Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter)

by Koehler, K. H.

  “Being a teen wizard sucks…”

  So there I was, Mr. Nobody.

  I had to stop a monster, the military, and the President of the United States from turning the country into a nuclear wasteland. And I had to do it by slaying a god, and, quite possibly, by killing the girl I loved.

  And you think you have problems.

  Praise for Raiju:

  “Young adult, teen fiction, I don’t really care what you call it, this is one hell of a monster book.”

  —Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine

  “A quick read, and the monster parts are definitely fun.”

  —Shroud Magazine

  “I loved this story. It is the quintessential kaiju story and anyone who loves Japanese kaiju stories will like this book, regardless of their age.”

  —MonsterLibrarian.com

  “Ms. Koehler has a hit with this book. Rousing action, teen angst, and just enough Japanese myth to whet our appetites. In short, this book rocks!”

  —SurvivalWeekly.com

  RAIJU

  A Kaiju Hunter Novel

  by

  K. H. Koehler

  TP

  TOKUSATSU PRESS

  www.tokusatsupress.com

  RAIJU

  A KAIJU HUNTER NOVEL

  by

  K. H. Koehler

  Tokusatsu Press

  http://tokusatsupress.com

  For ordering information, contact

  tokusatsupress@yahoo.com or visit us online.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.

  Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel Copyright © 2010 by K. H. Koehler

  Cover art Copyright © 2010 by K. H. Koehler

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the Publisher, except for short quotes used for review or promotion. For information address the Publisher.

  ISBN-10: 0982676107

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9826761-0-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  RAIJU

  P R O L O G U E

  The End

  See, the funny thing about death is, you never see it coming until it’s staring you in the face. Until you’re forced to look it straight in its burning red eyes. You go about your life worrying about your always-late homework, you’re I’ll-never-get-the-nerve-to-ask-her- out, you’re I’m-so-gonna-fail-class-big-time, thinking it’s the end of the world. At least, that’s how I always approached things.

  Until today. Until I found myself standing in the trembling rubble that had once been New York City, the sky inky black and choked with dust and debris, the neon lights of Times Square struggling fitfully to pierce the almost impenetrable darkness, the air full of that rotten-egg stench of open gas mains that I hated so much, and realized I was going to die today.

  I watched the kaiju rise up before me, through the passage of a torn-open manhole cover. It seemed to go on forever. Black against the black sky. Then it curled over—centipede-like, though it no longer resembled that—and stared at me with brilliant crimson eyes. It looked at me, and it looked through me, this thing that wanted to kill me, this thing that wanted me dead.

  Dead, because I stood between it and the rest of humanity.

  Me. Mr. Nobody.

  A big part of me wanted to rage against whatever gods had conspired to bring me to this point, to end my life so callously, but I had a feeling it would do no good. I had a feeling I had always been destined to be here today, to die like this.

  I raised my hands in self-defense and cried out in the last moments before the kaiju lashed out at me.

  C H A P T E R O N E

  The Great American Nightmare

  1

  Even though I owned a bike—a nth-hand Honda VTX Cruiser that my dad helped me buy and my best friend Wayne helped me rebuild—my dad drove me to school that first day. I wasn’t happy about that. My dad is the head cook at the Red Panda on Flatbush Avenue and his only car is a delivery van he bought from the owner, Mr. Serizawa. I really can’t think of any worse way of starting your first day at a new high school than being driven to it by your old man in a delivery van. And being Japanese made it even more clichéd.

  But if it made my dad happy, I’d deal. I figured if I could get through today, I could get through just about anything.

  They call this neighborhood Brooklyn Japantown, yet there are as many Armenian, Chinese and Indian restaurants as there are Japanese. Those open-air grocers that you think only exist in Third World countries or on Discovery Channel specials? They line the streets up and down, but most are owned by Greek and Italian families. Sure, there are plenty of Japanese in the neighborhood—like us, many had relocated as far away from the city formerly known as San Francisco as they could without falling into the Atlantic Ocean—but I don’t think the ethnic majority is in our favor. Basically, New York sucks tail.

  I won’t go into the whys and wherefores, but unless you’ve been living in a cave, I’m sure you know the story already. Monsters. Kaiju, as the top scientists studying them in Japan call them. It’s all anyone wants to talk about, to study, to obsess over. You probably already have the science course at your own high school—or will, soon. Over the last few years I’ve lost track of the books, magazines, and movie-of-the-week tearjerkers devoted solely to kaiju. Almost two years had passed since the day San Francisco was wiped off the map, and just like a natural disaster or a terrorist act, somehow the horror had turned into excitement, entertainment, science.

  Me? I was there when San Francisco was leveled by Karkadon. I lived it. I remember every gruesome detail of the night a monster shark that had eaten enough polluted fish to grow a hundred times its natural size pulled itself from the ocean, learned to breathe air, and managed to destroy half the city before dying in a hail of military fire. Forget the blockbuster movies and sensational news reports; I know what it was really like. I saw all the surreal nightmare stuff, the utter, crushing finality of it all. I was going to a new school and living in a new city because of it.

