Kaiju Canyon

by S. T. Cartledge

  Birds of a feather flocked together, hunting human flesh.

  They could no longer see into the distance, the haze of bloodhawks was so thick. They would run out of bullets before long, too, and the machetes couldn’t hold off a flock of this number. Traveling blind, they could no longer see the canyon’s edge; its shape and direction were a mystery, a memory which was hazy at best. The bloodhawks pecked and clawed at them, and they held up their blades and arms to protect their faces and bodies.

  They ran knowing they would never outrun the flock, but knowing there was nothing else they could do. They ran blindly, despite their illness and exhaustion. They ran blindly, trusting that the group could stick together. They ran blindly, hoping that the gods of fortune were smiling down on them and that they would run straight into a cave and find some shelter from these feral flying beasts. They ran until their legs turned to jelly and they coughed lungfuls of feathers and dust. They ran and tumbled over a ledge, every one of them, not knowing even what was right in front of their feet, and they each rolled and tumbled down a slope, red rocks cutting into them, and sank into a cold body of water.

  They held their breath and their bodies stayed under. The cold soaked through their clothes; sweat and blood washed off them. Their throbbing wounds calmed, but their heads still throbbed hard. The nightmare call of the birds rang through their skulls underwater. The bloodhawks remained above the surface, swooping at the splashes that they saw, landing on the bank, pecking at the dirt.

  One by one the group came up for air, taking gasping breaths into their lungs, scooping handfuls of water to their mouths. This was a fresh relief inside the mad red canyon, but still they looked around and found themselves floating down a river with an audience of bloodhawks lining the banks, curtaining the sky, focused all along the river, forming a tunnel of sorts.

  The guns, soaked, were now useless. They held onto their machetes as the only defence they had against these beasts.

  A loud screech penetrated the air across a great distance.

  The bloodhawks all stopped their frenzy, turned, and flew towards the screech, their mother’s call. The thrashing water returned to calm. The survivors pulled themselves from the water, lying on the riverbank, breathing deeply from exhaustion and near drowning. Adrenaline coming with the brush so close to death. Suffocation by feathers. They slowed down and drank from the river and already Steph and Domino were looking better, the blood and dirt washed from their bodies, the colour returning to their faces.

  In the bloodhawks’ absence, the sky swelled with orange and red storm clouds. Thunder broke the sky and cracked inside the canyon. The rain fell thick and heavy, red.

  THE STORM

  The rain brought mixed feelings. At first there was joy. They didn’t think the birds would be back for a while. The rain was cool and refreshing. It kept the blistering sun away. They could walk in this weather without getting overheated or dehydrated.

  Domino tilted his head back and stuck his tongue out to catch the rain. As it trickled down his tongue towards his throat, Domino realised it wasn’t right. It didn’t taste like water. He spat it out but couldn’t get rid of the taste. Bitter and metallic.

  He bent over coughing and hacking. “What is this?” he asked.

  Robert caught a few drops on his wrist and smelled it. Licked it. Swished it around his mouth and spat it out. “Blood rain?” he said.

  It bloodied the river water. It came down harder. The rocks became slippery, and then there came a sense of dread. They couldn’t climb the canyon cliffs in this weather. While the rocks were wet, there was no escape. Thunder cracked louder, closer to them. In the flash of lightning they could see the silhouette of Thornelius Rex in the far distant corner of the canyon. More thunder and another flash of lightning and off in the sky to the other side there was the shadowed figure of the bird-monster, Biomega. The rain came down harder.

  They ran through the canyon, slowed by the slippery rocks, eyes locked on the nearest cave in which to wait out the storm. It was all they could do. It felt as though some cosmic power was keeping them there for a slow torture.

  “That’s it, we’re done for,” Harris said, throwing his hands into the air. “We can’t fend off those beasts. We can’t climb out in these conditions. We can’t call for help. Our supplies are running low. We’re lost. We’re exhausted. We’ll probably wind up with severe hypothermia after being drenched in this … rain.” He gestured to the blood rain outside. “We weren’t properly prepared for this.”

