by M. C. Norris
ZOE0809 leapt right up, as though eager for duty. Its e-Me character was a black cat with blinking amber eyes. As usual, the drone insisted on being “Liked” before access to its feed was granted. Jill growled as she thumped her thumb against the “Like” tab. The black cat gave a yowl, performed a backflip, and disappeared in a shower of sparkling stars.
The drone feed splashed across Jill’s screen, but she couldn’t tell what the heck she was looking at. What should have been a familiar setting of white condos lining the shoulders of a twisty, seaside avenue better resembled the garbage dump of some third world country. Keening gulls spiraled over hillocks of rubble. Geysers sprayed from broken water lines. Flattened vehicles shared mass graves with displaced ships and flopping fish. Splintered joists jutting from crushed condominiums were entangled in fishing nets and rigging. It looked as though a great spoon had descended from the heavens to stir the sea and the seashore all together into one terrible amalgam.
Jill dropped her phone into her lap, and stared at nothing. She’d never felt so ghostly thin in all her life. The anxiety that had frazzled her nerve endings all day had vanished, leaving her gutted and hollowed in the face of reality. Her mother’s neighborhood had been annihilated, and she wasn’t answering her phone. There was only one course of action, one place in the whole world where Jill needed to be, and she needed to be there immediately.
Jill stormed back up to the locked partition to the Devil Ray’s cockpit. She beat her fists against the molded steel until she was sure that they could hear her down on the tarmac. The aircraft amplified her pummeling like a hollow drum. “Open this door!”
Her phone vibrated. Jill jerked it up to eye level, hoping to God she’d find a text from her mother. However, the message was not from her mom. All hope was slammed to the ground, yet again.
J.J.: R U OK?!!
“What in the hell?” Jill smacked her palm against her forehead, and gaped down at the text message, re-reading it over and over. Why wouldn’t she be okay? She didn’t want to believe it, but some part of her knew that bad things were happening, out there. It was the same part of her that insisted she resign from the team precisely when she did, pushing her to get out of Shanghai before the relationship between Psyjack and the SWCC turned caustic. Perhaps she hadn’t seized the opportunity to leave soon enough. Being detained in Shanghai was not going to be an option. Not now. Not after what just happened in Anchorage. She had to get out of here. Nothing was going to stand between Jill and her child.
Jill: I’M STUCK IN THE DEVIL RAY!!!
J.J.: Coming now
He knew all the codes. J.J. could break into the Devil Ray from the outside. He could access his cockpit, the flight controls, and the weapons systems. Peering out over the tarmac through the nearest window, Jill watched squads of armed soldiers hustling along the base of the steel wall that separated field command from the streets of Shanghai. The men dropped into defensive formations around the perimeter, shouted into radios, and waved other squads forward. It looked as though the base was preparing to defend itself against some sort of an outside attack. Jill searched Shanghai’s skyline for any sign of a Kaiju threat. Nothing but skyscrapers loomed.
A flaming bottle arched over the wall. It looped end over end like a fiery pinwheel. As it struck the tarmac, the vessel released a great lake of fire. Jill’s head whipped toward the prattle of automatic weapon fire. Another burst of gunfire from beyond the wall, followed by the shouts of men. Jill shrieked and fell to her knees as a spray of bullets rattled against the Devil Ray. The shots appeared to be coming from outside the base, in the vicinity of a nearby block of derelict buildings. Denuded and scarred, the ruins were somehow still standing, probably since the last days of the End War.
Jill scrambled across the floor on her hands and knees, headed for her usual battle station. The Devil Ray was a sitting duck on the tarmac. An incoming rocket whistled over the wall. The projectile howled overhead, and struck somewhere far behind her. Mortars screamed through the air. Their explosions rattled the steel panels against the bracing. Psyjack’s high-tech aircraft was left sitting alone and defenseless on the tarmac. It might as well have had a giant bull’s eye painted right on it. The whole situation seemed almost too convenient.
