My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights

Chapter 168: The Quarantine Coast

The number on the wall said forty-three when they left, and Sam made Caleb stand and look at it before he was allowed in the van.

"Forty-three," Sam said. "Twelve points of ceiling above it, so you’re still ahead, but I want you to carry the real number with you, not the one you’d rather believe. You walked into the yards at thirty-one. You walked out at forty-three. One door cost you twelve points of spread."

"There are four doors left. You do the arithmetic on what four more like Pasco does to that wall, and then you tell me you understand why I make you look at it."

"I understand."

"Say the arithmetic," Sam said.

"Four more doors like Pasco and the wall’s past ninety." Caleb said it flat, because his brother had not asked for it to be softened. "And ninety is close enough to a hundred that the gap stops mattering. I know, Sam. I’m not going to pretend the math is kind."

"But Pasco’s was the easy one. He had a sliver left to save. Mira’s notes say some of them don’t, and I don’t know yet what it costs to reach a door where there’s nobody home. Neither do you. So let’s go find out on this one before I bet the whole wall on a guess."

Sam did not like that answer, which meant it was the true one. He got in the van without another word.

***

The coast had been beautiful once. You could see it in the bones, in the shape of a place built for people who were never coming back.

The quarantine town sat on a bluff over a gray sea, a fishing place that had become a resort and then become a tragedy. It had been sealed eleven years ago, when something in the water did something to the people who ate from it, and it had never reopened.

The barricades were still up at the town line, faded biohazard orange gone almost white in the salt air, and past them the streets ran clean and empty down to a harbor full of boats nobody had come back for.

"I read the file on the way," Tali said, as the van rolled past the dead checkpoint. "It wasn’t the water. That’s the part that matters for what we’re walking into. The official story is contamination, a natural event, nobody’s fault."

"The real story is somebody approved a discharge permit they shouldn’t have, and when people started dying, the fastest way to make it a natural disaster instead of a crime was to find a doctor who’d signed off on the water safety reports and put the whole thing on him."

"Halden," Caleb said.

"Doctor Emil Halden. Public health officer for the district. He signed the water reports because the reports he was given said the water was fine, and those were fine because somebody upstream had cleaned them." Tali’s voice stayed flat, but flat was how Tali carried anger.

"When it all came apart, Halden was the name on the bottom line, so Halden was the one they hung it on."

"He lost his license. He lost his standing. The town that died blamed him, because they needed somebody to blame who wasn’t a permit office three hundred miles away."

"And he stayed. That’s the part I keep coming back to. Everybody else left the dead town. Halden stayed in it, in the place full of people who hated him for a thing he didn’t do, for eleven years, until about a year ago, when he stopped being seen."

"And somebody found him here," Caleb said. "Alone, hated, guilty of nothing, in a town built out of his worst failure. The exact kind of person she collects."

"The exact kind." Tali looked out at the empty streets. "He’d have been easy. He’d already decided he was worthless. All the door had to do was agree with him."

***

The hospital was at the top of the town, a low salt-stained building with the sea behind it, and the statue waited in the room where Halden used to work.

They came up through the empty wards on foot. Hiro went high on the stairwell with the rifle. Kikaru and Iharu moved ahead, clearing rooms out of habit even though everyone knew the only thing in the building was at the top, and Rina stayed beside Caleb with her tracker out, watching the junk-frequency readout that had reached Pasco.

She stopped at the door of the old public health office.

"It’s wrong," Rina said quietly. "Caleb. The readout’s wrong. With Pasco there was always a little hum, even before I touched him, this tiny live thing underneath. That’s how I knew somebody was home to talk to."

"This one." She held the tracker out so he could see the flat dead line on it. "There’s nothing. It’s not quiet, it’s empty. I’ve never seen one read like this."

Caleb stepped into the doorway and looked at the statue of Emil Halden, and the silver under his ribs, which had leaned toward Pasco like meeting a person, did not lean at all.

The statue stood at the window where the doctor must have stood a thousand times, looking out at the gray sea and the town that hated him. It was a tall man’s shape, stooped, the silver gone to the deep hard graven look of the vault-pieces, nothing like the dull unfinished surface Pasco had worn.

The marks on it were many and deep. Whatever the cold place did to a person across the months, it had finished doing to Halden a long time ago.

"He’s been a statue for a year," Caleb said. The understanding settled in him heavy and cold. "Pasco was seven months and there was a sliver left. Halden’s been gone twice that, and he walked in already believing he was nothing, so there was less to hold onto from the start."

"Rina’s right. There’s nobody in there to reach. The asking needs a person on the other side of the door to choose to open it, and the person’s gone. He went all the way into the metal months ago."

Rina lowered the tracker. "Then what do we do. If we can’t bring him back, what’s the point of being here."

It was a real question, the realest one of the whole job, and Caleb stood in the doorway of a dead doctor’s office with the gray sea behind the statue and made himself answer it honestly, because she deserved the honest version and so did the team coming up the stairs behind them.

"Pasco taught us the work when it goes right," Caleb said. "This one’s going to teach us the work when it can’t. There’s nobody to save here."

"But there’s still a name, there’s still a statue that’s going to stand up and start walking toward my house eventually like the others, and there’s still a town full of people who buried their families hating a man who never poisoned anyone." He looked at the deep-graven thing at the window.

"We can’t give Halden back his life. He doesn’t have one to give back. So we do the other half of the job. We stop the statue before it walks. We carry his name to the Record."

"And if I can do one thing more, standing where I’ll be standing, I’m going to find out whether the man blamed for killing this town can be the reason anybody learns he didn’t."

Behind them, Kikaru and Iharu had stopped clearing rooms and come to stand in the hall, listening. Hiro had come down two steps. The team understood, all at once and without anyone saying it, that this door was not going to feel like the last one.

"So this is a kill," Kikaru said, not arguing, only making sure the team said the true word out loud, as they’d made themselves say "kneel" out loud in the garage.

"This is a mercy," Caleb said. "But you’re right that it’s also a kill, and I’m not going to dress it up as anything softer, because the day I start calling the hard ones by soft names is the day I’ve started lying to you."

"There’s a man in there who’s already gone, and a piece of metal wearing his shape that’s going to hurt people if it wakes up walking. We’re going to put it down before it does, with respect, then write his name in a book and go tell this town the truth."

"That’s the job today. It’s not the one I wanted. It’s the one that’s here."

The team took that in.

Then Iharu, who was proud and loud and had not said a word since the checkpoint, stepped up to the doorway beside Caleb and looked at the statue of the doctor who stayed.

"Eleven years he lived in the town that hated him," Iharu said quietly. "For a thing he didn’t do. And he never left." He was not loud now. "Where I’m from, that’s not a coward and that’s not a failure."

"That’s a man who took a punishment that wasn’t his because somebody had to, and stood there and took it so the town would have someone to be angry at instead of nothing. That’s not nobody either, Caleb, whatever the readout says." He looked at Caleb. "When you write his name, I want to be there. Same as Rina was."

Caleb looked at the proud loud man who had gone quiet in front of a dead doctor’s statue, and he understood that the team was learning the same thing he was, one door at a time. The work was not about the ones you could save.

It was about refusing to let anybody go into the ground as a number, even when saving them was already off the table.

"Then let’s do it right," Caleb said, and he stepped into the room where Emil Halden had watched the sea for eleven years, to give a man who was already gone the only thing left that anyone could give him.