I sat up immediately.
Snowman’s tall, sweating, shaking form loomed high over me, both fists clenched. I noticed with some perverse joy that he had broken knuckles and was bleeding all over his fancy outfit. “Told you, hothead,” he warned. “Leave. Aimi. Alone.”
I tasted the blood of my broken lip. “Yeah, well,” I said as calmly as possible, “fuck you, chief.” I climbed slowly to my feet, swaying slightly. He was standing between me and Aimi, so I got up against him. “Get out of my way, Snow White.”
“Make me.”
“Stop it!” Aimi screamed at us both. “Just stop it!”
He punched me again.
He was good. I went down hard on my hands and knees, a buzz of pain in my head. The parking lot shifted slightly, like the world was on a giant cosmic pendulum. I heard voices. The rest of the band was gathering around our private little Fight Club, some of them yelling at Snowman to cut it out, that he was acting like a jerk, others edging him on. I ignored them. They didn’t exist. Only Snowman existed. I spit a penny-sized droplet of blood onto the pavement and began climbing slowly to my feet again.
“Just stay down!” Snowman yelled.
I got up, instead.
He tried to kick me in the ribs with his monster plats, but I moved too fast. I wasn’t that chubby kid who played video games and read books all day. Not anymore. I threw myself against him, grabbed him by the cravat, and together we crashed back against the chainlink fence behind us. Snowman grunted as he took the full force of the impact. I was going to say something smarmy before busting his teeth in, but something brushed the back of my neck, distracting me. At first I thought it must be a fly, then I realized the hairs on the back of my neck were standing at full, rigid attention. My skin was crawling like it was on fire…
A moment later I found out why.
Because a moment later, the street exploded behind us, and a kaiju rose screaming like a thing from hell above the inferno.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
Break Stuff
1
The explosion that heralded the end of my life and the beginning of my nightmare rocked the entire street from side to side. All of us went down, clutching the pavement, as dozens of car alarms went off, adding to the rising cacophony in the night. Something told me we were in trouble—the type of trouble that would cost us our lives if we didn’t keep our heads together. I sat up, gritting my teeth with determination, and scrambled backward. I didn’t stop until I hit the fence.
Something had happened, something that was going to change the world. Again.
The street was full of smoke and the raw smell of sewage. Ironically, the first thing I thought of was not that some creature was responsible, but that a gas main had exploded on the avenue or a bomb had gone off. This was New York. Crime happened in New York. Terrorists set fire to buildings.
Then the street rattled grittily and cracks spider-crawled across the pocked asphalt. It reminded me of the earthquake I had felt several days ago, taken to the tenth power. The street rolled and several cabs flipped over like toys. I was afraid, finally, down in my bones, where the basest survival instincts lurk.
I crawled unsteadily to my feet, covered in grit and blood and freezing sweat, and turned to look at Aimi and Snowman clinging to the fence for support. My mind was clear and alert and painfully sober. The first thing I did was grab Snowman by the front of his fancy glitter jacket and push him stumbling toward Aimi. “Get her out of here,” I said. “Get them all out of here now!”
He blinked at me, clearly shaken, our conflict forgotten for the moment. Then he nodded, and turned to assist Aimi, and then the rest of the band, over the fence.
I didn’t stay to watch. Behind me, beyond veils of smoke, came the worst sound imaginable, a screaming the likes of which you would expect to hear emerging from the bowels of hell. I stepped out into the street, looking at the people lying in the gutters like broken dolls. The explosion had brought traffic to a screeching halt and cars were jam-packed every which way on the avenue like a kid’s toy collection.
The street trembled, and again I heard that noise: like someone running a metal glove over a blackboard.
