Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (22 page)

Get up. Get moving. You can do this.

Do what again?

I make it to my feet. And for a moment memory bubbles up, surrounds me. For a moment I remember everything. Lila. Grant. The people down in the slums of Chicago. The broken ribs. The sabotaged core at my Mech's heart. I know exactly who I am and exactly why I am here.

Then it's all gone.

~

Later?

I stand. I wait. I marvel at the world. The water is so beautiful. I wonder how it got there.

Movement on the horizon catches my eye. Something cutting through the water. I stare at it. Red signs flash in the corner of my vision but they are just one more confusing detail in the mass of data piling into my head. I want to ignore them. There is peace in that line of water as it races towards me.

I watch it. The efficient beauty of it. It distracts me from the wrongness in my limbs. From the foreignness of my body.

It is almost on me. I want to see what it is. I am curious.

And then—rearing out of the water—a vast unspooling nightmare of flesh. And God. Oh God.

Peace is gone. I scream, flail. And the wrongness of my limbs can't be ignored now.

Why am I made of metal? Why are my thoughts numbers?

The monstrosity's jaws smash into me, tear pieces from me. I can feel teeth in skin that is not my skin. Coils ensnaring me. Sensors scream in my head. A strangely remote disemboweling of my electronic innards. Reams of my coolant system spilling out onto the ground.

Why am I made of wires and metal? Why am I dying?

Warning sirens split my skull. And heat. A jagged spike of heat in my chest. Building unbearably.

What is wrong with me? Why am I wrong?

Jaws, and claws, and teeth, and scales, and death and crushing and heat and everything caving in caving in and heat
ohgodtheheat

Iamgoingto
-

And then the heat in my chest crescendos, swells, consumes. Everything is eclipsed. Pain, and heat, and light, and the world, and memory. All reduced to single point and blown away.

~

Afterward
:

A voice. A voice brings me out of the darkness. It repeats the same word over and over. There is something familiar about the word. I grasp at it for a moment, but cannot place it.

Where am I?

Somewhere dark. I am strapped in. Wires cover my body. I work one hand free, pull at them. They come away with small wet sucking noises.

The voice is getting nearer.

How did I get here?

Light bursts into the room. I blink, try to shield my eyes with my free hand.

When I can see again, an open door floods the room with light. It is small, full of smashed screens, cracked dials, and trailing wires. I am strapped into a chair in the middle of it all.

A woman stands in the doorway. Tall. Dark hair worn long. A muddy red shirt worn loose. She stares at me.

“Hello,” I say when the silence becomes as strange as everything else about this situation. “Could you please help me?”

The woman starts as if breathed to life that very moment. She crosses the small room, pulls at the straps holding me in place. Halfway through she stops. I look at her face, and I almost believe she is going to cry.

“Are you alright?” I ask.

She closes her eyes. When she opens them they are clear. She nods, resumes her work. While she frees my legs I massage life into my arms.

“I'm sorry,” I tell her, “but I think I took a bump on the head. I really don't remember where I am.”

She nods, frees my legs. She lets me lean on her shoulders as we cross the room's sloping floor.

Then, as we reach the doorway, I stop, stare, gasp. In the distance there is the wreckage of a massive robot lying half drowned in a shallow sea.

The woman grabs my head, pulls it around, studies me carefully.

“Are you alright?” They are the first words she's spoken to me. They are full of concern.

I turn to stare again at the fallen machine. I point. “What is that?”

Her eyes cloud again. She hesitates before she answers. “It was called the Behemoth,” she says.

The name rings some deep drowned bell. I try to put a finger on the swirl of emotions. Something is wrong with my memory. Is that what's upsetting me?

The Behemoth
. I shudder. “That sounds like the name of a monster.”

She nods. “It could be.” Then, after a hesitation. “But it was a savior, too.” She smiles suddenly, and it strikes me that it is a very pretty smile. “It could do terrible things, but it was beautiful when it did them.” A second smile. “When it fought, it always reminded me of Bruce Lee.”

