Kaiju: Deadfall, page 23
Caitlin was knelt behind a slab of concrete, which had probably once been part of a blast wall. It lay embedded in the earth at a diagonal angle, as if it had been thrown into the air and then dropped, which was very possible, but that had been long ago. Moss stained its surface and gathered inside gaping lightning-bolt cracks.
Frank was about to speak to that, but Caitlin’s sister beat him to it. “That wall’s not safe. Come over here,” Autumn said, beckoning. Her voice was a protective hiss and a bit louder than any of them would have preferred. Frank heard someone that was crouched behind him sigh – probably Dodger, who, if he didn’t have a sarcastic comment for everything, made sure at least he was heard. For her part, Caitlin didn’t so much as make a face at her older sister. Instead, she moved away from the concrete slab and joined Autumn in the relative shadow of a skeletonized car. Looked like it had been a compact, the kind Frank had once driven to an advertising agency where he wrote dubious copy about fat-free snacks. His mouth watered a bit at the thought of chocolate. God, how long had it been since chocolate was a thing?
“You ever see a dead one?” Caitlin asked Chia.
The old man’s face creased in a sort of wincing smile and he shook damp wisps of gray from his forehead. “Never have, sweetheart. Heard of them. Seen pictures, but we always steered clear of the real McCoy.” Chia sounded regretful that they’d taken a different course of action this time, but their hand had been forced by...
Well, no sense breaking it down now, Frank thought. There were eight men and women huddled behind a line of blistered dead cars, waiting for dawn to break so that they could welcome the nightmare sight of a dead giant. “Them’s the facts, deputy. Now y’all just settle down. Pretend you’re in a pew on a Sunday. Hell, maybe today is Sunday.”
After hearing Chia’s words, Caitlin seemed a little less eager to see the real McCoy. There was once a time when the nineteen-year-old would likely have had her face in a smartphone and dissociated herself from the terrible tension and wonder that gripped them all. Hell, Frank would have too. As much as he’d always criticized the way that phones seemed to isolate everyone from one another, he’d more often than not preferred that little bubble of seclusion, especially in a waiting room, an elevator, bus, or Thanksgiving. That infrastructure, as far as he knew, was gone now. The only news and information came either from direct experience, or from the reports of other nomads they passed in the dark. Those reports were about as trustworthy as Frank’s ad copy. If a microwave cheeseburger that will help whip you into bikini shape sounds too good to be true, just stop thinking!
He supposed he’d been a professional liar back then. The stakes were different now. There wasn’t such a thing as a little fib anymore. There weren’t even fairy tales. There were only awful realities. The dragons were here now.
The edge of the sky on the eastern horizon bled a dark blue ichor. Dawn would be here before they knew it. From that point, the plan was to identify the location of the rumored fallen monster and give a generous berth as they continued east. From then on? South, maybe. South was usually good. Especially considering they were currently in the Midwest, where nearly any direction was good so long as it led away. This was Missouri, to be specific – Frank was pretty sure the pile of rubble they sat in at present had once been the city of Independence. To think they’d ventured this far into the hottest of hot zones, and all based on what someone had dared call a simple fib. However, this was no time for ruminating. The blue was spreading across the sky and soon they would see.
Frank sat on his butt in the road and glanced past Chia, their de facto leader, to the group’s two newest additions. It was too soon yet to tell whether these would become permanent members or just drift away. Frank suspected the former. The kid, a seventeen-year-old called Duckie, was clearly disabled. There was nothing about his appearance that suggested it – he was only as disheveled and frail as the rest of them – but it had been his blaring exuberance when he’d run at them yelling, “We seen a Little One that’s dead! It’s right up there and it’s dead!”
This had been the previous evening. The kid had emerged from a crumbling auto dealership just as the group was walking past it, and God how he’d been hollering. It was as if it were the greatest thing in the world that a Little One lay just a few miles ahead.
Quebra was the only armed member of the group and he’d drawn a bead on the kid immediately. The kid was frozen, face slackening, bewildered, and perhaps dismayed at the reaction. The rest of the group, Frank included, had just stared.
