Forgotten Tigers and Other Stories Read online

  The aliens weren’t coming after just him anymore. The other two peeled off and tried to get to the brothers. Omar was up and had ripped off a branch, creating enough movement and confusion to keep the pincher from his flesh. Easie slashed a leg joint, whipping his blade up as the alien reeled sideways and smashing it down onto where the pincher joined with the main body. A third slash took out its sack.

  Easie sprang back as one of the other aliens turned its attention from the maniac with the branch. He stumbled and winced as his joints screamed with fresh pain.

  “Easie! Hey hey. Alien salopri!” Rozalie charged down the alley with a spear in each hand, her purple night dress billowing around her. She was like an angry mama elephant, tusks brandished, the ground shaking with all twenty stone weight of her wrath.

  The alien at Easie’s feet exploded, the cold liquid bathing all of them. The remaining two aliens started vibrating, their colors shifting rapidly along the rainbow, blue scanners winking and blinking as though they couldn’t process the battle quickly enough.

  Easie tore his gaze from the charging beauty of Rozalie and stabbed at the nearest alien. Strong Vin and Omar edged behind him; calling out to Rozalie in the language Easie had never bothered to learn.

  His kukri broke its leg joint but this alien didn’t press the attack, instead staggering on three legs and its claw away from them, around the corner of the apartments. The last alien leapt impossibly high, gaining the balcony that overshadowed them and disappearing onto the roof.

  “Oh Jesu. Is that blood?” Rozalie reached them, huffing.

  Omar grabbed the door and slammed it shut but they’d all seen the wrecked body inside. That part of things Easie had forgotten and wished had been left in the fog. The emptiness of a corpse, a space suddenly vacant in the world. The heavy stench of blood in large quantities that was nothing like salt or copper.

  “What happened?”

  “They got Liron. What we gone do?”

  “We got to tell somebody. This is crazy.”

  Easie shut out their voices, reaching into the quiet pool he’d found when the fog of all these wasted years cleared away. He’d come up with something. His friends needed tasks. Tasks kept people sane after a battle.

  “Rozalie, get the truck,” he said quietly, but his tone cut through their panicked chatter and his heart beat a little stronger as they turned to him, their eyes filled with the desire to listen, the willingness to follow him. She dropped the spears and nodded, running back down the narrow alley, almost as light on her feet as the girl she once had been. “Omar, Vin, get blankets. We need to cover Liron.”

  Lights had gone on in the apartments around them, but other than twitched aside curtains, no one came out. The whole fight had taken almost no time at all in Easie’s mind. No time to kill. No time to die. Time. Time. He shook off the fog that threatened and licked his lips, tasting blood.

  Scraps of plans formed in Easie’s mind as he stood watch while the brothers wrapped Liron’s body in blankets. He wasn’t sure the aliens would come back. They were the enemy, but they seemed ill-equipped and easily confused. He thought on the first one he’d killed. In the rubbish. Scanning. Sorting.

  Scouts. They’d come after him because he’d seen them, maybe. Or because he’d killed one. Maybe they could track this goop they’d left all over him. Now they were running and he had a guess it was back to whatever they’d arrived in. While the sweet mechanical smell of anti-freeze was a good give-away, Easie didn’t think he could track the injured one from smell alone. Too much goop on his shirt and pants, he figured he’d be smelling it for a long time and little else. Except maybe Liron’s blood. Easie shoved that away, too.

  Rozalie backed the truck down the alley and Easie smiled as her red reverse lights showed him the way. The whole ground around him lit up with a blue-green glow as the red light spilled onto the aliens’ goop.

  “Rozalie, wait,” he told her. He found an electric torch, masking tape, and a screwdriver in a drawer in Liron’s kitchen. The brothers, having moved the corpse, followed him out, sniping at each other in Creole under their breaths.

  “Look at dat glow,” Omar said.

  “We’re going to track the injured one. I think we can maybe find their ship.” Easie set about liberating one of the taillights, unscrewing the red plastic.

  “Ship?” Strong Vin shook his head. The big man looked as though he were about to collapse and cry.

  “They aliens. They got a ship, zozo.” Omar shrugged.