  And yet, if you ask anyone, they’ll tell you we were one of the lucky ones. Most of my friends wound up homeless. Some of my friends didn’t make it at all. I’d give anything to see them again. Hell, I’d love to see my enemies again—and they weren’t exactly a joyride, if you know what I mean.

  Before you continue you should know something about me. Prior to the disaster I was that pudgy kid with glasses who sits all alone at lunch and actually reads the books assigned to him in English, the one that you pity, but also try to avoid, because rubbing shoulders with someone like me is like contracting a social disease. If having a genuinely awkward, unpopular, and thoroughly unkissed sixteen-year-old geek for a hero bothers you, I suggest you close this book immediately and move on. I won’t be offended, promise. I just feel you ought to know the truth. You need to understand what I was before learning about what I’ve become.

  A man needs to face his past before he can see his future. That’s Tao, just FYI.

  It started the first day of kindergarten, during recess, when all of us kids were sitting around the lunch table, naively eating our Double Stuf Oreos and slurping from our milk cartons. This kid named Bryce—who was even at the tender age of five built like a side of beefalo—decided I didn’t look white enough and came over and
threw his milk all over me, which got a good laugh out of the rest of the kids at the table, let me tell you.

  I should have slam-dunked his ass. Instead I did the worst possible thing, the mistake that would haunt me to the end of my days in San Francisco: I told my dad. Afraid I was riding the bullet to being bullied because I was only half-white, he told the principal, who immediately told Bryce’s parents. You see where this is going. By the time I was in grammar school I was known as not only a half-chink, but also a snitch and a wimp, a fantabulous trifecta of fail if ever there was one.

  So, yeah, I was that kid you love to hate, tripping over outstretched legs in aisles, laughing off the abuse, and basically crying over my chocolate Ding Dongs as I played Halo and hoped for better days ahead. Then reality reared its ugly brute head and I learned about the days ahead. I learned about reality. I learned that revenge, even served cold, tastes awful.

  Bryce died the night Karkadon came ashore. So did a lot of other kids, not all of whom had been jerks. There was Raymond, who was an even bigger egghead than I was; Wayne, the harmless stoner dude from Venice Beach who got me into bikes; and Chance, a preop transsexual who attracted Bryce’s ire like a steel rod in a lightning storm. In fact, about half of the city’s population went, including my mom, who was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when the monster pulled it down into the San Francisco Bay.

  “Looks like the squash is coming out,” my dad said, looking out the window. As usual, he was thinking about the restaurant. By the way, you wouldn’t think we were related. My dad is short, and he has that soft, round baby face that some men carry over with them from their youth. He cooks and eats way too much. I’m as tall as a giraffe, and in recent years I can’t gain weight no matter how many wontons I eat. “You know, Kevin,” he said after a moment, “you don’t have to go in today. Give it a few months…”

  “I can’t sit home all day and watch KTV,” I said, then regretted it. I was being a jerk. Everyone watched the Kaiju Network these days. But hearing it run day and night at home was giving me a case of the crazies. I added, almost as an afterthought, “I’ve already lost almost two years of school.”

  “You’ll make it up in no time.”

  Probably. I’m not a mental slouch; I just play one on television. See, the year after the kindergarten debacle, I skipped not one, but two grades. Immediately after, my mom and dad took me to an institute where they measure IQs. Mine came out somewhere between genius and freak of nature. At first I thought that was the awesomeness. But after it got me a broken nose at the end of Bryce’s fist I started to think otherwise—the obvious has never been my strong suit.

  San Francisco was gone, and with it pudgy, soft, geeky, push-him-around Kevin. In the last two years I had grown a head taller than my dad and I had lost all the extra weight I’d been carrying around for years, plus. Most importantly, if you punch me, I’ll punch you back.

  Dad was frowning. He was worried, as usual. He works in worrying like an artist works in clay or paints. He was afraid I was going to get pushed around like in the old days. My dad’s a good guy. He just doesn’t know that if you push me, I push back. Let’s you and I keep it that way.

  I reached up and fixed the shades I wear whenever I go out. I have a huge collection of them. It’s something my dad picks up for me whenever he sees them, like how some girls gain those ever-expanding unicorn collections (mostly parent-started), except I’m okay with the glasses. I used to wear them back in San Francisco to hide my mom’s electric blue Irish eyes in my dad’s Asian face, except that now they’d become a symbol of the reborn, impervious Kevin. The ones I had chosen today were artsy round frames with rose-tinted lenses, like something Ozzy would have worn in his trippier days. They worked great with my ragged black jeans and leather jacket and the crazy anime hair I have that needs trimming at least once every two weeks.

  “Eh, I’ll be all right,” I said as we pulled into the parking lot behind Thomas Jefferson High, a boxy red-brick building that looked about as friendly as a penitentiary. “It’s a few fucking classes. I can handle it.”

