I stared back at him with my patented blank look. He was looking for a blue-eyed Japanese kid. But he couldn’t see past the rosy Ozzy glasses, and thanks to my mom’s genes, I didn’t look Japanese with my face completely relaxed. “No,” I said. “No, officer.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a license or an ID on you?”
Great. I fiddled with the glasses. “Sure,” I said, reaching into my jeans pocket, trying to figure out what to do next. If the police hauled me back to my dad, I wasn’t sure what would happen.
No, that was a lie. I knew exactly what would happen. Qilin would find us both. And there was no way I was going to let that happen.
A commotion suddenly broke out at the pharmacy window. Two old women had started wrestling over a bottle of pills. The bottle popped out of their hands, caplets scattering like loose teeth across the linoleum. I nodded at them. “Better take care of that, officer.”
The security guard swore under his breath and turned to attend to the row.
I exited stage left and was halfway down the street before the door had finally closed behind me.
8
I walked. And as midmorning gave way to noon, I started ransacking my jacket pockets. Even a piece of gum would have been welcomed at this point, but my pockets were torn and empty. I wondered if other Keepers had to contend with being cold and hungry all the time, or if I was just a special case.
I spotted a vending machine across the street, next to a news kiosk with yesterday’s news stacked in neat, untouched rows. I almost kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. I charged across the street and sank four quarters into the machine, then pushed a random button, pushed it again. Nothing. I tried another button, but the results were the same. Then I noticed the lights on the machine were off. All those machines, and none of them were working. Water, water everywhere and all that good stuff. I stepped back and collapsed in the gutter, watching garbage flutter back and forth across a sewer grate.
And all at once I started to cry like a baby.
I just cried and cried there on the empty street corner, amidst the stalled traffic and tall, unseeing buildings and the machines that no longer worked in a city that was probably going to be destroyed soon anyway. I didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing. I wanted my dad. I wanted my mom. I wanted Wayne, and San Francisco. I wanted to go home. My ribs hurt. My heart hurt. And I was just so sick of everything. So sick of holding everything back, of being strong, of being an adult. I didn’t want to be an adult. I wanted to be a kid because that’s all I was, and I wanted to have a tantrum, and break something, and swear, and cry, and it wasn’t fair that I should have to do this, any of this…
Dammit.
I cried until there wasn’t anymore, until it was all used up, and then I just sat there on the curb, wiping my nose, thinking cynically, Well, that was useful. That accomplished a lot. I took a deep breath, took my shades off and wiped my eyes, wishing I had someone to talk to, some idea of what to do, where to go. But I was alone. More alone than I had ever been in my life.
When the first faint strains of “Fur Elise” reached my ears, I had no idea what was happening. I thought maybe I really had lost it. Then I remembered that I had programmed that into my phone. I’d forgotten because no one ever called me. I didn’t even know why I carried the damned thing around, except that my dad was a total stickler about me having a phone.
I picked it up and looked at it. It wasn’t my dad calling—though there were a number of missed calls, probably from when I was asleep—my frantic dad trying desperately to get in touch with me. But I didn’t recognize this number at all. I squinted at the phone as a bad feeling started churning in my gut that had nothing to do with the weird dream about Aimi or the utter, overwhelming despair I was feeling at the moment. I hit the button and licked my dry lips—they felt numbed and windburned like I’d taken a massive hit of Novocain at the dentist’s—and said, “Umm…yeah?”
All I could hear was a raspy breathing on the line. I set my jaw. If this was a prank or some telemarketer or something…
“Who is this?” I demanded.
“Kevin?”
I jerked. “Snowman?”
There was a long pause, and for a moment I wondered if this was a dream, or if I was just imagining that my arch-nemesis was calling me on my cell. Maybe he’d called to gloat? He was definitely the type. “Kevin…man, I’m sorry to be calling you like this.”
Snowman apologizing? Now I knew something was up.
“How did you get my number?” I asked, thinking maybe Aimi had given it to him, or he’d hacked my computer or something.
