Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (25 page)

I rocked forward, clutching my throat, coughing bloody droplets onto the broken ground. Mr. Serizawa had said nothing about taking damage for your Kami. There was simply no air left to breathe and my lungs felt like they were full of concrete. I ripped at my shirt as darkness began seeping into the corners of my eyes. For a horrible moment I gave into an overwhelming feeling of defeat. Years ago I’d been helpless against bullies like Bryce. I certainly hadn’t had the power to save San Francisco, or even my mom, for that matter. I really wasn’t much of a hero, whatever Aimi thought. Hell, I wasn’t even much of a son, of late.

The flames of the sword glowed bright neon blue. I set my jaw and gripped the sword in both hands. There was absolutely nothing I could do about the past. I could only do my best about the
now
. That was all I had. And as the sound of Raiju’s cries grew fainter in my mind, little more than a whisper of breath, I directed my terror and my loss and my loneliness
down
, feeding it into the ground with a cry and a massive burst of fire. I directed it into the Kami under my control.

Raiju let loose a ferocious roar that sounded like it was being ripped from the very center of her being. Finally, she clutched the tentacle stuck in her throat with her claws. And even though she was drowning on her own blood, even though she was in terrible pain, she managed to rip the whole tentacle from Qilin’s body in a gush of foul black fluid that slicked the streets and surrounding buildings. She screamed as she pulled the tentacle from her own throat, and I could feel the sound razoring my brain open. But I refused to release my hold on the sword.

The ragged wound in her preternatural flesh burned with fitful blue fire, knitting itself closed in seconds. Oxygen flowed back into her lungs—and into mine.

Rising with a reverberating snarl, Raiju climbed to her upright, bipedal position, her lips curling back over her saber teeth, and began lashing out at the tentacles that bound her with renewed rage. The fire along her mane and back leaped higher, burning not red this time but cold blue, like her eyes, like the fire that now danced along the blade of the sword and up the backs of my hands, surrounding me in a burning blue halo. She did the smile-thing, her mouth falling full open, but this time a blast of brilliant blue fire burst from her enormous, slavering jaws, a fire so hot it engulfed the front of Qilin’s whole body in seconds and made the beast’s tentacles explode into fountains of burning black fluid.

Qilin screamed, staggering stiffly back like a creature gone blind with pain, his clawed hands scraping blindly at the open air full of burning debris. Raiju narrowed her eyes as she took a moment to admire her handiwork. Then she suddenly charged in for the kill. The two kaiju clung together in a deathlock. But even now, with Raiju at full power and Qilin wounded, Raiju found it nearly impossible to kill the beast. Each time she grappled with an arm or a tentacle, the black atomic sludge slipped between her claws. Try as she might, she could not get a handhold on Qilin, as malleable as water and as caustic as hydrochloric acid, and the more she snatched at the toxic flesh, the more her clawed hands burned, and the more Qilin shifted away.

Soon Qilin would retreat, slipping down the deepest holes into the city’s underbelly to reform, to wait, to strike elsewhere. Raiju would have to finish off the monster within the next few minutes, or risk losing it forever.

14

A military convoy was headed my way, cresting the rise in the street. A line of vehicles followed. Times Square would be swarming with soldiers in minutes. But I didn’t have minutes.
We
didn’t have minutes. Soon Qilin would slip away, and the military would be powerless to stop it.

I turned my attention back on the battle taking place in the burning rubble of a half dozen buildings. Raiju, in desperation, had resorted to her most primitive weapons and was lashing out at her enemy with her enormous claws, ripping chunks of the creature away in boiling streaks of fire as she dug into him and
through
his tough outer hide into his soft, toxic innards. Qilin screamed and tried desperately to retreat, but Raiju had him by the
insides
now. I winced each time she pulled at the rotting poison mass within the creature and flung parts of it away, filling the street with steaming piles of offal.

Aimi
, I thought, feeling numb and almost delirious with pain and horror. She was most certainly dead by now. In fact, I hoped for it. For Aimi to be alive and suffering within that monster…

Raiju roared and finally drove her fist right through the thing, withdrawing it so quickly an enormous pile of festering muck was torn loose from the heart and flew two hundred feet in the air, slamming down into the street at my feet, spattering both my jeans and the sword with inky, toxic black sludge. The wounded Qilin staggered back, weaving with pain and weariness, a hole through his heart, or where his heart would have been, had he had one.

The two monsters eyed each other warily.

I held my breath, waiting, watching Raiju fingering the burning black slime between her claws. With a frustrated bellow of pure rage, she slashed at the air in front of her nearly formless enemy, then suddenly leaped on Qilin, slamming the full weight of her bulk against the nearly eviscerated monster. Qilin flew backward into one of the few remaining standing brownstones, the whole structure crumbling down atop him and pinning him soundly under a million pounds of burning bricks and rubble.

Qilin made a last attempt to reform into something smaller, something that could slip away, but Raiju opened her massive jaws and let loose with another blast of blue fire like a flamethrower on high.

And Qilin, at last, began to burn.

He tilted its head skyward and let loose a shrill scream of torment unlike anything I had heard him emit up until now, the very fabric of his being breaking apart, his eyes bursting like balloons full of rotten water. Pieces of his body broke away as the fire pouring from Raiju’s jaws consumed him and blew those pieces heavenward in burning black clouds that stank of death and disease and every manmade disaster.

Raiju finally closed her jaws and blinked slowly at the remains of the creature.

Qilin’s claws flailed uselessly and his head twisted from side to side, but from the waist down he was simply…gone. And still he fought on, mindlessly trying to rise, to run away.

