“Ten million.” Just one greedy soul. Just one. That's all I needed.
“You ain't listening.”
“Twenty million.” It would leave me with a pittance, I would have to move, but it'd be worth it. “You won't care what you forget with twenty million.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Adam Grant had been right. The lottery was a tipping point.
I didn't recognize the signal, but suddenly eight of them rushed me. More than one held a beer bottle in his hand.
I remembered Adam saying I don't fight as well now I'm sober. He was right. Still, I can hold my own.
I ducked the first blow, jabbed a fist up under the guy's jaw, into the soft part of the palette. I spun as I did it, slammed my foot into another man's groin, sent him crashing to the floor. I came out of the spin, put my fist into another man's nose, dodged a bottle, clotheslined his friend, then slammed my elbow back into the neck of the idiot trying to sneak up behind me.
Three left. One got in a good blow to my kidney, sent me to my knees, spitting a curse. Another lined up a blow to my jaw. I snatched his arm, slammed a palm into his elbow and watched the joint snap.
The kidney puncher, grabbed me behind the arms. I swung my head back, shattered his nose. Then I crushed his kneecap for good measure.
One left.
But the crowd was not cowed. I was breathing hard, and my hands hurt. The pain in my kidney was like a lance of fire. And then they went from one to forty-one.
I got lost in the violence. I took men down with short efficient blows, but for every six or seven I landed, they landed one of their own. A bottle shattered over my skull, blood ran into my eyes. An elbow crashed into my ribs.
I needed to get out. I recognized my actions as a mistake too late. I stopped fighting to win. Started fighting to escape.
It cost me. Two ribs. And I couldn't lift my left arm above my shoulder any more. But I made it out. It took me two blocks before I realized no one was chasing me.
I remember that fight. For a moment the pain in my side makes sense. And then it drifts away again. Just is. Then something else swims up.
~
After the fight:
Lila fetched a fresh ice pack for my ribs.
“You're an idiot.” The way she said it made it sound like a compliment.
“I have to fight,” I told her. “It's who I am.”
She smiled. “There's no winning this, Tyler. It is what it is. You fight that Leviathan. You bring me home. And I get to meet you again. Fall in love with you again.”
I swallowed. “What if you don't?”
She shook her head. “All the shit you've done, I've stuck with you. You really doubt me now?”
She almost managed to make me laugh. The moment passed. “Maybe afterward you'll be smarter,” I said.
She kissed me on the forehead. Snuggled in beside me.
They showed the Leviathan on the news that night. It had destroyed three townsteads on its way south. Casualties in the thousands. They said it would be visible from the seawall in two days. They said it might be the biggest in a decade.
They questioned whether I could stop it. For the first time in a long time, I did too.
~
Almost here. Almost at this moment:
In a vast hangar near the seawall, I stood before my Mech. The Behemoth II—named after Janin 's machine. But I had always been safe in the knowledge it outranked its predecessor in every regard. It could tear a Leviathan apart. The original could only explode.
It still demanded the proxies to operate, though. Janin, who thought up a way to win an unfair fight, couldn't think her way out of that. Her proxies all died when her Mech blew.
If I went out there without proxies the sensory overload would wipe out my memory. I would forget to fight. The Leviathan would tear me apart first, then the city.
Then, staring up, up, up at the distant cockpit, almost hidden beyond the curve of the reactor in the machine's chest…the faintest stirrings of an idea.
The Behemoth II. The clue was in the name.
All Janin could do was explode.
The Leviathans always initiate the fights. A walking bomb doesn't need to know how to fight. It just needs to go off.
But would I remember what I was doing for long enough to get clear of the city?
Maybe…
I would die. There was that.
But the auto-eject… No, Janin died.
Hadn't they improved the radiation seals? Some distant memory of joking with Adam Grant after some tech demo where they talked about it. Not really believing it because when would that ever be an issue?
When would any other pilot be that desperate again?
When…
Now. Now is exactly when a pilot would be that desperate.
~
An elevator ride up to a door in the Mech's midriff marked with a radiation warning. I remember that sign clearly:
The failsafe mechanisms are well designed. There are backup systems of backup systems. All are carefully programmed.
They are beyond my understanding. I was not a careful student at school. I was never a jock, never quite a geek, but that awkward middle position of being nobody in particular.
But then Lila.
It wasn't a revolution. There was no astonishing makeover. It was simply that being nobody to everybody else didn't matter if I was somebody to her.
Love is a slow creature. It isn't like a Leviathan. There is no sudden violence. Rather it wraps its tendrils around you slowly. By the time you are aware of it, it has already won.
Or maybe I was as slow at grasping the concept of love as I was at understanding the complexities of a programming language.
In the end, I reprogrammed the machine with a ballpoint hammer. That seemed to suffice.
~
The cockpit. Closer to the now:
Mech's aren't meant to work without proxies. Some inputs require needles pressing deep into muscle. They sample DNA. They demand diversity.
But I remember once: a proxy, an older woman, she had a heart attack on the elevator ride up to cockpit. The Leviathan was already visible. There was no time to call in a backup.
