Mayday: A Kaiju Thriller

Chapter Thirteen

I always hated the rain. Ever since I was a kid. You’d be trying to sleep, and there’d be the constant patter of raindrops on the roof, the window, everywhere, all around you. They said some people found it relaxing. Well, good for them. I guess I’d hate that Chinese water torture stuff.

That was the first thing I noticed when I woke, the rain pattering on the car. Pissed me off. The second thing was the guy swinging hammers in my head. It felt like he’d landed a glancing blow on my neck while he was at it.

My eyes drifted open. Sometimes in movies when they’ve been knocked out they take a few minutes to work out what happened. Not for me, though, not this time. I must’ve only been out a few seconds. And I remembered everything. In crystal clear motherfucking high definition.

The car was tilted over to the right, on account of the ditch I’d found myself in. I’d been caught by one of the few trees Tempest hadn’t knocked down on his way through here. The whole rear passenger door behind me was caved in by the tree trunk. Rain was leaking in through the shattered window. If I’d hit the tree at a slightly different angle, I’d probably have a broken neck. Wasn’t I just the luckiest son of a bitch?

I peered through the spider-webbed windshield in the direction I thought was west. The left window wiper was stuck in position halfway along the windshield; the right one had snapped off. The engine ticked and groaned. Between the cracked windshield and the forest, I couldn’t see shit. I couldn’t hear shit either. Nothing except the fucking rain.

My head was thick and heavy, like it was filled with unset concrete. I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. Bad idea. The hammer guy behind my eyes started pounding even harder. My own words to Curtis at Psi Division drifted back to me.

Are you going to get her that Panadol or what? Can’t you see she’s suffering?

Why the hell was I thinking about that? There was a Mayday on the loose. And Healy was out here somewhere. He couldn’t be far. Tempest was near here when I’d seen him pick up the car. I had to find it. And then…

…then I didn’t know. Get to the port, maybe, or the airstrip, get off the island. Pray Tempest didn’t follow. At least he wasn’t like Serraton or Grotesque. They loved to hunt boats.

Quit wasting time. I wiped the sticky blood from my head, unbuckled my seatbelt, and leaned over to snap open the glove box. I hesitated, then took out the handgun box. I unlocked it and weighed the revolver in my hands. It almost made me laugh, the size of it. Tempest had shrugged off bunker busters, MOABs, once even a 25 megatonne H-bomb. The footage had been broadcast on the public television when I was in the refugee town. The Alliance had dropped the bomb from a high altitude stealth bomber as Tempest strode across the Algerian desert on his course for Morocco. The aerial footage showed Tempest glance up as the bomb screamed down towards him. Then it detonated. The explosion turned the whole screen white for a long time, I couldn’t tell you how long exactly. We were all standing there, watching the screen, waiting. It cleared slowly. And there was Tempest, curled up in a ball. We held our breath. And then his legs began to unfold. He stood up, stared directly at the camera. And he roared.

And here I was, feeding rounds into this tiny revolver. Well, to hell with it. Tempest wasn’t the only thing I might need to use it on. The port wasn’t equipped for a panicked evacuation of the whole city. This gun might be the only thing guaranteeing me a ticket out of here.

There was a flash of light against the sky. A few moments later, something boomed in the distance. My mouth went dry. It had started. I swallowed and went back to rummaging through the glove box, looking for anything that might be useful. I took a tiny first aid kit, the kind that you put in your car to make yourself feel better even though you know if you get in a real crash a couple of Band Aids and an alcohol swab aren’t going to help you put your brains back inside your head. I found a small torch as well. By some miracle, the batteries weren’t dead. That was everything. There wasn’t even a bottle of water in the car. Screw it, I could always drink the rain.