The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  After the first appearance of the daikaiju at Nagasaki, encounters grew more and more common. At first only one would appear at a time, then two or three, coming together as if drawn to one another, battling amongst the cities and towns of men. The devastation was staggering; thousands killed in a matter of minutes, then they would retreat once more, into the mountains and valleys, oceans and lakes, and not be seen again. Expeditions were sent after them, armed with everything from prayers to nukes, but there was no trace of them. They appeared when they chose, and disappeared just as readily. And on those occasions when we had the chance to organize a military response while they were still there, we found that weapons had little or no effect on them, apart from enraging them even further. Slowly but surely, mankind began to adapt: setting up early detection systems, preparing evacuation plans and drills, organizing shelters. Humans are pretty flexible, really. We just learned to run. Mostly away, but not entirely. To begin with, a few film studios realized the amazing potential in these giant monsters, and risked life and limb to capture their rampages on celluloid. These daikaiju films found instant popularity in their home country of Japan, and over the decades they gained a cult following overseas as well. It was the thrill of the danger, without the actual danger accompanying it.

  But for some, that wasn’t enough. Some wanted the real thing.

  We walk a little while longer, passing a few touristy shops on either side of us, until we reach an intersection. Here the road joins a larger road, on one corner of which is a decent-sized grocery store, not dissimilar to the ones back home, apart from the unfamiliar name, “Cora.” Beyond this road, the area becomes more residential, ramshackle houses mingling with newer tourist villas. A lot of the older buildings look like they’ve been added to repeatedly over the years, mixing styles and materials, never quite finished. I read once that the native Mauritians often extended their houses piecemeal as the money was available, resulting in an architectural style I’d categorize as “hodgepodge.” Here, at this intersection, Ryuichi stops.

  He nods. “This will do.” He looks back over his shoulder, and I do the same. The film crew has vanished, presumably retreating to a safe distance, safer than ours at any rate. All I can see is the beach, and the ocean, and the monster. It’s almost clear of the water now, its hindquarters splitting into four enormous legs, like roman columns covered in barnacles, and I realize that it looks a little like a centaur at this point. I can hear its passage, a dull roar like an airplane heard from a distance, and something else below that—a deep hum that I can’t identify. The wind is picking up, but I don’t think it’s the cyclone yet, just the rush of air that the creature is pushing in front of itself.

  Then the wave at its feet hits the beach and explodes, spraying water high into the air, and for a moment I can’t see it anymore. My heart feels like it’s trying to smash its way through my ribs, as the deep guttural crashing of water fills my ears. I’m certain we’re going to be engulfed, swept away by the agitated sea, crushed against the rough walls of some Mauritian house before getting sucked back across the grass and sand and towed out to sea, pulled underwater to a tropical ocean grave. I can see it in my mind, clear as a photograph, clear as a premonition.

  It doesn’t happen, of course. The wave gurgles across the grassed area, foaming like detergent, and then washes weakly around our feet. It barely passes our ankles. I look over at Belinda, recognize a hint of the same fear that I’d just experienced, though she covers it up with a thin tight smile. Ryuichi, on the other hand, looks as relaxed as a yogi.

  “Get ready,” he murmurs.

  Then there is the first tremor, a minor earthquake, and I know without looking that the creature has reached the land. The sand on the beach is muffling its massive footfalls for the moment, but that won’t last long. Soon it will hit solid earth, not that far behind us. Soon we’ll start to run. My first run. I’ve dreamed of this almost my entire life, and now that it’s actually happening, I’m having trouble believing it’s real.

  The road beneath my feet lurches, almost tipping me over, and I yelp once, surprised. It’s real all right. “Be ready!” Ryuichi calls, bending his knees and touching his spread fingers against the rough bitumen. I do likewise, though it’s harder to bend in these damn leather pants. I’m starting to think Ryuichi had the right idea. After all, if something goes wrong, I might as well be naked for all the protection these leathers will offer me. I close my eyes, feeling the vibrations in the street beneath me, trying to see what is happening in my mind. See the centaurine behemoth galloping towards me, each step covering hundreds of meters, each footstep crashing into the ground, sending plumes of dust into the air, and pushing dirt forward, forward, until . . .

