As I ran, I realized I had done something to my left ankle when I’d fallen. It felt hot and sore, and every step was making it worse.
I looked up and I realized that Bella was now looming directly in front of me, with nothing more between me and her. I realized something else, too.
She was looking right at me.
Those big, glowing, unearthly eyes had rotated across her head and were now intently peering down to where I was.
I froze, because I suppose that’s what you do sometimes when you’re prey.
“I have one more shot, Jamie,” Sanders said, coming behind me. “Don’t make me use it.”
I looked back to him. “I got news for you, Rob. You’re the least of my problems right now.” I pointed up. He followed my hand to see Bella staring down at the both of us.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
I held out my arm in warning. “Don’t run.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“It won’t do you any good anyway,” I said.
We both stared up, transfixed, at Bella.
Who decided that she wanted to get a closer look at the both of us.
I’m not sure how to describe the geometry that was involved in how a more-than-one-hundred-meter-tall creature maneuvered her head down close to our level. But it happened. Bella’s head was the size of a largish suburban home, and her eyes just slid around until they found us. In and around the head, things moved; parasites that still had not been dislodged or had been moved to attack.
“Oh, fuck,” Sanders said.
“Stop talking,” I said.
Bella’s eyes split, considering the both of us severally.
As Bella gazed on us, I felt the heat of her internals blasting into me, forced out of her body through the network her parasites had created for her. It was almost unbearable, like standing in front of a furnace that was well on its way to overheating.
There was something else, too. Something in the way Bella held herself while she was considering us. She seemed …
Exhausted. Tired. Out of her element.
Sad.
Maybe I was reading more into it because I knew she had been taken to a place she didn’t belong. It’s possible my brain was ramping up a pathetic fallacy just to hope against hope that this monstrous creature with the head the size of a house wouldn’t eat me or step on me. Alternately, perhaps I was just having a psychotic break, pure and simple. Some or all of those things could have been true in the moment.
It didn’t change the fact that, at that very second, what I most wanted to do in the world was put my hand on Bella and tell her it would be all right.
“You poor girl,” I whispered to her.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Sanders said behind me. He had clearly heard me.
I turned to him. “Shut it, Rob,” I said. “You brought this thing over here. You brought it to a place where the only thing it can do is die. You want it to die. And for what? So you can have a bio-industrial process you and your family business can monopolize.”
“The world needs limitless bio-nuclear power—”
“Dude, don’t even pretend you’re doing it for the world,” I said. “You don’t give a shit about the world. This one or hers.” I pointed toward Bella. “Tom Stevens told me once that part of the job of the KPS was keeping the kaiju safe from humans. We joked about which of us were the real monsters. But it turns out it’s not a joke after all, is it?”
Sanders looked over nervously at Bella, who was still considering us, then back at me. “Give me the key, Jamie, and I’ll send her back,” he said. “I have everything I want or need from her. Give me the key and I’ll power up the portal. She can go back. You can go back. You can all go back.”
“What about the part where you were going to feed us to the parasites?” I asked.
“I can change that part of the deal.”
“Or the part where you just fired a shotgun at me.”
“Mistakes were made.”
“And you would just let us go on living, knowing what we know, knowing that we would be asked about what we know.”
“I think I can sufficiently motivate the four of you to tell a mutually beneficial story.”
“This is where you offer us money,” I said.
“Not just money,” Sanders said. “But money is a part of it.”
I smiled. “It’s tempting,” I said. “Until I remember that right now, you’re just making a Duke bet with yourself about whether I’m stupid enough to accept your offer.”