They all had the sinking feeling inside that this was the worst sign for the ones they had come out here to rescue. If they’d been fending off beasts like that for the past few days, they had no chance. Zero. It seemed like the only option from here was for the rescue party to retrace the markers and get the fuck out while they still could.
REUNION
The bush was for crickets and for lizards, for birds and rattlesnakes and bone-dry trees in rusted motion. The correlation was there, the image of bush and nature, but the landscape was distorted, skewed, jarring. The stars came out to spill their stories.
The rescue party set up camp in the cave for the night. The birds had settled, revealing an impossible quiet throughout the canyon. Cooper and Mia sat just outside, leaving the twins to rest.
“How can anyone sleep in a place like this?” Mia asked.
“Yeah, I don’t think they can,” Cooper said. “I could close my eyes, but my mind would still be running, cycling through the details, picking apart the case piece by piece, turning it inside out, asking the same questions over and over again, wondering why the answers never get any clearer. We know we won’t find anything in the night. Don’t want to get lost. Don’t want to get injured. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. The best we can do is give our bodies a rest, even if our minds can’t.”
“Have you always been that way, or just since you were a cop?” she asked.
“Probably a bit of both. I’ve always had a hard time shutting my mind off, but I think the detective job has kicked it up a notch.”
“You think that’s the reason you became a cop?”
“I think it might be one of the reasons,” Cooper said. “But mainly I think I just saw a gap in the justice system, and I thought I was the right guy to fill it.”
“I think if I had been born a guy, I’d have been pressured to be a cop,” Mia said. “Like it’s some family tradition all the guys have to uphold. I think my dad would have liked that better. A child who’s easier to relate to.”
“You’ve lived in Alice Springs your whole life?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“You think he doesn’t know how to deal with you because you’re a girl?” he said.
“Something along those lines.”
“I don’t think you would have followed in his footsteps either way. It’s just not who you are. Don’t worry, he doesn’t really ‘get’ me either.”
Mia leaned into Cooper. “He’s had it pretty rough, doing the whole ‘single parent’ thing. Out here it’s just so easy to feel isolated. I mean, here I am, jumping into cars with total strangers just because I’ve lost the people closest to me. I’m afraid. I’m lonely. My father thinks he’s got his issues under control, but really, he doesn’t. What else have I got left to lose?”
Cooper wrapped his arm around Mia and pulled her closer. “You’re stronger than you realise. We can’t give up hope yet. Yeah, the odds aren’t great, but I’ve seen worse before. I’ve been in uglier situations than this. I’m glad you tagged along with me.”
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s crazy. I feel like I’ve known you for years.” She rolled onto him, her face so close to his. “Some people, you just know them and trust them from the first moment.”
“That’s another detective’s instinct you’ve picked up,” Cooper said. He could feel the warmth of her breath. The sweetness of it. The night was too dark to see her face, but there was the silhouette of her and there was the gentle shine of her eyes.
“No, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s just an instinct that kicks in. Everyone has it. Some people just listen to it better than others.”
“True,” Cooper said.
She kissed him softly on the lips, then whispered in his ear, “It’s nice to pretend our problems aren’t so big when we’re together.” She stood up and said, “It’s nice to try to forget about them, even for a moment.” She walked back into the cave. “Good night, Cooper.”
“Good night, Mia,” Cooper replied.
***
Cooper and Mia lay side by side in the cave. His arm crossed over her. In the comfort of each other they slept. They dreamed of giant birds swooping down and picking the flesh off the faces of the hunters. They dreamed of bones snapping in the birds’ massive beaks. In the dream, they were attacked. They were falling. They were in small towns and big cities being crushed by these birds, by the mother of these birds, a kaiju crashing through the streets. Onlookers screamed and fled, crashed their cars and tumbled out, lifeless, bleeding to death. They turned their heads to the sky, and Mia heard them scream the beast-bird’s name, “Biomega.” They screamed it over and over again. Louder and louder, a wave of rabid birdsong. She saw the people transforming into birds, “Biomega” becoming their war cry. Cooper in this dream was laid out flat on his back, now seeing only stars, struggling to breathe, suffocating as pressure around his neck felt tighter and tighter. He woke up with Harris’s chunky fingers clutched around his throat.
