The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  Jiro walked out the open door to the catwalk and waited against the railing, as Shinobi caught up with him at last.

  The fog had lifted as the day’s sunlight burnt it away. The cloud cover had receded to a low blanket hovering over the land in patches and threatening possible rain, but not until later. For now the morning sunlight was piercing through the covering in spots, like samurai swords thrust downward through pillows, toward the green land spread out before them.

  But the clouds did not hold Shinobi’s attention.

  His eyes took in the many shades of green across the central part of the land of the island, and the things that pierced the green, reaching up like clawing hands to the sky—a reverse of the angle of the beams of light slicing down from above.

  They were bones.

  Hundreds and thousands of bones.

  The slim graceful towers Shinobi had seen from sea were giant rib bones, arching into the sky as high as the lighthouse. The carcasses of giant hundred-foot and two-hundred foot long strange beasts Shinobi could not recognize littered the island, and stretched as far as he could see. His father had said the island was approximately three miles long, and from his position near the top of the lighthouse, Shinobi could see most of the way to the far shore, where the green gave way to the dark volcanic rocks again. There were unnatural mounds and low hills in places, and the boy guessed they were the covered graves of yet more of the massive creatures. At the center of the island was one huge rounded hill with some irregularities and lumpy tufts of bushes and trees on it in places.

  Shinobi spotted massive lobster-like claws, and desiccated snake-like twisting bodies, piled high on tangled horns and bulbous bones. Most of the creatures had decayed to the point of little more than skeletons—even though the bones were impressive at their immense scale. A few of the dead monsters still contained eyes in unusual locations, or mouths full of teeth taller than the apartment buildings back in Wakkanai.

  “I see them all. This island has been a place where they come to die for centuries. Whenever one of them is injured, it comes here of its own volition. We don’t know why.” Shinobi’s father looked gray and ashen, as if the sight of the boneyard was still unnerving to him. It did little to ease Shinobi’s own tension at the sight, but the revelation that he was not going crazy and he was not the only one with the sight helped him some.

  “H-how many?” was all the boy could stammer.

  “We don’t know. When those few of us with the sight have found these mega creatures dead in other parts of the world, it has become a tradition to bring them here. I will tell you how it began. I will tell you what happened. You are one of the rare ones, Shino. You will have the sight all your life, and like me, you must become the caretaker of this necropolis. We guard more than just the bones.”

  The older man fell silent as the wind ripped past the top of the tower, bringing the scent of the water and what Shinobi now suspected was the smell of the dead.

  “First we will fix the light, son. It warns sailors to stay away, and that is a very good thing. Then we’ll go down and have a talk. Our family first took on this bizarre appointment with your grandfather, Haruki. He was the first in our family to see that the world is truly full of monsters.”

  Haruki Yashida ran for his life.

  The bombing of the city had ended a few days earlier, but he knew what would come next. He had seen the hideous monstrosities with his own eyes. The war had gone on for far too long, but this new twist? He didn’t know what to think. All he knew for sure was he would need to be far from Nagasaki on a ship, before they came here and did what they had to Hiroshima. The world was talking about American weapons that could level a city, but Haruki knew better.

  This hell was not from the West.

  The storm was approaching. Massive clouds had formed at the northern edge of the city. As the residents of the battered outskirts took shelter underground in grubby dirt tunnels and cramped wooden bunkers, Haruki raced along the broken, rubble-strewn streets, leaping trash heaps and scrambling over fallen walls, tumbled wood, shattered plaster, and the ever-present terracotta tiles that littered the ravaged city. He had been to Nagasaki once before, and loved that the old ways were still intact with regard to architecture and design. But after what he had witnessed in Hiroshima, he knew that even concrete and steel would offer little protection from what was coming.

  It had taken him two days to get here from the ruins of Hiroshima on the last of the three packed refugee trains that had made it out. He had seen the final devastation, with the terrifying pink rays of death spewing from the snake-like creature’s mouth. He had watched out the windows of the train, from a distance. A distance of miles, but even from that far away, he had felt the heat of the blast. Haruki understood that few would have survived the snake-beast’s frantic battle with the gigantic squid-like monster. He and the others had all fled—all the way here to Nagasaki, but Haruki was one of the only people to have seen the beasts. The others all spoke of bombings and of some American super-weapon. Or they spoke of earthquakes and floods. Even of American troops invading.

  Haruki remained silent, listening to the conflicting versions of the event. He understood that these people had seen the devastation and the destruction, but he knew they would all have different interpretations of what exactly it was that had murdered an entire city. He had lived with that discrepancy since he was a child, when he first saw the monsters in the world, and he had realized few others could. He came to know that only first-born teenage children could actually see the world the way it truly was. Like other teens, he should have lost his ability to see the creatures when he became a man, but for some reason, with him, the sight had never faded.

  As the train pulled in to Nagasaki, he overheard some teenagers whispering quietly near the rancid stinking lavatory, which was little more than a closet with a hole in the floor of the train and the rails rushing by below. They were comparing their events of what had happened—and pouring derision over the multitudes of conflicting versions of the story they had heard the adults tell. They had seen the giant beasts, just like he had. Haruki had gone over to them and spoken softly.

