by Sean Wallace
Dakota and the girl skirted the pile of sand to the right and Haruki peeled left, then he threw himself down with the boys and heaved, trying to catch his breath from his recent sprint. As he looked back up the street, he could see what had given the teens hope.
“Kashikoi,” he said, amazed at what he saw.
He had heard tales of Kashikoi when he was a teenager. Other teens spoke of the behemoth as if it was a force of holy good in the world. Most of the teens claimed to never have seen the creature, but those few who had, spoke with a glow in their eyes, always making Haruki think they were telling the truth. Most first-borns, when they had the sight for the few years before it faded, would spot all manner of unusual monsters and creatures that existed in the world. Things from flying monkey creatures the size of a loaf of bread to human-sized monsters like a horned cyclops, and bizarre hybrid things that could barely be called animals, like winged antelope and dogs with bones growing out of their bodies. But most of the creatures the Japanese teens had seen—or at least those Haruki had heard of—were of small scale. Only a few ever spotted an omega-class creature like the massive ouroboros, or the gigantic squid that had battled it in Hiroshima, shooting purple lightning from between its long pink tentacles, out of what appeared to be its ass. Haruki had spotted something once that was about the size of a dinosaur swimming off the shore of Chiba, but until he had seen the two gargantuan creatures trying to kill each other in Hiroshima, that had been it.
Now he was seeing the omega-size beast of all beasts.
Kashikoi was something akin to a mighty tortoise. Its shell was a steeply pitched mound with lumps protruding up in steeper bursts—as if the animal under the shell were trying to force its way out in pointy places. The legs were powerful scaled things that resembled a cross between a typical tortoise’s tough limbs and the leathery clawed things to be found on a massive monitor lizard. Each scale on the monster’s armor was larger than a man, and standing as it was on its hind legs, the beast must have topped over a hundred feet in height. It would have been taller if its heads—the two of them on individual necks, stretching from doughy folds at the front of the shell—had been pointed upward to the sky. Instead they angled down and forward. Toward the humongous snake beast.
Each head had thick bony horns and ridges, protruding backward along the jawline, and triple fins on top of the rounded head, giving the creature more of a dragon look. The gnarled bird-beak jaws opened wide and dripped a spattering pea-green saliva that burned holes through the ground wherever it touched.
The ouroboros demon shot its head out, lancing its forked tongue at Kashikoi’s belly, but the under surface of the shell was as thickly armored as the outer surface, and the snake simply bounced off, its twisting snapping body following the head in an arc through the air.
Kashikoi swung a powerful foreleg down, the jagged tips of the claws on its foot—snapped off in some long-ago battle—still tearing a gouge down the snake’s side, before the wounded ouroboros skittered away sideways on its stumpy side fins. As the snake-horror blasted through the brick wall of a factory, as if the wall weren’t there, masonry and smoke shooting high into the sky, Kashikoi lowered its upper body down, until its full weight slammed into the ground with the same sharp booming thump that Haruki had heard earlier.
But now the impact was much closer to him, and he was amazed as the earth shot him upward into the air from the strike, as if he had been on a trampoline. He landed in the soft sand pile, and turned to see the others all hitting the ground as well. The noise from the impact was louder than the sound of a Mitsubishi jet roaring overhead, and the sheer weight of the creature blasted a wall of air and dust toward Haruki and the others that felt like a hurricane wind.
“We can’t stay here!” he shouted.
They were picking themselves up when the air shook with a trembling vibration. A powerful shriek, like those Haruki had heard earlier, ripped into his eardrums. His hands shot to cover his ears from the hideous somewhat mechanical sound.
Kashikoi was roaring!
Haruki saw that the ouroboros had lunged again, and as it had had no luck against Kashikoi’s densely armored shell, it struck a rear leg this time, sinking twenty-foot white fangs deeply into the tortoise monster’s scaly flesh. The blood that squirted from the wound in a gushing burst was a deep dark green. Kashikoi shrieked and focused the alien eyes of both its heads on the double-ended snake, where it was still clamped to the injured leg with one of those ends.
