“Maybe we could broadcast it?” Michelle suggested. She shrugged.
“On what?” snapped Snowman.
“Radio? TV?” Michelle shot back, showing her teeth. “How about a billboard or something? Use your head, baboso.”
I thought they would start fighting again but Rex butted in. “How about the Astrovision?” He looked up from his Notebook, nodding his head like he was grooving on music only he could hear. As usual he was virtually unaware of the fact that the city was falling apart around us. The Internet was still running, so all was well with the world. “It’s like the biggest billboard in the city, man. I don’t think Qilin could ignore that.”
Snowman bit his lip. “That’s in Times Square. Isn’t KTV broadcasting from there?”
“I could take that signal, man.”
“Excuse me?” I looked at Rex. Maybe he really could rewire a bike, and hack some school computers, but to pirate a whole satellite signal…?
Rex gave me an evil grin. “Pirating a signal is child’s play, man. Back in 1977 a guy in Syracuse took over Channel 7 and broadcasted episodes of Star Trek by using a guitar amplifier. Same principals, just everything’s easier these days, because it’s all digital.” His eyes held a dangerous sparkle; I had definitely created a monster.
“That’s great, Terry, but we’d still have to lure it to Times Square,” said Michelle, staring at the smoke filtering into our little HQ and twisting around us. I could feel the distant thrum of footsteps as the monster stomped its way through Midtown. “I mean, it’s not going to do us a favor and just check out the Astrovision ‘cause we said so.”
“I’ll take care of that,” I said immediately, standing up. “It’s looking for me anyway.”
Snowman raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think so,” he said. “No. Absolutely freakin’ not. Do you think you can outride that thing?”
I gave him a hard look. He sticks his tongue in my mouth—which, by the way, I was still reeling from—and suddenly he’s calling the shots?
I. Don’t. Think. So.
I crushed out the clove and jammed my hands into the pockets of my jacket so no one would see them shaking and realized I was scared half to death. “If Rexman can jam the KTV transmission, I sure as hell can outride a monster.” I turned to Michelle. “That’s if Michelle will let me borrow her bike.”
6
Unlike Jennie and the Shadow I had borrowed, the VTX Interceptor was built for sport and high maneuverability—and looked it, too, with a super-light aluminum chassis and an updated fuel-injected V-8 engine. A track machine, built for razor speed. Alignment or no, I could still cut a hundred times better on it than on the Shadow—which, by the way, was probably buried under a ton of rubble.
Michelle looked her over with pride. “She’s fast. Cuts like she has a mind of her own. Do you think you can handle her?”
“No problem.” I had helped upgrade her. A week ago I would have been drooling over the handlebars, completely oblivious to the rest of the world turning around me. Right now, though, the only thing I cared about was whether it would go fast. I felt a dull, trembling sensation under my feet I didn’t have any desire to stand there and contemplate. The hackles on the back of my neck were telling me it was nothing friendly, nothing good.
Qilin was seriously on the move again, searching for me.
I mounted the bike to get a feel for her. It felt sleek and space-age. I kicked the engine over, listening to her roar to life, then tested the brakes, front and back. Everything checked out, so I turned the engine off and started walking her to the edge of the parking garage, peering out at the blackening sky.
I felt like I was doing a very stupid thing—mostly because I was. This time I was not only smacking the wasps’ nest and not running away, I was actually sticking my butt in the air, inviting it to be stung. Taking a deep breath, I threw a leg over the bike, wincing as all my sore spots protested the action.
Before I could kick the engine over, everyone started gathering around me. Michelle was first to offer me a grim smile and say, “Good luck,” like I was riding out to battle, never to return. It didn’t instill a lot of confidence in me, but I tried on a nervous smile anyway. If I was going to die horribly by doing the bravest, stupidest thing I’d ever done in my whole life, I wasn’t going to go out all gloomy and Gothic.
“Thanks,” I said.
Snowman pushed to the front of the group. He looked piqued in the cheeks, like he was trying fitfully to find something to say. Finally, he reached out and took the frames of my sunglasses in his hands and pulled them off. I stiffened, blinking in the bright light I was so unused to. Everyone was surprised by the sight of my naked eyes—it was the first time most of them were seeing them—but no one made any comment. Michelle smiled, leaned forward, and kissed me on the cheek, while Snowman clutched my glasses and stared at me, lost, afraid.
I looked around at the gathered faces of my crew, the pinched, worried, young expressions. The kid expressions. That was the worse thing of all—I was reminded that we were nothing but a bunch of kids doing this, trying to do what the military could not. “Does everyone know what to do?” I said.
Slowly, one by one, they looked at each other, then they looked at me and nodded.
“Anyone want out?”
Again they looked at each other, but no one spoke up.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Snowman complained.
“I love you, too, Snow,” I said, throwing him a kiss. Then I was off.
7
The VTX rode like a dream.
I watched big military jeeps tearing up the streets on both sides of me on their way to fighting the big bad monster. The scream of artillery shells bursting in air filled the far distance, and the air was so full of smoke it was as black as midnight, even though it was only a little after noon, according to the Interceptor’s built-in digital clock.