I don't recognize the name. “Who's that?”

Another smile.
Like the sun through clouds
, I think. She lets go of my head, takes my hand instead. “Why don't you come with me,” she says, “and let me show you?”

The Greatest Hunger

Jaym Gates

Derecho backs into her corner and huffs, watching her opponent. I can feel her assessing its weaknesses, the deep gashes on its pale, dripping belly, the broken antler. Its other antler is still proud, and streaked with Derecho's red blood, but its intestines must be barely held in. A little green blood trickles down a tusk, into her mouth, and her deep-set eyes gleam ruby under the bright lights, vivid against her black hide.

I set my jaw against a rash move—Derecho is too expensive to risk in a kamikaze, blood and glory run—and gather her focus. Time to kill.

~

I still remember the night this mess started. Las Vegas. New Year's Eve. 1946. The night was desert-cold, a thin dusting of snow on the ground. The city was on watch, waiting to see if the monster that had wrecked Reno was on its way north. I was huddled in a doorway in a bad section of town, trying to keep warm and out of sight.

It was a strange new world we entered when the war finally ended.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been the first salvos, a few months before, the beginning of the end. For a while, everyone thought it was over. But that was just the beginning. Project Manhattan had been compromised so quietly that no one even knew it...until London, Washington D.C, Berlin, and Rome exploded in great gouts of cancerous fire.

We never figured out who was behind it, but it put an end to the aggression. Stunned, horrified, desperate, we turned our eyes inward to repair our ruined world. We found a fragile peace, dependent on depleted resources as much as brotherly love. We were still living under the terror of nuclear fallout, waiting for winds to shift or another mysterious strike. An air of hysterical hedonism clung to everyone, from New York to Tokyo to Johannesburg. The Roaring 20s looked like a pale omen of the Raging 50s, silky and gilded compared to the macabre glory of now.

And then, in a final, crushing twist of fate, the monsters came. Drawn by the blood and death and war, birthed by unholy science, they fell from the skies and rose from the seas, unearthed themselves from ancient caverns and crept out of dark forests.
We lost almost as many souls to them as to the war, and we quickly learned the fear and respect our ancestors accorded the unknown.

The first ones were small and warped, more a danger to individuals than cities. These, we could blame on the bombs. But they got bigger, and science was suddenly at a loss. We knew we had a problem when something huge and tentacled rose from the sea and stormed through Boston. (Maybe Lovecraft was prophetic, if a little geographically-challenged.)

Our communications were rebuilding slowly, so it took us a little while to find out we weren't the only ones. A monstrous reptile had rampaged through Tokyo. A hundred-foot anaconda was killed in Rio. A six-legged water buffalo...thing...was being butchered for its meat after taking out nearly half of Johannesburg's business district. Japan called them
Kaiju
. We called them monsters.

Being American, we also called them profit. Even nuclear winter couldn't take that away from us. The warlords, coal kings, industrial princes, and oil barons had more money than they could burn. They paid big game hunters to lead expeditions to bag the biggest trophies in the world, but a house could only hold so many of those.

John Goodnight, heir to a vast silver fortune, financed the first Blood Pits. Four millionaires paid hunters to live-capture the biggest Kaiju they could get their hands on, and pitted the four against each other. The event raised millions of dollars, and Goodnight more than recovered his investment. The next year, Japan had its own Kaiju Wars, supposedly also financed by Goodnight, who had bought heavily into the decimated nation.

That night in Las Vegas, I proved that some of us had been ruptured in ways you couldn't see.

A horn wailed from the police department. It used to be there to warn us about incoming bombers—not that any ever came near Vegas, but you couldn't be careful enough. This time, it was warning of a bigger threat. Take cover. Bombs don't hunt. Bombers screamed overhead, the regional guard heading to intercept the beast.

