by J. E. Gurley
“Hurry!” her father yelled.
She turned to run up the steps. A wing slapped her in the face as a Wasp plucked the man in front of her from the steps and flew away. She looked into his terror-filled eyes as he struggled and screamed, and watched those eyes go empty and lifeless when the creature’s stinger repeatedly stabbed into his chest until his screams stopped. More screams erupted around her. A woman clutched by a Wasp grabbed onto her husband’s outstretched hand, who struggled to hold her down. The Wasp slashed her with its talons until her body split in two, spilling her intestines over her hapless husband. Her lower body fell to the tarmac, dragging him with it. Before he could rise, a second Wasp plucked him from the ground to join her.
The Wasps dove into the dispersing crowd, chasing down stragglers. More of the creatures flew into the terminal through the shattered door, slaughtering the people seeking shelter there. Farther down one of the runways, a De Havilland DHC-6 turboprop taxied for a takeoff against the wind. Its twin Pratt and Whitney engines struggled to lift the overloaded plane from the tarmac. Its wheels bounced several times before they left the ground less than fifty feet from the edge of the runway. Teana knew that with its limited range, the De Havilland might make the small airstrips on Teraina or Tabuaeran north of Kiritimati, but doubted it could reach Malden Island or Starbuck Island, the closest islands to the south. The De Havilland had room for the crew and a maximum of nineteen passengers, but it flew heavily and awkwardly, as if loaded far beyond its capacity.
It mounted slowly above the treetops and circled the field, as the pilot tried to decide on a destination. His indecision and the plane’s slow speed spelled its doom. One of the Wasps flew directly into the starboard engine’s spinning propellers. The blades ripped the creature to shreds, but its hard ebony carapace sheared off the blades. The engine stalled and died. The plane veered right in a steep dive. The pilot struggled to add power to the port engine, but it was a futile gesture. The plane was too close to the ground to recover. It struck a grove of palm trees near the beach and cart-wheeled into the surf where it exploded in a ball of flame. A billowing streamer of black smoke rose from its grave. Wasps followed the plane’s path and picked through the burning debris for the passengers; then flew away with still-smoldering corpses. Any flesh, living or dead, was food for the Kaiju.
Teana looked away from the grisly scene. She reached the top of the stairs and stepped toward the door of the 737. The pilot had witnessed the demise of the De Havilland and was not waiting. He gunned the engine and began taxiing down the runway. Teana lost her balance and fell forward as the boarding ladder slid down the side of the moving fuselage. She grabbed onto the rail to regain her balance, as the gap between the steps and the door widened.
“Jump,” the stewardess urged.
Teana hesitated; then, felt hands lift her and propel her forward across the gap, barely reaching the outstretched hand of the stewardess, who yanked her through the open doorway. She looked back to see her father and mother standing at the top of the steps, moving farther away as the jet gained speed, heedless of the people crushed beneath its wheels or blasted across the tarmac by the wash of the powerful engines.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
He smiled at her and wrapped his arm around her mother. His smiled vanished when a Wasp stinger pierced his chest. His arm fell away her mother’s shoulders as the creature yanked him from the platform and flew away. Her mother followed him a few seconds later. As the stewardess sealed the door, she caught one last glimpse of the Wasps flying away with their burden of humans. Few people remained from the hundreds that had thronged the terminal.
The stewardess looked down at her with a tear in her eye, her face awash with pity. “You’re safe,” she said. “You’re safe.”
As the 737 lifted from the end of the runway and shot away from the island faster than the Wasps could follow, she didn’t feel safe. She felt numb. She allowed the stewardess to help her to a seat at the front of the jet. She noticed with dismay that the cabin was barely half-full. There was room for so many more. As the jet banked west for a southern heading to Fiji, she looked down at her home from the window by her seat. Buildings burned in the cities and wrecked automobiles lined the roads. Hundreds of Wasps circled the island, rounding up and carting away all stragglers. Two of those bodies are my baba and toba, she thought. My father and mother dead, my home destroyed. I am truly butirawa – homeless. A few minutes later, she saw a black dot on the ocean below her with a line of Wasps flying between it and her island. The Kaiju, she thought. Anger swelled up inside, but she had no release for it except through her tears. She pulled down the shade on the window, closed her eyes, and wept for her parents and her friends, all dead because of the aliens.