  Right after San Francisco I had developed a swearing problem. At first my dad let it go. Then he told me to cut it out, that I sounded like a punk. He didn’t say anything now. He just sat there in the parking lot, hands resting on the steering wheel of our idling, oh-so-clichéd delivery van, looking at me. He looked older, more shrunken somehow, like a turtle in a shell that wanted to draw in its head. He didn’t look like my dad anymore. “Do you want me coming in?” he said. “Or do you want to make up an excuse?”

  He and I have always been close, able to read each other’s minds. He knew I wanted to go this alone, that it was important to me. But I loathed to say that to him; he might think I didn’t need him anymore.

  “If you want to come in…” I shrugged, leaving it at that.

  “I really want to check out that squash,” he said.

  He never uses squash in his stir-fry dishes.

  “No problem. I’ll cover you.”

  He slapped my knee.

  I slid open the van door and jumped down, my backpack over a shoulder. “See you at four,” I said.

  “Can you handle registration? Do you want me to pick you up?”

  “Yes to one, no to two. I don’t know if there’ll be an orientation or if they’ll make me take tests or whatever, so lemme handle it, okay?” I shrugged. “I’ll catch the bus home.”

  He smiled, a little. “Good enough. See you at four. And good luck!”

  I waved him off, feeling oddly like our roles had been reversed—like I was sending him off into unknown territory, never to return. It was a feeling that made me feel old. An old, bad fit to the school system. Like I didn’t belong here. Like I ought to just take off. Yet I was just practical (or maybe stupid) enough, to turn around and start off toward the building anyway.

  As things turned out, it was that great and wonderful practicality of mine that changed my life forever.

  2

  I felt a childish stab of nervous energy as I headed for the school.

  Kids were climbing the steps, shoving each other, catcalling, referencing games I hadn’t seen and teams I didn’t know. They all looked like they fit together—they had that perfect cohesion you only ever see with kids who grew up together in the same neighborhood. New York kids. A tough crowd. I thought about metal detectors at the doors, cops in the hallways, guns in lockers. I wondered if all the horror stories I’d heard were true.

  Gradually, I picked out the various cliques: skinny jeans and reversible jackets on the skate guys, a few tough-looking pusher types at the fence, and the jocks jaunting around sans jackets to show off all their gym muscle. Geeks and Emos on the fringes. Don’t think generalizations stand true? You haven’t been in high school of late. The girls looked pretty normal in jeans and tees or those short plaid skirts and funky jumper dresses that were all the rage—except, as usual, the cheerleaders had way more energy than anyone should at this ungodly hour.

  I squinted at the bright sunshiny sky, hating it, wanting it to rain, feeling old, feeling like I needed more coffee, or a cigarette, or something. For the hundredth time that morning I wished I had my bike; at least, if I screwed up so badly I couldn’t show my face around here anymore I’d have an escape route. As it was, I was stuck here till four. Can you say groan?

  There were, of course, bullies. A couple of big ones in varsity jackets were loitering at the doors, doing what bullies do, eyeing up the girls like the daily specials and making obnoxious comments in the direction of the pansier-looking boys. No matter where you go, a bully is a bully; they all came from the same Bryce-mold, it seems, created in the same Bryce-universe.

  I realized I had to get up the stairs and through the front doors and still somehow remain invisible, and the next few seconds were critical. I regretted wearing the shades. If the bullies spotted them, they might peg me as a hippie tree-hugger, which would probably get me killed in this school. So I lowered my head
slightly so my jawcut hair flopped forward to both sides of my face like a curtain and started climbing the steps casual-fast.

  A small group of kids in black fishnet and leather were going in ahead of me, making scary faces at everyone. Maybe, I thought, they would be enough of a distraction that the evil bully-force from the evil bully empire would never notice me. I could dream, anyway. I slipped in ahead of the skate guys and took up my place behind the group in black. I saw funky short funeral dresses on the girls and outrageous black poet shirts and chain jeans on the guys. What an eclectic mix—we even had Goths.

  Well, it turns out that New York produces an even meaner bunch of kids than I was used to, because one of the bullies stuck out his foot, tripping up the Goth girl in the lead. That annoyed me. Not the foot-thing (that’s an ancient tactic that’s whispered around primitive fires on Planet Bully) but the fact that he was going after a girl. Even Bryce and his band of Troglodytes wouldn’t have tried that shit. I mean, come on, weren’t there any rules or codes of honor on Planet Bully, however unfair and haphazard?

  I saw it happen. I didn’t think much about it. I dropped my pack and reached through the wall of taffeta and lace and caught the girl at the elbow, steadying her on her monster plats. She was tiny and it was a long way down the school steps. She would have achieved free-fall longer than a military paratrooper. She fell back against me, catching my toe under her heel, which hurt. But right then I was too pissed about the lack of rules to notice the pain.