His instinct upon waking was to halt the sensation of falling. He jerked from his restless sleep, pushing into the strangle and cracking his skull against Harris. The fingers released and Harris fell off him, taking a moment to regain his feet while Cooper tried to wheeze some air into his lungs.
“Keep your hands off her, you mongrel!” Harris boomed, his rage echoing through the cave. He stood there no longer as police chief, but as irrational father.
Cooper massaged his throbbing head, still drowsy from waking up. “What … the fuck,” he said, “is wrong with you?!”
“Dad?” Mia said, rolling over, stirring from her sleep. “What are you doing?”
He jumped on Cooper again, launching a series of punches down on his face and body. “Don’t. You. Dare,” he said, each word landing with a punch, “Touch. Her. Again!”
“Dad!” Mia jumped up and grabbed his body, trying to pull him off. “Stop it. Stop it!”
He ripped her arms away, knocking her down. “No. If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be in this mess.” He turned back to Cooper and continued to punch him.
Cooper now lifted his arms to block the swinging fists. “She chose to come here,” he wheezed. He coughed up blood. “I haven’t done shit to her.”
“You put my little girl in danger. You should have stopped her!” Harris said.
“Look what you’ve done,” Cooper said, nodding to where Mia had fallen.
She sobbed, limbs splayed at awkward angles as she picked rocks out from fresh scrapes on her skin.
Harris glanced over at her and took a deep breath. “Mia, I’m sor-”
Crack.
Cooper landed a solid punch to Harris' jaw. Harris slid off Cooper onto the ground.
“Fuck you,” Rodney said.
The twins threw themselves at Cooper.
“Stop!” Cooper yelled. The force scratched his throat. “Have you guys forgotten why we’re here?” His limbs were raised, guarding his face and body. The twins paused. “The chief should have known better than to fly off the handle like that. You should know better, too.”
They stopped and helped Harris to his feet. He was a little sluggish at the moment. He lifted his head to stare daggers at Cooper.
“We can settle this later,” Cooper said. “I didn’t come out here to steal your precious little princess from you.”
Robert helped Mia up and then Cooper. They packed their swags up and left the cave. Cooper rinsed his mouth out with water and tasted only blood.
The bloodhawks had returned to the sky. The carcasses of the ones who had died the previous day were mostly picked clean. Some were still being picked apart by other birds. Some were being snapped up by lizards. The birds that had fallen were fairly large. The lizards were larger. They snapped the bird bones with ease and crunched them. They tilted their necks and watched lazily as the rescue party wandered through their domain.
The lizards looked like some thousand-year-old species, a secret gem which s
hould exist only in distant Galapagos dreams. They were bigger than any Komodo dragon caught on film, yet they looked nothing like them. If anything, they looked like they could be the ancestors of the thorny devils which roamed around these parts. With claws hard and sharp like nothing else, they ripped apart the bird skulls and scooped out the juices and the brains inside with a lick of their long, violet tongues.
The ones that weren’t snapping and swallowing every last scrap of carcass were lumbering through the canyon in the same direction as the rescue party. It was like they were migrating somewhere. Did lizards even migrate?
The group tried to keep their distance from the prehistoric beasts. It was unnerving as hell to stare at a creature like that only for it to stare right back. Lick its tongue. Whip its tail. Snap its jaws. The lizards sniffed the air and wandered past.
The Jackson twins led the rescue party, knives out ready to stab a lizard if it came to that, although its size would make it challenging to fight off if one decided to attack. They also had their guns drawn to fire off warning shots if necessary.
Cooper and Mia hung back a little, each keeping an eye looking back in case there were any lizards coming up on them from the rear. Harris hung in the middle of the pack, dragging his feet in the dirt, half keeping an eye on Mia and Cooper.
