Tonight, though, I dreamed I was back in the library at my old school in San Francisco, except that Aimi was there, too. I guess we were having a study date or something because she said, “Maybe you’d like to learn more Japanese words?” and I said, “Yes.” So she started reading a book to me, but not in English. After a while I took it from her and glanced at the pages. They were covered up and down in Japanese kanji characters. I don’t know kanji, or even katakana, which is informal kanji, but somehow I could read this.
My lips started to move as I read down the page, but suddenly Aimi leaned forward and touched my lips with two of her fingertips, hushing me. “Don’t, Kevin! Don’t say her name. She wakes.” Then she started to cry.
I looked up to say I’m sorry, but Aimi was gone, and sitting across from me was the most beautiful Asian woman I had ever seen. Her face was milk white, her lips fire red, and all of her was framed in blood red ropes of hair that almost seemed alive. She was clearly Japanese, but her eyes were as blue as mine, as blue as my mom’s had been. She smirked at me, a knowing look, and her teeth were very white and sharp in her mouth.
“Who?” I asked the woman, standing up. “Who wakes?” Suddenly it was very important to me.
Flames sprang up from the book on the table in front of me, carving a name in the fragile rice pages.
The name was RAIJU.
Then I woke up.
C H A P T E R T W O
Thunder Underground
1
“Kev! Coffee’s on!” Dad called from the kitchen where he was, even at this ungodly hour, already rattling around.
What a night. I felt all banged up getting out of bed, like I’d fought a war, and the bedclothes were so tangled I figured I must have lost that war.
And what a strange dream. I kept thinking about it as I climbed out of bed.
The rain had stopped and all I could hear was the despondent drip-drip off the gutters outside, dishes clattering together in the kitchen, and the drone of the TV going. “Be right there,” I said, or gargled. I am so not a morning person.
My bedroom faces east so the sun always hits me right in the face if I oversleep, even through the mesh industrial windows. But we’re a blue-collar working family, and I can’t remember the last time the sun beat me to rising. It’s black when I go to bed, and black when I get up, even on the weekend.
I showered and dressed, choosing a black Nehru shirt I left untucked and a pair of faded black jeans with the knees ripped out. I wasn’t trying to be haute couture, but when you do your shopping at the Salvation Army, you take what you can get. The black suited me, made me look even bigger than I was. Maybe Snowman would challenge me today, maybe not. Either way, I was going in fighting. I sighed, hooked my damp hair behind my ear, and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet to smoke my morning cigarette with the bathroom window open.
I was so lost in thought that I almost didn’t feel the floor quivering. I heard the soap dish rattle against the vanity and slowly got to my feet while most of my internal organs sank so far down they might as well have taken refuge in my big clunky biker boots. My first thought was, It’s back. The thing. Karkadon. Then I remembered how dead it was, how the President had said nothing like that would ever happen again, and how foolish I was being.
I moved unhurriedly to the window that faces out over the East River. Nothing unusual was happening. Traffic was passing. People were moving in ordered chaos. A vendor was selling coffee and newspapers at a kiosk across the street. I waited, my heart slamming against my ribs like a frantic bird in a cage, but nothing dragged itself up the muddy banks of the East River. Nothing crawled up onto the suspension wires of the Brooklyn Bridge and began tearing it to shrapnel.
I was being stupid, imagining things; it was probably the delivery truck rumbling by outside on its Tuesday morning drop, or maybe a news chopper passing overhead. I started breathing again, slowly, in, out, in, out. Anxiety Disorder. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Doctors have all these fancy scientific terms for frantic human terror.
“Kevin?” my dad said from the kitchen. He sounded normal—tired, distracted, but not panicked. Was I imagining everything, I wondered?
Then I glanced down at my hands and finally noticed that my cigarette was on fire. Not burning, mind you, but on fire, the little licking flames inching toward my fingers. “Shit!” I hissed and threw the cigarette into the toilet and immediately flushed it.
“Kevin!”
“I’m already there!” I called.
Smoking is mondo bad for your health, just FYI.
