Kaiju Preservation Society(28)

“There are tree crabs?” Kahurangi asked.

Satie ignored this. “We have to wake him up,” he said to me.

“And how do we do that?” I asked.

Satie moved the helicopter closer to Edward. Much closer.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kahurangi said.

“I’m with him,” I added.

“Getting this close is usually enough to get his attention,” Satie said.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Sure.”

“And you think this is wise.” I gestured to us being mere meters away from a fleshy wall of kaiju.

Satie snorted. “If we were wise, we wouldn’t be on this planet.”

“Hey, what are those?” Kahurangi pointed at the wall of kaiju flesh. I followed his finger to a spot on Edward where things were, for lack of a better word, squirming.

“Parasites,” Satie said.

“The size of rottweilers.”

“If we stick around, you’ll see larger.”

“I think I’ve already cast my vote on sticking around.”

“It doesn’t look like he’s waking up,” I said to Satie. Edward’s parasites might be moving about, but he was not.

Satie grimaced. “Okay, well. I have one more trick up the sleeve.” He took us vertically up the wall that was Edward, until we were hovering over the top of him. There was enough room on the top to land, if we wanted to. I hoped that we did not want to.

“You ready with that switch?” Satie asked me.

I grabbed it. “Ready.”

“Okay. I’m going to do a thing, and then I’m going to count to three. When I get to three, you flip it on and count to five, then switch it off.”

“We’re not going to just let it run?”

“Why would we do that?”

“Look, Martin,” I said. “I don’t know why I need to remind you of this, but this is literally my first time doing this and I know nothing.”

“A five count is gonna work just fine,” Satie said. “We’ll cover the rest after. Ready?”

“For what?” I asked.

“This,” he said, and brought the copter down hard on top of Edward. Edward squished like a pudding with a hard crust on it. Satie hovered the copter a couple of meters above where he just poked Edward.

The area that Satie had just bounced off started to glow.

“One,” Satie said.

The glow suddenly focused itself into an intensely bright three-meter circle.

“Uhhhh, I think I found the eye,” I said.

“Two,” Satie said, and then jammed the copter back down into the heavily illuminated surface.

Edward roared.

“Three!” Satie said, and drove us straight up. I flipped the switch and started to count, watching the eye as I did so. It took until four before we started gaining altitude relative to it. Edward had been chasing us up the whole way.

“Off!” I yelled at Satie. He yanked us over and away from Edward, who narrowly missed swatting us with, well, whatever it was you wanted to call what he was swatting us with, since tentacle seemed too limited at the moment.

“Can you still see him?” Satie asked. Both I and Kahurangi said yes. “Watch his eyes!”

“What are we looking for?” Kahurangi said.

Edward stopped roaring. There were four wide disks of light we took for his eyes. We stared at them.

They suddenly contracted. The new sunlike pinpoints focused on us.

“Oh, shit,” Kahurangi said.

And then, equally suddenly, there were wings.

“Oh, shit,” Kahurangi repeated.

“There are fucking wings on this thing?” I yelled, incredulously.

“There sure are,” Satie said.

“There were no wings a minute ago!”

“They were there,” Satie said. “You were just looking for eyes.”

Edward heaved into the air.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” Kahurangi said.

“We should go,” I said to Satie.

Satie wheeled the helicopter around and started to fly away from Edward.

“Okay, so, right now, there’s good news and some potentially not-great news,” Satie said. He reached over with his left hand and clicked a button, which turned on a monitor showing us the view from the rear camera. It was, at the moment, mostly filled with Edward. “That head bounce pissed him off, and he was probably going to kill us, but then he got a whiff of those pheromones and now he doesn’t want to kill us anymore.”

“Are you sure?” Kahurangi said.

“Eyes dilated, right?”

We nodded.

“That’s your sign.”

“If he doesn’t want to kill us now, why is he chasing us?”

“Because he wants to do something else to us instead.”

“We’re gonna get fucked by a kaiju?!?” Kahurangi yelled, processing the implication.

“That’s the good news.”

“How is this good news?”

“It’s good news because as long as he wants to mate with us, he doesn’t want to kill us,” Satie said. He dipped the helicopter down, flying it dangerously close to the canopy of trees below. Edward was momentarily confused but then trimmed to match. “Which means he’ll chase us but won’t attack us. We want him to chase us because we’re leading him to Bella.”