  Easie glanced at them as he fitted the red plastic over the torch and started taping it more or less in place. Vin always seemed solid, less of a crazy drunk than his brother, but in a crisis, it seemed the roles reversed. Easie had learned that when it came down to the gritty bits, no man could hide his true heart. Or hers. He glanced at Rozalie. He’d always suspected she was a warrior inside, her scars and fat her armor against a world that had tried to throw her away as well. They were not so different.

  “We’ll need gas or something to destroy the ship. See if you can find anything around. Be back here in fifteen minutes or I leave without you.” Easie straightened up, clicking his torch on. It worked well, illuminating the wounded alien’s trail.

  The brothers looked at each other and Omar punched Vin in the arm.

  “Come on,” Omar said. He took off toward the larger street.

  “Zozo ou gro tankou yon tic-tac,” muttered Strong Vin.

  “That why you mama like me?” They disappeared around the corner.

  Waiting until they were out of hearing as well as sight, Easie tossed the makeshift spears into the bed of the truck before he looked at Rozalie. “Ready?”

  “To pe rode la gratelle don to liki la,” she said. “You go borrowing trouble.”

  “The aliens behave like scouts. The first one ignored me until I hurt it.”

  “Tann. You mean you started this?” Rozalie paused half inside the truck and glared at him.

  “It ignored me. Shoved me aside,” Easie said, looking down at the kukri in his hand. “It was too much.”

  She pursed her lips and took a deep breath. “We’re going to track it?”

  “We have to. No one is going to believe old drunks like us. Would you? Maybe we can stop the scouts, prevent them from phoning home.” He tried to smile at his own stupid joke but his skin felt too tight, too old and he worried it was just another grimace.

  “You the officer,” Rozalie said and though her tone was prickly she climbed into the truck without further comment in any language.

  The drove slowly east, following the glowing spatters. The injured alien stuck to the road, probably due to the trouble of moving with only three legs. The trail led them up King George’s highway toward Fond Cani but eventually died out. They parked by an abandoned cinderblock hut and backtracked, Rozalie carrying a make-shift spear, and both of them hauling five-gallon gas tanks.

  “I’m terrified,” she whispered as they stumbled along, moving slowly uphill. “But you seem like a statue. If you’re right, Easie, this is so much bigger than us. Than anything. What if it is the beginning of some all out alien war? What if they everywhere already?” The whites of her eyes gleamed as she rolled them up toward the sky where the blanket of stars peeked through the bamboo and palm canopy.

  “When I was six, maybe seven, my father, was assigned to protect an Indian diplomat. We went to his tea plantation and I wandered away, into jungle similar to this, I guess.” Easie kept his voice low, his tone even. They shouldn’t be talking, he knew, but it seemed to keep Rozalie calm. They were making a racket anyway, both of them breathing heavily. “I ran into a tiger. It was no further away from me than you are now. I could have maybe brushed its whiskers.”

  “It didn’t eat you?”

  Easie shook his head. “It was all shadow and sunrise, there in the half-light before sunset. Its eyes were so orange, like the heart of a fire. My family came looking for me, scared it off. But it looked right into me and I heard its
voice like a shooting star in my mind.”

  “The tiger talked to you?” Rozalie said in her usual acidic, world-weary tone, making Easie smile a little.

  “Aaja, it said. Today.”

  “Today?” Same tone.

  “It meant that today I die. When I told my father, he did not laugh, but let me hold his blade and told me I would be a great warrior because I had already died and need no longer fear.”

  He had feared, though. Feared losing honor. It had turned him into a shell. A coward. Kaatar hunni bhanda marnu ramro. The Gurkha motto. Better to die than to be a coward. He rolled the words over in his mind. He had chosen cowardice, chosen a small life, doing small things, discarded by those he had trusted. No more fear.

  A damp leaf smacked into Easie’s face and he shoved it aside. They crested a rise and the jungle quit in a perfectly circular bowl before them. The vegetation was just done, the ground smooth and barren. A black pyramid about the size of two of Rozalie’s trucks rested in the center of the shallow crater. Nothing moved, even the jungle had gone silent around them, as though Dominica herself held her breath.