“Your number? The school directory. Duh.”
I wanted to sound angry, but I was too taken aback by everything, and I fell back on old, timid Kevin the Pushover. “What’s wrong?”
“Is Aimi there with you?”
“Aimi? No. Why?”
“But you were with her last night.”
“How do you know that?” Did he know everything about me?
Snowman snorted. “You made a huge impact at some monster party in the city. Some distant friends of mine said they saw you and Aimi there together, that you put Troy back in the hospital.”
Had I detected a note of approval in his voice? It was impossible to tell. I mean, this was Snowman; he could sound pissed doing a standup comedy routine. “We wound up in the drunk tank at the police station, not the hospital,” I corrected him. “And Troy went home with his Gramma. But you might check the hospitals tomorrow. Or maybe the morgues. Gramma wasn’t happy.”
“Cool,” he said with approval. “Did you take her home? I’ve been calling her all morning, but she never picks up.”
I watched some dirty newspapers flutter by. “I think she’s kind of grounded.”
“Kind of?”
“Majorly. Horribly. Eternally grounded. Her dad looked a little pathological last night.”
“Mura…that old bastard.” There was another pause, then Snowman said, “Why does it sound like you’re sitting in the middle of some weird, post-apocalyptic movie?”
“Because I am sitting in what sounds like the middle of some weird, post-apocalyptic movie. I’m sitting on the corner of Jerome and Ocean Avenue and there’s nobody around.”
“You’re out in the city alone?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Why are you out in the city alone? Don’t you know the military are moving in?”
I stared at my feet. “I don’t know.”
He sounded beyond exasperated. Obviously I was the village idiot. “Look, she’s not picking up at any of her numbers—and I think her dad’s off chasing that damned monster. I thought maybe she was with you. I’ve been calling around to all her friends, but none of them have seen her since yesterday.”
“Well, she’s not with me,” I said as a bad feeling suddenly came to replace the numbness I was experiencing. “I acted like a total ass. She probably hates me and never wants to see me ever again. Hell, I don’t want to see me ever again.” I suddenly recalled the dream I’d had in blazing Technicolor, all the little details. The woman in the kimono plunging her long clawlike nails into Aimi’s heart; Aimi’s eyes flying open in surprise.
I stood up slowly, wobbly, and said, my voice a faint whisper, “Does Aimi wear contacts?”
“Huh?”
“Does she wear contact lenses?” I repeated urgently.
“What does that have to do with anyth—?”
“Does she or doesn’t she?”
“A lot of kids wear contacts. Jesus!” He sounded, as usual, on the verge of a conniption fit.
I, on the other hand, was feeling a lot worse than that. Aimi, like me, had blue eyes. But I was only now realizing it. Like me, she had found an effective way of disguising them, one so good even I hadn’t noticed.
“Aimi’s in serious trouble, isn’t she?” Snowman said.
“Maybe.” I glanced around foolishly, like there was transportation at arm�
�s length. There were plenty of abandoned cars, but I was in the same boat as the looters. There was no way I was going to be able to navigate these streets, not with a car, and the buses weren’t exactly running.
Then I spotted a used car/trade-in place across the street, selling everything from SUVs to dirt bikes, and I felt my spirits rise a little. “Where does she live?” I said, starting across the abandoned street.
For once Snowman didn’t sound like he wanted to rip my head off. He sounded scared. He told me as I stepped into the showroom. I looked over their selection of Hondas, spotting a very sweet looking Shadow with a candy-apple-red paint job and some serious muscle to it, but after checking the dealer’s desks, I realized there were no keys to any of the vehicles. In fact, I had no idea where they kept the keys, but a good bet was a safe somewhere to keep them out of the hands of miscreants like myself. I swore violently and kicked at the panel of a hybrid. My heart was knocking somewhere up near my throat with panic. I had to get somewhere, and I had no way of doing it.
“What’s going on? What’s the matter?” Snowman demanded to know.
