Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (5 page)

7

When I got home I immediately went upstairs to the loft we rent from Mr. Serizawa. It’s rough, barely habitable, really, a converted attic space with brownstone walls and a slanted roof that makes me stoop to see out the windows. But it’s better than the projects, which house two, sometimes three, families per flat since the disaster. I changed into my uniform and spent the rest of the afternoon in the restaurant downstairs, busing tables, taking take-out orders and going through the long list of dinner specials.

I like the work; it keeps that part of my brain that wants to dwell on everything else nicely deactivated. I don’t have to think, just
do
. But around eight o’clock my dad emerged from the kitchen in his grease-stained cook’s whites, stinking of soy sauce and peanut grease, to tell me the late-shift guys were coming in and I could do what I wanted—which meant, in Dad-speak: “Go do your homework.”

I stayed on, doing dishes, way too amped to look at textbooks, until well after ten, when my dad finally chased me out of the kitchen and told me to go check on Groucho. I gave in this time. I was tired, emotionally wiped from the day, and the incessant background noise of KTV was starting to get to me.

My dad likes to keep the TV running in the kitchen night and day. I think he’s afraid of being caught out unprepared should another Karkadon make landfall. But between you and me, I hate the Kaiju Channel. I hate the sensational news reports and the elaborate searches for the Chupacabra and Nessie that never come to anything. But with Karkadon dead, there was no new news to report. Documentaries and reality television shows had cropped up to fill in the empty time slots, and they sucked on so many levels. You can only interview people who saw the monster firsthand so many times before it all starts to blur together, before you start going numb.

Yet people continue to watch KTV as avidly as CNN after 9/11, afraid, much like my dad, of being hit on the blindside by disaster. But when I consider what happened to San Francisco, the extent of the damage, I wonder if
any
kind of advance warning would have been enough. Somehow, I doubt it. You can predict earthquakes and typhoons; you just can’t anticipate monsters.

It started to rain while I was outside walking Groucho. Groucho is Mr. Serizawa’s Rottweiler, bought for security reasons, except he’s afraid of sirens, storms, water, bright lights, and everything that breathes oxygen. On the upside, you never have to wait very long for him to do his business, because he’s terrified of the cats that scrounge around in the alley behind the restaurant. “This is like a country-western song,” I told Groucho. “Standing in the rain, under her window, thinking about her…except I don’t know where in the city her window is.”

“
Baroo?” Groucho said nervously. He’d heard some rats fighting over a burger wrapper in the shadows at the back of the alley. In Groucho’s defense, the rats here are
huge
, probably because they eat the radioactive danger dogs off the sidewalk vendor’s carts. After a while we went back inside and Groucho followed me up to my room. He sleeps with me because I keep a light on at night and he’s afraid of the dark.

I spent a long time just lying in bed, reading through Pat Frank’s
Alas, Babylon
and listening to the rain pinging off the roof like BBs. Generally speaking, I can usually chunk out a 400-page novel in one sitting. It’s not something I like to admit to, but neither is it something I’m willing to give up. In fact, it’s the only thing about the
old
Kevin that I’ve hung onto. But tonight I was seriously distracted. I found myself thinking about Aimi and school and New York. Everything and nothing in particular. How crazy the world was. How the world was this one thing before Karkadon pulled itself ashore and how it became something else afterward. Crazy stuff.

Eventually I fell into a light sleep—the only sleep I experience anymore. And sometime in the night I had one of those long, involved dreams that leave you feeling exhausted and vaguely troubled the next morning.

Usually I dream about Karkadon. I dream about the night it came ashore. I dream I’m trying to phone my mom about the news report on the TV. Her cellphone rings and rings, but I never get through. No one ever picks up—because my mom’s car was already at the bottom of the Bay.

Tonight, though, I dreamed I was back in the library at my old school in San Francisco, except that Aimi was there, too. I guess we were having a study date or something because she said, “Maybe you’d like to learn more Japanese words?” and I said, “Yes.” So she started reading a book to me, but not in English. After a while I took it from her and glanced at the pages. They were covered up and down in Japanese kanji characters. I don’t know kanji, or even katakana, which is informal kanji, but somehow I could read this.

My lips started to move as I read down the page, but suddenly Aimi leaned forward and touched my lips with two of her fingertips, hushing me. “Don’t, Kevin! Don’t say her name. She wakes.” Then she started to cry.

I looked up to say
I’m sorry
, but Aimi was gone, and sitting across from me was the most beautiful Asian woman I had ever seen. Her face was milk white, her lips fire red, and all of her was framed in blood red ropes of hair that almost seemed alive. She was clearly Japanese, but her eyes were as blue as mine, as blue as my mom’s had been. She smirked at me, a knowing look, and her teeth were very white and sharp in her mouth.

“
Who?” I asked the woman, standing up. “Who wakes?” Suddenly it was very important to me.

Flames sprang up from the book on the table in front of me, carving a name in the fragile rice pages.

The name was RAIJU.

Then I woke up.

C H A P T E R T W O

Thunder Underground

1

“
Kev! Coffee’s on!” Dad called from the kitchen where he was, even at this ungodly hour, already rattling around.

What a night. I felt all banged up getting out of bed, like I’d fought a war, and the bedclothes were so tangled I figured I must have lost that war.

And what a strange dream. I kept thinking about it as I climbed out of bed.

The rain had stopped and all I could hear was the despondent drip-drip off the gutters outside, dishes clattering together in the kitchen, and the drone of the TV going. “Be right there,” I said, or gargled. I am
so
not a morning person.

My bedroom faces east so the sun always hits me right in the face if I oversleep, even through the mesh industrial windows. But we’re a blue-collar working family, and I can’t remember the last time the sun beat me to rising. It’s black when I go to bed, and black when I get up, even on the weekend.