When the dying Hellcat clawed its way into Las Vegas, her body riddled with bullets and missiles, I didn't have anywhere, or any will, to run. Her yellow eyes, mad with pain and fury, glared down at me, ready to inflict some of her suffering on the creatures who had caused it. I thought she was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen, and I cried for her pain.

I don't know how, but I talked to her, and she understood. Laid down right beside me, her dying breaths blowing my dirty hair aside, and passed away next to me. They found me with my face buried in her blood-matted fur, sobbing.

The hospital patched me up, but within twenty-four hours, I was back on the street, hiding from the newfound celebrity. The bounty hunters found me less than a week later, and only
chance threw me into gentler arms, saved me from government interest. Nikolai Kuznetsov paid over two hundred thousand dollars for me, and put me in the arena with his beast, the Drakon, and won the Blood Pits. Charles Goodnight's agent, Mason Kincaid, bought me for two million, two years ago, to handle Derecho. We're undefeated.

The Blue Hurricane was the first celebrity Kaiju. Derecho, eight Blood Pits removed from her predecessor, is the latest.

Derecho's hooves shred the hard-packed earth as she charges her victim. The crowd is deathly silent as the slime-thing spits poisonous goo, but it doesn't slow Derecho a bit, and her gleaming tusks bite deep into the thing's belly, ripping it open. Steaming green guts gush to the arena floor, and Derecho roars her victory.

~

Back in the catacombs—the Goodnight Arena's monster-holding area—Derecho slumps to the straw with a weary sigh. Whatever her opponent spat was caustic, and she has burns all over her back and haunches. I can feel her pain like a vague burning at the back of my mind, and it annoys me. The monsters are dangerous, but there is no need to make them suffer for our enjoyment.

I have two boys helping me, scarred young street rats who will risk their lives for a warm meal and a roof over their heads. They already have the tub of ointment waiting, painter's poles for the hard-to-reach areas, and softer brushes to clean the wounds. I put my hand on Derecho's snout and lull her into complacence while the boys start cleaning and mending.

I am exhausted when I leave her, wracked with pain and the ashy collapse of adrenaline. I don't know how many more of these fights I have in me. She may be a beast, slow and dull, clouded with the fumes of rage, but how much of that is her captivity, her fear? And, too, there is the darker bitterness against those who sit in their boxes and feed on the misery below, the slow wearing of their bloodthirsty glee.

I am not so far removed from the creatures I shepherd. I didn't come from wealth, didn't learn fine manners. I taught myself to read, to write. I have no grace, no charm, no beauty worth a man's money. No gifts to buy myself out of their pits. Would they revel in my pain, too, if my mutations were visible? Treat me like the gladiators of Rome, goading me with cattle prods and whips, feeding me the barely-dead meat of my horrible cousins?

Why do I ask myself these questions? I am certainly too tired.

“What do monsters fear?” my captor asked me, the night before he sold me to Kusnetsov. We were sitting in a seedy motel room, eating cheap take-out food with lukewarm beer. He had been one of Hellcat's hunters, the first to see me, and he'd saved me from the bounty hunters. My gifts didn't work on him, and I was tired of running. It was a relief to be sitting there, eating my first real meal since the hospital. “How do you make them obey you?”

I didn't know. I still don't, but maybe I am starting to understand.

The door to my hotel room is locked, but I can smell him, waiting. A monster waits for me, a monster I have called, wished for, lusted after, invited through my door. He knows what I am, and does not fear me. There is comfort in that.

I am still locking the door behind me when his breath touches my neck.

~

The next day, her burns freshly crusted with scabs and healing skin, Derecho paces restlessly in her huge pen. She stops, occasionally, to root through the dirt with her tusks, some dim, racial memory maybe of when her kind ate roots and leaves. Dust clings to the drying blood along her mouth. I hope they did not feed her yesterday's kill, it was poisoned beyond use, but they do not always have sense. If she falls ill, I will flay their minds myself. Derecho has become precious to me.