I glared determinedly at the Shadow. “I have to hotwire a bike, and I’ve never done that before.” I transferred the phone to my neck while I uncased the hood, looking for the engine bay. If I could find the ignition coil…
“Smash the key ignition and find the rotation switch, stick a coin in and turn it,” Snowman said, surprising me.
I hesitated. “Why do you think that’ll work?”
“I know.”
It was going to take too long to do this the right way. I ducked into the adjoining garage, found a good, heavy wrench, and carried it back with me. Even though the dealership was abandoned, I still felt a little guilty about smashing the ignition, which, true to what Snowman had said, revealed the key tumblers. I felt a cold, frantic energy bubble up through my stomach and into my throat as I inserted a quarter and twisted the mangled ignition switch. I had no idea if this was going to work, or if Snowman was putting me on.
“Yes.” The Shadow roared to life.
I could have appreciated Snowman’s advice—messy but effective—but I was far too frightened at the moment. I was almost certain I had killed the girl I was falling in love with.
9
I arrived at Aimi’s building on Fifth Avenue in record time. It was a snobby, pedigree apartment building directly across from Central Park Zoo. According to Snowman, the Muras owned the penthouse triplex that formerly belonged to Laurence Rockefeller. There was no doorman, thankfully. I think everything was running on a skeleton crew, if that.
But once I was inside the building I was forced to slow down. The lobby was being manned by two very nervous-looking security guards watching KTV. Their purpose, I knew, was to keep the lowbrow riffraff like myself out, especially now, with looters hitting every part of the city. One stood up as I headed for the elevators. “Excuse me? Sir? You can’t go up there…”
Oh yeah? Watch me.
I hit the call button as they moved out from behind the big, circular courtesy desk and started toward me. I was feeling frantic again. I had tried stabbing in 911 on the way over, but I kept getting busy signals; the city was officially swamped by calls, and the monster wasn’t even here yet.
“Sir,” repeated the younger of the two guards, the one that usually gets it in all the horror movies, “I’m afraid I can’t allow you up there.”
He was almost upon me when I turned around and extended my hand, palm up, which suddenly burst into a flamethrower. My hand tingled and then a jet of brilliant flames jumped from it and out at the guards, lighting up the face of the young one and reflecting in the glasses of the older one. A potted hibiscus tree caught on fire and started to burn merrily. The young guard stumbled to a halt and stood there in an apelike half-crouch, slack-jawed, staring at the tree crackling with flames. Maybe he’d seen the same movies I had?
“Get lost,” I told him. “Go do something useful like dial 9-1-1. There’s a girl in trouble upstairs.”
The young guard said nothing, just hung there until the elevator car arrived. I backed up into it. Then the doors shushed closed and I was alone with the dull buzz of muzak in my ears and my own dark thoughts rattling around my head. I couldn’t help wondering if I was too late.
10
Aimi’s big oaken penthouse doors were unlocked. I didn’t know if that was a good omen or a bad one. But the moment I pulled open one of the heavy, baroque doors, a slush of music papers slipped out and covered the floor at my feet. I didn’t consider that a particularly good omen. I stepped over them and into the apartment, looking around at the massive, unfamiliar wainscoted walls, cathedral ceilings and imported Pier 1-type furnishings.
“Aimi?” I said. My voice echoed. The penthouse was dark and silent.
I had an unnerving moment of déjà vu. I wasn’t standing in a school corridor, looking for her, like in my dreams, but the echoing silence was still weirdly familiar and made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. No one answered. The penthouse seemed to be deserted.
The place was a wreck, like looters had been through it, yet nothing appeared to be missing—rather, the looters looked like they had been bent on destroying what was there. There were portraits and newspaper clippings behind glass on the walls, mostly of Dr. Mura getting this or that award for this or that humanitarian act, but the glass had been shattered by a blunt weapon and some of the portraits slashed. Furniture had been smashed to shards, and I saw a high-end chaise lounge with its intestinal stuffing hanging out, like a psycho with a knife had been at it. A line of ragged, half-crumpled music sheets covered the floor, leading me like breadcrumbs down a long corridor to a music room.