Adam Grant showed me the trick.
“Give me that damn thing.” He'd grabbed the needle from a panicked technician. “DNA is everywhere.” He wiped the needle along the crevices of the seat. Dirt, lint, and hair clinging to it. They never really cleaned the cockpits.
Grant rammed the filthy needle into the arm of a proxy already getting input from other sensors. The technician looked appalled
Grant shrugged. “He's a proxy. He won't remember.”
It worked. That proxy took input from two sensors. I don't know what happened to him. Maybe nothing. Maybe he was fine. Maybe the poor bastard died of septic shock.
It was harder jamming the dirty needles into my own flesh. But, I reasoned, it wasn't like I'd remember.
~
Closer:
They tried to stop me leaving. They sealed the city gates against me. I could hear someone raging through my headset but her voice was overwhelmed by the data pouring into me. Heat readings, pressure sensors, gyrostabilizations, revolutions per minute.
I fired missiles. I felt them leaving my body. I felt the heat of their burning fuel burn inside of me. And worse. I could feel pieces of me leaking out with each projectile. The taste of strawberries carried away in a burst of flame. My father's name. What I'd eaten last night. All the inconsequential minutia that we're made of.
But I had sabotaged a nuclear reactor. I had re-engineered hardwired failsafes. Mere doors and words couldn't stop me. I blew my way out of the city. I marched on, marched out. I went to face my Leviathan.
~
One final memory:
“What do you think?”
Lila on the doorstep of our apartment. She had redecorated. Repainted. New furniture. New art on the walls.
They'd not allowed her to go to the rehab facility to
pick me up. A driver had dropped me off at the curb. She'd been waiting when the penthouse elevator doors opened. She looked perfect and anxious in equal measures.
I hesitated, trying to work why she was worried. I was the one who should be worried.
But she misread my hesitation, thought I didn't like her work. And I could see how much she had wanted me to like it. But she just nodded and bore it. She didn't bend, didn't break.
All I had done to her. And she thought I was doing it again, but she remained undefeated. All the monsters I had beaten, but she was the one thing I could never conquer. I loved her for that. So deep and so strong.
“You made it beautiful,” I said.
She smiled. The sun banishing clouds. “Good.”
~
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.
Get up. Get moving. You can do this.
Do what again?
I make it to my feet. And for a moment memory bubbles up, surrounds me. For a moment I remember everything. Lila. Grant. The people down in the slums of Chicago. The broken ribs. The sabotaged core at my Mech's heart. I know exactly who I am and exactly why I am here.
Then it's all gone.
~
Later?
I stand. I wait. I marvel at the world. The water is so beautiful. I wonder how it got there.
Movement on the horizon catches my eye. Something cutting through the water. I stare at it. Red signs flash in the corner of my vision but they are just one more confusing detail in the mass of data piling into my head. I want to ignore them. There is peace in that line of water as it races towards me.
I watch it. The efficient beauty of it. It distracts me from the wrongness in my limbs. From the foreignness of my body.
It is almost on me. I want to see what it is. I am curious.
And then—rearing out of the water—a vast unspooling nightmare of flesh. And God. Oh God.
Peace is gone. I scream, flail. And the wrongness of my limbs can't be ignored now.
Why am I made of metal? Why are my thoughts numbers?
The monstrosity's jaws smash into me, tear pieces from me. I can feel teeth in skin that is not my skin. Coils ensnaring me. Sensors scream in my head. A strangely remote disemboweling of my electronic innards. Reams of my coolant system spilling out onto the ground.
Why am I made of wires and metal? Why am I dying?
Warning sirens split my skull. And heat. A jagged spike of heat in my chest. Building unbearably.
What is wrong with me? Why am I wrong?
Jaws, and claws, and teeth, and scales, and death and crushing and heat and everything caving in caving in and heat ohgodtheheat
Iamgoingto-
And then the heat in my chest crescendos, swells, consumes. Everything is eclipsed. Pain, and heat, and light, and the world, and memory. All reduced to single point and blown away.
~
Afterward:
A voice. A voice brings me out of the darkness. It repeats the same word over and over. There is something familiar about the word. I grasp at it for a moment, but cannot place it.
Where am I?
Somewhere dark. I am strapped in. Wires cover my body. I work one hand free, pull at them. They come away with small wet sucking noises.
The voice is getting nearer.
How did I get here?
Light bursts into the room. I blink, try to shield my eyes with my free hand.
When I can see again, an open door floods the room with light. It is small, full of smashed screens, cracked dials, and trailing wires. I am strapped into a chair in the middle of it all.
A woman stands in the doorway. Tall. Dark hair worn long. A muddy red shirt worn loose. She stares at me.
“Hello,” I say when the silence becomes as strange as everything else about this situation. “Could you please help me?”
The woman starts as if breathed to life that very moment. She crosses the small room, pulls at the straps holding me in place. Halfway through she stops. I look at her face, and I almost believe she is going to cry.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
She closes her eyes. When she opens them they are clear. She nods, resumes her work. While she frees my legs I massage life into my arms.
“I'm sorry,” I tell her, “but I think I took a bump on the head. I really don't remember where I am.”
