Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (6 page)

3

My second day at Thomas Jefferson High somehow managed to be both uneventful
and
irritating.

In Algebra I got a paper back from Mr. Russo all A-Plussed up with a note attached asking me if I could tutor the “less gifted” students of his class. That made me want to pound my head against the top of my desk until I achieved full unconsciousness. I mean, I wouldn’t be caught
dead
tutoring, even if it does mean meeting a lot of easy and appreciative girls. Michelle sat next to me in Latin, then walked with me to Biology. Mrs. Rodriguez didn’t call on me today so I was able to properly maintain my masquerade as the dumb new guy, but by mid-morning I also learned that the earthquake I thought I had imagined earlier had been felt by a fair number of other students. In fact, faint tremors had been reported all over the downtown Brooklyn area, according to the closed-circuit KTV broadcast that Mrs. Rodriguez made us watch. That didn’t improve my overall opinion of New York much. California is supposed to move around under folks—you kind of expect it—but I’d thought that New York was built on pretty solid bedrock. At one point, during English, the janitor rumbled by the classroom with his bucket and brooms. The noise made this one uber-nervous girl jump up and run shrieking from the room. I figured that had a lot to do with the colorful rumors going around (probably started by Troy and his meathead friends) that a giant monster was moving under the ground.

That was bad, but what was worse was I didn’t see Aimi anywhere in the halls, or in any of the classrooms. I tried not to let that bother me. We didn’t share any classes, so it was only natural that we not run into each other until lunch. Maybe she had gotten sick, I thought, or the earthquake had frightened her like the girl in Latin. Snowman
had
said she wasn’t well, whatever that meant.

The moment I entered the cafeteria, Michelle hanging by my side, my eyes shifted over to find all the kids in black. Aimi wasn’t there, though the Goths were amassed in their usual place, doing what they usually did—posing self-importantly and not eating.

Snowman was sitting on the end of the outlaw bench, dressed in a bright green Mad-Hatter-inspired tuxedo and top hat, his bleach-white hair tied back in a long ponytail. I thought he looked like the bastard offspring of Lucky the Leprechaun and Oliver Twist. He was signing a homemade Destroyer album for a girl. The color rushed through the girl’s cheeks as he scribbled across the impact case with a silver pen. I rolled my eyes. And when she started jumping up and down like a demented kangaroo, I had to suppress an urge to throw up a little in my mouth.

“
I don’t get what they see in those clowns,” Michelle said while we stood in the lunch line with our trays, waiting to be slopped. She casually reached up and ripped a poster down off the wall advertising the concert at The Hole—Destroyer was playing a double bill with a local girl band I’d never heard of.

I grunted noncommittally and stared down at the free school lunch being dumped on my tray, trying to decide if the mystery substance was made of roadkill or only looked that way, and if I necessarily needed a Hazmat suit in order to consume it.

“
And the Willy Wonka clothes…wassup with that?” Michelle made a face.

“
Some of it’s okay,” I said.

“
Maybe. But I prefer a guy who looks hot in jeans.” She smiled winningly up at me.

I sighed and picked up my tray and followed her to our table, where Terry was busy doing an autopsy on his Notebook, probably so he could upgrade it into a rocket-launcher, à la MacGuyer.

I was being hard on Michelle, I knew. She was reliable, down to earth,
normal
. The type of girl my dad would dig. But I wasn’t sure if I could tolerate her practical, All-American approach to life. All of that wholesome, kinetic energy was likely to give me motion sickness.

For the next half an hour I pushed the industrial waste that passed for lunch around my tray and tried to pay attention as she chattered on about a bike an uncle of hers had given her. She looked at me pleadingly with her big brown doe eyes. “Could you look at it, Kevin? Please? I think I’m going to make it my Shop project, but I was hoping you could help me with the alignment. My dad is always working, so I can’t ask him.”

