Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (25 page)

“Are you freaking crazy?” Thunder punctuated Janie’s words.

“If she tries to bolt,” Fred said, “the person doing it has to have the strength to hold on to her. So I reckon it needs to be me.”

“I’ll come with you,” Carol said. “They won’t hurt Luke. Like Joe said, he’s just a minor.”

Fred shook his head. “If one of them happens to get a hold of you, then we’re in a hostage-for-hostage stand-off.”

“Then they can have me.”

Fred sighed. “Carol, I know from your father you can shoot. The best thing you can do for Janie and me is cover us from a window.” He held the .30-06 out to Carol. “It’s already loaded, a round chambered. All you have to do is release the safety and pull the trigger.”

She sighed in resignation and took the rifle. “You should head north. Old Flathead might be reluctant to enter another beast’s territory.

“My thoughts, exactly,” Fred said. “We can meet up some place we both know that’s not too conspicuous.

“You know the old hospital in Red Bank? Off the Morrison Springs exit?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll head for it. Meet you in the
—”

Janie lunged forward, shoving Fred where he crouched and bowling him over.

“Janie, no!” Carol leaped at Janie and caught her ankle. Janie stumbled but kept her feet. She kicked away her mother’s hand. The follow-through of her heel connected, and Carol went down. Then Janie was through the door. Wind slammed it flush against the cabin wall, clearing a path for the storm to blow inside.

Carol could only watch, helpless, as Joe enveloped their daughter in his arms and ushered her into the back of a police car.

Fred’s back appeared in Carol’s field of vision. The old man sprinted out the cabin door, the .38 held before him. The boom of shotgun blasts joined that of the thunder, and he went down.

The cuckoo clocks went off, and Carol screamed.

The din of noise was eclipsed by a sound like the eruption of Hell itself.

Carol rolled just in time to see the cabin collapse on top of her.

~

Carol Blevins stood, every muscle in her body aching as ceiling tiles and pieces of broken lumber rolled off of her to join the wreckage littering the ground.

Shove the pain down. Just like the depression. Shove it down.

The storm at large was over. The rain now fell as a drizzle. The smell of wet forest hung in the air. And something else.

Something that stank of sewage and river bottom.
The stench of Old Flathead’s passing—his musk.

Carol’s eyes adjusted to the night, and she caught sight of Fred Connor’s Springfield among the debris. She snatched up the rifle and hung it over her shoulder by its strap.

Only then did she see her son
, Luke. He knelt beside Fred Connor’s Ford pickup, cradling its owner in his arms. The old man was still alive, though Carol failed to see how. Blood poured from multiple shotgun wounds lining his torso as he hyperventilated, trying to fill lungs no longer capable of holding air.

“He’s not going to make it, is he, Mom?” Luke asked.

A moment pregnant with silence passed. Carol knelt and slipped a hand inside the old man’s jeans pocket. When she withdrew, she clutched a set of keys.

“Stay with him, Luke. Give him what comfort you can. I’ve got to get Janie. I’ll be back when I have her.”

Carol opened the truck’s driver-side door. Got inside. Slipped off the Springfield. Propped it against the passenger seat.

“I love you, son.”

Luke didn’t answer.

Carol closed the door, found the truck key, and turned the engine over. Moments later, she was speeding down the side of Colburn Town Mountain, heading for the rock quarry where Old Flathead had first appeared. It was where the ceremony would be held
—where it was always held.

She reached the foot of the mountain and hydroplaned out onto Route 72. Ten minutes later, she was passing under the interstate. Five minutes after that, she was fishtailing off Battle Creek Lane onto the gravel road that led up to the quarry.

Half way up the hillside, she cut the truck’s lights and engine, not wanting to alert those who would be gathered in the quarry to her presence.

She grabbed the rifle and hopped out of the truck, taking off for the hilltop in a dead run. When she got there, she threw herself down among a copse of pines and caught a few gulps of air, the sound of her heartbeats thudding in her ears.

Below her lay the quarry. The entire population of Heartland lined its ever descending tiers of earth. The crowd stood in silence, watching and waiting as the chants of the church elders reverberated from one face of cleaved rock to another.

Carol sighted the rifle. Through the scope, she found the ring of Heartland police standing guard around the elders. Joe was among them. Samantha Davis stood behind him and to his left, Betty Womack to his right.

Carol tracked the rifle and the black-encased circle of reality before her moved to reveal the elders themselves. The hoods of their ornate robes concealed their faces, but Carol knew well enough who they were: Pastor Roberts. Judge Powers. Coach Green. And Doctor Adcock.

Janie stood between them and the lake filling the quarry bottom. Her scratches had been bandaged, and a wreath of flowers rode in her hair. She wore a simple white dress that the rain had adhered to her young woman’s body.

