I lifted an eyebrow at that. “This was the best night you’ve ever had?”
Aside from the usual drunks smelling of vomit, there were a bunch of kids in here with us, sitting despondently on bunks or standing around with their hands in their pockets, looking like they were waiting for the hangman to come for them. All of them looked bruised and slightly smashed by the night’s adventure. I probably looked worse than any of them. Well, Troy and I—except Troy was gone. His grandmother had shown up ten minutes ago in her housecoat and babushka, all three-hundred-pounds of her, and had literally beat him with her right shoe out of the cell and down the hallway to the exit while Troy cried, “Gramma, Gramma, I’m sorry, Gramma!” I had a feeling Gramma would be finishing up with Troy at home, and that Troy would soon be sporting new bruises.
I figured my sentencing couldn’t be far behind. It had taken four squad cars’ worth of police to break up the fight at the monster party, which had acquired a certain surreal quality about it, complete with broken pool cues, broken furniture, a broken liquor cabinet that had drenched me in cheap scotch, and a stereo system that went kaput when I shouldered Troy into it. It had been a pretty colorful fight, and had garnered a nice audience for us. But the owners of the house, assuming they were still in the city, would not be happy campers when they saw how we’d redecorated their den
In a way, it had been fun, even though I felt like I’d been dragged behind a small truck. And I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the consequences.
“I thought maybe this was like every Saturday night with Snowman,” I said, then instantly regretted it. Way to go, Kev. Jealous, much?
Aimi glanced around the station. Most of the cops from the night Qilin first attacked the city were on duty tonight. Most were staring at me like I was the Antichrist descended to earth. I really couldn’t blame them. Every time some drama broke out in this town, I seemed to be at the center of it. Hell, even I would have been suspicious of me, at this point. “Snowman and I have fun,” she said. She looked around at the station. “But not like this. The way everyone is staring, I think you’re some kind of celebrity.”
I poked at a loose tooth at the back of my mouth with my tongue. “So is he.” A part of me again wondered if I should blurt out my suspicions or keep them to myself.
She gave me the drollest look. “Snowman and I are best friends, Kevin, and nothing will ever change that. But believe me, you’re worried over nothing.” I must have looked unconvinced, because she added, “Snowman has his sights set on someone else, just so you know.”
I was about to try and puzzle that one out—how Snowman could notice anyone past Aimi—when I heard footsteps approaching and turned to see Dr. Mura standing in the station, dressed much the same way as last time. He glared at me as he clutched the collar of his coat closed. Suffice to say he didn’t exactly look like my number one fan. “You,” he said. The ice in his voice could have frozen a bonfire.
Aimi’s face turned hard. “Daddy…it wasn’t Kevin’s fault! He didn’t start it.”
I did finish it, though.
Dr. Mura kept his hairy eyeball on me as he approached the drunk tank.
“Daddy…!”
“That’s enough, Aimi. We’ll talk about it when we get home.”
A duty cop stepped forward to let Aimi out of the tank.
I felt a sudden spurt of anger somewhere inside. I think it was hero-itis…or maybe stupidity. “It wasn’t Aimi,” I hurriedly told Dr. Mura. “It was all me. Aimi had nothing to do with tonight, with any of this…”
“Oh,” said Dr. Mura, “I know that.” He glared in at me, looking like he wanted to reach through the bars and pull me through by the hair. Under the circumstances, I probably had that coming. “I specifically told you to leave my daughter alone. Yet you disobey me. Just who do you think you are, young man?”
The voice of parental authority. The old Kevin would have shrunk down to roughly microscopic size. Me, on the other hand…
“Well, I’m not one of your lackeys, that’s for sure,” I said. “Where do you get those guys?” I said, indicating the zombie standing next to him. “Do you farm them like vegetables or just manufacture them? Do they actually have eyes?” I took a step forward but a cop held out his hand to keep me from stepping outside the cell. “Oh, just dump the condescension and get out of my face, old man!” I shouted.
