Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Margaret, you’re h-, h-, hurting me—’

  She could no longer restrain herself; she slapped Tesla with a vicious open hand across his face. Her own palm stung immediately from the force of the blow, and she knew that his cheek would be burning with pain. He stared up at her with the confused, betrayed look of a beaten dog that had done nothing wrong.

  ‘M-, Margaret—’

  ‘Are we friendsh or enemiesh, Tesla?’ she hissed. ‘If you’re really my friend, you’ll t-, take me up there right now. Otherwishe, I know the truth: that you hate me. That you’re a traitor and a l-, liar.’

  ‘O-, okay,’ he stammered, still stunned from her brutal slap. ‘There’s a ladder b-, built into the wall just h-, here.’

  He stumbled over to the city wall, lurching like a lush mired in the depths of inebriation, and pushed aside the thick boughs of a shrub. Sure enough, steel rungs had been attached to the wall there. They led all the way up the wall of the tower to a spot on the roof.

  ‘We h-, have t-, t-, to climb a-, a- … all…’

  His voice trailed off into garbled sludge as his head began to loll about his shoulders. The sedative power of the antihistamines and alcohol had finally kicked in with full effect, and Tesla was powerless to resist their combined, crippling might. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, his knees buckled beneath him and he crumpled to the ground. Margaret walked over to him, her head light with both the buzz from the wine and nerves from the surreality of actually going through with this madcap plan. She looked down at him, and he opened his eyes briefly, staring up at her with such a look of crushed trust and broken spirit that her throat tightened as if throttling fingers were wrapped around it, and she was forced to look away. Tesla opened his mouth to say something, but then his eyes closed and he slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  ‘You’ll be out for at least fifteen or sixteen hours,’ she whispered to the unconscious boy. ‘And you’re going to feel like shit when you do eventually wake up. And God knowsh what that monshter is going to d-, do to you for allowing me to eshcape. I hope he doesn’t k-, kill you, I really do. I’m sorry kiddo, but I had to do thish. You were my only w-, way out of here. Goodbye, and thanksh for the help.’

  Margaret looked around to make sure the coast was clear. It was, so she bent down, took one of Tesla’s thin arms in each hand and dragged the boy behind the shrub. After this she took his holster belt off, with its nine-millimetre pistol and its hunting knife; despite her loathing of weapons, she realised that she may well need them for the coming journey. She had to adjust the belt substantially for it to fit around her substantial waist, tailored as it currently was to the boy’s narrow hips, but fit it eventually did. She then used the hunting knife to cut some branches off the shrub, and with these she covered Tesla’s body. The sun would be high in the sky the next morning before anyone found him.

  Now that Tesla had been taken care of, Margaret had one final hurdle to overcome, one last obstacle to scale – quite literally – before she was well and truly free.

  ‘Jesus Christ, oh Jesus, this is scary…’

  She stared up at the rungs that went all the way up the six-metre wall and then up the side of the tower; the ascent was more than fifteen metres in total. And for this seemingly suicidal climb her only handholds and footholds were the bare-bones steel rungs, worn smooth and buckled slightly in their centres from the passage of too many feet over time. There was no safety cage around the ladder; one slip during the precarious ascent and she would plunge earthwards to her inevitable demise.

  Now, however, she felt emboldened; the wine oozing through her veins heated her core with its magma of Dutch courage, and her desire to escape spurred an iron-braced determination into her weary, aching limbs. It would be a long climb, but a lot of the wall and tower was obscured by the thick foliage of the old trees growing nearby, so unless someone ventured right to the foot of the ladder, they likely would not see her going up. She knew that she could take her time, if she needed to – but she realised as well that every moment she spent lingering was a moment closer to getting caught.

  ‘It’sh time to do or die,’ she whispered to herself, stepping up to the wall and gripping the first rung.

  She drew a deep breath of air into her lungs, and then put her right foot onto the lowest rung, and with a grunt she heaved herself up.

  All right, all right, that wasn’t so bad. Now just about a hundred more of these to go and I’m all set.

