But before he could run, the priest grabbed a hold of his sleeve.
“You must take Boss Tom with you,” said the priest.
“Let go of me, you bloody monkey!” Joe shrieked and swung at him.
It was an old prizefighter’s instinctual blow, the kind that would have knocked an untrained man unconscious had it landed. But the priest did something peculiar with his free hand, and Joe’s punch seemed to slide uselessly down his branded arm. Then the smaller man’s two fingers pinched Joe’s wrist and twisted. The pain was so intense Joe gasped and fell to his knees, all thought of struggle gone.
He found himself face to face with Tolliver, laying nearby. The man was a black and bloody mess. He must have been caught in the explosion Joe had heard earlier, the one that had awakened this thing. He had known Tolliver back when Irish muscle had done the backbreaking work, not Chinese. They had come up together. He felt ashamed at having tried to abandon him.
But they were all dead men anyhow, in the face of this thing from the pit of Hell.
“Chow Lan!” the priest yelled. “Help him!”
“Where can we go?” Chow Lan yelled, having fitted his glasses back on his nose. One lens looked like a spiderweb.
The priest looked about for a moment, then pointed to the shallow western tunnel in the base of Devil’s Cap which the terrified coolies had abandoned.
He pointed.
Joe looked up as a massive shadow fell across the entire area. The air grew chill. The sky was dark.
Then were was a tremendous impact that knocked Chow Lan to the ground and sent the snow and the loose stones hovering for a surreal moment before everything crashed back down.
The thing had leapt from the summit and landed behind them.
Joe watched as it scooped up a fistful of the fleeing workmen. He saw dozens of men flailing between its huge ruddy fingers and heard their screams as it stuffed them hungrily into its mouth.
“Let me go!” Joe yelled.
“You will help Boss Tom?”
Joe nodded, exhaling as the pressure on his wrist disappeared.
“Go then,” the priest ordered, and to Joe’s surprise, he began to strip away his shirt.
“Come on, Chow Lan,” Joe urged, taking Tolliver under the armpits.
“Where he go?” Chow Lan wondered, taking Tolliver’s feet and watching mystified as the priest discarded his pants.
“Never mind him! He’s barmy. Let’s go.”
They bore Tolliver back to the shallow depression and huddled among the rubble and abandoned equipment.
The priest was bare-ass naked. He sat down on the spot and closed his eyes. He was muttering something, and his fingers were interlacing in weird passes.
Tolliver groaned.
Joe reached into his coat and pulled out his bottle.
“Here, Tom, here now,” he said, pulling out the cork and tipping it to Tolliver’s bruised lips. “Mother Mary’s milk, it is. You drink. I’m sorry, Tom.”
Beside him, Chow Lan gave a cry of surprise and fell to his knees, throwing his forehead to the ground.
Joe looked over and nearly dumped the rest of the firewater up Tolliver’s right nostril.
The priest was getting to his feet.
But he had changed.
Somehow, in the few instants it had taken Joe to speak to Tolliver, the man had grown abnormally large. Taller than the tallest man Joe had ever seen in a freak show.
The priest took a step toward the thing massacring the fleeing workmen, and he shot up another ten feet, his legs and arms swelling and growing proportionately. In another step, he was thirty feet high. A third, he was forty.
“Saint Stephen dodgin’ fuckin’ rocks,” Joe stammered, and fell back against the wall of the tunnel trembling.
By the time the priest was upon Dzoavits, they were the same size. A hundred and fifty foot tall Chinaman, naked as a jaybird, muscled and smooth as a yellow colossus dominating some pagan temple. His eyes shined with a strange sunlight golden light.
As Dzoavits raked one of its huge hands through the crowd of screaming Chinamen, the priest reached out and took hold of its wrist, spinning the creature around to face him.
It howled in rage as he gave its clawed hand a twist, and a dozen men fell shrieking from its grip. They stumbled away, gaping at the two giants in horror.
The ogre wasn’t brought down so easily as Joe had been, though. It kicked out with both its marsupial feet and sent the giant priest flying backwards.