Way to go, Kev. Forget about having Dr. Mura as an in-law. Like, ever.
Dr. Mura looked taken aback by my baditude. First surprise, then anger crossed his face—the kind, I should add, that usually lands people in maximum security prisons for life for first-degree murder. I imagined he was contemplating whether he could choke the life out of me before a cop pulled him off of my gasping, slowly dying body. He narrowed his eyes to black slits. “Last warning,” he said evenly. “You’ll get no more from me. Next time I act.”
I took a step back, feeling like I was being shoved by the force of the anger in his voice alone. Act? Act as in what? What could he do to me? Shoot me?
Without another word, Dr. Mura started down the corridor, his hand guiding Aimi along as if she were an invalid. But before she left with her father, she whipped around and ran back to the cell and took the bars in her hands. She took a deep breath, the bodice of her dress rising and falling. “I’ll do what I can to clear you of all this,” she promised. “I’ll tell them it was Troy who started it.” Then her fact crumbled. “I’ll see you soon, Kevin.”
I sat down on a bunk. I looked into her eyes and recognized the dark truth there. She was lying. I licked my lips, tasting the blood from my broken lip. “There won’t be a ‘soon’,” I said, my voice pitched low so she wouldn’t hear the sound of it trying to crack. Like that first time behind the club, there was a lump in my throat, but for an entirely different reason. This time around, I knew it was over before it ever began. I was saying goodbye.
“No,” she said, staring at her feet. “I guess there won’t.” Her voice was small and trembling, full of unshed tears. Finally, she looked up, her eyes shining. “You have to understand, Kevin, my dad…”
“Fuck your dad.”
She trembled. “I wish…” She blinked against the tears welling up in her eyes. “I wish it were that easy.”
If wishes were horses, and all that. “I’m not good enough,” I said, the words just jumping right out of my mouth the way they had a tendency to do of late. I saw her flinch, and experienced a miserable moment of utter satisfaction. “That’s it, isn’t it? Not white enough, not yellow enough…not rich enough…”
“It’s not that, Kevin.”
“Then what is it?” I realized I was shouting and making the cops on duty nervous. I didn’t want to lose it, not like I always did, but trying to hold it in was like trying to stop a nuclear explosion by stuffing the bomb inside a hatbox. It just wasn’t going to happen.
“You don’t understand.”
“No,” I said, slumping back. “I guess not.”
“Kevin…please…please don’t be angry.”
“Not hearing you.” I looked around at all the other miscreants. I figured I’d better get used to it. I had a feeling I was going to be here a while. Who knows, it might even be a way of life, the way things were going. Anyway, I belonged here, not in Aimi’s ivory tower of a life. Who was I kidding?
“I am so sorry, Kevin,” Aimi said, grasping the bars separating us. “Today meant so much to me. More than you’ll ever know.” But when I didn’t answer, she finally turned and left me to stare at the cinderblock walls.
I was so done with this romance shit.
5
My dad showed up around five in the morning to take me home. This was the second time he was picking me up at the police station, and he wasn’t thrilled, to say the least, but at least he didn’t say anything as I climbed gingerly into the van, a hand over my bruised ribs. I slid the door closed with an audible clunk. I didn’t feel like talking. I didn’t feel anything. I just wanted to get the he
ll away from the station as soon as possible.
My dad looked me over like he didn’t recognize me. “You okay?”
I guess I looked pretty busted up. The truth was, it hurt with every breath I took. It hurt to just think. And I wasn’t all right. I was as far from all right as anyone could be. I sat back in my seat. “Just drive, Dad,” I whispered.
“That’s me,” he said, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles. I saw his jaw clench, the way mine does when I’m ticked. “Dad the chauffeur.”
I touched my head where a headache was growing exponentially worse by the second, like bass drums inside the walls of my skull. It probably had something to do with the fact that it was there that Troy had landed his stick. I thought about telling him everything, but if he knew what I was mixed up in he’d go ballistic—if he believed me at all. He’d probably lock me in my room until I was thirty years old. “You want I drive?”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said, low, voice grating.