  She started ascending the ladder, doing her best to remain as calm and focused as she possibly could.

  ‘That’sh it Margaret,’ she muttered to herself as she made the ascent, edging ever up. ‘Don’t look up, don’t look down. Jusht keep on takin’ it one shtep at a time. One shtep, one shtep, that’sh it, one more sh, shtep. Sh-, shtare at the wall. Do not look down, do not look up – jusht shtraight ahead at the wall. That’sh it, that’sh it, one more sh-, shtep, one more shtep.’

  The climb seemed to be taking forever, and she soon began to feel as if she was running out of breath. What was more, her arms were now aflame with an acute, burning pain, while her legs were starting to hurt as well. She had no idea how high up she was, as she was focused on staring only at the wall ahead of her. The temptation to shoot a glance either up or down the wall was overwhelming, but she knew that to do so would result in being overrun with vertigo – vertigo that may not only paralyse her with abject terror, but potentially cause her to slip and fall to her death.

  She paused, with her gaze still locked onto the wall ahead of her. Now even her eyes were beginning to hurt; staring at the same close sight for so long was giving her blurry vision and bringing on a headache.

  Jesus H. Christ, how much longer is it gonna be before I get to the top? I feel like I can hardly manage even one more step! Shit, I wonder if anyone is suspicious that Tesla and I haven’t come back yet … Well, that’s even more reason to keep going. Come on, one step at a time. One more step. Up!

  She began ascending the ladder again, moving slowly and carefully, but taking care to maintain an even rhythm as she made steady upward progress. She did not slow down again, despite the fact that her lungs felt like they were on the verge of collapsing, and her legs and arms were leaden with exhaustion.

  After what seemed like half an hour, her eyes were no longer staring uninterrupted at a flat wall of stone, twelve inches away; suddenly her vision crested the top of the tower wall and she found herself looking at a little platform of wood, anchored to the sloping tower roof by the most rickety of fixtures, it seemed. The rungs ended here, but there were steps and two steel handrails that allowed the climber to get off the ladder and up onto the platform.

  Margaret was panting heavily now, and her back was drenched with cold sweat. Every muscle in her body seemed to have been doused in fuel and set alight, burning with the persistence of dayglo orange coals in a barbecue pit.

  ‘Almosht up,’ she gasped, her chest rising and falling with heaving breaths of exertion. ‘Almosht. One lasht push Margaret, one lasht push!’

  She reached up to grip the curved handrail – and then her heart almost stopped when her sweaty palms slipped on the slick steel, causing her to lurch backwards. She slammed her other hand onto the other handrail the moment her feet slid off the rungs beneath her, and for one absolutely terrifying second she was dangling over the abyss, holding on only by the strength of her fingers. Hyperventilating with panic, she kicked her feet madly to regain her footing, and when she finally felt a rung under her foot she pressed hard onto it and scrambled up onto the platform, wrapping her arms around one of the handrails and hugging it with all her might.

  ‘Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God,’ she repeated mechanically as wave after wave of terror flushed liquid nitrogen paralysis through every atom of her being. Shivering uncontrollably, she kept seeing flashing, pulsating stars behind her eyes; she was on the verge of passing out from the fright of the slip, and knew that she needed to take control of
the situation at once. Fainting up here on this flimsy platform would mean falling to her death.

  Come on, stand up, stand up damn it! Breathe in deeply, hold the breath in, breathe out nice and slow, and calm the heck down. You’re almost there! That’s it, that’s better. Now, are you ready? Yeah, you’re ready! Come on! Move! Stand up you weak, fat, pathetic shit-bag!

  Cursing at herself through her terror-chattering teeth, she struggled to her feet – still holding onto the handrail with a death-grip for support – and she found herself staring at an utterly petrifying view. She felt, for all intents and purposes, as if she was standing on top of the world itself. Stretched out behind her were the gentle rainbow-spectrum lights of T’Kalanjathu, the colours like glowing jellyfish suspended in a midnight ocean as they shone amidst the blackness of the grouped-together trees and shrubs.