I walked into the street, feeling like the token Asian in a spaghetti western about to go out and face the gunfighter villain. I thought of sirens, fires, ineffectual police squads firing on the monster that crawled out of San Francisco Bay two years ago. I walked, but afraid. I knew I had to buy Aimi and Snowman time to get away. My throat was dry and clicked when I tried to swallow. All around me people were struggling to escape their cars, banging doors against the vehicles packed against them, breaking windshields, crawling through jagged glass with no hesitation for fear or pain as their own instincts for survival kicked in. Ragged people in ragged clothes and blood…
The earthquake, I thought. Something huge was moving under the street. And now that something was here…
An injured businessman staggered into the street. Maybe he was trying to help, or maybe he was only in a state of shock, but he reached a car with a family trapped inside it and tried yanking open the passenger-side door, which only banged against the side of the idling cabbie that had slammed into it at the intersection.
I didn’t think. I pushed him aside. The family in the car was screaming. I slid the jacket off my shoulders, wrapped by forearm in the thick material, and bashed in the passenger-side window with my fist. “Get out!” I shouted. “Get out of here now!”
As they began scrambling out, I moved to the center of the street. Surrounded by the massive pile-up, I stared at the belching smoke coming from a half dozen open manholes. Something was out there, in the smoke and darkness, something I couldn’t see…yet.
Smoke closed in around me, obscuring my vision and making greasy halos of the light on the avenue. The man I had been trying to help began to scream, to scream the way a man should never scream.
It’s like that night, I thought. The night the thing crawled out of the sea and began trampling the people as they tried desperately to get away. The nightmare is starting all over again…
A black thing writhed in the smoke. It stank of sewage, well-rotted fish, ozone, nightmare. The stink of it was in my nose and in my hair, and I knew it would be days before I was rid of it. If I lived that long.
Suddenly manhole covers popped all up and down the street and black, snakelike tentacles began wriggling along the ground. There must have been a dozen of them. I tried to figure out what it was, the vile black thing swaying darkly in the mist. Centipede, snake, eel, caterpillar. It was all of those, none of those. I felt my heart and bowels fall as the thing quivered into view only a few feet from me, a pulsating black mass that became more apparent as the smoke cleared. It was twenty feet high and as thick around as an old oak tree. I could see no head, no face, just a wall of darkness raining down putrid black oily water on the street. I heard a dull thudding noise that seemed to emanate from the very earth itself; it took me several moments to recognize it as a heartbeat so powerful the ground itself carried a wild current.
The earthquake…it suddenly made a lot more sense.
The thing curled over like a curious foraging centipede, the tip expanding into a bulbous, pod-like head. I stayed frozen in place, but the businessman in the street started screaming hysterically. Something unzipped itself across the thing’s face, a vertical insect jaw lined with jagged teeth that drooled clear mucus. I saw the jaws on the Venus flytrap head flex, once. Then the monster emitted a cackling bellow that sounded both amused and victorious at the same time and it shot downward, swallowing the man whole, in mid-scream. It emitted a terrible clicking noise as it swallowed, then began searching for more prey.
I thought about screaming myself. It seemed like a really good idea at that moment. But something paralyzed me. All I could do was stand there and watch, wide-eyed, electric with fright, as the thing swayed overhead, searching for more prey. It wouldn’t take long before it detected me, I knew. I clenched
my hands, noticing that they felt hot, like two irons in the fire.
I glanced down. And despite the craziness of the situation, it actually got crazier in that moment—because I finally realized that my hands were on fire.
2
Gaping, I wondered what I had done to deserve this hell. I mean, I’m not a bad kid. Really. I don’t cut class, or smoke crack or backtalk teachers or set bugs on fire with magnifying glasses. I’m a really dull person. I think karma was picking on the wrong guy tonight.
And yet, despite it all, I wasn’t really afraid, either. Unclenching my hands, I realized the flames were blue and almost cold to the touch. They leaped up, a column of fire within which I recognized a familiar object—one of those things you recognize even if you’ve never seen one up close and personal. It was insane, completely unlikely…but I know a samurai sword when I see one. I immediately gripped the hilt. I knew if I could just hold the sword, I wouldn’t be afraid of the monster anymore. Hey, it worked for Saint George.
