by M. C. Norris
Their aimless walk through the hospital corridor was stiffened and strange. They didn’t speak. Hand in hand, they clopped mindlessly down a crowded hall, gawping into the nothingness that seemed to be their future. They felt like a couple of dead people walking, a pair of wandering ghosts. Collin slipped into an empty room, and he pulled her after him. She followed, closing the door quietly behind them. No one in the bustling hallway appeared to notice or care.
“I’ve got an idea,” Collin said, as he made his way over to the bed, climbed upon it, and began to draw the privacy curtain around himself.
Still stunned, Skyler could only bring herself to stare at whatever it was that he was doing. If he’d completely lost his mind, she wouldn’t have held it against him. All that they’d experienced in the last twenty-four hours seemed quite enough to push a normal person right over the brink. After a moment, Collin poked his head out from behind the curtain. He’d strapped the Mindbender Rift back atop his head.
“Come in, if you want,” he said.
“What the heck are you doing?” Skyler asked, as she pushed through the curtain, and took a seat beside him, on the edge of the hospital bed.
“I’m going to connect to Hotspot, and review the last hour’s records.”
“Records?”
“Everything Hotspot sees and hears is recorded.”
For a second, Skyler felt like her eyes were about to go crossed. “Wait. The dog?”
“Yeah.”
“The dog has a hidden camera?”
“Not exactly,” Collin replied, dropping the Rift visor, and reclining back onto the bed. “It’s just another application of the same nanobot streaming technology that we use to pilot our animal hosts. All of Hotspot’s ocular and auditory nanobot data is continuously streamed to an internal drive, where it’s stored in twenty-four-hour increments before it’s backed-up to the cloud.”
“I—didn’t know that.”
“How could you have?” Collin inserted the mouse-piece, and flipped the toggle on the side of his headset. He inhaled a deep breath through his nostrils, as he prepared to tap into the hard drive of his golden retriever. “Hotspot’s full of surprises, but I’m the only one who can access them. Nobody hacks my dog but me.”
Skyler watched his chest rise and fall. Collin was slightly built, almost fragile. His prowess was a cerebral strength, and even that was so very subtle. At times, he seemed too meek to be much of a critical thinker. In fact, he could almost seem simple. However, Skyler was beginning to understand that it was his social disconnection that made him appear out of step with the dance going on all around him. Beneath his awkward exterior, Collin was quite clever. Skyler was just beginning to appreciate how nimbly his mind raced along when he wasn’t being distracted by the one species that he didn’t seem to understand.
Her brow gathered when she saw his breathing quicken. His arms drew protectively up against his chest. It was almost like watching a sleeping person suffering from a nightmare, only she knew better than to touch him, or interrupt. Skyler did not envy Collin for whatever sights he was about to behold.
“It’s Bent,” Collin said, blurting the Mad Hatter’s name around the side of the mouse-piece.
That shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. “Is he alone?”
Collin shook his head. “Got a bunch of military police with him.”
“Can you see J.J. and Takashi?”
Collin nodded.
“Are they alright?”
“Yes. No. Cops are taking them.”
“Taking them where?” Skyler asked, leaning closer. “Can you see where they’re being taken?”
Collin began to breathe even more heavily. His fingers clenched into fists. “It’s like—a garage. A mechanic’s garage. I don’t recognize it. It’s dark inside. They’re dragging them in there. Something’s wrong. Dog’s going nuts.” Collin sucked a loud gasp, and jerked partway upright off the bed. “J.J. got away! He’s running!”
“God. Are you serious?”
Collin’s expression slackened. “Takashi’s still fighting. They’re pulling him back into that dark place.” He winced. His hand rose to his face. “Stop fighting, dude. They’re hitting him, Sky! They keep hitting him with those clubs. Oh, God.” Collin’s hands flew up, as if to shield himself from a flurry of ghostly blows. “They’re killing him!”