2
Just my luck, I ran into Mr. Serizawa as I headed out to school. Usually he stays upstairs in his room, which is just fine by me, since he has these crazy Muppet eyes that sort of freak me out.
“Mago,” he said in greeting, hobbling down the stairs with his carven little cane. ”Mago, I had a dream about you last night.”
You know that crazy Asian dude who gave little Billy the mogwai? Yeah, exactly.
“Hi, Mr. Serizawa,” I said.
At least he was speaking English this morning, except for that mago business. It means something casual like son or grandchild. Older Japanese folks use it on young people in a patronizing way that’s supposed to make you feel good, but that’s about all I’d learned of my dad’s native language. Generally speaking, I know less Japanese than the average otaku, which is pretty sad when you think about it.
Mr. Serizawa worked his way down the steps without help. He’s not what you’d expect—some wizened old magus in a Kung Fu movie or whatever. He’s over eighty years old, and was head chef of various New York bistros most of his life, and a butcher before that, and a soldier before that, if the stories are true. Despite his age, he’s built solid like a mountain.
I thought about telling him I had to run, that I was late for school, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t buy it. He’s the only one I know who can see right through my fibs—maybe it’s the Muppet eyes, I don’t know. So I waited impatiently at the bottom of the stairs, my pack over one shoulder, hoping this wouldn’t entail some boring long philosophy lesson about a Samurai or something. “What kind of dream did you have, Mr. Serizawa?” I prompted.
He nodded dourly. “You were fighting the Orochi, like the god Susa-no-Ō,” he announced, rolling the words along in a way you just don’t hear anymore unless you visit the Japanese countryside where the old dialects are still spoken. “I saw you with a flaming sword, taming the great Kami.”
“Oh yeah? Was I saving any girls?”
He laughed. “No girls. But maybe tomorrow night.”
I pretended to smile, but what I really wanted to do was to get the hell out of there. I mean, the way Mr. Serizawa studies me has total creepy child molester written all over it. He’s never pulled anything, but you can tell he’s up to something.
“Did you cut your hair, mago?” he asked, admiring me.
I glanced longingly at the door. “Um…no?”
“Yet something is different this morning. Something has changed.”
Yeah, I had taken a shower. Was that it?
“You are older today than you were yesterday,” he said. Again he nodded, as if to himself. “Visit me when you are ready, mago. You will know the time. And I will always be here for you.” Turning, he hobbled off to the restaurant’s kitchen.
Do you see what I mean about creeeepy?
Rolling my eyes, I ducked out to the converted shed in the alley behind the restaurant before anything weirder could happen—and before my dad could catch me and offer me a lift to school, because I’d never get out of that one. He hates it when I take Jennie out on these streets and keeps telling me I’m going to break my neck one day. It’s a good thing I’m not a gun freak, because then he’d warn me I’m going to shoot my eye out.
Out in the shed I swung a leg over Jennie’s worn and pitted saddle, then stopped a moment just to savor the feel of her under me. The obsolete and totally unfashionable dirt bike was comfortable, w
aiting for me. As always, it felt like coming home.
But, as always, I felt a spike of despair once Jennie’s engine turned over and snarled to life. It reminded me of Wayne—greasy-fingered Wayne, ponytailed Wayne, Wayne my best (and only) friend, and how I’d never get a chance to fix an old jalopy like this with him again. Jennie was his magnum opus, named for a girl who wouldn’t talk to him at school. But Wayne, like so many other things in my life, was gone. He never got a chance to make a total fool of himself by asking Jennie out. And Jennie never got a chance to laugh at him because, she, too, was gone.
3
My second day at Thomas Jefferson High somehow managed to be both uneventful and irritating.
