Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (13 page)

“
The same place I was an hour ago,” I shouted back, then realized Michelle could probably hear me. She’d set up her Notebook in her dad’s garage at just the right angle so I could tutor her in tuning up the Interceptor without actually being there.

I glanced at the screen of my laptop and realized she was presently “engaged,” as it were. “
Yo mataria tu
!” she barked, throwing down a wrench, which bounced off the cement floor. “Why is the cylinder head not moving?” she asked me with pitiful desperation, rubbing a smudge of grease across the bridge of her nose. “You said it would move!”

I looked over her work. “That’s because you’re trying to loosen the exhaust port.”

“
Oh.” With a growl and a curse she turned back to the engine, giving the bike a swift kick.

“
Kevin?” my dad shouted, “Do you know where the packaging tape is?”

I let my head drop onto my desk as if it had been decapitated. “The same place it was five minutes ago,” I shouted back to be heard over Blue Oyster Cult playing on my stereo. “The kitchen table.”

If you asked me what was worse, facing down a Kami from hell or dealing with my spazzed-out dad, my dad would win every time. There are some monsters even a Keeper can’t handle. In the days since the attack, he’d barely let me step outside the building to walk Groucho, even though I had tons of time on my hands now.

To quote Alice Cooper, school was out forever…or, at least, until the authorities could prove that no new monsters were going to pop up out of the ground unexpectedly—which was proving difficult. According to the news, the military was sweeping the sewer system, looking for any remnants of Qilin. I didn’t think they would find anything; Qilin was toxic slime, basically, and the New York sewers are full of toxic slime.

The no-school thing made everything worse, somehow, because it meant I had absolutely no escape from KTV, or my dad. In the end, I exiled myself to my room, with my stereo turned up on a classic rock station to drown out the incessant babble of KTV and just my laptop for company, while my dad worked frantically on getting our stuff packed up and getting the apartment in Anchorage.

Thank goodness for the web. Were it not for Michelle and Rex, I would have felt like I’d fallen down into a hole somewhere.

“
I don’t suppose you could come over and look at the mess I’m making of this bike, could you?” Michelle pleaded with me. She put her hands on her hips. “I think the patient is dying.”

“
The patient is not dying,” I told her. “You’re doing fine. And I’ll try to come over tonight, after my dad is done freaking, okay?”

Michelle’s face instantly lit up.

I felt a little bad about lying to Michelle. I had no idea if I’d be able to make our date or not, what with my dad in a whirlwind of preparations. At the rate he was going, he’d have the apartment by week’s end. That meant we’d be gone by next Monday. I didn’t know if I wanted to spend time with Michelle and Rex when I might never see them again.

I didn’t even know how I felt about that, exactly. On one hand, I was used to the whole lone-wolf routine—I’d grown up an only child, after all. And after my mom had died things had gotten really weird, with my dad sometimes spending days in bed under the covers, clutching her robe, while I was left to my own devices. I liked to think of myself as an island, but I’d gotten kind of used to having Michelle and her brother around, bugging me at school or on the Internet, proving there was an actual life beyond these four walls. Not that I was getting sentimental or BFF-ing or anything like that, because that would totally screw up my lone-wolf image.

I looked at the list I had scribbled and realized it was damned useless. Alaska was starting to look better and better, at this point. Better I leave now, I thought, when I could still cut my losses and not look back. Not to mention I was finding it somewhat frightening that I could get sentimental over kids I’d only known for a few weeks—that was definitely something old school Kevin would do, and I was totally removed from that crap now.

Fuck it, I thought. I was a total badass loner, always had been, always would be. I flipped down the screen, leaving Michelle to fight with the bike alone, turned off the stereo, and flopped back onto my bed, covering my eyes with my winged lion toy so the sun wouldn’t blind me. I listened to the faint morning sounds filtering through the closed window. Traffic on the street, distant sirens, a passing car radio broadcasting a Howard Stern show. Normal city things. Yet nothing was normal anymore.

