He sat up, blinking and regarding her with wary caution. ‘Dutch? What is it?’
Hi Nat, she imagined herself saying. I was just searching through your stuff because I trust you even less than you think I do. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re going to try and kill me, and I’d rather get the hell out of here before you get the chance.
‘You looking for the solenoid?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she lied.
‘Then what?’
Dutch thought hard for a moment, then stepped closer, pulling her T-shirt up and over her head before dropping it on the chair where Nat’s jacket hung. Her jeans followed, and then she climbed onto the bed, straddling him.
‘This means nothing,’ she said, looking down at him.
He looked up at her in silence, then brought his hands up to rest on her hips before giving her a single small nod.
‘Just so we’ve got that clear,’ she said, reaching for the clasp of her bra.
Endless Highway
Dutch woke shortly after dawn to the sound of someone screaming.
She stumbled upright and saw that Nat was gone from the room. She stepped over to the window, pushing aside a curtain and peering through the starred glass. The dawn sky looked like a painted backdrop, the streets below a hastily constructed set. Nat stood in the road in front of the hotel, looking past the scientist’s RV.
She heard the same voice cry out again, full of anguish and terror, from somewhere on the other side of the RV. Nat ran past the vehicle and out of sight.
Dutch got dressed fast and threw herself down the steps and outside. She came to a halt in the middle of the street and looked around, hearing nothing but the wind.
‘Nat!’
No response.
Leave him here, she told herself. He’d left the map in the car. She could take it and drive away without him. Wu would have to believe her when she said he died in the jaws of a Kaiju.
But then, she thought, grinding her teeth together until they hurt, he still had the solenoid. Without that, the Coupé wasn’t going anywhere.
She ran over to the Coupé and grabbed a .375 hunting rifle out of the back. She tried hard to ignore the rush of fear down her spine like a flood of frozen diamonds as she loaded the rifle.
She found a narrow alley past the lot, with high walls on either side. At its far end, at the foot of a path that wound deeper into the forest slopes, crouched none other than Jack Burton. He had one hand pressed tightly over an open wound in his chest, his eyes pleading when he looked at her.
Dutch lifted the rifle and shot him straight between the eyes. She’d tried to brace herself, but the recoil still sent her stumbling backwards. A .375 was enough to take out an elephant.
She landed on her rump. Burton had vanished, replaced by another shapeshifter-Kaiju. Blood streamed from a wound where one of its eyes had been. It started to crawl towards her, the smell of its breath like a charnel house in hell.
Nat jumped down from the right-hand wall and ran towards her. He got her back upright, and then they both ran around the corner to the Coupé. Dutch pushed the hood open, and Nat hurriedly replaced the solenoid before joining her inside the car.
Dutch had barely got the engine running when Anna Dubayev came stumbling around the corner towards the rear of the Coupé, hands reaching towards them as if in supplication.
Dutch laughed out loud and reversed the Coupé straight into her. The mirage faded, and the injured Kaiju screamed its rage as they drove away at speed.
She still hadn’t stopped laughing by the time they left the village behind them. Nat glared at her, his face streaked with sweat and blood.
‘I hope to Christ it’s not me you’re laughing at,’ he said.
‘It would take forever to explain,’ she gasped. ‘Now tell me what the hell you think you were doing, taking a stupid chance like that.’
His face reddened. ‘It made me think one of the other scientists had come back from the Rift.’
She chuckled. ‘Idiot.’
He looked out the window. ‘You don’t need to tell me.’
They headed towards the column of light over the next hill, and Dutch decided she had to kill Nat before he had a chance to kill her first.
But first, she needed the answers to some questions.
* * *
By now, they were almost at the island’s centre, and halfway to the East Coast. The light from the Rift grew stronger as they steered through jungle-strewn roads. The road ascended a mountainous slope through a series of steep switchbacks, and Dutch pulled over at the sight of a metal handcart abandoned on the road dead ahead. A body lay next to it, wearing a torn jumpsuit much like the one in the RV had been wearing.
Nat got out and looked around. Dozens of grey rods lay scattered all around the handcart, and thousands more on the surrounding slopes. Dutch caught sight of a shattered wreck half-buried in the trees that looked like a flying saucer, but of course couldn’t possibly be.
She left Nat to gather up more of the rods and walked a little further up the road. This close, the Rift was so bright it hurt to look at it. She kept walking until she could look down into a shallow bowl of land where the road dipped back down.
The Rift took the form of a column of blazing, shifting light that rose from the floor of the valley, as if someone had captured the Northern Lights and put them on display where few might ever find them. What looked like the ruins of a hospital sat in the valley’s centre, barely visible amidst the penetrating brilliance.
A secret facility, Elektron had said. She was starting to think he hadn’t been lying at all. She discerned shapes in the shifting patterns of light and shadow that seemed to be
