Tiger

by William Richter

  Within just a minute of driving, the sky ahead began to glow a little, reflecting bright lights from somewhere below. Wally rolled down the windows of the Escalade and could hear house music—thumping bass and piercing electronica—a bit faint for the moment but growing in volume as they rolled closer.

  “It’s already happening,” Wally said, more to herself than Kyle.

  She had barely gotten her words out when Kyle suddenly reached for his door handle and pulled it, swinging the door outward and hurling himself out onto the dark shoulder of the road.

  “Kyle!” Wally shouted, pounding her fists on the steering wheel. She was outraged with herself at being caught off guard.

  Wally immediately skidded the car to a stop and jumped out, but Kyle was nowhere to be found. The SUV had been traveling at just over thirty miles per hour when he had jumped, but it still would have been a hard, painful landing. How far could he have made it in just a few seconds? The shoulder of the road was dense with brush and she had no flashlight, so Wally stood still and listened for a few moments, waiting for Kyle to reveal his location. There were no sounds at all coming from the brush, and no sign of movement.

  Kyle was disciplined enough to keep himself completely still.

  Shit. Wally wanted badly to go in after him—feeling her way through the darkness on her hands and knees, if that’s what it took—but realized that if she ventured out into the dark brush, she would be vulnerable to an attack from Kyle. Reaching Tiger was her priority, and she couldn’t risk screwing it up.

  “I’ll find you, Kyle,” Wally warned in a normal tone, knowing he had to be very close. “And you’ll never see me coming.”

  She listened for a moment more, then climbed back into the Escalade and motored on along the service road, all the while trying to set aside her frustration at letting Kyle escape. She passed through another mile or so of dark forest before finally reaching the factory complex.

  It was a huge building with one long section about four or five stories high and a higher tower section on the far end—where Tiger would be headed, if Kyle’s information could be believed. The compound was surrounded by a very high cyclone fence with razor wire on top. Two or three hundred vehicles of every type were already parked in the surrounding fields, with a few dozen young people—excited and talkative—walking across the ground toward an open gate in the fence. A rainbow of flashing strobes leaked from every opening in the factory, and even outside the building, the house music was almost deafening.

  Wally left her gun in the car, sure that it would not make it through the kind of security she was expecting. She casually mixed with the other kids as they approached the gate, trying to act relaxed, but in reality staying hyperalert—she could sense that Tiger was very close now, and already approaching his target.

  Wally didn’t know all the details about her brother’s mission, but everything she had learned about Divine and his organization—his involvement in black-market arms sales, the extreme violence he’d used, and the fact that Alabama had been in the market to purchase very powerful, untraceable explosives—told her that something devastating and huge was about to go off. Wally needed to find Tiger before he was destroyed by whatever Divine had planned, and time was critical. She felt as if a bomb was ticking inside her chest.

  The guards at the gate—four of them—were nothing like she expected. They were of various nationalities, and no older than she was. They’d dressed in a hodgepodge of guerrilla military gear, and most of them possessed the distant, impassive look of battle-hardened veterans. All were armed with “choppers”—assault rifles—plus knives and handguns stuffed into their belts. Wally smiled blankly as she approached the gate, matching her outward mood to that of the gleeful, stoned kids around her.

  One of the guards patted Wally down, lingering too long on her curves as his hands ran along her body. He had a strange gleam in his eye, as if imagining the things he would do to her when he had the chance.

  “Find anything you like?” she smiled flirtatiously, letting her eyelids droop as if she was heavily stoned. The guard—an Asian kid no older than fourteen but with a look like he had been through the wars—winked at her.

  “Maybe I see you inside?” he said.

  She and the other kids entered the main building and were immediately swallowed up in a storm of music and light, hundreds of dancing, sexing, tripped-out kids filling the vast space. Wally was impressed—the scene was more depraved than most of the action she’d witnessed in Manhattan clubs.

  At the edges of the room were dozens of young bodies wrapped up in each other—half-dressed boys and girls in groups with no gender boundaries, writhing around on the floor. They were lit dimly by rows of tiki torches set to either side of the room, flames flickering to the vibrations of the house music and smoke rising up toward the ceiling in oily, acrid plumes. It was like a level of hell, Wally thought—the kind you’d see in a classic old painting at the Metropolitan Museum, where legions of the damned were being roasted alive in a fiery pit.

  Wally soon focused her attention on the north end of the room, where a staircase led up into the tower section of the old factory. There were four security “men” on guard there, each armed with choppers—military-issue assault rifles.

  Wally was willing to bet her life that Tiger would be there. She slowed her pace a little and passed by the foot of the stairs, fixing a playful gaze on one of the guards—an African-looking guy of no more than sixteen—his eyes hidden behind a pair of dark aviator sunglasses and a soldier’s red beret perched sideways on his head, the edges of an Afro poking out the sides. Once she was sure the guard had clocked her, she headed for an exit at the east side of the floor.

  She didn’t need to look back—Wally could sense the boy following her. She reached the doorway and exited back out into the night, headed toward a shadow at the edge of the building. This side of the grounds was empty, save for one young sentry standing post at the southeast corner of the building, about forty feet away.