“You’re a little too excited, son,” Quebra had said in his flat tone of authority. His stance rigid, he’d followed Duckie in his sights as the kid wavered from side to side, face ashen.
“You sick?” Quebra called. It seemed the only reasonable explanation for running blind at the group of strangers, for yelling at the top of one’s lungs. Kid had to be infected.
Duckie had said, “Yes,” almost shamefully, hands falling at his sides.
At that moment, Quebra was training an AR-15 on the kid. Frank remembered watching Quebra’s tensed forearms, the only part of him not swathed in camouflage. He remembered wondering if the soldier was just going to shoot the kid right then and there, all business, no mercy, and if that wouldn’t have been the right thing.
Then a woman’s voice had called from the auto dealership. She’d stepped through a shattered display window and shouted shrilly, “He’s not sick, not like that!” She was middle-aged and frizzy gray hair (they all had at least a little) fanned out around her head. She held her arms out pleadingly and walked toward the street.
“We’re not sick,” she’d said, more softly. She pulled up the sleeves of her ratty cardigan sweater and pushed the hair back from her neck. “Duckie,” she called, “pull up your shirt and show them. Very slowly.” To Quebra she added, “He’s unarmed. He’s a child.”
Quebra had not moved in all that time and did not reply then. His silence said it all. Doesn’t matter if he’s a kid. If he’s armed or infected, that’s what matters. Not that Frank believed Quebra to be a cold man. He was just a man who did the things no one else could bring themselves to do, things that had to be done.
Duckie, with an almost comical slowness, as if he were mocking the woman’s command, had peeled his navy blue sweatshirt up from his waist. He’d pulled it up past his pecs and then, at the woman’s direction, had turned in a slow circle to show his bare torso, front and back. He was clear of sores. Quebra had lowered the rifle a millimeter.
“He’s mentally disabled,” the woman had said. There hadn’t been any exasperation in her voice – no tone of How could you not know? How dare you? – but Frank had heard a certain weariness, the weariness of someone who has made a firm and loving commitment and who is being exhausted by it. He remembered thinking she must be his mother.
O’Brien, as it had turned out, was Duckie’s Special Education teacher, or had once been. She had explained that Duckie’s family was dead, as was hers, and she’d been shepherding him across the Midwest ever since. She’d gone from an educator to a full-time caretaker, and Frank supposed it was because neither she nor Duckie had anyone else left. He hoped there wasn’t anything weird going on between the two, though that thought seemed ridiculous now in the early hours of dawn, as he watched O’Brien sponge dirt from Duckie’s face with a spit-moistened sleeve.
After accepting O’Brien and Duckie, the group had rested up inside the auto dealership until dark and then had resumed their trek on a path which allegedly contained a dead giant. They had moved with painstaking slowness, stopping often, and so it was only now that they sat in this car-choked stretch of road next to ruined blast walls, and waited to see the creature – the Little One, as Duckie and so many others called them. Duckie, however, did it with no trace of irony. He did it because, in spite of the fact that the Little Ones were some three hundred feet tall, there was simply a much bigger one standing to the north. Them’s the facts.
There they sat as the sun played chicken with the night sky. Frank, an ad man with bad lungs and joints that screamed whenever he shifted. Chiapperino, an old fart originally from Queens who exhibited an almost superhuman patience and incredible empathy with people – and who had said nothing during Quebra’s confrontation with Duckie. Duckie himself, who was a nice kid even if a little loud sometimes. He had to be reminded frequently that there were human monsters of which one must be wary. O’Brien was every bit the part of a surrogate mother. She looked to be about Frank’s age, forty-ish, though weathered as they all were.
