Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (33 page)

“You are far from home,” I said. “What you take to be true will be proved a lie soon enough.” I spoke confidently, but I retreated from her presence. It unnerved me that she could speak our language, though this was the least of her tricks.

“Meet me under the light of the waning moon,” the witch of the Meadors clan challenged, “and we shall see.” In a moment, she was gone.

~

The night was clear and still, the sea calm. The enemy had pulled back beyond visibility. Likewise, our tattered army sat about their fires. Refugee camps swelled to bursting on the outskirts of Edo to the north.

Below the burned husk of the western part of the city, The Earth Dragon waited, silent in the depths of the earth. I waited within him. His rage burned like molten iron. It took all my energy to hold him back, to keep him from bursting through and running amok.

The three-quarter moon colored everything in shades of blue and silver. The sea beyond the wreckage of the docks appeared to be an endless chest of glimmering coins. All the breath of the world was held in fear and anticipation.

Out of the argent sea, the twisted form of the giant troll arose, as tall as the Earth Dragon, filled with such malevolent hunger for destruction that it shook the spirit world. This ancient creature walked within the darkness of its own long shadow.

“Remember where your strength is,” I whispered, letting the Kaiju free. He burst from the ground, shooting toward the troll before he had come a hundred human paces up from the beach. The troll bellowed a challenge and pulled a massive anchor attached to a chain from one of the battleships. He swung it above his head like a grapnel, releasing it expertly so that it smashed against the Earth Dragon’s head, knocking it aside.

Pain flared, physical hurt. It almost overcame me, this feeling the Kaiju had not felt in eons. He shook his head to clear it, but the troll had already taken the initiative and climbed behind him, drawing the chain taut across his neck.

Earth spirit or no, the Kaiju still needed to breathe, and the anchor chain shut his airway. In my true body, I felt myself clawing at my own neck, trying to breathe for him. I couldn’t. The vision through the Earth Dragon’s eyes went white, then snowy gray. He was dying, and any struggle on his part only made the chain bite deeper.

He would die unless I acted. I prayed to the spirits inside the metal chain links. Though it had been mined, smelted and forged in distant lands by our enemies, I spoke the language of the earth spirits and they heard my plea. There was something, some faint sound of tortured metal, then the chain burst at its weakest link, setting the Earth Dragon free. He gasped in a great breath and spun around. His head lanced forward and grasped the troll, biting down with all the power of his crushing jaws. I tasted the troll’s vile blood as it touched the Kaiju’s tongue.

Lifting the troll took the full measure of the Earth Dragon’s strength, but Ryuujin Sekai did so, shaking the monster until it went limp, then spitting it at the edge of the surf.

Pierced by a hundred teeth of the sharpest stone, the troll lay there, unmoving. Blood as brown and thick as river mud flowed from the wounds, staining the beach.

Closer, closer the Earth Dragon slithered, breath still coming like wind through a cave. The troll seemed dead.

With the Earth Dragon’s chin poised to deliver a fatal bite, the troll burst upward, laying hold of the bottom of its neck. The troll’s sinewy arms held Ryuujin Sekai behind the skull with his shoulder below the jaws.

And he began pulling the Earth Dragon into the sea. Waves washed over the troll’s waist and he was renewed, his grip tightening. His dark blood glimmered upon the moonlit surf. The troll howled, claiming his victory.

Fear burst in Ryuujin Sekai’s heart, a foreign emotion. The strength of the troll seemed to grow, the gaping wounds sealing. At the same time, the Earth Dragon’s power ebbed as he was dragged into the water and lost contact with the land.

“Break its hold!” I screamed in his mind. “It cannot go where you rule. Take it there, and you will win.”

Ryuujin Sekai writhed and thrashed, loosening the troll’s grip. The Earth Dragon could not free his head, but he coiled his body around the troll and squeezed, using all his weight to slow the march into the sea. Bones crunched and the troll was pulled off its feet. Rolling and pulling, Ryuujin Sekai brought the
gaijin
monster back onto the beach. The bite wounds reopened, the troll’s body buckled.

Finally free, the Earth dragon lifted his head and brought his chin against the troll’s shoulder like a man hammering a peg into the ground. Again and again he struck until the troll went to its knees, and finally the sound of its shoulder bones snapping filled the air.

