‘That,’ William said grimly, his forehead and face glistening with a sheen of sweat, as if he’d just run a marathon, ‘was a distraction to confuse the Huntsmen’s thermal imaging scopes. It won’t last long though, so no more questions.’
‘Stand still, all of you,’ Zakaria said to the teens. ‘We’re coming to you.’
As soon as he said this the beastwalkers moved. Lightning Bird stepped in front of Daekwon, William walked over to Chloe, Njinga slipped between them to stand in front of Jun, and Zakaria shifted over to stand by Paola before continuing to speak. ‘We won’t be able to speak to you while we’re in our animal forms, but we will be able to communicate with you in your minds. You can simply speak normally to respond; we’ll be able to hear and understand you. Don’t ask me questions about this; there’s no time. We’re going to transform now; when you climb onto our backs, grip us tightly with your thighs around our flanks, and use both hands to grip fistfuls of fur. Trust me, it won’t hurt as much as getting slammed with Huntsmen bullets. Keep your torsos low, pressed into our backs. We’ll do our best to keep things stable, but I can’t guarantee that it’ll be a comfortable ride. Oh, and keep the safeties of your AKs off! If any of us tells you to shoot someone or something, you pull the trigger immediately, without question – or we all die. One last thing, put your ear plugs in right now. There will be gunfire, and while our ears will heal from the damage of having guns fired next to them, yours won’t, and you’ll be permanently deaf. Hurry, all of you, ear plugs in! There’s more no time to talk; we must change now.’
The teenagers were not given any time to respond or ask questions. The beastwalkers dropped their bathrobes and for half a second all four stood nude before the teens, who were stuffing their ear plugs into their ears. In the next half-second, though, all four beastwalkers’ bodies transformed, in a fur-sprouting hyperspeed flurry of grotesqueness, in which torsos were distended, jaws extended, limbs swollen and stretched, heads and extremities elongated and colours changed. Then, where William, Zakaria, Njinga and Lightning Bird had been, there now stood a Bengal tiger, an Eastern Lowland gorilla, a puma and a grizzly bear.
Even though the teens had witnessed the beastwalkers shifting forms before, seeing it again – especially with all four doing it simultaneously, combined with their mounting fear and anxiety – struck them all temporarily catatonic with shock. Daekwon was the first to regain his composure, and quickly asserted a measure of authority.
‘C’mon, y’all heard Zakaria!’ he yelled. ‘G-, get up on ‘em!’
The animals turned and faced away from the teens and lowered their bodies so that the teens could mount them. Zakaria, however, picked up the M60 machine gun in his right gorilla hand and slung the ammo bag strap over his shoulder and across his chest. Then he patted his shoulders with his left hand, indicating to Paola that she should climb up.
‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit,’ Paola whimpered, on the verge of hyperventilation, the bulginess of her eyes emphasised to an almost cartoonish degree by her soda bottle spectacles.
Jun’s wan cheeks creased into a rare smile, and he clambered up onto the Njinga’s puma back, straddling her as he would a miniature pony. At a shade over sixty kilograms, she was by far the smallest of the beastwalkers in her animal form, but even so, she was easily able to carry Jun, whose meagre, almost emaciated-looking body weighed in at little more than forty-five kilograms.
Paola, for all her debilitating fear, had an easy enough time climbing up onto Zakaria’s gorilla back; it was just like getting carried piggyback by her older brothers, which she had done many a time.
Daekwon, the most athletic and agile of the teens, scrambled onto Lightning Bird’s massive bear back and shoulders, and felt a charged thrill of exhilaration coursing through his veins as he got into place; riding a massive grizzly like this, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a couple of grenades hooked around his belt, it was difficult not to revel at least fleetingly in a heady rush of godlike invincibility.
‘Aw hell yeah!’ he whooped, giddy on this swell of thrilling power.
Chloe, meanwhile, was spellbound, standing with her mouth agape and staring at William’s tiger body with quiet awe. The last time she’d seen him in his tiger form had been when he’d been close to death in the back of the van on that fateful day in New York, and despite her mixed feelings about the man, she was absolutely smitten with the tiger. Before she could gawk too long, however, she heard William’s voice inside her mind – a strange, almost dizzying sensation – and it was both stern and urgent.
‘I know you like tigers, lass, but please, this is a matter of life and death! Get on my back right now, or we’re leaving you behind for the enemy troops.’
A curious cocktail of reactive anger and frightened desperation gushed through the girl’s veins, but as odd as it was, it gave her enough of a jolt to spur her into action, and she swung her leg over William’s back and dug her knees and thighs into his flanks. It felt strangely natural. She’d spent one summer as a child in rural Texas on a ranch, and while she’d loathed the experience almost as much as she’d hated the foster family who had