  Cooper rolled his eyes. He lay flat on the cave floor. “We never could have prepared ourselves for this,” he called out.

  “We could have gathered a larger team, figured out a contingency plan, a proper form of communication in this situation,” Harris said.

  “Could have. Should have,” Cooper said. “Never would have done it, though. Hindsight is pretty sweet, isn’t it?”

  “And you,” Harris stooped over Cooper. “You should never have brought Mia into this.”

  “Not this again,” Mia said. “If we hadn’t left when we did, we wouldn’t have made it here in time.”

  “You don’t know that!” Harris said. He turned to face her. “You shouldn’t even be here!”

  “Oh yeah, because it’s too dangerous for me to risk my life for these people, but it’s perfectly okay for you to do it? You’re such a hypocrite!”

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Harris said. “Look what’s happening now. You want to be in this situation?”

  “What if I stayed back in town? What if I stayed and you went and you never came back? How is that fair?” Mia asked.

  “It’s not about fair. It’s about keeping you safe.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it. Stop trying to control me. Stop trying to hold me back. You know Mum never would have wanted that,” Mia said.

  She walked deeper into the cave, leaving her father smouldering in silence.

  Harris began pacing around the cave’s entrance. Cooper followed Mia. The others hung awkwardly somewhere in between.

  “Hey,” Cooper called out into the darkness. “You there?”

  “Yeah,” her voice echoed softly from a little farther down.

  He followed her voice and the gentle sobbing which came after. He sat down beside her.

  “Hey,” he said, “we’re all doing it rough out here. He doesn’t mean to take it out on you.”

  “I know.” She sniffed and wiped her face with her sleeve. “It’s just frustrating. He just doesn’t get it. And it’s so shit how he’s trying to blame you for everything.”

  Cooper let out a sigh. “Yeah, he’s a bit of a pain in my ass, isn’t he?”

  Mia laughed.

  “Hey,” he said, “at least we did what we came out here to do. We found these guys. The rain will clear. We’ll go home. Get the military to nuke this place. You’ll patch things up with your father. It’ll be just fine.”

  “How can you say that?” she said. “How can you be so calm and sure?”

  “What else can I do?” he replied. “If I focus on staying calm and rational, I can try to make the best logical decision in the moment. I just want to get the job done and get everyone home safe. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. As soon as you start hesitating and breaking down, that’s when you make mistakes. I can’t have that. For me. For you. For your father. For the twins. For the hunters. I’ve got to keep it together or else I’m going to fail. We’ve got too much to lose here. I can’t give up hope.”

  “Is that why you transferred to Alice Springs?” Mia asked.

  “What do you mean?” Cooper said.

  “Something happened at your old job. You let someone down?”

  “You’re a true detective’s daughter, you know that?” he replied. “Yeah, I was working a serial killer case. It felt like something which was pulled straight from one of those cop shows. The guy was picking women up in bars, drugging them, raping them, and dismembering them. Not always in that order.
We found the bodies always tied together with strings and hanging from a bridge or tree or lamppost, dangling like mobiles or puppets.”

  “That’s sick,” Mia said. “I hope you caught him. Fuck …”

  “Yeah, we did. I’d been compiling the case from the evidence for months. He knew how to stay under the radar. He was very clean, very thorough. I’d never seen such cold-blooded shit before. I thought I had everything figured out. I had all the details memorised. I knew his plans, his schedule. I knew who he was. I just needed to track him down. I knew there was another victim being dragged into his game. That’s what it was to him, a game. And by the time I caught up with him, I was too late. I was too late.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that,” Mia said.