“Why did you have to come out here, Mia?” Harris asked. “You would have known it was dangerous, right?”
“I don’t need your protection,” she said. “I don’t need you to look out for me, and I don’t need you to protect me from boys.”
“That doesn’t mean you should throw yourself in harm’s way to prove a point.”
“I’m not trying to prove a point,” she replied. “I came out here because I want to find these guys. Isn’t that why you came?”
Harris paused a while, walking in silence. He let out a heavy sigh. “Do you think … I failed you as a father?”
“What?”
“Was there something wrong with the way I raised you?” He hung back to walk beside her.
“I think I turned out fine,” she said.
“But was there something wrong with the way I raised you?” he repeated.
“I wouldn’t have nominated you for any ‘father of the year’ awards, but you had it rough. We both did.” Mia held his hand and squeezed it.
He smiled. It wasn’t exactly quite what he wanted to hear, but it was good enough.
THE JINGO LIZARDS
The farther down in the canyon they went, the more likely it seemed that this place would go on forever. In distance and in time. The canyon opened out wide, continuing deeper into the earth. The cliffs were steeper; the horizon was more distant. Getting found out here would take a search party of hundreds of people with nothing else to do. And years. It would take years. A military operation to drive out the bird-beasts and the lizards. In this wide expanse they could see just how many lizards lived here, and just how many birds. The lizards ranged in size from family dog, through horse, up to elephant-sized. The birds were all bigger than cats, and some looked big enough to crush a house should they land on one. None were as big as Biomega though, and all the birds too were headed in the same direction as the lizards. Deeper into the canyon, ever deeper, with the expanse growing ever larger, wider.
They all seemed aware of the rescue party, though none of the beasts seemed to care. That didn’t put the humans at ease though. Those powerful jaws and long claws. The peculiar markings, the thorn patterns covering the lizards, each one unique. These creatures were like a rhino crossed with a porcupine. They were each a wandering killer cactus of the wild.
The bloodhawks often didn’t go near the lizards. The lizards let out a guttural roar every time they tried. On occasion the birds swooped and claimed a small lizard to take up high and drop, smashing it on the rocks to pick that dark meat to shreds.
Completely surrounded by the pack of lizards, the rescue party searched nothing; they only shuffled forward with the pack, hoping the lizards wouldn’t snap and suddenly realise that easy prey was so close. The lizards seemed far too focused, like they were being hypnotised or controlled.
The rescue party knew they couldn’t break through the mass and make a run for it. There just wasn’t anywhere here for them to run to. At the least, it was possible the hunters had gotten caught up in this migration too. Maybe they had been swept up to the far side of the canyon and the rescue party would wind up there too.
Cooper was running escape scenarios through his head. He examined the natural flow of the canyon and tried to think of what the hunters might have done in this situation, if they had survived up to this point, where they might have gone. He thought of how easily the lizards snapped up those bones, left nothing behind, how those birds smashed their prey against the rocks and picked them to shreds. There might not even be anything left of the hunters to find.
He thought back to the first clue, Josh’s mutilated body. How come Josh wasn’t in the canyon? He must have lost the others and decided to make a run for it. By the way his body was still more or less intact, Cooper thought he must have collapsed from exhaustion or dehydration before the bloodhawks set upon him, otherwise they would have smashed him to bits before devouring him.
“I think the hunters probably made it into hiding,” Cooper said. “Probably sheltered in one of these caves.”
“Why do you think that?” Rodney asked.
“Josh,” he replied. “Have you noticed the way the bloodhawks kill their prey? He must have already been dead when they found him, meaning that he must have been separated from the group, and he was trying to make a run to save himself. He probably thought if he could make it to the nearest town he could call in help to rescue the others. Poor guy never made it that far.”
“Yeah? So what about that means they’re hiding in a cave?” Robert asked.
