‘Son of a goddamn bitch!’ the woman cursed. ‘Stay right behind me dammit, we cannot slow down, we cannot!’
She accelerated, keeping her AK-47 shouldered and ready to fire at a moment’s notice. The teens tore along behind her, their throats and lungs feeling as if they were seconds away from the point of collapse, with the air they sucked in tasting caustic and their limbs feeling leaden and impossibly ponderous. Zakaria, also panting from exhaustion now, ran behind them, hunched over on all fours, stabilising himself with his right fist and using his left hand to make sure the huge cat stayed safely on his shoulders.
‘We’re here!’ the woman yelled after she swung around one last corner and skidded to an abrupt halt. ‘Up the ladder, go, go!’
As Zakaria stumbled to a halt behind the exhausted teens, both he and the woman felt buzzing electricity snaking through their bodies like swarms of microscopic, burrowing fireflies; another beastwalker was close. Someone removed the manhole cover from above them, and Chloe was the first to scramble up the ladder.
She was almost at the top when the grizzly bear poked his head down through the hole. Too terrified to scream, she simply let go of the rungs, dropping off the ladder like a stone. She was barely airborne, though, when the huge bear shot out his paw, hooked his claws through the back of her shirt, and pulled her up through the manhole.
‘Don’t you fuckin’ dare jump or scream, girl!’ the woman screeched at Paola, who was whimpering with debilitating terror and frozen in place on the ladder. ‘Get your ass up that ladder! Ignore the bear!’
Too cowed and fear-stricken to do anything but obey, Paolo ascended the ladder with violently trembling limbs and tears streaming down her cheeks. As she neared the top rung the bear grabbed her and hauled her up through the hole. Daekwon slung Jun’s body over his shoulder and scurried up the ladder, and the bear plucked the unconscious boy off him when he neared the top. Daekwon scrambled out of the manhole and found himself in the back of a small furniture truck, occupied by the other teens and, to his astonishment, an enormous grizzly bear.
Adding to the bizarreness of the situation, there were a couple of bathrobes and three large, very old-looking bonsai trees in the truck – the inside of which was far more spacious than the interior of the van had been – along with a variety of weapons and military equipment, a computer desk with a number of monitors on it, an office chair and some other random items that all seemed out of place. Chloe and Paola, utterly petrified and hyperventilating, pressed themselves up against the rear wall of the truck, as far from the bear as they could get in these cramped confines. The bear, however, paid no heed to the teenagers, and instead reached down into the tunnel. With a sonorous growl that rattled the whole structure of the truck and got the teens screaming with fright, he hauled the unconscious tiger up through the manhole.
The tiger was followed by Zakaria in his gorilla form; he had been pushing the tiger up the ladder using his immense strength and dexterity, with just one arm pulling both his own weight and William’s. As soon as he was inside, he collapsed onto his stomach, almost crushing Jun in the process. The pale fur on his back was dark crimson, matted with blood, and he was panting with crippling exhaustion.
Last, the woman emerged from the manhole. She scrambled through the truck and slipped through a door that led to the front, and then clambered into the driver’s seat.
‘Let’s go, let’s go!’ she screamed as she started up the engine. ‘Close it up, I gotta drive!’
The grizzly rolled Zakaria effortlessly onto his side and then dragged the manhole cover over the opening, backed further into the truck and slid the floor panel into place, sealing up the hole in the floor. The woman then shifted the van into gear and pulled off, but unlike Zakaria she drove at a sedate pace, not wishing to draw any unwanted attention to the vehicle.
‘Are we all good in the back there?’ she called out as she pulled up to a stop at a red light.
In a grotesque flurry of dissolving fur, withering muscles, shrivelling limbs and a shrinking head, the grizzly bear became, in the blink of an eye, a freakish human-bear hybrid monstrosity, and then in another flash of shrinking and twisting and distending, only a man was left sitting in the space where the grizzly had just been.
The Native American man was rail-thin, with his umber skin vacuum-packed around small but granite-hard clumps of muscle, upon which fat rattlesnake veins basked, and his sinewy frame was a ghostly mockery of the seven-hundred-kilogram bear he had been a moment earlier. He wore his long hair loose, and it cascaded about his narrow, hunched shoulders like a flash-frozen spill of black ink that reached almost down to his slim hips. Naturally hairless, the only hair visible on his body was a smattering of hair around his pubic area. His serene, gentle face was almost ageless; his cheeks were hollows from which the flesh looked as if it had been gouged by the hands of a clumsy and overeager god, but no lines or wrinkles marred the corners of his downturned mouth. A pronouncedly hooked beak of nose sat low over his burnt crimson lips, and his eyes were large and protuberant, with irises