  “I played the case over and over in my head. I thought of every piece of evidence I didn’t connect quick enough. The questions I could have asked in my investigations but didn’t. Heading to the crime scene, every detour I could have taken to save those precious moments fighting with traffic. And when I got there … he handed himself over to me. I had every opportunity to arrest him, but I shot the guy. This monster thought he could roll over and take his punishment pain-free. I shot him, maybe half a dozen times? A dozen times? I don’t know. I only remember the satisfaction of bringing him slowly closer to death, knowing I missed all the vital areas, knowing he would feel the pain and have nothing to ease the suffering. I could spare no mercy for such a wicked being, knowing I came so close to saving this poor girl’s life, and when she needed me, I wasn’t there. Abuse was my coping mechanism.”

  “That wasn’t your fault, you couldn’t have known. You said it yourself. Hindsight is pretty sweet,” Mia said.

  “Yes,” Cooper replied. “I say that now.”

  A resonating scream filled the cave. Long and agonising, it pulled Cooper and Mia from their moment and took them towards the light of the entrance.

  There stood Domino, hollering, surrounded by the others, blood dribbling from every orifice on his face. His eyes were wide and mad, full of terror. He launched himself at the closest of them, Mark, who fell to the ground. Teeth bared, Domino tore into Mark’s neck. Mark cried out in pain. Lewis cried out in panic. Lewis and Steph grappled with Domino, trying to lift the hefty man off Mark. They tore him away with help from Harris and the twins, but Mark’s jugular was bleeding badly.

  “What the fuck!” Lewis yelled. He shoved Domino to the ground, but Domino got right back up and charged at Lewis, teeth gnashing like some rabid zombie.

  Cooper grabbed one of the remaining machetes off the cave floor and approached Domino with it raised and ready to swing.

  Domino reached Lewis before Cooper had the chance to attack, and Lewis slung him around. Domino tumbled to the ground. Lewis jumped on him and punched him in the face. Blood spattered from it. Domino, still yelling, tried to grab Lewis, tried to bite him. Lewis punched again. Harder. No apologies. He looked into the man’s eyes and knew Domino was no longer there, no longer human. There was only a monster in human form.

  Mia and Harris huddled over Mark, trying to put pressure on his wound, trying to convince him it would be okay. His body was turning cold. A puddle of blood had formed around him. There was no stopping the bleeding. He shivered, skin turning grey, hair stuck to his face from the blood and sweat, eyes bugging out of his head. He coughed and wheezed and gasped and grunted. There was no relief for him, only more pain.

  Lewis punched Domino over and over again. He punched Domino’s mad face so hard and so much that his skull caved in and he finally stopped resisting. Tears poured down Lewis’s face, his body shaking, knuckles bruised and bloody, skin torn up. He fell off Domino towards his brother and tried to whisper words of comfort.

  Mark struggled to gasp for air before expelling a forced sigh. He stopped shivering and his body went limp. He was quiet. His eyes were vacant. Mia and Harris stepped back to give Lewis this moment.

  “What do you think could have done this to him?” Mia asked.

  “Infection?” Cooper suggested.

  “Who knows what was in the rain he drank,” Rodney said.

  “He didn’t drink much of it,” Robert said.

  The group stared awkwardly at Robert, examining him for signs of illness.

  “You tasted it, too,” Rodney said. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m fine,” Robert replied. “Really. We should get moving, anyway.” He pointed outside. “The storm’s clearing up.”

  THE JACKSON BROTHERS

  They were cold and numb. Their clothes were soaked. Their bodies shivered from a combination of fear and cold. Robert stepped out into the sunlight. Rodney followed close behind, and the rest came out and felt the warm glow of sunlight sinking into their skin. They walked to keep warm. They followed the murky river through the canyon roughly in the direction from which they thought they had originally come. The general consensus was that they needed to head in a vague west-ish direction, but none were completely sure.

  The clouds had mostly cleared from the mostly birdless sky. Robert led the group, and the others kept their eyes on him. If anything happened, if madness triggered, they would know.

