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

The storage facility on Vesper Street was a four-story prefab with corrugated metal walls and a chain-link fence around the perimeter.

It had not been renovated in nineteen years. The neon signage at the entrance buzzed in the cold air. A single attendant sat in the office booth with a paperback and did not raise his head when Caleb walked past.

Unit 219 was on the second floor at the end of the hall.

Iris was at his right. The rifle was gone today, replaced by a small revolver under her jacket, a flashlight, and the brass key from his mother’s photograph frame.

The Hacker had Soma on the comm, listening.

[Soma: I’ve not been here.]

"I’m aware."

[Soma: I want you to be aware. Your father did not bring me to this unit because he could not bring himself to bring anyone. Iris has known about the unit for nine years. She has not been inside it. You will be the second person ever to open the door. The first person was your father in November twenty-fourteen. He has not been back since.]

"What’s in here, Soma?"

[Soma: Open it. Your father wants you to find it how he found it.]

Caleb put the key in the lock and turned it.

The door rolled up on rails that had been oiled within the last six months.

The unit was a single room. Concrete floor. Cold.

A long, low refrigeration cabinet sat in the center. Stainless steel. Six feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep. Powered by a battery cell stacked beside it that had a six-year service tag dated last month. Someone had been maintaining the unit on his father’s behalf.

A folding chair stood beside the cabinet.

Marcus’s handwriting was on a card taped to the cabinet lid.

Caleb. He is inside. The piece is in his chest. He has been here since the morning of November fourteenth, nineteen ninety. I could not bury him without inviting questions, and I could not cremate him without releasing the piece. I have not opened the cabinet since I sealed it. You will need to extract the piece for Day Sixteen. I cannot do it. I have tried four times in thirty-five years. The fourth time was in twenty-fourteen and I sat in this chair for nine hours and did not lift the lid. I am asking you to do what I could not. He is your grandfather. He has been waiting for one of us to come back for him.

Caleb read the card twice.

He turned to Iris.

Her attention was fixed on the cabinet.

Her face was the face she had at orientation podiums, but quieter.

"I knew it was him," she said. "I did not know which version of him."

"You knew."

"I have known for nine years that there was a man your father could not stop carrying. I did not know your father had kept the body. I would have come with him in twenty-fourteen if he had asked. He did not ask. He came alone. He sat in that chair alone. I will sit in it tonight with you if you let me."

"Yes." She sat down in the folding chair, her eyes on the cabinet, while Caleb walked to the lid.

He read the seal date. November 14, 1990. The signature line below was his father’s.

He laid his hand on the metal.

The metal was cold.

The silver marks under his ribs warmed for the first time since the bridge.

A different warmth this time. Not heat. Not kin. Something like recognition without urgency, like a man recognizing a relative he had never met.

Caleb broke the seal and lifted the lid.

His grandfather lay inside in a preservation gel that had been engineered before refrigeration this clean was commercially available. Marcus had built the apparatus himself. Soma had told Iris about it in twenty-sixteen, over a drink Iris had not finished.

The body was intact.

The skin had gone the color of paper that had been stored away from light for a long time. The eyes were closed. The hands were folded over the chest. The shirt was a plain white work shirt, buttoned all the way up. A small entry wound was visible at the right temple where the bullet had gone in. Marcus had cleaned it. Marcus had closed it.

Caleb’s grandfather carried Marcus in the brow and Caleb in the jaw.

The chest of the work shirt was raised slightly over the sternum, the slight rise of a chest holding more under the skin than the cavity wanted.

The piece was in there. Iris stood, came to the side of the cabinet, and put her hand on Caleb’s forearm.

"Don’t do it tonight."

"He needs it for Day Sixteen."

"He needs it on Day Sixteen. He does not need it tonight. Tonight he needs you to sit with him for the time your father could not. Tonight you sit. Tomorrow morning, in daylight, with Tali and the equipment, you extract. Tonight is for the man on the table. Tomorrow is for the piece."

Caleb needed a minute. Then he closed the lid.

He left it unsealed. The room held the cold.

He pulled a second chair from the wall, where it had been folded against the corrugated steel. He set it next to Iris’s chair. He sat down.

His attention stayed on the cabinet. Iris sat with him.

After a while, Caleb said, "Yes."

[Hacker: I am closing the channel. Soma is closing his. We will be on standby until you open it again. You have the room for as long as you need it.]

"Thank you."

[Hacker: Your father is sitting in his own chair tonight. He is not on the comm. He is not at the safe house. He is somewhere I do not know about. He told me before he left that if you did not come out of the storage unit by oh-three-hundred I should go in and bring you out. I am holding to that. He told me to tell you he is not going to ask if you sat in the chair when he sees you next. He wants you to know he is not going to ask. He wants you to know he knows.]

She closed the channel.

Iris and Caleb sat in the folding chairs for two hours and thirty-one minutes.

Neither of them spoke.

Once, at the ninety-minute mark, she put her hand on his back between his shoulder blades and left it there until his breathing steadied.

She took it away.

He let her have the gesture without turning it into a conversation.

At twenty-three-fifty, she stood up. She folded her chair. She walked to the door. She waited.

Caleb stayed in his chair for another four minutes.

His attention returned to the cabinet.

He said, out loud, to no one in particular but to the body in the cabinet most of all:

"I’ll come back for the piece in the morning. I won’t take you out of the cabinet. I’ll close it up after. You’ll stay where my father put you. Mom doesn’t have to know. We’ll do it how he wanted it done."

He folded his chair.

He carried it to the wall.

He rolled the unit door down behind him on his way out.

Iris locked it with the brass key and gave the key back to him.

In the car she said: "You did good in there."

No answer came.

He put the key in his coat pocket, against the dampener and the photograph frame’s spare paper and the medical gown that was no longer warm, and the third folder paper with the seven names, and the fourth folder’s list of fifteen items, two of which he had not read yet.