Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘What you Rebels don’t know, and what the Huntsmen don’t know either, is that I am working for nobody. Nobody but myself, Sigurd Haraldsson. Well now, is that entirely true? Perhaps not. I am a servant, in some ways … a servant of chaos, of anarchy, of mayhem. My plans are greater, more far-reaching and more twisted than you Rebels or the Huntsmen could begin to fathom.’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  Sigurd threw back his head and roared with a booming laughter that was half derision, half genuine amusement. Then, in the blink of an eye, the smile vanished from his face, replaced by a look of monstrous intensity.

  ‘No. I’m the only sane one in this world of absolute fucking insanity. I’ve seen a thousand years of history through these eyes, Indian. I’ve sailed every ocean, and I’ve warred, killed, raped, enslaved, looted and plundered on every landmass. I’ve seen it all, and everywhere, when you boil it down to its very essence, everywhere human beings exist, it’s all. The. Fucking. Same.

  They’re like cockroaches, the lot of them … cockroaches with weapons that can annihilate this planet a thousand times over. And they have spread their cockroach hives all across the surface of the earth, devouring everything, poisoning it, turning everything to shit, and breeding like flies. But there is an alternative to this reign of the roaches, an alternative that you naïve Rebel idiots cannot comprehend: chaos, madness, an anarchy of pure violence, to bring about a final end to it all. This, this, this is the only sanity in a crazed world, a world of institutionalised, ratified, sanctified insanity.’

  Lightning Bird felt a sliver of hope stab its sharp, unexpected glass-shard pain into his skin. One of his arms was buried beneath the broken wood and scattered papers of the closet, and with this concealed limb he started to reach subtly into the debris, his trembling fingers desperately seeking an object he knew had been inside the closet. He kept talking to Sigurd to stall and distract him.

  ‘So, chaos then? Chaos … that’s your pursuit? That’s your great answer to the conundrums this planet faces? You’ve lost your mind, truly. Why do you need Parvati then? Why do you need anyone else at all, if mere anarchy is your goal?’

  Sigurd chuckled with pure malice, and that was when Lightning Bird noticed a slick of dark blood trickling from the Norse giant’s lips, staining his platinum beard with a spreading crimson wetness.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ Sigurd smirked, his eyes glinting with malicious intent in the darkness of the room.

  ‘Oh, I would, believe me. So come on, why don’t you enlighten me, great warrior?’ Lightning Bird sneered in a mocking tone, his hooked mouth curled with contempt and his dark eyes aflame with defiance, despite his grievous wounds.

  Sigurd chuckled … and then abruptly coughed and stumbled as a wash of bright blood gushed from his mouth. Now it was Lightning Bird’s turn to laugh, and this he did, slowly and dryly.

  ‘What’s wrong, mighty Viking? Did those bullets give you a bit of a tickling?’

  Sigurd started to stagger towards him on unsteady legs. He glanced down at the M-16 lying on the floor as he stumbled past it, and his ice-blue eyes lit up. His whole beard was dark red now, and his face was becoming deathly pale and sallow.

  ‘Despite your best efforts, I’m still breathing,’ he growled.

  ‘The way it looks to me, you might not be breathing for much longer anyway. So much for your grand plans of worldwide chaos.’

  ‘What does it matter to you anyway, you spineless worm? You have the powers of a god, like me. You can take the form of a fucking grizzly bear! You’ve been alive for seven hundred years! Yet you’ve devoted these awe-inspiring powers you were given to … to these mortals, these pathetic, weak amoebas, who by all rights we should crush beneath our heels.’

  ‘There are far nobler things in this world than riches, domination and violence, Ice Bear. Although one as steeped in greed, power-lust and wickedness as yourself could hardly see them, I suppose.’

  Sigurd lurched to the side, almost losing his footing, but then in a burst of vengeful rage he straightened himself and spat out a slick of blood.

