Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (20 page)

I half-laughed. “You didn't think I could do it?”

She half-grimaces, half-smiles. “That's not what I meant. Of course I believed. But then… There's a difference between believing and actually seeing.”

“So it was a religious experience?” I was cocksure, still too full of myself.

She kissed me. Her lips warm against mine. Her arms slipping around me. When it was over she pulled away. “I've honestly never been more scared in my life.” In her eyes I saw her own brand of fearless honesty.

I pulled her to me. Kissed the top of her head. The scent of her filled my nostrils.

“Adam Grant wants me to go out and celebrate tonight,” I said.

“You deserve it.”

I shook my head, kissed her again. “I want to stay with you.”

She smiled. Big and broad, and it felt good to have put that smile on her face. Almost as good as tearing the Leviathan apart.

Almost.

We nestled into each other, talked. I wish I could remember the words, that the sweetness could linger.

But then… We were lying down, her head snug against me. She lifted it, a look of sudden sadness on her face.

“What about the proxies with you? They were okay, weren't they? I heard something on the news about some protest groups, and… God, it was awful some of the things they were saying.”

That was it, I think. Maybe. The first bit of grit.

“They take care of them.” I shrugged, wanting to move on.

“What did they do to them?”

Another shrug. “I don't know. They were on gurneys. They wheeled them away.”

“Gurneys?”

The moment was shattering around me. It made me unfairly angry. It was my moment. Not the proxies. I sat up. She half fell off my chest, sat up beside me. “I don't know. One had a nosebleed. I guess they were taking them to the hospital.”

“A nosebleed? What was wrong with him?”

“How the hell should I know? It was a nosebleed. Everyone has nosebleeds.”

“So why do you think they were going to the hospital?” She looked like she was on the verge of tears.

That angered me more. That she cared so much when I had cared so little.

“I don't know. I just said it. They're just proxies.”

She looked at me, blinked, as if trying to see clearly. “Just proxies?”

Dammit.

“That's not what I meant.”

We stood there looking at each other. Both angry now. Both wishing we weren't.

“It's been a difficult day,” she said. “Maybe we should… bed… rest.” She shrugged.

But I still remembered the thunder of adrenaline—of being a
champion
—in my blood. “Actually, I think I might take Adam up on his offer.”

I turned away from her.

~

The memory fades. Another comes up. Was it still that night? Or another? A memory so familiar it’s worn a groove in my mind. Something repeated over, over, over so all that's left is one homogenous whole
:

You think, by now, we'd have invented something more glamorous.

In the nightclub bathroom, I bent over the white porcelain of the sink. I pinched off one nostril, inhaled the line of white powder.

~

And then… just once? Just many times? Was this even me?

“Jesus, look at the state of him.”

I don't remember who said it. It was hard to concentrate on things like that. My attention jumping from shining object to shining object. The straps on the pilot's seat. A pretty technician's face. The beeping of a cockpit dial. The desire to punch that man right in his eye.

“Screw you, you pen-pushing prick. I'll kick its ass.” No idea who I was yelling at.

“He'll be fine.” Was it Adam Grant who said that? Lila? Did I know who was there propping me up even back then?

“Jesus. Just strap him in.”

I don't even remember the proxies I had fighting those Leviathans. They were there to stop the Mech from pushing me out of my own skull, and I'd already done the job. Some chemical substitute of me that ripped and kicked and split skulls.

I remember reaching my fist down one Leviathan's throat, turning its head inside out. I remember stomping, stomping, stomping one into paste on the seabed. I remember them quoting
how much damage the waves I made did to the seawall. I don't remember caring. The crowd still cheered. For every crash there was another high.

I loved fighting monsters while I was high. Truth be told, I miss it now, even after all the rehab and the therapy. I don't do it anymore. But I miss it.

~

More recently again. This is important. I want
to get this right:

Adam Grant caught up with me in the council hall lobby.

“Jesus, Tyler.” He shook his head. “That was not the smart play. You have to understand the situation.”

I cocked my head. “Really?” I asked him. “What the hell do you think I don't understand about them scrubbing my wife's memory clean? About her not knowing who I am? What part am I missing, Adam?”

“Jesus.” He shook his head again. Looked out at the crowd surrounding the building. I thought I could see the word “Lottery” on a placard. “Not here,” Grant said. He dragged me to a bar.

“It's over.” He was intense over a tumbler of whiskey. “The party is done. No more free drinks. No more getting people out of the lottery.”

I felt the urge to punch him again. Add to his scars. “You're telling me that Marburg's daughter gets a ticket, he won't get her out of it?”

“I'm telling you that if he does there will be riots. There'll be a damn revolution. The lottery… the proxies…it's a damn mess. There's too many people who don't remember the world we're fighting for any more.” The creases in his brow deepened. He glanced at the back of the crowd, still visible through the glass in the bar's door. I looked too. They did not seem like happy people.

“The council has to appease the mob, Tyler. They've drunk too deep from the well, and now they need to make a sacrifice to fill it back up again.”

And then I saw. There in that shitty little bar. It wasn't random chance. That ticket had been signed and sealed and addressed to Lila. They'd decided to do this to me.

I realized then the fight I was in.

“You have to help me. You have to remind them of everything I've done for them.”

“Remind them?” Incredulity broke his stony façade. “Your show just now reminded them all of why they picked you. You've pissed off too many people. And you know as well as I do that you fight for shit now you're clean.”

