Titan Wars: Rise of the Kaiju

by M. C. Norris

  Collin rubbed at his tender face. “Was I really that bad?”

  “It wasn’t you,” Skyler replied, her brow gathering. “It was Jill.”

  Collin sat up straight in his bed. He ran his fingers through his crazy hair, straining to recall any elusive details related to an injury that Jill might’ve sustained, but he couldn’t remember anything, in that regard. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s going to be alright, but it was a close one. We almost lost her.”

  “I figured she’d be in Anchorage by now.”

  Skyler shook her head. “Anchorage got hit.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Her family is safe, though. We just heard from Jill’s mother. They’re aboard a freighter full of refugees, bound for Vancouver.”

  “Good.” Collin licked his chapped lips. “I mean, not for Anchorage, but I’m glad her family is safe.”

  “Yeah.” Skyler sat down on the edge of his bed, and placed her hand on his knee. She stared down at the floor for a moment, as though carefully choosing the words that she was about to say.

  Collin felt his heart sink. “What’s the matter?”

  “Listen, I’ve got some bad news, and I feel like I should be the one to have to tell you.” She gazed into his eyes with the sort of softly pinched expression that people reserve for conversations about death. “It’s about Hotspot.”

  Collin cleared his throat. “He’s gone.”

  After a moment, Skyler nodded. “How much do you remember?”

  “Everything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

  Skyler frowned, adjusting her position on the edge of his bed.

  “That dog recorded everything,” Collin said. “Every word we ever said, every experiment we ever attempted, going all the way back to our beginnings, in Glasgow. That dog was more than just our inaugural host. He was also a living, breathing server. Everything auto-saved to his internal drive.”

  “But, why?” Skyler shook her head. “Why install a hard drive in a dog?”

  Collin shrugged. He could feel his eyes getting moist. “Started out as kind of a joke, you know. We were still exploring, feeling out the boundaries of our science. We knew the dog was already going to be opened up on the operating table as our first test subject, so we decided to add a few extras during the surgery because, well, that’s what geeks do.” Collin leaned into his hands, and smeared the wetness from the corners of his eyes. “Obviously, our program continued to develop. Our store of information kept growing and growing. At some point, I realized that we couldn’t risk our technology ever falling into the wrong hands. Hotspot was a potential leak source. So, I went back and programmed in a failsafe device.” Collin could hardly bare to look at her. “Anyone but me ever tried to hack my dog, focused electromagnetic pulse, hard drive meltdown, instant cardiac arrest.” Collin snapped his fingers. “Quick and painless.”

  Skyler covered her mouth.

  “Yeah. I really did that.” Collin raised his hand. “That was me.”

  Skyler shook her head. “I can’t imagine how awful you must feel right now.”

  “Yeah. Well, better than the guy who tried to hack him. That’s for sure. I made sure to add a little something special in there for him, too. Psychological torture running on a loop, powered by military-grade lithium that’s good for, I don’t know, probably twenty years.”

  Skyler closed her eyes, and appeared to rest for a moment, before opening them again. She took Collin’s hand in her own. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Anything.”

  “That last fight between the Charybdis and the water bear … that wasn’t you who killed the big one. It couldn’t have been you. Your helmet was off by then.”

  “I don’t remember that, so no.”

  “I’ve already asked Jill and J.J. It wasn’t either of them.”

  Collin guessed he could see where she was going with this train of thought. “Takashi’s gone.” He shook his head. “There’s no way it was him. I saw them beating him into—”

  “Hey-hey. It’s okay. I just thought maybe …”

  “No. Not Takashi.” Collin leveled his eyes with hers.

  “Who, then? That’s what I’ve been mulling over, the last few days.”

  “Is that how long I’ve been out?”

  “I’ve been trying to eliminate all of the other possibilities, before I’d allow myself to believe that it was really him, and no, I’m not referring to Takashi.”

  “Who?”

  “Carl.”

  “You mean, Carl the Charybdis? Behaving autonomously?”

