Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Hey man,’ Daekwon said, somewhat riled by the Ukrainian’s dismissive references to ‘the Indian’ and ‘the cripple’, ‘they g-, got names, you know. Lightnin’ Bird an’ P-, Parvati.’ He idly stroked the grip of his Glock Seventeen as he spoke; he had made a habit of doing this in recent times.

  Stas, looking somewhat sullen, brushed a stray dreadlock out of his face and pulled on the cigarette once more before handing it back to his older brother.

  ‘Yeah Igor,’ Stas said, backing Daekwon up. ‘C’mon bro, use their names.’

  Igor rolled his eyes as he took the cigarette, and dragged heavily on it before responding to either of them.

  ‘Okay, I know, I know, but my point still stands. I think Lightning Bird is worrying over nothing. Look at this place! Who’s gonna get in here?’

  Daekwon chuckled darkly, his lips curling into a mirthless smile while a coldness crystallised in his eyes.

  ‘That’s the k-, k-, kinda thinkin’ that’ll get you k-, killed, man. Every damn p-, place we hid, them Huntsmen motherfuckers found us, even in the middle a’ n-, n-, nowhere in the mountains in California. Y’all think they can’t f-, find us here? They gon’ find us, trust me man, they gon’ f-, f-, find us. It ain’t a matter a’ “if”, it’s a matter a’ “when”. They got eyes an’ ears e-, e-, err’where, err’where.’

  Stas double-checked his AK-47 again with fidgety fingers, flipping the safety on and off, and then on and off once more.

  ‘I hope the boss is right, big brother,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t want to have to shoot this thing tonight.’

  Igor stared off into the lumpy darkness of the forest beyond the boundary of the property, exhaling a lungful of smoke into the night.

  ‘Shit, I don’t either.’

  Daekwon, his nerves on edge, suddenly stood bolt upright.

  ‘Hey, did you guys see somethin’ m-, move down there in the bushes?’

  ‘Where?’ Stas asked.

  ‘Way down by the f-, f-, fence, in the trees. I think I saw something … or someone. Take a look through the b-, binoculars.’

  ‘It’s nothing man, I didn’t see nothing down there,’ Igor said. ‘You’re spooked bro, you’re seeing shit that isn’t there.’

  ‘Just t-, take a look, okay? I’m gon’ head upstairs an’ t-, t-, tell the others to get ready in case some shit’s about to go d-, down. My, whatever you wan’ call it, sixth sense or some sh, shit, is tinglin, an’ I got a real bad f-, feelin’ about this.’

  Daekwon turned and headed through the slatted doors, which he closed behind him before jogging up the stairs, leaving the Ukrainian brothers on their own. Igor pulled on the cigarette one last time and then flicked the smouldering butt down the sloped tiles into the darkness. He watched the passage of the little firefly as it bounced and tumbled, shedding microscopic sparks and embers of quick-dying flame during its descent. He then turned to flash a reassuring grin at his younger brother, pausing as a strange flying insect whizzed briefly past his face. He swatted at it, but it dodged his hand with ease and flew away.

  ‘He’s real spooked huh?’ Igor said with a chuckle. ‘Still, I guess I’ll have a look through—’

  A sharp, gassy blast from the shadows to the far right of the balcony cut Igor’s sentence short – as did the ten-inch steel blade that seemed to have sprouted spontaneously from the teenager’s ear. Stas’s eyes grew wide as he watched his older brother’s eyeballs roll back in their sockets, with the glossy liquidity of life deserting them with shocking abruptness. The young man flopped forward, lifeless.

  ‘No,’ Stas gasped through the rising mass of terror, disbelief and panic that was threatening to engulf him completely. ‘No, no, no—’

  Another blast cut through the shadows, and this time it was Stas’s knees that buckled beneath him as a gas-propelled blade cleaved through the darkness and found its mark. The projectile obliterated Stas’s left eyeball and lanced its unyielding steel through his eye socket into the core of his brain.

  As the bodies of the two young men slithered to the floor in the limp slump of death, a hulking figure materialised from the shadows below them.

  ‘Slavic scum,’ Sigurd muttered emotionlessly as he stared at the still-warm corpses. Thin, half-translucent wisps of gas rose from the final two ballistic knife launchers on his forearms. The others had already been fired a few minutes earlier, dispatching the guards who had been posted on a lower level. He unstrapped the spent knife launchers from his forearms and tossed them aside; their job was done, and it had been done well. Grinning suddenly and savagely, he gripped the trench knives loosely, one in each hand. He was now ready for the final skirmish before the culmination of this mission.