Here it comes, I thought. I should have known to expect something. This time there would be no pass Go, no collect $200. I was good and well screwed with my dad. I decided to give it the final push. I don’t know why. Maybe because I hated myself that much. “What do you mean? I mean…what do you want from me?”
Dad shook his head as he pulled into the street and downshifted violently, grinding the gears. “I don’t know. Maybe for you to stop acting like an ass and running after girls, sneaking out and partying and boozing it up. That would be a good start,” he said, nodding to himself.
“I’m not acting like an ass.” Real lame. I fiddled with my glasses. “Shit.”
“You know, you don’t have to play act the tough-guy image all the time,” he said, glancing over at me with a sour look on his face. “I get a call you’re at the station…again. You scare the living hell out of me. You get into a fight with some punk. You smell like alcohol…” Again he shook his head. “This isn’t you. I feel like I hardly know you anymore, Kevin.”
That lump again in my throat. My heart felt like a stone, like it didn’t belong in my chest. I could think of a thousand retorts. All of them would get me in deeper with my dad. Some of them would even make him afraid of me. I was tempted. I was feeling self-destructive again. But I kept my big fat mouth closed. Just let it be, I thought. Let him get it out and over with.
“What is going on with you lately? It’s like you’re somebody else. Somebody I don’t know.”
I tried to ignore his words.
“Is it that girl?” he asked. “If it’s some girl getting to you…”
“It’s not a girl, Dad.”
“Then what? What the hell’s the matter with you? You were a good kid, once. A genius…”
A genius who was a wimp, a loser.
“I know things are rough right now. I know how you feel, but I’m doing the best I can…”
I let out my breath in a puff. Enough. “You have no idea how I feel, okay?” I shouted at him, surprising myself. My voice sounded coarse, like I had whatever Snowman had. “You have no idea what I’m going through right now, so don’t talk to me like I’m a retard or a crazy, all right? Fuck.”
He looked at me, blatantly shocked by my words. He opened his mouth, then closed it as he turned his attention back on the road. We inched down the crowded avenue. The air inside the van became stifling, electric. “I wish your mom was here,” he said at last. “She was always better with this stuff than I was. She, at least, could talk some sense into you…”
“Mom’s gone,” I spat. “She’s dead. Get over it already!”
He hit me backhand style, knocking the glasses off my face.
It wasn’t a hard hit—I barely felt it at all, I was so numb from everything else that hurt. But my dad had never hit me before, not when I was little, not while I was growing up, and no matter how big of an asshole I was being. It stunned me and put me in a surreal place. I was actually surprised to feel the nasally onslaught of tears in my eyes and nose.
I looked at him. An old man. I looked at my dad for the first time not like my dad, but like an old man crumbling away under one too many disasters. I realized he was frightened, a husband without a wife, a father who didn’t even know his own son, a dirty, tired little man stinking of fried fish who didn’t know if the world was going to fall in around him tomorrow. I looked at him and saw just how lonely and shrunken he really was.
That’s what frightened me more than anything. He had no more power to protect me than the military, who couldn’t stop all the monsters in the world from rampaging. Only I could do that. The great and mystical Keeper.
The van was stuck in traffic. I picked up my glasses and reached for the door.
“Kevin…” he said.
I shrugged off his hand and opened the door and jumped out, slamming the door of the dirty little van stuck in traffic with my dirty little dad in it who looked so confused by everything. I climbed over the medium and headed for the shoulder of the road, weaving through the motionless traffic full of dirty little people who didn’t know if they were going to live or die.
When I reached the edge of the street I turned around and saw my dad standing beside the open door of the van. He was calling me back while cars and trucks honked impatiently at him from every angle, but I kept walking away.
6
When I was younger, and my dad pissed me off—it didn’t happen often, but it did happen—I sometimes fantasized about running way. Just taking my backpack and walking in no specific direction until adventure found me, a real modern day Tom Sawyer. Just one without a raft or a Huck Finn.