But for all his newfound immensity, he had lost none of the agility Joe had seen him display in the rescue of Tolliver. He arched his back and flipped entirely backwards, landing on his feet and putting up his fists, feet set apart in a weird fighting stance.
Joe regained some of his reason and jerked Chow Lan to his feet by his queue.
“Chow Lan, boyo, tell me you see what I’m seein,’” he pleaded.
“I see! I see!”
“What is he? How?”
“He Shaolin, Boss,” Chow Lan mumbled with a hint of reverence amid his own fear.
“What the bloody hell is show-linn?”
“Fighting monks, Boss. Strong. They know things. Secrets. Maybe magic. Make them strong, fast, fight like demons. I read about such stuff, but never think I see.”
“But how? How?” Joe repeated.
There was no answer from Chow Lan.
Dzoavits let out an angry howl and came charging like a bull gorilla at the priest, knocking aside trees and crushing the tea barrel to splinters.
The priest intercepted its charge with his foot, lashing out and kicking it between the eyes.
The creature fell flat on its back with a staggering crash that shook the earth.
It somersaulted weirdly to its hands though, and began to sweep at the priest with its massive arms.
The priest leapt above these savage lunges, but the monster’s wicked, clawed feet lashed out in deceptively short, one-two combinations. Though the priest dodged and slapped aside the slashing appendages with his forearms, it managed to rip a shallow furrow in his left side, and Joe gaped as a gout of blood splashed the rocks at the entrance to the tunnel in a red shower.
The priest countered, the monster slashed and snapped, each of them fighting alternately with their hands and feet. Every checked blow resounded in the mountains like a burst of artillery. They were sometimes so rapid and close together it gave Joe the impression of a thunderous fusillade. The creature’s awful howling and roaring intermixed with the occasional martial shout or grunt of the priest.
One titanic combatant would go smashing to the ground only to leap or roll aright again and rejoin the fray. Great ropes of fur and tides of blood covered the snow.
Then the priest jabbed a knife hand into Dzoavit’s left eye, putting out the red bulging orb and causing a steady stream of black blood to gush down its horrible face.
The monster howled and leapt back.
The priest, gasping, his olive skin now leaking bubbling creeks of blood from a half a dozen places, jumped back, too, and flicked the dark slime from his fist, splashing a stand of trees in the stuff.
The monster seemed to double over in agony, and shook its body. The dark, crystalline spines protruding from its back shined blue, each glowing with its own light.
The priest gripped the base of a tall, full grown fir tree, and striking it with the edge of his foot, uprooted it and whirled it one hand. He turned to face the creature, poised with the huge timber set in front of him like a partisan.
Dzoavits straightened and opened its wide, bloody maw. Like a toad, its black tongue sprang from its mouth, shooting across the distance. The priest was slow to block the thing, and it lashed around his corded neck like a bullwhip.
The blue phosphorescence, which had glowed on its back, traveled like St. Elmo’s fire down the length of its tongue. When that visible, unknowable energy reached the monk’s neck, he cried out and fell to his knees, dropped his makeshift weapon, and wrest
led with the source of his pain constricting his neck like a ravenous anaconda.
Joe blanched, watching as the flesh around the giant monk’s neck began to sizzle and smoke and he clenched his eyes and teeth in pain. His hands, trying to grip the tongue, recoiled again and again in pain.
“Cuckold Joseph!” he exclaimed. “It’s murderin’ him, sure!”
“What can we do?” Chow Lan pleaded.
Joe looked around the tunnel and felt a wavering in his knees when he realized they’d been taking cover among unused crates of blasting powder. Water walking Jesus, any stray bullet or flame could’ve blown them all to Moses.
Dzoavits was retracting its glowing tongue now, and the priest was dragged towards its toothy maw, knees plowing great trails in the earth as he gamely resisted.
“We must help him,” Chow Lan cried.
“Help him? What can we do?” Joe mumbled, but even as he dropped the question mark his eyes lit on Old Judah, lying on its side between the two tugging giants, spewing water in little arcs like a garden fountain.