  Skyler’s eyes brightened.

  “I’m not so sure that—”

  “Hotspot knew. He knew that pirate was a bad guy. He sniffed out evil the very second it stepped in from of him. I don’t think we give animals enough credit, you know? Especially a creature from another world that we know next to nothing about? If a dog can sense a threat and act selflessly, sacrificing itself for some greater good, then maybe a so-called ‘monster’ could do the same.”

  “Maybe so.” Collin took Skyler’s hand. “Maybe all along, we had one of the good ones on our side.”

  “That’s what I’d like to believe.”

  Collin smiled. Her nutty love for those monsters was one of the things that he found most endearing about her. In a program like theirs, it was a pretty tall order to remain down-to-earth, but somehow, Skyler always managed to do so. “Me too,” he replied.

  Knuckles rapped against Collin’s door. Before he had a chance to reply, Jill entered the room. She was seated in a wheelchair, and J.J. was driving. “Hey,” Jill said.

  “We need to get out of here,” J.J. said, pushing the door closed behind him, “soon as you’re able.”

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Our separate ways. It’s too dangerous to stay together, and we sure can’t stay in Japan. Military presence is too high. People are going to come looking for us. Bad people.”

  “What about the team?” Skyler asked.

  “There is no team. It’s over. We’ve got no friends in the Allied Navy anymore. After what happened to Takashi—”

  “Yeah, after what happened to Takashi,” Collin said, interrupting J.J. “No one hated our military leash more than him. He was pushing to privateer our program from the get-go. Out of all of us, he was always the most in favor of severing ties to the Allied Navy, going rogue, operating out of a hotel room, or the back of a van … traveling light and fast all around the world to wherever the world needs us most. If Takashi were with us right now, he’d be so damned thrilled to be able to finally—”

  “Yeah, well he’s not here now, and I for one am tired of living my life according to what dead loved ones might’ve wanted me to do.” J.J. drew a deep breath, and released it in a sigh. “My heart’s just not in it anymore, guys. It’s just not, and neither is hers.” He dipped his head at Jill. “I’ve decided to see this thing through with her. Reunite her with her family in Vancouver. That’s all I want on my radar right now.”

  “Fair enough,” Collin replied, averting his eyes.

  “Don’t be that way,” Jill said.

  Collin stared out through his hospital room window at those monuments of mirrored glass. Fat clouds roamed across their sleek surfaces. “We were moving mountains, you guys.”

  J.J. attempted a smile, began to blink, and began backing Jill’s wheelchair abruptly toward the door. “We’ve got a flight to catch.”

  “Love you guys,” Jill said, lifting a weak hand, as J.J. wheeled her out of the room.

  “Call us when you get there,” Skyler said. “Send pics! I want to see that baby girl.”

  The door closed. The latch clicked. Just like that, they were gone.

  Their lifetime effort that had spanned so many years, so many personal changes, suddenly seemed so small and pointless. For a moment, they were the most powerful people on the planet, sitti
ng at the very top of the food chain, but once again, no one noticed. No one even knew that they were there.

  “What now?” Skyler asked. “What about us?”

  Collin searched her eyes. He guessed that he was hoping to see some sort of a sparkle in there, a glimmering hint that for the two of them, the adventure of a lifetime might not yet be over. Instead, he found himself staring into gulfs of infinite possibility, diverging and converging paths that writhed to the farthest reaches of the universe. Collin knew that if he plunged into that abyss of possibility, and explored those trails to their ends, he might eventually reach an absolute point of reckoning that would qualify every second of effort he’d spent pushing so hard in a single direction. As Skyler herself had pointed out had pointed out, whether or not a person had the courage to throw that curtain back was perhaps more important than whatever lay in store behind it.

  “Well, there’s just no way I can go back to waiting tables,” Collin replied. “Do we have a functioning headset?”

  “Theirs.” Skyler smiled. “That makes two.”