The Earth Dragon bit down on the crumpled form of the troll, dragging it back to the fissure where it had emerged. Suddenly aware of what was happening, a mournful scream arose from the foreign beast. The troll’s one good arm beat uselessly against the Earth Dragon’s neck, but it was too late. Into the ground Ryuujin Sekai went, burrowing down and down, the stone crushing and biting at the troll in a way that even the Kaiju’s teeth did not, tearing its hide apart. Still it wouldn’t die. Only when the Earth Dragon tunneled into the hot veins of the world was the troll finally overcome, screaming as molten rock flowed over it like a tide.

The death rattle of the troll was echoed by his summoner. The witch of clan Meadors, once known as Melanie, fell in on herself. She screamed as the immortality stolen from her Kaiju turned to smoke and poured from her mouth. Her insides burned and soon she was nothing more than a pile of ash aboard her iron ship.

A tremor shook the ground, threatening something greater. Ryuujin Sekai’s anger was still hotter than any forge, his heart awakened to the violent emotions of war. Humans had caused this, and we had not paid dearly enough. The land shivered beneath us again. I clenched my teeth and focused the last of my energy, wondering if it would be enough to forestall the quake that was coming.

“It is over, Mountain Father. You have your vengeance and the Empire of the Sun is safe. Sleep now.” I whispered. “Continuing the suffering will not bring her back, but the world may bear you another sister, if you are patient. Sleep, and try to forgive us for what we have done.”

He could not hear my words. The rage knew no end. The Earth Dragon fought me until it seemed the moorings of my sanity would collapse, that I would be lost within the depths of the spirit world as Mizumi had. I didn’t dare let go, no matter the danger. Words were lost. They were weak creations of our young race. I had to show him something he understood.

My mind was shaken, spiraling out of control, but I fought for one last moment of focus. I envisioned all the thousand sunsets I tried to paint at the mountain shrine. I brought the image of cold mornings in the depths of winter, when every exhalation is a cloud of steam, the trees barren of their leaves. I let the Earth Dragon see the beauty of the world, the fragile balance that he had the power to topple. This, at last, began to calm him.

I let him loose. I had never been so far from my body, so deep within the unknown byways of the spirit world. I had never been so exhausted and drained. When I returned to myself, I couldn’t rise. I did not need to. General Ichiro carried me in his arms, carried me before the men whose lives he said I saved.

In sight of the burned-up districts of Edo all the way to Yokohama Bay, he called for a cheer for an old woman named Shinobu.

~

The general had taken to visiting me frequently. Each time, his dress had been less formal, his behavior more familiar. He looked at me differently, a warmth in his eyes that had not been there before. I found myself different, changed after having communed with the Kaiju. I could kneel and pray for hours and my hip did not ache. When I touched my cheek, the deep wrinkles had filled in. The age spots no longer dotted my hands, and I no longer felt or appeared as a grandmother would.

Then again, the change in him may have had but little to do with my rejuvenation. It may be that the great honors bestowed upon his shoulders, the titles and the position of the highest rank allowed him to do as he wished. Strange that he would have desired the company of a mystic who lived in a rustic old temple.

Ichiro-sama sat, drinking from his customary teacup, now the last unchipped one in the mountain shrine, watching me with a mysterious expression. He had been here for some time, silent.

“It is said that the home of the Dutch, the place where the foreign witch hailed from, fell beneath the sea when the troll was slain.”

The spirit world was always close now, a door that had been forever propped open. In my mind, I first saw an image of the low, green land, protected by levies and dikes that held off the sea. I saw it drown as the barriers lost their strength and the water overtook the shores, the fish rushing in to explore the riches of its vegetation and the fields of brightly colored flowers which would never grow again. I sighed. I had imagined it would be so. The laws of the world do not stop at the edge of the Empire. The troll’s death had ripped away at the fabric of that country. Cruel as he had been, they had needed him.

Ichiro hesitated, his lips moved and then pressed tightly together.

I had allowed him to see my great sadness. Though part of me did not want to know more, I asked, “What else has been said about our enemies?”

“The capital of the English has been flooded by a massive surge from the sea. Their mighty river overflowed its banks. Thousands upon thousands are dead.”