  “I saw what you saw. You’re not crazy.”

  The teens had been startled by his admission, but nodded, grateful for it.

  Haruki understood the haunted look in their eyes. He’d had it in his own since he was fourteen. He’d tried to find the teens again in the throngs of packed humanity swarming off the train and into the station, but he lost sight of them in the sweaty masses.

  He was going to try to find a ride to the harbor, but the roads were blocked pretty heavily to the north of town, from the damage sustained days earlier by Allied bombing raids. Looking north to the approaching gray storm clouds, Haruki had opted to run for it instead. He needed to move rapidly south through the shattered residential neighborhoods, before he would pass through the industrial factories and the Allied prison camp, on his way to the southern harbor. He knew if he waited too long, any sea-worthy ships would be gone.

  An underfed dog with patches of dark fur leapt out of a trash pile, snapping and barking at Haruki as he ran, but he ignored the noise, one of many sounds all blending into the hurried roar of a wartime city. As he came closer to the fence line of the prison camp, he felt a hot breeze rip into the city from behind him, and he turned to see he wasn’t going to make it to the harbor in time.

  The wind had blown the gray clouds filling the horizon into the city, spraying dust and small specks of debris. Flashes of pink and golden-green light erupted from within the clouds, as if mystical lightning were threatening to attack the northern edge of the town. Haruki knew that wasn’t far from the truth. He turned to run again, but a shouting voice halted his run.

  “Hey, mister! Over here! Quick!”

  Haruki turned away from the fence line of the camp. Two of the teens he had seen on the train were hunkered down behind the low wall of a dwelling that had partially collapsed in the last bombing.
Just below the line of the crumbled wall, he could see the top of a third head, with peculiarly light-colored hair. The teens he recognized waved him over, as another gust of wind carried a choking cloud of dust past his face, and he detected the scent of rotten meat on the breeze. He raced across the street and leapt over the wall, just as the two teens ducked down below the shelter of the fragmented wood and cracked plaster. A shrieking noise ripped out of the cloud behind him, and Haruki instinctively ducked down lower behind the wall with the others, just as a far stronger gust of wind rammed into the structure at his back, shaking it. A wooden food cart flew overhead, crashing into one of the few remaining walls of the vacated house, splintering into fragments no larger than toothpicks.

  The force necessary to do that! Haruki thought.

  He squatted lower as the wind howled and the shrieking noise grew louder around him.

  “The edge of the battle . . . the debris cloud . . . It’s one of the first major dangers,” one of the two teens shouted at him over the roar of the wind. The boy was probably no more than fifteen, with shaggy dark hair, like most Japanese boys his age, and thick-framed glasses. The other boy Haruki recognized as older, at maybe seventeen. He had a long thin scar up the side of his face, and his countenance was grim.

  “Be prepared to run as soon as the wind dies down,” the older boy shouted.

  Haruki just nodded. He turned to the other side of him and was in for a shock. There wasn’t just one more person next to him—there were three. One was an attractive girl, probably seventeen. She had long wavy hair, and a somewhat chestnut face. Haruki had seen women like her before. She was not pure Japanese. At some point in her ancestry, she had some Pacific islander in her. Haruki found her to be stunningly beautiful. She was hunched down like he was, and holding her ears against the shrieking of the wind, as the storm found its way to where they hid. Next to her was another boy, round and chubby, at least fifteen, but possibly older. He was blubbering and crying, covered in plaster dust, and his nose was crusted with old snot.

  But neither of those two held Haruki’s attention long.

  The third person was an adult. A man, probably a year younger than Haruki’s twenty-one. But this man was not like the others. He was the source of the lighter-colored hair Haruki had spotted before he jumped the wall.

  This man was an American.

  Haruki stared at the man. He was wearing tan pants and a thick dark brown leather jacket. A pilot, Haruki realized. He was about to ask himself where an American pilot could have come from, when he realized that just across the street was the fence of the prison camp. He must have escaped! As Haruki scrutinized the man’s face, he saw the boy inside. Then it became apparent. This pilot wasn’t really an adult. He was still a teen. He had probably lied about his age to join the military. He wasn’t as young as the others, but he couldn’t have been much older than the girl.

  The wind sped up, and more debris began to fly over the top of the small wall, crashing into the remains of the house, as Haruki hunched with the rest. He felt the wall shift behind his back, and realized how fast and strong the wind must be. Then the wind and the shrieking sound began to die down, but before it could stop completely, he felt a great tremor in the ground beneath him—not like the earthquakes he had felt near Kyoto as a child, where the ground would rumble and shake for even minutes at a time. This was an immense thud—a single impact that more closely resembled an explosion.

  “Now!” the older teen with the grim face yelled.

  All at once Haruki was scrambling up to his feet and running south again, with the four terrified teenagers and the brown-haired pilot. The ground shook again with another impact before they had run even ten steps. “I was heading for the harbor,” Haruki yelled to them.

  The American just looked at him for a moment, then turned away. The older boy grunted an acknowledgment. Haruki realized the American man might not speak Japanese.

  “We are running for a ship!” he told the man in heavily accented English.