Last Friday changed the city, the world. It had changed my family.
Again.

Another move. A new school. New teachers to hate and new kids to avoid. A new room, with a different angle of sun to burn my eyes. I closed them and gritted my teeth until they ached. I wondered what Alaska was like. I imagined a tiny town floating out on an iceberg somewhere. No girls, no Internet or cable, and a lot of polar bears. Cripes, I might as well be dead. My dad would love it, though—peaceful, white, with no monsters.

Wait: not true. A lot of prehistoric monsters in the movies were frozen for millions of years in the ice of the far north before thawing out and going on a rampage, which didn’t bode well. But they would be getting a Keeper, wouldn’t they? Kevin Takahashi, Kaiju Hunter, at your service.

I got up and started dressing just for something to do, stumbling over some textbooks on the floor as I pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and found a T-shirt that didn’t smell. The sight of the books made me feel even more depressed, despite the fact that I hated school, the Cinnamonster, everything. I went to the window and opened it to let in some cold morning air and to clear my head. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, and there was a pre-winter chill that made my breath plume. Cars, cabs and the occasional tour bus moved leisurely up and down the street. Cabbies blared their horns as they competed for early-morning fairs, and a vendor stood out front on the sidewalk, selling bootleg T-shirts and Red Sox baseball caps. Strangely, the world was carrying on as if nothing had happened last Friday. New York was both brilliant and seemingly stupid that way. I wondered what our next place would be like.

“
Kevin?” I heard my dad call from the kitchen. “I could use some help with these boxes.”

I rolled my eyes. I
really
needed to get out of here, at least for a little while. Picking up my leather riding jacket and my shades, I discreetly slipped down the backstairs and out the Fire Exit door.

2

The morning had warmed up by the time I reached the gates of The Evergreens Cemetery. Not much, though, and the spiky October air still cut through my jacket like needles as I rode Jennie down the quiet, tree-lined road that wound around a 150-year’s worth of granite headstones, marble statues and chipped, mossy mausoleums.

I didn’t know why I was here, only that the road had led me to this place.

The day before there had been a huge memorial service for the kids who had died in the club, but I hadn’t been there to see it, though I’d seen captions in all the major newspapers. I just couldn’t bring myself to join the other students in mourning. I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right, me being there, listening to eulogies from overwhelmed and probably hysterical parents, when I had so much to do with it all.

Maybe I hadn’t killed those kids, exactly, but the jury was still out on how much of the disaster was my fault. I mean, if Mr. Serizawa was right, then Qilin had been there at the club that night looking for
me
. Everyone else had been cannon fodder.

I just couldn’t do it, be there. Instead of attending the funeral yesterday, I’d retreated to the rooftop of the Red Panda. There I sat in a lawn chair despite the fifty-degree weather and watched the unchanging skyline as I smoked a whole pack of Newports down, something I’d never done before. It was my way of mourning, I guess. It was a good thing my dad didn’t keep booze or a lot of razor blades around. Who knows what kind of trouble I might have gotten into. After I had chain-smoked the third cigarette, I learned I could light them by just pinching the tips. I’m one talented guy, didn’t you know?

Eventually Mr. Serizawa appeared on the rooftop to tend to the herbal plants he keeps in a miniature greenhouse up there. I ignored him, watching the sun slide down like a pat of butter behind the Empire State Building, though I did hear him say softly in passing, “
Mago
…how are you?”

“
I’m great,” I answered him, staring at my yellow, nicotine-stained fingertips. “I call demons from hell, can light my own cigarettes without a Zippo, and I burst into flames whenever I get excited. I’m officially a unique person. However, I do plan on asking my dad for a Pyromex anti-flame suit for my next birthday.”

I don’t know if he picked up on my sarcasm or not. He didn’t say anything, just moved on with his little watering can like everything was peachy-keen. Have I mentioned that adults are clueless?