Jill clambered into her seat. She snatched her Mindbender Rift off the wall mount, and strapped it atop her head. Thank God she’d not worn it out into the hangar, as the guys had done, or she’d likely have left her headgear back there with them. She and Skyler had been too busy assisting Collin off the aircraft to take part in the front of solidarity that the boys had staged against the Mad Hatter. She flipped the power toggle, dropped the visor, and swept her mouse-piece into her lips. Bent might’ve figured that she was trapped in the Devil Ray, unarmed and powerless, when in fact he’d left her armed with one of the most powerful weapons in the world.
“Mommy’s coming, baby,” Jill whispered. She drew deep breaths as the system loaded, ignoring the ping of bullets against the aircraft, resonant explosions that she could feel inside her skull. “Hang on. Mommy’s coming.”
Windows opened, one by one, displaying the feeds of available hosts within her range. She hated this. Hardware development had always come to her quite naturally, but her prowess as a computer geek had no relationship with her ability as a pilot, or lack thereof. She preferred a backstage role as the team’s support system, leaving the piloting to the pilots. Sliding the tip of her tongue over the surface of the mouse-piece, she highlighted the feed belonging to Carl the Charybdis, praying that their enormous friend had somehow managed to survive its bloody engagement with the Navy fighters. It appeared to be resting on the bottom of the Yangtze.
A mortar careened unseen toward the Devil Ray. The whistle became louder with every passing second. Jill braced herself for the impact. The round detonated close enough to lift her partway out of her seat. They were dialing them in now. “Are you kidding me?” she shouted around the mouse-piece. “That is enough!” Jill tapped Carl’s highlighted feed with the tip of her tongue, and prepared for the freefall.
Glittering motes of stardust began to streak by. Jill felt herself wanting to hyperventilate. Her fingernails dug into the ends of her armrests. She hated this part so much. Enveloped in whorls of spectral energy, Jill plunged into that disembodied vastness, where a soul felt as vulnerable as a newly hatched tadpole wriggling through a pond’s murky abysms. These were uncharted waters where nothing was really understood, where a soul might go spinning out of orbit to become forever lost in a dynamic dreamscape between bodies.
Jill’s eyes rolled back into her head. Her nails split against the armrests, and she began to convulse. It was so hard to let go. As Jill rocketed through the freefall, she felt like a trespasser in God’s backyard, a place where no living human being should ever hope to be. Bolts of fire flashed through the miasma. Spoken word devolved to sound. Collective energy egressed every cell in her human body, and her cognitive one became one billion, as Jill’s consciousness reentered the primeval soup as a galaxy of falling stars. All that remained was a girl’s reflection on the gazing pool, if she’d ever even existed at all.
In the next instant, she was reborn. An infant on the ocean floor, she could barely lift her oversized head. Nothing felt right. Disoriented, paralyzed in the gloom, she felt all mixed-up, as though she’d been dismembered and reconstructed from scrap animal parts. Limbs squirmed beneath her hulking form like a catch of eels. Her gangly arms felt disjointed, backwards. The seemingly limitless capacity of her lungs, if they were even lungs at all, was an oddly distracting sensation. Like a flaccid balloon that begged to be inflated, she filled the empty bladders with a great rush of river water, and then released a small burst with a fluttering groan. Inhaling deeply, she filled every recess in her body with water, gathered her mess of legs beneath her, and rose.
While some estranged part of her felt the shellshock of mortars, the concussion of bullets against steel walls, and the slap of J.J.’s hand r
epeatedly against her cheek, she stayed committed to the Kaiju stream. Volumes of water thundered over the rim of her carapace. Brownish cascades churned the Yangtze to foam as she rose higher into the sky, until the city of Shanghai lay sprawled like a lurid garden at her feet. Unfolding her mantis forearms, she used these saw-toothed appendages to hitch her way upriver, back into view of the naval base. She could see the Devil Ray taking fire on the tarmac. The realization that her human body was down there inside that tiny vessel was the most surreal experience of her life. She had to protect that aircraft, as well as its precious cargo.
“Jill, it’s J.J. Hang on. We’re getting out of here, girl.”
