Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (23 page)

Qilin writhed in the street, snapping those Venus flytrap heads at anything that moved within ten feet of it. The camera jittered around to take in the full breadth of the monster—a giant mass of darkness easily the size of the school I had attended before my life went to hell and didn’t come back. Qilin recoiled from the barrage of firepower being unloaded into him, but it was a mere reflexive action; no projectile could cause him any real damage. He lashed out at the soldiers, his red eyes roving contemptuously over the puny little men trying to stop him with their useless, spitball-like bullets.

Qilin’s whiplike tentacles swept vehicles and soldiers aside, sending them flying into the air like little toys. He made his jolly laughing sound again, a sadistic noise like blades rubbing together, then spattered the whole area with thick black shining ink that burned corrosively through the bodies of trucks and cars in the street. A building began to crumble as Qilin used his tentacles to pull it down atop the soldier’s heads and vehicles.

When the clouds of dust and debris finally cleared I saw the skirmish line—what was left of it—retreating, and military tanks and armored jeeps moving to fill the place left empty by the ineffectual soldiers. Giant combat cannons mounted atop tanks and jeeps fired noisily at the monster undulating in the middle of the street, generating his shining sea of black sludge and industrial waste and lashing out at anything that moved.

I wondered if Snowman, Michelle and Rex had made it to Times Square. We had to end this. And we had to end it
now
.

The President flashed onto the screen, looking sleepless and severe, and started delivering a public address while flashbulbs went off in his face and White House attendants ran back and forth frantically in front of the camera. It was a recap from earlier in the day, according to the ticker at the bottom of the screen. He started talking about the possible use of nuclear weapons to destroy the creature that was, even now, destroying downtown Manhattan.

Nuclear weapons. But Qilin was
made
of nuclear waste. I had no idea what a nuke would mutate him into, but I had a feeling it would be nothing good.

I stared at the useless receiver hanging dead on its umbilicus. Numb, I rushed back to the bike.

9

So there I was, Mr. Nobody.

I had to stop a monster, the military, and the President of the United States from turning the country into a nuclear wasteland. And I had to do it by slaying a god, and, quite possibly, by killing the girl I loved.

And you think
you
have problems.

10

The cloud of smoke and ashes was getting worse with every passing mile, almost chokingly thick, making everything as impenetrable as midnight. I flicked on the bike’s high beams to cut the gloom.

I was missing the sun at this point, but as I sped through Midtown I realized there was an advantage to the dark. I could see lights up ahead—Coca-Cola and Virgin signs flashing as we neared the epicenter of the United States. I was almost there. Everything looked intact and KTV was broadcasting live over the Panasonic Astrovision, one of the city’s largest spectaculars, giving people vital information for evacuating the city. Best of all, the Destroyer van was parked lengthwise across 42
^nd
Street, near the subway. I pulled the bike to the curbside, but I didn’t have to kill the ignition; she made a croaking noise and gave up the ghost under me with a belch of smoke. I dropped the bike ingloriously to the asphalt and raced around to the back of the van.

The van doors were open and Rex and Michelle were sitting in the back. Michelle was holding an impressive-looking DV-rig camera, while Rex cradled a Notebook that was in the middle of doing a complex operation. He threw me a walkie.

“
You made it!” Michelle cried, swinging the camera around so it was pointed at the center of Times Square.

“
Did you do it?” I asked Rex, clipping the walkie to the belt of my jeans. I was panting breathlessly and felt like I was going to fall over from a heart attack. “Is it hacked? Tell me it’s hacked.”

He pointed the way Michelle was filming. “Check it.”

I turned to face the two-hundred-foot-tall Astrovision, the biggest one in Times Square. KTV had confiscated both it and the newscrawlers earlier in the week. In fact, they had been controlling them for days, ever since Qilin’s existence had been confirmed. But as I watched, numb and almost swaying with exhaustion, the gigantic vision of a concerned anchorman grew snowy and began to break up into tiny digital pixels. The little pieces began blinking out one by one, until the screen had gone completely black, cutting off the reporter in mid-speech.

I held my breath and waited, staring at the despondently blank screen.

A few tense seconds passed, then the screen came up again, this time featuring a gigantic, animated Tyrannosaurus Rex bobbing up and down in a ferocious pose. It let out a terrific roar before vanishing off the screen, only to be replaced with Michelle’s jiggle-footage of Time Square with a ticker running along the bottom of the screen that read REX-TV FILMING LIVE FROM TIMES SQUARE.

Rex grinned, giving me two thumbs up. I was pretty sure whoever was in charge of the feeds for the KTV news teams was scratching his head right about now and wondering why he no longer had control over the Astrovision. Unfortunately, mingled with my relief was a feeling of pure, unrelenting horror; somewhere, in the back of my mind, I was trying to calculate how many years’ jail time we were racking up by pirating a major news station.

Onscreen, Snowman was standing in the center of Times Square, an acoustic guitar hanging from his shoulder. He looked small and nervous, nothing like himself. For one moment I felt my confidence slip and I was reminded that we were four kids who didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want my friends to die. Then Snowman glanced up and, spotting me, he nodded. It was then that I remembered that we were also the only ones willing to do something other than bomb the city of New York into oblivion.

We didn’t have much time. I picked up the walkie and told him to go. He nodded again and reached up to slide his earphones and mike into place. I turned back to the van and saw that Rex had boosted Michelle to the roof. She knelt there, trying to get a steady, in-frame shot of Snowman. Rex grabbed a pair of headphones and stuck one to his ear. He nodded to me to indicate the audio was working.

