by Greg Keyes
Mark broke eye contact; wolves saw that as a threat. He bowed lower, holstered the gun, and reached out toward the wolf, submissively.
Okami growled again, but softer. The standing hair on his neck relaxed a little. He took a step toward Mark.
But then his head jerked up, and he bounded away, toward his pack.
Mark watched him go, taking deep, long breaths, feeling the flush of reaction. What had just happened?
But then he heard a distant thut. A familiar sound, not natural but mechanical. Rotors beating in the air above. A helicopter.
He scanned the sky and saw it. No, not a helicopter. An Osprey. It looked almost like a plane with stubby wings, except that at the end of each wing it sported cylindrical engines and rotors like a helicopter.
The wolves darted away. Within seconds they all vanished. That was it for his fieldwork today. Maybe for several days. Because the damned thing wasn’t just passing over. It was landing. The wolves wouldn’t like that at all.
The buzzards, on the other hand, would be pleased. They would get more than their usual share of the leftovers.
The Osprey dropped lower.
What the hell? he thought. What did they think they were doing? Who did they think they were?
Then he saw the marking on the machine’s stabilizer, four lines – a cross with two ends closed off, so it resembled an hourglass on its side. Or a highly stylized butterfly.
Monarch. These were monster hunters. What could they want with him? He didn’t work for Monarch anymore. Hadn’t for years.
But he knew the answer to that even as he asked it. Or was afraid he did. Maybe he was being paranoid; maybe they were just bringing Maddie for a visit. If that was the case, he could forgive them scaring off the wolves.
The craft touched down on a relatively even spot. The motors cut and the rotors began to slow. He watched as three people debarked. None of them were Maddie.
He knew two of them – Dr. Ishiro Serizawa and Dr. Vivienne Graham. They were both important players in Monarch. Serizawa had been obsessed with Godzilla, chasing signs of the reptilian monster for decades. Hoping to get a glimpse of it years ago, he’d gotten his wish, when not just he but everyone else on the planet got a good look at the rampaging beast. A lot of people had gotten such a good look they never saw anything else again.
Graham had been Serizawa’s protégé for a long time, but last he’d heard she had been assigned to some project in Antarctica. He had worked with both of them, along with Emma, prior to the Godzilla thing.
The third guy he didn’t know from Adam.
They didn’t look like they were bringing good news.
FOUR
From Dr. Chen’s notes:
I was among my cubs
on a meadow beside a brook.
This was the way
I continued to live
on and on until
One day downstream
noises were heard
I looked and saw
an evil monster bear
a vile demon bear,
with his lower fangs
jutting out beyond
his upper jaw,
with his upper fangs
jutting out beyond
his lower jaw,
and with his inner gums
exposed.
The evil monster bear
the vile demon bear
came this way.
As soon as
he caught sight of me,
he glared at me
with his eyes wide open.
Then he attacked me.
—Song of Wolf Goddess
Ainu traditional song
Mark had bought the cabin not long after the 2014 attacks. He’d thought the three of them could make a life here. Off the grid. The place had everything they needed. They could homeschool Maddie, and she could grow up without further terror. Far from the coasts. From Godzilla and whatever other monsters might drag their prehistoric asses out of the sea.
Emma had had other ideas. She didn’t want to quit Monarch; in fact, she just threw herself into her work that much more. He’d tried to talk her into at least letting him bring Maddie up here while she was in China.
But that was never going to happen.
He’d thought he was buying for three, so the cabin was a little bigger than he needed, but it gave him room to sprawl out comfortably.
Now it felt… crowded.
He rarely had visitors, and when he did they didn’t stay long, and that was to his liking. Today he had not one, but three. Normally that would be irritating – except that he was far too distracted by what they had come to tell him. As he listened to their story, he realized that an overcrowded house was the very least of his worries.
He focused on the picture as they spoke, the photo of his daughter and him on a fishing trip. Maddie. It had been a good day, all of it, from the long drive out to the campfire that night.
This was not a good day. What his visitors were telling him seemed impossible, a fiction they were selling for some bent reason.
But, of course, they had video.
“The feed cuts out here,” Dr. Graham said in her soft British accent. “The survivors haven’t been able to give us much more than what the footage allows. Only that Emma and Madison were the only ones taken.”
Yeah, he thought. But they killed everyone else in sight.
He couldn’t say anything. He just stared at the picture. Wishing he could go back to that moment, keep her with him out here, where it was safe, far from the coast and the hell away from Monarch.
“I’m sorry, Mark,” Serizawa said.
Mark looked back at the video feed on the laptop. The temple in the Yunnan Province of China. The monster. The gunmen. If his life had gone differently he might have been in Yunnan, too.
“I never should have… I should have been there for her,” he said. “Who did this?”
“We don’t know yet,” Dr. Graham said. “We believe they were after this.” Graham zoomed the image on the laptop in to Emma, facing the… whatever it was. The black case open in front of her. The ORCA.
He hadn’t caught that on the first viewing. He’d thought it was just some random piece of equipment, a radiation sensor or something.
