Kaiju Preservation Society(76)

This was not terribly surprising; we were in the forests of Labrador, and the nearest human population of any size was a hundred kilometers away. The trees did not need cell service. It was too bad. If ever there was a time for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, this was it.

I looked at the time: 2:20 a.m.

“It’s cold,” Aparna said. She fished in her pack for her pullover. We all did the same, as well as retrieving, checking, and loading our various weapons.

“We came through at two twenty,” I said to Aparna.

She nodded, knowing why I was telling her the time. We were now waiting to see what the interval was between Bella’s ventings.

“Anyone else feeling a little woozy?” Kahurangi asked.

“You got used to the atmosphere on the other side,” Aparna said. “Just breathe.”

“Right, got it.”

I looked around. Bella was illuminated by the moon, which was nearly full and to the west. We were too close to her to see anything else, but I could hear faint noises in the distance.

“I think we landed on the far side of Bella,” I said. “Away from whoever took her, I mean.”

“That’s a bit of luck,” Niamh said. “It would have been inconvenient to pop into existence in front of the people we were trying to surprise.”

“So, how are we going to do this?” Aparna said. “Get to the perimeter thing and turn it on to get Bella back?”

We all looked at Kahurangi.

“Why are you looking at me?” he asked.

“You’re the one who got us here,” I said.

“He is not,” Niamh retorted.

Kahurangi held up his hands. “I was kind of focused on getting us here,” he said, and then pointed at me. “I thought Jamie was the one with the plan after that.”

I was going to respond to that, but at the moment, someone came around Bella and stepped in front of us, carrying some sort of equipment. He took several steps toward us before he looked up and realized there were four people in front of him.

We all stared at each other for a good ten seconds.

“All right,” he finally said. “Who the fuck are you people?”





CHAPTER

25




“Let me show you some ID,” Niamh said, closed the distance on the interloper in an instant, and zapped him with a stun baton.

He stiffened, gurgled in surprise, and fell to the forest floor, unconscious.

The rest of us stared, shocked.

Niamh noticed. “What?”

“You have rage issues,” Kahurangi said, after a second.

“If I had rage issues, he’d be dead.”

“Are you sure he’s not dead?” Aparna asked.

“I can hear him whimper when he breathes,” Niamh said.

We all stared some more.

Niamh sighed, looked to the heavens with a help me Jesus expression, and looked back at the rest of us. “What do you want me to say? This asshole could have given us away. We didn’t cross a friggin’ dimensional barrier to get popped by the first joker who saw us. I zapped him. It needed to be done. And frankly I’m pissed that you all are giving me shit about it.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just now we have an unconscious dude to worry about.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if we leave him here, Bella’s parasites are going to make him into cold cuts.”

Niamh shrugged. “Fuck ’em.”

“Niamh!” Aparna said.

“It’s not like he wouldn’t leave us.”

“This is what I mean by rage issues,” Kahurangi said.

“I may be working through some residual annoyance that your plan worked,” Niamh admitted to him. “Sort of worked, anyway. But I’m not wrong about this shithead.”

“Maybe you’re not,” I allowed. “But maybe we should try to be better people than the faceless henchman of an evil organization.”

Niamh sighed again. “You’re not wrong,” they said. “But look. We can’t do this every single time we meet up with one of these assholes. We’ll be here all night stuffing bodies away. Bella will go up by the time we’re done.”

“Let’s deal with this guy right now and we’ll figure out the rest of this as we go along,” I said.

“Figuring things out as we go along is our problem,” Niamh said.

“We really should have had a better plan for once we came through,” Aparna agreed.

“I’m feeling suddenly blamed,” I said.

“A little, yeah,” Kahurangi said.

I motioned. “Well. For now, let’s drag this dude out toward the tree line. Put him out there, spray him with the ‘I’m a kaiju’ pheromone. So they leave him alone.”

“Good idea,” Niamh said. “And that way when he wakes up, he’ll smell like shit.”

“I’m open to a better plan,” I said.

“I have none, so let’s do this.”

“You two do that,” Kahurangi said. “I need Aparna’s help with something.”

“What thing?” Niamh asked.

“Preparing a backup plan. So we don’t have to drag everyone’s body into the tree line.”