“Oh, baby.”

Carol watched Janie fall to the ground as something emerged from the quarry lake. A stench like a beached whale weeks in the sun hit Carol in the face, and she jerked her head up from the rifle to see Old Flathead rising out of the water, one story at a time.

His sloping head was a giant, grotesque version of that of a catfish. Teeth like spears lined his cavernous mouth, and spiked barbels jutted in every direction from his nostrils and chin. Spines the size of light poles protruded from a dorsal fin that began at his head and continued down his humped back. His body—the length of it Carol could see cresting above the water—was covered in bony plates the color of ash. Carol saw enormous pink gill filaments peeking out from behind the spiked plates on either side of the beast’s neck.

Worst of all were his eyes. His left rolled continuously in its socket, searching, full of malevolent intelligence and all too human. His right was dead. A set of claw marks the size of field furrows interrupted the plates surrounding it on either side, a battle scar from some long ago fight with another beast of the apocalypse.

Old Flathead rolled a shoulder, and a gargantuan, webbed claw came to rest next to Janie on the lakeshore.

Janie began to scream.

Carol’s life with her daughter flashed before her mind’s eye in reverse, beginning with the tragic events of the night and ending with the first time she’d held her daughter in the hospital. What a beautiful baby Janie had been. So tiny. So innocent. So vulnerable. Completely at the mercy of the ways of the world.

This horrible
world.

“Let it end.”

For Janie’s sake. For that of all the girls who came before her and all those who would follow.

Carol sighted her rifle. “Forgive me, Janie. Your mommy loves you.”

Carol squeezed the rifle’s trigger, and a shot rang out in the night, eclipsing Janie’s cries.

Carol watched through the scope as her daughter collapsed, the life gone out of her.

Old Flathead roared, the bony plates at his neck expanding like sails to reveal his gills in full. His bellow shook the earth and transformed the people of Heartland into a frightened, screaming mob. They tried to run, but the quarry held them trapped.

Devil’s Cap Brawl

Edward M. Erdelac

Joe Blas was so called because his papist upbringing in Drom, County Tipperary, had given him a knack for devising the most ingenious blasphemies anyone on either side of the Sierras had ever heard.

He blew hot air into the cold red palms of his hands and turned that coarse and inventive tongue against Chow Lan, the agent for the forty coolies under his charge.

“Jesus Christ’s holey hands an’ feet! What d’you mean they’re scared to blast? We’ve blown though every goddamned cliff and mountain since Dutch Flat with no issue. What’s different about this one?”

Chow Lan’s job was to act as liaison between the red-in-the-face Irish riding boss and his aforementioned forty countrymen, who made up the spearhead of the work gang Charles Crocker had hired on to get the Central Pacific Railroad into Utah by 1867.
He divvied up their paychecks, keeping a customary cut of it for himself, placed orders with the
gwailo
agent for suitable foodstuffs for their cook, and voiced employee concerns when the situation arose.

“Hesutu say mountain home to devil. He say brasting powder free devil. Coolies scared. Say no brast.”

Joe slapped his hat down on his knee.

“That goddamned Indian.”

Hesutu was a halfbreed Shoshone and Miwok who had signed on with them six weeks ago along with a gaggle of Paiutes, specially hired to drive a ten-yoke team of oxen up to the camp. To avoid the troubles their Union Pacific cousins had been having with the Sioux and the Cheyenne, Strobridge, the superintendent of the CP, had signed treaties with the local Sierra tribes and offered them all jobs. Males
and
females had answered the call.

Though the Celestials were diligent, they were superstitious beasties, even requiring their own joss house in camp with a heathen priest on duty. Joe had found the Indians liked to sport with them from time to time. One joker of a Paiute had convinced the Celestials that a dragon lived in the high country, and they had lost a day convincing them there wasn’t any such thing. Hesutu was a name that had come up again and again in the past few days.

“Look,” said Joe, rubbing his patchy jaw in exasperation. “You tell them Hesutu talks with a forked tongue, that red serpent. Tell them they better get to work or I’ll send the whole lot of ‘em hoofin’ like sorefooted Israelites back to Sacramento through the snow.”

“I tell, but they no listen,” Chow Lan said.

Joe sighed. He snatched his brass speaking trumpet off the table and slapped his hat back on his head. He shoved Chow Lan aside and went out into the cold air.

They were fifteen miles west of Cisco, high up in the Sierras. Last year they’d been delayed in blasting by an early snow.
Word had come down to his lowly ear from Charles Crocker himself; no such setbacks this time around. The line was to be open from Sacramento to Cisco by December and to the far end of Devil’s Cap summit by the same time next year. They had three and a half months to get there, and neither mountain nor the buckskin hoodoo tales of any damned Indian was to retard their progress.