“You didn’t…”
“The ORCA,” the third person said. The one he didn’t know. Nervous-looking fellow with a wispy beard and wide, blue eyes.
“We think it’s why they need Emma,” the guy went on. “She believed if we could somehow replicate the bio-sonar the Titans use to communicate—”
“I know what the hell it is,” Mark broke in, his shock, fear, and guilt now joined by anger. “I helped build the prototype.”
He looked at Graham. “Who is he?”
“Uh, Sam Coleman,” the man said. “Head of Technology. I joined Monarch shortly after you left – I’m a big fan of your wife’s work… and you… the whole… That came out so weird. I’m sorry.”
Mark turned back to Serizawa.
“Emma and I destroyed the prototype,” Mark told him.
“And then Emma decided to rebuild it after San Francisco,” Graham said. “She went home to Boston, spent years developing it. She thought it could help—”
“Help what?” Mark snapped. “Play God?”
“No,” the Englishwoman said. “Help prevent another attack.”
“The ORCA was a grad-school science project,” Mark said. “It was meant to keep whales away from the shoreline, not so you could talk to your little creatures out there. Listen to me – they’ll think it’s one of them. You use the wrong frequency on any one of ’em, and you’re gonna be responsible for a thousand San Franciscos.”
“Which is why we need to get it back,” Serizawa said. “Emma always said no one knew the ORCA better than you.”
“It shouldn’t even exist,” Mark said.
“That may be, Mark,” Coleman replied, “but it’s fallen into the wrong hands. And right now the OR
CA is the only thing keeping Emma and Madison alive.”
Mark turned away from them and stared out the window. What was Emma up to? What did she think she was going to do with the ORCA? Have a conversation with monsters? Talk out a peace treaty with Godzilla?
But the question now wasn’t what her plans had been, was it? It was what her captors meant to do.
“Mark, please,” Dr. Graham said. “We know you’re hurting. But if we find the ORCA we’ll find your family. I promise.”
Mark looked around his little cabin. He could think of a dozen reasons why he didn’t want anything to do with Monarch ever again. But there were two reasons why he must, and they were all that mattered now.
* * *
The Osprey was a tiltrotor aircraft, which was a fancy way of saying that it could land, take off, and hover like a helicopter but also fly like a prop plane by switching the propellers from overhead to facing front. Helicopters were pretty lousy at long-distance travel; they got terrible gas mileage. But they were great at coming and going from tight places. The Osprey was a solution to that problem.
They had been in plane mode for a while now. The mountains of Colorado gave way to the checkerboard Kansas farmland and then wetter, greener country as they moved further east. Night came, and he dozed, fitfully. When he woke they were cruising over a whole lot of water, with the occasional scatter of mist-shrouded islands. He’d tried at first to reckon where they were going based on direction and landmarks and sneaking looks at the instruments, but finally decided it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like he was going to try to get back to Colorado anytime soon.
The wolves wouldn’t miss him. He needed them, not the other way around. Which seemed to sum up all of his relationships.
It was not a smooth ride. The craft bumped and bucked through an agitated sky. Up front, he noticed Serizawa checking his phone and flipping the old pocket watch he carried everywhere. Just like old times. Mark remembered Serizawa had gotten the watch from his father, who had also been with Monarch. And he remembered a joke about that watch.
He was in the back, left to himself, which was fine by him. He figured these guys had told him as much as they planned to for the moment; now all he could do was parse out the information he had.
He was pretty sure if the ORCA was turned on, he could track it – if they were in range of the signal. From what he could make out of Emma’s latest version of the machine, its speakers were probably not that much stronger than their first model. If the bad guys amplified the output, the range would increase, making detecting it easier. So there was that – Monarch could start listening, and he could probably help tell them how.
But it all came back to what the terrorists or whatever wanted, didn’t it? What did they intend to use the ORCA for?
He kept replaying the video of Emma and Maddie in his mind. Had she been communicating with that maggot-thing, or had the sound of the ORCA merely calmed it down?
The bad guys had taken Emma so she could work the machine for them, that much was clear. But why take Maddie? Once he detached a father’s wishful thinking from the question, that was just as obvious.
They wanted Maddie in case Emma was brave. What if Emma wouldn’t show them how to work it, even if they threatened her life? Anyone who knew his ex – or anything about her – would know she wouldn’t cooperate with terrorists, even if her own life was at stake.
No. They needed Maddie to motivate Emma. Maybe a threat would be enough. Maybe they would have to hurt her before Emma gave in. Hurt his little girl…
No, scratch that. It was worse. Madison wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a strong, hard-headed, smart young woman. She would push back against the bad guys. They would punish her until she stopped.
He couldn’t bear the thought, and yet his mind kept coming back to it. It was like a roadblock in his brain that kept him from progressing.
He saw Graham get up and head his way. She settled into the seat next to him.
“How are you holding up?” she asked, softly.
He just stared at her. He didn’t want to make conversation right now. He didn’t want company.
“You could yell at us more if it will make you feel any better,” she said.
