I turn my back on the destruction and limp off to find my fallen scooter. San Javier Hospital is a fifteen minute ride away.
~
San Javier is a scene out of a Romero flick. Walking wounded stream through the lobby, dazed, bloody, and moaning. Doctors rush from patient to patient, shouting orders to stressed-out nurses and EMTs. Orderlies and security guards sprint to-and-fro, fetching bandages and medicine. So much chaos, no one notices a guy with a road-rash leg slip into the hospital’s Farmacia.
It takes thirty seconds to find what I’m looking for, another five minutes to locate the kid’s room on the third floor. I wonder how many lives the Mega has cut down in that time.
A local woman sleeps curled up in a big chair. Little señora with one of those faces that looks permanently tired. The kid’s mom, I’m guessing. But where’s the kid? His IV tube hangs dripping and forgotten.
I sit on his bed, the syringes feeling heavy in my pocket. The plan was to get in, do the deed, and slip away. I didn’t want to hang out with his sleeping mother, looking at the kid’s get well cards. I didn’t want time to think about what had to be done.
Mom stirs. I slow my breathing and go to the window. That’s when I see it, a rinky-dink playground built in the hospital courtyard. A little boy in a hospital gown on the swing set.
I leave mom to her dreams and head for the elevators.
~
The kid on the swing is Carlito Diaz. I know from the Colonel’s file. Scrawnier in person than in the photo. Gauze and medical tape obscures half his face, making me think of a pint-sized Invisible Man. Under the bandage, a bubble of flesh covers the infection site, hot with fever and pulsing with alien veins. I know, because I’ve seen it before on the other hosts.
I keep my head down, avoiding eye contact, but the kid calls out to me anyway.
“Hey, señor, your leg is bleeding.”
Jesus, I didn’t want to face him. “I know,” I say. “But all the doctors inside are too busy for me.”
“Si, because of el monstruo.”
The kid’s a slow moving pendulum, his swing gliding back and forth. His heart really isn’t in it. A riot of sound echoes in the distance—explosions and gunfire, and horrible alien roars of victory. The noises drift further and further as the creature stomps its way inland.
The swing post creeks as I sit next to him. I should grab him, jab his neck with the needle, and be done with it. “What happened to your eye?”
His hospital slippers scrape the mud. He tells me his story, speaking Spanish, but with a dash of English creeping in. I catch most of it—the crab thing stinging him, his mom scared shitless, the clueless doctors. He even tells me about his nightmares, like he was seeing the world through the monster’s eyes. As he’s talking, I reach into my pocket, touch one of the syringes.
“Tengo miedo,” he says. A rain-cool breeze drifts in from the sea, but fever sweat still streams down his brow. “Now, I got these sounds in my head, like a million dogs all growling in my ear.”
“What if there was a way to make them quiet?” I pull out one of the syringes and show it to him. The blood quickens in my veins. “Just a little pain, then the voices will go away Carlito.”
Fear creeps into him. He slips off his swing and backs away from me. Moving slow, but I can tell he’s ready to bolt. My brain screams. Now! Do it now!
The kid takes another step back. “But you are not a doctor. How you know my name, señor?”
“Lo siento,” I tell him. Grabbing a fistful of his gown, I pull him close. He thrashes in my grasp, trying to wiggle free. I have to shove him against the swing post to keep him from escaping. “I’m sorry.”
My heart pounds. I press the syringe against the flesh of his neck. All I have to do is press the plunger down and he’ll stop squirming.
But I hesitate.
Looking at the cold, hard numbers, it makes no sense. If I let the kid live, tens of thousands of innocent people will die horrible deaths. Yet, I still can’t bring myself to do it. If he had been a grown man or even a teenager, that would be different, but I’ve seen too many dead children—in Iraq, in Afghanistan, then later in Jakarta. I don’t want to add to that pile of discarded innocents.
