Bikini Kaiju - Ch 5

Naomi Cooper felt like was caked in filth. She’d almost been crushed by the falling masonry, and while she’d escaped with little more than a few bangs and bruises, she was dusty all over and coughing like she’d inhaled half of Taipei herself. By the time rescuers had dragged her clear of a pile of broken wall, the drama was over and night was falling. The street was packed with people helping clear up, under dazzling floodlights standing between huge construction vehicles. No kaijus left to photo and no Sentinels to interview. Her phone had, miraculously, survived, and was alive with angry texts from Solomon Julius, her editor’s very brief concerns for her well-being hidden in a swamp of demands for footage. She didn’t bother reading the messages, or listening to the voicemails, just called him back and immediately got an earful: “Oh my God, Cooper, tell me you’ve got something good. Are you okay? Sure, you must be, so spit it out, where’s my exclusive? It’s late!”

“Jesus, Solomon, I had to crawl out of a collapsed building.”

“Alright. Sure, that’s something we can work with. Are you injured? How badly?”

“I’m fine. The EMTs gave me a clear bill. But I need a new hotel. Trying to pick the old one out of my hair. I’m leaving the centre now.”

“Leaving? Are you kidding me – you’re at the epicentre of this thing and you’re walking away?”

Cooper stood at the corner of the intersection where Queen Rat had devoured a bunch of people, looking up the road to where the rodent had fallen. There were cordons up everywhere to stop people getting too close to the rubble, and far down the road huge tents had been erected around what she assumed were the rat’s remains. She told Solomon, “There’s nothing left to see. Who was the Sentinel?”

“Who was the – you did not just ask that. I wanted you to give me that answer, dammit, Coop! I was counting my lucky stars knowing you were out there! I’ve been waiting by the phone all morning, sure we were about to absolutely nail this, only to get scooped by some fucking greenhorn from the LA Times. They co-opted some damn opportunist travel blogger with shit-poor footage when I had an actual reporter on the ground. I’m thinking, okay, not ideal, we might not be first, but Cooper will still deliver. So what the hell are you telling me?”

Cooper held her phone away from her ear, his voice drilling into her already aching head. She swiped through her gallery and called up the video she had got. Blurry, jumpy, but raw, she supposed. There was the giant rat, people disappearing into its mouth, and here came the giantess. Towering bare legs, a beauty. Slightly out of focus. “I’ll send you what I got. But I was knocked down.”

“Knocked down,” Solomon echoed bitterly. “She’s sitting on the story of the century, at the literal feet of a literal godsend, and she gets knocked down. Hold on.” A minute passed as the video was delivered and her editor watched it. She could hear the disappointment in his silence. It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking material; some of the footage shot in the ’60s was better. The fake Bikini Sentinel fan films all over social media were miles better. He tutted. “It’s something. This is it though? Everything?”

“I can write it up. As I get myself a –”

“You didn’t get photos?” Solomon cut in. “Not a word with this new Sentinel?”

“My hotel collapsed, Solomon, like, right behind me. I could’ve been killed.”

“Yeah, yeah, we covered that part. Fuck.” He huffed. “Okay. It’s not ideal but you can still help us out here. We’ve got other footage circulating and other reporters who did get a word in with this maniac, but you know what the Chinese are like, they locked that shit down fast.”

“Taiwanese,” Cooper corrected, just to get something in, but he bowled on.

“Seeing as you banged your head, I guess I’ll fill you in: pretty much all we know is this giant called herself Sweet Sloane Alabama, and sounded more or less the part. She came in from the west of the city, out the water, same as the rat, but no one’s reliably saying exactly how she got there. The rat swum the fuck up from the deeps, probably hiding down there for weeks. Your woman, she smacked down that kaiju and ripped its head off with her bare damn hands, then stood around posing for photos and sharing how-do-you-dos before getting in a brief spat with Steel Ruth and diving back in the water. She swam off to parts unknown, and while I’m sure the Chinese and the US military and every other security force on the planet is trying to keep her pinned down, the rest of us schmucks are left with our dicks in our hands.”

“What about your contacts –”

“It doesn’t matter where she’s gone right now. We’ll figure it out. That’s not the story. What I want to know, which no one’s answering because the Chinese put up all sorts of injunctions, is how the hell that woman killed a kaiju. You got it?”

Cooper gave the distant tents another look, walls of blue canvas bathed in luminescent light, with people in hazmat suits and, now she noticed, soldiers all around. She saw a couple of men in masks carrying freezer boxes to a secure vehicle. Taking samples from the giant dead rat. But her mind backtracked and she said, “Hold on. Steel Ruth was here?”

“Oh yeah, fuck. You missed that too?” Solomon cursed in disbelief. “BBC snapped up some prime footage of that one. Front page of every paper in the world tomorrow’s gonna be this pretty young thing offering Ruth her hand and the old guard glaring at her like she wanted to rip her head off. I can’t believe you missed that.”