He smiled a little. He had liked Vivienne, back in the day. He knew that whatever else was going on, she was worried about Emma and Maddie, too.
“It is good to see you, Vivienne,” he said. He found that he meant it. She was an effortlessly comforting person.
Her lips turned up a generous, sympathetic smile.
“I know you were a good friend to Emma after the divorce.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to Emma?” she asked.
“About three years ago. After San Francisco, we went back home to Boston… tried to put the pieces back together. Emma dealt with it by doubling down on saving the world and I – I started drinking. I can’t tell you how much I hate myself for letting Maddie see me that way.”
Vivienne didn’t remark on that, but her gaze brimmed with sympathy.
Mark noticed Coleman approaching, too. Opening up to Vivienne was one thing but he had no interest in airing out his heart around a stranger. And there came Serizawa, too. Was everyone going to come back?
“Uh… you mind if we cut in here?” Coleman asked. Mark shrugged.
“It’s just… you’re going to want to see this,” Coleman explained.
Coleman plopped down across from him and handed him a tablet.
Emma’s research on the ORCA. Blueprints, 3-D models of what must be monster vocal cords, sonic snapshots, audio graphs, sequence builders… She’d been busy. This thing was a long way from their little science project, but at its most basic it was pretty much what he remembered. Except for some of the audio profiles. Those got pretty weird.
“Emma combined the bioacoustics of different Titans to create the ORCA’s signal,” Coleman said. “A sort of baseline frequency that all the creatures respond to – attracting them, repelling them, even, at times, calming them down. It’s pretty remarkable, actually.”
“The problem,” Vivienne said, “is that we don’t know which Titans she combined. But if you can identify those frequencies, we’ll be able to track the ORCA. And find Emma and Madison.”
So pretty much as he’d thought.
Mark continued through the data, to a set of – X-rays. Of monsters. More than a few. They were all over the place; some had primarily exoskeletons with some interior buttressing. Others were more like Godzilla, vertebrates. To his zoologist’s eye, no two of them looked like the same species.
“Jesus,” he said. “How many of these things are there?”
“Seventeen,” Serizawa said. “And counting, after Godzilla.”
He absorbed that. Seventeen more monsters like Godzilla? Seventeen creatures that could level a city just by taking a stroll through it?
“Seventeen?” he said.
Coleman pulled up a map of the world with various locations marked. Some he recognized – Skull Island, for instance. But most of these were totally new to him. He noticed one off the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Another near Atlanta. Was something under Stone Mountain?
But the one he focused in on was the one in the Yunnan Province in China, where Emma and Maddie had been taken.
“Most of them were discovered in deep hibernation,” Vivienne said, “while others we’ve contained at top secret sites around the globe: Cambodia, Mexico, Skull Island. We even found one in Wyoming. They’re everywhere.”
Wyoming. So even his plan to stay high, dry, and monster-free in Colorado had been wrongheaded. These things were everywhere.
“Why don’t you kill them?” Mark asked.
“The government wants to,” Serizawa said. “But Emma and I believe some are… benevolent.”
Not this again.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Mark told him.
Hadn’t they learned anything? They had kept watch over one latent monster, years before, thinking they could con
tain it. They hadn’t, and the result had been catastrophic. It had trashed the Monarch base there, cut a swath through Hawai’i and totaled San Francisco. Now they had seventeen they were trying to keep sedated or whatever? It was insane.
Something in the cabin began beeping.
“Uh, hey,” Sam said. “Look at that. We’re here.”
Where was here? Mark got up and went into the cockpit for a better view.
The otherwise open sea was broken ahead by the cloud-shrouded mountains of an island. It seemed like a small one, but he couldn’t see all of it. Just offshore, an oil platform stood out of the water on four thick red pylons. Several cranes stuck out from the deck and the derrick towered up on one side. He wasn’t sure about the rest of it, but he could easily identify a landing pad and spare living quarters.
The props had rotated, and the Osprey was back in helicopter mode. They began to drop toward the landing pad on the rig.
It was funny, he’d been expecting something a little grander from Monarch. They had big plans, and a knack for getting the funds to pull them off. He supposed an oil rig wouldn’t attract a lot of unwanted attention, but it was a little underwhelming.
Were they going down too fast? It seemed like they were going down too fast. The pad was coming up with breathtaking speed, and the pilot seemed to have no interest in slowing down.
Or something had gone very wrong with the Osprey.
He braced for impact.
FIVE
From Dr. Chen’s notes:
When Gilgamesh reached Mount Mashu,
Which each day guards the rise of the sun
Whose two peaks support the heavens,
Whose lower flanks reach to the Netherworld,
There were Scorpion-men guarding its gate.
Fearful dread they stir, their glance is death,
Their terrifying radiance engulfs the mountains.
—The Epic of Gilgamesh
Tablet IX, 1300–1000 BCE
They were still dropping like a rock; Mark flinched, but the impact didn’t come. Instead, the landing pad on the oil rig opened, revealing a hole that went down – way down.