I never would have really done it; that’s why it was only a fantasy.
I never thought I would actually go through with it, until now. But as I made my way through Brooklyn Heights, past old historical neighborhoods full of fading brownstones, novelty shops, bistros and open-air kiosks with no one at the helm, I started wondering if I had made the best decision. In the greasy yellow light of morning, the place looked deserted. Shops were empty and the streets felt weirdly apocalyptic. Most of the neighborhood had been evacuated sometime during the night. There were cars dead in the streets and newspapers scattered across the cobblestone sidewalks with big marketable banner headlines like NYC AWAITS GIANT MONSTER ATTACK!
I walked until my ribs started hurting so badly I was forced to stop and rest in front of a trade-in furniture store window where two teenaged looters were loading TVs onto a pickup truck. KTV was playing in triplicate on the TVs in the window, and a stringer from the Kaiju Network was announcing an impending quarantine of the city. Soon no one would be allowed in or out as the military at tempted to trap Qilin in the sewers. I watched the boys load the goods up onto a truck, each of the TVs dying as their plugs were pulled and they were duck-walked up the ramp of the truck. After high-fiving each other, one ran around to the driver’s side and got in, turning the engine over. It was only then that they realized what I had first noticed on approaching them—they were gridlocked in dead traffic, cars and buses parked every which way in the street when people took off on foot, with no way to drive off with the loot.
I moved on, a cynical little smile on my face. Eventually I found myself at an intersection with a broken stoplight that looked like it had been shot out. An un-New York silence hung over the street, except for the distant popping sound of gunfire as a conflict erupted a few blocks down. If more looters were about to hit town, I didn’t want their kind of trouble. I had enough of my own.
I crossed the street and ducked inside a drugstore that seemed to be open. Inside, people were haggling with the pharmacist, trying to get prescriptions filled if they could before leaving town. It felt nice to be inside the store, normal. I sat down on a bench and reached for some painkillers on a nearby rack, dry-swallowing four caplets. KTV played in the corner, the newscast illustrating how each borough of New York was being systematically evacuated. I tried to decide what to do.
If I hunted down Snowman
, even if only to try and reason with him, our Kami would be forced to duke it out in the streets. And if I ran away, Qilin might follow me. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Either way, I was damned.
The painkillers helped, but they also make me feel incredibly tired. I decided to close my eyes for only a second, but a second was all it took.
7
“Aimi,” I said, walking after her in the school corridor. I had finally caught up to her. I touched her shoulder.
Aimi turned around, but I realized, belatedly, that it was the woman from the dream several nights ago who stood there in the halls of our school. And she was wearing the same type of kimono, red silk that seemed to breathe, with flames dancing along the sleeves and hem like weird movie CGI. She smiled, and her teeth were long and white and almost painfully sharp in her rose red mouth. Master, she said, though her lips didn’t move at all. She licked her wet red lips with a long black tongue. She unfolded her arms, and I saw that beneath her draping sleeves she held Aimi in her grip, her long painted nails stretching across Aimi’s white, painfully frightened face. For you, Master, said the woman in the kimono. And with those words, she plunged her long catlike claws deep into Aimi’s heart.
Aimi’s eyes flew wide open, brimming with a sea of black tears. Aimi screamed.
I jerked awake. I knew it was a dream—had known for some time while still in the dream—but that didn’t make it any less painful. It had felt so real I felt compelled to glance down at my hands, afraid they had sprouted flames again. They were long and white and heavily corded, the nails bitten pitifully short, but normal.
“Excuse me. Son?”
It was the voice that had awakened me. I jerked around guiltily.
A tall, beer-bellied security officer was standing over me, a police ban radio squawking on his belt. I wondered if he had seen me swiping the painkillers, or if it was something else that had put me on his trouble radar. Maybe my dad had gone to the police and had had an APB issued for my whereabouts. That was practical; it was something he would have done. The guard looked me over as if he were trying to see past the glasses. “Is your name Kevin Takahashi?”
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 11