“Yeah I missed that,” Cooper said. “I missed everything, Solomon, because I was buried in the rubble!” She felt her temperature rising to match his, but the frustration was directed inward. He was right to be annoyed: she should’ve had this. There was still a chance, though. “I’m looking at the Chinese clear-up effort right now. I can see their tents. They’re not letting anyone through; they’ve got guns all over. Give me a minute, I’ll get you something good.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Solomon said. “Make it fast, we’ve still got time to scoop the evening edition. What do they know, what are they hiding, you know the gas.”

“I know it,” Cooper said, and started walking. She hung up, eyes on the prize. A few steps in and she winced as her right leg flared with pain. Not so hale as she’d thought. But that was a problem for tomorrow.

Cooper walked down a street broken apart as if hit by bombs, but she could see the differences: cars with their front ends flattened where a giant had landed on them. Craters roughly the shape of a foot, if you looked at them from the right angle. She took photos as she went, an automatic instinct, while trying to ignore the blood. A woman’s arm stuck out between shattered, slanted segments of asphalt, trodden into the ground. Had she seen it coming, the huge sole of an unimaginably big woman falling from the sky, to snuff her out as easily as a trampled blade of grass?

Hackneyed, Cooper scolded herself, as she pressed on towards the tent. While encounters with the Sentinels and their enemies had been things of the imagination for her generation, who had grown up in safety, there was no end of popular media exploring the subject. No first-hand encounter she wrote now would break any new ground, nor even come close to the classic prose of the Beat generation. Before the millennium, there might have been Bikini Classics from every decade, each with their own flavour, from Burroughs’ drug-fuelled Whose Lunch to McCarthy’s Blood Sentinels, but during the Kaiju Calm there’d been an absolute deluge of novelists chasing that kaiju fiction dollar. Not her, Cooper told herself. She wasn’t looking to capture the adventure of giant creatures, nor to reveal what they could tell us about the human condition. She was about the truth, about breaking news and chasing accountability. She was going to give people something they could hold onto.

She reached a blue barrier, flanked by two soldiers with faces hidden behind chunky gas masks, machine guns slung low on their waists. In perfect Mandarin, she told them she was with the World Unity Initiative, the global defence agency championed by the Chinese, and rapidly railed out demands that they get a supervisor to clear her as she’d dropped her credentials in the chaos. She didn’t need to see their faces to see how her quick confidence made them nervous, and didn’t let them respond, continuing indignantly, saying this was a damn mess and gesturing to someone far off with a clipboard. In their confusion, she moved past. One of the soldiers trotted after her, but he faltered as she redirected her attention to rapidly issue orders to a nearby lab tech. Cooper swept up a mask and coat from a pile as she continued, and railed out more of the same nonsense to someone else, with the low-ranking badge of the CKP, China’s kaiju analytics team. When she’d suitably flustered them all, she whisked on by, masked and in a lab coat herself, to slip inside the closest tent, suitably anonymous.

Not everyone could pull off that kind of whirlwind, Cooper was well aware. She had a rare gift for exuding confidence and belonging, which had got her into more than a few restricted areas. But rarely had she had an opportunity like this. What she saw in the tent took her breath away. What remained of Queen Rat’s head sat enormously before her, eyes dead like glass, jaws open. Big enough to walk in. People were walking in, she saw with wonder – lab techs stood on the thing’s vast tongue, like a fleshy red carpet, studying its teeth and venturing into its throat. She approached with her camera down, snapping subtle shots. Even if she didn’t get information, this was good. Not many people had lived to see a live kaiju, but even fewer had up-close encounters with a dead one.

Queen Rat was, however, resolutely dead. Once Cooper got past the sheer scale of the rodent, she realised how savage this scene was, with the head raggedly ripped around its neck. The force such an attack required would’ve been massive and Cooper could see why Solomon sensed a story. This might be bigger than a mere kaiju battle, wild as that sounded. She paced around the head, inspecting the torn remains of the rat’s neck, and asked a passing tech in a hazmat suit if the giantess had used a weapon. The man was in a hurry, barely looking up from carrying a liquid container, and answered simply, “No. She dug her fingers in and pulled.”

“There’s nothing unusual? No sign of a special ability of power?”

“Nothing we’ve found yet, but we are looking,” he replied testily, as if this very question had already harried him enough. But he paused, regarding her oddly from behind his flat plastic mask. He added, “She is strong enough to pull off a kaiju’s head. Isn’t that enough of a special power?”

She hummed in agreement and the man continued off, but looked over his shoulder. Suspicious. From the way they were dissecting the creature, in a rush and with gear to prevent contamination, they didn’t yet have any answers and were concerned they might not find them. They seemed as impatient as frustrated as Solomon – understandably so, because if there wasn’t another explanation for how this head had come off, it meant the kaiju and the Sentinels weren’t just back. The giant defender, if that’s what she was, must’ve been significantly stronger than the giantesses that came before.

Cooper had an uneasy feeling about this. But she noticed movement to the edge of the tent. People taking notice of her. She wasn’t getting her answers tonight.