Path of the Tiger, стр. 456

split-second, but the instant that the lightning hurled its strobe-fire light across the landscape, William saw a massive cat a mere twenty metres from them, looking unlike any creature he had ever seen in his life. Since arriving in India, he had seen lions and tigers, both in the wild and caged, but this monstrous creature looked like a mixture of both lion and tiger. It was more lion, to be sure; its coat was the same tawny brown as that of a lion’s, yet its mane was a lot more insubstantial, and its coat was dappled in a light camouflage pattern, which was almost a blend of that of a tiger and that of a leopard. What was most intimidating about the creature, though, was its sheer size; it was a great deal bigger than any lion or tiger William had ever seen.

‘It’s, it’s the lion, it’s…’ he stammered, shouting against the cacophony of the storm, trying to tell the others what he had just seen, but he was so gripped with fear that he could not complete the sentence.

Soon enough, though, they heard it. That explosive roar rocketed its fury through the trees mere metres from William this time, leaving his ears ringing in the wake of its tree-rustling potency, and the unworldly sound was answered immediately by another roar and a bassy snorting from the front left.

The lion’s roar blew through William’s body with a shock wave force, leaving in its wake a rush of irresistible terror that seemed to paralyse him utterly. He found himself reeling in his saddle like a drunk, with no control over his movements. Beside him Kelly screamed with abject horror and started firing off rounds from his revolver in a panic, shooting blindly into the shadow-drenched forest.

‘Maintain order!’ Bingham bellowed, trying his best to be the voice of authority, although an undercurrent of dread was unmistakably present in his voice too. ‘Stop firing Kelly, damn you! Stop firing!’

‘I don’t want to die!’ Kelly shrieked, his eyes almost bursting from their sockets. ‘I don’t want to die!’

He abruptly down his revolver and fled into the forest, screaming all the while. Up in the treetops, the porters were chanting out incantations of protection, their voices shaky and weak. William watched Kelly stumbling on his madcap path through the vines and trees with horror, and then, as yet another explosive flare of lightning illuminated the area, William saw a huge cat – a leopard, it looked like – drop from the treetops onto the fleeing man. Kelly and the beast plunged in a thrashing tangle into the undergrowth, with Kelly letting out a bloodcurdling scream that was cut abruptly short midway through.

‘Kelly’s dead!’ Bingham roared, ‘and the rest of you will be too if you break formation! We’ve got the firepower to stop all of them, if we just maintain the discipline to—’

Something smashed William right off of River King and sent him hurtling through the air at an incredible speed. He was airborne for a full second or two before his body ploughed through a couple of branches and then decimated the prickly shrub into which it crashed. He tumbled and rolled in a chaos of destructive momentum, cartwheeling through the forest and eventually coming to rest against the gnarled trunk of an old, sprawling tree. Dazed and semi-conscious from the immense force of the blow, he nonetheless tried to get up. He found, however, that he could not breathe, for all of the wind had been knocked out of his lungs. It felt as if whatever had hit him had utterly pulverised every inch of his body, so intense and widespread was the pain.

Gasping ineffectually for breath, he peered through the cascading rain and the half-light, but could see no signs of either his horse or anyone else. After a few moments he began to regain his breath, and then on jelly-weak limbs he struggled up onto his hands and knees and started crawling through the damp mess of leaves and peat that carpeted the floor of the forest, wheezing and spluttering as he went. Through the madness of the storm he heard the booming clap of the elephant gun firing, and then the sharper cracks of someone’s Winchester rifle shooting off rounds in rapid bursts, as well as the percussive thumps of Bingham’s revolver firing. All of these weapons were quickly silenced, though, and a strange and eerie calm then descended upon the forest. Even the rain itself began to cease in its intensity, and soon all that William could hear was the heavy pounding of his heart in his breast, and the rushing polyrhythms of superheated blood gushing through his temples and drumming in his hot ears.

Still weak and disoriented from the mighty force that had hurled him into the forest, he tried to get up, but he fell instantly onto his back as the world seemed to swim around him. Determined to somehow escape this calamity, he tried, growling wordlessly, to struggle to his feet, but when he got as far as hauling himself halfway up his stomach heaved involuntarily, and he spewed up his half-digested breakfast before he collapsed again, choking and coughing and trembling.

‘River King,’ he wheezed, ‘where are you, lad, where are you?’

It was then that he heard it: a crunching of leaves up ahead – the kind of crunching that signified the presence of something very, very heavy.

‘What on earth is tha’?’ he whispered to himself, a fresh dose of terror pulsing its jagged crystals through his veins.

With a grunt and a groan, he managed to rise onto all fours, peering in fright all the while through the drifts of mist that were wafting up from the forest floor. Then, just upwind from him, he spotted an enormous Indian rhinoceros, with its single-horned head tilted upwards as it sniffed at the air. Before William could even think of trying to run or hide, though, the behemoth spotted him, its tiny eyes lighting up as they