I let myself into her cage, and she comes to me, snuffling concern. The top of my head comes barely to her knee, yet she comes to me and lowers her giant's head to look me in the eye. I hope no one is watching, it should not be known that the animals love, not fear, me.

She thinks she is protecting me, a mother sow defending her child.

A few minutes to calm her, then it is time to gild myself in my garish costume—the purple and gold of Goodnight Industrial, low-cut and tasteless—to take my place beside the other Shepherd. I don't even know who we're fighting. I had more important things to think about last night.

My assistant kneels in front of me to begin buttoning my dress and, for a moment, I am overcome with a memory of the night before. The bruises on my neck ache, although they don't show, and my back aches with the weight of the monster I called.

He is like me, invisible in his mutations. If the people around us knew, would they pick up torches and pitchforks?

I was the first of many, but we are sheep in wolves' clothing, as unlike the others as they are unlike the Silent. (We call them that, because they have no voice except the crude one in their throats, ungainly and unlovely, unlike the smooth-flowing stream of our own communication.)

The assistant finishes the last button and crisply adjusts the gold lace over my breasts, lays the heavy gold-and-amethyst chain of Bond around my neck. It is a circus, and I am the invisible ringmaster, dressed the part of the clown.

The contempt in the girl's eyes is palpable, and I nearly reach into her to squeeze that smug superiority out of her, but the crowd roars, and I can feel Derecho's fear seeping into me.

Of course they would pick up pitchforks and torches if they knew about me. After all, they burned my kind in the Middle Ages, didn't they?

And those unfortunates couldn't do half of what I can barely refrain from doing with every breath.

~

Another battle, nearly over.

This Shepherd was too weak to repel me, and as Derecho savaged the hurtful thing, I toyed with him. He is a Balm, meant to keep his charge passive. He doesn't understand the sharp, bitter joy of killing, but he watched his beast's desperate battle with a half-smile, enjoying the pain it suffered, and so I took his limp little mind in hand and chained him to his beast while Derecho broke its legs, bringing it to the ground.

His scream should not have pleased me so much. I was not wounded enough last night, not brought to heel. I hope it is that, rather than my greater fear that my bloodlust is growing, that I will lose myself in the need for death. There is too much to do still, too many things to protect, too many delicate manipulations necessary.

And Shepherds die all the time. They are weak. The weak do not deserve to live.

Derecho crushes the other beast's chest, and the joy of the Shepherd's death tears through me like an orgasm.

~

Again, I have barely closed the door before rough hands have locked my wrists in front of me.

“You killed him.” His breath is hot and dry. He is not as huge as my young memories painted him, but his compact power easily dwarfs my wiry strength. Struggle is pointless. “You killed the Shepherd for pleasure. You are losing control.”

Reflexively, I poke at his mind, try to prod him into the actions I want, but I fail, as always. Somehow, I cannot get into his soul to twist and tear and destroy. I have never met another—man, beast, or monster—capable of withstanding me. He is my refuge, the one who knows what I am, who can stop me if I can't stop myself. He kept me safe from the bounty hunters that night
in Vegas, delivered me safe to a place that would protect me for my monetary value, if nothing else, and I still sometimes indulge myself in his protection.

I cannot touch his mind, but he can pull my soul out and sate it with violence and the knife-edged pleasure of being helpless again, of not worrying over the powerless, deadly beasts who speak in my dreams every time I sleep.

~

It is the semi-finals. My costume is more transparent than before, the thin silks clinging to my legs, heavy with golden beads that provide more concealment than the cloth. I am maskless, a brag by the barons that they have the money to filter the air sufficiently, even with all these people. I loathe these costumes, flimsy and fragile, and expensive.

I am a free woman in name, but I would never have achieved that if I hadn't struck a deal with Goodnight Industrial: freedom in name, so long as I signed away my life in service to their sport. They couldn't breed or sell me, but neither could I leave, and I could never work for anyone else even if the Goodnights retired me.

It isn't much but it is better than many people have, these days, regardless of skin color or gender.