  Cooper ran the scenario through his head. He’d never seen such an illness before. He’d never seen such rain like that. He’d never seen a human snap and lunch on flesh. He’d never seen such birds and such lizard-beasts. Never seen a canyon suddenly appear in the desert. If the group could make it back to Alice Springs, they could get a doctor to examine Robert, see if he showed any signs of illness. Maybe there would be a clue to what had happened to Domino. See if the remainder of the group were affected. If they made it that far in the first place.

  If Robert was sick, they should restrain him. There were enough environmental risks out here without running the risk of cannibalism amongst your own people. But Cooper wrestled internally with the logic, with their lack of knowledge about everything that had happened. Why Robert and not the rest of them? They didn’t even know if the cause of the … illness was blood rain related.

  Robert didn’t look like a fevered madman. The sky was blue. The birds here looked more or less like birds you’d find in the bush. No bloodred hawks, no massive prehistoric beasts. For a moment Cooper entertained the thought that perhaps this was all just some collective delusion, a series of wild frenetic hallucinations caused by severe dehydration and exhaustion. He dismissed the thought. The wounds were real. The memories were real.

  Cooper, Harris, and Mia clutched the three remaining machetes. They followed Robert closely. They had the image burned into their minds of Domino’s face distorted with bleeding, that face remembered in all the stages from ‘undone’ to ‘punched into oblivion.’ Lewis had his shirt wrapped around his throbbing fist and needed no reminding.

  With each passing moment came a lifting sensation, like the madness had passed and perhaps the canyon was now willing to release them.

  They were torn. Like they were holding onto Schrödinger’s hope, a dream far off in the distance at once both alive and dead. They were exhausted, spent completely beyond belief. They tried to travel quickly while the path was clear and the sun was burning. It wouldn’t be long before sunset, and then their minds would descend into paranoia, imagining beasts lurking in the night.

  Every sound a haunting.

  Every voice a nagging argument for their failure.

  The loved ones gone died because of you.

  The mistakes made rest on your shoulders.

  You’re sick and tired, and wouldn’t it be great if you could end things here and blame some fevered madness?

  Couldn’t you just swing that machete? Bite that flesh? Push her over that ledge and watch that body break?

  The vehicles appeared on top of the canyon in the distance, the sun reflecting bright and low in their windows. They wouldn’t reach them by nightfall, but the reassurance of seeing them, and knowing that tomorrow they could head home, might have been enough to keep the doubting voices outsid
e their skulls for one more night.

  They paused where they were and drank in the natural beauty, letting the horror of their recent descent drip away for a moment. Then Robert collapsed.

  Harris and Rodney rushed over to him and tried to help him up. Robert struggled. He cried out in pain. He punched Harris with a wild left hook. He grappled Rodney and dragged him down. The grey-haired twins scrapped and rolled in the dirt.

  “Snap out of it!” Rodney yelled.

  Robert yelled back, unintelligible. He had begun bleeding out from his eyes and nose and ears.

  “Listen to me,” Rodney shook Robert. “We’re brothers. You know me. You know who I am. Don’t do this to me.”

  Harris got to his feet and approached the twins again. Cooper came towards them from the other side, but there was no getting between them.

  Before Cooper or Harris or any of the others could register what was going on between the two, Robert was on top of his brother, pinning him down with his knees, a machete picked up off the dirt and raised high above his head, ready to swing. He brought it down, sinking it deeply into Rodney’s shoulder. Rodney screamed out in pain. Then, a loud, piercing screech echoed out into the canyon, followed by the screeches of the returning frenzied flock funneling through the canyon.

  Biomega’s return.

  Robert pulled the machete back, screaming. He tilted his head towards the sky and saw the bloodhawks coming back. Like Domino, he seemed totally disconnected from his former self. He recognised nothing of the scene before him. The people. The landscape. The birds. He seemed cognisant of only the violence the weapon in his hands might perform and the defenceless creature struggling beneath his weight.