The monster’s mouth clicked open. I felt a spattering of hot saliva on my cheeks.
I was afraid. And I was not afraid.
Naturally, I thought of Mr. Serizawa. You were fighting the Orochi, like Susa-no-Ō. What a stupid, cheesy name, I thought even as the monster suddenly snapped at me with its wide, jagged-toothed jaws.
I expected to be dead. Chomped. But my hand had moved faster than my eye, faster than it had ever moved before. And suddenly the sword that was on fire—or rather, the sword that was made of fire—had cut through the spongy flesh and left the “head” flopping around on the ground like a giant black fish out of water.
The ground shook as the creature, much larger than I had expected, screamed in agony beneath me. Black fluid spurted from the truncated appendage as it flailed, smashing wetly into the street, covering everything in a burning black slime that immediately ate through the asphalt like the most caustic acid, and where it touched abandoned cars, ate them right down to their axles. The street rocked, and windows shattered apart on the upper floors of buildings on both sides of the street. Finally, the monstrous thing began sinking back down the hole into the ground. To the earth. To the water. Back to the unknown depths from which it had come. The other shrieking, swaying pod-headed appendages immediately followed suit, disappearing one after another.
It was gone in seconds, as if it had never been. But it left behind a path of broken cars, bodies and glassy destruction that littered the street up and down. I was about to let out my breath in relief when the whole street heaved upward and cracked open.
Like a rancid asphalt egg, it birthed a new kaiju into the world.
3
There are things you never forget, things stamped down deep into your memory like footprints in wet sand. The day you fell from a tree and broke your arm. The day you made a fool of yourself in front of a girl you liked. The first time you really fell in love…and the first time you realized the monster was about to get you.
The sound the kaiju made as it surfaced is something I’ll ever forget. Claws on blackboard, child screaming, woman weeping, knife singing as it sinks deep into your gut. It sounded like all these things. The appendages I had seen were only a small part of the whole beast, I realized. The monster that ploughed out of the massive hole in the street looked like a fish, or frog, or something no one had ever heard of before.
I scrambled out of the way, amazed at how analytical I could be, considering it was easily the size of a house, and as black as pitch and shining with wet, razor-sharp scales. Its humped back was covered in those snakelike appendages with the Venus flytrap heads, making it look like something out of old H. P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmare. It stank of sewage and death, and the smell of it made me want to gag.
I didn’t. I was too fascinated by the sight of the thing’s grotesque, barely-formed head, the reddish, heavily-lidded, almost humanesque eyes glaring at me with a cunning and evil intelligence. I stood there, outside the club, listening to a series of popping explosions as the beast tore up various gas mains in its wriggling effort to emerge.
It finally settled atop the street like a mountain of burning black slime, making that sound again, like it was laughing at me, laughing at the sheer puniness of mankind. I should have been afraid of it. Instead, I swung the burning sword around two-handedly, ready to take another piece out of it. Under the circumstances, there wasn’t much else I could do.
It eyed me cautiously.
“Afraid?” I said, then kicked myself mentally when it dawned on me that agitating a monster was a lot different than doing it to a bully. Bullies didn’t normally try to eat you.
It hissed at me and leaped into the sky. For a moment the lights of the city were eclipsed as it passed overhead. Then it crashed down atop the roof of the club across the street. The structure exploded under the monster’s weight like it was made of Tinker Toys. I staggered back as dust and debris spilled all the way into the street and surrounded me. I could hardly believe it had moved so fast…or that the whole building lay crushed beneath it in seconds, with everyone still inside.
The street looked like a demolition zone, surreal, like the end of the world in some post-apocalyptic movie. The only thing missing were the zombies. The creature made that hissing/cackling noise like it was pleased with itself and its work.