I showered and dressed, choosing a black Nehru shirt I left untucked and a pair of faded black jeans with the knees ripped out. I wasn’t trying to be
haute couture
, but when you do your shopping at the Salvation Army, you take what you can get. The black suited me, made me look even bigger than I was. Maybe Snowman would challenge me today, maybe not. Either way, I was going in fighting. I sighed, hooked my damp hair behind my ear, and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet to smoke my morning cigarette with the bathroom window open.

I was so lost in thought that I almost didn’t feel the floor quivering. I heard the soap dish rattle against the vanity and slowly got to my feet while most of my internal organs sank so far down they might as well have taken refuge in my big clunky biker boots. My first thought was,
It’s back. The thing. Karkadon.
Then I remembered how dead it was, how the President had said nothing like that would ever happen again, and how foolish I was being.

I moved unhurriedly to the window that faces out over the East River. Nothing unusual was happening. Traffic was passing. People were moving in ordered chaos. A vendor was selling coffee and newspapers at a kiosk across the street. I waited, my heart slamming against my ribs like a frantic bird in a cage, but nothing dragged itself up the muddy banks of the East River. Nothing crawled up onto the suspension wires of the Brooklyn Bridge and began tearing it to shrapnel.

I was being stupid, imagining things; it was probably the delivery truck rumbling by outside on its Tuesday morning drop, or maybe a news chopper passing overhead. I started breathing again, slowly, in, out, in, out. Anxiety Disorder. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Doctors have all these fancy scientific terms for frantic human terror.

“
Kevin?” my dad said from the kitchen. He sounded normal—tired, distracted, but not panicked. Was I imagining everything, I wondered?

Then I glanced down at my hands and finally noticed that my cigarette was on fire. Not burning, mind you, but
on fire
, the little licking flames inching toward my fingers. “Shit!” I hissed and threw the cigarette into the toilet and immediately flushed it.

“
Kevin!”

“
I’m already there!” I called.

Smoking is mondo bad for your health, just FYI.

2

Just my luck, I ran into Mr. Serizawa as I headed out to school. Usually he stays upstairs in his room, which is just fine by me, since he has these crazy Muppet eyes that sort of freak me out.

“
Mago
,” he said in greeting, hobbling down the stairs with his carven little cane. ”
Mago
, I had a dream about you last night.”

You know that crazy Asian dude who gave little Billy the mogwai? Yeah,
exactly.

“
Hi, Mr. Serizawa,” I said.

At least he was speaking English this morning, except for that
mago
business. It means something casual like
son
or
grandchild
. Older Japanese folks use it on young people in a patronizing way that’s supposed to make you feel good, but that’s about all I’d learned of my dad’s native language. Generally speaking, I know less Japanese than the average otaku, which is pretty sad when you think about it.

Mr. Serizawa worked his way down the steps without help. He’s not what you’d expect—some wizened old magus in a Kung Fu movie or whatever. He’s over eighty years old, and was head chef of various New York bistros most of his life, and a butcher before that, and a soldier before that, if the stories are true. Despite his age, he’s built solid like a mountain.

I thought about telling him I had to run, that I was late for school, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t buy it. He’s the only one I know who can see right through my fibs—maybe it’s the Muppet eyes, I don’t know. So I waited impatiently at the bottom of the stairs, my pack over one shoulder, hoping this wouldn’t entail some boring long philosophy lesson about a Samurai or something. “What kind of dream did you have, Mr. Serizawa?” I prompted.

He nodded dourly. “You were fighting the Orochi, like the god Susa-no-Ō,” he announced, rolling the words along in a way you just don’t hear anymore unless you visit the Japanese countryside where the
old dialects are still spoken. “I saw you with a flaming sword, taming the great Kami.”

“
Oh yeah? Was I saving any girls?”

He laughed. “No girls. But maybe tomorrow night.”

I pretended to smile, but what I really wanted to do was to get the hell out of there. I mean, the way Mr. Serizawa studies me has total creepy child molester written all over it. He’s never pulled anything, but you can tell he’s up to something.

“
Did you cut your hair,
mago
?” he asked, admiring me.

I glanced longingly at the door. “Um…no?”

“
Yet something is different this morning. Something has changed.”

Yeah, I had taken a shower. Was that it?

“
You are older today than you were yesterday,” he said. Again he nodded, as if to himself. “Visit me when you are ready,
mago
. You will know the time. And I will always be here for you.” Turning, he hobbled off to the restaurant’s kitchen.

Do you see what I mean about
creeeepy
?

Rolling my eyes, I ducked out to the converted shed in the alley behind the restaurant before anything weirder could happen—and before my dad could catch me and offer me a lift to school, because I’d
never
get out of that one. He hates it when I take Jennie out on these streets and keeps telling me I’m going to break my neck one day. It’s a good thing I’m not a gun freak, because then he’d warn me I’m going to shoot my eye out.

Out in the shed I swung a leg over Jennie’s worn and pitted saddle, then stopped a moment just to savor the feel of her under me. The obsolete and totally unfashionable dirt bike was comfortable, waiting for me. As always, it felt like coming home.

But, as always, I felt a spike of despair once Jennie’s engine turned over and snarled to life. It reminded me of Wayne—greasy-fingered Wayne, ponytailed Wayne, Wayne my best (and only) friend, and how I’d never get a chance to fix an old jalopy like this with him again. Jennie was his
magnum opus
, named for a girl who wouldn’t talk to him at school. But Wayne, like so many other things in my life, was gone. He never got a chance to make a total fool of himself by asking Jennie out. And Jennie never got a chance to laugh at him because, she, too, was gone.