Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (16 page)

I looked at him. An old man. I looked at my dad for the first time not like my dad, but like an old man crumbling away under one too many disasters. I realized he was frightened, a husband without a wife, a father who didn’t even know his own son, a dirty, tired little man stinking of fried fish who didn’t know if the world was going to fall in around him tomorrow. I looked at him and saw just how lonely and shrunken he really was.

That’s what frightened me more than anything. He had no more power to protect me than the military, who couldn’t stop all the monsters in the world from rampaging. Only I could do that. The great and mystical Keeper.

The van was stuck in traffic. I picked up my glasses and reached for the door.

“
Kevin…” he said.

I shrugged off his hand and opened the door and jumped out, slamming the door of the dirty little van stuck in traffic with my dirty little dad in it who looked so confused by everything. I climbed over the medium and headed for the shoulder of the road, weaving through the motionless traffic full of dirty little people who didn’t know if they were going to live or die.

When I reached the edge of the street I turned around and saw my dad standing beside the open door of the van. He was calling me back while cars and trucks honked impatiently at him from every angle, but I kept walking away.

6

When I was younger, and my dad pissed me off—it didn’t happen often, but it did happen—I sometimes fantasized about running way. Just taking my backpack and walking in no specific direction until adventure found me, a real modern day Tom Sawyer. Just one without a raft or a Huck Finn.

I never would have really done it; that’s why it was only a fantasy.

I never thought I would actually go through with it, until now. But as I made my way through Brooklyn Heights, past old historical neighborhoods full of fading brownstones, novelty shops, bistros and open-air kiosks with no one at the helm, I started wondering if I had made the best decision. In the greasy yellow light of morning, the place looked deserted. Shops were empty and the streets felt weirdly apocalyptic. Most of the neighborhood had been evacuated sometime during the night. There were cars dead in the streets and newspapers scattered across the cobblestone sidewalks with big marketable banner headlines like NYC AWAITS GIANT MONSTER ATTACK!

I walked until my ribs started hurting so badly I was forced to stop and rest in front of a trade-in furniture store window where two teenaged looters were loading TVs onto a pickup truck. KTV was playing in triplicate on the TVs in the window, and a stringer from the Kaiju Network was announcing an impending quarantine of the city. Soon no one would be allowed in or out as the military at tempted to trap Qilin in the sewers. I watched the boys load the goods up onto a truck, each of the TVs dying as their plugs were pulled and they were duck-walked up the ramp of the truck. After high-fiving each other, one ran around to the driver’s side and got in, turning the engine over. It was only then that they realized what I had first noticed on approaching them—they were gridlocked in dead traffic, cars and buses parked every which way in the street when people took off on foot, with no way to drive off with the loot.

I moved on, a cynical little smile on my face. Eventually I found myself at an intersection with a broken stoplight that looked like it had been shot out. An un-New York silence hung over the street, except for the distant popping sound of gunfire as a conflict erupted a few blocks down. If more looters were about to hit town, I didn’t want their kind of trouble. I had enough of my own.

I crossed the street and ducked inside a drugstore that seemed to be open. Inside, people were haggling with the pharmacist, trying to get prescriptions filled if they could before leaving town. It felt nice to be inside the store, normal. I sat down on a bench and reached for some painkillers on a nearby rack, dry-swallowing four caplets. KTV played in the corner, the newscast illustrating how each borough of New York was being systematically evacuated. I tried to decide what to do.

If I hunted down Snowman, even if only to try and reason with him, our Kami would be forced to duke it out in the streets. And if I ran away, Qilin might follow me. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Either way, I was damned.

The painkillers helped, but they also make me feel incredibly tired. I decided to close my eyes for only a second, but a second was all it took.

7

“
Aimi,” I said, walking after her in the school corridor. I had finally caught up to her. I touched her shoulder.

Aimi turned around, but I realized, belatedly, that it was the woman from the dream several nights ago who stood there in the halls of our school. And she was wearing the same type of kimono, red silk that seemed to
breathe
, with flames dancing along the sleeves and hem like weird movie CGI. She smiled, and her teeth were long and white and almost painfully sharp in her rose red mouth.
Master
, she said, though her lips didn’t move at all. She licked her wet red lips with a long black tongue. She unfolded her arms, and I saw that beneath her draping sleeves she held Aimi in her grip, her long painted nails stretching across Aimi’s white, painfully frightened face.
For you, Master
, said the woman in the kimono. And with those words, she plunged her long catlike claws deep into Aimi’s heart.

Aimi’s eyes flew wide open, brimming with a sea of black tears. Aimi screamed.

I jerked awake. I knew it was a dream—had known for some time while still in the dream—but that didn’t make it any less painful. It had felt so real I felt compelled to glance down at my hands, afraid they had sprouted flames again. They were long and white and heavily corded, the nails bitten pitifully short, but normal.

“
Excuse me. Son?”

It was the voice that had awakened me. I jerked around guiltily.

A tall, beer-bellied security officer was standing over me, a police ban radio squawking on his belt. I wondered if he had seen me swiping the painkillers, or if it was something else that had put me on his trouble radar. Maybe my dad had gone to the police and had had an APB issued for my whereabouts. That was practical; it was something he would have done. The guard looked me over as if he were trying to see past the glasses. “Is your name Kevin Takahashi?”

I stared back at him with my patented blank look. He was looking for a blue-eyed Japanese kid. But he couldn’t see past the rosy Ozzy glasses, and thanks to my mom’s genes, I didn’t look Japanese with my face completely relaxed. “No,” I said. “No, officer.”