  ‘It’s too late for you now, animal-brother,’ he growled. ‘Too late for you, and whatever worthless mortals are waiting on the top floor. The wolf is not simply at your door, he is now inside your fucking house. I will take your lives, and then I will take the prize that awaits.’

  With his eyes closed for a few seconds, Sigurd breathed in deeply, his polar-bear-enhanced supersenses inhaling the strange concoction of scents of this place; the sharp sweetness of vast amounts of cocaine, the acrid sourness of used sex toys, the slightly mouldy smell of old books stacked in shelves, and the overpowering chemical assault of fresh coats of paint and varnish. However, interwoven into the sensory overload that was this miasma of odours were other scents; scents that stirred the electricity in his granite-like muscles and infused them with the urgent voltage of a thousand lightning strikes. There was fresh human blood, dripping from the splintered skulls of the corpses he had just made, and in addition to this heady olfactory cocktail, the humid breath of the still-living just above him; yes, the final few breaths of the oblivious corpses-to-be, wafting down the stale currents of air that trickled from the upper floors.

  Sigurd crouched next to Stas’s corpse and slowly pulled the ballistic blade from the young man’s eye socket until, with a macabre sucking pop, it came out of his skull. A gooey mix of blood and brain oozed from the ruined eye socket, and Sigurd dipped the tips of his index finger and forefinger into the warm stickiness of it. He raised his glistening, gore-coated fingers up to his nose and inhaled deeply of the smell of fresh death, drawing in its iron-rich intensity and tasting the bitter metallic bite of blood, enjoying how ferociously and completely it saturated his olfactory senses. The hairs on his arms prickled with goosebumps as a thrill scuttled over the entirety of his skin. Battle, victory, the ruthless crushing of opponents … this was what it was to truly be alive.

  He licked the bloody mess off his fingers, feeling the battle-rage beginning to pulse and throb with ravenous hunger in his veins at the taste of warm death in his mouth, and then he opened the slatted doors and grinned.

  ‘Come mortals,’ he whispered to the blanket of dark ahead, ‘come and dance with a god.’

  With his right hand he reached into one of his suit pockets and pulled out the insect drone he had used to reconnoitre the balcony, and with his left he dug in another pocket and retrieved the insect’s remote control pad and the monocle viewing screen. He set the tiny robot down, placed the monocle over his right eye, and then flew the drone up the stairwell, observing his waiting opponents, noting their exact positions and their individual weapons. While doing this, he was also working out the exact sequence of manoeuvres he would perform when he stormed them. Once he was satisfied, he flew the drone back and put it away.

  He breathed in and out a few times, holding the air in his lungs, allowing it to aerate his blood as efficiently as possible. Closing his eyes, he visualised his blood – thousand-year-old blood, supercharged with the power of his kind – inflating every fibre of every muscle in his body with the strength and ferocity of an ancient volcano bristling to erupt. The trench knives in his hands were steel extensions of his knuckles and fingers; their sharp and brutal blades would move with the fluidity of organic limbs, as if wired directly to his nervous system.

  The men
around the corner stood no chance; Sigurd was ready to unleash hell. He inhaled one final breath before the battle began, and then with stealthy speed he swooped around the corner. The men on the landing saw his ghostly, monstrous form storming through the gloom, and the fight was on.

  No words were spoken, no insults hurled, no battle-cries roared; all understood at once the direness of this skirmish. It was life-and-death, quite literally. No quarter would be asked, none would be given; death was the only certainty.

  Some men are born with the talent to paint pictures that at once expels the viewer’s breath entirely from their lungs, and some are born with the ability to write pieces of music that stir the human soul, catapulting the listener’s spirit from its darkest depths to its most transcendent heights. Not Sigurd Haraldsson, although, like Mozart or Picasso, he too had been born with a prodigious gift. His talent, however, had been that of violence, and it was a dark gift that he had put to widespread use over the centuries.