I closed my eyes and saw the angry Water Dragon, Ryuujin Toyotama-hime, swimming up a river in a cold and foggy land with strange gray buildings and stained bridges. She called to the waves and they rushed to her, flooding an old and dirty city filled with smokestacks and ash. I could see a bridge with towers at its middle being smashed by a tsunami wave, its brick and mortar brought down.

Many died in their foundries and factories, but for the first time in centuries, the land was washed clean of the garbage and sewage, the bodies and filth carried out to sea. I could feel the sickness of wrath abate, the Princess of the Waves growing weary and filled with the knowledge that her violence solved nothing. She withdrew, the bitter taste of coal dust and waste upon the waters. Within her, there was a familiar flicker, some remainder of Mizuumi still lingering there. I do not know how long I was lost in my thoughts, but when I opened my eyes, Ichiro knelt across from me, his eyes full of worry.

“Should I have not told you, Shinobu-san?” he asked.

“I am saddened, but I suspected this. Let us hope all the different peoples of the world do not forget the lessons we learned in this dark year.”

He put his cup down. “You count too much on the wisdom of nations, Shinobu-san. We will make these mistakes again. It is likely that our weapons will be different, but the flaw in the gem of men’s souls remains. I wish it were not so.”

“Who speaks as a philosopher now?”

Ichiro-sama smiled, meeting my eye. “I once came here seeking an answer. I have found many. For that, I thank you.”

He reached out, an uncertain expression on his face, and touched my hand. I allowed our fingers to twine together. My teacup rolled across the floor, spilling dregs upon the old bamboo slats.

The Flight of the Red Monsters

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

It is a pleasure to crush. Under the slap weight of our tails, human vehicles crunch like breaking seashells. When walking, I try to avoid the ones that move, but like the microscopic snails that litter the pools at low tide, they are too difficult to avoid altogether. It is not pleasant to suck their slick guts from the points of our crusher walkers. They leave behind a red goo that reeks like the earth outside the sea. If it were up to us, they would not be here. It would be easier if they were not here.

Because of them we have been forced to make our way from the world below the sea, that place that we called home for longer than humans existed. It took a while for their stain to reach where we dwell, but we knew whose doing it was when we saw the ink so much like the squid but thicker, darker, invasive, coating the scales of our food fish, our food weeds, until they were inedible. Would they have us starve? We had heard from ones who have seen them in their habitat that they are a compassionate species, for their part, and so we hoped they would not have us starve but would allow us to cross their dirt to get at the other side, where maybe their oceans were not as saturated and where maybe we could find another world beneath the waves.

We did not know they would kill as many of us as they could. We did not know they would be able to kill any of us, the ones of hard shells, at all. We cannot let such a crime go unpunished. We will ruin the human cities as they ruined ours. I will ruin their home as they ruined mine.

It is a pleasure.

~

The red monsters took everything. First they took my car, a brand new Honda Hybrid Civic, still in payments. Second they crushed my parents’ condo in Marina del Rey, forcing Mom and Dad to pack up what was left of their belongings and move in with Simon and me in Venice, leaving behind a pile of rubble, that nostalgic salt water home smell wiped out forever. Then, the red monsters took Simon.

We were out with some friends when it happened, having a drink at a local bar in a desperate attempt to get away from my folks for a second. They’d been pestering us about when we were going to get married, been trying to convince us that one of us should sleep on the couch while they were there. They weren’t normally so crazy; it was the red monsters. The red monsters made people freak the fuck out. Simon was handling it remarkably well, but I was starting to wonder, too, when we might get married, if we might get married, the thought leaving me with equal parts fear, revulsion, and a warm glee. Marriage was a weird, outdated thing, wasn’t it?

I didn’t have to figure it out. Because on the way back to our apartment that night, the ground shook like an earthquake. We were used to it. We knew the protocol. We ran away from their noise, which was like a broken pipe hissing water. As if they had water in their shells which squeezed itself out as they walked. Was this how they survived on land, then, this water storage? Not even the experts knew.

