by M. C. Norris
Standing upright on its hind legs, a behavior unusual in itself, the Alpha bear appeared to be controlling its pair of subordinates by lengths of bridge cables leashed around their necks. This was something beyond intelligent behavior. This was a very specific intelligence, one she remembered all too well. Clutching snarls of frayed steel in each of its clawed paws, the monster steered its harnessed beasts toward the Charybdis with much the same sick interests as she’d once beheld when she’d faced a pair of flesh-eating baboons.
Rearing back against the leashes, the Alpha bear stepped between his beasts to deliver one thunderous kick to Collin’s chest, toppling the Charybdis back into the heart of the city. Skyscrapers crumbled and calved in great slabs that flickered with dying light as they tumbled to the streets. When the monster hit the ground, the shockwave was reeling.
Hotspot ran to her side, as though the animal sensed her distress. While she was grateful for the dog’s company, Skyler threw an arm around the animal’s neck, less for her own comfort than to ensure that it didn’t approach Collin, and interfere with the streaming. The bizarre contortions of his body on the rooftop in some way corresponded to every movement of the complicated body of the Charybdis that rose to its feet in time to defend itself against the gnashing mouthparts with slashes of its mantis claws. The timing of their lunges was off, but not by much. Water bears were unaccustomed to being harnessed and controlled in such a manner. They appeared to be more distracted by the feel of the steel tethers around their throats than enraged by the proximity of their enemy. Despite their handler’s rough treatment, they thrashed like leashed cats against the cordage.
Sky hated to feel helpless. She wanted to at least shout some words of encouragement, but she knew that any interference in this critical engagement would be disastrous. If they managed to escape Shanghai with their lives, and moved forward with the Psyjack program, she would demand a nanobot injection and a headset. She and Collin might make a formidable team, fighting side by side, but for now, she could only watch and pray.
Stumbling backward over one of Shanghai’s writhing monorail systems, the Charybdis tipped momentarily off-balance. The Alpha bear seized the window of vulnerability. Both leashes were released from its hooked claws. The war beasts felt the slack in their tethers, and they lunged with simultaneous ferocity, slamming into the breast of the Charybdis before Collin was able to raise his arms in defense. Enmeshed, they tumbled, flattening whole wards of the city beneath their knots of rending claws and gnashing teeth.
Even standing apart from his unleashed beasts, the Alpha bear retained a horrifying likeness to Skyler’s nightmarish pirate. Muzzle drawn back behind a grimacing rack of cutting plates, the monster appeared to be grinning. Skyler couldn’t begin to understand how the psyche of her personal demon had managed to infect the mind of this creature, but she had no doubt that it was him, nor was there much doubt about the mechanism behind this magic trick. She feared that this was the worst-case scenario in what was already the worst possible scenario. Psyjack’s technology had somehow fallen into the pirate’s hands.
Entwined in cable and claws, the Charybdis rose again. This time, with their cables clamped in its pincers, Collin drew one of the beasts back against his chest by a leash twisted into a deadly garrote. Blunt paws flailed the air as the cable tightened, biting through its flesh, until a cascade of indigo blood rushed from the beast’s flayed throat, spilling over its rotund belly and pouring down into Shanghai’s streets. At last, the bulbous head toppled from a fountain of gore that stained whole blocks of the city a striking blue. Hopelessly entangled in cables, the remaining beast could only emit an indignant squeal as both sabers of the Charybdis’ claws plunged through its nameless organs. The Alpha bear threw back its head and released a roar unintended by God or nature to be heard above the frozen crust of an ocean moon.
Skyler’s head was still spinning. It was unfathomable how a comatose patient strapped to a hospital gurney had somehow managed to steal Psyjack’s technology? Her first thought involved Takashi, and it was a grim one, but even if Takashi had somehow been robbed of the nanobots inside his head, there was still no account for the pirate’s quick mastery of the skills required to use the technology. It seemed more likely that the security breach had to have occurred some time ago. Surely the bad guys’ brand of technology was one developed separately from Psyjack’s product line, and unaffiliated in any way to their program. However, as badly as she wanted to believe that to be true, it still seemed an uncanny coincidence that the same pirates involved in the attack on her research team had later plundered Psyjack’s store of technology. There had to be some connection. It was beginning to feel as though that personal demon of hers was inside her head, streaming her, and spying on her from behind her own eyes.