Maybe the parasite has taken control of him. Or maybe Carlito is just scared and desperate. Whatever the case, he takes advantage of my hesitation and grabs my wrist. His fingers are like steel, impossibly strong for a stick-thin nine-year-old. He shoves me away, so hard I stumble backwards and crash into the mud. A sharp pain flares. The needle sticks out of the flesh of my forearm.
Carlito races to a gate leading out of the hospital’s courtyard. I rip the syringe from my arm and shout to him. He vanishes into a back alley. I scramble to my feet, ignoring my bloody leg, and dash after him. Pumping hard, I begin to close in.
Mexico City, I tell myself. Twenty million. How many are children?
As strong as he is, his little legs simply can’t match my stride. I reach into my pocket, finding the other needle. Maybe one will be enough. Maybe…
The syringe must have hit a vein in my arm because the world does a hazy tilt and my feet turn to lead. I tumble to the rough blacktop, my whole body going numb. Damn stuff works fast.
“Carlito, wait.” The words come out a slur, but Carlito doesn’t listen. Instead, the boy hangs a hard right turn and disappears into the night.
~
For hours, Carlito sat in the little tool shed, listening to the helicopters overhead, their blades going thump… thump… thump. Once in a while, their searchlights would sweep over his hideout and harsh white light would pour in through the windows and door cracks. They were hunting for him, just like that big man with the needle had been. Carlito wished they would go away. He was tired and hungry and he wanted to see his madre more than anything. But something in his brain willed him to keep hidden.
So Carlito stayed put and drifted in and out of sleep. Each time, the nightmares came. He heard the growls and the weird, gurgled whispers. Then he was seeing through the monster’s eyes again. Visions of fire and destruction, of crumpled towers and dead bodies. He watched army helicopters swarm the creature like flies. But their guns and missiles barely slowed it down. And when the monster shrieked, some of the helicopters dropped from the sky like broken toys.
Carlito fought off sleep for another hour. Then, as the sunrise burned away the night sky, his eyelids grew too heavy to resist.
This time the monster stood high on a mountain, and Carlito could see the sprawl of Mexico City below—High-rises and schools, churches and homes, stretching on forever. Carlito was wondering how many playgrounds the city had when the monster shrieked and began to descend.
The Behemoth
Jonathan Wood
Now:
Ankle deep in water, my Mech stumbles. I try to correct, overcook it. Massive, clumsy, the machine goes down on one knee. Around me, flat-bottomed fishing boats are swamped, sink with viscous gurgles. Gulls shriek angrily, billow around the Mech's knees.
I try to stand. Try to get my Mech to stand. In the cockpit it’s hard to discern where my body ends and the Mech's begins. Overwhelming reams of data push into my consciousnesses, try to push me out.
Around me, water stretches off in every direction. The Shallow Sea. I search for reference points, for reasons to be here.
Get up. Get moving. You can do this.
Do what again?
~
Before: A memory, already fading:
The day Lila won the lottery, I vomited for almost half an hour.
I was in our bathroom, hunkered over white porcelain. She stood outside the door, tried to talk me down. That she was comforting me just made everything worse.
The lottery has been a fact of life since before I was born. It's just the way things are. The lottery is needed to select the Proxies. The Proxies are needed to keep pilots safe from their Mech's operating systems. And the Mechs are needed by everyone. They keep us all safe. The loss of every me
mory in the Proxy's head is just the price we pay. That's the undeniable truth. That got me through rehab: I am a pilot; I am needed; I save people.
My stomach was empty. I stared at its contents swirling in the bowl before me. Like my whole life floating, excised and ugly. Where there had been food, now there was just rage. I stormed out of the bathroom, snatched the lottery ticket from Lila's hand.
“It'll be OK.” She looked small and delicate. After all the strength she'd shown, that little piece of paper had stolen it from her.
I screwed the ticket up, flung it away. She put her hand on my arm. “Don't, Tyler. Just… Maybe one won't come this year.”
The Leviathans. The goddamn Leviathans.
I could still taste the bile and acid on my tongue. My teeth felt loose in my gums.