She nods, frees my legs. She lets me lean on her shoulders as we cross the room's sloping floor.
Then, as we reach the doorway, I stop, stare, gasp. In the distance there is the wreckage of a massive robot lying half drowned in a shallow sea.
The woman grabs my head, pulls it around, studies me carefully.
“Are you alright?” They are the first words she's spoken to me. They are full of concern.
I turn to stare again at the fallen machine. I point. “What is that?”
Her eyes cloud again. She hesitates before she answers. “It was called the Behemoth,” she says.
The name rings some deep drowned bell. I try to put a finger on the swirl of emotions. Something is wrong with my memory. Is that what's upsetting me?
The Behemoth. I shudder. “That sounds like the name of a monster.”
She nods. “It could be.” Then, after a hesitation. “But it was a savior, too.” She smiles suddenly, and it strikes me that it is a very pretty smile. “It could do terrible things, but it was beautiful when it did them.” A second smile. “When it fought, it always reminded me of Bruce Lee.”
I don't recognize the name. “Who's that?”
Another smile. Like the sun through clouds, I think. She lets go of my head, takes my hand instead. “Why don't you come with me,” she says, “and let me show you?”
The Greatest Hunger
Jaym Gates
Derecho backs into her corner and huffs, watching her opponent. I can feel her assessing its weaknesses, the deep gashes on its pale, dripping belly, the broken antler. Its other antler is still proud, and streaked with Derecho's red blood, but its intestines must be barely held in. A little green blood trickles down a tusk, into her mouth, and her deep-set eyes gleam ruby under the bright lights, vivid against her black hide.
I set my jaw against a rash move—Derecho is too expensive to risk in a kamikaze, blood and glory run—and gather her focus. Time to kill.
~
I still remember the night this mess started. Las Vegas. New Year's Eve. 1946. The night was desert-cold, a thin dusting of snow on the ground. The city was on watch, waiting to see if the monster that had wrecked Reno was on its way north. I was huddled in a doorway in a bad section of town, trying to keep warm and out of sight.
It was a strange new world we entered when the war finally ended.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been the first salvos, a few months before, the beginning of the end. For a while, everyone thought it was over. But that was just the beginning. Project Manhattan had been compromised so quietly that no one even knew it...until London, Washington D.C, Berlin, and Rome exploded in great gouts of cancerous fire.
We never figured out who was behind it, but it put an end to the aggression. Stunned, horrified, desperate, we turned our eyes inward to repair our ruined world. We found a fragile peace, dependent on depleted resources as much as brotherly love. We were still living under the terror of nuclear fallout, waiting for winds to shift or another mysterious strike. An air of hysterical hedonism clung to everyone, from New York to Tokyo to Johannesburg. The Roaring 20s looked like a pale omen of the Raging 50s, silky and gilded compared to the macabre glory of now.
And then, in a final, crushing twist of fate, the monsters came. Drawn by the blood and death and war, birthed by unholy science, they fell from the skies and rose from the seas, unearthed themselves from ancient caverns and crept out of
dark forests. We lost almost as many souls to them as to the war, and we quickly learned the fear and respect our ancestors accorded the unknown.
The first ones were small and warped, more a danger to individuals than cities. These, we could blame on the bombs. But they got bigger, and science was suddenly at a loss. We knew we had a problem when something huge and tentacled rose from the sea and stormed through Boston. (Maybe Lovecraft was prophetic, if a little geographically-challenged.)
Our communications were rebuilding slowly, so it took us a little while to find out we weren't the only ones. A monstrous reptile had rampaged through Tokyo. A hundred-foot anaconda was killed in Rio. A six-legged water buffalo...thing...was being butchered for its meat after taking out nearly half of Johannesburg's business district. Japan called them Kaiju. We called them monsters.
Being American, we also called them profit. Even nuclear winter couldn't take that away from us. The warlords, coal kings, industrial princes, and oil barons had more money than they could burn. They paid big game hunters to lead expeditions to bag the biggest trophies in the world, but a house could only hold so many of those.
John Goodnight, heir to a vast silver fortune, financed the first Blood Pits. Four millionaires paid hunters to live-capture the biggest Kaiju they could get their hands on, and pitted the four against each other. The event raised millions of dollars, and Goodnight more than recovered his investment. The next year, Japan had its own Kaiju Wars, supposedly also financed by Goodnight, who had bought heavily into the decimated nation.
That night in Las Vegas, I proved that some of us had been ruptured in ways you couldn't see.
A horn wailed from the police department. It used to be there to warn us about incoming bombers—not that any ever came near Vegas, but you couldn't be careful enough. This time, it was warning of a bigger threat. Take cover. Bombs don't hunt. Bombers screamed overhead, the regional guard heading to intercept the beast.
When the dying Hellcat clawed its way into Las Vegas, her body riddled with bullets and missiles, I didn't have anywhere, or any will, to run. Her yellow eyes, mad with pain and fury, glared down at me, ready to inflict some of her suffering on the creatures who had caused it. I thought she was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen, and I cried for her pain.
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 18