The Alpha bear dropped to its multitudes of paws, lowered its head, and it charged. Buildings detonated to clouds of chaff before the rippling mountain of warthog hide. The power of the creature was tremendous, discernible in the effortless expansion and contraction of muscled layers that propelled the beast through reefs of skyscrapers as if the buildings weren’t even there. This thing was a living wrecking ball, and the civilized world appeared to be slated for demolition.
The goal of the Psyjack program had always been to take the fight to the monsters before they ever made landfall, before they ever had an opportunity to cause damage, but the evident ease with which a terrorist could obtain the same tech and raze an entire city within a matter of seconds forced Skyler to question everything. However, it was too late to turn back. The cat was already out of the bag. There seemed to be little choice but to proceed with the program, if only to protect the world from the very threat that they’d inadvertently created.
Monsters collided with a slap of flesh that made the whole region tremble. The water bear’s phantom pilot was superior to Collin in his mastery of control over the beast. Skyler awed over the fluidity of his blows, the deadly precision of every strike. It was a terrible mismatch. Even if Collin was the best dolphin pilot in the world, the fact was that he might never have been in an actual fight. The pirate, on the other hand, had probably killed more people than Collin had ever stood up against. The Charybdis could only stagger backward into Shanghai, claws raised defensively, as the pummeling continued. The water bear leapt into the air, and brought down two fists atop his broad carapace in a thunderous hammer strike that tipped the Charybdis drunkenly to one side. Savage blows drummed against the borrowed body, until the carapace cracked all the way to the cyclopean eye.
Skyler covered her mouth. It was finished. There was no fight left in the Charybdis. The Alpha bear reared on his haunches to drum two sets of fists against its chest.
Rising with the aid of her cane, Skyler limped over to where Collin lay gasping on the rooftop. Prone on his back, not unlike his broken counterpart, he pawed at the trickling blood that rolled from beneath the visor. Skyler disconnected the chinstrap, and freed him from his headset. When she saw the geometric wounds, the blotches of dot matrix all over his face, Skyler felt lightheaded and numb. The psychosomatic injuries associated with streaming could no longer be denied. Profound evidence was right before her, where Collin had just been beaten to within an inch of his life. If she hadn’t removed the headset, she wondered if his life might’ve slipped into the hereafter hand in hand with the ghost of his borrowed body.
The Alpha bear whirled around. As though satiated with its rage against the defeated Charybdis, the thing swiveled its massive cauliflower head in the direction of the naval base, and its burning glare seemed to settle upon her. Skyler’s heart chilled inside her chest. The monster was most certainly looking at her, and its pearly eyes were shimmering with recognition.
The water bear cocked its bulbous head. Contorting its throat and jagged mouthparts into unnatural positions, it looked as though it was about to regurgitate something it had recently eaten. Gobbets of slobber the size of cars dropped from that blender of a mouth, as the cutting pla
tes shifted into a very specific position. Although the maw of this monster was designed for no greater purpose than shredding the flesh of its prey, its phantom puppeteer appeared to have another use in mind for that reeking cavern. The monster’s basal voice shook the city like the condemnation of an angry god.
“You!”
Skyler shook her head in disbelief. It knew her. It recognized her as the girl who got away. She could only stand frozen like a small rodent in a raptor’s shadow, as the destroyer of worlds thundered closer. In an instant, she was enveloped in the blackness of its shadow, inhaling its otherworldly stink. Whatever traces of humanity might’ve once resided in the heart of that man in the wire mask, they’d since been consumed by his fire of hatred.