Joe saw the young Chinee priest, barefoot in the snow, doing the same weird, slow dance he did every morning outside the crude joss house. He looked like an only child play fighting, but underwater, turning and bending, throwing an occasional sluggish punch or a ridiculously high kick. Only his queue-less, shaven head distinguished him as a priest; he wore the same patchy blue loose clothes all the coolies wore. There was an air of ease and self-assurance about him that annoyed Joe, but he wasn’t some fat, soft handed parson.

He did his fair share of work. He brewed tea for the workers all day, kept the big forty gallon barrel the men drank from brimming, and was even known to fill in for a man struck sick on the gangs now and again, so he wouldn’t lose his place. The heathens respected him, bowing to him when they saw him pass, and at night he directed their prayers up to Buddha or wherever with his droning chants. Mainly, he stayed quiet and out of the way, which Joe liked. He’d been at Wilson’s Ranch when they’d arrived at the beginning of the year and had volunteered with them, solely to see to their spiritual wellbeing. He figured the priest had some angle on the side, fleecing the coolies out of their fantan money, or dealing opium, though he had never seen him pass the collection plate.

It was a two hundred foot walk through a tunnel of snow from the camp to the work gang. Walking that tunnel made Joe nervous. Due to the blasting, snowslides were not infrequent, and had carried off whole gangs of men. In most cases their bodies hadn’t been found. The avalanche that claimed them also made their only graves.

The railway tunnel through the bare granite peak called Devil’s Cap was being assaulted from four points. Two teams of thirty men each worked simultaneously from the east and west, and another pair from the center of the mountain itself. They’d sunk a shaft midway through and lowered the Celestials in, but the hand derrick used to hoist the rubble out had finally failed and they’d had to halt the center work for about five weeks while a twelve ton steam engine, the Old Judah, and its tender, were stripped of their wheels and hauled up the mountainside from the railhead at Gold Run by the Indians and oxen. They’d finally settled the engine down over the shaft last week, and built a sturdy wooden enclosure over it to hold back the snow.

Yet the 440 engine was not chugging along. There was no ringing of chisels and hammers, no intermittent, muffled explosions, no nothing.

Tom Tolliver and a couple of the Paiutes who ran the engine were standing expectantly outside the enclosure, smoking. All the west end tunnel coolies were milling around chattering like it was tea time.

“What’n the name of the Blessed Virgin’s holy hymen are you yellow niggers doin’ standin’ around?” Joe roared through the speaking trumpet when he got in their midst, Chow Lan running alongside him. “Get to work!”

There was a lot of muttering and head shaking, a lot of heads turning towards where some of the Indians, too, were standing around.

“Where’n the hell’s Hesutu?” Joe Blas demanded.

He came forward at the mention of his name, a lanky, long haired redskin with a wispy mustache, hide boots and a knife through his belt, a big black hat pulled low over his eyes.

“Here, boss.”

“Alright now, boyo,” Joe Blas said lowly. “’You the one been fillin’ these heathens’ ears with a lot of guff about the Devil bein’ in the center of that grand high rock?”

“I didn’t say no such thing, boss,” said Hesutu, smiling with his dark eyes.

Joe looked back at Chow Lan, who shrugged and adjusted his spectacles.

“That what
they
tell me!” Chow Lan protested, encompassing the crowd of Chinamen with a sweep of his arm.

“I didn’t say it was the devil,” amended Hesutu. “What I said was, Dzoavits is in there.”

“What?”

“Dzoavits,” Hesutu said again. “It’s like a giant. Eats babies. But don’t make no mistake, you all keep breakin’ up Dzoavits’ mountain, he’ll come out and eat you too. He ain’t particular, what I hear.”

“What are you on about?” Joe demanded.

“Some say it was always there,
” said Hesutu. “Some say it fell from the sky. It’s big enough to blot out the sun. It went after Dove and her children in the old times, but Badger dug a hole, and tricked Dzoavits into it. Then Dove threw hot rocks down over the hole and trapped him inside. It was up there,” he said, pointing to the rise on which sat the snow covered building housing Old Judah. That’s why they call this place Devil’s Cap. He’s been in there since.”

Joe Blas bunched and unbunched his fists at his sides. It was all he could do not to grab up this crazy Indian and drown him like a kitten in the Celestials’ tea barrel.

“Boyo,” he said through his teeth, “you’re gonna stop talkin’ this bollocks in front of my coolies, or so help me I’m going to boot your red arse into the happy huntin’ ground.”

“Can’t you feel it, white man?” Hesutu asked, staring at the summit. “At night, when you’re sleepin’ in the shadow of that rock? Can’t you feel it watchin’ you?”

