Path of the Tiger, стр. 15
In a room two floors above, three rather different figures were sprawled on a ratty sofa. A deluge of light from a neon sign across the street from the shattered floor-to-ceiling window painted their comatose, mostly nude bodies with tones of blood-red. All three were tragically young in appearance … but one was far older than he looked.
The junkie on the far right of the wrecked sofa was an African American in his early twenties. Dressed only in soiled white underwear, the dreadlocked man had once been a towering colossus, but now his muscles looked as if they’d had all the tautness and potent volume vacuumed out of them; they hung like deflated balloons from his limbs, while ribs that looked too large for the sunken torso in which they were imprisoned strained against his dull skin. Festering wounds peppered his arms, and his eyes – stark white and rolled back in their blackened, sunken sockets – twitched as he shivered through a feverish dream.
In the middle of the sofa was a Hispanic girl who was barely out of her teens. Her long hair, voluminous and healthily buoyant in former years, now hung greasy and limp about her bony shoulders. Dressed only in a pair of grimy red panties, she had passed out with one tattooed, trackmark-scarred arm cupping the back of her head, and her other arm hanging limp. Like the young man next to her, her body seemed to have had most of the life drained from it, as if infested by youth-devouring parasites.
Few traces remained of a figure that had once been voluptuous, and her ribs and hipbones pushing so harshly through her tea-coloured skin, along with her gaunt, skull-like face, now swung the pendulum bob of her appearance to side of the god of death rather than that of a primordial fertility deity.
The man on the far left of the sofa cut a very different figure to the others, and his pale skin glowed with a radiance of vitality and potent life that had long since deserted the bodies of his companions. Although a little older than the dreadlocked fellow– late twenties, perhaps – he was in peak physical condition. While his build was on the slender side of athletic, the taut muscles of his bare torso, which bore scars from what seemed like hundreds of wounds, exuded a subdued strength. The tight black jeans that covered his legs were ripped and torn, but this was because this was fashionable, not because they were rags, and unlike his companions’ smelly clothes, his were freshly washed, and his red trainers were brand new. His medium length, sandy blonde hair was thick and full-bodied, and while a little messy, it had recently been styled and washed. His strong, almost angular jaw was coated with a heavy shadow of dark stubble, and the symmetrical arrangement of his features on either side of a high-bridged, long nose split his face into two perfectly mirrored halves. Each featured a full cheekbone and a soulful eye set in a deep socket beneath a bold, hard-angled eyebrow.
The instant the jaguar roar and the screams of dying men tore through the foggy silence, the man’s eyes flickered open, and they were bright with alacrity. He plucked the dirty syringe from his arm, flung it to the floor, and jumped up from the foul sofa. Within the steel-grey orbs of his irises his pupils dilated, adjusting to the gloom and allowing him to see quite clearly through the shadows, far more clearly than any normal human could, for a mystical potency enhanced the blood that flowed through his veins … blood that had been flowing through them since before either of his companions’ great-great-great-grandparents had been born.
While the heroin high still ensnared the other two in its blissfully warm cocoon of oblivion, it had long since dissipated from the blonde man’s system. His nostrils flared as he sniffed at the air, and he narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, his ears pricked as he listened for the sound he thought he had heard … knew he had heard. And then, alongside a howl of raw terror and agony, the sound cut through the night air again: the raspy growl of a jaguar.
‘Immortality’s a shitshow, a bitch from the blackest depths of hell,’ whispered the man to the damp-ridden wreck of a room and the passed-out junkies, ‘but for you, Hernández, that long and lonely ride ends tonight.’
After one last glance at his companions, the man pulled on his white tee shirt and black motorcycle jacket, and then raced off into the shadows.
***
While Pedro Hernández crushed the bones of a disembodied human arm between his jaguar jaws he stared at the corpse of the larger skinhead, observing with clinical calm the gushing of blood from the man’s torn-out throat as it slowed to a trickle. The other’s screams of agony, meanwhile, reverberated through the alley and, amplified to an immense din within Pedro’s jaguar skull, incised his ear drums with the sharpness of a scalpel blade. In a second of grotesque contorting of limbs, sucking back of golden fur beneath human skin, retracting of claws into flesh, and a shrinking of his skull and a flattening of his dagger-fangs, he transformed back into his human form, at which point the sound became a lot less piercing. With a sadistic chuckle he watched the panicking man attempting to stuff his eviscerated intestines back into the gaping maw of his abdominal cavity.
‘You should have just let me pass, hombre,’ he remarked coldly, detached wholly from the spectacle of gory death before him. ‘Now you’ve watched your friend die in agony next to you, and you’re about to leave this world screaming like a pig in a slaughterhouse, slipping around in a pile of your own blood in this stinking alley. I don’t imagine it’s the end you pictured for yourself.’
All the man could do in response was