The monster hooked an owlish claw in her direction, and emitted chuffs of air that might’ve been some devilish rendition of laughter. Reflections of a burning world danced on the surface of its moony eyes. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
Chapter Sixteen
The image of the young lady poised on the rooftop became fragmented, almost pixelated. Whole sections of the visual stream vanished, froze, and winked out of focus like poor satellite reception during a storm. The helicopter’s thumping rotor blades could now be heard with disconcerting clarity. Something was wrong. Krupin emitted a growl, twisting his body beneath the straps of his gurney. The data stream from his Kaiju host was starting to break apart. He guessed that the chopper had flown too far from Shanghai’s coast, and out of range of reception to his monster’s signal.
“No!”
Krupin felt the hands of paramedics pressing down all over him. They were grabbing at his wrists. They were tightening straps across his chest and thighs. He could hear them reassuring him, telling him to remain calm. The stream of consciousness waned to a trickle, and then it dried up as though it had never been anything more than a bizarre dream. The ride of his life had just come to an abrupt end, before it ever had a chance to really begin.
“No-no-no-no-no!”
Krupin’s eyes flicked open. A latex hand cupped his screaming mouth. That was a mistake. With a wet crunch and a snap of latex, the same hand left his face spurting red ropes of blood from the ragged stumps of missing digits. The medic’s screams brought Krupin the slightest taste of satisfaction, but not the life of every person in the chopper could begin to compensate for all that he’d just lost. Krupin wrenched against his tethers, spitting fingers with a gurgling screech. Elbows crossed his face. Needles stabbed into the bends of his arms. They tried, but they could not subdue him. Not united in all their strength and their efforts, not one or a dozen could do so. Krupin went berserk.
Snapping straps and pinging buckles could be discerned over mixed screams of rage and terror that filled the teetering aircraft. Inevitably, it was Krupin who rose from the dogpile, with two or three medics clinging to each of his sinewy limbs. The dangling feet of his handlers left the floor. One by one, he shook them loose of his arms. Medics tumbled to the floor. Needles yanked from his arms were plunged into screaming faces. Krupin sprung snarling from the gurney into their midst, and he felt those dark machinations begin to spin. Bones shattered. Faces changed shape. The sterile, white walls of the medical chopper were sprayed with fountains of vermillion chaos. Spirits departed bodies in gouts of flowing blood.
Krupin stormed past the unconscious form of Volkov, and smashed through the flimsy partition to the cockpit with a single strike of his bare foot. He was a killing machine gone haywire. The pilot died before his mind could’ve reckoned it possible, the queer manner in which his life had been taken. Krupin withdrew his glistening fingers from the man’s brain, smeared them against his bearded cheek, popped the door, and committed the pilot’s still-quivering corpse into the wild blue yonder, as he slid his own rump into the seat.
So hard to calm down from such a rush. His hands were still shaking from the desire to rip, strangle , and smash, as Krupin grunted at the assortment of weird gauges, blinking lights and switches. He’d never flown a helicopter before. The instrument panel was a very busy - looking place. Perhaps murdering the pilot had been a hasty decision, but once he started killing people, there wasn’t a lot of decision making in the process. People just died, until Krupin ran out of people to kill.
He noticed a couple of pedals down on the floor. A bendy lever resembling a large joystick protruded from the lower dash. It was aimed right at his midsection, practically insisting that it be handled. These items seemed to be pretty important for flying helicopters. Krupin curled his fingers around the joystick, and slid his bare feet atop the pedals. Everything felt pretty good. His intuition suggested that the foot pedals might swing the chopper’s nose one way or the other, and that the big joystick might affect the pitch and roll of the aircraft. Most intriguing was a red button hiding beneath a protective hatch atop the joystick. He liked red buttons. He guessed that it had something to do with a weapon. A bit of piddling with the controls proved his intuition to be correct. Flames spat from the chopper’s nose cone, and an unseen cannon hammered beneath his feet. Krupin’s eyes widened, and he emitted a shriek of delight. That would do nicely.
