‘Oh shit, oh my God, fuckin’ shit,’ Chloe cursed, tucking her hands behind her head. ‘What’s happening out there?!’
Paola, wide-eyed, peeked out from behind the sofa and saw Daekwon lying on the floor. His eyes met hers, and despite the peril he flashed her an almost cheeky grin, to which Paola responded with a blush. She looked away, her face hot, feeling suddenly self-conscious – and that was when she saw a sight that boosted surges of icy fear through her veins.
‘Jun!’ she shrieked. ‘Jun, are you fuckin’ crazy?! Get off the fire escape!’
Jun had run out onto the fire escape to catch a glimpse of the battle that had erupted outside. He ignored Paola’s shrill exhortations, and leaned even further out over the edge, desperately trying to get a view of the action.
Daekwon looked up at Jun, glanced back at Paola’s terror-stricken face, and needed no further impetus to act. Even as another exchange of gunfire rent the silence with its rat-a-tat crashing, he sprang up and charged out onto the fire escape, scooping up the diminutive Jun to haul him away from danger, but as he was throwing the unwilling, feebly-struggling youth over his shoulder he froze, staring at the roof of the building just across from them, which this fire escape – and no other – happened to overlook.
‘They stopped!’ Jun shouted. ‘Put me down, let me go!’
‘Are you crazy?!’ Paola shrieked. ‘Get back in here, get down!’
Daekwon, however, set Jun down and scrambled to get his phone out of his pocket.
‘Somethin’ real big’s about ta g-, go down,’ Daekwon murmured as he pulled up his phone’s video app, his gaze locked on the unfolding scene. ‘Somethin’ I gotta get on f-, film.’
He held his phone up and started filming, pumping up the zoom setting to the max, even though this made the footage grainy and pixelated.
‘Are you two literally trying to fuckin’ kill yourselves?!’ Chloe shouted from behind the sofa. ‘There’s a gunfight happening!’
‘FUCK! WHAT THE F-, FUCKIN’ FUCK SHIT THE … FUCK! FUCK!’
‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, no, no, no, oh my God, oh my God!’
Daekwon’s hoarse cursing and Jun’s sudden jabbering of what sounded like paralysing shock and disbelief silenced Chloe midway through her yell.
‘What the hell is going on out there?!’ Paola demanded, half-frightened, half-curious. ‘What’s wrong, what’s happening?!’
‘G-, G-, G-, G- … GET YO’ ASSES OUT HERE! F-, FUCKIN’ HURRY!’ Daekwon howled.
From the frenetic stumbling of his stuttering and the hoarse, frantic tone of his voice, which was on the verge of cracking, the girls heard that something either outlandishly extraordinary or sublimely terrifying was underway. But before either of them could say anything else, another sound – something that neither of them could have expected to hear – rumbled its booming threat through the aural chaos of the city. It was a roar, a mighty, primal roar … and it could only have come from a lion or a tiger. The girls exchanged a white-eyed look of utter disbelief, their eyes almost popping out of their sockets. Without saying another word, they scrambled to their feet and sprinted out onto the fire escape, and what they saw almost caused their knees to crumple beneath them with shock. There, just across the alley, on the roof of the adjacent building a few yards across from and below them, a tiger and a rhinoceros were circling each other. Men dressed in SWAT riot gear, armed with assault rifles, were presiding over the unfolding skirmish.
Daekwon was filming the whole thing on his phone, his eyes wide and white in their sockets, and his jaw slack with sheer incredulousness.
‘Th-, th-, th-, the t-, t-, tiger is a, a, a, man,’ he managed to gasp, ‘a-, a-, an’ so is th-, th-, th- rhino! Fuck me, f-, f-, fuck me sideways yo’, I ain’t never s-, s-, seen nothin’ like this! Fuck, fuck me, I can’t fuckin’ believe dis’ shit, I must be trippin’, I must be fuckin’ trippin’ or some shit, fuck, fuck me!’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?!’ Chloe yelled excitedly, staring with slack-jawed astonishment at the wild beasts just below them.
‘The tiger is a werewolf. Weretiger,’ Jun answered calmly. ‘So is the rhinoceros. Wererhinoceros, if you will. I don’t understand how … but I saw it. We saw it. We both saw them … transform.’
Paola tore her eyes from the astounding spectacle for a few seconds to stare at Jun, her face crumpled into a messy mixture of confusion and disbelief.
‘What?!’ she almost spat. ‘Werewolf?!Weretiger?! Are you crazy?! What the hell are you talking about?!’
‘It’s on my ph-, ph-, ph- phone,’ Daekwon stammered, his gaze locked on the spectacle. ‘He ain’t l-, l-, lyin’, I told you, those animals … they p-, p-, people! They fuckin’ people!Werewolves! Real fuckin’ were … weretigers! Fuckin’ … it’s t-, t-, true, we ain’t lyin’! It’s on my fuckin’ phone! On video!’
‘Oh my God, no!’ Chloe shrieked, turning away as the animals – were-animals – began to fight. ‘Why aren’t those men stopping them?!’
‘Holy fuckin’ shit!’ Daekwon cried. ‘Did y’all s-, s-, see what the rhino just did to the tiger?! Holy shit!’
‘Oh my God, I can’t watch this, I can’t watch,’ Chloe gasped, tears streaming from her eyes and smudging her eyeliner as empathy twisted a fistful of rusty razor blades through her tightly-coiled innards and caused an icy sweat to break out across her skin. ‘We have to, we have to stop this!’
‘C-, call 911, somebody call 911!’ Paola yelled.
‘Holy shit,’ Daekwon muttered, both horrified and spellbound as he watched the two huge animals fighting to the death on the rooftop below him. ‘Holy fuckin’ shit.’
‘The tiger is going to die,’ Jun whispered. ‘There’s no way he can survive after that. The rhinoceros is going to … he’s going to kill him … now.’
Chloe was fumbling with her phone, struggling to punch in the three digits of the emergency number with her madly trembling fingers, while