Then she wept for herself.
7
Saturday, Dec. 16, 7:30 a.m. Radiant Princess, north of Enderbury Island –
Mark Talent knew something was amiss when the steward failed to deliver his breakfast to his room as he had every morning of the voyage promptly at 6:15 a.m. He waited an additional forty-five minutes before deciding to venture to the Horizons Courtyard. The choices offered by the enormous breakfast buffet were less limited than those of room service, but his standing order of toast, butter, jelly, crisp bacon, and two scrambled eggs was more than sufficient to start his day. The Horizons was a last resort. Sharing breakfast with hundreds of passengers, many of them children, did not appeal to him, but at least it offered the option of grabbing something and returning to his cabin to eat in solitude.
He stepped out of his cabin into a hornet’s nest of activity. As he feared, word about the Kaiju attack on the islands of western Kiribati had already spread. Frightened passengers crowded the corridors, whispering so they wouldn’t frighten the children, who already knew something was amiss by the pallid faces and furtive mannerisms of their parents. Rumors triumphed over fact. One story he overheard announced two Kaiju appearing in Washington. D.C.; another rumor had multiple Kaiju ravaging parts of Europe.
One young woman whose cabin was two doors down from his and with whom he had never spoken cornered him by the elevator. Every time he had seen her, she had taken great pains to make herself attractive with judicious applications of lipstick, eyeliner, rouge, and makeup. However, today her hair was unkempt, and she wore no makeup. Her clothes looked thrown on in haste.
“Are they turning the ship around?” she demanded. “They should turn the ship around.”
“I have no idea. I wouldn’t think so. It’s almost twenty-four-hundred miles back to Hawaii.”
She tugged at her pale, lipstick-free lower lip. “Where’s our Navy? Why aren’t they here to protect us?”
Before he could respond, she shook her head and wandered back down the corridor. By the time he threaded his way through the speculating crowd and reached the fresh air of the Lido Deck, Kaiju had destroyed Hawaii, all of Kiribati, and the Philippines.
The air of celebration that had previously suffused the ship evaporated like water spilled on a sidewalk in a hot Arizona summer. Now, the passengers were merely frightened, milling about in confusion. Next, after their apprehension mounted and the rumors grew even wilder, they would panic. After that … He didn’t want to think that far ahead.
He spotted several harried crewmembers harangued by crowds of insistent passengers, as if they thought a steward or a housekeeper would be privy to some private information they didn’t have access to from the television or the internet. He felt sorry for the poor crew, but not sorry enough to intercede – not his circus, not his monkey.
On the Lido Deck, no one was in the pool. This in itself was an ominous sign of the mood aboard ship. People scurried to and from the Horizons Courtyard like a line of carpenter ants bent on defoliating a forest. They buzzed by him with trays laden with food. The selections were random, as if any food in sufficient quantity would see them through whatever impending crisis they imagined might occur. Talent took one look at the melee inside the buf
fet and reconsidered his options for breakfast. The bag of potato chips, a can of macadamia nuts, and two apples in his room now looked good. As he stood there, one overweight man clad in plaid shorts and a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt, looking back over his shoulder to see if his equally overweight wife and child were following, slammed into Talent, sending the tray of food he carried flying across the deck. The man glanced up at Talent and sneered.
“Asshole!” he shouted. “Look where you’re going.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Talent replied calmly. “I was standing here.” He didn’t want to give the overwrought man a heart attack. His face was as bright red as the blob of cherry Jell-O quivering on the deck. “But excuse me anyway.” He stepped aside to let the man pass.
Hawaiian-shirt man refused to accept Talent’s apology. He noted Talent’s long, black ponytail beneath his Stetson, his cowboy boots, his ruddy complexion, and the Tohono O’odham Man-in-the-Maze symbol on the horsehair clasp of his bola tie and frowned. Instead, he decided to show his young son how a real man handles a situation.