  As if competing with this sprawl of colour and light, or perhaps sneering at it with haughty disdain, the sky was awash with a jewel-spread of stars; a great silver backlight piercing in a million places through this tattered, moth-eaten rag of deep velvet that stretched taut above her.

  Despite this awe-inspiring vista, all Margaret could think about was the ground, yawning with such voracious hunger for her fragile body, so impossibly far below her. Vertigo screamed like a great, jeering crowd on the ground, the roaring mob firing tens of millions of barbed harpoons into her skin and using their steel-cabled hooks to pull at her with a merciless force.

  Oh my God, don’t look down, don’t look down, whatever you do, do not look down!

  A narrow path made of planks led around the roof, following the curve of the cylindrical tower until it ended at the front, overlooking the river where it emerged from beneath the city wall. That was where the teenagers jumped from, and that was where she needed to be.

  It was only a few metres, but there was no guardrail and nothing at all to grip onto. There was only one way she would be able to get there.

  Margaret lowered herself onto her hands and knees, and, doing her best to focus her gaze on the planks beneath her, she began to crawl on all fours along the rickety path, inching her way forward, step by near-delirious step.

  ‘Come on, come on, come on!’ she hissed through painfully gritted teeth, spitting and drooling and shivering as she pushed through the membrane of both physical exhaustion and debilitating terror.

  After what seemed like an hour of exhausting crawling, she finally reached the end of the path. There was nothing there; it just ended, like a flimsy diving board, jutting out off the roof and looking out over the impossibly black river below, studded here and there with the blurred reflection of the stars above, their light smudged by the lazy drift of the current.

  This was it. There was no backing out now.

  ‘If a couple of kids can do it, you can do it,’ she said to herself, willing herself on with every ounce of determination she possessed. ‘You have to. You’ve gotten this far, and this is how you escape this place. Come on. Come on, damn it, come on!’

  Drawing on the deepest reserves of willpower in her body, she heaved herself up from her hands and knees until she was finally upright. She was shivering madly, and was weak-kneed with terror, but she was standing nonetheless.

  The longer you stand here the more impossible this is going to seem, Margaret. You’re almost free. You just. Have. TO. JUMP!

  She breathed in deeply and whispered a silent prayer … and then she did it.

  With her heart in her mouth she launched herself off the edge, and gravity sucked her instantly downwards with its jet-engine acceleration. It felt as if her internal organs were being pushed upward, trying to vacate her body in this terrifying, drawn-out moment of impossibly hurtling speed … and then she hit the water.

  She had managed to keep her limbs straight, so she plunged in smoothly, and, it seemed, kept on accelerating into the blind darkness of the river’s chilly depths. Eventually she began to decelerate, but the combined shock of hitting the water and the sheer unexpectedness of how cold it was drove the air out of her lungs with alarming rapidity. She tried to push upward, to stop this deadly, sucking sinking, and it took all of her strength to swim up – or at least she thought she was going up, because she could not see anything at all in the inky blackness of the night river.

  Her lungs were starting to hurt as they howled out for oxygen that just wasn’t there, and her throat was burning and closing up as she struggled to swim upwards with all her might – yet still she had not broken the surface. She screamed underwater as she pushed up, the last of her air bubbling out into the black water.

  So this is it … this is how it ends. I survived the fall but ended up drowning instead. God, I came so damn close, so tragically—

  Her head broke through the surface of the water, and air, sweet, sweet air came rushing through her gasping mouth into her lungs.

  She almost screamed with joy – almost – but suppressed the cry at the last second, realising just how tragic a fate it would be to give herself away now, at this moment, after having survived everything she had just gone through.

  You’re alive, you’re alive, somehow you’re alive … but don’t blow it now! Holy hell, I’m pumped with adrenalin, pumped! Jesus, I’m all tingly and, and, fucking electrified! Shit! Shit on me, shit on me, I did it, I actually did it! I made the damn jump!

