Kaiju Preservation Society(68)

“I don’t know.” I connected through my headset to Satie. “Did you just see anything?”

“Other than the two of you moving slow enough to become snacks? No.”

“Keep an eye on the area Bella was in,” I said.

“What am I looking for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Are you two almost done?”

“We have two other sites to look at,” I said.

“Don’t waste time talking to me,” Satie said, and clicked off.

“Done,” Kahurangi said, then looked in the former direction of Bella. “What are we looking at?”

“I thought I saw a flash.”

“It’s daylight.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I only think I saw it. I might have imagined it.”

“Let’s keep an eye out while we walk,” Kahurangi said.

“You keep an eye out for it,” I said. “I’m going to keep an eye out for things trying to eat us. Just in case your new batch of pheromones stops working.”

The next pack location had only one pack at it, the older one. It was, not surprisingly, smashed and broken.

“Where’s the other one?” Kahurangi asked.

I scanned the area and saw something several meters away. “Come with me,” I said. We walked toward the thing. It was the newer instrument pack. Like the others, it was smashed and broken.

Unlike the others, there was a bullet lodged into the shattered instrument package.

“Hello,” I said, and showed it to Kahurangi, who took one look at it and summed up what we were both feeling into a single word.

“Fuck,” he said.

“You think Riddu Tagaq let anyone out here with something that fired bullets?” I asked.

“No. Shotgun? Yes. Rifle? No. She doesn’t have that much faith in our ability to aim.”

“This means you were right,” I said. “Someone came through. Someone came through and shot this thing.”

Kahurangi nodded. “And probably took down the aerostat. And Chopper One. Fuck.” He looked away, disgusted.

I turned and dropped the shattered instrument pack. As I did, something glimmered in my peripheral vision.

“Shit, I think I just saw that flash you’re talking about,” Kahurangi said.

I turned to look at him. He was looking in the direction opposite of where I saw the glimmer. I went to where I thought I saw it.

“Where are you going?” Kahurangi asked.

“All right, I did see something that time,” Satie said, through my headset. “What the hell was that?”

I ignored both of them and crouched down by a fallen tree. There was an object there, partially obscured by moss and algae. I picked it up.

It was a phone.

A phone that appeared to have been intentionally placed, with its camera in the direction of where Bella had been.

“Hello,” I said again, more quietly this time.

“Jamie?” Kahurangi said, coming up on me.

I turned and showed him the phone.

“What is that doing here?” he said.

“I think it was left here on purpose,” I said. I pressed the power button. Nothing. It was dead. I opened a channel to the helicopter. “Martin,” I said.

“I saw that flash thing,” Satie repeated.

“Okay,” I acknowledged. “Unrelated question. Do you have a phone charger on Chopper Two?”

“What?”

“A phone charger.”

“You planning to make a call or something?”

I looked at the bottom of the phone. “Preferably a charger that has USB-C.”

“Chopper Two has two USB outlets, and I have one of those cords with multiple ends, including USB-C. Why?”

“We’re going to be done in about two minutes. Be ready for us.” I clicked off and looked at Kahurangi. “I already know what we’re going to find at the last installation area, but we have to be sure,” I said.

He nodded. “All right.”

We jogged to the final installation site, where we found two smashed instrument packages. We didn’t even stop, we just confirmed they were smashed and destroyed and immediately went back to the pickup site, where Satie was waiting for us. We jumped in the chopper, and Satie took off, straight up.

He motioned to the console between his seat and the copilot’s one I had strapped in and put on the cockpit headset. “Cord and charger in there,” he said, and glanced over as I produced the phone and plugged it in. “Why do you need to charge your phone so urgently?”

“It’s not my phone,” I said.

“Whose is it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I’m betting that whoever its owner was, they were smart enough to have it record whatever was going on at the site. And I hope they were smart enough to do something else.”

“What?”

“Turn off the lock screen.”



* * *



“This isn’t easy to watch or listen to,” I warned everyone in the conference room.

There were nods all around. The earlier group had reassembled and was aware that I had found something, but only Kahurangi and Satie had any idea what I had. I opened my laptop and cast to the wall monitor, and then pulled up the first video file. In the first still image, Tom Stevens was looking into the camera, which he’d already placed into position. An instrument pack sat on the ground by him.