Golden fire ripped out of all four of Kashikoi’s eyes, tearing into the snake fiend. The wave of heat rushed back at Haruki as the ouroboros instantly recoiled, releasing its grip and using its strange fins to wind its way sideways, back and away from the injured mammoth amphibian.
Kashikoi lunged fast toward the retreating two-headed snake, his immense size no impediment to his speed. The ground shook hard at each impact of the massive claws, and as Haruki fell to his side, he saw the immense tortoise creature’s left head snap open and clamp down hard on the snake thing’s neck, just behind one head. Steam rose from the ouroboros’s body where the powerful jaw had snapped, and the snake tried to recoil, but Kashikoi’s neck unexpectedly yanked backward, pulling the twisting snake into the air. As soon as its head at the other end had cleared the ground, Kashikoi swept a powerful foreleg at the monster and released his hold near the opposite head. The effect was the snake monstrosity being hurled through the air, as if it weighed no more than a fly batted away by a human hand.
But the creature was coming for Haruki and the others.
Haruki turned and moved toward the girl. Dakota was on the other side of her, having just gained his feet again. The other two teens had fled. Haruki ran into the girl and pushed her into Dakota, and the three of them tumbled down the side of the sand pile to the bottom, just as the top of the pile erupted in a spray of sand.
The ouroboros swept just barely over their heads. It flew further down the street and slammed through two buildings, twisting and winding all the way. Haruki and the other two struggled to their feet yet again, as the winding snake slithered out of the rubble and back toward them, retracting a head at one end, and then striking up and forward. It would clear Haruki’s position by several feet, so his eyes naturally shot upward to watch the snake strike. Its tongue shot out, as it raced at an incline up through the air. It spewed a searing line of pink energy from its mouth, the jaws open nearly at a 180-degree angle, all fangs pointing forward. The energy beam shot across the sky and scored along the side of one of Kashikoi’s two necks. The tortoise-beast started to fall backward.
Haruki turned back in time to see the other end of the snake was coming his way, and staying low, near ground level.
Dakota had seen it, too.
Haruki had just a split second for his eyes to meet Dakota’s before both men were in action.
Haruki raced toward the American, but he moved instead for the beautiful girl. She was looking upward, as the mega-tortoise fell over backward onto its shell in excruciating slow motion. Haruki shifted his angle for her, as his eyes swept back toward the quickly advancing snake head. It shifted in mid-flight, its oversized eyes—larger than trucks—suddenly twitching, as its inner eyelids closed vertically before retracting open again. It twisted its head in mid-flight.
It had seen them.
Haruki lunged, just as Dakota reached the girl and pivoted. Dakota shoved the girl, throwing her directly into Haruki’s arms. Haruki wrapped his arms around her as they fell to the side. He twisted so he would land on his back, cushioning the girl from the fall.
But no one was left to save Dakota.
He tried to turn at the last second, one arm cocked back as if he meant to punch the monster in the mouth. But the jaws were wide open, the immense fangs all pointing directly at Dakota as several of them skewered him from behind, right along the edge of the creature’s mouth. The long fangs ripped out the front of Dakota’s body. Then the huge snake mashed its mouth shut, folding Dakota’s
pierced corpse in half and grinding him into several pieces, some of which fell to the ground as the beast’s head flew past. Haruki saw a leg and part of the pelvis still jammed between the gargantuan teeth before the ouroboros passed over him.
The girl had not seen, as her face had been turned toward Haruki’s chest. And her long wavy hair had flopped over to cover her face. Haruki turned to his side and twisted to his knees, dragging the girl up. He swiped his hand across her face, pushing her hair back. Her face was gaunt and pale. She was in shock. He bent down and put his shoulder into her waist, hefting her over him like he had seen firemen carry victims.
He ran down the street, focusing on his footing amongst the rubble. When he was past the second building into which the ouroboros had crashed, he turned to catch sight of the battle one last time, before rounding a corner of a still-standing steel factory building.
