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This is a kaiju attack---the city transformed. Stay in doorways, stay out of structures like tunnels. If you’re in a group, don’t split up, don’t try to carry anything, just get to shelter. Don’t try to seek out clean air. You know what spilled gasoline from cars smells like. You know what Kaiju Blue smells like. You know what concrete dust can do to the lungs. You have to be brave.
The street has become a valley of crushed buildings. Steam billows from the gas outlets of shops and offices with their insides torn up, rushing from utilities lines that cracked or were ripped out whole when the street was shattered. Objects---a stack of coffee cup lids still wrapped in plastic, a windshield wiper, a barstool---no longer mean anything in this field. Chuck beckons the girl closer. Yes, into the alley, away from the shadow of the beast. This far from the salt smell of the ocean---unless his nose is wrong---the kaiju must be a category 2. Maybe a small 3, if they can hear it breathing. The girl is holding a shoe, and the look on her face doesn’t suggest that she understands that Chuck is alive---that anyone else could be present in this hell.
Chuck doesn’t like watching Kaiju attacks on the news, but he knows what they look like, and he knows what to do if he’s ever in a city when it’s hit.
“My dad will be here with the helicopter soon. We just need to get to a rooftop and he’ll see us. Can you follow me?”
Chuck isn’t sure if the girl speaks English or not, but he takes the hand of hers that isn’t holding a shoe and she follows him, eyes focused on the ground, stepping around car door glass that crunches under Chuck’s boots. There’s a street sign visible from the alley’s opening, but it’s twisted at a slant. There are other blocks of text too, words that Chuck suddenly can’t read for some reason. That’s fine though. Chuck isn’t supposed to rely on street directions---he needs to stick to landmarks that can be seen from the sky. Buildings this size must have roof access. If they can get inside without the kaiju seeing them, there should be a maintenance stairwell they can use.
Kaiju aim for population centers. What makes this landscape feel so familiar? Chuck tries to take in the broken pattern of traffic markings on the asphalt, the shape of the fire hydrants, the logos in the windows and turn them back into someplace he’s sure he knows, but none of it comes together. What does it matter, anyways? There are holes in the street. The windows are a glitter of glass. Rubble is rubble.
What’s important is staying alive.
Chuck shuts the door to the stairwell behind them, cutting the noise of car alarms still wailing off outside. They should be hearing the Pan-Pacific evac sirens too, but their whine is strangely absent. Maybe the grid is down.
There is something familiar about the girl, too, but this feeling does not intrude on Chuck’s desire to get the both of them to safefy. The heavy armor is he wearing makes his steps a little lumbering, but that’s something to worry about after they make it up the stairs. Making sure the girl is following him, he begins to climb.
Chuck is too focused on fighting down the sound of his own heartbeat to notice that some details have begun to fade. The yellow light from the emergency generators is a constant color now, independent of the bulbs set in the ceiling. The concrete no longer displays the scuff marks of footsteps or general wear, instead edging upward in featureless blocks of white angles. They go up another flight of steps, and then another. There are small windows in the heavy doors at each double curl of the stairwell, but the spaces in the windows are black void.
The girl is no longer whimpering. Chuck turns back to look at her. The shoe the girl is holding is the same color, but the expression on her face is completely blank, and then it isn’t there at all.
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“It was Tokyo. On the day Onibaba struck the city.”
“I was in Tokyo, and there was a kaiju tearing through everything. Wasn’t my memory, I was in the camp in Adelaide back when the first 2’s were coming up.”
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The technicians tell Mako that she is not qualified for the pilot program.