Down the street came the shuddering of a giant body moving underground. I could feel the vibration all up and down my spine, making me tremble with a dull and horrible dread.

Snowman took a deep, shuddering breath and closed his eyes. His fingers played over the guitar strings, a high, strong note. Then he began to sing. For Aimi.

11

The ground trembled, signifying Qilin’s approach, but there was nothing to see, no monster topping the buildings crowding around us. It was going to be a subterranean attack. Qilin was a coward.

I turned to stare at the Astrovision. A two-hundred-foot-tall Snowman filled the screen, his eyes closed and his lips moving, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by all the manhole covers in the street exploding at once and flying off into the distance. Seconds later, the snapping black flytrap heads began emerging, undulating snakelike along the ground. Snowman stopped singing and just stood there, watching them writhe across the asphalt toward him. One of the flytraps snapped inches away from the toes of his boots. He swallowed and took a step back.

I thought he would run—I mean, that would have been the
sensible
thing to do—but it turned out he was almost as crazy as I was. Ignoring the slithering mutations writhing and hissing around his feet, he closed his eyes and began to sing, first faintly, then louder, stronger, as he started to find his groove. Mind you, his was the gravelly voice of a singer used to belting out metal lyrics. No real grace required. But as his voice rang out over Times Square, he put enormous emotion into it, molding the words as if he were singing them for the first time.

Do you remember the red sun we shared

With your crying face we bid forever a goodbye

I watched you dance in those waves of yesterday

I wrote your name in the sand and outlined it in shells

All broken

And then the waves took it all away

But the red sun remained and we shared that last goodbye

Forever

I close my eyes and remember a beach of broken shells

Do you remember the red sun we shared

When my heart broke that first time

Forever

Snowman stopped strumming the guitar and looked up at all the flytraps that were hovering and hissing overhead like a many-headed hydra, watching the Astrovision. There were tears in his eyes and a quiver of absolute fear in his playing hand as it jangled over the strings of the guitar. The hydra heads were slowly braiding themselves together, their black Jell-O-like bodies merging into a giant armored black serpent that swayed uncertainly in the street, its hooded, beadlike eyes fastened to the screen as if it was being hypnotized by a Kamir snakecharmer.

I thought about what Aimi had said about Qilin, the snow-white water serpent, and I wondered briefly what he had looked like before Dr. Mura had tainted him. I wondered if it was anything like this.

Snowman swallowed at the awesome sight of the Kami pulsing before him, bigger than ever before, so big it eclipsed the lights. His breath hitched and he stumbled back a step. “Aimi?” he said, his voice booming out over Times Square as well as the rest of the world. “Aimi…are you there?”

Qilin let out a long rattling hiss like a hydraulic machine turning over and began writhing in the intersection, its powerful musculature knocking over cars and buses as it twisted and writhed in the street. For one heartbeat I thought Snowman had done it, that the music had been enough to restore some part of Aimi’s will, that she was fighting to reclaim control of her Kami. Then the serpent tilted back its scaly head and began to scream to the heavens like it was in mortal anguish.

I knew what was going to happen seconds before it did. I darted out into the street and tackled Snowman like a semi-pro QB, the two of us smashing into the door of the storefront just under the eaves of the Astrovision. A second later the serpent drove its head like a massive battering ram straight into the Astrovision above us. The roar of the explosion was deafening. I pressed Snowman back, pulling up my leather jacket to try and cloak us both. I watched in the glass of the storefront as a waterfall of razor-sharp LED glass smashed down into the street, shards pinging off the sidewalk and unzipping the back of my jacket as they bounced off.

I could hardly breathe, but I didn’t lower my jacket until I realized how close I was to Snowman, that we were more or less in each other’s arms. I lurched back, crunching glass underfoot. That was
way
closer than I wanted to get to His Esteemed Gothicness.

What a mess. Glass was scattered
everywhere
; it was a miracle that we hadn’t been ripped in half. Ozone was thickly choking the air, the smoke of the Astrovision only adding to the darkness already blotting out the afternoon sun. Everything looked like midnight…in a pit of Dante’s infamous Hell.

I sighed tiredly and shrugged off some glass shards.

Snowman looked dazed, a gash above his eyebrow leaking blood into his eye. He touched it, winced, then slid down the locked doors of the storefront until he was slumped on the stoop, staring at his feet.

The walkie on my belt squawked. I picked it up as I tried to peer through the haze.

“
What the hell happened?” came Michelle’s near-hysterical voice.

“
It didn’t work,” I said. My voice sounded hollow and weary, old beyond measure.

“
No duh.”

“
I want you and Rex to get out of there now.”

“
But—”

“
Now
, Michelle. I’m not fucking kidding.”

Snowman was glancing around at the debris, his shaking hands fumbling in his pockets for a smoke. He shook his head, his eyes slowly widening at the breathy, hellish noises that Qilin was making out there in the smoke. “Jesus…it’s going to kill us. I mean, we’re really going to die here today.” He looked up at me unexpectedly. “I don’t expect we could…you know…“ He crossed his first and second fingers.

“
No,”
I said immediately.

He lit the smoke and leaned back against the door. “Wow. Anger management issues
and
a raging homophobe.”

“
Shut up.” I took the smoke from him and dragged on it like it might be my last. Under the circumstances, it probably was.

In the glass of the storefront I spied my eyes. They looked paler than ever, liked fired steel. Old. I shrugged and the jacket fell off of me in a half dozen pieces, just so many strips of black leather singed and battered.