  “Now!” Ryuichi cries, but I’m already moving, as the ground beneath me rises sharply. It feels like being in an elevator, my weight suddenly increasing. I spring up and begin to run.

  We all run, one way or another.

  Ryuichi was the first. In his late teens, a little younger than I am, he traveled to the site of a daikaiju encounter. It was an enormous pig, but with a mane like a lion and tusks the size of city buses, and it was ravaging a small city in the south of Japan. He sought it out, while everyone else was fleeing. He remembered the sensations he’d felt as a small child, his experiences then, and somewhere inside those terrifying memories he found something wonderful. Watching footage of subsequent monster attacks over the years that followed, he barely saw the creatures themselves, majestic and huge, towering above the buildings like gods. No, what he saw was the ground that supported them, and what it did beneath their weight, their power. How it reacted. How it flowed.

  That day, that young man did the unthinkable, the unbelievable. And since then, a small group of crazed enthusiasts have followed, quite literally, in his footsteps, seeking adventure or adrenaline or even some kind of enlightenment at the pounding feet of these monsters. Most everyone else ran away from them, and the maniacal film crews ran to them. But we don’t run away, or run to.

  We run with them.

  This is the most bizarre feeling I’ve ever experienced, a surreal dislocation. It’s a little like riding on an escalator, being pushed upwards and forwards, but the speed of the journey varies quite wildly. It’s considerably less smooth than surfing, but the sensation isn’t completely dissimilar to that nonetheless. As I run, the road begins to fracture and break beneath my feet, pulling off in different directions. I don’t have time to think; I step hurriedly from the chunk of bitumen I’m riding onto another in front of me, then another, each one falling by the wayside as I pass it. Somewhere behind me, I can hear the creature, its breath hot and wet on the back of my neck like a tropical breeze. Droplets of water splatter on my shoulders, and I hope it’s the cyclone catching up with us, rather than monster slobber. That would be kind of disgusting.

  I catch sight of Belinda on my left. She’s running like Hermes himself, winged heels masked by knee-high leather boots. I’m momentarily hypnotized by the fluidity of her run, moving from platelet to platelet like a gymnast, never pausing, never faltering. Never stopping. When you’re running, as the old saying goes, he who hesitates is lost. I can’t see Ryuichi; I don’t know whether he’s behind or in front of us. I hope he’s okay.

  The piece of road I’m riding lurches suddenly to one side, and my balance begins to falter. A burst of cold fear splashes up my back, and I react without thinking, quickly shifting my weight and leaping forward, leaving the crumbling bitumen behind me. I hear it collapse, crashing into a thousand pieces of rubble, and I realize how close I was to joining it. I have to concentrate, stay focused. Live man running, or dead man falling. It’s up to me and God to decide which one I am. And the monster, of course.

  To my right, I can see the town begin to fade, or what’s left of it at any rate. Flic en Flac has been shaken, flipped upwards on a wave of rock, and then dropped back down in its wake. What remains looks more like a rubbish dump than a seaside tourist town, wreckag
e and debris spread surprisingly evenly across the ground. Beyond the town, we begin to enter more rural surroundings, huge expanses of sugarcane stretching for miles ahead of us. I hope that the creature sticks to the roads, where the solid ground will help us keep our footing, stay ahead of it, like riding a storm front. But I know I can’t rely on that. I’ve seen footage of runners getting caught in a tidal wave of soft earth, feet stuck in the sucking mud, dragging like plows, until they’re finally pulled beneath the monster’s feet and crushed into the dirt, just messy smears left in its wake. This is an extreme sport, often a death sport. But I feel I have to do it anyway, despite the risks. After all, you’re never as alive as when you’re close to death.

  The rock I’m running on begins to list to one side, the left, and I realize that the creature is turning slightly. I don’t need to see it to know this; I can picture the shockwave of earth, imagine its alignment. I know that the front of the wave will always be angled away from the direction it’s moving, whilst it veers off to the sides the further around you go. I’m still traveling forward, but I’m leaning left, so my position on the wave is too far to the left of the daikaiju’s path. I’ll have to sidestep in order to continue running. Of course, I could always allow myself to slip off the wave on this side, ride the ever-decreasing ripples of rock back down to ground level, and end the run here and now. It’s a tricky maneuver, but hardly impossible.