  ***

  The patrolman raised his whistle. He cheeped a warning at the pair of refugees, and waved his arm back and forth in the air. It had taken nine days to quell the Jaw-long uprising, and to regain some measure of control over Shanghai’s streets. The People’s Liberation Army was sent in to support the overwhelmed security stations, but the presence of those regimented ranks only added to the surrealism in which their seaport was steeped. The Pearl of the Orient was yet unrecognizable as the city that it so recently had been. Even if you closed your eyes and plugged your ears, the stench of those titanic carcasses was always there, a reeking reminder that nothing was quite the same in Shanghai, and might not ever be. When the skulking duo refused to acknowledge his whistle, the patrolman racked the bolt of his rifle, and popped a couple of live rounds at their feet.

  “Ribbons. Show them to me,” he shouted.

  The refugees froze. They lowered their satchels to the ground, and raised their bandaged hands. Enveloped in rags and blankets, much like everyone else crawling out of the wreckage, any affiliation they might have to the insurgency was obscured. Before boarding a barge to one of the camps upriver, every passenger had to be cleared. Keeping their heads in the sights of his rifle, the patrolmen clambered down the hillock of rubble. He ordered them to lift their shirts. They complied. They were not carrying any weapons.

  “Where are you headed?”

  The men glanced at one another, before the larger of the two finally replied. “University of Nantong,” he said, in what was barely a whisper.

  “Speak up!”

  The man waved his hands in a strange but submissive gesture, and tapped his index finger over what appeared to be an injury to his throat. He shook his head back and forth, and croaked some unintelligible garble that prompted a fit of coughing. He appeared to be in a considerable amount of pain.

  “You students?”

  “No.”

  “Military?”

  After a moment, the larger man shook his head.

  “Those are Allied Navy bags.” The patrolman jabbed the barrel of his rifle at the larger man’s chin, which was just poking out from beneath his hood. “Where’d you get them?”

  The refugee tipped his head seaward.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You looters? You looting the base?”

  “No.”

  “You Jaw-long?”

  “No.”

  “Show some I.D.”

  The refugee’s shoulders rose and fell. The patrolman sensed his mounting agitation. Here was a moment when a man in the wrong state of mind might decide to do something stupid, and the patrolman wasn’t in the mood for any of that. The last nine days and nights had been long ones. He fired another burst of rounds right over their heads, causing both men to flinch and cover. “I.D., Now!”

  Lifting his trembling fingers to the edges of his hood, the refugee peeled back his soiled headdress. Beneath, festering islands floated amidst oceanic swirls of melted flesh. Holes gaped behind his temples, where both of his ears had been burned away. He stood hairless and quavering in the humid air. “Please,” he replied, revealing a flash of silver teeth. “My son and I, we’ve lost everything.”

  “That true?” The patrolman prodded the smaller man. “This guy your father?”

  Lifting his chin, the smaller fellow revealed a face beaten beyond recognition. Blackened lips pursed around a few fragmented teeth. One eye was a tenantless cavity, while a faint glow through the swollen folds of the other suggested that the remaining eye was an artificial.

  “What’s in those bags?” The patrolman kicked one of the Allied Navy satchels with the toe of his boot. Something about the size and shape of a melon rocked back and forth.

  “Just some food.” The larger man slid an arm around his son’s shoulders. “What little we could find.”

  The patrolman cleared his throat. It seemed obvious that these poor battered people posed no threat to anybody. “Alright. Go six blocks up this street to the river. Look for barges with white canvas tops. They’ll take you up to Chongtai Bridge in Nantong. That’s where you get off.” The patrolman reached into his pocket, and produced a couple of red ribbons on strings that were issued by the Ministry of Public Security. “If you’re approached by another patrolman, you show them these. Means you’ve already been searched and cleared. Understand?”

