Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

Bugger Marathon . And then, irrelevantly: And they call them ‘Snickers’ now, anyway. Old anger. Chocolate bars should not take on new identities. They should be content with who they were.

He rounded a bend and saw a man threatening a woman with a broken bottle. Not Sandrine, no. Just a woman. Just a man.

He surged past, twisting his body and scything his elbow as he unwound. He was in the air when the blow landed: perfect technique. The impact took the man across the ear, snapped his head around. He fell and stayed down. The Sergeant’s motion was pure and unaffected, and he ran on. Behind him there was another shout, like an amen in a charismatic church or the roar of fury from a football crowd. The jeep went left. So did he. The road seemed to bear him up, as if the island’s constant vibration was for this purpose, to power his feet as he chased the jeep. Was he catching up? Maybe. Not long now. Not long. Close enough, soon, to do something, use the belt. Flashbang? Taser? Fire extinguisher? Something something something. Anything. Catch up.

In between accelerations, he could hear the woman in the back seat singing. ‘Danny Boy’, for fuck’s sake. Enough with Danny bloody Boy! Change the record . But ‘Danny Boy’ seemed to be working well enough, Sandrine was still calm. Or perhaps she was just enjoying the ride. She glanced back and saw him, watched him run. ‘… From glen to glen, and down the mountainside… ’

Shit.

The jeep swerved and knocked out the supporting post of a wooden awning just ahead of him. He had his hand at his belt for a stun grenade, had to abandon it for balance, saw a girl not five years old staring up and lifted her, lifted her away and she wailed because he’d banged her head against the metal plate on his chest, bloody HELL she was heavy, so small to be that heavy, and the fucking awning was coming down on them both and of course it would have a water tank on it this end, it just would, so he swerved and smashed his way through a plywood board as the structure came down behind him, sprawled and let her find her own balance, scraped himself up and carried on but he was slowing, slowing, too slow and the jeep was escaping and FUCK FUCK FUCK! All for nothing if he didn’t find more.

He found more. Hadn’t run like this from Pechorin’s lot. That had been rehearsal. Light training. Hadn’t run like this in his life, never cared this much. Stupid old man. Water sluiced across the road behind him, the crowd splashed through it. Tigerman! With his luck he’d catch Sandrine and they would burn him, burn her, stake them out like a dog on a telegraph pole. Nothing left in the tank. His tank, not the jeep, fucking jeep was fine. Fucking John Henry this was, man versus machine and all the odds stacked. He had seconds. Seconds. Make it count make it count make it—

And here was more trouble, more stupid, stupid, in-the-way trouble. Beneseffe and his dockmen – thieves and brigands and smugglers all, if we’re honest, so what was happening was not so much good versus evil as it was demarcation and turf – were facing off against a few Quads and their hangers-on, and the jeep piled on through them, and no, no, no NO, of course it wasn’t just a few Quads it was all of them, and here were the trucks, the waiting trucks to carry the mob up the hill. This wasn’t a chance encounter, it was a last stand. He’d been unfair to Beneseffe, this was pro bono after all. Trucks and flatbeds and bikes and all for Brighton House, all ready for the burning, that was how you got a mob to go up a hill: you laid on transport.

And press. Press bloody everywhere, Kathy Hasp following her nose and commandeering someone’s car, everyone else following Kathy Hasp, all there to cover the endgame of British Colonial rule on Mancreu. See the kick-off, rush up the hill to catch the first Molotov cocktail and then be in time for the massacre, win a Pulitzer and home before bedtime.

He looked around and realised he was standing by the mission house. Up on the weathervane was the pelican, dislodged from her perch and apparently looking to him to sort it all out. Like everyone else. He stood at the intersection of a huge number of paths and powers, all gathered by accident in this one place. He: Tigerman.

And he had stopped running. Where was Sandrine?

The jeep rolled out of the far side of the square onto the main road. Clear path to the docks now, to the Fleet, to NatProMan, to anywhere – wherever they were going, it didn’t matter. If he’d been faster. If he’d been twenty instead of nearly forty – although, no. Never, really; not unless he’d been Mo Farah and he wasn’t. And this was his business, right here, right now.

He heard the sound of the engine fade away, and turned to face the Quads. If he took off his mask, Beneseffe might help him. But if he took off his mask, the mob would tear him apart and Africa would scatter what was left to the four winds, and it still wouldn’t help anyone and he’d never have a chance to get Sandrine back from wherever she ended up.

He rolled his head around slowly on his neck as if this was what it had been about, as if he had planned everything to bring them all to this moment. The sound of his breathing, amplified and alarming, filled the square. He took the sharkpunch from his belt and held it in his right hand, twirled it like a swordsman, then threw his left hand forward in a stabbing gesture that reminded him instantly of Sandrine and her knife. With his index finger, he indicated the biggest and ugliest of the Quads, hanging by one arm from the fountain, and fixed his eyes – the mask’s eyes – on the Quad’s face. He did not speak. He just pointed, and waited, and let the challenge stand.

Waited.

And waited.

And the Quad did not come.

The Sergeant would fall on his knees soon. Would pass out. Nothing in his life had prepared his body for that pointless dash through the backstreets. He measured it in his mind. Three miles? Four? At top speed, desperation speed. He would fall, surely, any moment now. He shifted his feet, feeling for the vibration in the ground, and realised that it had stopped, that for the first time in days everything was still. He saw everyone else realise it too, with relief and an unlikely sense of loss.

Something was happening at the back of the crowd. A weird susurrus was spreading out in waves, words exchanged and shared, accounts of witnesses and testimonies, and out of all of them emerged that one word so that it ebbed and flowed in the tide of whispers but never vanished, and moment by moment it actually grew, strengthened and unified, and here was a young man with a phone holding it high for others to see – video, more bloody video, always someone. But now it seemed there were more cameras, more angles, and the square was lit as if by candles with glowing screens and tiny cameo recordings. Tigerman flew from a burning house with a sick woman in his arms. He stopped a rape, or a murder. He rescued a child. He chased, always, impossibly and indefatigably, chased an abduction by someone in a foreign car, a Fleet car, chased and would not give up even though his breathing rasped and his feet twisted. Tigerman. And then, here, at last, he let it go, because for all that he had done in his quest, this moment in the square was more important, not to him but to them. Tigerman. Tigerman. Tigerman . He was not Fleet. He was not Britain or America or France or anywhere except Mancreu, Mancreu looking out for its own. Tigerman, Tigerman, Tigerman , and the noise was louder than anything he had ever heard. Tigerman , for Mancreu, because they needed him so very, very much.

The Quad shook his head, threw his mask down on the ground.

They carried the Sergeant through the town, and where they went they put out the fires. Small groups broke away from the main throng and became anything from street sweepers to civil engineers, and road by road and house by house the sound of Beauville became a goosegabble of hammering and mending.