’s concrete intestines, a cancer-riddled digestive tract that choked on the combined piss, shit, vomit, blood, cum, tampons, drugs, condoms, diapers, rotting hair, and sloughed off skin of close to ten million human beings.
It was only now, in this crisp, untainted air, that William remembered what large swathes of the world had once smelled like. Too long had he nested, rat-like, in a cocoon of hedonistic abandon in a garish concrete tomb, punch-drunk on overstimulation and numbed to everything by the three-dimensional cardboard cutout fakery of a 21st century urban existence.
‘God,’ he murmured, drawing in a slow, sumptuous breath, filling his lungs with purifying, life-giving cleanliness. ‘It’s been so long … so very, very long.’
In closer proximity, within the cabin, there were different smells: strong was the sulphurous odour of gunpowder, packed into many bullets, and equally immediate were the subtle but unmistakable scents of cold steel and gun oil; there were weapons here. Elsewhere in the cabin was a miasma of voices, laughing, chatting, joking. None of them were familiar … none except one.
A rich baritone voice, speaking English, but coloured with a North African accent. It was frustratingly familiar, but with his mind still muddled William could not connect voice to memory. An attempt to rise jolted shears of pain through his body, and he suspected that it wasn’t only his ribs that he had broken. While broken bones would heal quickly enough if appropriate care was taken, the agony racking his body was debilitating and impossible to ignore.
A hit … I need one now, right now. I had some … I had some of my special medicine, but where is it? Where the hell is it?
William was hunted, always; this was the primary, overriding condition of his existence. He had to suspect that, as clean as this air was, the environment in which he found himself was hostile. An escape would thus need to be made, regardless of injuries and pain. The hit he needed so badly would have to wait; escape was his first priority. He had no idea how he could have come to be here in his tiger form, but he knew he needed to get out, and get out fast. He shifted into his human form and struggled to his feet, gripping the edge of the nearby desk and wincing with pain. He peered around the room, trying to figure out a plan.
‘One problem at a time old boy, one problem at a time,’ he muttered.
There were some clothes draped over the back of a nearby chair; a plain white tee shirt and jeans. Holding them up, he saw that they were his size; his captors had at least provided these for him. He took the jeans and attempted to slip his legs into them, biting his lip and trying not to cry out from the stabs of pain that accompanied every movement.
The next order of business was to see if there was anything with which he could arm himself. As quietly as he could, he rifled through the desk drawers. There were a few papers and items of stationery, but nothing, unfortunately, that would serve as a weapon.
‘Damn it,’ he hissed.
The throbbing pain in his side was growing more severe, so again his thoughts turned to heroin cravings. Just one hit of his medicine would be able to alleviate this agony. A little hit, just a tiny one…
‘No, no … focus, man, focus,’ he whispered to himself through gritted teeth.
Aside from the sparse furniture the room was empty. His quick search proved fruitless, so he eased himself into the chair, groaning and sweating with the intensity of the pain.
Think, lad, think. How are you going to get yourself out of this one?
A flash of inspiration detonated within his mind, and he probed under the desk, groping around the space into which a chair was supposed to be tucked.
Yes!
Duct-taped there was a machete. William pulled it out and gave it a few test swings to assess its weight and balance. It was no sword, but it was well-made and wickedly sharp, and it would have to do under these circumstances.
As he was practicing a few hacking strokes, the sound of footsteps creaking on the floorboards caught his attention. He limped over to the wall by the door and flattened himself against it, gripping the machete loosely in his right hand, ready to strike rapidly and viciously if necessary. He hit the light switch and plunged the room into blackness, for even though he wasn’t in his tiger form he nonetheless possessed much better night vision than any human. As the doorknob turned, he held his breath, poised to strike, watching with bated breath as a dark-skinned female arm pushed the door open from the outside. Before he could, though, an eerie tingling sizzled across the surface of his skin and burrowed like a thousand microscopic beetles into his flesh. Whoever was coming through the door froze; she felt it too.
‘Put the machete down, William. You’re in no danger here.’
He knew that voice … but from where?
‘Who are you?!’ he demanded. ‘What is this place?!’
Pain savaged his ribs as he spoke, and he hoped that the agony was not coming through in his voice.
‘Put the machete down and we’ll talk.’
‘Answer the questions first, love, then I’ll consider putting it down.’
‘Okay, listen, I’m unarmed an’ I’m alone. Surely your tiger senses are telling you that much?’
‘The alone part, yes. The unarmed part … I’m not sure.’
‘I’ll stick both my hands throu
gh the door to show you, all right?’
William swallowed slowly; a dry tightness throttled his throat from the inside and wicked the moisture from his mouth like hungry sand. Adrenalin sizzled in his core, bursting its firecracker strings through his limbs.