A dirty truth. An ugly truth. But a truth. It left me with nothing else to say.

“Hey,” he offered the thinnest of smiles. “If you're lucky one won't come this year. She'll be clear of it.”

“They come every year.”

He nodded. “Go home, Tyler,” he said. “Enjoy the time you have left together.”

~

Drifting back in time again. To one
memory that still shines bright:

I'm a teenager. Fourteen years old. Sitting in the bleachers while the football team runs its drills. Watching old Bruce Lee flats and trying to memorize the moves.

“Hey.”

She startled me. I almost dropped the screen. I spun around.

“Sorry,” she was half-laughing, half-nervous. Embarrassed maybe.

The new girl. Transferred in. I didn't know from where. Kind of pretty. Dark hair that she wore long, and a red shirt she wore loose.

“Studying?” she asked.

“Erm,” I wasn't sure why she was talking to me, not sure what angle to take, “kind of.”

She shrugged, sat down on the row of chairs behind me. “I feel so behind. You guys are all so far ahead of my old school. It's all so different here.”

She looked more frustrated than anything else. Her honesty disarmed me. I ventured some of my own.

“I wasn't studying, like, school stuff,” I say. I show her the screen.

“Who's that?”

“His name's Bruce Lee. He was, like, this actor back a hundred years ago or so. That's why it's a flat. But he was amazing. It's all wires and special effects now, but back then it was real. He did all this stuff.” I let the flat play for a minute. She watched without comment, without judgment.

“You like fighting?” she asked when I paused it.

“Erm…” I hesitated. This was where conversations usually went wrong. “Kind of,” I said.

She nodded. “My dad does thai-jitsu, or something.”

“Tae Kwon Do?”

She smiled. “Yeah, that's it.”

She was prettier when she smiled. “I do that, too,” I said. “That and a bunch of others.”

“What others?”

I listed them. After the third, she counted off on her fingers. “So,” she said from behind eight raised digits. “Kind of?”

I was sheepish, felt some explanation was required. “I want…” I almost balked, it was like saying I want to be a movie star, but her eyes didn't let me go. “I want to be a pilot. Of, you know, a Mech and stuff. I want to fight the Leviathans.”

I regretted it as soon as I said it. I tried to read the emotions on her face, to work out if she'd laugh at me or walk away.

I didn't expect what she actually did. She asked, “What about the proxies?”

“What about them?” I was off guard, still not seeing the angle.

“It seems sad.” She kicked at a pebble perched on the metal seats. “What happens to them? They don't even know what they did to make themselves forget.”

That seemed like an irrelevant fact. “We have to fight the Leviathans,” I said, “or they'll kill us. We have to have the proxies. It's four memories for everyone's lives.” I shrug. It was the simplest of math.

She shrugged. “I guess. It just seems sad.”

I didn't know what to say to that. She just sat there next to me. And it was nice actually.

“Hey,” I said after a while. “I'm Tyler.”

She smiled that pretty smile of hers. “I'm Lila.”

Closer. Approaching the now. Try
ing to hold the pieces together:

Lila was watching TV when I got home from the bar and my talk with Adam Grant, holding her knees to her chest.

“I was worried you weren't coming home.”

The drugs. It seemed almost laughable that she was worried about that.

“I'm clean.” I sat beside her, leaned in. “You know that.”

“This is a lot of stress.”

“I'm clean,” I promised.

She put a hand on my cheek. “I need you to survive this fight, Tyler. I need you to be there to talk me back to myself.”

I ran a hand over her cheek, through her hair, round to rest on the back of her neck. I pressed my forehead to hers. “Don't think like that,” I told her. “One might not even come this year.”

She let out the smallest, saddest laugh in the world as she pulled away. She pointed to the TV. “One already is.”

~

And after that:

I slipped out of bed when Lila's breathing grew deep and regular. There was one other solution perhaps. Adam's talk about riots and revolution had made me think. I've seen the downtown slums on the news. I've seen the refugees.

I took the car north, close to the seawall. A foot of water swilled around my tires. Everything smelled rotten or worse. Fractured light from neon signs painted the water-logged streets—logos become abstract and obscure. Street vendors marched around in thigh-high waders. Ragged men stood on floating platforms screaming about the lottery, about the man keeping them all down. Small crowds cheered them on. Deeper in, I watched a man reel out of a bar, drunk, fall into the swill. He emerged with an enormous leech clinging to his cheek. He ripped it away in spray of blood, staggered off.

I couldn't understand how people could live like that. Then I remembered they didn't really have a choice.

~

I try to keep the thread, keep ahold of my reasons, my history, but it's gone again, and I'm falling back into older times:

“Tyler?” It was some talk show host whose name I couldn't remember. “Are you okay?” she asked. She's didn't look concerned.

An audience stared at me. Grinning idiots. Screw them. My high was burning out. I felt like shit.

“I'm fine.” Even I could hear that I was slurring. “Can you repeat the question?”

There was a time when I loved this, the attention, the presenter's bated breath. I would talk and talk, and they would love it. Stories of violence. Stories of me saving them all.

This time I just wanted painkillers and a warm bed.

“I was asking about the proxies in your Mech,” the presenter asked. “Do you ever talk to them? Or their families?”

There was something in the way she asked it. Accusatory.