  Ah, the hell with that. I didn’t wait this long and come this far to wimp out now.

  I start stepping across, my legs pumping, my breath burning my lungs. I’m starting to tire, I have to admit, and it’s only been a matter of minutes. Running is incredibly demanding both physically and mentally, and it’s starting to take its toll. I ignore the fatigue though, ignore the pain, and continue to run, cutting across the creature’s path.

  This is where it could go horribly wrong; a miscalculation, a misstep, and I could end up beneath the feet of the beast, monster toe-jam. I can see it to my right now, from the corner of my eye, its breath steaming in the air around its maw, tentacles flailing like an underwater anemone. Its legs swinging back and forth, so slowly, so deadly. The ground is rising higher and higher beneath my feet the closer I get to it. Alarm bells start to ring in my head.

  Turn.

  Turn.

  Turn!

  I turn left and redouble my efforts, trying to get some distance between myself and the monster. My legs are steel springs, my arms pistons in a perfect engine, my brain a supercomputer. I focus utterly on what’s in front of me, striding from rock to rock. I am a legend, a superman, a godling. Invulnerable. Invincible.

  A noise to my left catches my attention. I glance across and see Belinda stumble, crying out as she rolls from her platform, head-sized chunks of rock and soil tumbling with her as she vanishes, her yelps of pain cut off suddenly. I watch the spot for a moment longer, horrified. Frozen.

  I’m just a man. Barely more than a boy. Flesh and blood, same as Belinda. Less. Vulnerable.

  I’m going to die here.

  “Go!” a voice behind me screams, and without thinking I obey. My legs work independently, pushing me forward, and after a few stumbling staccato seconds I find my rhythm again. The ground underneath my feet is softening, long broken stalks of sugarcane whipping past me like slalom flags, and I have to dodge left and right to avoid being hit in the face. But it’s still solid enough to support my weight, thank heaven.

  “Thought we lost you for a second there,” the voice calls out again, and I glance to my right. Ryuichi is there, further back, closer to the creature, but running almost casually, not a worry in the world. I can’t understand his attitude to the monster at his heels, despite reading his memoirs. If my family had been killed by a monster, I’d hate them, fear them, keep the hell away from them. Instead, Ryuichi seeks them out, not to try to hurt or kill them, but to share an experience with them. To run with them. It makes no sense to me.

  “Belinda?” I call back to him, legs moving automatically, boots slapping the mud beneath them fast and loud enough to sound like a drum beat, or a heartbeat. Life signs.

  He nods in an exaggerated fashion, almost theatrically. “She’ll be fine,” he yells, barely audible over the rumble and roar of the beast’s rough progress.

  I relax a little, relieved both for her and for myself by proxy. I’ve seen videos of runners doing what she’d done; it’s similar to a surfer’s ignominious exit from a particularly large wave, painful and dangerous but not often fatal. She’ll be battered and bruised, perhaps even a little broken, but she’ll live. I hope that’s the truth, at any rate. We believe what we need to believe, in order to keep going.

  The wind whistles over my buzz-cut hair, my eyes watering a little. I’m keeping a close eye on the ground just in front of my feet now, stepping left and right, back and forward, depending on where the heaving earth is carrying me. And always I’m acutely aware of the massive presence behind me driving me on, and the smaller one to my side sharing the experience. I wonder for the thousandth time why Ryuichi does this. In his book, he spoke of his reasons, but they were masked by rhetorical questions, so there were no easy answers. The one that’s always puzzled me was simple—six ordinary words—but the old Japanese man seemed to find something more in them, a philosophy that I didn’t understand.

  His question was, Why are there no daikaiju fossils?

  Ryuichi is waving to me, grinning. I wave back with a smile. He continues to wave, more animatedly than before, and with sudden dread I realize that he’s not smiling, he’s grimacing. And he’s not waving, he’s gesturing. Gesturing ahead at something. I raise my eyes from the undulating soil at my feet, knowing it is dangerous to do so, but suspecting that it would be even more dangerous not to.

  I’m right. Worse luck.

