Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (8 page)

His crossed forearms made contact with the thin wooden wall of the partially destroyed home, and the surface of it tore under the impact like origami paper. His arms barely felt it, and then he was slammed into another wall. He slid down to the floor, broken slats of wood falling on top of his head. Small pebble-like chunks of plaster rained down on Haruki, and as he stood, wobbly on his feet, he found himself looking at a completely undestroyed bathroom wall, with the mirror over the wash basin still undisturbed. Covered as he was in plaster dust and dirt, Haruki looked like a ghost.

“Haruki! You’re alive!”

He glanced over to see the pilot and the girl. They were standing at the door to the broken building. Then he ran to them, shouting, “Go!”

They turned just before he got to them, and they sprinted along the street, away from the mega-snake, which was hissing and striking at something unseen in the billowing soot and dirt. Now that Haruki shot a look at the thing, he could see where his confusion had come from. He
had
been hit by the tail end. It was just that the creature didn’t have a proper tail. It had a head at each end! As far as he could tell in the quick glance he had of the beast, both heads were identical.

As he and the others got several yards away from the massive beast, they found the two surviving teen boys—the one with the glasses, who had called to Haruki, and the grim-faced lad. The boys were huddled behind a pile of rocks and construction sand, which had obviously been dumped in one of the war’s few lulls, in anticipation of making repairs on the ruined neighborhood. The boys were peering intently over Haruki’s shoulder at the ouroboros-like thing with equally dour looks, until suddenly their faces changed. The boys began to look elated.

Dakota and the girl skirted the pile of sand to the right and Haruki peeled left, then he threw himself down with the boys and heaved, trying to catch his breath from his recent sprint. As he looked back up the street, he could see what had given the teens hope.

“Kashikoi,” he said, amazed at what he saw.

He had heard tales of Kashikoi when he was a teenager. Other teens spoke of the behemoth as if it was a force of holy good in the world. Most of the teens claimed to never have seen the creature, but those few who had, spoke with a glow in their eyes, always making Haruki think they were telling the truth. Most first-borns, when they had the sight for the few years before it faded, would spot all manner of unusual monsters and creatures that existed in the world. Things from flying monkey creatures the size of a loaf of bread to human-sized monsters like a horned cyclops, and bizarre hybrid things that could barely be called animals, like winged antelope and dogs with bones growing out of their bodies. But most of the creatures the Japanese teens had seen—or at least those Haruki had heard of—were of small scale. Only a few ever spotted an omega-class creature like the massive ouroboros, or the gigantic squid that had battled it in Hiroshima, shooting purple lightning from between its long pink tentacles, out of what appeared to be its ass. Haruki had spotted something once that was about the size of a dinosaur swimming off the shore of Chiba, but until he had seen the two gargantuan creatures trying to kill each other in Hiroshima, that had been it.

Now he was seeing the omega-size beast of all beasts.

Kashikoi was something akin to a mighty tortoise. Its shell was a steeply pitched mound with lumps protruding up in steeper bursts—as if the animal under the shell were trying to force its way out in pointy places. The legs were powerful scaled things that resembled a cross between a typical tortoise’s tough limbs and the leathery clawed things to be found on a massive monitor lizard. Each scale on the monster’s armor was larger than a man, and standing as it was on its hind legs, the beast must have topped over a hundred feet in height. It would have been taller if its heads—the two of them on individual necks, stretching from doughy folds at the front of the shell—had been pointed upward to the sky. Instead they angled down and forward. Toward the humongous snake beast.

Each head had thick bony horns and ridges, protruding backward along the jawline, and triple fins on top of the rounded head, giving the creature more of a dragon look. The gnarled bird-beak jaws opened wide and dripped a spattering pea green saliva that burned holes through the ground wherever it touched.

The ouroboros demon shot its head out, lancing its forked tongue at Kashikoi’s belly, but the under surface of the shell was as thickly armored as the outer surface, and the snake simply bounced off, its twisting snapping body following the head in an arc through the air.