‘All right love. Both hands through the door, nice and slow. As long as they’re empty, I won’t remove ‘em.’ Two arms came through the door. ‘Feet too,’ William insisted.
‘You are thorough, ain’t you?’
‘Do it.’
First one foot, clad in a Converse sneaker, and then another, came through the door.
‘You satisfied now?’
‘Come in then, slowly. Real slowly.’
William kept the machete at the ready as the woman walked into the room, but as soon as he saw who it was the weapon fell from his hands and clattered to the floor.
‘Njinga?!’
She stared intently at William with her liquid chestnut eyes.
‘Now there’s a face I haven’t seen since—’
‘April ‘94,’ he muttered. ‘Yes, I know, I’ve been MIA for over twenty-six years. Christ, over a quarter of a century, and it feels like the bloody blink of an eye, it does. One big messy blur of … well, debauchery, nihilism, crushing despair, sex, drugs, booze, blackouts, half-remembered dreams of reality and hallucinations, all blended into this … this chaos of hopelessness. I’ve been … in the shadows. Deep in the shadows, for a long time now.’
Njinga’s eyes frosted over, and her mouth tightened.
‘You’re a coward,’ she said bluntly. ‘A real fuckin’ coward. You just up an’ ran, ran away an’ hid when we needed you most. An’ part of me feels like we should have just left you to rot, to kill yourself, to get to the very bottom of the downward spiral an’ end it all. But things have reached crisis point; the world, William, is hanging like the last winter leaf on a dying tree … an’ a hurricane is coming.’
William chuckled darkly; a dry, rasping chortle parched of even a drop of humour.
‘And what do you expect me do to about that, love?’ he sneered, his voice caustic. ‘You said it yourself, in not so many words. I’m a fuckup, a dried-out, drugged-up husk of whoever I used to be, whatever I used to be … what you all thought I was, at least. I never really was the hero you all wished I could have been, dreamed I could have been, though. Yeah, maybe I got lucky a few times, but luck was all it really was. I’m not special, and never bloody well have been. I could never live up to the dreams of what the teachers wanted, what they hoped for … because you’re right, I am a coward. I’ve run from everything, every problem I’ve ever had, every challenge that’s ever come my way, in the end. It’s just what I do; don’t you fucking well get it by now? Can’t you understand, after everything you’ve seen? You’re right, for fuck’s sake! I ran in ‘94, I bolted, I gave up! Why the hell did you all waste your time and risk your necks to find me this time? You must have almost killed yourselves, and for what, to dredge me out of a polluted swamp like a drowned, bloated corpse? I know what you’re going to ask of me, and the answer is no. Just … just let me go. Thank you for, for saving my life and everything, but … I can’t help you. I never could. Just let me go and leave me alone. Let me drown, let me fucking drown, please.’
Before Njinga could respond, both her and William sensed the proximity of another of their kind. Zakaria walked into the room, his hulking presence immediately dominating the space. His seeing eye sparkled with delight, and broad and white was the smile stretched across his face when he saw that William was awake.
‘My friend!’ he boomed, his unbridled joy melting the tension that had crisped the air with brittle hoar frost, ‘it is good to see you! Praise to the Great Mother, it is good to see you!’ He scooped William up into a bear hug, but restrained the eagerness of his embrace, lest he injure his friend further. After a brief, gentle hug he stepped back from William, still beaming and gripping him by his shoulders. ‘Twenty-six years, my old friend,’ he rumbled, his smile stretched wide and his eye afire with effervescent joy. ‘Twenty-six long, difficult years. Hope dwindled, sputtered like a weak candle flame against a howling wind … and so many times I thought that single, struggling light would be extinguished. But now, looking into your eyes, feeling the warmth of your presence by my side once again … Great praises be upon the Earth, my brother of blood, mind, heart and soul! Hope burns like a raging bonfire in me once again!’
‘I hate to be the bucket of ice water that douses those flames, Zakaria,’ Njinga muttered sourly, ‘but your boy is about as eager to help us now as he was in April ‘94.’
William’s face fell, and he broke off eye contact with Zakaria, staring guiltily at the ground. Zakaria’s smile crumpled into a deep frown, and his grip slackened on William’s shoulders.
‘Why? Why my brother, why do you not want to return to your rightful place among us? Has Njinga not explained to you the dire severity of the current situation? The desperate urgency of the calamity that is almost upon us?’