I stared at the overturned cars, the broken bodies, the bloodied glass scattered everywhere. The wind sighed, blowing the yellowish debris around as if we stood on a devastated planet, the victim of a cataclysmic nuclear war. A poster blew against me, then blew away. I coughed as the dust began to clear. I finally saw a girl lying in the rubble at my feet, her fancy club wear ripped to bloody tatters on her still body. Ignoring the monster, I knelt down, pushing aside the debris atop her and checked for a pulse, but she was as lifeless as a mannequin.
I wiped the soot off her face. She was my age. Pretty. She was one of the girls who had been giggling about me in the halls of my high school.
My mind went calm, my horror far away. But my anger burned. It burned like the sword I still gripped in my hands.
I stood up. I swung the sword high overhead, not because I thought I could actually destroy the monster with my puny little weapon, but because I was following a predetermined pattern, carving a complex symbol into the aim before me, even though I had no idea what I was doing. But my hands knew, even if my brain was too numb to understand what was happening.
Two signs. Characters. Kanji. They seemed to take on a glow in the very air before me. I knew what they meant. I knew what they said. I knew from the dream. I had seen the same characters carved into the book.
What am I doing? I wondered. But, somehow, I knew. I raised the burning sword in a salute to the night sky painted with a billion ancient stars, and I thought, for no apparent reason at all, Come. Then I swung it around so the blade was pointed toward the ground and drove it into the asphalt between my feet with all of my strength. Logic stated that the blade should have broken on contact, but this was obviously no ordinary sword. The sword and the ground were now fused, as if they had always been one. I held the hilt, feeling the vibration of the impact all the way up to my aching shoulders.
Come, I thought, as the wind picked up around me, spilling my hair all over my face. The night was full of the stink of blood and fire. “Come!” I screamed. “Come now!”
The asphalt under my feet split as a fork of lightning struck the sword, making me blink and shudder. I felt a wave of heat so intense it made my skin tighten and crawl; the spit in my mouth dried up and my hands felt like they were burning. With a cry I released the hilt of the sword and stumbled back.
A column of flame burst from the crack I had made in the street, growing larger by the moment, until it was a full-fledge bonfire so tall it could lick at a ten-story building. I fell back in the gutter, shielding my face from the intense, scalding heat, and watched the air shimmer around me like it was coming off a desert deadpan. Something within the flames roared. It so
unded like a train when you’re so close to the tracks you can feel the noise vibrating in your bones. Above, the stars seemed to go out and blood red veins of forked lightning snaked outward across a pitch-black sky, followed by an answering roar of thunder. A storm without rain, I thought. It felt like I had been transported to some remote bowel of hell.
Maybe I’m dreaming all this, I thought. Or maybe I was crazy. There was no other reasonable explanation.
I had thought nothing stranger could happen this night, but it turned out the thing that sounded like a derailed train was taking form in the flames. I hissed between my teeth at the deathless brilliance of it. I decided that the old artists who painted wall scrolls and shoji screens that adorned so many traditional Japanese homes really had no idea what they were doing when they depicted the holy Kami—the gods of ancient Japan. They had never seen one with their own eyes, that was for sure. They based their artwork on something earthly, tangible, something that could be understood with human eyes and grasped by a human brain. A dragon or tiger or crane, that type of thing. This went beyond all that.
This was made of nightmare fabric. As it came into clear focus, I saw scales and fur and feathers all at once, at every point of its body, something like a lion but also like an armored dragon, with a face both bestial and strangely human, and a massive head crowned with a myriad of curling horns that extended all the way down its back and the long line of its serpentine tail. All of it was on fire, crackling with the power of a sun gone supernova. It set its giant, iron-clawed feet on the ground before me and flicked its tail, a wall of sulfuric heat so intense it was like standing before a blast furnace. The eyes, I thought, raising my arms to shield my face from the intense, baking heat. The eyes are human…the eyes are blue.
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 6