  “Will it burn?” Rozalie whispered.

  “Only one way to know for certain,” Easie whispered back.

  He gave her no time for second thoughts, moving out into the barren space. The stars lit everything in black and white and grey, giving texture to the slightest ridge of soil, to every curve of every dislodged rock. There was no need for torchlight. Easie dropped his and drew his kukri. He wanted to charge, to cry out to Kali and announce the battle properly, but his leg muscles had turned to rubber on the long climb here and his lungs wheezed that he was nearer to sixty than thirty. So he crept over the open ground, hearing Rozalie moving behind him, her shadow a strange comfort.

  One face of the pyramid cracked open, dropping down with a wave of damp soil. An alien emerged, all its legs intact, its pincher snapping and its blue light flickering across the meters between them. Easie sliced the cap off the plastic gas tank and forced his tired legs to rush forward. He tossed the container past the alien and it splattered into the dark interior beyond the open door. The fumes set his eyes watering and he nearly collided with the alien as it jumped forward, slashing at him.

  A copper pipe tipped with a kitchen knife held on by duct tape stabbed between Easie’s legs, nailing the alien directly in its vulnerable sack. Easie fell back against Rozalie’s warm, sweaty body and she caught him, righting him as the tooth-grating vibrations started. The door started to lift and a beam of blue light erupted from the tip of the pyramid.

  “Lighter,” Easie gasped, grabbing for the second gas tank. He splashed gasoline onto the alien as it died and shoved its shivering body back onto the door. The alien was surprisingly light for how solid it looked, as though all its strength was in the fluid draining away.

  Rozalie flicked the zippo on and they both ran backward as she tossed.

  The fumes caught, then the alien. Then it exploded as the door jammed. The fireball was something straight out of the American movies, a heat wave that singed Easie’s stubble and turned his vision blank for several long breaths after as he lay, heaving, beside Rozalie.

  When he could see again, the pyramid was still burning and no blue light shone from its tip.

  Though it felt like hours had gone by as they stumbled their way back down to the truck and then crept along the winding, narrow road back to Roseau, but the sky showed no hint of dawn and the brothers were awake, still drunk as seamen.

  “You get dem?” Omar asked.

  “Why you leave us?” Strong Vin added, though he didn’t sound angry at all.

  “I think we got them,” Easie said. “But we need to shower and put anything we wore that might have got alien goop on it into the washer.”

  “I’ve got bleach for the courtyard,” Rozalie said, forestalling Omar’s next question with an exhausted wave of her hand.

  “Is it over?” Omar asked, ducking as Vin took a half-hearted swipe at his head.

  “I don’t know,” Easie said. He turned away, not wanting the lie to show on his tired face. It wasn’t over, he felt it in his heart. That fireball had been like the eyes of the tiger, a salvo. A promise. Aaja.

  Cleaner and more sober than he’d been in years, Easie took the chicken roti Rozalie had reheated for him out onto the front balcony. He could just see over the tops of the buildings in front of them to the dark spill of the sea, out beyond the cruise ship port. He pulled up a chair and set down his plate, drawing his kukri and checking it for nicks.

  He shivered despite the warm night and raised his eyes as the sky over the ocean shifted from black tarp and pinprick lights to rippling icy blue. Easie took a deep breath, let it out. Propping his feet up on the railing, he laid his kukri across his knees, and smiled.

  Jai Mahakali, ayo Gorkhali. Praise to Kali, here come the Gurkha.

  Aaja. No more fog. No more fear. He was ready.

  * * * * *

  The Crimson Rice Job

  Hong Kong-

  The last place Nipa Burke expected to find a criminal mastermind was in a posh office high up in a Hong Kong tower. This was certainly not where Nipa imagined a man like The Mongol would work, but he was the best and neither she nor the world could afford to settle for less. The building was all steel and glass, appearing to have been built by someone from fifty years in the future, and the office itself was clean and modern, tastefully furnished with white couches, a subtly patterned rug, and a smiling receptionist who had clearly been hired for both her bosom and her ability to multi-task.

