When I got back to the bunker, Mr. Bellamy was standing by the door. He gave me a disapproving stare as I stepped inside. The student council was carrying boxes on their shoulders, distributing tinned food to the students. Elam gave me a smile as he walked around the room, handing out ‘Papa Jack’s Beans’ to the students. Harper waved at me from the side of the room. She was holding two cans of tinned fruit.

“Managed to grab some of these,” Harper said. “They’re a luxury, apparently.”

“Thanks Harper,” I said. “You have your phone? I need to check the news.”

“Nope,” Harper said. “Ran outta battery.”

I glanced around the room and found five dudes hunched over another dude holding a phone. They were all grinning and in the middle of an animated discussion. I walked over to them, Harper followed behind me.

“Excuse me boys,” I asked, they all turned to me. “Mind if I see what’s happening.”

They all glanced at me, as if they’d never talked to a girl before. They nodded nervously and I leaned forward with them. They were watching a stuttering video off what looked like a red blob tearing into blurry interpretations of skyscrapers and helicopters.

“The internet’s really bad here,” I said. “Huh?”

The boys all awkwardly nodded together.

“Could you give me a rundown of what’s happening?”

“U-Um,” said the boy in front. A boy with black hair and glasses that were a little too big for his face. “There’s this big monster that just popped out of nowhere in the middle of the city. That’s why we’re um…”

“I get that,” I said. “But what’s going on right now?”

“The military couldn’t handle what’s going on,” the boy said. “So, they decided to hire the help of some private military group to assist them.”

“That happened really fast,” I said. “You’d think our military would put up some resistance. I mean they killed dragons, right?”

 “Yeah, we um think the company may have known about the monster,” said one of glasses boys’ cronies. “Otherwise…”

“What’s this companies name?” I asked.

“Something with a T?” the glasses boy said. “Thana something…”

“Thanatos?” I asked.

The boys nodded. It was at that moment the video decided to buffer again. There were the scattered sounds of the red monsters screams and shouts, the sounds of buildings being crushed underfoot and rockets crashing down on a thick red hide.

The blurry image of a red beast stared at me like a pixelated painting. The jagged spikes on its back blurred together with the grey buildings and bright white airplanes and helicopters rushing toward it.

I stared at those red reptilian eyes, feeling an odd sense of familiarity with the creature, wondering just what exactly the link between it and the company was.

…

By the evening, the Kaiju just disappeared, completely. There was a tiny period of investigation but within a few hours the government determined that it was safe to leave the bunkers. We all returned home at 9 in the evening and got school off the following day. Most of the damage in the city was done in the centre where all the malls were.

There were a lot of questions after the incident. Why was it isolated in one area? Where did the monster come from? There were no major incursions at the bottom of the city, so the beast didn’t come from the underground, and nobody noticed any atmospheric changes, so it didn’t come from above the ground. Back then I didn’t really care all that much about the technicalities but now with the involvement of Thanatos Inc my mind changed. The whole city was abuzz with the discussion and even though people were just getting home late into the night all the lights were on in animated discussion of this new creature.

Speaking of Thanatos Inc, their armies were seen around the city mingling with the government army. Their white armoured trucks were scattered around random parts of the city, the name of the company on all their weapons and armour in big bold letters.

The company’s soldiers were dotted around the city, all dressed in their white and black camouflage outfits and black masks that looked like biker helmets that covered their entire faces yielding no discernible features. Each of them carried machine guns hung over their shoulders and pistols holstered on their hips. When they noticed me staring at them, they walked over to me.

“Please go home, Ma’am,” the soldier said. “It’s late.”

“Do you know anything about this?” I said, waving my friendship bracelet in front of that faceless mask.

“Uh… no,” the soldier said. “If you don’t comply, the government gave us authority to confine…”

I walked away and went back to the apartments. The other apartments still had their lights on. I knocked at the door of one of my neighbours whose state-of-the-art TV speakers was blasting a news report of the Kaiju incident.

There wouldn’t be another Kaiju attack until the end of the week and a few more here and there after that. By the end of April, they would no longer be any attacks. Till then, these attacks were all everyone would be talking about. The only casualties throughout the entirety of this ordeal would be the soldiers and thanks to the state-of-the-art technology in their possession, the most dangerous injury would be a few broken bones.

 I remember the excited discussion around me during the initial attacks. Discussions that I even joined. But as the attacks become a regular occurrence, the excitement died down, people just found it to be a bother and after the attacks stopped, things just went back to normal and this whole incident became a fun fact about our city. I moved on with the city and just continued with my day-to-day life.

Not this time. Thanatos Inc had my answers, and I was going to find out just what exactly I was doing here.