Two of them came at us, from both sides of Rose Avenue, piercing car after car with those eight sharp feet, crushing shit with those snapping claws. Who the fuck thought they’d see lobsters with huge, buggy eyes searching out the metal glint of cars? Who the fuck thought they’d see giant fucking lobsters at all? Not me. Not Simon, who froze when he realized how blocked in we were, the two monsters walking toward each other as though they meant to greet an old friend, their antennae roaming the street like two oversized pieces of spaghetti. As if they didn’t even notice us down there. The red monsters never noticed us, any of us.

“We have to spread out,” Simon yelled. The red monsters’ tails were wide as the street. They were both about ten human feet away from us. With every stride they left eight holes in the cracked concrete. Buildings trembled in their wake. Luckily, none of them fell. It was my only luck.

“What are you talking about?” I yelled. “Stay with me!”

But Simon was already running. “It’s better,” he said. “Better this way.”

The red foot barely missed him. I’d seen those things pierce a body right through the stomach. I breathed, my hand at my throat, and chased after him. He looked back at me and smiled.
I’ll marry you, Mr. Simon Monk,
I thought. Well, maybe I will. And then the red tail came down on him. He didn’t have time to scream. I stood there gaping, stupid. I had been missed.

I ran home to find no home there. It was still standing, sure, but it felt like a place I had imagined. My parents tried to pry what happened from my choked words. They sat next to me on the couch and wrapped me in a blanket Simon bought me for Valentine’s Day two years ago. It had stupid red hearts on it. It was all red, and I stared at the color for hours and wanted to kill. I wanted to see one of those monsters split open and seared over a giant fire. I wanted to pick him apart with a fork and dip his guts in butter.

My parents tell me it wouldn’t help, to go out and get myself in trouble. My mom reads the news every day and tells me the good stories: two more of them dead. The authorities are having some success with flame throwers. They left Venice for a while. When she goes to sleep, I pore over the bad stories: more dead. More damaged. More buildings fallen and crushed. Then, yes, what I’ve been looking for: they’re spotted again near L.A.

It’s been three weeks. My home is not my home anymore. I have no home, not anywhere in the world.

Yes,
I think as I read it over and over.
The red monsters are here again.

~

I come from a blue metropolis of beautiful giants. We are the biggest ones, but there are others like us: snake ones and sleek black ones with green lights that dangle in front of their mouths. There are white ones with many ropey tentacles and suckers which will never let you go if you let them touch you. There, too, were red ones similar to us but smaller and therefore ours to snap with our grabbers and suck the meat.

On land there is little food for us. This worries me. I know my kind. I know our ways when we are hungry. I will try to be civil, but there is no guarantee. All we can do to stave off the savage is to remind each other of our old world, of the world which we will make anew.

There was so much darkness in our world. There were beautiful clouds of food fish. Beautiful clouds of waving worm plants to look at when we were restless of wading through the cloud mud ocean bottom. There were hills and places to hide when we were too tired for our eyes to be open anymore. There was none of this choking air. There was none of this choking black smoke which billows like walked-across sand but looks and smells of death.

Our world now is rotting carcasses. The sea flowers do not live anymore. The worms wilt and die into the dirt. We die from eating our own food fish. When we molt, our inner skins soak too much poison into them, and we do not recover. It is good that we left, but there is this: that we won’t ever be able to go back. Whose fault is this but the human ones? And we breathe the air of their world, somehow, and it is like a gift we never asked for. We want them to take it back. We will take our world again. We would not have traded it for this bad gift. The trade is unequal. We are not sure how or why we breathe, but we believe it is out of a great necessity. We will do whatever it takes to survive. This is both our greatest strength and our worst fault.

~

Daylight is easy. They don’t come out in daylight. In daylight I walk the beach and the streets and the canals and wish around every corner that I might hear Simon’s stupid drunk
laugh. He’ll tell me he just got too fucked up and forgot who he was for a while. I’ll hug him and remember who I am.

This won’t happen. It’s not really why I search. I search so that I might find proof of the monster killers, the vigilantes who I have seen in black Kevlar gliding through the streets in videos snapped by nosy Internet people. They are like shadows. I want to be one too.

“You already are a shadow,” my father said when I first told him this. “You barely speak, barely eat.”

My father is right. I have made a decision. I will speak only when it matters to the killing of the red monsters. I will consume only fish you eat with your hands.