“
You have a bike?” I said. I stopped Goth-watching and turned my full attention on Michelle. It wasn’t like Aimi was going to mystically appear in the middle of the cafeteria just to make me feel better.

Michelle’s face lit up. “It’s a VTX Interceptor. V-4 engine. But my dad is helping me upgrade it.”

“
You’re kidding,” I said. “The new Hondas? Those are killer.”

Michelle nodded, secure in the knowledge that she finally had me. “My uncle races them up in the Pocono raceways.” She gave me a close-lipped smile, her face flushing as she suddenly turned shy and picked daintily at the salad she had chosen over the Roadkill
Du Jour
entree I was trying not to gag over. I wondered if I had anything to do with that. “But he trashed this one. I mean, it’s a great cruiser, but he can’t maneuver on the track with it anymore, so he gave it to me as an early graduation present.”

Wow, a family who gave each other retired, top-of-the-line bikes. Why did I have to be born into a family whose one ambition in life was to make the perfect rice ball? I mean, does my karma suck or what?

“
Kevin, I saw your bike, man. It’s awesome!” Terry surfaced long enough to proclaim. “Can I take it for a ride sometime?”

“
Terry,” Michelle said with exasperation, “you wouldn’t
fit
on Kevin’s bike.”

“
I will after I make the football team,” Terry insisted.

“
Troy and his fathead friends will slaughter you,” Michelle countered, looking appalled.

“
Shows what you know, Shell. Wait till I make a touchdown. And then…” And here Terry got up to do a bizarre end zone dance even as Michelle bit her plastic fork and rolled her eyes at me as if to say:
As if that’s ever going to happen
.

I tried not to smile, but Terry’s victory dance
was
pretty funny—I had to give him props for his I-don’t-give-a-damn-who’s-looking attitude. “I love that bike,” he babbled, sitting down again at the table. “Doesn’t John Woo use those in all his films?”

“
I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe. But it sort of needs work.”

And all at once, bikes were
the
topic. Michelle said her dad did custom paint jobs at his garage in the Heights and she had access to just about every kind of tool or paint I might need to upgrade Jennie—which, for me, was pretty much like turning a starving kid loose in a candy shop. Terry said he knew “carputers” and could hack anything with wires. I got so into what they were saying, I stopped thinking about Aimi for a whole half an hour.

4

The rest of my week was positively sucktastic—especially at the end, when the monster tried to eat me.

In Computer Lab I got a partner who turned out to be the only kid left on planet Earth who didn’t know how to use a PC except to download porn. P.E. was only minimally better—I didn’t have a uniform yet, so Coach Kuznik let me sit it out on the bleachers instead of wrestling down on the mat and making a fool of myself. But in Biology, Mrs. Rodriguez said we were going to be studying Karkadon’s anatomy
in detail
and I almost walked out after that announcement.

Friday afternoon, seconds after the last bell rang, found me standing beside Jennie in the parking lot, pulling my riding gloves on and watching all the other students scurrying en masse toward their vehicles. The skate guys set up their ramp, and the pusher guys were back at the fence. I watched the Goths climb aboard their black van, minus Aimi.

For the fourth day in a row Aimi had failed to show for school. It had taken a lot of subtle digging on my part, but I had managed to get at least some information out of Michelle, who disliked Aimi even more than Snowman, which was saying a lot. According to the stories, Aimi was suffering from a mystery illness and her attendance in school was sporadic, at best. Aimi never talked about it, but the rumors ran from an incurable childhood disease like leukemia or Multiple Sclerosis to various STD’s. Michelle was leaning toward the STD’s, even though I was having a hard time believing that. Aimi just didn’t seem the type, somehow.

I wondered if she would be at the concert on Saturday. I wondered if she was well enough to play. I thought about asking Snowman if she was okay, but I was pretty sure he would just punch me in the face. I was fingering the note in my pocket I had been carrying around with me all week like a magic talisman, thinking about what to do, when I saw Terry waving enthusiastically to me.

