She glanced at the d-meter. The readings were still climbing. The closer you got to the centre of Teijouan, and the Rift, the worse the effects were. The d-field didn’t just mess with electronics—it screwed with your head. Get too deep into it for too long, you risked losing your mind.
The sky flickered, changing from blue to darkest night and back again. Dutch glimpsed unfamiliar constellations scattered across a desolate sky, as sure a sign as any that the Rift had just birthed a new monster.
‘Blockage up ahead,’ said Nat. ‘The next—’
‘The next turnoff on the right,’ she said, slowing the car. ‘I’ve been here before, remember?’
Nat pursed his lips and said nothing.
A pile of crumbling wreckage had blocked this section of coast road for as long as the Devil’s Run had existed, but a well-mapped detour cut through the ruins of a nearby village. She drove past a cluster of bleached white bones the size of girders, and a Kaiju skull twice as big as the Coupé.
The smoke billowed upwards from the other side of the village.
‘D-meter’s still climbing,’ warned Nat. ‘This detour takes us deeper into the d-field. We could wait it out…’
‘No. Could be days before it drops again.’
She drove between ruined and empty buildings, headed north-east—deeper into the derangement field. The air throbbed like something alive and she wondered when she’d start seeing things.
‘Next left,’ said Nat. ‘Then left again, and we’re headed back west.’
Dutch nodded, tantalising shapes dancing at the edge of her vision like a promise of incipient madness. The next turn took them into a street lined with mismatched buildings, the road potholed and uneven. Halfway down, she saw that the smoke rose in a tall black column from a Toyota Hilux knocked over on its side.
General Hurley’s car, she remembered, her heart bouncing around inside her chest like a frightened starling. She saw a pair of blackened outlines inside the blazing wreck and felt her hands tighten on the wheel until the knuckles turned whites.
‘Could be whatever killed them is still around,’ said Nat.
‘Won’t know for sure until it shows itself,’ said Dutch. She looked away from the burning wreck. ‘Take a picture while you can.’
Nat nodded, digging around beneath the dashboard before producing an old-style Polaroid camera. Normally they’d retrieve the film canisters too and collect the bounty for whatever footage they contained, but those had gone up in flames with the Hilux.
Nat pointed the camera out the window and took a snap of the Hilux as Dutch pulled up alongside. The camera whirred and spat out a square piece of paper. Nat peeled off the backing and waved the photograph in the air to help it dry.
‘We’ve hardly started and that’s one team down already.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s got to be a bad omen.’
‘I liked Hurley,’ said Dutch. Something sour had gathered in the pit of her belly, a feeling somewhere between sadness and rage. ‘If it’d been Elektron or even the Countess, I wouldn’t feel so bad.’
While she talked, Nat got a pen from the glove compartment and scrawled the time on the back of the picture. Then he pulled one of the rocket launchers free of a rear rack. He aimed it out the open window and nodded to Dutch. ‘Figured we’d best not take any chances.’
‘In my experience, Nat, the most you’ll do is annoy the hell out of whatever killed Hurley with that thing.’ She got them moving forward again. ‘That’s why I only ever use weapons as a last resort. You’ve got a far better chance of outrunning a Kaiju than taking it down.’
They got back to the coast road without further incident, and the d-field loosened its grip on them. The hills on the inland side grew higher and more primordial. Just when Dutch thought they’d left any trouble behind them, a sudden, powerful tremor almost caused her to lose control of the Coupé. She looked up and saw something the size of a blockade ship come crashing down the hillside towards them, roaring like a chainsaw with laryngitis.
A Blackjack, Dutch realised with horror; one of the ugliest, biggest and meanest types of Kaiju. But also, as she knew from experience, painfully dim.
Dutch pressed the gas pedal down as far as it would go, hoping to outrun the beast before it came crashing onto the road. Nat, meanwhile, struggled to get his rocket launcher aimed at the beast.
‘Nat!’ Dutch yelled. ‘Don’t—!’
Too late: a missile went corkscrewing through the air like an oversized firework, striking the slope a dozen metres above the descending Blackjack.
‘If you’re going to shoot at all, at least shoot at the damn Kaiju, you asshole!’
But then she saw the missile had triggered a mini-avalanche, rocks and boulders tumbling down from higher up the slope and striking the Blackjack on its head and shoulders with sufficient force that it, too, went tumbling. It crashed to a halt before it even reached the coast highway.
‘Not bad, right?’ said Nat as they passed the Kaiju by.
‘I could still have outrun it,’ she said. ‘All you’ve done is piss it off.’
He stared at her with a look of incredulity. The Coupé’s tyres screeched as they took the next bend, and the next.
‘You can slow down,’ he said. ‘It won’t come after us.’
‘We’re in a race, Nat. The whole point is to drive fast.’
‘We’re not here to win—’
‘Maybe it’s about time you told me what the fuck we are here for,’ she shot back.
He pushed the rocket launcher into the back. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’re going inland.’
At first she thought she’d misheard him. ‘Say again?’
‘I said, we’re—’
She turned her attention back to the road in time to see the same Blackjack reappear on their right, crashing through small houses and sending trees tumbling before it landed on the motorway before them, its jaws wide.
‘Brake!’ Nat screamed.
Dutch did nothing of the kind. Instead she took a left that sent them crashing through bushes before landing on the shore. The