  ‘Noble? What is noble to you, savage? Trees? Dirt? Insects? You spineless sap, you gutless moron! You spent all these years honing and developing your powers into what? Powers to heal stupid mortals who are going to die anyway? Meaningless communion with the earth and trees? What use are these sideshow tricks in the greater scheme of things? You could have been like me, you short-sighted imbecile! You could have had a fucking empire! Instead, you’ve drifted around this continent like a hobo, watching your powers trickle away as the forests have been cut down and the animals have been slaughtered as the empire of the humans has expanded beyond what anyone could have imagined! There is nothing left of your world anymore, tree-hugger. The old forests will fall; most of them already have. The wild places of the earth will be eradicated completely. Concrete, plastic and steel will dominate; indeed, they already do. The mortals will cover the world over with slow-spreading death in their lust for eternal expansion. Your world has been dead for a long time. You know this. You know this…’

  Lightning Bird’s eyes blazed with a flare of defiance.

  ‘And you would fight for that? Against the very essence of makes us what we are?’

  ‘I told you,’ Sigurd rasped, ‘I fight for nobody. No, I fight for unbridled chaos, pure anarchy. And that will come, soon. A great storm will be unleashed, greater than anything this world has ever known. And I will be there, in the eye of the hurricane! It will be glorious, too glorious to contemplate … but like I said, an idiot like you could never understand. Now, enough of this banter. Your life is over. I have won. I … have … won.’

  Lightning Bird ’s fingers finally wrapped themselves around the item he had been seeking so desperately, and he made sure to conceal the triumphant gleam that he so badly wanted to flash across his eyes.

  ‘Yes, you have won,’ he said softly. ‘Proceed, mighty warrior. Do your duty and end my pathetic existence. Send me to the Shadow Forest.’

  Sigurd snarled, and then chuckled as he clenched his fists.

  ‘Come then, Indian. Let’s dance one final dance.’

  ‘Oh yes, Ice Bear, I’m ready.’

  With that, Lightning Bird sprang suddenly up from the debris, clutching the hand grenade he had found, the pin of which he had pulled a few seconds earlier. He, the last of the Chimariko who still drew breath on this earth, whooped the ancient war cry of his tribe as he tossed the grenade at Sigurd. In two bounding steps he sprang in a diving leap, crashing through the window and soaring out into the night, transforming in mid-air into his grizzly form.

  Inside the room, Sigurd’s eyes bulged wide with sudden panic and terror as he saw the grenade sailing through the air towards him, and he tried in vain to turn away from the imminent blast.

  He was too late. The explosive detonated.

  ***

  Sigurd did not know how long he lay there, straddling the liminal zone, the dark line between the wet sand and the dry, where the tide of the black sea that was Death licked with morbid hunger at the multicoloured shore of the world of the living. Memories from centuries long-past came to him, brushing at the perimeter of his consciousness like little pieces of driftwood brought in by the waves, and they swirled briefly around his mind, but were then sucked back out to sea again; that eternal ocean from which there could be no return. His heart was slowing, like an oil-starved machine on the verge of seizing. Strength had failed him; he could no longer summon his powers. Indeed, he could not even move his fingers, let alone his limbs.

  All he could manage to do, it seemed, was to breathe, more slowly and more shallowly with each lungful of air. Soon there would be no more lungfuls of air.

  It was as a bright light was beginning to cut its warming, numbing rays through the edges of his vision that he felt it; the proximity of another of his kind. Was the Indian returning to finish him off, to make sure that he was dead? If so, there was nothing he could do about it
; all strength had deserted him now. He did not even have enough left in him to enact the change into his polar bear form.

  It was not the Indian, though.

  ‘My mightiest warrior, lying here broken and defeated. I am disappointed, Sigurd.’

  The voice spoke with a soft and almost gentle lilt, yet behind those seemingly innocuous tones there was a gargantuan power, deep and dark and dripping with satanic menace.

  ‘Yaotl…’

  The name crawled like a death-beetle from Sigurd’s blood-caked lips.

  ‘I’ve been following you, all the way from New York,’ the man said. He was a short, squat individual dressed in an all-black suit, with a black shirt and a black tie. Neatly combed hair, thick and jet-black, sat atop a round, beardless face, the coffee-coloured skin of which was marred only by a few wrinkles around his small black eyes, which were hypnotic in their intensity.

  ‘We needed Parvati, and you almost had her. Almost. But in the end … you failed.’

  Sigurd had no response to this. Instead, he merely released a dry rattle from his dying body. The little man smiled and stared down at Sigurd.