***
Batons rose and fell, cracking woodenly against his skull, landing with muted thumps against his ribcage. Takashi rolled underfoot on the floor of the automotive garage. Drawing his knees to his chest, he tried to cover his head. He assumed a submissive posture that would afford him some protection from their blows, but that didn’t slow the officers down. Something was twisted about their motives. It seemed as though the officers had been given orders to beat him to death.
Bolts of pain shot through his forearm. His wrist dropped to a grotesque angle, leaving his hand swinging in the air. This breach in his defenses created a new opening. A police baton slashed through the gap, smashing against his temple with such force that one of his ocular implants detonated. Sparks spat from the flickering socket. The light in his left eye went out, and for a moment, everything went red. Takashi inhaled the stink of his own burning circuitry, and he threw back his head and laughed.
Takashi was no stranger to pain. He knew abuse, and he knew the vast depths to which human depravity could plunge in situations where sadists thought no one was watching. Nothing could surprise Takashi, in this regard. Not when the last sight beheld by his natural eyes was his mother’s face melting onto the streets of Osaka. Beyond the doors of that bus onto which she’d thrust him, in her last act, shoving five-year-old Takashi onto the bus that saved her son’s life, his mother liquefied until his eyesight was lost in the cloud of burning vapor.
Deprived of sight, his tactile senses became heightened, and he learned to feel everything with great intensity. Through the last months of the End War, Takashi felt every act inflicted by those predators whose favored hunting grounds were the squalid camps where wailing thousands of blind refugees followed ropes to musical prompts from overhead speakers. The Mickey Mouse Club theme was the call to every meal, where hapless prey were snatched from the chow lines to be dragged bleating behind those rows of regimented tents. He felt it all, every second of his suffering in that hell hole. While the free world celebrated victory in the worst war in human history, and reveled in the economic boom that followed, Takashi’s personal battle had only just begun. Cancer fastened itself upon his toxified body. He fought the deadly malady while he bounced through group homes and orphanages, fighting for daily survival against stronger healthier children. By the time reparations for Japanese victims of war crimes awarded Takashi with his new set of eyes, he’d already seen too much without them, and the world had become a darker place that it perhaps might’ve been.
Takashi rolled over to glare up at Miles Bent through his remaining artificial eye, and he smiled. He was glad to see blood streaming from Bent’s broken nose, and dripping from the lacerated flesh of his forearm, where the dog had chomped down and given him a good shaking. “You just made a huge mistake,” Takashi said. “The world was watching.”
Bent circled him with all the dark purpose of a shark through bloodied waters. He placed an index finger to the side of one nostril, and he blasted a reddish spray into the air. He wiped his forearm beneath his crooked nose. J.J.’s punch should have dropped Bent like a sack of potatoes, but if the blow had affected Bent in the least, he hadn’t shown it. If anything, it had almost seemed to amuse him. In some twisted respect, perhaps Bent and Takashi were not unalike.
“Back on the Barrier Reef, they gave me a nickname,” Bent said, as he retrieved Takashi’s Mindbender Rift headset from the garage floor. “Maybe you’ve heard it?”
Takashi’s chest rose and fell, but he did not respond. He watched every movement of Bent’s fingertips as they fondled his dropped headset, and he tried his best to hide the anxiety that it ca
used him. It felt like he was back in an orphanage, and a bigger kid had just taken one of his few personal belongings.
“Around ten years ago, when this base was still under construction,” Bent said, gesturing around him with a wave of his hand, “they were having a lot of trouble with insurgents. It’s one thing to maintain your military presence offshore, but holding onto a piece of real estate is a different ball game. Turning point came one night when a wave of a thousand Jaw-long rolled right over the site, and massacred a few hundred Navy Seabees. Torture. Mutilation. All that kind of stuff.” Bent smiled, and allowed a chuckle. “That’s when they sent us in. That’s where my military career began. We were the Shanghai street sweepers. Clearing blocks was all we did, and back then, victory was assessed by the number of daily dead. The land was already captured, see, so in order for the Navy to calculate the effectiveness of our unit’s presence, it came down to corpses.”