  The man, running hard, turned to glance at Haruki with a half-grin. “Good plan! Those things yours?” He asked the last part with his thumb cocked back behind him.

  Haruki didn’t spare a glance the way he’d come. “Not ours. We are in this together.”

  The American nodded. They ran with the others to the end of the street, then turned onto a wide avenue that would bring them past the last factories in the southern part of the city.

  “Dakota Talbott,” the pilot said, his breath coming in heaving gasps.

  “I am . . . Haruki.”

  The other teens either spoke no English, which was likely, or they were too out of breath from running. The group was no more than a mile from the harbor, but Haruki knew they were out of time.

  He chanced a look over his shoulder and was glad he did.

  “Down!” he shouted in Japanese and threw himself into the American’s back, knocking them both sprawling to the ground. The older teens all dropped to the cracked asphalt road, as a gasoline tanker truck flew over their heads. The younger, chubby boy with the snotty nose hadn’t leapt down.

  He had turned to see what the problem was.

  Haruki saw the boy’s tear-streaked face, and knew that the boy didn’t even have time to understand the threat before the truck smashed into him and swept him up the street, before it slammed though the brick wall of an armor-plating factory. A fireball erupted from the hole in the wall, sending a wave of heat and vapor back toward them.

  “Stay down,” he shouted. He didn’t need to translate. The American had seen the fireball, too, and quickly ducked his head down to the asphalt and covered the back of his head with his hands.

  Haruki did the same until he felt the wave of baking heat rip past above him.

  Then he felt another stabbing thump in the earth from below, and another of the hideous shrieks occurred.

  This time, he looked back.

  The clouds of smoke and debris back up the street separated, as the mouth of the huge snake-creature blasted out of the center, its twenty-foot-tall teeth snapping and gnashing. Its body slithered out of the cloud like a snake, but this close up, Haruki could see that only its movement resembled that of a true snake. Its back was ridged like the bony scales or plates of some dinosaur representations he had seen in a museum. Yet the creature’s skin below the bony protrusions was smooth and shiny, like that of a whale. Its head was lumpy and misshapen, not sleek like the head of a viper. But when it opened its mouth and turned its long forked tongue back at the cloud of the oncoming storm, Haruki knew it had more in common with a viper than its skeletal structure hinted at.

  He saw that the creature had short fin-like legs along its length—three on each side. They didn’t look functional, but as the long tube of the body, which was easily thirty feet in diameter and over a hundred and fifty feet long, slithered out of the debris and dust, it rolled on its side, and the fins scrabbled at the broken asphalt beneath the beast. Suddenly its immense bulk shifted sideways, and the creature pulled its head back to strike at the cloud.

  The sharp impact to the ground came again, and then again faster.

  Haruki turned away from the spectacle and saw the others all watched with him, standing limp and lifeless, looking at the gargantuan snake-beast.

  “Run!” Haruki shouted.

  His voice snapped the teen boys out of their stupor, and they sprinted away down the street. The American—Dakota—grabbed the girl’s hand and ran as well, dragging her after him.

  Haruki took five leaping steps, but something slammed into him from the side as the thumps in the ground increased in tempo. Then he was flying horizontally across the street, straight for a huge section of a traditional wooden wall. He crossed his arms in front of his head, as his body twisted in the air, and he saw that the giant snake creature had lunged back at the gray billowing clouds, its tail-end snapping away from the far end of the street and whipping into Haruki’s body, as it crossed the road. But Haruki was confu
sed, because the head had hit him, instead of the tail. He could see the long fangs of the creature’s mouth retreating. The trail of ripped-up asphalt on the ruined street left little doubt in Haruki’s mind as to the true chain of events, though.

  His crossed forearms made contact with the thin wooden wall of the partially destroyed home, and the surface of it tore under the impact like origami paper. His arms barely felt it, and then he was slammed into another wall. He slid down to the floor, broken slats of wood falling on top of his head. Small pebble-like chunks of plaster rained down on Haruki, and as he stood, wobbly on his feet, he found himself looking at a completely undestroyed bathroom wall, with the mirror over the wash basin still undisturbed. Covered as he was in plaster dust and dirt,

  Haruki looked like a ghost.

  “Haruki! You’re alive!”

  He glanced over to see the pilot and the girl. They were standing at the door to the broken building. Then he ran to them, shouting, “Go!”

  They turned just before he got to them, and they sprinted along the street, away from the mega-snake, which was hissing and striking at something unseen in the billowing soot and dirt. Now that Haruki shot a look at the thing, he could see where his confusion had come from. He had been hit by the tail end. It was just that the creature didn’t have a proper tail. It had a head at each end! As far as he could tell in the quick glance he had of the beast, both heads were identical.

  As he and the others got several yards away from the massive beast, they found the two surviving teen boys—the one with the glasses, who had called to Haruki, and the grim-faced lad. The boys were huddled behind a pile of rocks and construction sand, which had obviously been dumped in one of the war’s few lulls, in anticipation of making repairs on the ruined neighborhood. The boys were peering intently over Haruki’s shoulder at the ouroboros-like thing with equally dour looks, until suddenly their faces changed. The boys began to look elated.