by M. C. Norris
The surface of the water danced in response to basal concussions of such depth that their source might’ve been continental plates grinding together, pushing up mountain ranges, and spawning tsunamis. Droplets bounced and flitted past his face. He drew another deep breath and dove. The submarine was canted to one side, submerging portals beneath tons of water. These blocked routes of escape were signs that the Navy hadn’t come in that way, decreasing the odds that his route of escape would be guarded.
Krupin seized the portal handle in Jochi’s mitt of a hand, gave it a squealing crank, and pulled up with all of his might. He could hear the rush of escaping water through the broken seal, as the great weight upon the door began to lighten. Just as he feared he was about to drown, the falling water level exposed his face, and he was able to suck a huge gasp of air. Water roared through the portal in a sucking whirlpool that spun its way down to ground level. Below, daylight blazed through a large tear in the steel wall.
Krupin lowered himself to his knees, studying the aperture for any hint of a shadow cast by a guardsman positioned outside. When he discerned no evidence of a lurking sentry, he slid down through the portal, dangled by his thick fingertips, and then dropped through space until his boots struck steel with a much louder and more reverberating tone than he’d anticipated. For a few seconds, he dared not move. Fingers splayed, he was prepared to lunge and seize anyone who happened to peer through the hole, ready to crush and pop their bones into pebbles with his bare hands. However, no enemy appeared. Only the distant thump of gunfire suggested that anyone even remained to defend the base at all. A fleet of helicopters roared overhead, rotors hacking at the sky. It sounded like everyone was leaving.
Krupin stole a quick peek through the opening, and when his brain registered what he’d just beheld, he had to steal another. Where once the Pearl of the Orient lay sprawled and resplendent in lustrous neon light remained a smoldering wasteland. Drones fished through heaps of ragged metal, headlights lancing the fog of destruction, like lost souls haunting the shores of some netherworld.
“Hnn,” he grunted. He stepped out through the aperture, and he cocked his head. The wastelands were not entirely uninhabited. Dark and villous forms lay strewn about the airstrip, indistinct through the haze of war, but still recognizable as corpses of the countless slain. The battle had sounded like a terrible one, but it began and ended so quickly that Krupin could hardly believe so many lives had been snuffed in such a short amount of time.
Somewhere beyond the pale reefs of dust, an unseen skyscraper crumbled. Krupin turned on a heel. Great slabs calved from the firmament with the rumble of distant thunder. A wave of dust rolled out across the airstrip, enveloping dead and living alike beneath an unfurling shroud that deprived sight, but sharpened the ears to the spattering Plum Rains. It was beautiful. No better conditions existed to facilitate an escape that would amount to a casual stroll off the military base. From there, he would vanish into the crowds of Shanghai refugees that were surely forming, and probably moving upriver. Krupin lilted his smiling face skyward, closed his eyes, and extruded his tongue to capture gritty droplets of rain. It was almost like a dark god was smiling down on him from above.
He blinked, as a shadow spilled over him.
Veils of mist parted before the descending head. Maw gaping, mouthparts chirring, the creature’s jaws slammed closed over the borrowed and cowering form of Jochi. Twin screams erupted from both halves of the doubled-man, as the better half of Mr. Krupin was engulfed, and sucked headfirst into the flesh blender.
***
“We got a live one, here! Morphine!”
Mr. Krupin’s eyes bulged from the sockets of his restrained skull. Medics swarmed around his stretcher. Masked against the fetid clouds that hung over the burning city, their scrubs flapped about their frames in the tempestuous airstream. Over the thumping rotors of the chopper squadron, all Krupin could hear were his screams. He couldn’t bring himself to stop. Again and again, his cries pealed up from his gaping throat. Apart from the immeasurable agonies that wracked his body, it was the mental torment that he found most unbearable.
Complete psychological disintegration followed the mastication and digestion of Jochi’s body. Rather than being reimbursed his halved psyche, when Jochi’s brain dissolved in the monster’s digestive juices, Krupin’s mind felt as though half his mind had been ripped out like pages from a book, and scattered into the howling winds. Every trace of his phantom connection to his obliterated human counterpart became connections to a brand new entity that was now streaming through Krupin’s mind, and it was anything but human.
“Just keep these two prisoners stabilized until we land in Japan. After that, they’re not our problem anymore.”
“Who are they? Some kind of VIPs?”
“Trust me. You don’t want to know.”
Krupin’s eyes lolled over to the patient who was strapped onto the stretcher next to him. He found himself to be the focus of a hateful pair of emerald eyes that he knew all too well. Volkov mouthed words that Krupin was glad not to hear. Blood bubbled from the end of a broken pen still jammed into Volkov’s throat. That struck him as being a little bit funny, but he was in too much agony to laugh. Krupin’s body stiffened beneath the restraints, and he began to seize. His eyes rolled back into his skull, his lids fluttered closed, and froth came bubbling up through his gritted teeth. It felt as though his fragmented mind was comprised of a million mixed-up pixels that were just beginning to fall back into place. A new stream of consciousness was taking form, and although it was alien to the human constructs of his mind, he did not dislike the sensations of immensity and boundless power that came with it.