Kashikoi swung a powerful foreleg down, the jagged tips of the claws on its foot—snapped off in some long ago battle—still tearing a gouge down the snake’s side, before the wounded ouroboros skittered away sideways on its stumpy side fins. As the snake-horror blasted through the brick wall of a factory, as if the wall weren’t there, masonry and smoke shooting high into the sky, Kashikoi lowered its upper body down, until its full weight slammed into the ground with the same sharp booming thump that Haruki had heard earlier.

But now the impact was much closer to him, and he was amazed as the earth shot him upward into the air from the strike, as if he had been on a trampoline. He landed in the soft sand pile, and turned to see the others all hitting the ground as well. The noise from the impact was louder than the sound of a Mitsubishi jet roaring overhead, and the sheer weight of the creature blasted a wall of air and dust toward Haruki and the others that felt like a hurricane wind.

“We can’t stay here!” he shouted.

They were picking themselves up when the air shook with a trembling vibration. A powerful shriek, like those Haruki had heard earlier, ripped into his eardrums. His hands shot to cover his ears from the hideous, somewhat mechanical sound.

Kashikoi was roaring!

Haruki saw that the ouroboros had lunged again, and as it had had no luck against Kashikoi’s densely armored shell, it struck a rear leg this time, sinking twenty foot white fangs deeply into the tortoise monster’s scaly flesh. The blood that squirted from the wound in a gushing burst was a deep dark green. Kashikoi shrieked and focused the alien eyes of both its heads on the double-ended snake, where it was still clamped to the injured leg with one of those ends.

Golden fire ripped out of all four of Kashikoi’s eyes, tearing into the snake fiend. The wave of heat rushed back at Haruki as the ouroboros instantly recoiled, releasing its grip and using its strange fins to wind its way sideways, back and away from the injured mammoth amphibian.

Kashikoi lunged fast toward the retreating two-headed snake, his immense size no impediment to his speed. The ground shook hard at each impact of the massive claws, and as Haruki fell to his side, he saw the immense tortoise creature’s left head snap open and clamp down hard on the snake thing’s neck, just behind one head. Steam rose from the ouroboros’s body where the powerful jaw had snapped, and the snake tried to recoil, but Kashikoi’s neck unexpectedly yanked backward, pulling the twisting snake into the air. As soon as its head at the other end had cleared the ground, Kashikoi swept a powerful foreleg at the monster and released his hold near the opposite head. The effect was the snake monstrosity being hurled through the air, as if it weighed no more than a fly batted away by a human hand.

But the creature was coming for Haruki and the others.

Haruki turned and moved toward the girl. Dakota was on the other side of her, having just gained his feet again. The other two teens had fled. Haruki ran into the girl and pushed her into Dakota, and the three of them tumbled down the side of the sand pile to the bottom, just as the top of the pile erupted in a spray of sand.

The ouroboros swept just barely over their heads. It flew further down the street and slammed through two buildings, twisting and winding all the way. Haruki and the other two struggled to their feet yet again, as the winding snake slithered out of the rubble and back toward them, retracting a head at one end, and then striking up and forward. It would clear Haruki’s position by several feet, so his eyes naturally shot upward to watch the snake strike. Its tongue shot out, as it raced at an incline up through the air. It spewed a searing line of pink energy from its mouth, the jaws open nearly at a 180 degree angle, all fangs pointing forward. The energy beam shot across the sky and scored along the side of one of Kashikoi’s two necks. The tortoise-beast started to fall backward.

Haruki turned back in time to see the other end of the snake was coming his way, and staying low, near ground level.

Dakota had seen it, too.

Haruki had just a split second for his eyes to meet Dakota’s before both men were in action.

Haruki raced toward the American, but he moved instead for the beautiful girl. She was looking upward, as the mega-tortoise fell over backward onto its shell in excruciating slow motion. Haruki shifted his angle for her, as his eyes swept back toward the quickly advancing
snake head. It shifted in mid-flight, its oversized eyes—larger than trucks—suddenly twitching, as its inner eyelids closed vertically, before retracting open again. It twisted its head in mid-flight.

It had seen them.

