by Greg Keyes
“Mr. Kearns,” she broke in, “two monsters are already loosed on the world, and the crazy doctor just told us she’s going to break out as many as possible. That is not an excuse to kill Mokele, it is a mandate.”
“Three,” Esmail said.
“What?” Kearns asked.
“Mexico,” he said. “Just came in. La Isla de Mara. The Demon’s Nest…”
On one of the monitors a volcano was erupting, but it wasn’t just lava, smoke, and ash coming out. A Titan was spreading fiery wings. It looked like it was made of lava itself.
“Rodan,” Lang said.
Be damned, she thought. That’s Tsé nináhálééh, the Rock Monster Eagle.
“Now can we kill it?” she asked.
“This site will not be compromised,” Kearns said. “Mokele-Mbembe will remain contained and unharmed. You make sure of that. It’s why you’re here.”
She sighed, but then she began giving orders.
“Move the helicopter and drone patrols out to ten klicks,” she said. “If a mouse moves out there, I want to know about it.”
* * *
When Monster Zero flew off, he had a destination in mind. Drones tracked him to Isla de Mara, where – beneath a steadily darkening sky – he settled into Rodan’s flaming nest.
It looked to Mark like a classic case of asserting dominance. He was not only taking Rodan’s territory but also his very seat of power, a usurper sitting on the old king’s throne. And yet, that was odd behavior for a wounded animal. They usually returned to somewhere they considered safe, or at least familiar.
And there could be little doubt Monster Zero was badly hurt. Once in the nest, he began writhing and screeching in pain. Maybe – hopefully – the loss of a head was fatal blow, but like a decapitated snake, Monster Zero was taking his time realizing he was dead. Sitting in the lava seemed to make things even worse for the big fellah, which was a shame. Had he made a fatal mistake claiming Rodan’s throne? Was he now too wounded to fly out again?
But then Mark noticed something. It wasn’t just the necks that still had heads that were squirming like earthworms on a hot sidewalk. The headless neck was, too. It was no longer gouting blood, and in fact the severing wound wasn’t there anymore, either. In fact, something appeared to be emerging from the stump.
No, he had read it all completely wrong.
Monster Zero wasn’t pissing on Rodan’s territory, and he wasn’t dying. He’d come to the Demon’s Nest for the lava, the radiation moving up from beneath the earth. Searching for the nourishment he needed to regrow his freaking head. Like a goddamn hydra from Greek mythology. It was covered in some sort of slimy membrane, but one of the other heads reached over and bit it off, so the baby head could keep forming.
In moments the new head was fully grown, blinking newly formed eyes, just as full of malevolence as the others.
At least, Mark thought, it only grew back the one. Hydras were supposed to grow two for every one you took off.
But three was still three too many.
Monster Zero opened his trio of razor-filled mouths and screamed at the heavens.
To Mark, it didn’t seem like merely a scream of triumph. It was something else. A challenge, maybe. Or a call.
THIRTEEN
From Dr. Chen’s notes:
Of coral wood the flesh of man was made, but when woman was fashioned by the Creator and the Maker, her flesh was made of rushes. These were the materials the Creator and the Modeler wanted to use in making them.
But those that they had made, that they had created, did not think, did not speak with their Creator, their Modeler. And for this reason they were killed, they were deluged. A heavy resin fell from the sky. The one called Xecotcovach came and gouged out their eyes; Camazotz came and cut off their heads; Cotzbalam came and devoured their flesh. Tucumbalam came, too, and broke and mangled their bones and their nerves, and ground and crumbled their bones.
This was to punish them because they had not thought of their mother, nor their father, the Heart of Heaven, called Huracan. And for this reason the face of the earth was darkened, and a black rain began to fall, by day and by night.