  We’re headed directly for a mountain. Mauritian mountains aren’t like the gentle slopes back home, where you can often barely notice the incline as you climb one. No, they are acute lumps of stone, easily taller than they are wide, jutting defiantly at the sky. The one in front of us looks suspiciously like a pudgy finger carved in rock, covered by a thick blanket of dark green vegetation. It must be four or five hundred meters high, dwarfing even the behemoth at our heels. For a moment I’m caught in its majesty, its beauty, its grandeur. Then I snap out of it, and see it for what it really is.

  A wall. A huge stone wall. And we’re hurtling towards it.

  I look left and right, hoping for a way off the earthwave before we hit, but both Ryuichi and I have been too skillful in our placement; we’re right at the tip of the arrowhead, which is aimed directly for the center of the mountain. Even if we skipped to the sides, we’d still be smashed against it. I look to Ryuichi for some kind of comfort, some hope, but his posture doesn’t offer much of either. He’s almost back-pedaling, as close to panic as I’ve ever seen him, in all the years of watching the movies of him running. Between us, we’ve had a deadly combination of inexperience and overconfidence. He who hesitates is lost, they say, but they also say look before you leap. And pride cometh before the fall.

  I look back over my shoulder, fear falling away from me as if caught in the slipstream. The creature continues to advance, not slowing at all, perhaps not even noticing the mountain. I still can’t see its eyes, just the dull red glow from beneath its brow, but I suspect that even if I could, I’d see nothing there, no intelligence, no will. Looking at it this close, it’s somehow less monstrous, less bestial than from afar, or on a television screen for that matter, stripped of dramatic music and editing.

  . . . no fossils . . .

  Turning back, I see Ryuichi signaling me again. I’m not certain what he’s trying to tell me, so rather than attempting to interpret his motions, I pay attention to his actions. He’s allowing himself to fall back, closer to the creature, and this time he appears to be doing it on purpose. I blink a few times, trying to both clear my eyes of tears and to comprehend what he’s doing.

  Then the penny
drops. The closer we are to the creature’s feet, the more force will be behind us when it hits the mountain. Too far forward and we’ll be dashed against the rock. Too far back and we’ll be caught between it and the monster. But if we get it just right . . .

  Goldilocks never played for such high stakes.

  I slow the pace of my run, feeling the earth under my boots start to jerk and wobble more violently as I do so. We’re closer to this moving epicenter now, and the Brownian motion of the ground is become more pronounced and chaotic.

  I just hope we have time before . . .

  The outskirts of the wave ahead of us crash into the mountain, sending a wall of dirt into the sky. Like a wave breaking on rocks, the soil is scattered into a million directions, raining down on us in large sodden clumps. I have to dodge desperately in order to keep my footing on the ground, which is starting to tilt upwards, rising ominously. I look over at Ryuichi one last time. He gives me a thumbs-up signal. I return it, though I wish I was as confident as he is. I hear the monster behind us bellow, just once, as if thwarted by this gigantic rocky finger in its way. I can sympathize.

  Then we hit, and I’m flying.

  At first the ground is still beneath my feet, pressing them hard as it accelerates into the sky carrying me along with it, rising on a column of soil and sugarcane. Then it falls away, and I’m running in thin air. The gap between me and my footing widens, ten meters, twenty, fifty. In front of me, the vegetation cloaking the mountain speeds past my eyes. It’s impossible to judge how close I am to it. Too close, I’d wager. Any moment now, it’ll slap me hard in the face, and then I’ll be scraped along it like an insect hitting a sloped windscreen, leaving a long smear behind me as I’m sanded into oblivion on the rough shrubs.

  Suddenly, the mountain is gone, and all I can see is gray cloudy sky, and distant vistas of fields and roads below me. I realize I was right about how useless my leathers really are.

  My stomach turns over, and I realize I’ve stopped ascending, gravity finally taking a firm grip on my ankles. And slowly, almost reluctantly, I begin to freefall. I don’t even think to scream; the sensation is both exhilarating and terrifying, and between the two emotions I’m struck completely dumb. My muscles have gone dead, arms and legs flapping in the wind like a paper doll’s. I look down and see the mountain again, the finger pointing up at me. Now it doesn’t look defiant. It looks accusing. You, it’s saying, you human, you proud, stupid human. This is what happens. Icarus flies too high, Pandora opens the box. Now reap what you have sown.