“Well, if Josh made it that far on his own, I don’t think the birds and the lizards were here yet. I think the earthquakes must have … awakened them, I guess you could say. Otherwise he would have gone into hiding too. I think they fell into the canyon when the earthquakes started. I think one or more of them must have been injured, and I think they tried to get back out, but they crawled into hiding when the birds and the lizards came along.”
“That’s great,” Rodney said. He stopped walking and turned to face Cooper. “But have you counted how many caves we’ve passed? There are hundreds of them here, probably thousands. How do you expect us to find the one they’re hiding in, if they’re even here at all?”
The group stopped. The lizards continued to shuffle around them.
Cooper stepped in close to Rodney. “If you think we’re wasting our time here, you’re welcome to turn around and go home.” He stared at the older detective and waited for a response. “Good. That’s what I thought.” He walked past Rodney and took the lead. “If you were stuck out here and you had to hide from these creatures, how would you let others know where you were?”
“You’d place some sort of marker outside the cave,” Mia said. “Anything that stands out in the bush. A shirt, a shoe, a bag. The bigger, the brighter, the better.”
“Bingo,” Cooper said. “We don’t need to search every cave. We just need to search for their marker.”
They continued on in silence, scanning the cliff walls for caves, scanning the entrance of the caves for markers. They began to see markers in the earth. A strange-shaped branch. A rock positioned in an unusual way. A wreath of bones around a pile of skulls. So many things seemed to appear intentionally designed, but they also screamed ‘bizarre natural phenomenon.’ They didn’t venture into any caves for fear of finding beasts within. Some dark and menacing creature they couldn’t imagine, a mutant form blending lizard and bird-beast into some dragon monster. These thoughts fueled their nightmares throughout the day. Each eye which met their own was the very eye of madness. It dwarfed them, drained them of strength, gazed deep into their souls and left them with only hopelessness and despair.
The eyes of these beasts told them countless narratives, each one with an identical ending: All the ones you seek are dead.
The lizards stared at them, thorned faces, opened their mouths and clicked their tongues. From deep within their throats they made a two-toned sound that slowly and deeply echoed through the canyon as if taunting the rescue party. Jin … go. They called to each other across the pack as along they went. Jin … go. Loud and slow, the call of the lizards crawled inside their heads, the jingo lizards of central Australia, the wildest of the wild, an avant-garde chorus more violent than any carnivorous bird.
Then the sound of the bloodhawks and jingo lizards murdering each other descended on the canyon. The lizards surrounding them went wild. They ran into the massive cluster of feathers and scales and thorns, claws and jaws and beaks. Flesh and blood and bone.
Cooper called for the others to follow him, and he took off climbing some nearby rocks to a higher plateau where the mass of lizards wasn’t so dense. What lizards were here were wrestling with the bloodhawks. They smashed against rocks and tumbled over the edge. They kicked and scratched and growled and screeched. The bodies flew recklessly about the place while the rescue party tried to dodge them on their way to the closest cave.
Crawling from the caves there came more jingo lizards. They launched into the air and ripped the bloodhawks down, chomped their necks, then attacked the others.
As the lizards proceeded to strip down and outnumber the nearby birds, more of them paused to watch the rescue party. Before long, there were dozens of lizards watching them. These bloodthirsty beasts with black eyes and red claws dripping with bird blood.
One of the jingo lizards lumbered towards them and rose on its hind legs and made that sound. Jin … go. Jin … go.
It roared and shifted its weight.
Then it paused, a blade sticking through its chest. The blade was pulled out through its back and hacked into its neck. A machete cutting with strength and precision, missing the sharp thorns and sinking into the tough, muscular flesh. Shotgun blasts sounded off nearby, sending the closest lizards flinching back. The beast in front of them fell down dead, its neck half-hacked off, and there was Mark, standing with his machete dripping. There was his brother Lewis, and there was Carol, their guns cocked and loaded, a warning to the beasts here to keep their distance. The rescue party had become the rescued.
Kaiju Canyon Page 3