I snorted as I rode past old statues and worn-looking angels, their hands raised in supplication, the road curving toward the center of the cemetery. The new monument was easy enough to spot; I just looked for the largest collection of wreathes. I parked at the curb and slid my helmet off, hanging it on the handlebars. I noticed a black-clad girl with a bouquet of lilies standing by the granite memorial wall like a shadowy angel of death, her clothes whipping against her body in the sudden high October gales. The rain hadn’t broken yet, but the wind was knocking the dry yellow leaves off the trees above, and I watched them seesaw lazily down around her.

I felt a catch in my throat.

I glanced around, half expecting to find Snowman and his band of Whiteface Warriors standing nearby, but Aimi was alone. Steeling myself, I left the bike and started toward the monument.

Aimi glanced up as I approached. She looked thin, transparent, her eyes and mouth dark smudges in her porcelain white face. She should have looked beautiful, ethereal; instead, in the whiteface and black makeup, she looked like a big, horrible, Victorian doll come to demonic life, and again I wondered what was wrong with Aimi, what terrible disease was eating through her.

I stopped when I reached the outer edges of the flowers strewn across the massive plot. As far as I knew, none of the kids who had been buried the day before were in Aimi’s circle. I had no idea why she was here. Hell, I didn’t even know why
I
was here, except that I felt I owed something to the kids who had died at the club. Maybe she felt the same way.

Our eyes finally met. “You came,” she said, an eerie thing to say, like she had expected me to be here, like she had been anticipating it. Her eyes flicked up and down. “Did you know any of the students?”

“
No. I just…I felt I should be here. Pay my last respects, I guess,” I said, stuffing my hands in my pockets. “I keep thinking about those kids caught in the building, what it must have been like for them when they realized they were going to die, when nobody was going to save them and they weren’t going to wake up from a bad dream.”

“
I know.” She bent down to set the white bundle of lilies tied with a black ribbon down and then glanced at the names of so many of our classmates engraved on the wall. She let out her breath. “I keep dreaming about it.”

I waited, letting the moment linger, until Aimi lifted her head and broke the silence. “Kevin, are you staying in the city?”

I kicked at some loose gravel. More than half of the city had already been evacuated or were in the process of taking off. Most were heading for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, anywhere they thought, or only hoped, was safe. I felt too ashamed to admit that my dad and I were a part of the panicked majority that were working on leaving. “Yeah,” I finally fibbed, then felt really bad. “I mean…we’re going to leave eventually. Soon, I guess. Are you?”

She shook her head. “My dad has to stay, to clean up this mess.”

That made sense. “He’s keeping you here?”

I saw a shadow pass behind her eyes. Her face became hard and suddenly very old, almost haggard. “He always keeps me with him.” She shrugged. “My mom died when I was born. It’s always been just the two of us, and he’s…excitable. Daddy always needs to know where I am.”

“
Sorry,” I said, feeling like I’d crossed some invisible line. “I just figured he’d send you away. Some place safe. I mean…it’s a dad thing, don’t you think?”

“
Maybe,” Aimi sighed, suddenly sounding angry. “But I can’t go ten feet without him. Without being watched constantly.”

Unfortunately, I knew what she was talking about.

She nodded at some trees. “Take a look.”

I pushed some professionally trimmed fir trees aside. On the other side of the hill was a long, paved road and a slick black limo waiting at the curb, with a chauffeur leaning against the driver’s side, reading a newspaper. I would have been seriously jealous about Aimi’s ride, except that the chauffeur looked exactly like the MuraTech men who had interrogated me at the police station. I swear, Dr. Mura’s MIB clones were
everywhere
, and they all looked alike. I wondered if there was a big machine somewhere that just stamped out the same thing over and over.

Maybe, I thought, being rich wasn’t so great. Especially if it meant your parents were even more psycho about watching you than my dad was.