  The receptionist tucked the phone against her ample chest and motioned to Nipa, switching from Cantonese to English without taking a breath as she said, “You may go in.”

  Nipa took a steadying breath and pushed through the doors. The office inside had a breathtaking view of Hong Kong and for a moment she was lost in the dazzle of the afternoon sun.

  “Dr. Burke?” said a man’s voice to her right.

  She started, blushed, and turned. Most businessmen would have placed their desks straight across from the doors, putting themselves central to anyone entering. The Mongol has his desk to the side.

  The man himself underwhelmed. From his reputation, his paperwork at Interpol, and his moniker, Nipa had pictured a large, dark man who perhaps twirled a thin moustache and stroked an exotic pet. The Mongol was small man in his early forties, shorter than her own 1.7 meters, with a clean-shaven face. His hair was black like hers, but a duller, coarser black, and only the shape of his eyes and his prominent cheekbones hinted at non-Caucasian origins. His eyes, which now watched her scrutiny of him with a spark of amusement, were the steel blue she remembered from summers spent on the Welsh coast.

  “Usually, people who spend as much effort finding me as you have prefer to talk instead of just stare,” he said, waving in the direction of one of the plush leather stools facing his desk. His voice held only the barest traces of an eastern European accent.

  Nipa smoothed her hands over her skirt and took a seat, feeling like a school girl about to be punished as she perched on the low, modern stool.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “you are not what I expected.”

  “I do my best.” He smiled and his teeth were unnaturally even and white, glinting in the sun streaming through the windows. He had a tea service in front of him and she could smell the freshly steeped herbs, some kind of chai mix, inside the iron teapot. He did not offer her refreshment.

  “I would like to hire you,” she began after another awkward pause. She waited but he continued looking at her with the same half-smile in his eyes. She crossed her legs carefully, letting her silk skirt ride up. His gaze did not shift from her face. She had encountered men who were apparently immune to her beauty, she could handle this. She took a deep breath, trying to make it look like a normal one.

  “I would like to hire you,” she repeated, “to steal something for me.”

  “And what would I be stealing?” No chan
ge in his face.

  “Rice,” she said.

  That got her a reaction. He leaned back and his dark brows came together. “Rice?”

  “Yes. Forty-five thousand kilos of rice.”

  He blinked, once, slowly, like a lizard. “I assume not just any rice will do?”

  “No, this is very special rice. We call it Crimson Rice. It is genetically engineered to have high levels of iron, beta-carotene, and trace minerals such as zinc in it. It grows anywhere rice can grow, with a shorter growing season and a high resistance to pests and disease. The only Crimson seed rice available is at a warehouse by a testing facility in Jilin Provence. I need it taken without bloodshed, if possible. Everyone I have spoken to says that you are the man who can steal anything. I can pay, of course.” Hopefully not too much, she added silently. Her accounts were already drained, but she had saved everything for this moment, for a man like this man.

  “What will you do with this rice?” The Mongol asked. He leaned forward now, putting his thin arms up on the desk, and she caught a hint of his cologne, cedar and smoke.

  “I’m going to save the world,” Nipa said.

  “Tell me the details,” he said, reaching for a pen. “We shall see if this is thing that can be done.”

  * * *

  Dubai-

  After the thick clot of Hongkong, Dubai felt almost dated and empty to Nipa. She went from air-conditioned airport to air-conditioned Rolls Royce to air-conditioned hotel. Where Hong Kong has seemed built by someone from the future, her hotel in Dubai felt as though it had been built by someone who was imaging the future from fifty years in the past. The huge sail shape was lost up close and the details of the place were obscured by tourists. Her room, however, with its carpet that seemed to wrap her feet in soft towel comfort and the huge garden tub, was just what she wanted. The decadence pricked her with guilt, but she shoved it aside with the single-minded tenacity of one who has lived without, of one who knows how fragile the façade of the world really is.

  She had called Faisal and told him she was coming to see him. He needed warning, for though she knew about the prince’s harem, they both pretended that she was the only woman in his life. Nipa zipped herself into her last clean dress, pulling on the string of black pearls Faisal had given her for her thirty-ninth birthday, and wondered if there would be a prince to give her presents by her fortieth.