Precautions taken against tiger attack: Chapter 4

After my meeting with Nigel I decided to return to the other Plough and Compasses. What sort of journalist was I, you might ask, if my day simply involved crawling from pub to pub? But I wasn’t revisiting the glory days of British journalism, when journalists were selected purely on their ability to drink ten pints over the course of an evening.

I was simply returning to my sighting of the tiger, the tiger who claimed to be a little girl called Amy. It was over 3 hours since I had spoken to her and it was highly likely that I had missed her return. Never-the-less, this was the only place in the world I would ever get to see her again, so I poured myself a pint and settled into my snug for a long wait if necessary.

As it turned out, I had to wait less than twenty minutes before I heard the handle of the front door turn and watch a twelve foot Bengali tiger stroll into the room.

“Hello Amy,” I said, as friendly as possible, though my voice betrayed the primal fear that I naturally felt in the presence of a highly evolved killer. “So where’s the tiger?” I asked, “Is she giving me an interview?”

Amy said nothing for a while, I watched her sniffing her way around the room as she prowled towards me. She could probably smell Nigel on my clothes, though she said nothing.

Eventually the tiger spoke, in the same little girls voice as before. “The tiger says that it would help no-one if she gave you an interview. She thinks that if you’re a real journalist you’ll find me a far me interesting story. I’m to take you to where I came from.”

“To your parents’ house you mean? I thought that the tiger was at your parents house?”

Amy took a long time to reply, like a child mulling a difficult question.

“Not my parents house, no. I’m to take you to where I was made.”

“Where you were made?”

“I was not born like this,” she said, referring to her tiger form, “you need to see where I became a tiger. Me and the others.”

I knew that there was no point asking any more questions at this stage. I followed her out of the door. We walked the bare city street for over a mile, a man and a tiger that talks like a child, we were all there was to be seen, a sight to behold on any day, but now, at the end of the world, it seemed like a joke, or a scene from some bizarre children’s story.

Eventually we reached an industrial estate and Amy led me through the streets to an abandoned warehouse, a long forgotten artefact from the 70s, with crumbling bricks, smashed windows and the dusty sheen of abandonment.

Amy led us down an alleyway to a side door.

“In here,” she said.

We crawled through a broken window into a disused lavatory. From there Amy led us down corridors and onto the main warehouse floor. Whilst the building looked desolate and abandoned on the website it was clear that it was in fact up and running again, the corridors were freshly painted, the lights were on and in the distance I could distinctly hear the rumble of machinery.

Amy paused outside a door. “This is the nursery,” she said, “where I grew up.”

I cautiously opened the door, genuinely having no idea what I would find inside. What I found was a collection of cages, each of them filled with tiger cubs at various stages of growth. So much for the tiger being

“Help me,” said a voice from one of the cages. I turned to inspect. In a cage in a corner was a tiger cub, less than a year old, with a child’s face implanted where its own face should be.

“That one went wrong,” Amy said matter-of-factly. “It’ll be taken out and disposed of. The rest have all taken properly.”

I didn’t have to ask what she meant as I could hear their voices. One tiger crying like a baby another kept calling out “set me free” “set me free”. Altogether there were thirty or forty tiger cubs all like Amy, each with children’s minds inside them.

I took photos and video footage, though other than the tiger in the corner they all looked normal and it would be impossible to prove that the voices were really coming from the tigers.

I didn’t have to ask Amy what the tigers were for, their use was obvious. The Americans alone have spent untold billions bombing trees in conflicts with third world enemies. Tiger children were natural killers of the jungle but with the brains to identify and target specific enemy.

They were the ultimate form of guerrilla warfare. I had stumbled upon a military factory, one that would end resistance to the might of the capitalist machine. The young civil servant was right about there being a conspiracy, but he had hopelessly underestimated the scale of it.

I took the GPS coordinates of the factory as we left. If my editor would back me we could take a film crew here and bring the government down. Shutting down London so that the government could indulge in a land grab to make themselves even richer was one thing, but harming tigers would really be a big story. Nobody likes to hear about cruelty to animals.

Yes, there was no doubt about it, I had here the biggest story not just of my life, but the biggest story of the century. I would just have to be careful.