Caitlin and her sister Autumn were also recent additions to the group. Caitlin’s long hair was startlingly dark, maybe because it was unwashed, although it seemed healthy. That was why it caught Frank’s eye so often. The girl was attractive to be sure, but Frank’s mind, even in its most idiotic recesses, no longer processed the sight of a girl in that way. Those idle, often ugly thoughts which seemed to crop up regularly in a man’s brain regardless of circumstance, had been retired when the shit hit the fan and deeper instincts took charge. Autumn was pretty too, and her hair seemed smooth and clean, even if it had to have been at least a month since they’d had enough clean water to wash anything. Autumn’s hair was red. Somewhere along the way, while traveling alone with her orphan sister, Autumn had taken the time to break into some Walgreen’s and apply scarlet hair dye. She looked maybe thirty, “Cate” being her kid sister. Frank only really thought of her in reference to Caitlin, because Autumn had been careful so far not to exude a lick of personality. She was fiercely guarded. Though Caitlin was more outgoing, Autumn kept her on a short leash and the tension in it was apparent on rare occasion.
Then there was Quebra, who was always good for a joke unless he’d been “activated.” That was what Chia called it when Quebra’s training kicked in and he went rigid. Frank had found the comparison akin to a hunting dog but had said nothing. When he wasn’t activated, Quebra and Chia could sit around a fire for a solid hour and trade one-liners until everyone was struggling to keep from laughing at the tops of their lungs. That was good, if a little unsafe, because Frank was certain that if they didn’t all laugh once in a while, they never could have gotten this far. Quebra, their trained killer, knew that perhaps better than anyone did.
The final member of their octet was Ethan Dodgman. Dodger, he preferred to be called. Twenty-six, the son of a governor and the nephew of a U.S. Senator, and wealthy. These were the things Dodger wanted everyone to know about him, things that no longer mattered in the real world. Frank had no reason to doubt any of Dodger’s claims, but like everyone else, he didn’t give a shit either. The only compelling part of Dodger’s story was that he’d been cast out of his family’s state-of-the-art doomsday shelter when he’d drawn the short straw. “I’m sorry son, we just don’t have enough for all twelve of us, but you’re young. You’ll have a better go of it out there than your old man will. America needs your old man, son. They need him down here in the war room.” Frank imagined Dodger’s father had delivered this icy farewell from behind a tumbler of scotch. A mad aristocrat who believed that the American government still existed and that there was a seat of power with his name on it. Then again, Dodger also seemed to believe these things. Even though he’d been out here in the shit for a good three years - had watched civil unrest become civil war, and then civil nothing - he still talked like Mr. Class President gunning for an internship with a Congressman.
They were waiting to see a dead giant. Them’s the facts.
#
When it was light enough for Quebra to use his binoculars, he stood with his elbows on the roof of a stripped sedan and took a look.
“There it is,” he breathed, and his whole body tensed. “It’s right there, compadres.”
Dodger rose immediately to his feet. “Let’s have a look.”
Without removing the binoculars from his eyes, Quebra said, “Go ahead.”
They each stood and approached Quebra’s back slowly, as if he could shield them if the thing suddenly became undead and spotted their position. Frank had never, ever heard of such a thing, even in the craziest ramblings of fellow nomads, but he half-expected it just the same. His knees creaked and groaned as he left his seat in the road and stood beside the soldier.
Lord God, it was only a hundred yards away. The great, fearsome head lay in a crater of asphalt in a fast-food parking lot. It was right there.
Frank had never been this close, and as the sun proper finally rose, he saw the so-called Little One in such gruesome, startling detail that he nearly jumped. It was like realizing one had been sleepwalking, just as one’s hands reached for the orange-hot oven range. Similarly, he saw Dodger and Autumn jerk away. The latter clamped a hand on Caitlin’s elbow.
The Little One’s head was long, narrow, the entire thing beak-shaped, and made up on sharp, offensive angles. It was like a giant pair of jagged pliers, only these pliers were made of a smooth, bone-like matter, a sort of armor, or an exoskeleton, Frank supposed. He’d seen them before on TV back when there was TV. He’d seen photos back when there was photography. Some people called them bone giants, but now, this close, he saw that the creature’s substance resembled petrified wood more than bone. There were subtle grains running along the sharp snout, a snout which ended in grasping hooks. The mouth was closed, but Frank had seen footage of the open maw. Rather than opening into top and bottom halves, it split into four splaying mandibles that clawed at the air like the fingers of a hungry hand. In the palm of that hand, Frank had glimpsed the great wet wound that was the actual throat. They had eaten people. That was fact. It didn’t seem that they needed to. They didn’t seem to subsist on anything other than wanton destruction. Long, barbed arms with clubby fists plowed into vehicles and buildings. Frank had seen the film. Their curiously bowed legs rammed straight into bridges as if the structures had no right to be there – and the bridges would disintegrate, throwing cars, cables, and people. That was what they did, the Little Ones, when they were alive. This thing was completely unmoving and the blood-red orb of its eye was covered by what looked like a sheet of bone. It looked dead as dead could possibly be, what Frank could see of it anyway. Beyond its shoulders, the rest of the body was hidden behind a strip mall blackened by old fire.