  ‘No matter, great warrior; we all fail sometimes. Even I could not save my empire from the Spanish four hundred years ago.’

  Yaotl walked over to the far corner of the room, where Maksim was still lying in a daze. His life had been spared from the shock wave of the grenade blast by the heavy oaken desk, and now he was just starting to come to. Yaotl stared at him for a moment, and then reached down. He grabbed Maksim by the collar of his white silk shirt – now spattered liberally with blood – and hauled him over the desk with a strength that belied his size. He dragged the incoherently mumbling Ukrainian across the floor to where Sigurd was lying, and dumped the man next to the Viking. He then reached into his suit coat and pulled out a long, thin case, which he opened. Inside of it was a scalpel.

  His eyes were focused with a cold, almost reptilian gaze as he unbuttoned Maksim’s shirt. With calm, steady hands he plunged the scalpel into the Ukrainian’s chest, making a deep, yawning incision. As Maksim started to regain consciousness, he realised what was happening and began to scream and thrash about on the floor, but Yaotl pinned his arms down with his knees, keeping him immobile. When the incision was complete, Yaotl carefully set the scalpel down, ignoring the blood that was cascading from the gaping wound in Maksim’s chest, and then he plunged his right hand into the bloody gash, seeking the man’s still-beating heart.

  He found it and wrapped his fingers around it, ignoring Maksim’s terrible howls of agony and terror. Gripping the beating heart with his right hand, he placed his left hand on Sigurd’s forehead and then began to call on his powers, whispering an ancient Aztec ritual chant. Energy, amplified by the power in this place, began to crackle and surge through the conduit of Yaotl’s body as the dark smoke and flame pulled the life force from Maksim’s body into Sigurd’s. Maksim began to shudder and convulse as every last molecule of energy was torn from his body, stolen and transferred into Sigurd’s, with the electricity leaping from cell to cell, re-energising and recharging as the red sparks flew and jumped.

  With a final shudder Maksim’s body stopped writhing as death draped its dark, suffocating cloak over him, and the moment the gangster died, Sigurd’s glazing-over eyes shone with a fresh, jolting brightness.

  Yaotl, meanwhile, pulled his blood-dripping hand from Maksim’s chest and smiled.

  ‘My warrior has returned from the darkness.’

  ‘I…’ Sigurd gasped.

  ‘Quiet, Ice Bear. It will take time, and more blood – a lot more blood than just one mortal can offer – to restore you fully. But do not worry about that; for now you are alive, if only just. Our plan will continue. Yes, yes … it must continue.’

  Sigurd lay back, his hair matting in the stickiness of the pool of blood that was spreading beneath him. He closed his eyes, smiled, and began to laugh.

  And a few floors below, unbeknown to either Yaotl or Sigurd, Daekwon’s not-quite-dead body began to stir, and through his dark-clouded mind, fever-dreams of some massive and mysterious beast started to swirl.

  PART SEVENTEEN

  56

  COLONEL RUDD

  5th October 2020. CZ-17H2 Coltan Mine, in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

  Colonel Rudd chewed on a wad of tobacco as the combat helicopter he was in circled the jungle, and as he masticated on the bitter lump, he stared through his aviator shades at the unending morass of green below him. As the chopper began its descent towards the coltan mine – a broad grey-brown scar gouged from the endless broccoli green – he leaned out of the side of the aircraft and spat, watching the brown slick of liquid whirling, splitting up and disintegrating as it hurtled earthwards. Shifting over to where the GE-M134 Minigun was mounted, he slipped his hands over the grips and closed his eyes. Jungle, jungle, a bulbous ocean of trees and lush foliage … this was bringing back all sorts of memories.

  A young man, all those decades ago, and green myself, but not for long. It was a minigun just like this one, that’s what was in these hands a’ mine. There’d been flames, a fuckin’ inferno; napalm fire. Rockets streaking like avengin’ angels through the air.