“Status epilepticus. Where’s that morphine?”
The sensory stream flickered in and out of perception. What he began to see was the city of Shanghai, all spread out before him like a toy playset. The Pearl of the Orient had been gifted to him as a personal playground, to do with as he pleased, but already, he was imagining bigger and better things. The whole world, and every form of life upon it, would soon be at his mercy, and he didn’t intend to show the world any more mercy than it had ever shown him. In fact, he’d show it less.
There was a reason for his lifelong pain and suffering. Mr. Krupin understood things better now. The world’s cruelty was meant to harden him. It had all been part of a necessary process to forge him into what he’d finally become, following the last phase of metamorphosis that shed Jochi’s body like a chrysalis. His transformation was complete, and his true form had emerged. Krupin glared down upon Shanghai’s ruin, and he could only think of one good reason why a god would reward a monster like him with the ultimate destructive power. Filling his massive lungs with untold volumes of polluted air, he announced the beginning of the world’s end with a roar that shook the planet to its mantle.
Chapter Fifteen
“Where are they going?” Skyler shouted, throwing her arms wide, at the center of the hospital rooftop. She limped over to the roof’s edge, and there she stood, propped on her cane. “They just left us behind.”
Collin averted his eyes from the sight of the Devil Ray roaring off toward the northeastern horizon, and he lowered his chin. He trusted his teammates. He knew that they must have had a good reason for the sudden evacuation, but that didn’t make him feel any better about the hopelessness of the situation in which he and Sky had evidently been abandoned. Explosions continued to tremble the lower wards, while bursts of gunfire stitched the silence in between. Given the Kaiju threat combined with a Jaw-long insurgency, being abandoned in Shanghai with affiliation to their Allied oppressor was nothing less than a death sentence, and their deaths would not likely be good ones.
He left Skyler standing at the edge of the roof, and he sat down next to a ventilation louver. Didn’t seem like the rain was ever going to stop. He was so thoroughly soaked that he could’ve wrung a pint of water out of his underwear, and that would probably be a tastier beverage than anything he’d hope t
o be served in a Shanghai prison camp. Suddenly, waiting tables for a living didn’t seem so bad. Hotspot plodded over to his side, and flopped down with a groan. The animal’s fur was still stained with Takashi’s blood. Collin couldn’t bring himself to look at it, not after what he’d seen in the recording. No one could’ve survived a beating like that. No one. Takashi was gone.
“Aren’t you freaking out a little bit, right now?”
Collin pressed his palms against his temples, and he closed his eyes. He’d seen quite enough for one day. Perhaps too much. He had to process it all. Part of being an introvert was upholding a mandatory requirement for personal time and space in order to quietly organize that clutter of mental files that got scattered all over your brain’s desktop over the course of the day. If an introverted personality didn’t take the time to perform those psychological grooming exercises, then the result was being overwhelmed by the next infraction upon a very fragile illusion of control over one’s chaotic life.
“We’re outlaws now,” Skyler said, staring out over the battlefield that had so recently been an airstrip before the lives of all friendlies and foes were deprived with indiscriminate abandon by one of their teammates inside the head of the Charybdis.
Skyler was right, of course. If the Navy hadn’t wanted them dead ten minutes ago, they almost certainly did now. The Charybdis lay beached and heaving on the banks of the Yangtze. After its brawl with the pack of water bears, the creature did not appear to have much life left in it. This was the end result of their collective efforts. Perhaps thousands of innocent lives had already been lost, including the life of a magnificent creature whose mind they’d pirated, and whose blood they’d looted to the very last drop. He could hardly bring himself to face the terrible truth: if they’d never come to Shanghai, if they’d never climbed aboard the Devil Ray, and had just remained in the lives they’d left behind …
“Who do you think did that?” Skyler turned away from Shanghai’s bleak horizon, where the mountainous forms of the water bears lumbered beyond a hanging curtain of dust. The shrill edge to the breeze was perhaps the collective scream of an entire city. She swept back a wisp of blonde hair from her gathered brow.
Collin shrugged. He didn’t see why it even mattered, at this point. They would all be held equally accountable for the destruction. The Navy was probably already assembling some team of forensic hackers to interface with nanobots and determine their networking history. If they dug deep enough, all the evidence would be there, of course. All of their fingerprints would be all over that crime scene, except for Skyler’s.
“You should probably go,” Collin said, glancing up at Skyler through a squinted eye.
Skyler half-laughed, and tossed up her hands. “Go where?”
“Anywhere,” Collin replied, throwing his arm around the dog’s neck. “But you’re better off distancing yourself from me.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Is it?” Collin cocked his head and stared at her.
“Nobody knows when and where Psyjack intervened, and if that monster was just behaving like a monster.” Skyler pointed her titanium cane in the direction of the Charybdis.
“You know as well as I do that they’re going to hang every bit of what happened in Shanghai on us. Captain Roswell is dead, Sky. Dead—and, Takashi …” Collin sighed. “If that’s not an indication of how the Navy plans on dealing with our program, then I don’t know what is.”