He banked the chopper hard to port side, amplifying the staccato of hacking blades inside the cockpit as the rotor tilted on its axis, peeling the aircraft off of its intended course toward Japan, and back into the Yellow Sea. He was nothing if not determined, and he’d never felt more passionately about anything in his entire life. Veering back in the direction from which he’d come, Krupin aimed the chopper’s nose at the shelving thunderheads over Shanghai. He was going back for his monster. Once reunited, he swore that their fused minds would never be separated again.
***
It was hard for most guys to live up to their father’s expectations. Seemed to be the norm amongst young men, who began to feel a little small and inadequate, maybe even lost in their old man’s shadows, right about the time a guy turned nineteen. That was the age when young men were just starting to realize that maybe their fathers weren’t complete idiots after all. Seemed to be the turning point there, as the childhood window slid closed, and a young and formless man stood poised before the stark reality of his future amongst the adult world. Relationships between sons and fathers came to new reckonings when boys realized their fathers would be the sounding boards for so many of their adult decisions. It was at that age when the young teenager who thought he knew everything began to question his own judgment, and started running his larval perception through a new and regular filter that suggested what his father would do, were he in his shoes. Anyway, that’s how it appeared to J.J., but he could only speculate. He’d never met his father, because the man had died two weeks after J.J. was born.
All his life, he’d never been able to relate to that relationship between other boys and their fathers. It seemed as though they respected, feared, admired, and sometimes even hated their old men. The relationship between a dad and his son had always seemed to J.J. to be something larger than life, something to which you weren’t capable of comprehending unless you had a father of your own. That bond, when there was a bond, appeared to be fundamentally different from a boy’s bond to his mother, sister, or brother. It seemed somehow more intense than any dynamic between him and a friend or a coworker, because there was that underlying fear, admiration, and respect all melded together to form the strongest sort of emotional alloy that framed that bond, even if the bond itself was crooked. Never outright, always cloaked in humor and hobbies, the basis of that relationship was something more complex than love, something you couldn’t have any other way, or with anyone else in the world.
At least, that’s how J.J. liked to imagine it.
Piloting the Devil Ray over the Yellow Sea, bound for the Bering Strait, the very spot where his father’s soul had departed this world, J.J. could only wonder whether he was doing the right thing by leaving his team behind in order to save Jill’s life. He had to wonder what his father would’ve done, based on what little he thou
ght he knew about the man, who was widely regarded as a war hero, a giant amongst men who’d earned the respect of every Allied pilot in the Bering Sea before he sacrificed his life for some greater good by turning his plane into a missile that crippled the Chinese war machine. That kamikaze run would forever be his legacy, as well as the sounding board off of which every major decision in J.J.’s life would be bounced, including this one. Which path would Dad have taken at this crossroads, knowing him only to be a man who was willing to sacrifice all he had, and everything that might’ve been?
“You’ve got to turn back,” Jill said.
Slouched in the copilot’s seat with a bloody towel wadded against her midsection, her voice was becoming weaker by the minute. Shallow breaths vacillated her chest. One look at the sallow complexion of her face was enough to assure him that there were no guarantees whatsoever that Jill would even to make it to Anchorage. What then? What if he gambled it all, every one of their lives, in an effort to bring Jill to safety, and his gamble failed?
J.J. had never been a religious person. He’d never seen relevance in reaching out to some unseen higher power that might or might not be available, when he’d spent his whole life trying to connect to another godlike being who actually shared his DNA, appeared in photographs, and lived in the memories of those he’d touched and affected. His missing father was the greatest mystery of the universe, so close, yet so cruelly intangible that he didn’t even bother to leave behind any trace of his physical remains. The closest J.J. ever came to praying was talking out loud to his phantom dad, always alone, and probably more often than he’d care to admit.
Do you ever regret it, Dad?
J.J. needed to believe in the possibility that his father might regret his final decision if he were somehow able. He needed to believe that his dad was human, a guy like everyone else who sometimes made impulsive decisions, as well as stupid mistakes. Although there might’ve been no alternative course of action but the fatal one he’d chosen, J.J. had to believe that there was still room for his dad to lament all he’d forsaken when he banked into that fateful dive. He had to believe that about his dad, because if he couldn’t, then there was no reason not to hate him.