  Now, on this dimly lit stair landing in an old mansion, he spun and whirled with the acrobatic flow of a flamenco dancer, his powerful limbs swirling with fury in a tornado of carnage. The men all descended on him at once; Ukrainian veterans of countless street and prison brawls, there was not one among them who shook with fear as this pale yeti of a man thundered into their midst. And then, alongside these gangsters there was Daekwon, through whose veins the blood-boiling fury of imminent vengeance was gushing, unabated. Paola’s death loomed stark in his mind, the anguishing memory of her laughter and shy smiles driving liquid steel, red-hot from the forge, through the young man’s muscles. This man, this whirling giant who was crashing through the Ukrainians like a wrecking ball, was one of those responsible, in some way, for the foul crime of snuffing out Paola’s presence from this world, and like every single one of them who had had a hand in her demise, Daekwon was determined to make them pay in blood for what they had done. He aimed his Glock, trying to get a clear shot at the huge man, his heart hammering with combat-mandated excitement in his chest.

  The Ukrainians were not driven by the same sort of motivation that spurred foolhardy courage through Daekwon’s veins, but they fought fiercely nonetheless. Seasoned as they were, though, none could match the ancient warrior for speed, skill and accuracy. With his first move of the death dance, Sigurd windmilled his right arm horizontally forward, ducking under a vicious swing from a baseball bat and simultaneously plunging the blade of the trench knife into the side of the bat-wielder’s neck. In the same motion, without pausing, he spun around on the ball of one foot, ripped out the bat-wielder’s trachea from behind and slammed the trench knife hilt-deep into a brawny opponent’s ear, just as the man was raising a machete over his head to strike. A lithe fighter surged forward with a fireman’s axe as another raised a nine-millimetre pistol to fire, and yet another two charged in with baseball bats raised, while Daekwon, cursing and snarling, circled the perimeter of this hurricane of anarchy, hoping to get a shot in without hitting any of his allies.

  In a flurry of motion Sigurd whipped the edge of the blade across one bat-wielder’s throat, opening it wide and unleashing a gush of arterial blood, and a split-second later he crashed a bone-shattering uppercut with the knuckleduster section of the trench knife into the thin man’s face, finishing off this manoeuvre by diving into a forward-tumbling roll, evading both a baseball-bat swing and a volley of rounds fired from a Ukrainian’s pistol. Daekwon was almost hit by the flurry of bullets, and, yelping with fright, he had to dive for cover when the desperate gangster started firing.

  With the effortless agility of a breakdancer on the floor, Sigurd spun about, tripping up the gunman with a low, whipping sweep of his leg, and then, with the momentum of the kick propelling the rest of his body, he rolled flat to the left on his side, slamming a blade through the gunman’s eye into his brain, while just managing to dodge a brutal downward chop from the axeman, who was dazed from his broken jaw but still brimming over with battle-wrath.

  Righting himself on the ground and raising his body up so that he was kneeling in a lunge position, Sigurd aimed a deliberately clumsy stab at the axeman, who side-stepped it with ease and countered with a vicious horizontal swing, stepped into the blow to give it as much force as possible.

  This was exactly what Sigurd had wanted him to do. He ducked under the singing axe blade and propelled himself forward, stabbing his overhand-gripped knife into the man’s groin. In a swift turnabout he spun, sprang up to his full height, and then plunged the other blade into the soft flesh between the man’s throat and collar bone.

  His opponent jerked and shuddered as the axe slipped from his grasp, but now, with so many men down, Daekwon finally had the chance to take a shot at Sigurd. He sprang across the room, creating space to shoot, and then unleashed a volley of semi-automatic fire. The moment he did this, though, Sigurd swung the thin man’s body around in front of him – impaled and anchored as it was with his trench knives, which held the dying man as fast as any butcher’s hooks – and used him as a human shield.

  As Daekwon’s volley of nine-millimetre bullets was thudding into the body in front of him, Sigurd slipped his right hand out of the knuckleduster-grip of the trench knife embedded in his human shield’s throat and whipped his hand up, catching the baseball bat that was scything towards his head. The bat-wielder stared with surprise-wide eyes at the huge hand that had just caught the bat he had swung – and his eyes remained frozen wide-open as Sigurd gave the bat a vicious yank, pulling the man stumbling forward. He simultaneously drove the full eight inches of the blade he had just slid out of his human shield’s groin upwards through the bat-wielder’s chin.