—The Popul Vuh, Sacred book of the Quiche Maya
Book One
Sedona, Arizona Monarch Outpost 55 Titanus Scylla
Rick drove from Flagstaff to Sedona on the winding road through Oak Creek Canyon, admiring as he always did the great beauty of the place. Forty years he had been making this drive, and he still loved it. He thought about how he’d brought his children here, when they were young, to play in the creek. One day he explained that the stone the canyon cut through had been laid down mostly in the Permian period, and they’d spent the rest of the day crawling on all fours through the horsetails, pretending to be dimetrodons, the top predators of the early Permian.
He was a rock hound and a paleontologist at heart, but that didn’t always pay so well, so he’d put his degree to work in the oilfields down around Sedona.
He reached the field and pulled his truck around by the office, a prefab metal building. He climbed out and stood for a moment, watched the pumpjacks bobbing up and down, like giant metal versions of the drinking bird toy he’d had as a kid. The pumpjacks, of course, were drinking oil – or as his youngest, Molly, liked to put it, “sucking the earth’s blood.”
The operation was mostly automated, but there were workers around, minding things. About half a mile away he saw the government guys were unusually busy. They had commandeered some land a few years back, claiming some sort of bio-hazard. It didn’t matter; they could pull the oil right out from under them, and they kept to themselves.
Sawyer stuck his head out of the shed.
“Hey, Rick.”
He nodded. “I was headed on west to have a look at the new site,” he said. “I thought I would check in here first.”
“Did you get my text?”
“I was in the canyon,” he said. He pulled his phone out.
“There it is.”
“I just sent it,” Sawyer said. “It’s your seismograph. It’s going loony.”
“Huh,” Rick said.
The seismograph was something he’d built, mostly for fun, nearly thirty years ago. His son Evan had helped him update it a few years back, so it recorded digitally, instead of on paper.
Sawyer was right; the usually flat line was looking excited, as if recording a distant earthquake, and a pretty big one.
Or else a little one, right under the ground where they were standing. As he watched, the waves continued to spike.
Now he felt it in his feet. The shed was starting to rattle.
“You think it’s one of the rigs?” Sawyer asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”
He stepped outside, looking at the field with a more critical gaze.
“I don’t—”
The ground exploded, and something long and black stabbed out of it, arched over, and slammed back into the ground about twenty yards from the shack. Rick stepped back so fast he banged into the shed.
“Holy mother—” Sawyer swore.
They were sticking up everywhere, jamming into the ground. Jointed, covered in bristle-like hairs. The earth jumped and just lifted up. Almost quietly, the pumpjacks slid into the hole it left.
It.
He was barely aware that he and Sawyer were only a few feet from the pit it had come up out of. His whole nervous system felt like it was shutting down, the thinking part of his mind overwhelmed by a fear hundreds of millions of years old, encoded in the primitive brains of his chordate ancestors when they were prey to things like this. Its spider legs held up a bulbous body, a face of squirming tentacles under two merciless eyes, buried in something like a cuttlefish.
David. Anna. Molly, he thought, picturing their faces.
“The goddamndest thing,” Sawyer said.
It was the last thing Rick ever heard.
Near Munich, Germany
Monarch
Outpost 67
Titanus Methuselah
The cork came out of the bottle with a loud pop, sailing across the meadow.
“That’s littering,” Lara said, smoothing out the blanket and placing their little picnic of cheese, bread, and strawberries on it.
“It’s cork,” Jannik said. “Biodegradable.”
“Um-humm,” she said, as he poured the champagne into two plastic cups. “Paper is also biodegradable, but if you throw it on the ground, it’s littering.”
He handed her a cup.
“Prost,” he said. They both took a sip.
“Listen,” Jannik said. “I grew up right around here, you know. You see that mountain there?”
“You’re trying to change the subject from littering,” she said. But she glanced behind her and saw the mountain he meant, rising over the trees.
“My grandfather told me it wasn’t always there. There was a village instead. And then one day a guy who was traveling in some other country came home. The village was gone, and that mountain was there.”
“I see,” Lara said. “And when did this happen?”
“Very long ago,” he said. “The Middle Ages, maybe.”
“Your grandfather must have been pretty old.”