In Algebra I got a paper back from Mr. Russo all A-Plussed up with a note attached asking me if I could tutor the “less gifted” students of his class. That made me want to pound my head against the top of my desk until I achieved full unconsciousness. I mean, I wouldn’t be caught dead tutoring, even if it does mean meeting a lot of easy and appreciative girls. Michelle sat next to me in Latin, then walked with me to Biology. Mrs. Rodriguez didn’t call on me today so I was able to properly maintain my masquerade as the dumb new guy, but by mid-morning I also learned that the earthquake I thought I had imagined earlier had been felt by a fair number of other students. In fact, faint tremors had been reported all over the downtown Brooklyn area, according to the closed-circuit KTV broadcast that Mrs. Rodriguez made us watch. That didn’t improve my overall opinion of New York much. California is supposed to move around under folks—you kind of expect it—but I’d thought that New York was built on pretty solid bedrock. At one point, during English, the janitor rumbled by the classroom with his bucket and brooms. The noise made this one uber-nervous girl jump up and run shrieking from the room. I figured that had a lot to do with the colorful rumors going around (probably started by Troy and his meathead friends) that a giant monster was moving under the ground.
That was bad, but what was worse was I didn’t see Aimi anywhere in the halls, or in any of the classrooms. I tried not to let that bother me. We didn’t share any classes, so it was only natural that we not run into each other until lunch. Maybe she had gotten sick, I thought, or the earthquake had frightened her like the girl in Latin. Snowman had said she wasn’t well, whatever that meant.
The moment I entered the cafeteria, Michelle hanging by my side, my eyes shifted over to find all the kids in black. Aimi wasn’t there, though the Goths were amassed in their usual place, doing what they usually did—posing self-importantly and not eating.
Snowman was sitting on the end of the outlaw bench, dressed in a bright green Mad-Hatter-inspired tuxedo and top hat, his bleach-white hair tied back in a long ponytail. I thought he looked like the bastard offspring of Lucky the Leprechaun and Oliver Twist. He was signing a homemade Destroyer album for a girl. The color rushed through the girl’s cheeks as he scribbled across the impact case with a silver pen. I rolled my eyes. And when she started jumping up and down like a demented kangaroo, I had to suppress an urge to throw up a little in my mouth.
“I don’t get what they see in those clowns,” Michelle said while we stood in the lunch line with our trays, waiting to be slopped. She casually reached up and ripped a poster down off the wall advertising the concert at The Hole—Destroyer was playing a double bill with a local girl band I’d never heard of.
I grunted noncommittally and stared down at the free school lunch being dumped on my tray, trying to decide if the mystery substance was made of roadkill or only looked that way, and if I necessarily needed a Hazmat suit in order to consume it.
“And the Willy Wonka clothes…wassup with that?” Michelle made a face.
“Some of it’s okay,” I said.
“Maybe. But I prefer a guy who looks hot in jeans.” She smiled winningly up at me.
I sighed and picked up my tray and followed her to our table, where Terry was busy doing an autopsy on his Notebook, probably so he could upgrade it into a rocket-launcher, à la MacGuyer.
I was being hard on Michelle, I knew. She was reliable, down to earth, normal. The type of girl my dad would dig. But I wasn’t sure if I could tolerate her practical, All-American approach to life. All of that wholesome, kinetic energy was likely to give me motion sickness.
For the next half an hour I pushed the industrial waste that passed for lunch around my tray and tried to pay attention as she chattered on about a bike an uncle of hers had given her. She looked at me pleadingly with her big brown doe eyes. “Could you look at it, Kevin? Please? I think I’m going to make it my Shop project, but I was hoping you could help me with the alignment. My dad is always working, so I can’t ask him.”
“You have a bike?” I said. I stopped Goth-watching and turned my full attention on Michelle. It wasn’t like Aimi was going to mystically appear in the middle of the cafeteria just to make me feel better.
Michelle’s face lit up. “It’s a VTX Interceptor. V-4 engine. But my dad is helping me upgrade it.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “The new Hondas? Those are killer.”
Michelle nodded, secure in the knowledge that she finally had me. “My uncle races them up in the Pocono raceways.” She gave me a close-lipped smile, her face flushing as she suddenly turned shy and picked daintily at the salad she had chosen over the Roadkill Du Jour entree I was trying not to gag over. I wondered if I had anything to do with that. “But he trashed this one. I mean, it’s a great cruiser, but he can’t maneuver on the track with it anymore, so he gave it to me as an early graduation present.”