  Both the human shield and the bat-wielder flopped lifeless to the ground, leaving only Sigurd and Daekwon alive. Sigurd turned around slowly, breathing heavily from the ferocious physical exertion of the last twenty seconds, and he locked a devilish glare into Daekwon’s dark eyes. The young man, mottled as his skin was with vitiligo, looked like a cornered jaguar in the dusky gloom; in his eyes there burned the primal aggression of an apex predator; cornered, wounded and desperate … with nothing left to lose.

  ‘Don’t move, bitch,’ Daekwon growled, his Glock aimed squarely at Sigurd’s face. ‘I got you now, I f-, fuckin’ got you. You may be fast, but you ain’t faster ‘n’ a b-, bullet.’

  Sigurd chuckled slowly and deeply, keeping his ice-blue eyes locked into Daekwon’s. He curled his lips up into an evil smile.

  ‘That’s a Glock Seventeen you’re carrying, my friend,’ Sigurd rumbled in his booming, guttural voice.

  ‘That’s right asshole, an’ it’s g-, gon’ take yo’ damn head off a’ your shoulders!’

  Sigurd’s eyes crackled with phosphoric fire, and he stared with a smirk on his face that suggested that the pistol aimed at his head might as well have been a rubber prop.

  ‘The thing is, my young friend,’ he growled, ‘the Glock Seventeen has a magazine capacity of ten rounds. Guess how many rounds you just fired into the body of your comrade over there? Were you counting? Were you? I was.’

  Sigurd’s grin broadened as he saw doubt creeping its clammy serpent slither across Daekwon’s countenance.

  ‘You wan’ t-, take that chance, bitch?’ Daekwon stammered, suddenly unsure of himself. ‘You really wan’ test your m-, m-, math skills, motherfucker?’

  ‘Boo!’

  Sigurd lunged suddenly forward in a mocking half-step, and Daekwon squeezed the trigger … but nothing happened. A lash of panic rippled across his features like a sail in a squall, and he squeezed the trigger again and again. Nothing, however, but a series of impotent clicks emerged from the pistol.

  ‘Hahahaha!’ Sigurd bellowed, his sonorous laughter rocking the blood-spattered walls of the room. Then, abruptly, he ceased his cackling and snarled at Daekwon. ‘Now you die, like the rest of them,’ he growled, advancing with slow menace on him.

  Daekwon, however, was not ready to give up just like that. He dropped the gun and balled his
fists, stepping into a boxer’s stance.

  ‘Drop the blades, you s-, sonummabitch,’ he snarled. ‘Let’s go toe to toe! I’m a Golden Gloves b-, boxer! I’ll b-, break you in half!’

  Sigurd stopped in his tracks, and with a savage grin he slackened the grip on his trench knives, uncurling his fists and letting both of the weapons drop to the floor with a metallic clatter.

  ‘A champion boxer, are you?’ he sneered. ‘Well, well, well, this will be fun.’

  Sigurd prepared to brawl, grinning fiendishly and bobbing swaying with a hyperbolic gait, mocking his opponent, whose stance was steady and firmly planted.

  ‘Come on asshole,’ Daekwon growled, ‘come on!’

  Sigurd darted in, keeping his guard up, and lashed out a quick right jab at Daekwon’s jutting jaw. Daekwon flicked his head back, evading the punch with ease, and glided in with liquid speed to unleash a furious flurry of combo blows. His moves were flawless, and the power behind each punch was whopping; years of skill-honing and thousands of hours spent hammering both a heavy bag and opponents in the ring had committed all of his movements to muscle memory … yet somehow this huge warrior was dodging, ducking, bobbing and weaving with superhuman speed, and Daekwon’s vicious yet precise strikes and combos were hitting nothing but air. Every jab, hook, cross, body shot and uppercut slashed through empty space as Sigurd chuckled and dodged, seeming somehow to know where every punch was going before it was even thrown, and soon an acerbic mixture of frustration, anger, fear and growing exhaustion was bubbling and frothing in Daekwon’s guts.

  ‘Come on, champ!’ Sigurd roared as he evaded punch after punch, ‘Hit me! Come on and hit me!’

  With a growl Daekwon surged forward, swinging and jabbing with a fresh, turbocharged fury, and he finally began driving Sigurd back. Now Sigurd was having to block the blows as well as dodge them; it seemed as if Daekwon was about to make a breakthrough. Thoughts of Paola blasted through the corridors of his memory with every punch he hurled at Sigurd, and the searing pain of her loss injected boost after boost of speed and power into every punch he threw.