  And them. They’d been all over the ground. So many of ‘em. Running blindly from their burning village. Enemies, all. Enemies. Lil’ yellow people, stick-thin. Uneducated peasants, more animal than human. Couldn’t speak a lick a’ English, not one of ‘em. Weak. Thin and weak. God, how I despise weakness. Weakness, vulnerability … them things make me fuckin’ sick, make me want to puke my goddamn guts out. And them thin lil’ yellow folk, them pathetic, primitive subsistence farmers with their indecipherable tongue, they represented the fuckin’ epitome of weakness. Hard targets with their spindly limbs and insubstantial torsos, for sure, but not when you’re firing 7.62-millimetre slugs at a rate of a few thousand rounds per minute. You’re a god, up in the clouds in this metal falcon. And you’re a wrathful god. A god of no mercy. A god of war. A god of vengeance.

  They tried to run. They had had hogs with ‘em too. Fucking pigs; them stupid peasants tried to take ‘em with in their desperate flight from our choppers. Hadn’t mattered. Rockets. Napalm. My fingertips unleashing death from above. So many dead, sprawled out, dying, screaming, bleeding out. Peasants indistinguishable from hogs. Weak, unable to offer any resistance. Disgusting. Pathetic. Wastes of skin.

  And me? No more a boy. A man, and by God and Jesus and the fuckin’ Virgin Mary, what a man. No, not just a man. Not with that kind of power. Like I said: a god. A god, with godlike power.

  Colonel Rudd opened his eyes and the memory faded, and here he was, back in the present. Down below on the ground a rake-thin, shirtless African youth was gesticulating with two brightly burning signal flares in each hand, giving the attack helicopter the signal to land.

  With his square jaw jutting purposefully and his thin crimson lips rolled into a snarl of menace, Colonel Rudd prepared to make his entrance. First impressions were key; he had learned this over many decades of conflict situations, both military and non-military.

  Intimidate from the start and you already have the upper hand in any situation. Establish dominance immediately, and maintain it.

  He unclipped the strap on his hip holster as the chopper hovered just above the ground, giving easy access to his HK45C semi-automatic pistol, a gesture which was as much for ritual and for show as for practicality.

  The chopper touched down, and from both sides of the aircraft marines armed to the teeth and clad in combat armour poured out, and with clockwork precision formed up in a defensive position.

  ‘All part a’ the fuckin’ show,’ Rudd whispered as he got ready to make his exit from the chopper. ‘Establish dominance from the start, definitively, an’ by whatever means necessary.’

  The Colonel stepped out onto the crumbly soil, his muscular bulk – still toned and firm, despite his sixty-six years of life – perfectly balanced, with his weigh
t fused to the earth via spotlessly gleaming combat boots. He took a long, slow look around him, with his thick arms folded in a gesture of arrogant defiance across his barrel chest. He nodded subtly, pulled a cigarette from the black steel case in the left chest pocket of his flak jacket, flicked it into his mouth and lit it up.

  All around him emaciated, haggard-looking Congolese were hobbling across the denuded earth, struggling beneath loads of ore and soil that looked, in many cases, larger than their skeletal bodies. Clumps of scraggly banana and palm trees growing in seemingly random spots, haphazardly arranged like everything else in this place, swayed tiredly in a weak breeze that brought no relief from the stifling heat and humidity.

  From out of the scattered throng of listless workers, who were limping about their duties with all the reluctant strain of rusty automatons, strode an altogether different figure. A diminutive redhead with pale skin, sprayed liberally with freckles, she was dressed in a beige business suit that was impeccably clean despite the muddiness of these surroundings. While on closer inspection it became clear that she was in her late thirties or early forties, from a distance her insubstantial figure gave her the look of a mere adolescent. Her large green eyes were lined with fine wrinkles, and her hard, almost chiselled features were as angular and sharp as those of any catwalk model. With an icy look on her narrow face she strutted up to Colonel Rudd and extended a formal hand to him. The Colonel gripped it at once and pumped it with firm vigour, noting with silent disgust how clammy and weak her hand seemed.

  God, this lil’ whore is no bigger ‘n’ a twelve-year-old. I could kill her with one well-placed punch. Snap her in half like a fuckin’ twig. Weak. Fuckin’ pathetic. I could crack her jaw in half with a bitch-slap.

  ‘Colonel Rudd, I presume?’

  The woman’s voice was soft and lilting; an unsettling contrast to the hard angularity of her physical features. Colonel Rudd didn’t like to be unsettled. He didn’t like her; not at all.