Kashikoi had indeed landed on its steeply rounded bulbous back, but the beast kept rolling. Its giant back claws had dug in, the momentum carrying it around and up. The immense thing was now standing on its hind legs like a man. The ouroboros had fired its terrifying pink mouth rays again, but they appeared to do no damage to Kashikoi’s armored belly. The rays shot past Kashikoi too, though, and when they did, they obliterated any man-made structure they found.
Just before Haruki rounded the building’s corner, he saw the move that was coming. Kashikoi was bringing both its forelegs, and the jagged, scarred claws on their tips, inward to crush on the sides of one of the ouroboros’s heads like a vice grip. The boom shook the wall of the building, as Haruki rushed past, the girl unconscious over his shoulder. He stopped only three times before he made it to the harbor and a ship that took him and the girl to Yakushima Island, south of the main islands of Japan.
“Who won the fight, father?”
Jiro looked out over the landscape of bones in the distance, most easy to see from their new vantage, high on the massive grassy hill near the center of the island. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun shone brightly across the strange landscape. Shinobi had been frightened by the bones at first, but upon seeing them closer, after the two had fixed the light on the lighthouse, the ever-present thick carpet of green moss that covered much of the island and the ancient bones somehow charmed the lad. Jiro stood up and stretched his lower back, then smiled.
“Kashikoi dragged the ouroboros to the sea, but the beast was revived by the water and escaped.”
Shinobi stood and pretended to stretch his own back, as he had seen Jiro do. The boy often imitated his father. Jiro smiled again.
“So . . . the world believes that the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was from atomic bombs?”
Jiro grunted. “Most people. Even many with the sight have no reason to doubt history. But history is always written by those who win in conflicts, Shinobi. The Americans claimed the credit for the destruction—who knows what they saw as being responsible.”
The man started down the grassy hillside, and he could hear his boy following him.
“What happened to Grandfather Haruki, then?” the boy inquired.
“He and the woman married. They moved north to Wakkanai, and he took the job as lighthouse keeper of the surrounding islands. But your grandfather never lost the sight, Shino. Like you and I, he kept his ability to see the creatures his whole life. Your grandmother—my mother—forgot what she had been through just months after it happened. They were both nijū hibakusha. Double survivors. Japan has officially recognized 165 hibakusha as having survived the destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but your grandparents were actually 166 and 167. But they never told anyone. Your grandmother’s memory of the event was muddled at best, and Haruki could never tell anyone what had really happened. He kept track of Kashikoi, though, as the creature moved north through the islands of Japan, in the days after the war. The beast was much more careful in its travels then, he said. Almost as if it was aware of the terrible destruction its battle with the ouroboros had wrought.”
Jiro fell quiet as he descended the rest of the hillside. As Shinobi scampered down behind him, he looked again to the sky but there was no sign of another storm. Still, they would get inside the lighthouse to sleep for the night, long before darkness fell over the necropolis.
As Shinobi reached the level ground at the base of the hill, he paused and tilted his head. Jiro could see that his son was working out how to phrase his question. He waited on the boy.
“Why are there so many bones here? Why this island? And why is Kurohaka Island not on any of the maps?” Jiro paused. “This is where he took the ones he defeated.”
Shinobi’s eyes widened.
Jiro nodded. “Kashikoi defeated many threats against Japan, and when he killed another giant beast like the ouroboros, he would bring it here. Remember, some of the corpses here are actually monsters that were dying and came here voluntarily. Some of the bones are from creatures that died and were transported here by teens with the sight.”
Jiro started walking for the lighthouse. “My father tended the light that would keep most sailors away from this island, and he received a government check from both Japan and Russia to tend to the outlying islands as well. I took the job from him, just as you will one day take the job from me.”
Jiro noticed Shinobi’s absence after another handful of steps and turned to look back at where Shinobi remained rooted to the ground, at the foot of the steep hillside.
The boy had a perplexed look on his face, until he finally asked his burning question.
“What happened to Kashikoi?”
Jiro looked at the boy, then raised his eyes to the immense hill behind him. Then he lowered his eyes back to the child and raised one eyebrow.