I waved back, just to be nice. That’s me, Mr. Nice Guy.

But Terry, being Terry, misinterpreted it and bounded over, his fat jiggling girlishly under his Darth Maul T-shirt and outdated patch jacket. “
Sweeeet
ride, man,” he said, staring wild-eyed at Jennie and doing that victory dance of his in a totally embarrassing way.

“
Thanks, man,” I said, glancing around to see if anyone was noticing us together. I mean, I felt for the guy—obviously, he was in need of a cool card, but I didn’t have any extras to lend him. I turned the engine over, hoping he’d get a clue and catch his bus.

No dice; Terry was still looking my bike over like she was completely edible. “She have a killswitch? ‘Cause I can rewire that for you, man.”

I weighed hanging with Terry versus a bike that wouldn’t die if I hit too high an MPH. Without the killswitch I could go fast enough to alter time. But then Terry would be a permanent fixture in my life, and Terry was no Wayne. Gah. It was like a conundrum of epic proportions.

“
You can do that?” I finally said. Yeah, I could hardly believe I had just said that.

Terry grinned and his eyes lit up like Christmas lights behind his glasses. “No problem, man. Terry-saurus Rex can hack it. Didn’ja notice there’s no locks on the school computers? I have the whole place wired, man.
Hack city
.” I
had
noticed that, actually, considering the amount of porn my lab partner was able to download. Terry folded his arms old school Vanilla Ice style, trying waaay too hard to earn that cool card, as far as I was concerned. “Tell me I’m the man.”

As I watched the black van pull out of the parking lot, inspiration hit me, a way to find out what I needed to know about Aimi without going to Snowman. I turned my attention back on Terry. “Rex,” I said, “you
are
the man. If I ever need to get inside the Pentagon computer, you’ll be my go-to guy.”

He developed a sly look. “Rex,” he said with approval. “That rocks, man.” He smiled like he could probably do it, too.

5

Technically speaking, I don’t have a curfew. My dad’s a pretty straight guy. He trusts me to be home before nightfall, unless something’s come up, in which case, I’m supposed to phone. So by visiting The Hole and not telling him, I was breaking the unwritten rules. But the concert was from seven to nine, and my dad never wanders up to the loft before nine anyway, so I figured I could catch the concert and still make it home before him if I left a little earlier than everyone else.

In my defense, I hadn’t expected all hell to break loose. I swear. More on that later.

The Hole looked pretty seedy from the outside, the kind of place where drug dealers in action movies hired professional assassins to knock off the competition. Needless to say, my dad would have had a triple cow if he saw it. As I rode toward the building, I stared up at the age-pitted brownstone, grey and almost luminous in the dim streetlights, with black iron bars over the windows and an iron gate in front of the door.

I parked Jennie around back, in the weedy little lot adjacent to the chainlink-fenced backyard of the project next door. There seemed to be a lot of cars. But just to be sure, I walked around the corner and found the colorful murals of graffiti emblazoned on the side of the building that I’d heard about. The place looked like a condemnable dive, but it was definitely it.

The heavy pneumatic door had the words ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER spray-painted across it—not an encouraging sight. I stopped and stared at it, wondering what I hoped to gain from this little venture. I mean, Snowman hadn’t been kidding when he’d said Aimi had problems.

Terry’s hacked school computers had inspired me earlier. I’m not exactly a cyber-slacker, after all. After making it home from school I sat down at my dinosaur of a laptop and did some serious web research.

It wasn’t difficult to find Destroyer information and fan blogs on MySpace, Facebook, all the usual suspects. True to what Michelle had said, Aimi’s fans considered her a “bad girl,” the kind that all guys want but would never bring home to meet their families. She had been expelled from virtually every school in New York City, and rumor had it she’d spent more time in rehabilitation clinics for various addictions than River Phoenix, had at least two DUIs on her record, and had been a cutter since she was thirteen years old. She had a social worker and a therapist, neither of which seemed to be doing her any good.