  Wally had just reached the shadowed area when a hand grabbed her by the shoulder and roughly turned her around. The African kid wore a cocksure grin as he set his assault rifle against the cyclone fence and leaned in toward Wally, jamming his tongue into her mouth without skill or nuance, like he was pushing a plunger into a toilet bowl. Wally placed a hand on his chest and pushed him gently away.

  With a suggestive smirk, she glanced toward the sentry at the corner of the building. Romeo took the hint and yelled at the sentry to get lost. The sentry complied, disappearing around the corner of the building to give the young lovers some privacy. Romeo turned back to Wally, running his hand up her shirt as he leaned in with his lips parted.

  His tongue never made contact this time. Wally brought her elbow up hard and drove it into the kid’s throat. His eyes bulged hugely as he absorbed the full force of the blow and struggled to breathe, a surge of adrenaline burning through all the oxygen in his lungs until he went limp and passed out on the ground. Wally grabbed his rifle from its place by the fence.

  Now she was armed. What next? The firepower of the assault rifle clearly wasn’t enough to get her through the tower sentries, so she’d have to be more resourceful. There was an outside staircase leading up to the tower, but it seemed inevitable that there would only be more guards posted there than she could handle.

  Wally looked around and spotted a metal shed set off from the main factory building—was there some sort of mechanical sound coming from inside? She thought she could hear something barely discernible beneath the dense bass of the house music that filled the air. The shed was about fifty feet away, near the corner where the sentry had disappeared a few moments before. Wally approached the corner and peered around it, smiling at the sentry, who was now leaning against the outside wall of the factory, his rifle slung across his shoulder as he smoked.

  “Hi,” Wally said.


  The sentry smiled back and tossed his cigarette away, heading toward her. As he rounded the corner, Wally whipped her new assault rifle around, striking the unsuspecting boy on the forehead. He dropped to the ground in a motionless heap. Wally grabbed his rifle and flung it away, then approached the metal shed. As she drew nearer, the ground underneath her vibrated with the rhythm of a motor.

  She darted into the shed, finding a large engine inside that was running at a high pitch. A generator, of course. The factory probably hadn’t been on the power grid in decades, Wally figured, and lots of power would be needed to light it up for the evening’s festivities. She knew nothing about engines, but she reached out anyway and grabbed the round rubber thing on the front of the motor that had two cables coming out of it. She gave the cables a strong pull and the rubber part popped right off the engine, which sputtered for a few seconds before shutting down completely.

  The music and lights in the factory immediately went dead, and the echo of the sounds bounced back and forth across the valley for a second or two before giving way to complete silence. Wally could imagine the hundreds of stoned kids all standing completely still on the dance floor, trying to figure out what was happening and wondering if the interruption was real or just in their own heads.

  After a moment of quiet, Wally heard a stirring from inside, voices speaking and hooting and booing at the interruption of their fun, while others laughed out loud at the sheer surprise of it all. The dim glow of the flickering tiki torches inside the factory could just be seen through the windows, and Wally realized that it was the light of the torches that was preventing an all-out panic among the partiers.

  Chaos, thought Wally. That’s what we need.

  She looked up to the highest part of the main factory roof, where there was a row of glass skylights that stretched the entire length of the building. About half were already broken but many remained intact. Wally shouldered her assault rifle and aimed high, toward the glass.

  32.

  TIGER STEPPED OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND approached Sweet, who was having a close, personal discussion with one of the local crime bosses. Tiger swept his right hand down by his hip, feeling the butt of the handgun there and reassuring himself again that he would be able to draw it quickly. He had covered half the distance to his target, Sweet, when the room went dark. It appeared the power outage was not restricted to the room they were in—the intense pulse of music from the rave downstairs had gone quiet as well.

  Sweet’s soldiers were young but they were also well trained—without panicking, they immediately produced at least half a dozen bright flashlights and gathered tightly around Sweet, surrounding him with a human shield that would make a shot at him almost impossible. The room came to life with sounds of radio communication, at least three of the boys holding walkie-talkies that they were now using to get a fix on the security situation. Tiger heard the word generator mentioned several times, with voices on the other end of the line saying that they were converging on the generator and would have it back on in just a few seconds.

  Tiger stood his ground in the center of the room, with no choice but to hold off on his attack. The calm vigilance of Sweet’s team turned to full alert when a barrage of gunfire rang out—four long autobursts from an assault rifle outside the building. The gunfire was followed by the sound of shattering glass and then loud, shrieking screams from the hundreds of partiers below, already half out of their minds with dope and now caught up in full panic.

  “GO!!!” one of Sweet’s security boys shouted. “EVERYONE MOVE!”

  Tiger could only watch as the team hustled Sweet to the door and out of the room like a cadre of veteran Secret Service agents, following a key principle: when in doubt, get the package out. Tiger hadn’t even come close to taking a shot. What would Divine be thinking at that moment? That Tiger had somehow tried to cross him?

