~
Just as I’m about to start heading to higher ground, the earth buckles, and then queefs and gives way. I’m thinking about some underground bomb having been detonated, my end fitting—not nearly as climactic as I’d planned.
But then I see Gema’s shark-like head pop up. She’s fast rising from the hole, fast spinning and biting, fast spitting out hunks of steel and crushed bone. She turns to me. There’s blood dripping down her neck, and yup, right between that valley of beautiful cleavage.
She looks at me and says, “What the fuck are you doing?”
I want to tell her I’m letting myself be killed. That I’m making myself famous. That I’m trying to do a single thing worthy of her affection, my own affection, something that makes me not hide from every acquaintance in the sea. But all that comes out is, “I don’t know.”
“So fucking stupid. Follow me.”
She dives back underground. I follow. And just like that, it’s over.
~
Here’s how Sweetgrass! the movie would’ve gone. We duck underground and Gema tells me how brave and sexy I am. She understands how I wanted to be famous in order to gain her love, which, she tells me, is stupid as fuck because she’d loved me all along. We make out and there’s probably some adventurous fingers and it’s love, pure and simple, the audience sympathizing with us while turning on the quick-to-kill humans. We swim out in the ocean, hand-in-hand, happy and in love, ripe for Sweetgrass2!
That’s the difference between real life and Hollywood.
Instead, Gema dragged me through the sewers, and then to the ocean and dumped me a mile off shore. She told me I was so fucking stupid and pathetic, that I’d ruined everything for our species, that I’d be lucky to live through the week after Diablo got a hold of me. Then she left.
Well, guess the joke’s on her, because it’s been a year to the day since I made my rampage through Hollywood. I’m still alive. I didn’t ruin shit for anybody. Yeah, there are a hell of a lot more deep-sea expeditions, but they’re not even close. And Diablo? Fuck that guy. There’s no separate-but-equal, not during the pharaoh times, not during Jim Crow, not now.
But here’s what there is: Day of the Demigods.
Warner Brother’s put it out after they rebuilt. It opened last night at midnight, and grossed 58 million on a Thursday night opening, which shatters every record imaginable. It’s supposed to be epic, inventive, using both actual footage and CGI. The reviews say it’s the most terrifying film every created. They didn’t make it all cheesy, rah-rah America, but darker, more truthful, terrorism in the form of prehistoric gods who strike, and then disappear, ready for vengeance.
So yeah, I’m a big fucking deal.
Don’t doubt a house call from Gema any minute, to which she can see the back of this fucking hand. I’m the most famous creature to ever live. I’m Mohammad and Kanye rolled into a rock-hard body, sold for $7.99 at every Wal-Mart across the world. Yes, I still masturbate to my own reflection. I still hate being around others. I still wish my mom wasn’t a whore. But when I can’t sleep at night, I scroll through the tabloids, through my picture, through the stories about survivors of my attack, blurbs about the movie, all of which are testimony to my greatness, and I feel almost good enough to close my eyes and not apologize for ever being born.
The Lighthouse Keeper of Kurohaka Island
Kane Gilmour
The gray light of the morning merged with the steel color of the waves, giving Shinobi the feeling he was being tossed around in the air. He stood at the bow of the freighter, his young hands gripping the rail tightly—he’d been told and he remembered, ‘one hand for yourself and one hand for the ship, at all times’—and he peered into the murky shades of concrete that filled the sky and the sea. He couldn’t determine where one began and the other ended.
Thick fog shrouded everything, and his one thought over and over was to wonder where all the brilliant blue had gone. From his home in Wakkanai, at the northern tip of Japan, the sea was always blue, even on stormy days. But here, in the no man’s land twenty miles northeast of Hokkaido, everything looked hostile to the boy. But then, everything in the world now looked that way.
“Shinobi,” he heard his father’s abrupt voice from behind him. Mindful to keep one hand on the damp railing, as the massive freighter bounced in the invisible troughs of the cold waves, he turned to see his father approaching him from the starboard side of the ship. “Come inside. We are nearly there.”
Shinobi walked along the railing, moving hand over hand, lest some rogue wave slap the big ship and send him headlong into a never-ending drop through the gray moisture. “Almost where, Father? I’ve checked the maps. There’s nothing here.”
His father, a stern man named Jiro, remained quiet until Shinobi reached him along the rail, skirting the massive multi-colored metal containers that filled the center of the ship’s broad foredeck. When Shinobi looked up at his father, he realized the man was not simply waiting for him or being his typical quiet self, but rather he was peering intently past the bow of the ship and into the gloom.
Shinobi knew to stay still and be quiet. His father was either deep in thought or looking for something in the fog. The man would speak when he was ready to, and not before. With nothing else to do, besides hold the railing, Shinobi studied his father’s face. He quickly determined that the man was actually looking for something in the thick mist that shrouded the ship. He was just about to turn, when his father spoke.
“There,” the man pointed past the bow. “Kurohaka Island.”