I had taken the most dangerous job. The suicide run.
But you knew I would, didn’t you?
I swerved around a gridlock of thirty or so cars stuck at an intersection. All of them were trying in vain to escape via the Brooklyn Bridge, which looked like it was plugged with so many military personnel that it was impossible for anyone to get off Manhattan Island at this point. I popped the bike up onto the sidewalk, then took an alley, hoping to cut out the main roads. By my estimation, my crew would reach Times Square in about ten minutes—assuming they didn’t run into problems along the way, of course. Deep in my heart I sincerely hoped that stupid army brat would bring Michelle and Rex through okay and with no injuries. I certainly didn’t need that on my conscience along with everything else.
Qilin was busy tearing into the Trump Tower when I arrived. He had mutated again and looked more like a giant, black, multi-armed octopus than anything else, though those keen, crimson eyes remained. He wasn’t happy. Pretty obvious, what with the trees he was uprooting and the asphalt he was cracking in huge flaking pieces by pounding against it with his tentacles like a kid having a temper tantrum. Just great, I thought. I had to aggravate the most pissed-off god in the history of humankind.
Qilin turned his glistening red eyes on me the moment I stopped in the street in front of him. He stopped with a huge tree in one upraised tentacle. He looked confused by my appearance. I guess he wasn’t expecting me to come to him.
I was alone, no military backup: the road was too badly torn up for even the heartiest Humvee to get this close. And anyway, the army teaches its soldiers not to stupidly run toward monsters, but away from them. Me, on the other hand…I leaned over and picked up a piece of mortar the size of a softball. I put a good wind-up on it and hurtled it directly at one of those ginormous rolling eyes.
Bulls-eye!
Qilin screamed, tearing up the street as his tentacles flailed in response.
“Yeah,” I said, “your mother.”
I jerked the bike around and hit the gas, narrowly avoiding the tree as it slammed into the ground inches behind the
bike. I checked the rearview mirrors. Sure enough, Qilin was on the move, a mass of crawling chaos pursuing me, tearing up shards of stony asphalt and throwing them at me. Using my mirrors, I swerved right and left to avoid the falling debris like I was riding a giant slalom. Up ahead a manhole cover was blown skyward, looking like an oversized penny. I saw more of those squirming Venus flytraps lurching upward out of the hole—My god, I thought, the thing must be rooted in every inch of the city’s sewers—the jaws clacking together in hungry anticipation.
I jerked the Interceptor to one side, riding the sidewalk around the looming, snapping appendage, then gave her the gas full-on when I hit the street again. It might kill her, but at the moment I was more worried about being eaten alive than the bike burning up under me. The Interceptor coughed and there was a scary, heart-lurching second when I feared I had done her in. But she kept up her speed in the end, like she knew this was her shining hero moment.
Behind me came that ominous thunder underground as the monster took to the sewers after me, and the distinctive snapping sound of asphalt as it was smashed from the underside of the road as if with a series of angry, pummeling fists. Grit rained down on me and caught in my hair. More manholes blew as I rode past them, with still more tendrils crawling out, as if Qilin had stretched himself to cover most of lower Manhattan.
As I neared an intersection I heard a tremendous roar that made the whole street shake, a sound that left me deaf for a moment and aching in my bones. A car fell trashed in the gutter inches away, looking like a twisted up soda can. I jerked the Interceptor around it. Something swept by overhead like a giant flyswatter and smashed into a bus lying on its side in the road, pulverizing it to flying shards that spilled out into the street in front of me. I used what looked like a very flattened car in the road ahead of me as an impromptu ramp to get up over the debris, saying a little prayer to Evel Knievel as my tires left the road. It was great hang-time, but in my current state of absolute terror, I found I couldn’t appreciate the maneuver at all.
The moment I landed on the other side, I gave the Interceptor all the gas I could, riding faster than I had ever ridden in my life, certain that at any moment I would feel those tentacles closing around me, then teeth taking away the light…
Something brushed the back of my neck. I heard Qilin’s hackle-raising scream, almost human—like a child, denied. The sound made my teeth hurt and my bones vibrate. But I rode on. I rode to outride the reach of the monster.
The bike began to cough again, but I didn’t let up on the acceleration and I didn’t stop shaking with adrenaline until I was several blocks away.
8
I made one pit stop on Broadway. I grabbed my cell, but there was no service. I jumped off the bike and picked up the receiver of a payphone outside a minute mart, hoping to get through to my dad, to tell him how sorry I was about everything, in case I never saw him again, but the lines were dead. Even the most primitive forms of communication had been obliterated in the crisis.
I stared at the receiver as if trying to project my thoughts down the dead wire to him.
Next door, a television was running in the broken picture window of a used furniture store that had been abandoned and vandalized. A KTV anchorwoman was talking about armed forces moving into Manhattan to combat Qilin. Meanwhile, the President had declared a national state of emergency and was discussing the use of military-grade weapons on Qilin.
I dropped the dead receiver and watched the camera cut to live footage of convoys on the move back on Fifth Avenue—trucks, military jeeps, and a confiscated snow plow that was sweeping dead vehicles out of the way for the troops to pass on foot. Soldiers in camo and combat uniforms were shooting at Qilin with high-powered military rifles, but their ammo passed harmlessly through the slimy thing and just blew chunks off the surrounding buildings.