The Mindbender Rift was designed to filter the stream of sensory input to the extent that the pilot didn’t feel split in two. However, Jill could hear J.J.’s shouts in her human ear. She could feel his hands on her shoulders, but she willfully distanced herself from his voice by plunging deeper into the head of the Charybdis, so as not to interrupt the stream of consciousness. She lacked the confidence that Collin and J.J. seemed to enjoy in the pilot’s seat, with one foot in each world. To Jill, the experience was a tightrope. She always felt as though she might at any moment come reeling out of the stream like a dazed sleepwalker, or worse, dive too deeply, and never resurface.
She could see them now, hordes of Jaw-long insurgents spilling through a smoldering breach in the wall. The frame of a box truck engulfed in flames was still rolling across the airstrip like a shipping vehicle sent straight from Hell. While the majority of the militia engaged the soldiers in a firefight, Jill noticed a trio of fighters moving in on the Devil Ray. They had in their possession what appeared to be a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The shooter took a knee, brought the weapon to his shoulder, and aimed it at her aircraft.
Jill thundered upon the military base, reared back, and unleashed a sonic blast that flattened every human body on the airstrip. It was too difficult to distinguish between soldiers and insurgents in the chaos of battle, so her attack was indiscriminate. Being careful to avoid hitting the Devil Ray, she swept her flattened carapace from side to side, broadcasting her sonic death blast with an intensity meant to liquefy human innards.
“Jill! Turn around!” J.J.’s shouts sounded like the warnings of some spiritual advisor reaching out to her from another dimension.
In the next instant, something slammed into Jill from behind with force enough to topple her borrowed body right into Shanghai’s bustling waterfront. Jill glimpsed her otherworldly attackers as the edge of her carapace plunged through the first block of neon skyscrapers like the blade of a titanic battle axe. Buildings crumbled upon her shell. Jill gathered herself, and swiveled the natural shield of her carapace in the direction of the assault.
There were four of them. They bore down as one savage mass of muscle and rending claws. Having committed their slain cub to the eternal lull of the Yellow Sea, the pod of enraged water bears now hungered for vengeance. Jill raised her spiny claws, absorbing the brunt of their combined impact in her limbs. Collapsing beneath their weight, she watched whole sections of city lights flicker as she and her assailants took a tumble right through the heart of Shanghai’s infrastructure. Transformers thundered all around them like cannon shots. Skyscrapers sloughed their skins in ghostly skeins of dust.
There were too many of them. A pebbly arm came down with a great slap atop her carapace. Stunned by the powerful blow, Jill was reawakened by the white-hot agony of claws raking furrows through her flesh, just beneath her single eye. The anguished cry that seemed to emanate from some faraway world, Jill realized, was in fact her own human scream. Jagged mouthparts like commercial blenders shredded into her flesh. Hooked claws ripped into her underbelly. They meant to tear her to pieces, and they would. The combined ferocity and power of the pack was overwhelming.
As though the water bears had all agreed that their lost cub had been avenged, the mauling came to a halt. Three of the creatures turned their attentions toward the naval base, and they thundered off in that direction. Jill was abandoned to the dark whims of the fourth monster, whose intent to devour her alive was evident as rending mouthparts ripped away great chunks of her borrowed body. Smothered beneath its thrashing bulk, every second of the agony became real. The sound of her human screams grew ever more distant, as did her connection to the other world she’d left behind. If this was all just a nightmare, she was lost within it, and couldn’t wake up.
“Luna!”
That word. What was it? That little word with such huge connotations kept resonating throughout her divided mind. Jill couldn’t be certain if she’d shouted it out loud, thought it, or evoked it from some fuzzy memory, but it was a word that refused to be denied. If Jill’s every reason for existence was somehow threatened, that phantom face would never let her go. She would kill and die in the name of that memory, and the name of that face was Luna.
Gathering her strength, Jill dragged her mantis claw between herself and the devourer, clamping the spiked vise of her forearm around the predator’s throat. Rearing back on its quivering haunches, the creature lifted her from the crater of rubble that they’d pounded into the city, but it could not pull free. Powerful as the water bear was, the grip of the Charybdis was stronger. Jill locked her opposing claw around the back of the monster’s head, and pulled the alien face against her own for a deadly kiss.