  The larger man nodded. He eased the loop of fabric around his burned scalp, and situated the red ribbon against his chest. His young companion waited until he’d finished before following his example. Once both refugees were properly adorned with their passes, the larger man bowed respectfully, flashed the patrolman a silver smile, and gazed up at him through a pair of dragon green eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

  THE END

  Read on for a free sample of Kaiju Canyon

  THE SUICIDE FOREST

  Some people called Cooper a functioning alcoholic, but they didn’t know him very well. Few did.

  He entered the local pub, the Suicide Forest, and found it empty. It was a place of dark-wood furniture and low-hanging lights. The TV was muted. The fans didn’t stop spinning. This time of year, they never stopped spinning. The bartender had dark eyes like a spider. She leaned against the counter with her skin softly, slowly transforming from a solid to a liquid state. She stared at Cooper all the way from the door to the barstool.

  Cooper placed a file on the bar, examined the spirits on the wall, and said, “I’ll take a Kraken with cola.” Sweat dripped from his hair and beaded on his forehead.

  “You’re the new cop, yeah?” she asked, placing the spiced rum on the bar.

  He nodded. Took a sip. “I’m the new detective, yeah,” he said. “Name’s Cooper. You heard anything about the missing persons around here?”

  She laughed and held out her hand. “Mia.” They shook hands. “You’re a big city guy, aren’t you?”

  He nodded again. “I came here from Melbourne, yeah. Why’s that?”

  She leaned in a little. “Rumours spread quick in towns like this. Everyone around here knows about the missing people. This is your first case, huh?”

  “Yeah, I started today. What can you tell me about the people. You know their names, yeah? Know what they’ve been up to?” He picked up his file and flicked through it.

  Mia pointed at the two seats next to Cooper. “The Hodgins brothers, Mark and Lewis.” She pointed at Cooper’s seat. “Josh.” She continued along the bar, giving names to the stools. “Carol. Steph and Chris Foster. Domino. All in their thirties. They drove down south about a week ago for a hunting trip. They were meant to be back a few days ago, but no one has heard from them.”

  “What were they hunting?” Cooper asked.

  “Rabbits and foxes, mostly. Maybe kangaroo.” She shrugged. “They were meant to be back two days ago.”

  “Huh,” he said. He couldn’t imagine going hunting in this weather. He couldn’t imagine an anima
l existing in this heat that didn’t turn to soup or vaporise. The sun outside was merciless.

  Mia wet a tea towel and wrapped it around her neck. The water dripped from her collarbone, mingled with her sweat, and ran down her chest.

  He closed the file. “What kind of a name is Domino?”

  “It’s European. He came to Australia with his parents when he was a teenager. He’s lived here probably twenty years or so. Big guy. He’s like a second father to me. Are you on your lunch break or something?”

  He was halfway through his drink. “Something like that, yeah. These people, they’re all like family to you?”

  Mia nodded. “What’s your plan? Rally up the locals, get a big search party going?”

  He wiped the perspiration off his glass and ran the cool water across his forehead. He shook his head. “Can’t do that. Haven’t you heard about the earthquakes?”

  “I’ve heard about them. I wasn’t sure it was true. I thought it was a joke. We didn’t feel anything here. We don’t get earthquakes often, and when we do, the news is all over it. We just had rumours to go off.”

  “No, they were real. I’m guessing they were too far from town to make headlines. Either way, it’s not safe to send volunteers into an area so far out when we don’t even know the damage.” Cooper had been here one day and already he felt drained. He finished his drink.

  “But the damage is already done. If the earthquakes are what caused them to get stuck, the more people we have to help the better. The earthquakes must have happened, what, at least two or three days ago? The land should have settled by now. There shouldn’t be any risk left when we get there.”

  “The risk is that the earthquakes haven’t stopped. They’re still going strong. I’ve never come across anything like it. We have no idea what’s going on. I think they wanted to keep people from going into panic mode.”

  “No shit,” Mia said. She stepped back from the bar and leaned on the bench behind her.

  “You’re not going to panic, are you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe it. I was hoping they just had such a good time they lost track of the days, or they forgot to call us up and tell us they’d be back a little later.”