Then he looked at a crate of blasting powder barrels and the coil of fuse lying next to it. It had to weigh three hundred pounds. He considered Chow Lan’s skinny arms dubiously.
“Awright, boyo. You think you can help me carry that box?”
“What we do with that?” Chow Lan asked, though he went to the other side of the box and tested the weight.
Joe looped the fuse coil over his arm and gripped the hemp handle of the crate. “Just you follow my lead.”
Chow Lan’s end of the crate sagged sharply, but the little man was stronger than he looked, and made no complaint as they stiff-walked the heavy burden out of the tunnel and beneath the giant Chinaman’s spread legs.
“Christ’s Granny Anne, what a view,” he muttered, trying not to look up as he guided Chow Lan toward Old Judah, slipping through the snow and splashing through ponds of blood.
At the midway point, the creature’s glowing tongue over their heads, Chow Lan gasped and dropped his end with a jarring thud.
“Don’t break the thing, you bloody leper, or we’re lost.”
Chow Lan nodded and gave it a second go.
It took some doing, but they finally reached the battered engine, which was piddling water from a dozen cracks in the tubes and billowing steam. They lifted the crate into the engineer’s cab with a roaring effort.
Joe considered the state of the leaky old engine with dread, and checked the boiler level. Hell, they hardly needed to have brought the blasting powder. The engine would explode in a matter of minutes.
“Start fixin’ this crate to blow, Chow Lan,” Joe yelled, as he leapt out of the cab. He tossed the coil of fuse to the Chinaman.
As Chow Lan went into the cab, he looked up at the huge priest and the slavering monster. They were just massive, unreal, silhouettes against the bright sky from this angle, but the glow of the tongue between them lit the grimacing face of the golden-eyed priest. Joe noticed that of the spines on the back of Dzoavits, only a few were shining now, and one flickered and went out as he looked.
But the priest was losing his ground. In a few minutes, he would be dragged past the engine.
“Okey dokey, Boss,” Chow Lan yelled, jumping down.
“Get to cover, Chow,” Joe said, taking out his matches.
“Boss,” Chow Lan said, wide-eyed. “What you do now?”
“I said get to cover, you damn fool!”
Chow Lan loped off for the trees, and Joe climbed into the hot, shuddering engine cab. Chow Lan had cracked open the crate and slipped the fuse inside one of the barrels.
The boiler gauge was quivering in the danger zone.
The giant Chinaman’s great foot dug in a few dozen feet away.
How to get his attention?
But of course.
Joe reached up and blew the engine whistle, a shrill scream that pierced the air, audible even above the contention of the giants.
He jumped down and touched the match to the fuse.
He looked up.
The Chinaman’s enormous glowing eyes focused on him.
Joe waved his hands, mimicked an explosion, and ran after Chow Lan, hoping the giant would get his meaning.
He did.
Joe looked back as he ran for the trees.
The priest seemed to relax, and let the glowing tongue pull him forward. As he was drawn towards Dzoavits, he reached down and scooped up Old Judah in his hand with a groan of metal and a great hissing. Surely he was scalded, but if the brands on his arms meant anything, he could take it.
Dzoavits’ tongue ceased glowing as the priest came toe to toe with it, and it grabbed at him with its forelegs.
The priest brought up Old Judah and drove it into the thing’s wide open mouth, cracking off a couple of its wicked teeth in the process. At precisely that moment, either the boiler or the blasting powder exploded. Joe didn’t know which, but one definitely helped the other along.
The fiery explosion blew the priest back, severed Dzoavits’ tongue, and left a gaping, drippy hole where its face had been. Shards of superheated iron and steel riddled its body. A few teeth hung like bits of broken glass in a window frame, twisted on strings of gummy tissue, before falling to the earth.
Then the enormous beast teetered and fell face forward with an enormous crash.
When Joe and Chow Lan dared to pick their way from the trees, the priest was nowhere to be seen. There was just an impression where he had fallen, and a great ragged, smoking coil of Dzoavit’s severed tongue.