Haruki lunged, just as Dakota reached the girl and pivoted. Dakota shoved the girl, throwing her directly into Haruki’s arms. Haruki wrapped his arms around her as they fell to the side. He twisted so he would land on his back, cushioning the girl from the fall.

But no one was left to save Dakota.

He tried to turn at the last second, one arm cocked back as if he meant to punch the monster in the mouth. But the jaws were wide open, the immense fangs all pointing directly at Dakota as several of them skewered him from behind, right along the edge of the creature’s mouth. The long fangs ripped out the front of Dakota’s body. Then the huge snake mashed its mouth shut, folding Dakota’s pierced corpse in half and grinding him into several pieces, some of which fell to the ground as the beast’s head flew past. Haruki saw a leg and part of the pelvis still jammed between the gargantuan teeth before the ouroboros passed over him.

The girl had not seen, as her face had been turned toward Haruki’s chest. And her long wavy hair had flopped over to cover her face. Haruki turned to his side and twisted to his knees, dragging the girl up. He swiped his hand across her face, pushing her hair back. Her face was gaunt and pale. She was in shock. He bent down and put his shoulder into her waist, hefting her over him like he had seen firemen carry victims.

He ran down the street, focusing on his footing amongst the rubble. When he was past the second building into which the ouroboros had crashed, he turned to catch sight of the battle one last time, before rounding a corner of a still-standing steel factory building.

Kashikoi had indeed landed on its steeply rounded bulbous back, but the beast kept rolling. Its giant back claws had dug in, the momentum carrying it around and up. The immense thing was now standing on its hind legs like a man. The ouroboros had fired its terrifying pink mouth rays again, but they appeared to do no damage to Kashikoi’s armored belly. The rays shot past Kashikoi too, though, and when they did, they obliterated any man-made structure they found.

Just before Haruki rounded the building’s corner, he saw the move that was coming. Kashikoi was bringing both its forelegs, and the jagged, scarred claws on their tips, inward to crush on the sides of one of the ouroboros’s heads like a vice grip. The boom shook the wall of the building, as Haruki rushed past, the girl unconscious over his shoulder. He stopped only three times before he made it to the harbor and a ship that took him and the girl to Yakushima Island, south of the main islands of Japan.

~

“Who won the fight, father?”

Jiro looked out over the landscape of bones in the distance, most easy to see from their new vantage, high on the massive grassy hill near the center of the island. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun shone brightly across the strange landscape. Shinobi had been frightened by the bones at first, but upon seeing them closer, after the two had fixed the light on the lighthouse, the ever-present thick carpet of green moss that covered much of the island and the ancient bones somehow charmed the lad. Jiro stood up and stretched his lower back, then smiled.

“Kashikoi dragged the ouroboros to the sea, but the beast was revived by the water and escaped.”

Shinobi stood and pretended to stretch his own back, as he had seen Jiro do. The boy often imitated his father. Jiro smiled again.

“So…the world believes that the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was from Atomic bombs?”

Jiro grunted. “Most people. Even many with the sight have no reason to doubt history. But history is always written by those who win in conflicts, Shinobi. The Americans claimed the credit for the destruction—who knows what
they
saw as being responsible.”

The man started down the grassy hillside, and he could hear his boy following him.

“What happened to Grandfather Haruki, then?” the boy inquired.

“He and the woman married. They moved north to Wakkanai, and he took the job as lighthouse keeper of the surrounding islands. But your grandfather never lost the sight, Shino. Like you and I, he kept his ability to see the creatures his whole life. Your grandmother—my mother—forgot what she had been through just months after it happened. They were both
nijū hibakusha
. Double survivors. Japan has officially recognized 165 hibakusha as having survived the destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but your grandparents were actually 166 and 167. But they never told anyone. Your grandmother’s memory of the event was muddled at best, and Haruki could never tell anyone what had really happened. He kept track of Kashikoi, though, as the creature moved north through the islands of Japan, in the days after the war. The beast was much more careful in its travels then, he said. Almost as if it was aware of the terrible destruction its battle with the ouroboros had wrought.”