Shinobi turned and momentarily let his hand drop from the railing in surprise. In a part of the Sea of Okhotsk he knew to be empty of any spit of land, a jagged dark shape was rising from the sea and the fog. The island looked to have strange curving towers near the center, and rough rocky shores at the edges. Finally, his eyes sought out what he was looking for—the lighthouse. It was on the end of the island, on a high rocky promontory, but its lifesaving light was absent, and its white paint made little difference in the thick fluffy coating of whitish gray that filled the air. The spire could barely be seen in all the mist.
Shinobi’s father was a lighthouse keeper in the region, being paid by the governments of both Japan and Russia to ride whatever available ships were in the area, and to frequently visit and maintain the ramshackle lighthouses on the islands scattered around Hokkaido and the giant lobster-claw tips of Sakhalin, around the Gulf of Patience. Shinobi had travelled with his father to Rebun Island and Rishiri Island. He had even gone on one memorable camping trip with his father to the abandoned Russian island of Moneron, northwest of the Soya Straight. He had listened attentively to his father’s few descriptions of his work on the lights. Shinobi was meant to take over his father’s work someday, first apprenticing in two years’ time, when he turned fifteen. He had studied hard in school, and paid special attention to the nautical maps in the library and around the house. He knew the names of every jagged rocky islet in the area, but he had never heard of Kurohaka Island.
True, his attention of late had not been on maps or studying. Instead he had been seeing things, and hoping he wasn’t losing his sanity. But he had kept that information hidden from his father.
“Kurohaka?” he asked.
His father nodded grimly. “A dark place, but still part of the job. Let’s go in.”
Shinobi followed his father back to the ship’s forecastle, wondering at the name of the island. Kurohaka. Black tomb. He wondered if sailors had named it that because it was such a rocky shoreline. Many times islands were given fearsome names to warn sailors off the reefs. But the name might actually stem from a true tomb.
He wondered who was buried there.
Or, considering what he had been seeing lately—what might be buried there.
~
The freighter had lowered them in a small speedboat with winches from the high sides of the rusting gunwales. Once in the choppy water, they had made quick time to the dark island,
and his father expertly navigated them past some treacherous headlands and into a tiny sheltered lagoon. Any boat larger than their speedboat would not have made it into the small inlet. They pulled the boat up to a concrete pier that jutted an absurd four feet into the water from the wet rocky land. The lagoon looked to Shinobi to be a popped volcanic bubble more than a sandy beach. The shoreline was all dark rock, but at least here it was smooth.
Shinobi helped his father tie up the small boat to the two rusted metal cleats sunk into the concrete pier’s rough surface and carry their gear ashore. When he turned to the gray sea, he could watch the freighter moving away into the distance. A different boat would swing by in two days to collect them.
“How can this island be here, Father?”
Jiro Yashida hefted his pack and began walking up the rocks, toward the interior of the island. He spoke over his shoulder to his son in short bursts. “You know the maps. Think of the shapes. A long chain of islands connects Hokkaido to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula. And Wakkanai points at the western tip of Sakhalin. Is it really so surprising to you that an island lies midway between Hokkaido and the eastern tip of Sakhalin?”
Shinobi considered his father’s logic, and found that geologically, the location of the island made perfect sense. “No. I understand, but the island does not appear on the maps.”
“Many don’t,” was all his father said.
They turned left and followed a coastal trail up along the rocks, twisting and turning through switchbacks, until the base of the white lighthouse was visible overhead. Their path, keeping so close to the shore as it did, kept the rest of the island hidden from Shinobi’s view, even as the fog began to lift. What little he could see was dark brown and black rock, most of it volcanic, and fitting with his initial assumptions about the geology of the island. Shinobi was not fond of math at school, but when Earth sciences came into things, he paid strict attention.
With the base of the lighthouse just thirty feet overhead now, their path narrowed, and they needed to rely on the artificial railings made of thick heavy chains. They had been bolted into the side of the rock and painted in so many layers of heavy black paint, that even when Shinobi could see the outer layers had chipped, all he could see in the remaining holes on the links were more and more layers underneath.
Shinobi watched where his father stepped, and how the man moved his hands along the chains, as if they were the railing on the freighter—one hand for the ship—and he did the same. They were nearly to the top of the path, which would bring them right to the door of the lighthouse, when his father spoke.
“When did you plan on telling me? Or did you think you should keep it to yourself forever?”
The man didn’t pause in his ascent, nor did he look back at his son.
Shinobi knew what his father was talking about, of course. There was just the one thing he had kept from his father in his whole thirteen years.
His father was talking about the monsters.
Shinobi could see them, and no one else could.
He stayed quiet, thinking how best to answer the question, as his father made it to the top of the climb and lowered his pack to the ground, just outside the door to the lighthouse. Finally, as Shinobi neared his father and the pack, he spoke, while removing his own heavy pack.
“Have I done something wrong, Father?” Shinobi hung his head as he spoke.
His father reached down and tenderly lifted Shinobi’s chin, so he was looking his father in the eyes. “You have done nothing wrong, Shino.”
“How could you have known?” the boy asked, his eyes beginning to water.
His father quickly turned, allowing him to save face, as a tear sprang from the corner of his young eye and ran down his round cheek. The man worked a large brass key into the lock on the lighthouse door, and entered. Shinobi followed.