‘I told him,’ she said coolly. ‘And he don’t give a shit. You know man, I told you … I told you this whole fuckin’ rescue mission was bullshit. I told you it was a waste of our precious time an’ resources, that it was gonna turn out just like this, with this weak, cowardly dick wanting to run straight back into his fuckin’ rathole, to lose his mind to heroin an’ crack, an’ try to fuck his sorrows away in the pussies of a thousand mortal whores. Jesus fuckin’ Christ, what a fuckin’ waste of time. What a goddamn fuckin’ waste of time.’
The muscles of Zakaria’s jutting jaw were straining against his stubble-rough skin, and as Njinga was finishing off her tirade he began shaking his head.
‘No,’ he said firmly after she fell silent. ‘No. Not after everything we’ve done, after all the sacrifices we’ve made. No.’
‘I’m sorry, my friend,’ William grunted, his eyes downcast. ‘I’m done. I’ve been done with it all for twenty-six years, and I’m as done with it now as I ever was. Don’t imagine that I’ve been living under a rock, either; I know what’s going on. I know how bad it all is … but I realised, a quarter of a century ago, that there was nothing I could do to stop any of it. I realised just how naïve and futile we’d all been in hoping, in imagining that we could change any of it. We’re like ants trying to stand in the path of a bulldozer, mate, like a couple of fucking ants. What’s the point? It’s not all going to end … it’s all already over. The end arrived long ago; we’re in the death throes now. I might as well just live the last few years I’ve got just … just losing myself in whatever ways I can, dulling the pain for a few moments here and there.’
Zakaria’s eye was aglow with something else now; wrath, hot and ugly like an infected wound. His right hand darted out, and he drove his fingers like lion’s teeth into William’s jaw, gripping it with such crushing power that the bone beneath almost splintered. He forced his friend’s face up, compelling him to meet his gaze.
‘No.’
‘Zakaria,’ Njinga began, ‘it’s hopeless, it’s a lost fuckin’ cause, don’t waste—’
‘Nothing is lost forever,’ the big man said, his crushing grip on William’s jaw unrelenting. ‘And I refuse … I flat-out refuse to believe that this man, whose spirit once shone so brightly among us, has crossed irretrievably over into shadow. You might not believe it, Njinga, and you, William, perhaps you do not believe it yourself … but I believe, with all the fire that rages within the deepest core of my soul, I believe that some part of the William I once knew is. Still. In. There. And you, this drug-addled shadow, this shrivelled imposter who stands before me, wearing the skin of my brother … you will leave him forever, and return to us the true William Gisborne. That is what is going to happen; there is no other option.’
With the pain in his jaw now rivalling that of the agony throbbing in his broken ribs, William darted a hand up, gripped the big man’s wrist in a Krav Maga hold and bent it with swift and unexpected power to the point at which he co
uld have broken his adversary’s wrist.
‘Let me go, Zakaria,’ he hissed through anger-clenched teeth. ‘Your faith means fuck-all to me. Njinga’s right; you wasted your time, and I’m—’
Zakaria yanked his hand out of William’s grip, and in the blink of an eye he whipped a crashing Muay Thai kick up into William’s broken ribs. The agony that blitzed like a searing-hot lightning strike through his flank was beyond crippling in its intensity, and he dropped to the ground and curled up into a foetal position, groaning and gasping.
‘I will bring the old William back, whatever it takes,’ Zakaria growled, staring at his wounded friend with a pitiless gaze. ‘This is for your own good, as well as for a cause far greater than yourself. We will purge your heart, mind and soul of the poison that has afflicted them … and release your body from its dependence on the foul substances to which it has yet again become a slave. It will not be a pleasant process, not for any of us … but it will. Be. Done. Come Njinga; now we know that we must lock him in here. It pains me to make you our prisoner, William, but if that is the only way, then that is the only way. Remove that machete and leave this ungrateful wretch to stew in his misery for a while. Pain, as he is well aware, is a good motivator of change.’
With William still groaning on the ground, immobilised from the agony of his freshly rebroken ribs, Njinga snatched the machete away from him. She turned and fired a scorching, accusatory gaze at Zakaria.
‘You should have searched this room more thoroughly!’ she growled, thrusting the weapon at him. ‘I told you those meth cookers who were squattin’ in this place would have more weapons stashed in here! This asshole was waitin’ behind the door, wanting to take my damn hands off with this thing.’
‘Yes, yes, I should have been more meticulous,’ Zakaria muttered, his righteous anger wilting in the face of Njinga’s wrath. ‘I’ll get the kids to help me check the rest of the rooms properly.’
‘K-, kids?’ William managed to rasp, between groans and gasps.
Njinga rolled her eyes melodramatically, and pierced Zakaria with an even more ferocious glare, a look that stabbed with such lance-like force into his skull that he half-stepped backwards, as if expecting a blow to be swung at his face.