I was beginning to believe that the monster killers were nothing more than some fuckers' video editing pranks when I found the first evidence of them, a snag of black fabric on a shard of broken glass ripe for the cutting of night runners. The fabric was silky smooth and smelled like dust and revenge.

I sleep with it under my nose, choking on the smell. I dream of dancing on shadows, gulping jar after jar full of shadows, fucking Simon on a bed of shadows. They curl up around us and hold us together, and I cannot breathe for how tight they wrap us.

My father shakes me awake. “You were gasping,” he says. “I worried you were having a seizure or something.”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. He holds the piece of fabric in his hand. I snatch it back. “That’s mine.”

He frowns. Purses his lips. Nods, then leaves.

I wish he could stay, read me a bedtime story, like he used to. Make me feel safe again. But shadows have no time for fairy tales.

~

The first we hear of these night ones is the crack of their bombs hitting concrete. The second we hear of them is the boom that tears our shell from skin. The third is the slip of knife in our vulnerable shellless bellies. I have seen nothing solid of them yet, only rumor. I have seen only the shadows their violence leaves behind, buildings burning from the aftermath. They are more our enemy than the metal bird devices above, which drop their own bombs. Those bombs we can run from. They come with the sound of flapping wings. The night ones’ do not come with sound. It is more and more dangerous here by the terrible bright of day.

I see the way my old friends watch me. They are hungry. We are all too hungry to go on crushing. It was a pleasure to crush, but it is pleasure no more. We keep on because it has become that which we know, like our home was.

When we doubled back, we were lured by the smell of unruined food fish. Now we follow the smell to a tank packed with more food fish than any five of us could eat, and there are three of us here, in this travel pack. I would not have risked the doubling back if it were not for the sweet smell of a full stomach, the sweet smell of keeping our savage away for a few days more, at least. It is a trap, this we are sure of, but I am not frightened. The bird devices warn us when they are circling overhead.

I did not expect the night ones to be here. I have never seen human ones so black. The regular ones vary in shades, but none of them are so much like shadows as these are. The shadow one weaves between my feet, darting from darkness to darkness but is not as quick as the others. She stands before me, and I look down at her. I see her. In her hands she holds one of their bombs, black as she is and round as a sea globe. What did I expect? The food fish reeked of traps. I thought I was better than they thought me. I thought I was being fished by those who do not know the fishing. I did not realize we would be fished by one who knew the streets as we used to know the dark crevices of our world.

I look down at her. She trembles like one losing its skin. She holds the bomb above her head as though it is a sun to light her way from the dark.

~

I found the monster killers, huddled like homeless down near the busted canals. I was drawn to them like a pheromone, like the way Simon’s smell used to follow me through our home, even when he was away at work. I stood before them, huddled, their faces too dirty for me to make out in the darkness. I held out their slice of fabric.

“I want to be one of you,” I said. “I’m ready to be shadow, too.”

They said nothing. I understood this. Instead they stared at me until they heard the crunch of breaking concrete in the distance. They rose from the ground and readied themselves for war. They did not slip masks and suits over their bodies, as I thought they would, but instead rubbed the ash of our breaking city over their skin. Watching them made goosebumps rise along my arms. I tried to follow them, but the shortest and smallest of them pressed her hand against my chest and shook her head. I didn't try again.

As I walked home, I wondered if they might watch me, test me. That was how it was in the stories; you had to pass a test before you joined the club.

The next day five of them were at my door. My parents came and got me.

“Is everything okay, Maria?” my mom asked, eyes wide.

I kissed her on the forehead. I went with them. I took nothing with me.

We walked a reverent silence among streets I had known so well in that other life but which looked new to me now, as though they were a new home. I stopped to smear pieces of Venice across my face. The chalky powder itched on my skin. Some of the monster killers clutched skateboards to their chests. When we were a mile or more away from my old apartment, we stopped. It was then that they talked. The shortest and smallest one talked first. She sounded like a teenager. “We have a plan, right. We put together a tank of fish, right, to, like, lure the red monsters here. Once they’re here, you’ll, you know, use this, right?” She handed me a handmade bomb wrapped in black tape. It was a misshapen sphere. I thought it would be smooth and slick, like in the cartoons. They told me I would light it when it was close enough to matter. “Then, run, right?” the shortest and smallest one said.