  If so, Wally was as good as dead.

  Shit!

  The local bosses stayed close to Sweet and raced away also, with one security man staying until everyone was out. The kid—hyperalert and twitchy—motioned for Tiger to exit in front of him, and Tiger hurried to the door as if obeying the command. At the last second, he pulled up short and crouched low, delivering a surprise punch to the kid’s solar plexus. The kid dropped to the floor, out cold.

  Tiger snatched away his assault rifle and flashlight.

  What next? Sweet was probably halfway out of the factory already, on his way to his waiting helicopter. Should Tiger hurry after him and try to take a shot? He’d never be able to get close enough. Unless . . . if someone were able to disable Sweet’s helicopter, the target would be grounded, and Tiger would be back in play. Tiger had to do something to let Divine know that he was still in the hunt and trying to fulfill his part of the deal.

  He pulled the cell phone out of his pocket, realizing that he had never actually completed the first text he’d been instructed to send—the one confirming that he was in position and ready to carry out the hit. Now he erased the first message and entered a new one as quickly as he could: Target on the move. Take out helicopter and I will find a way to finish. Tiger was about to press the “send” button but paused. Something was bothering him—the same feeling that had stopped him from sending his first text message earlier.

  The confirmation text didn’t really make sense—it was an extra moving part in the operation that served no real purpose. Why would Divine need to know his position? From his spot on the nearby hilltop he would know right away whether or not Tiger had taken his shot on Sweet.

  And then Tiger understood. In a moment of revelation, he remembered his first trip to the factory site with Rachel, how she had trekked down to the factory without him, a daypack slung over her shoulder. When she had returned to him on the hilltop, her pack was gone—she’d left it behind, somewhere inside the factory.

  Tiger began sweeping the room with his flashlight, and it only took a moment to find the spot—the same location he would have chosen himself. The far wall of the room had a section that had been patched over several times, so one more piece of scrap board on the plaster would never be noticed. Tiger moved to the spot and used all his strength to pull away the board, which had been secured with four or five rusty old nails. In the empty spot behind it sat Rachel’s backpack.

  Very carefully, Tiger pulled the pack out and set it on the floor. He unzipped the pack and found what he already knew would be there: somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds of plastic explosives, with a cell phone attached to a detonator.

  Of course. Once Tiger had been seen entering the tower, anything that happened after that could be blamed on him. He’d been told to confirm his arrival on the top floor with a text message, and sending it would have blown the entire factory tower off the map, probably killing hundreds of local party kids at the same time. Tiger would be dead, unable to tell his own version of the story.

  Tiger shut off the power on the bomb’s cell phone and zipped the pack up, tossing it over his shoulder—if Sweet had been slowed down on the way to his helicopter, the plastic explosives might be a weapon Tiger could use against him. Divine had schemed to blow Tiger up along with Sweet, but that didn’t change the mission: if Tiger couldn’t take out Sweet, Wally would pay the price.

  With the bomb on his back and the assault rifle in his hands, Tiger charged out of the room. Racing down the tower’s staircase, he arrived at the ground floor and was greeted by absolute chaos. Hundreds of drugged-up, half-naked teenagers were screaming at the top of their lungs and fighting each other to get out of the building in a primal frenzy of self-preservation. The crazed throng had knocked down several of the tiki torches as they rushed across the floor, the flames hitting the dry, old factory floor and setting it on fire, causing even more panic than the bursts of gunfire that had set off the stampede in the first place.

  Tiger fough
t his way through the crowd and saw that a window on the east wall had been smashed, teenagers diving through it desperately and cutting themselves on the glass edges in the process. Tiger headed in the direction of the noise and launched himself out the window, nicking his face on the glass.

  He raced toward the area inside the south fence where Sweet’s helicopter was waiting. Before he could get anywhere near that spot, he heard the high-pitched turbine engines begin to whine and the rotors whirring to life. Within seconds he saw the sleek aircraft lifting off, fifty yards in front of him. Tiger shouldered his assault rifle and took aim, but as he checked the ground ahead he saw dozens of the local party kids racing away, moving across the area directly beneath the chopper.

  If he got lucky and actually shot down the helicopter, dozens of those kids would die as it crashed to the ground in flames. Tiger hesitated, his finger tight on the trigger of his weapon. Until that moment, he had assumed that he would do absolutely anything to save his sister. But that wasn’t turning out to be true. He imagined Wally in his position, gun poised and ready to unleash hell—and he knew in his heart that she would never do that, not for anyone.

  Maybe he and his sister were more alike than Tiger had realized. He tried to shake off his hesitation, finding Sweet’s helicopter in his sights again and tightening his finger on the trigger of his rifle. He willed himself to pull it back the last millimeter and save Wally from Divine’s wrath.

  But he couldn’t do it. Tiger lowered his weapon and buried his face in his hands, howling in agony. One chance to save his sister, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Did he even know who he was anymore? Tiger was left with only one option: another helicopter would be taking off soon, and he would need to stop it. He took off, racing across the factory grounds as fast as he could.

  33.