“The haunted look in your eyes, son. I had the same look, when I first saw the creatures.”
That his father knew about the monsters was a surprise to Shinobi. That his father had seen them, as well, filled the boy with a relief he hadn’t known he needed. He followed his father up the twisting iron staircase. The lighthouse was close to a hundred feet in height—Shinobi could tell by counting the stairs as they ascended in silence. He wanted to ask his father more, but he knew the man would tell him when he was ready. Probably at the top of the tower, since speaking while ascending the steep steps would require an excess of oxygen, and Jiro Yashida was a practical man of economy. Shinobi hoped to be as sensible when he was an adult.
As his father came close to the lantern section of the tower, a good twenty steps ahead of Shinobi on the cast iron stairs, he began speaking again, but softly. “Every first-born child between the ages of thirteen and eighteen has the sight, Shino. But only first-borns. Your brother, Naro, will never be able to see the beasts, as you do. Unless you were to die, before he grows to adulthood. Most teens lose their vision as adulthood approaches, but in our family, we are unusual. We retain the sight as adults. I still see the creatures today, son.”
The man stepped up off the stairs and into the service room of the lantern. Then he ascended a straight ladder to the optic section of the tower. Shinobi hurried after him, as the man stepped off the ladder and opened the door from the optic room to the gallery around the tower’s top. Wind rushed into the structure and flooded down toward Shinobi. It was cold and, of course, he could smell the briny aroma of the sea, but there was something else on the wind. Something old, like dust.
Jiro walked out the open door to the catwalk and waited against the railing, as Shinobi caught up with him at last.
The fog had lifted as the day’s sunlight burnt it away. The cloud cover had receded to a low blanket hovering over the land in patches and threatening possible rain, but not until later. For now the morning sunlight was piercing through the covering in spots, like samurai swords thrust downward through pillows, toward the green land spread out before them.
But the clouds did not hold Shinobi’s attention.
His eyes took in the many shades of green across the central part of the land of the island, and the things that pierced the green, reaching up like clawing hands to the sky—a reverse of the angle of the beams of light slicing down from above.
They were bones.
Hundreds and thousands of bones.
The slim graceful towers Shinobi had seen from sea were giant rib bones, arching into the sky as high as the lighthouse. The carcasses of giant hundred-foot and two-hundred foot long strange beasts Shinobi could not recognize littered the island, and stretched as far as he could see. His father had said the island was approximately three miles long, and from his position near the top of the lighthouse, Shinobi could see most of the way to the far shore, where the green gave way to the dark volcanic rocks again. There were unnatural mounds and low hills in places, and the boy guessed they were the covered graves of yet more of the massive creatures. At the center of the island was one huge rounded hill with some irregularities and lumpy tufts of bushes and trees on it in places.
Shinobi spotted massive lobster-like claws, and desiccated snake-like twisting bodies, piled high on tangled horns and bulbous bones. Most of the creatures had decayed to the point of little more than skeletons—even though the bones were impressive at their immense scale. A few of the dead monsters still contained eyes in unusual locations, or mouths full of teeth taller than the apartment buildings back in Wakkanai.
“I see them all. This island has been a place where they come to die for centuries. Whenever one of them is injured, it comes here of its own volition. We don’t know why.” Shinobi’s father looked gray and ashen, as if the sight of the boneyard was still unnerving to him. It did little to ease Shinobi’s own tension at the sight, but the revelation that he was not going crazy and he was not the only one with the sight helped him some.
“H-how many?” was all the boy could stammer.
“We don’t know. When those few of us with the sight have fo
und these mega creatures dead in other parts of the world, it has become a tradition to bring them here. I will tell you how it began. I will tell you what happened. You are one of the rare ones, Shino. You will have the sight all your life, and like me, you must become the caretaker of this necropolis. We guard more than just the bones.”
The older man fell silent as the wind ripped past the top of the tower, bringing the scent of the water and what Shinobi now suspected was the smell of the dead.
“First we will fix the light, son. It warns sailors to stay away, and that is a very good thing. Then we’ll go down and have a talk. Our family first took on this bizarre appointment with your grandfather, Haruki. He was the first in our family to see that the world is truly full of monsters.”
~
Haruki Yashida ran for his life.
The bombing of the city had ended a few days earlier, but he knew what would come next. He had seen the hideous monstrosities with his own eyes. The war had gone on for far too long, but this new twist? He didn’t know what to think. All he knew for sure was he would need to be far from Nagasaki on a ship, before they came here and did what they had to Hiroshima. The world was talking about American weapons that could level a city, but Haruki knew better.
This hell was not from the West.
The storm was approaching. Massive clouds had formed at the northern edge of the city. As the residents of the battered outskirts took shelter underground in grubby dirt tunnels and cramped wooden bunkers, Haruki raced along the broken, rubble-strewn streets, leaping trash heaps and scrambling over fallen walls, tumbled wood, shattered plaster, and the ever-present terra cotta tiles that littered the ravaged city. He had been to Nagasaki once before, and loved that the old ways were still intact with regard to architecture and design. But after what he had witnessed in Hiroshima, he knew that even concrete and steel would have offered little protection from what was coming.
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 6