“How long is it?” Caitlin asked. She was talking to Chia.
He said, “Never got any bigger than a few hundred feet, not as far as I know.” Three hundred feet, though – that was fifty men, an office tower, the end of the goddamn world if it stepped on you. It was marvelous to behold for all the terror it inspired. To think of the moment when this beast had collapsed here. How the earth must have quaked, how any unbroken windows in the vicinity must have shattered, how junked cars must have jumped and blast walls crumbled. When a Little One moved with will and intent, it was worse, of that Frank was sure. He never wanted to glimpse another of these things alive again, not after the last one.
“If that’s a Little One,” Caitlin asked, “how big is the big one?”
In moments like these, it seemed everyone turned to Frank. He wanted to tell them he was a copy guy, not a poet, certainly not a journalist, but they wanted to hear him tell it. Even though he’d only ever seen it on the news – just like the rest of the group, so far as he knew – he was considered to be the resident wordsmith. Caitlin followed the others’ gazes to him and her questioning eyes threw glints of sunrise at him. He turned from her for a moment, clearing his throat, and then spoke.
“It’s – did you ever go on an airplane, Cate?”
“When I was a baby,” she replied. “I don’t remember.” At nineteen, she would have been born right after all this started. Wouldn’t have been long after that when commercial airlines began closing up shop. Frank thought for a few seconds. “Well, airplanes, the kind you and me would travel on, used to get up to about thirty, thirty-five thousand feet. Up there in the clouds, if you can imagine. You would fly above the clouds sometimes and stare down at them from your window seat. It was really kind of fantastic.” It had been. The sky had belonged to Man then and far above it, the exosphere with its unthinkable litter of satellites and junk, but this was about the Big One who stood now in Chicago, dormant for years. What dormant meant was anyone’s guess. Most knew to leave it at that, lest their recurring nightmares got worse.
“The Big One,” Frank said, “stands about seven miles tall. That’s around thirty-seven thousand feet. Its head is literally in the clouds.” Caitlin didn’t acknowledge the turn of phrase and Frank went on. “The highest peak in the world is Mount Everest. The Big One has it beat by eight thousand feet. They never did figure out how something that big and that heavy managed to walk at all.”
“Most people don’t call it the Big One,” Quebra said, his eyes still in the binoculars. “They call it the Dragon and things like that. Doesn’t really look like one though, especially now. Hard to make out any features on anything that big. It always was just like a giant mountain.”
“I prefer the German Hölle geht,” Chia said quietly. “Hell Walks.” He looked at the others and said, “Very theatrical – Biblical, I guess - but I’ve ever seen some Biblical shit, it’s that thing.”
The Beast, some others called it, and there were other variations based upon language and religion but Chia was right, Hell Walks pretty much summed it up. Except it didn’t walk anymore, and if there was a God, it never would again.
Unless He’d sent it, of course.
Autumn pointed at the Little One lying in the parking lot. “We saw one once. Not quite this close, but...” she trailed off and held Caitlin close. She’d almost said something personal, had almost given away some backstory.
Caitlin did. “I remember. I didn’t get to see it because I was under a bunch of crap in the back of a van, but it was when we were in Tornado Alley. I saw the tornadoes, three of ‘em chasing us, before my head got shoved under a bunch of luggage.” She glanced sideways at Autumn to indicate that her big sister had done the shoving. “We grew up there. They say the storms got worse and worse and worse because of the monsters. That’s how Mom and Dad died.”