Without a word, Joe and Chow Lan went to this, and found the priest, normal sized again, lying half beneath the rubbery debris, naked and bloodied.
As Chow Lan laid a tentative hand on him, he opened his eyes. They weren’t glowing anymore.
“Great God in Heaven,” Joe said, unironically, taking his hat from his head as Chow Lan fell to his knees and bowed his head. “Boyo, can all you show-linn do that? Grow like that?”
“Not without sacrificing eight years of life,” the priest muttered, closing his eyes again.
~
By the time Chow Lan found the priest’s clothes and Joe had salved his cuts with medicinal from the camp stores, the survivors were crowding the man in silent awe. The coolies uniformly prostrated themselves, yammering their thanks in their native tongue. He only answered them with a thin smile and a simple salute, fist in hand, and when he had dressed, he retired to his joss house.
When he emerged, he was dressed for travel, with a bindle and a saucer hat.
Joe had stood outside the whole time, waiting. What was that Shakespeare line, about more things in Heaven and earth? Well call him Horatio.
“What are you, mister?” he asked.
“I am like you. Like them,” he added, nodding to the coolies. “He who pulls the rickshaw is as much a man as those who ride.”
Joe grinned and shook his head.
“Still preachin.’”
“Burn the carcass,” the priest said to the gathered workers in a loud voice. “And seal the hole,” he told Joe.
They all nodded as if he stood on a cloud.
“We will remember you with honor. All of us,” said Chow Lan.
“Where you headed?” Joe asked.
“Over the mountains,” the priest said, looking east.
Joe held out his hand.
“You’re a hell of a man, for a heathen priest.”
The priest smiled thinly and shook. “It is not the creed that makes the man. It is the man who justifies the creed.”
“Boy, you’re full of ‘em. Well here’s one you taught me. Don’t judge a horse by the saddle he wears.”
The priest bowed his chin and walked off.
They all watched him, holding their breath as he disappeared into the snow tunnel.
Joe sighed and took out his dented speaking tube, turning on the men.
“Well alright boyos, you heard the man. Let’s burn that great monstrosity, blast the ho
le shut, and get on with our work. We’ll be shiftin’ course for Donner summit, so pack it up.”
“Like Hesutu said?” Chow Lan ventured.
Joe only rumbled, keeping his tongue in check. He felt disinclined to cuss these heathens just now.
“What will Mr. Crocker say?”
“That’s a good question,” Joe sighed. “But there aint’ no helpin’ it.”
He went off to his shanty as the men dispersed, looking forward to a pull of who-hit-john to put all these wonders into perspective.
“Boss Joe,” Chow Lan said, rushing to keep up with him.
“What is it?”
“You asked the priest what he was. We have a name for it. Yīngxióng.”
“Ying-she-yong?” Joe repeated.
Chow Lan seemed to be swelling, smiling.
“It means hero.”
Joe nodded.
“Sure, boyo. I guess that’s a good fit.”
Shaktarra
Sean Sherman - Kaiju Rising Backer
Craig Davis awoke to a pounding at the front door. He looked over at his alarm clock but it was dead. As the pounding continued, Craig withdrew his revolver from the nightstand and crept to the door in complete darkness. The sliver of light that normally glared into his bedroom from that annoying streetlight outside was gone. That and the rampant pounding were the first signs something was wrong.
“Who's there?” he called.
“It's Leslie, you dope. Open up.”
Craig opened the door and Leslie slipped in as soon as there was room, squeezing under his arm. She glanced at him, and he only then realized what he must look like, just in his boxers and holding a .44. She shook her head, biting back a smile, but she didn’t look much better. A short woman with wild, sandy blond hair, blue jeans, t-shirt, Leslie wore an olive green jacket that looked like an army surplus reject. A remnant of the Korean War perhaps?
“So, what's the story? What the hell is going on out there?”
“I don’t know for sure. Maybe some kind of EMP blast that’s knocked out all the electricity. You know, like in one of those sci-fi movies. All I know is that the whole city’s blacked out. No communications to anywhere outside. Maybe this is the big one.”
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 23