Wow, a family who gave each other retired, top-of-the-line bikes. Why did I have to be born into a family whose one ambition in life was to make the perfect rice ball? I mean, does my karma suck or what?
“Kevin, I saw your bike, man. It’s awesome!” Terry surfaced long enough to proclaim. “Can I take it for a ride sometime?”
“Terry,” Michelle said with exasperation, “you wouldn’t fit on Kevin’s bike.”
“I will after I make the football team,” Terry insisted.
“Troy and his fathead friends will slaughter you,” Michelle countered, looking appalled.
“Shows what you know, Shell. Wait till I make a touchdown. And then…” And here Terry got up to do a bizarre end zone dance even as Michelle bit her plastic fork and rolled her eyes at me as if to say: As if that’s ever going to happen.
I tried not to smile, but Terry’s victory dance was pretty funny—I had to give him props for his I-don’t-give-a-damn-who’s-looking attitude. “I love that bike,” he babbled, sitting down again at the table. “Doesn’t John Woo use those in all his films?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe. But it sort of needs work.”
And all at once, bikes were the topic. Michelle said her dad did custom paint jobs at his garage in the Heights and she had access to just about every kind of tool or paint I might need to upgrade Jennie—which, for me, was pretty much like turning a starving kid loose in a candy shop. Terry said he knew “carputers” and could hack anything with wires. I got so into what they were saying, I stopped thinking about Aimi for a whole half an hour.
4
The rest of my week was positively sucktastic—especially at the end, when the monster tried to eat me.
In Computer Lab I got a partner who turned out to be the only kid left on planet Earth who didn’t know how to use a PC except to download porn. P.E. was only minimally better—I didn’t have a uniform yet, so Coach Kuznik let me sit it out on the bleachers instead of wrestling down on the mat and making a fool of myself. But in Biology, Mrs. Rodriguez said we were going to be studying Karkadon’s anatomy in detail and I almost walked out after that announcement.
Friday afternoon, seconds after the last bell rang, found me standing beside Jennie in the parking lot, pulling my riding gloves on and watching all the other students scurrying en masse toward their vehicles. The skate guys set up their ramp, and the pusher guys were back at the fence. I
watched the Goths climb aboard their black van, minus Aimi.
For the fourth day in a row Aimi had failed to show for school. It had taken a lot of subtle digging on my part, but I had managed to get at least some information out of Michelle, who disliked Aimi even more than Snowman, which was saying a lot. According to the stories, Aimi was suffering from a mystery illness and her attendance in school was sporadic, at best. Aimi never talked about it, but the rumors ran from an incurable childhood disease like leukemia or Multiple Sclerosis to various STD’s. Michelle was leaning toward the STD’s, even though I was having a hard time believing that. Aimi just didn’t seem the type, somehow.
I wondered if she would be at the concert on Saturday. I wondered if she was well enough to play. I thought about asking Snowman if she was okay, but I was pretty sure he would just punch me in the face. I was fingering the note in my pocket I had been carrying around with me all week like a magic talisman, thinking about what to do, when I saw Terry waving enthusiastically to me.
I waved back, just to be nice. That’s me, Mr. Nice Guy.
But Terry, being Terry, misinterpreted it and bounded over, his fat jiggling girlishly under his Darth Maul T-shirt and outdated patch jacket. “Sweeeet ride, man,” he said, staring wild-eyed at Jennie and doing that victory dance of his in a totally embarrassing way.
“Thanks, man,” I said, glancing around to see if anyone was noticing us together. I mean, I felt for the guy—obviously, he was in need of a cool card, but I didn’t have any extras to lend him. I turned the engine over, hoping he’d get a clue and catch his bus.
No dice; Terry was still looking my bike over like she was completely edible. “She have a killswitch? ‘Cause I can rewire that for you, man.”
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 4