The room was huge, easily the size of my whole loft, but dim. There were reams of paper everywhere, covering the floor, the plastic-covered furniture, the ancient, preserved baby grand piano in one corner. The room would have been as dark as night, except that hundreds of flickering votive candles had been lit and covered every surface like a weird constellation of stars. “Aimi?” I whispered again, my voice echoing uncertainly. I walked on the crumpled pages of the music she had once written, hundreds of pages covered in notations and black ink scribbles and scratch-out marks. She must have been blacking out her music for hours after she had come home.
A shadow flickered further on, in a dark recess. I turned toward it.
I’d finally found Aimi.
She’d tried to commit ritual Jigai—hara-kiri for girls. She had wedged herself between the baby grand piano and a desk and had tied her knees together with a long silk obi belt. I knew she had done so to bind herself in a dignified position in spite of any convulsions she might experience in death. On the floor beside her were more crumpled music sheets, and besides that a razor blade on a slim silver necklace, the edge of the blade covered in a shining thread of blood that looked black in the near dark.
“Aimi?” I said, kneeling down beside her. I was afraid to touch her. I stared dumbfounded at the blood seeping from dozens of gashes that covered her arms, her legs, her neck, even her cheeks. She had been cutting herself over and over, maybe for hours. What was worse, amidst all the fresh wounds were dozens of old white scars, hidden only because she wore so much clothing all the time. She looked lifeless, like a marble statue in black clothes, except that her chest was rising and falling fitfully. I pressed two fingers to her throat and found a thready pulse beating like moth wings against my fingertips. But her eyes wouldn’t open at all.
“Aimi,” I said again, surprised by how calm my voice sounded, even though a blade of panic was slowly cutting me wide open. I took her face in both hands, rubbing my thumbs against her cold, stony cheeks. “Aimi, it’s Kevin. Aimi, open your eyes.”
She made a low groaning noise like someone waking up—or trying to. With effort she turned her head and her eyes cracked open—they were gummed together by the blood leaking from the tiny wounds all over her face. Her eyes were bright pale
silvery blue, the color of the heavens after a rainstorm. I definitely understood why she wore the contacts. In her pale, Asian face they looked surreal, almost otherworldly. My mind flashed over to a (perhaps) imaginary memory, a gawky, preteen Aimi being pushed and laughed at on the playground, and fighting back because she knew she was different. “Ke-evin?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Are we dead?”
“No, Aimi. We’re not dead.”
“Oh,” she said, a painful noise.
“What did you do, Aimi?”
“Kevin,” she said again, more forcefully. Her voice was dry and husky like she had been screaming for hours. She squeezed her fists closed so that more blood wept thickly from the wounds on her wrists. Despite all the blood loss, she didn’t seem to be dying of it. Yet. Her eyes were huge and dark, the pupils almost completely dilated. She stared off into space. “We had fun. At the party.”
“Yeah, we did.”
“I didn’t want to fight you. I…you…”
“I know you’re a Keeper,” I said to spare her a long, stuttering explanation. “And I know you know I am, too.” And the sad truth was, I had only just recently figured it out. So much for a genius IQ, I thought bitterly. “I know you’re connected to Qilin.”
She turned her head away as if she were ashamed of herself. She wouldn’t last, I thought, not the way she was bleeding out from her wounds. Though, from the sight of the blood surrounding her, I thought she should have been dead hours ago. Maybe, I thought, Qilin was such a huge part of her now that it wouldn’t even let her die normally anymore.
But, of course, I couldn’t know that for certain.
That weird calm suffused me again, the same as when I had called Raiju forth that first time. I picked up the razor blade—it was genuine, and as sharp as sin—and cut the silk binding her legs. I ripped the fabric in half so I had two makeshift bandages of equal length and started binding her arms where her wounds were the most severe, pulling the silk tight against the deep black gashes in her wrists. It was the best tourniquet I could make in a pinch.
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 12