  Abuzz with the crackling power of adrenalin, and feeling as if she was sparking like a shorted pylon in the night, Margaret began to swim, pushing through the gently flowing water and aiming for the right bank, which loomed black with densely packed jungle: perfect cover to wait for the barrels to come drifting by.

  After about five minutes of steady swimming she began to feel aquatic plants stroking their slimy leaves along her limbs, while the shadows of the jungle trees, leaning precariously over the water, began to blot out the star-holed sky. It was then that she knew she was almost at the riverbank. Sure enough, her feet soon hit the bottom, so she stopped swimming and waded until she was completely out of the river. Then, with her feet finally back on solid ground, she stumbled up the bank into a small clearing amidst the trees and promptly collapsed.

  She could have passed out right there and then; the reassuring stability of having solid earth supporting her body felt so exquisite that it was like the embrace of a mother, cradling a child who has been wandering lost and alone in a forest full of unseen danger.

  ‘No, not now!’ she growled, forcing herself to sit up. ‘Not now, not now! If you miss that barrel your only chance is gone! You can only get so far on foot, and God knows they’ll find you tomorrow morning. You have to get into that barrel! Get up! Sit up and watch the damn river!’

  She sat in the darkness for a long, long time, shivering and staring at the rippling water with its sudden splashes of fish jumping like stones of infrequent hail; a prelude to a tempest. All around her the symphony of the night was deafening in its quadraphonic volume; there was so much life in this jungle that it was at once amazing and completely overwhelming. Insects trilled and hummed and buzzed, while owls hooted and monkeys howled and shrieked, and occasionally, in the distance, a predator growled or roared while a large ungulate rumbled or snorted.

  After what seemed like a good hour or so, an altogether different sort of rumbling vibrated the night air. Margaret looked up at the enormous city wall and saw the portcullis, through which the river flowed, being raised.

  Her heart immediately began to pump surges of excitement-laced blood through her veins; this was it, this was the barrels being sent downriver, with one of them heading to Bafa village. She stared with unwavering concentration at the portcullis as it was hauled up. The process seemed to take forever; the river must have been very, very deep for the steel grille to have gone all that way down. Finally, however, its spiked bottom emerged from the water, dribbling bright jewels of water as it was raised from the surface, and after a few minutes the barrels came bobbing along. After they had all passed under the wall the portcullis was l
owered again, and the deep sounds of the gears and pulleys grumbled their iron protest across the surface of the river until the portcullis was locked into place, sealing up the city once again.

  Margaret kept her eyes on the barrels, and as they got closer she waded out into the water and swam toward them. She managed to intercept the barrel with the monkey painted on it, and by keeping one hand on the lip of the edge she started to pull it back to her hidden spot on the bank. There she would empty out some of the vegetables and fruits, climb in, and float her way down to Bafa village, using the lid as a paddle to speed her passage.

  While she was unpacking some of the barrel’s cargo, tossing the food into the river in her haste to empty it out, a pair of eyes was staring intently at her through a pair of night-vision binoculars.

  ‘Is she getting into the barrel, General?’

  ‘She’s still unpacking it.’

  ‘But everything is going according to plan?’

  ‘Oh yes. It has worked out quite perfectly.’

  Atop the wall stood the General and Dr Ogilvy, both hidden in the shadows, quietly observing Margaret.

  ‘Where is Sergeant Tesla?’ Dr Ogilvy asked.

  ‘She hid his body at the bottom of the tower ladder. I’ll send some troops to fetch him and take him to the medical bay as soon as Dr Green sets off in the barrel.’

  Dr Ogilvy nodded.

  ‘The boy’s acting skills are phenomenal; Green didn’t suspect a thing. I hope you’re going to give him a medal for this mission, and a promotion.’

  ‘Oh yes, Doctor,’ The General murmured, his eyes still on Margaret. ‘He will have both; he has performed outstandingly.’

  ‘I find it rather amusing that she was so caught up in her obsession to escape that she did not once seem to truly question why she was here in the first place,’ Dr Ogilvy commented with a smirk. ‘You told her that you had kidnapped her because you needed her medical skills, correct?’