“We live in a zoo without cages, Collin. Every one of us. If we just stood by and did nothing, and just tried to pretend that everything was normal, then the future of humanity would be a very short and foregone conclusion. Like it or not, we are the wards of this planet.”
“But, so many people have died …”
“People are going to die. Look, I worked alongside Roswell on the Psyjack reboot for almost two years. I was practically second in command. If they killed Roswell over the work we shared, then you can bet that I’m next on the Navy’s hit list. I’m no safer than you are, and I’m starting to think that Takashi was right all along.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We should’ve gone rogue with our program while we still had the chance. We could’ve done our job more effectively from a private headquarters, without tripping all over the SWCC’s red tape. We never needed that leash around our necks.”
“I’m starting to think that it was never a leash. It was a noose.”
They shared a long moment of silence.
“What do you think we ought to do?” Collin asked.
“How much energy do you think he’s got left in him?” Skyler asked, glancing back at the Charybdis.
Collin lifted his headset back atop his head, and squeezed it down over his ears. “I don’t know. What are you thinking?”
Skyler strode back over to the edge of the rooftop, folded her arms, and glared into the curtain of mist. “There are Kaiju over there, right-smack in the middle of Shanghai, one of the biggest and most important seaports in the civilized world.”
“Yeah.”
Skyler clicked her tongue. “I don’t know about you, but that’s a problem for me.”
“Carl might have a little bit of fight left in him.”
“People are dying. Right now. Right over there.” Skyler pointed toward the haze of destruction that was billowing from the heart of the city. “Who else but you, Collin, has the power to do something about that?”
“For the greater good.” Collin dropped his visor, and switched on his headset toggle.
“For the greater good.”
“Dropping in.”
As a child, Collin dealt with a wild imagination that demanded extended delves into worlds of pretend. He could draw for hours on end without ever interacting with another human being. Great landscapes of Styrofoam and cities of cardboard were constructed for his lucky action figures, who rode in his fists through shunned creeks and hedgerows, while Collin whispered from their viewpoints like some feral madling. That was normal for him, and it was perhaps that overactive imagination that made piloting another life form feel so natural. Dropping into their minds felt to Collin like scampering down a secret woodland path to some childhood sanctuary, where the rigors of his human life disintegrated, and he experienced absolute peace. It was a blissful death.
Bit by bit, Collin was reborn. He could feel his mind and body being reassembled into something wonderfully new and inhuman. Better than any game of pretend, better than a book, a movie, or a video game, this was the ultimate escape. Visual and auditory streams began to rush through his mind’s eye, as he was reintroduced to the same world he’d left behind, but through the sensations of a fantastic new form.
“Oh, God.” The tactile stream hit him like a runaway bus. A deluge of agony overwhelmed his senses, and for a few intense seconds, he fought the urge to manually crash himself out of the experience. The Charybdis was dying.
“What’s the matter?”
Although J.J. had survived the death of a dolphin host, he was a shallow swimmer in the stream of consciousness. His connection to the host was no more intimate than his engagement to a flight simulator. At the depths to which Collin dove, he couldn’t imagine the trauma to his disembodied mind if his host died while they were coupled.
“Collin? What is it?”
Collin felt Skyler’s hand on his shoulder, and he flinched away. “He’s hurt. He’s hurt really bad. So bad.”
“His limbs can regenerate.”
“It’s more than just his limbs.” Stabbing abdominal pains doubled him over. It felt like lava burning in his guts, as well as across that broad plane of the carapace that correlated with the side of Collin’s face. The poor creature had really taken a beating. “I’m empty. All out of water.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The stores of water in the creature’s internal bladders were depleted. Not unlike the discomfort brought by hunger or thirst, the pangs of emptiness that Collin felt deep within his bo
rrowed body competed even with the pain of the injuries, and it demanding correction. Some hardwired mechanism in the Charybdis was evidently in place to bolster its chances of survival by keeping the sonic weapon loaded and ready for discharge. Failure to do so resulted in an unpleasant sensation that caused the most terrible anxiety. Free will was a fleeting concept between the body’s regular demands, and while those terms of enslavement almost went unnoticed in human form, they were glaring to a tourist in a borrowed body.
“Collin, look out!”
Shanghai’s blurred skyline swept past with one swing of the creature’s pendulous head. Neon lights smeared the sky with lurid tracers that further confused a backdrop of swirling smog and moving mountains of flesh. The water bears were upon him. Collin rose to defend himself against his attackers, but the sight before his cyclopean eye could not be reconciled by his borrowed mind. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. What the monsters were doing could not be possible.
***
Skyler knew he didn’t like to be touched while streaming, but she wanted to grab hold of him. She wanted to rake her nails down the sides of her face, fall to her knees, and just scream. Without another person to cling to, she was afraid that she might just lose her mind.
It was him.
She didn’t know how it was possible, and that’s what made her feel as though she’d somehow stumbled over the cliffs of insanity. It couldn’t possibly be the demonic pirate in the wire mask, but as she gaped at what appeared to be the leader of the pack of water bears, that’s who she saw looming over Shanghai.