“
You wouldn’t happen to have a license or an ID on you?”

Great. I fiddled with the glasses. “Sure,” I said, reaching into my jeans pocket, trying to figure out what to do next. If the police hauled me back to my dad, I wasn’t sure what would happen.

No, that was a lie. I knew
exactly
what would happen. Qilin would find us both. And there was no way I was going to let that happen.

A commotion suddenly broke out at the pharmacy window. Two old women had started wrestling over a bottle of pills. The bottle popped out of their hands, caplets scattering like loose teeth across the linoleum. I nodded at them. “Better take care of that, officer.”

The security guard swore under his breath and turned to attend to the row.

I exited stage left and was halfway down the street before the door had finally closed behind me.

8

I walked. And as midmorning gave way to noon, I started ransacking my jacket pockets. Even a piece of gum would have been welcomed at this point, but my pockets were torn and empty. I wondered if other Keepers had to contend with being cold and hungry all the time, or if I was just a special case.

I spotted a vending machine across the street, next to a news kiosk with yesterday’s news stacked in neat, untouched rows. I almost kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. I charged across the street and sank four quarters into the machine, then pushed a random button, pushed it again. Nothing. I tried another button, but the results were the same. Then I noticed the lights on the machine were off. All those machines, and none of them were working. Water, water everywhere and all that good stuff. I stepped back and collapsed in the gutter, watching garbage flutter back and forth across a sewer grate.

And all at once I started to cry like a baby.

I just cried and cried there on the empty street corner, amidst the stalled traffic and tall, unseeing buildings and the machines that no longer worked in a city that was probably going to be destroyed soon anyway. I didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing. I wanted my dad. I wanted my mom. I wanted Wayne, and San Francisco. I wanted to go home. My ribs hurt. My heart hurt. And I was just so sick of everything. So sick of holding everything back, of being strong, of being an adult. I didn’t
want
to be an adult. I wanted to be a kid because that’s all I was, and I wanted to have a tantrum, and break something, and swear, and cry, and it wasn’t fair that I should have to do this,
any
of this…

Dammit.

I cried until there wasn’t anymore, until it was all used up, and then I just sat there on the curb, wiping my nose, thinking cynically, Well, that was useful. That accomplished a
lot
. I took a deep breath, took my shades off and wiped my eyes, wishing I had someone to talk to, some idea of what to do, where to go. But I was alone. More alone than I had ever been in my life.

When the first faint strains of “Fur Elise” reached my ears, I had no idea what was happening. I thought maybe I really had lost it. Then I remembered that I had programmed that into my phone. I’d forgotten because no one ever called me. I didn’t even know why I carried the damned thing around, except that my dad was a total stickler about me having a phone.

I picked it up and looked at it. It wasn’t my dad calling—though there
were
a number of missed calls, probably from when I was asleep—my frantic dad trying desperately to get in touch with me. But I didn’t recognize this number at all. I squinted at the phone as a bad feeling started churning in my gut that had nothing to do with the weird dream about Aimi or the utter, overwhelming despair I was feeling at the moment. I hit the button and licked my dry lips—they felt numbed and windburned like I’d taken a massive hit of Novocain at the dentist’s—and said, “Umm…yeah?”

All I could hear was a raspy breathing on the line. I set my jaw. If this was a prank or some telemarketer or something…

“
Who is this?” I demanded.

“
Kevin?”

I jerked. “Snowman?”

There was a long pause, and for a moment I wondered if this was a dream, or if I was just imagining that my arch-nemesis was calling me on my cell. Maybe he’d called to gloat? He was definitely the type. “Kevin…man, I’m sorry to be calling you like this.”

Snowman apologizing? Now I knew something was up.

“
How did you get my number?” I asked, thinking maybe Aimi had given it to him, or he’d hacked my computer or something.

“
Your number? The school directory. Duh.”

I wanted to sound angry, but I was too taken aback by everything, and I fell back on old, timid Kevin the Pushover. “What’s wrong?”

“
Is Aimi there with you?”

“
Aimi? No. Why?”

“
But you
were
with her last night.”

“
How do you know that?” Did he know
everything
about me?

Snowman snorted. “You made a
huge
impact at some monster party in the city. Some distant friends of mine said they saw you and Aimi there together, that you put Troy back in the hospital.”

Had I detected a note of approval in his voice? It was impossible to tell. I mean, this was Snowman; he could sound pissed doing a standup comedy routine. “We wound up in the drunk tank at the police station, not the hospital,” I corrected him. “And Troy went home with his Gramma. But you might check the hospitals tomorrow. Or maybe the morgues. Gramma wasn’t happy.”

“
Cool,” he said with approval. “Did you take her home? I’ve been calling her all morning, but she never picks up.”

I watched some dirty newspapers flutter by. “I think she’s kind of grounded.”

“
Kind of?”

“
Majorly. Horribly. Eternally grounded. Her dad looked a little pathological last night.”

“
Mura…that old bastard.” There was another pause, then Snowman said, “Why does it sound like you’re sitting in the middle of some weird, post-apocalyptic movie?”

“
Because I
am
sitting in what sounds like the middle of some weird, post-apocalyptic movie. I’m sitting on the corner of Jerome and Ocean Avenue and there’s nobody around.”

“
You’re out in the city alone?”

“
Yeah. I guess.”

“
Why are you out in the city alone? Don’t you know the military are moving in?”