Qilin writhed in the street, snapping those Venus flytrap heads at anything that moved within ten feet of it. The camera jittered around to take in the full breadth of the monster—a giant mass of darkness easily the size of the school I had attended before my life went to hell and didn’t come back. Qilin recoiled from the barrage of firepower being unloaded into him, but it was a mere reflexive action; no projectile could cause him any real damage. He lashed out at the soldiers, his red eyes roving contemptuously over the puny little men trying to stop him with their useless, spitball-like bullets.
Qilin’s whiplike tentacles swept vehicles and soldiers aside, sending them flying into the air like little toys. He made his jolly laughing sound again, a sadistic noise like blades rubbing together, then spattered the whole area with thick black shining ink that burned corrosively through the bodies of trucks and cars in the street. A building began to crumble as Qilin used his tentacles to pull it down atop the soldier’s heads and vehicles.
When the clouds of dust and debris finally cleared I saw the skirmish line—what was left of it—retreating, and military tanks and armored jeeps moving to fill the place left empty by the ineffectual soldiers. Giant combat cannons mounted atop tanks and jeeps fired noisily at the monster undulating in the middle of the street, generating his shining sea of black sludge and industrial waste and lashing out at anything that moved.
I wondered if Snowman, Michelle and Rex had made it to Times Square. We had to end this. And we had to end it now.
The President flashed onto the screen, looking sleepless and severe, and started delivering a public address while flashbulbs went off in his face and White House attendants ran back and forth frantically in front of the camera. It was a recap from earlier in the day, according to the ticker at the bottom of the screen. He started talking about the possible use of nuclear weapons to destroy the creature that was, even now, destroying downtown Manhattan.
Nuclear weapons. But Qilin was made of nuclear waste. I had no idea what a nuke would mutate him into, but I had a feeling it would be nothing good.
I stared at the useless receiver hanging dead on its umbilicus. Numb, I rushed back to the bike.
9
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.
10
The cloud of smoke and ashes was getting worse with every passing mile, almost chokingly thick, making everything as impenetrable as midnight. I flicked on the bike’s high beams to cut the gloom.
I was missing the sun at this point, but as I sped through Midtown I realized there was an advantage to the dark. I could see lights up ahead—Coca-Cola and Virgin signs flashing as we neared the epicenter of the United States. I was almost there. Everything looked intact and KTV was broadcasting live over the Panasonic Astrovision, one of the city’s largest spectaculars, giving people vital information for evacuating the city. Best of all, the Destroyer van was parked lengthwise across 42nd Street, near the subway. I pulled the bike to the curbside, but I didn’t have to kill the ignition; she made a croaking noise and gave up the ghost under me with a belch of smoke. I dropped the bike ingloriously to the asphalt and raced around to the back of the van.
The van doors were open and Rex and Michelle were sitting in the back. Michelle was holding an impressive-looking DV-rig camera, while Rex cradled a Notebook that was in the middle of doing a complex operation. He threw me a walkie.
“You made it!” Michelle cried, swinging the camera around so it was pointed at the center of Times Square.
“Did you do it?” I asked Rex, clipping the walkie to the belt of my jeans. I was panting breathlessly and felt like I was going to fall over from a heart attack. “Is it hacked? Tell me it’s hacked.”
He pointed the way Michelle was filming. “Check it.”
I turned to face the two-hundred-foot-tall Astrovision, the biggest one in Times Square. KTV had confiscated both it and the newscrawlers earlier
in the week. In fact, they had been controlling them for days, ever since Qilin’s existence had been confirmed. But as I watched, numb and almost swaying with exhaustion, the gigantic vision of a concerned anchorman grew snowy and began to break up into tiny digital pixels. The little pieces began blinking out one by one, until the screen had gone completely black, cutting off the reporter in mid-speech.
I held my breath and waited, staring at the despondently blank screen.
A few tense seconds passed, then the screen came up again, this time featuring a gigantic, animated Tyrannosaurus Rex bobbing up and down in a ferocious pose. It let out a terrific roar before vanishing off the screen, only to be replaced with Michelle’s jiggle-footage of Time Square with a ticker running along the bottom of the screen that read REX-TV FILMING LIVE FROM TIMES SQUARE.
Rex grinned, giving me two thumbs up. I was pretty sure whoever was in charge of the feeds for the KTV news teams was scratching his head right about now and wondering why he no longer had control over the Astrovision. Unfortunately, mingled with my relief was a feeling of pure, unrelenting horror; somewhere, in the back of my mind, I was trying to calculate how many years’ jail time we were racking up by pirating a major news station.
Onscreen, Snowman was standing in the center of Times Square, an acoustic guitar hanging from his shoulder. He looked small and nervous, nothing like himself. For one moment I felt my confidence slip and I was reminded that we were four kids who didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want my friends to die. Then Snowman glanced up and, spotting me, he nodded. It was then that I remembered that we were also the only ones willing to do something other than bomb the city of New York into oblivion.
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 16