Bent turned the Mindbender Rift over in his hands, as though the headset evoked some sentiment of nostalgia. “So, I started collecting hats. Became kind of a dark joke, you know, how many hats I could carry back into field command. It was a game to me. I liked to cover the walls of our barracks with bloody hats. Bullet holes, brains and stuff all over them. Collecting hats was my thing, and that’s how I earned my nickname.”
Bent tossed the headset underhand to a startled police officer, who somehow managed to catch it. “They called me the ‘Mad Hatter,’ because whenever I decided to erase some piece of human trash from existence, I kept their hat as a souvenir. If I had your hat, you were dead. If I decided to come for your hat, you were dead. Thanks for that one, by the way,” Bent said, glancing toward the captured headset with a hitch of his chin. “That’s a really nice one.”
Takashi didn’t know what to say. Part of him refused to believe what Bent was insinuating, but something stung. The insult of being stripped of his headset hurt worse than the injuries they’d inflicted with their batons, or any veiled threats of death. Perhaps the best feature of artificial eyes was that they didn’t mist over, and they never produced tears.
“Let me ask you something,” Bent said. He cleared his throat, and rested his fingertips upon his chin. “Do you have any idea what’s going on out there right now, beyond the walls of this base?” He stopped circling, and raised his eyebrows. “You said that the world was watching, and you’re right. It is. Nothing goes unnoticed. No screw-up is ever missed, and every move you make is probably being recorded.” Bent aimed a finger at Takashi, and narrowed one eye. “You and your pack of asses screwed-up big time.”
“We did what we were ordered to do,” Takashi replied, struggling to sit upright. He clutched his shattered forearm to his chest. “Captain Roswell of the Barrier Reef gave us orders to engage the kaiju of the Yellow Sea with our technology, and that’s what we were trying to do. When Roswell gets here, and he finds out—”
Bent interrupted him with a scrape of rusty laughter. He shook his head, and turned on a heel. Military police officers stepped aside as he strode through the middle of their line. “Roswell ain’t coming to Shanghai.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bent circled around behind the police officers. After a few tense seconds of silence, he reappeared at the far end of their line. Soon, he loomed back over Takashi, once again. “Not that you care about Chinese politics—I do. I mean, I kind of have to—but, while you were celebrating your little rampage up there on the Yangtze River, you failed to notice how your actions triggered an uprising.” Bent grinned, and nodded his head. “Worst uprising in twenty years, thanks to you.”
Takashi frowned.
“Oh, it’s true.” Bent gestured to the nearest police officer, who replied with a single nod. “It’s all over the news.” Bent knelt down beside Takashi, crossing his mauled arm over his knee. He picked a fleck of something out of the wound, and flicked it at Takashi’s face. “China is tricky. This region has been teetering on the brink of civil war for two decades. You’ve got your nationalists, your patriots and freedom fighters, your cells of Jaw-long insurgents, and the corruptive influences of Russian and Mongolian crime lords, like your friends over there in ICU. China has basically been a giant powder keg ever since the End War, and all it needed was that little spark. You guys were a flamethrower.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to hang anything you can on us.”
Bent shrugged. “Doesn’t much matter what you believe or don’t believe, at this point. The fact is, your monster brawl took a massive death toll, and caused billions in property damage throughout those flooded lower wards.”
“That wasn’t our fault. That was yours. You attacked us. Your gunships and planes and rockets are exactly what—”
“Hey. Doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”
“Doesn’t matter. Look. Here’s the thing,” Bent said, pinching his nose. “Right now, several thousand Jaw-long have surrounded our base. It’s alright.” Bent smiled and winked. “They’re just trying to pick a fight, and we’re going to go ahead and give them one, but not before we let them hit us first, and we’re going to let them hit us pretty hard. We kind of have to. Makes us look a little better, you know, with the whole world watching and all, because we all know how a little guy’s fight with the Allied Navy is going to end—and if you don’t, well, you’re about one minute away from finding out.”