Joe Blas tucked himself in with a bottle of tarantula juice every night. His own mother’s shade could stand waling at the foot of his bed until the break of dawn and he’d snore through it. But he was no believer in bugaboos. He had turned his back on all such nonsense when the English had taken his father’s farm and the old man had died on a boat bound for New York City. There was no God but what the priests made up to fill their coffers.

“Skipper Noah’s whiskey dick, man! The only eyes I feel at night are those of Boss Crocker in Sacramento, waitin’ for us to bust through the other side of that damned rock. Now, will you tell these gullible sonsabitches the truth, or is it a walk over the rocks to Coburn Station you’ll be wantin?”

Hesutu chewed his lips a minute before answering.

“If you aim to continue along your course, then I b’lieve I’ll take my leave. Won’t no place be far enough
away from here once you let that thing loose. You take my advice, dig over t’the north instead, through Donner’s summit.”

“Oh so it’s a surveyor you are now, eh?” He blew up at last, hollering through the megaphone in the Indian’s face. “You get the fuck down off my mountain, chief, or I’ll club you like Sebastian!”

Hesutu held up his hands and walked away, shaking his head.

“Alright, boss. But you stay here, you’re gonna get swallered up like Jonah.”

Joe turned to the gathered Chinese, all of them huddled together and whispering.

“Shut your gobs, you noodle suckin’ yellow pagans!” he hollered through his speaking trumpet, stomping through their midst and clambering up on a boulder to shout down at them good and proper. “Chow Lan tells me you won’t work because you’re afraid. Don’t fear any devil in that mountain, fear me. You want to bring your yellow wives and your little slant-eyed nippers over here from the old country? Well, you know that takes money. Each of you has a contract with the Central Pacific Railroad at twenty eight dollars a month. Twenty eight dollars!
Can you make that washing dishes back in San Francisco, or sweeping up the Five Star Saloon down in Dutch Flat? How old will your children be by the time you save enough money shoveling shite? Will they remember your ugly faces? Will your wives? How long before they let some other opium smoker in to buck their sideways cocktroughs? You want to see your kith and kin, see the other side of that rock. If not, pack up your stinkin’ cuttlefish and your bamboo shoots and your goddamned piss warm tea and point your squinty faces west, because that’s all you’ll be taking with you. I don’t pay any man till the job’s done.”

One man, Lo Shu, stepped up, scowling.

“We work long time a’ready! We earn—”

“You’ve earned nothing, you little squint! Get back in line or I’ll fetch your skull so grand a clout you’ll forget your father’s name, if you ever knew it to begin with. I’ll say it again, and slowly so’s it’ll penetrate your muley heads. No work-ee no money. Savvy that?”

This set up a frenzy of protests from the men, but again Joe shouted them down.

“Read your contracts, you goddamned ignoramuses. Or get Chow Lan to read ‘em if you can’t or don’t believe me.”

Some grabbed Chow Lan by the shirt front and shouted questions at him, and after a bit he explained to them that yes, the
gwailo
was correct. They were contracted for the end of the job. The only way to leave early with a paycheck was to lose a limb.

“Now you know where you stand?” Joe yelled, when Chow Lan had finished his spiel. “Reform your gangs and get to work, and no more of this heathen tripe about monsters and devils.”

The Chinamen grumbled and scowled, but after lingering, they grudgingly went off to their respective jobs.

Joe Blas stood on the rock with his hands on his belt until the last of them had climbed up to the summit and Tolliver signaled to him and went inside the engine house. A minute later Old Judah wheezed to life. The sharp whistle signaled the delayed start of the work day.

The sun peaked behind Devil’s Cap and shone like a halo, causing Joe to look away, eyes watering. He reached into his coat pocket and took a pull of firewater, shivered and spat.

~

In an hour the gangs were in full swing, hammering at the rock, filling it with powder, and blowing holes as if Hesutu’s talk had been a bad dream. Joe wasn’t surprised. He knew money dispelled more demons than holy water and crucifixes.

The work was slow and tedious. They could expect to get about seven inches a day all in all if they kept it safe, eight if Joe booted their arses a bit. But the latter usually led to blown off fingers and worse. The Indians and the whites wouldn’t dangle in a basket over a cliff face with a barrel of blasting powder, and he didn’t like to waste Chinamen.
If they fell behind, of course, they were a commodity to be spent. Blasting could be a dicey business, but he had never lost a white man yet, although admittedly the company didn’t count how many Honest Johns had gone to China feet first.

There was a subterranean explosion, the summit gang blasting in the center shaft. The priest came out of the snow tunnel, a bamboo pole over one of his sturdy shoulders, a powder keg filled with fresh tea bouncing on either end.