“They shouldn’t let Indians on this ship,” he said in a voice loud enough to cause heads to turn in his direction. “You’re all drunks and thieves.”
Talent was willing to give the man a little leeway. Since the advent of Facebook and social media, people believed they could say anything they wished with impunity. It wasn’t the first time someone had called him out for being Indian. He held his temper and turned to walk away. The man rushed around in front of him to continue his tirade. “I’m not through with you,” he said. “I’m going to report you to the captain. I paid good money for this cruise, and I shouldn’t have to deal with the likes of you.”
Talent replied, “I paid eleven thousand dollars myself. Now, why don’t you go get your family some more food?”
He stepped around the irate man and continued walking. From the corner of his eye, Talent saw Hawaiian-shirt rush up behind him, swinging his fist at the back of his head. Talent ducked aside, and shoved the man in the back as he overshot his target. The man stumbled across the deck and slammed into a stack of folded deck chairs. He fell, and the pile of chairs collapsed around him. Talent stared at him for a moment, judging whether the man would try to escalate the altercation, but the anger had left him, replaced by embarrassment.
Talent left the man where he lay to consider his rude behavior. His wife rushed over and attempted, unsuccessfully, to extricate him from the tangle of deck chairs. The crowd, more concerned with their own fears than with the momentary spectacle, broke up. Before Talent reached the elevators, a ship’s officer with two gold bars and the word Security on the epaulets of his white uniform barred his path. Talent looked from the man’s nametag, which read Nils Ivers – Security, to his face, stern and frowning.
“We don’t want any disturbances aboard ship,” he warned. “We will not tolerate such behavior from passengers.”
“I agree. Perhaps you should speak to him.” He pointed to the Hawaiian-shirt man just now getting up from the scattered deck chairs.
“I was passing by when the incident occurred. I saw you shove him.”
Talent quickly grew weary of the security officer’s arrogant manner. As a Native American, he had been on the receiving end of too many authoritarian diatribes over the years. He had not liked it from the police; he certainly refused to tolerate it from a ship’s security officer, not for eleven-thousand dollars.
“He confronted me, and then insulted me. When I attempted to leave, he attacked me. I’d say he came off damned lucky.”
The officer took a step closer to Talent. “You embarrassed him in front of his family.”
“No, he embarrassed himself in front of his family. Maybe he’ll learn from his experience. Perhaps you’d better concern yourself with bigger problems.”
“What bigger problems?”
“Look around, Ivers. These people are ready to explode. They’re afraid, and no one is telling them anything. The truth would be less harmful than rumors.”
Ivers shifted nervously. “There’s no cause for alarm.”
While they had been conversing, the atmosphere of fear among the passengers had grown worse. Talent pointed to people grabbing liquor bottles from the pool bar and rushing off. “Then you had better tell them that. They might believe you. I don’t.”
“I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
Talent laughed. “Don’t try to intimidate me. You do a piss poor job at it.”
Ivers scowled, reached out his hand, and grabbed Talent’s bola tie. Talent immediately seized the security officer’s thumb and twisted it behind his hand. Ivers yelped in pain and struggled, but Talent’s grip was too strong to break.
“Don’t ever lay hands on me,” Talent growled. “You might intimidate frightened passengers or women and children, but to me you’re just a glorified mall cop in a white uniform.”
He released the security guard’s hand. Ivers reached for the whistle hanging around his neck by a chain to summon help.
“Before you can blow that whistle,” Talent warned, “you’ll be lying on the deck choking on it.” Ivers hesitated. In a softer tone, he said, “Good. You accused me of instigating an incident with no facts and without questioning any of the two dozen witnesses. You made a mistake. Don’t make another one that you might regret. I don’t want any trouble, but I won’t back away from it.”
“We have a brig on this ship,” Ivers warned, trying to regain some of his lost dignity.
“You might have enough men to put me in it.” Talent narrowed his eyes and glared at the security officer. “But you won’t be in any condition to see it happen.” He backed away from Ivers, giving the man the personal space to calm down.