Yawning her mouth, Jill unleashed what remained of the pressurized store of seawater through both barrels of her biological weapon, channeling all of the kinetic energy through the sound chamber in her throat. The conversion was a blast of galactic resonance that flattened background structures to dust, parted the Yangtze River to its exposed channel, and dispersed her attacker’s head across Shanghai in a spray of deliquesced flesh.
Jill released her grip on the monster’s spurting stump. The headless corpse tumbled down into the river, and dyed the swirling water with rhythmic fountains of gore. Looming over the smoldering city, Jill turned her attention to the naval base, where the remaining water bears had begun to plunder. They thrashed their heads through hangars, and shredded barracks with their claws. Navy jets roared by in tight formation, flitting lances of fire from that blew wet and ragged craters into their flesh.
From the heart of all the chaos, one aircraft arose. Sleek as the ace of spades, it tilted in the tempest, catching a flash of lightning on the blade of its wing before vanishing into the horizon with a sonic boom. The sight of the aircraft’s departure brought Jill a moment of relief, because she knew that there was some sort of connection between that thing and the face named Luna.
“It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
Jill blinked her eyes. A bleary visage materialized out of mist. As detail came into focus, it was apparent that the face did not belong to Luna. It was someone else.
“Autopilot is locked onto Anchorage. We’re going to get you to a hospital. You just hang on. You hear me?”
“Luna.” Jill gasped for breath, gaping at the man who held her head in his hands. He unfastened the buckle beneath her chin, and lifted the Mindbender Rift from her head. She somehow recognized him, but could not remember his name. His face, the setting, it all seemed so familiar, right on the tip of her tongue. The man placed her headset on the wall bracket, and smoothed her bangs away from her sweaty brow. When his hand retracted, Jill noticed that his fingertips were dripping red.
“You went too deep,” he said. “I had to crash you.”
Just like that, her collective memories came rushing back into her mind like a delayed download. She knew where she was, in the Devil Ray, and she knew the man hovering in front of her so well that he might as well have been her own brother.
J.J. smiled. “You did awesome back there.”
“I killed people. I killed lots of people. Oh, my God.”
“They were not our friends, Jill. None of them. They were going to kill us.”
“What about the others?”
“I—I don’t know.�
��
“We have to go back for them!”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“But we can’t just leave them behind!” Jill became aware of a stricken expression on J.J.’s face. She frowned, licking her lips. As though his anxiety was some contagious disease, she began to feel the same fearful reaction prickling up inside herself. Her chin dropped, and her eyes fell toward the spot on her midsection where J.J.’s gaze kept falling.
“We can’t turn back, Jill. We need to get you to a hospital, right away.”
Everything hurt. There were too many sources of pain around her body to be individually assessed. However, the worst agony by far practically screamed from her abdominal region, in the same general area where those water bears had ripped into the soft underbelly of the Charybdis.
“Don’t,” J.J. said, catching her chin on the crook of his finger. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “You don’t want to look down.”
***
Mr. Krupin used the giant’s borrowed arms to lift the submarine hatch. He peered down through the flooded caverns of twisted metal, where the floating corpses of Red Brothers were so swollen and gray that they resembled some fallen race. It surprised him that the Allied Navy hadn’t bothered to recover the dead, but judging by the commotion raging outside the submarine’s walls, something of greater importance had the Navy’s undivided attention. Explosions shook the vessel’s steel panels against the ribbing. The staccato of automatic weapon fire punctuated the screams of dying men. Those were familiar sounds. The exhilarating cacophony of combat brought simultaneous smiles to each of Krupin’s faces. The timing for this skirmish couldn’t have been more perfect, affording his escape from his steel sanctuary amidst the confusion of battle.
Krupin felt the hands of medical personnel fussing over his natural body, back in the hospital. It felt like they were strapping him down to another gurney. The room was bustling with commotion, as though the medics were preparing their patients for some sort of an emergency evacuation. Trundling shockwaves reverberated through the ground. Krupin’s borrowed body leapt through the portal, and plunged down into the flooded compartments amongst the bloated dead.
