Fishing Off Kaiju Break

by Corey Jae White

When the wind is right, the smell reaches the shore before the sound: a sickly, ripe-garbage scent carried on a salty spray. That gut-deep bass follows – dhoom... dhoom... dhoom – kaiju footsteps beating steadily across the ocean floor.

"Shouldn't we go inside, Grandma?" Kaylee asks, holding her jacket tight at her throat, watching the moonlight shimmer over the water.

"You want to see one, don't you?" Maureen pats the low-slung camping chair beside her and Kaylee sits. They are the same seats Kaylee remembers from childhood, but back then she sat with Grandpa while he fished and pretended not to fret over his wife.

Maureen holds the fishing rod tight, arthritic knuckles swollen. Kaylee takes a beer from the cooler and Maureen turns at the sound of clinking ice, unvoiced reproach written in the wrinkles around her mouth. Kaylee's heart breaks another tiny crack when she sees her grandma realise: Kaylee isn't a little girl anymore. That realisation is benign, but it's connected with many others – Maureen's husband has passed, her friends are dead or dying, her twin sister is gone. Maybe the worst realisation of all lingers in the over-long gaps between those previous: Maureen's mind is slipping.

Maureen squints and the creases by her eyes grow deeper. Kaylee twists the lid off the beer bottle and hands the drink across, then takes another for herself.

"We'll finish these then head inside," Kaylee says.

"Alright, alright," Maureen says before drinking long, the loose skin of her neck quivering with each swallow.

"Catch anything?" Kaylee asks, pointing to the rod, propped at a forty-five-degree angle over the sheer cement cliff of the break wall.

"'Course not," Maureen says bitterly. "Nothing to catch."

Her mind is here now then, Kaylee thinks.

"Boring hobby, but I enjoyed spending time with your grandfather just the same," Maureen continues. "It wasn't the cancer that killed him, it was the end of fishing."

Kaylee nods and drinks; she has heard it all before, guided Maureen through the same conversations, confessions, and griefs. Sometimes as herself, sometimes playing the part of the dead.

They sit on an outcropping of reinforced polycrete near the base of the kaiju wall. Defensive barriers jut from either side, shaped like children's jacks but massive, large enough for the kaiju and defence mechs to toss.

A few hundred metres out, a wave rushes toward shore. It breaks apart as the kaiju's spiked spine emerges. The monster rears up on its hind legs, arms stretched out, hands tipped in jagged black claws, glossy as obsidian. It roars and Kaylee tries to block her ears, but only manages to smack the side of her head with the beer bottle. It's a sound both deep and screeching at the same time, a sound she can feel reverberate in her bones.

The garbage smell is stronger, the hot wind of kaiju-breath hitting them hard. A second later the wave slams against the break wall beneath them and the ocean mist caresses Kaylee's face, gentle as the kaiju is not.

"I don't know what was worse," Maureen says, "the continent of garbage, or the monsters we created to deal with it."

Kaylee has heard this before too.

"No one could know they'd turn on us," Kaylee says, because she is meant to.

She waits for the lecture on mankind's many self-inflicted follies, but Maureen only sighs.

The chop of helicopter blades roars from behind the wall, distant at first, then deafening all at once as two chinooks clear the monolithic structure, carrying their charge out to sea. Searchlights dance across the wall and the broken black sea, brighter than the full moon overhead. Kaylee shields her eyes so she can see it: the d-mech's humanoid silhouette, the flare of its reactor.

The d-mech disengages from the helicopters and seems to hang in mid-air for a full second before it drops into the sea. The water explodes in a plume, obscuring the colossal machine as its knees bend and it steadies itself against the sandy floor of the bay. Tyger South stands tall, painted in the colours of the Thylacine, tan with black stripes, plasma daggers sparking hot in each hand.

"You must miss it sometimes," Kaylee says; "piloting a mech."

Maureen shakes her head. "I don't miss the danger, or the adrenaline. Only the connection it let me have with Doreen. That was a gift no one else can understand. Help me up, child."

Kaylee offers a hand and levers Maureen out of the camping chair – the old woman grimacing as she stands.

"Mind taking everything inside? I've got to pay a visit." Maureen doesn't wait for a reply, she just heads down the long tunnel that runs through the kaiju wall, toward their quarters inside the defence facility.

Kaylee watches her for a moment – one half of the fiercest mech pilot team in history, stooped and shuffling, her memories steadily coming unstitched.

She finishes Maureen's beer first, then her own, throwing the empties into the cooler. She takes Grandpa's old rod from the divot carved into the cement and a heavy weight pulls the line taut. Her heart beats faster and she turns the reel, the whir of it silent beneath the din of titans battling just offshore.

Kaylee lifts the rod up and back, groaning with the strain. The water breaks, scales gleaming in the flash of plasma, and Kaylee's breath catches in her throat. She lands the fish and it flops on the ground, teeth grinding on the metal hook, trying to break free or just trying to feed. Its skin bears the toxic-bright stain of kaiju life, cyan and neon pink. Ocean creatures now metabolising plastic to fuel their rapid evolutions, gradually becoming small kin to the kaiju.

Kaylee cuts the line and tosses the mutant back, wiping her hands on the seat of her coveralls. She grabs the rod and cooler and hauls them back toward base. Behind her the kaiju and d-mech fight, but Kaylee has seen it all before.