Color drained from the child’s face as realization sank in. The boy turned to stare at the side of the hill, upon which they had been perched all afternoon. The hill that was not a hill. Jiro chuckled and turned toward the lighthouse.
“We tend the light, and we protect the protector. Come now, Shino. It will be dark soon.”
Breaking the Ice
Maxine McArthur
The footsteps stopped. Huddled under the low bridge, Kaoru stuffed his fist into his mouth to stop the whimper escaping. Please, go on. Don’t find me.
More giant footsteps ground on the rusty girders and vibrated into Kaoru’s shoulders. He was jammed into the tiny space. Surely they’d think he couldn’t fit in here . . .
A shrill buzz drilled into his ears. What . . . no, it couldn’t be . . . He scraped his elbow painfully against the concrete support as he jammed his hand in his pocket and thumbed the “Off” key. The thing kept ringing. Desperately he thumbed the “Receive” key . . .
A hand grabbed his sleeve. With a satisfied “Got him!” the enemy yanked Kaoru out of his refuge.
He struggled feebly against the grip on his arm. “Leave me alone.”
The two worst bullies in his class: Ariyoshi and Nakata. Bastards, oni, demons, Kaoru spat at them in his mind. But his body just stood sullenly beside Nakata. He’d learned the futility of fighting back years ago.
Ariyoshi jumped down from the footbridge and wrinkled his nose at the mess of beer cans, cigarette butts and dried vomit in the ditch.
“Stinks down here.” He slapped Kaoru casually across the head. “You stink.”
Kaoru’s ears buzzed and he staggered against Nakata’s wide chest. Nakata shoved him back.
Ariyoshi lit a cigarette with his special silver lighter and tucked the lighter away carefully in the pocket of his non-regulation scarlet shirt. Nakata lit up, too, using an orange plastic 100-yen lighter. They grinned at each other and both blew the smoke into Kaoru’s face.
Kaoru squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to cough. They’ll finish soon they’ll finish soon they’ll . . .
“Where’s your weekly contribution?” Ariyoshi puffed. “You’re two days behind.”
“I . . . I didn’t get any lunch money,” Kaoru heard his voice squeak. “My mum m
ade lunch for me.”
“ ‘My mum made it for me,’ ” mimicked Nakata. His livid, pimple-filled face clashed with his carroty dyed hair.
A housewife carrying bulging plastic bags from the supermarket glanced over at the unused footpath and bridge, but hurried on when she saw the black uniforms. Kainan Junior High students were to be avoided.
“No excuses.” Ariyoshi shoved his face into Kaoru’s.
The burning eyes and nicotine-heavy breath filled Kaoru’s universe. He scrambled backwards but Nakata was in the way.
“I’ll get it, I’ll get it. Tomorrow. I promise I will, I’ll get it.” He was sobbing with fear, apprehension, remembered pain.
“You better.” Ariyoshi leaned back, smoothed his gel-slick hair and lit another cigarette. “Check his bag.”
Kaoru choked off another cry as Nakata dragged his school bag from under the footbridge and upended it. The contents hit the ground in a shower of textbooks, notebooks, lunch box, calculator, loose paper, MD player and gym T-shirt. His pencil case burst, and pencils rolled everywhere.
“Hey, that’s a better calculator than mine.” Nakata pounced. “The MD’s too old, but . . . ”
“You oughta get some new stuff, stink-arse,” said Ariyoshi. “This lot’s not worth stealing.”
That’s the point, moron. Kaoru kept looking at his feet. His pencil sharpener had come to rest beside his right toe.
“What’s this?” Nakata grinned ferally. “Still playing with toys, are we?” He held up the small plastic figure of a monster, one of the daikaiju who battled superheroes of TV and manga.
“It’s not mine,” protested Kaoru. “It’s my kid brother’s.” Masaki had given it to him to fix at school in his craft class, because one of the legs had snapped off during too-strenuous aerial maneuvers between kitchen table and sink.
“Playing wiv liddle bruvver’s toys, now?” Nakata cooed.
On the other side of the footbridge adult voices rose in a real altercation.