Raiju leaned over the creature to examine him. Qilin suddenly thrust his head upward, and the longest of his horns penetrated Raiju under the jaw with a searing pain I felt all the way to my brain. Raiju screamed as she grasped the horn between her long, black claws. With a mighty wrench, she yanked the horn from the top of the monster’s head, long strings of sludge sliding off Qilin’s malformed head. Slowly, she pulled the horn from her own throat and held it in both hands as that, too, turned to black slime that ran through her fingers like muddied rain.

The pain made her mean. The pain wiped away any mercy she might have shown her fellow Kami.

She turned her attention on her enemy one last time. I felt the blue fire come to her—come to us both—and again my hands caught fire, burning so hot and cold at once I screamed and clutched myself with the utter, mind-searing pain of it all. It was the deepest, darkest pain within me coming to horrible life, burning up, bursting forth. I felt my rage. I felt Raiju’s own. Her eyes glowed bright, heavenly blue as a final burst of white flames coughed out from between her massive teeth. She poured that white-hot, smelting fire into her enemy, bathing Qilin up and down, burning him and the building rubble around him down to soft, crackling black stuff. Closing her jaws and smiling savagely, she punched at the monster’s head, bursting Qilin into a mountain of flyblown pieces that crumbled away.

Her eyes blinked at her work with an almost human intelligence. Without making another sound, she turned away from the ruins and looked directly at me, and I heard her voice deep in the innermost whorls of my brain:
A gift for you, my handsome Master.

She smiled at me. Then she roared savagely in the last second before I pulled the sword from the rubble and the fires of sleep consumed her and she was gone once more from this earth.

15

I had no idea what gift Raiju had given me. And to be honest, I was too exhausted and battle-weary to care.

The sword fell to the broken ground and burned up; I followed soon after.

Lying there in the rubble, my hair and clothes smoking, I waited to vomit, but my stomach was painfully empty. I could only manage a few pathetic dry heaves as wisps of white smoke drifted off the surface of my skin. I was so tired I thought I might die right then and there. I almost wished I would.

And all I could think was,
She’s gone. Aimi’s gone. I killed her. Oh God, I killed Aimi...

The convoy was here at last. I could hear sirens and trucks crunching over gravel as they drew as close to the disaster zone as they could. I realized I wasn’t going to pass out like I wanted to, and I really didn’t want to be found here and taken back to the police station, so I pushed myself up, scrabbling amidst all the debris. That’s when I spied movement out of the corner of my eye.

The great lump of black sludge that Raiju had torn from Qilin’s heart was moving. My heart lurched, then seemed to stop dead in my chest.
Oh God
, I thought,
please don’t let it be alive…not again.

But as I watched, the slime fell away and a thin, ragged girl stood up, covered from head to foot in shining black tar, her hair in greasy tatters plastered around her pale, drawn face. She shivered and hugged her shoulders, then fell to her knees in utter exhaustion.

“
Kevin,” Aimi gasped. “He’s gone. Qilin’s gone.”

Raiju’s gift coughed up some muck and then gave me a tired and sad smile of victory.

E P I L O G U E

The End of the Beginning

1

The Hole was rebuilt six months later and dedicated to those students who had lost their lives there. Around that time I started seeing posters going up for the grand reopening all over the school halls. Aimi asked me to be there. She was playing for Destroyer in a gig that would be broadcast live all over the country and the Internet simultaneously.

Michelle told me all the details while I worked on her bike.

I scooted back to show her how I had tightened the manifold on her VTX—I mean, I felt I owed it to her, since I had pretty much killed it. I pointed my pocket flashlight at different parts of the engine, explaining how each section worked together. It was a sweet bike, but the alignment was even worse now that I had mangled it.

Michelle had given me a new nickname: Kevin Takahashi: Slayer of Bikes. She also helped me upgrade Jennie as part of my Shop project. That way, she said, I wouldn’t eat up any more of her own Shop projects. Rex had disengaged the killswitch, and Michelle had given Jennie a lighter frame and a fantastic new paint job—black, with flames and skulls. She said she was determined that Jennie should look kickass in case I ever had to do stupid, insane stuff again. Not that I planned to do stupid, insane stuff ever again. Promise.

That Saturday, the night of the big concert, I stood there in front of my closet door mirror, fixing my clothes and choosing my glasses. My dad poked his head cautiously into my room. He and I had been slowly bridging the rift between us, but it was slow going, a lot of work. He asked for less out of me; I tried to do him more favors. Somehow, we met in the middle, even though neither one of us were talking much. The night he hit me remained between us, un-discussed, unobserved. But I preferred it that way—if we didn’t discuss it, it didn’t really happen. That’s what I told myself, even though I knew it was the fattest of the big, fat lies.

“
Do you need a lift to the club?” he asked, resting his shrunken bulk against the doorway. His eyes looked tired, his face darkened by beard because he had forgotten to shave again. His apron had plenty of grease stains, naturally.

I buttoned the cuffs of the black satin club shirt with embroidered sakura along the lapels that Snowman had lent me for the night. He said that way I wouldn’t look like a Goodwill refugee anymore. He told me my hair was hopeless, though. “I’m good,” I said, smoothing down my old broken-in blue jeans. “I want to take Jennie out, show off her new moves.”

I waited for him to say something about that, about me being grounded or whatever, but he just stood there, silently watching me like he didn’t recognize me at all. I looked at him in the dresser mirror. “I’ll be back before midnight. Promise.” I opened the top drawer of the dresser where I keep my glasses, opting for my little rosy Ozzies.

Dad continued to stare at me in the mirror, brushing at the silver just recently cropped up in his hair. He looked like he wanted to say something. Then he suddenly noticed the pack of Blacks in the open drawer atop my tee shirts. I blame Snowman; he’s the one who got me hooked on cloves. I waited for Dad to freak, to lay into me. Instead, he turned away. “Try to be back by midnight, okay?” he said, making no mention of the smokes.