They drove up the ramp, and for a long moment the Coupé was airborne, passing through the flames. They landed hard on a second ramp, knocking the wind out of Dutch.
They rolled back down to the ground and Dutch took the next bend fast, twisting the wheel hard. The Coupé slid sideways into a long, straight stretch and she floored the gas.
‘The fuck?’ Nat shouted. ‘Are you trying to win?’
‘Fuck you,’ she yelled back. ‘You don’t like it, you drive the damn car.’
They came to another bend followed by another long, straight stretch of tarmac Dutch didn’t trust one tiny bit. The race organisers were notorious for inventing brand-new obstacles for each year’s time-trial with what Dutch always imagined to be sadistic glee. The time-trials alone were dangerous enough that every couple of years someone wound up going home in a wooden box without ever reaching Teijouan itself.
Straight ahead, Dutch saw what looked like steel plating laid over the track. As they approached, the steel plating came apart, separating into two halves that rose to reveal a pit dug deep into the ground.
Something huge shouldered its way up and out of the pit; something with multiple legs, chitinous skin, a long, whiplash-like tail and a pissed-off expression.
‘Is that—?’ Nat started to say, and then the beast was upon them.
A Kaiju, he’d meant to say. But by the time the thing had climbed all the way out of its hidey-hole, he was too busy screaming to say much else that was coherent. It was one of the lesser Kaiju species, being not much larger than a typical mid-range house, but in some ways that made it more dangerous. The small ones moved faster and were smarter.
Somewhere in the back of her mind Dutch wondered who’d caught it, and what process had led them to think hey, maybe we should chain it up in a hole in the middle of the Fuji race-course.
Dutch knew she had no choice but to barrel on through. She maintained her speed, noting that the creature was at least restrained by battleship chains wrapped around its extremities.
The creature raised a tail like a scorpion and leapt towards them in a manner that made it clear to Dutch that the chains were, nonetheless, quite lengthy. Dutch pushed in the clutch and hit the brakes hard, spinning the wheel as far as it could go. The car skidded in a circle until it faced in the opposite direction.
‘Christ!’ Nat shouted in disbelief. ‘You’re facing the wrong way.’
While she performed this manoeuvre, Dutch glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw, as she had anticipated, that the Kaiju had begun to run towards them with even greater speed, believing they were about to flee. Then she put the car into reverse, driving straight under the creature and between its legs before it had time to react.
‘That’s my signature move, asshole,’ she screamed back at Nat.
She kept the Coupé moving backwards, so that they had a good view of the Kaiju as it tried to reverse direction. It got tangled in its chains and bellowed its frustration, its long jaws snapping as they accelerated backwards down the race-track.
‘And fuck you too,’ yelled Dutch, performing the same manoeuvre to bring them the right way around.
She glanced sideways at Nat, who looked shellshocked, his lips set in a thin line. ‘When the hell did they start putting live Kaiju in the time-trials?’
‘I think this is the first time,’ he replied, his voice small and still.
Everything else the racecourse threw at them felt like a Sunday afternoon drive by comparison. What the Coupé lacked in armour-plating, it made up for in all the agility and speed Dutch had promised. Before long they crossed the finishing-line and the flag came down. Dutch exited to cheers and heard the race commenter announce that they had, indeed, raced the course faster than anyone else.
‘Don’t look so glum, sport,’ she said to Nat as they got out of the car. Engineers and mechanics swarmed around the Coupé. Dutch felt giddy in a way she hadn’t in years.
‘I told you not to—’ He stopped and closed his eyes, his jaw set tight.
‘Not to win?’ She laughed throatily. ‘My ass.’
Island of Death
The next day, at dawn, Dutch boarded a Chinook along with the rest of the drivers and their navigators and flew fifteen hundred kilometres south-east to the former island-nation of Teijouan—except for Lucifer Black who, as usual, insisted on riding inside his car while it was choppered in separately. She saw the South China Sea far below, and the outline of one of the battleships that formed the blockade. Nat sat beside her, back in his deep-blue racing suit and still monosyllabic. He’d hardly said a word to her ever since she made the terrible mistake of winning the time-trials.
Which was fine with Dutch. She spent the trip flicking through a copy of Kaiju Spotters Monthly she’d found discarded near the grandstand until the island hovered into view.
A light mist covered the ground when they landed at the Security Zone, a flat spit of low-lying sandy terrain at the very southern tip of Teijouan, a few hundred metres wide and walled off from the rest of the island by a six metre steel fence with guards patrolling along the top. Heavy artillery guns poked their long barrels over the fence in the hopes of deterring any inquisitive Kaiju that wandered too close. A road passed beneath a portcullis-style gate set into the fence, coming to an end on a low rise near a jetty.
The road had served as a starting point for the Devil’s Run since the race’s inception. A two-story concrete shell that had once been holiday apartments served as