“It's bullshit.” I couldn't acquiesce. Couldn't just give up. Because screw undeniable facts. Screw everything else. It was her who had got me through, who had stood by me.
“I'm a goddamn pilot,” I said. “This doesn't happen to us. I will stop this.”
“Tyler…”
I shook my head. “I'm a pilot,” I told her. “If I go into a fight, I win.”
~
Back further—a memory almost lost:
I remember the first time I saw a Leviathan. I was standing on Chicago's seawall. They built it back in 2050 once they realized Lake Michigan wasn't going to go back to its old shoreline. That was just before all the great lakes, joined up, became the Shallow Sea, swallowed everything north of the Carolinas. It had been standing thirty years or so by the time I stood upon it. I was eight. I remember that clearly enough.
The Leviathans had been coming from the north for about ten years at that point, but this was the furthest south anyone had ever reported one.
When the poles melted the Leviathans had been… What? Waiting? Sleeping? I dream about that sometimes. Vast and subterranean, waiting for their cages of ice to melt away, for us to screw up enough so that they could come forth once more.
They'd ripped the shit out of Canada. A flotilla of refugee boats was tied beneath where I stood. Families hunkered on decks, watching, working out if they should run.
The Mechs we had back then were for shit. The Leviathan coming south had already ripped through three of them, jaws slicing armor, body crushing engines. I doubt it even noticed the pilots it consumed.
Chicago had its own Mech. The Behemoth. Its pilot, Sally Janin, had been doing the talk show rounds. She'd been going on about how she was going to be the one to stop it. No one believed her. The camera had done a close up of Janin s eyes. She didn't believe it either.
That was why I was there. I wasn't meant to be. My parents had strictly forbidden it. They were busy prepping an emergency shelter for when the Leviathan ripped through Chicago and killed everyone dumb enough to stand on the wall, but I had to see. I had to see Janin fight. So did half of Chicago. We all went to the seawall to see if she would save us or let us die.
Standing there, I was amazed at how small six hundred feet of steel built around a nuclear core could look.
It was the crowd's murmur that revealed the Leviathan to me. The fins of the beast slicing towards the Mech. Janin took a step. The spray was a white corona around the Behemoth's foot.
Then it began. If I had held my hand out in front of my face it would have seemed they were dancing in my palm. I remember it now as if I was standing on the Mech's shoulder.
The Leviathan reared up, eel-slick body whipping around and around its mechanical foe. A casual flexing of muscle that cracked foot-thick steel sheets and sent weapons spilling in explosive rain. Its massive head looked too big for its body. A heavy, under-slung jaw, a bony crest behind the eyes. Small, half-formed legs scrabbled at the Mech, claws carving through hydraulics.
The Behemoth's arms were pinned at its side. Missiles detonated at point blank range, did more damage to machine than monster.
But then, and the how of it is lost to me now, Janin got an arm free. She swung it like a piledriver into Leviathan's right eye. The force of the creature's scream almost knocked me off the wall.
Janin swung again. The Leviathan's jaw hung loose, and for a moment, we actually had hope.
Then the Leviathan's tail whipped out of the water, a hideous tumor of spikes and claws. It smashed into the Mech's arm, tore it free of its mooring. The Mech tottered, maimed, lopsided. The whole weight of the Leviathan was on it now.
It staggered, fell. The Leviathan wrapped sinuous coils around the Behemoth’s chest. Metal folded like paper.
And then the explosion. A spot of bleach dropped onto the horizon, spreading, obliterating. The force of it driving the water in a wall towards us, exposing the seabed in the moment before the shockwave hit and bowled me over.
I lay on my back as a mushroom cloud rose into the sky.
~
Later:
They figured out what had happened by the time they held the state funeral. Janin had sabotaged the failsafe mechanisms on her Mech's nuclear core. Transformed the machine into a walking tactical nuke. Then the fight started, and the core had no cooling, no gyrostabilization. It was only a matter of time before it went critical. When it had blown, fifty percent of the Leviathan's midriff had turned to meat paste.