Takashi glanced at the stony faces of the military police officers. The level of corruption throughout this facility was worse than he’d ever dared to imagine. These uniformed men were nothing more than Bent’s squad of personal assassins. It was at that moment that Takashi realized that he was going to die on the floor of an automotive garage, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it.
“Why would anyone outside those walls be stupid enough to attack this base?” Takashi asked, blinking his remaining eye. He felt like a cornered dog, about to be euthanized. Any conversation he could prompt might extend what time he had left by precious seconds. The other team members were on his mind. He wondered if J.J. had managed to send a message of warning to the others. If so, Collin and Skyler might still have a chance. Jill probably had the best odds of making it out of Shanghai unscathed, since she had the foresight to turn in her resignation before the situation got out of hand. Takashi’s heart tumbled in a wave of guilt. He hoped that she was safely in the air, flying home, and would soon be cradling her baby girl in her arms.
“Oh, they will. Call me clairvoyant, but I know it with one-hundred percent certainty. A Jaw-long attack on Shanghai field command is imminent.” Bent flashed a grin that was just as crooked as his shattered nose. “It will be precise, devastating, and unprovoked in the eyes of the world. It’s just a matter of choosing an irresistible target, and placing that target within their easy reach.”
Takashi flinched as Bent rose suddenly to his feet. The Mad Hatter strode over to the nearest police officer, and extended his open hand. It seemed to take the officer a second or two before he understood, and he placed his bloodied baton into Bent’s hand.
“You’re not getting away with this,” Takashi said, chest heaving. “They’re coming back for me. They’d never leave me behind.”
“Think so, do you?” Bent turned back to Takashi. He examined the polished club as though he was an appraiser, and the police baton was among the rarest of artifacts.
“I know so.”
“I’ll bet you—ten-ba-jillion,” Bent said, pointing the baton at Takashi’s face, “that you’re wrong, and that they’ve already decided to leave you behind.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a pain in the ass. You’re a cripple. I don’t know.” Bent shrugged. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter anymore, but I’ve seen these types of things play out, and you’re not the sort of person worth saving. What does matter are those millions of prying eyes floating around out there. They need to believe that what happened up th
ere on the Yangtze River was just a standard naval response to a kaiju threat. Doesn’t need to be anything more than that. It’s cleaner that way. Nothing good would come from the whole world learning that the Allied Navy was involved in some kind of a—monster puppet show.” Bent spat on the concrete. He then leveled his eyes, cold and hard as a pair of polished bullets. “Sorry, little fella, but I’m afraid it’s going to be a whole lot better for everyone if you never even existed, and I’m pretty sure your so-called friends would agree with me.”
Chapter Fourteen
Crushed cars fell like leaf litter from the monster’s spiny hoof, as the leg withdrew into the clouds. In the distance, another plunged through the mist to flatten a strip mall with a chuff of gray dust. Drones swarmed over the ruins of Anchorage like flies around a corpse. The nature of the destroyer remained a mystery. Its enormity was too vast to be discerned through the overcast sky, and it had no definite color. Those massive columns that rose and fell from the clouds were translucent and glassy, not unlike the appendages of strange forms of life that inhabit the ocean’s darkest depths, where color has no meaning. Terrified crowds gawped skyward, searching the mist for a glimpse of the titan. One woman clutching an infant stumbled and fell. Jill covered her mouth and gasped, as the fallen mother and child were trampled by their own kind.
“My God.”
Jill tapped back to the map of Anchorage, and swept her thumb against the screen until the seaside villas of Turnagain Arm slid into view. Her hands were shaking. She widened the screen to zoom in on her mother’s neighborhood, and then highlighted the locations of all available drones in the area. There weren’t many. Most had already departed the residential area, and were bee-lining toward the action at the heart of the city, where the monster appeared to be embedded. Jill had doubts about whether the few remaining drones on her mother’s block were active or functional, but it was worth a shot. She whispered a little prayer as she tapped on the drone nearest the condo.