Inside the Horizons Courtyard, the food had run out. Passengers began yelling and fighting for the few remaining scraps. The fact that there were fourteen dining rooms, grills, cafes, and bars aboard ship, as well as room service, was lost on them. In their fear, they had abandoned rational thinking for frenzied mob mentality. Tensions on the ship were ready to explode.
“I’m returning to my cabin now. I think that in a few minutes, you’re going to be too busy to bother with me.”
Ivers stared over Talent’s shoulder at the growing fracas in the courtyard and his face paled. Without another word to Talent or a backward glance at the crowd, he raced to a door marked Personnel Only and disappeared through it. Talent thought it was time for him to disappear as well.
As he hurried along the outside corridor to the aft elevators to avoid the crowds, he saw people pointing out to sea. He glanced to see what had caught their attention. At first, he thought it was a whale – he had seen a few on the voyage – but as he realized how far away the object was, its true size became apparent. It was low in the water, as black as the inside of a mineshaft, and headed directly for them. A chill coursed through his body as he recognized it as a Kaiju, the one that had wiped out Kiribati.
As he watched, scores of lines appeared in the water between the Kaiju and the ship, like torpedoes fired from a submarine but traveling much faster than any torpedo he had seen in the movies. Within seconds, they had closed to within a few hundred yards of the ship, close enough to make out details. They were gray and long, but they weren’t torpedoes, at least not any type of torpedo he had seen. The portion of the objects visible above the waterline was at least ten-feet long. Their movement seemed more organic than mechanical, as if propelling themselves with tentacles or long, thin fins. He wasn’t sure what they were, but was certain they meant trouble.
He crossed to the port side of the ship to place more distance between him and the objects in case he was wrong and they were torpedoes. Screams erupted all around him as people became aware of the Kaiju and the strange objects. Now their unfocused fears had a target upon which they could vent. Panic became a stampede.
The 113,000-ton ship shuddered from the impact when the projectiles struck starboard amidships. Talent grabbed a doorfra
me and hung on as the ship canted several degrees to port. When the ship resettled, he rudely elbowed his way through the crowd and raced down two flights of stairs to his cabin just a few doors down from the aft stairwell. He opened his door, went immediately to the balcony, and stared out. What he saw froze his blood in his veins. They had not been torpedoes, as he had feared. They were aquatic alien creatures, and they looked like they meant business.
He rushed to the open closet by the bathroom, pulled a gift-wrapped box from the shelf, and ripped off the bright red and green paper. He laid the box on the bed and opened it. Inside, wrapped in two souvenir tee shirts, lay a leather sheath holding a kukri, Nepalese machete with a curved thirteen-inch blade and a Becker BK7 combat utility knife with a seven-inch blade. He thanked Hawaii’s user-friendly knife laws. He didn’t know if Australia would allow him to bring the weapons into the country, but he had felt naked without some kind of self-defense protection. He wished he had one of his guns.
The Gurkha kukri machete was a tourist souvenir, cheaply made with a dull blade. The first thing he had done after purchasing it was to apply a liberal amount of superglue to the space between the metal tang and the wooden handle and pound the rivets tighter. Then he wound a long, thin leather strip around the entire handle to pull the two pieces together tighter. Afterwards, he attacked the dull edge of the blade with a rattail file and a whetstone until it was sharp enough to draw blood from his finger pressed against the fine edge. The Becker utility knife blade only required a few strokes with the whetstone to remove the steel burrs. A machete and a knife against alien creatures hardly qualified as an even match, but it was better than no weapon at all.
He went back out on the balcony with the kukri in his hand. Looking down and to his right, he saw several of the creatures chewing through the metal hull below the waterline as if it were cardboard and disappearing inside the ship amid a flurry of whipping tentacles. Others used their long tentacles to pull themselves from the water and crawl up the side of the ship. At first glance, they resembled giant squids with tubular bodies rounded on the end with eight tentacles twice their body length, but as they left the water, their streamlined bodies expanded and broadened until they became shorter and twice as wide for greater stability on land. They employed four of the thicker tentacles to grip the metal hull. Instead of suckers, the tentacles bore lines of sharp barbs that sliced through the steel as easily as a church key through the top of beer can.