Janin had even survived the initial blast. The Mech's auto-eject system. Radiation sickness did it for her two days later, though.
Even though she was a corpse, even though they had to close the coffin because the sight of her was so awful, from that moment on I knew I was going to walk right in the footsteps of Sally Janin.
~
More recently, but mistier, barely grasped:
I pushed through a shouting crowd around the city council halls. They weren't calling Lila's name so I didn't care. I crashed through doors, stormed down corridors, the crumpled lottery ticket in my balled fist. A skinny secretary with a skinnier mustache was the only one who had the nerve to tell me, “It's a closed-door meeting.” He flinched out the way before I could shoulder check him.
Marburg, the spineless shit of a mayor I voted for, stood at the middle of a long conference table. He looked up at me. His cheeks went white.
“The hell is this?” My flung lottery ticket bounced off his starched shirt.
He licked his lips, flicked his eyes around the crowd. He knew exactly what it was. Still, he took the time to unfold it.
“I…” he started, pretending to read. “I am so sorry, Tyler.” Another eye flick. Scared, I'd have bought, but he'd have to have to try a hell of a lot harder to sell sorry.
“Look,” said a large, puffy man, “this is a closed-door-”
I am not a big man. You do not need to be a big man when you fight in a two hundred ton suit of armor fueled by a nuclear reactor. You also do not need to be a big man to know the part of the neck to strike so that the ligaments in the first vertebrae snap, the hindbrain is crushed, and a man dies before he hits the floor. My gaze fell on the councilman and reminded him of this. His voice dried up.
“You,” I pointed at Marburg. “Your piece of shit nephew.” No one knows this story is true for sure. Except everyone knows. “You got him out of the lottery.”
I scanned the room, spotted familiar faces. My finger picked them out.
“Your son-in-law's cousin.”
“Your grandkid's best friend.”
“The daughter of that janitor you were screwing.”
I went round the room. I indicted them for their sins because everyone knows the lottery is a fact of life except these people. And I thought I was one of these people. The fights I'd won for them. I was their goddamn champion.
“It's Lila,” I implored them. “It's my wife.”
Adam Grant stood up. The one man in the room I respected. My old commanding officer. One of Janin 's compatriots. A man I wanted to emulate. Right up until that moment.
“Tyler,” he said. He pulled the ticket from the mayor's sweaty hand. “This…” He examined the paper,
looked back at me. “…is unfortunate.”
His voice galvanized the room. Postures shifted. And that was it. That was my reply. I could beat them all to a pulp but there was no bend in Grant's voice. Behind the fear there was steel. I've see fights like that. The ones where the clear favorite lies beaten and bloody because the little guy refused to just lie down and take his beating. Behind the bluster and the fear, that was this room. My fists would mean nothing, in the end. I needed words and connections. And I'd cast those aside years ago.
~
A memory within a memory. Some distant nested thing:
My fist smashed into the Leviathan's mouth. It mewled, twisted away but my other fist grabbed it by the scruff of the neck. Snug in the Mech's cockpit the proxies filtered the raw data from the pressure sensors, translated it into something thick and satisfying in my fingertips.
Skin gave way. Blood gushed. The Leviathan tried to wrap its tail around my Mech's leg. I sent a knee into its midriff, brought it to the floor. Monstrous ribs cracked. The Leviathan smashed its tail uselessly in the water. My fist broke its teeth.
“You come to my town? My city? You think you can devour my friends?” I worked the Mech's fingers into the flesh beneath the base of the Leviathan's cracked skull. I thought of Sally Janin. Of the adoration of the people.
The Leviathan's head ripped free. I stood, waved my trophy and hollered.
The shout echoed emptily around the cockpit. The proxies, my only companions—their consciousnesses as battered by the Mech's sensory inputs as the Leviathan was by my fists—didn't say a word.
~
A short while later, one memory running into another:
The technicians unstrapped me from the seat, unplugged the electrodes. The Mech left me sensation by sensation. My body became my own.
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 16