“My family has been here for centuries,” he said. “But let me tell you the other thing about this mountain. They say if you bring a pretty girl here, and ask her to kiss you, she can’t say no.”
“Oh, I see,” Lara said. “Well, it’s a good thing you haven’t asked me. I would hate to prove your legend wrong.”
He grinned and leaned toward her.
“But I will prove it wrong,” she said.
He stopped and reddened a bit. Jannik was used to getting his way with girls, she knew. With his long blond hair and blue eyes, he was almost pretty, and he could be interesting if he wanted to, so maybe someday she wouldn’t mind that kiss. Maybe even later today.
But not now.
“Are all university girls so hard to get?” he asked.
“You tell me,” she said. “You’ve gotten plenty of them, from what I’ve heard.”
“What’s so wrong with that?” he asked. “I like educated women.”
“I like men who don’t litter.”
“Fine,” he sighed. He stood up and wandered off in the direction the cork had flown.
She had a strawberry and looked off into the distance.
“A-ha!” Jannik said. He held up the cork.
And then his gaze went past her. His eyes widened.
“The mountain…” he said.
“Oh, now I’m going to hear more about this magic mountain, am I?” she said. “Come on, you’ve tried that on me already. Be original.”
“No,” he said. “The mountain, it—”
His scream was surprisingly high-pitched. It was so surprising it set her skin on edge.
He turned and ran
“Really, he’s taking this too far,” she said.
But then she felt the earth shift below her.
She turned around and saw the mountain was standing up on four immense legs.
It had a face and horns like a bull from some ancient hell. And as she watched, it put one ponderous limb forward, and then another. The forest growing on its rocky back shivered and shook with each step.
She didn’t scream; she kept her breath quiet. It was half a kilometer away, at least. It would never notice her unless she drew its attention.
They had walked here after taking the train from Munich to the little town over the hill. She thought that was where it was going.
When its head was out of sight she picked up the champagne bottle and began drinking.
Indian Ocean
Classified Monarch Outpost
Undesignated Titan
In his office beneath the Indian Ocean, Dr. Kingsley Ikande lay on his cot and watched the surface of the water some ten meters above him. He had tried to take a nap – he hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours – but sleep eluded him. He was too troubled. He’d been meant to fly to Lagos, to see his wife and little girl for a week.
And now all of this.
He knew Emma Russell; his dissertation had been based on some of her early work. He’d had the great pleasure to meet her, at a conference. There, she had recruited him for Monarch.
It was so hard to believe she had gone mad. Two Titans unleashed on the world, and the suspicion was that she would try to release more.
Their floating containment was probably one of the safest; very far from land. Anything flying or moving under the water would be noticed from very far away.
But that didn’t stop him worrying, of course.
Let the nap go. He was going back up.
But instead he went to see Kraken.
That wasn’t its official name. It still hadn’t been assigned one in the Monarch classification. That was fitting, since this outpost was similarly unnamed. But someone – he seemed to remember it was Devlin – had called it Kraken, and the name had stuck.
They had discovered the sleeping Titan on a seamount in relatively shallow water, curled around the remains of a nuclear sub that had been missing for decades. They had built the containment around him, sub and all. He was in deep hibernation and didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.
The habitable part of the base – the living quarters, the control room, the laboratories – was all either on the surface or near it. But to observe the Titan directly – or take some sort of sample – several elevators ran through the ocean down to various points adjacent to the beast.
They had learned quite a bit about Kraken. X-rays, sonic scans, DNA analysis, had built a picture of what he must be like. His central brain cavity was enormous, far larger than it needed to be to control his body, suggesting a certain amount of intelligence, not unlike his distant cousins, the octopuses – although unlike octopuses and squids, his head was protected by a dense, curving cone of shell. He had dozens of smaller brains associated with his limbs. Like octopoids, he could also change the color and pattern of his skin and shell; when they found him, he had been virtually invisible. They pinpointed his location by radiation signature and his bio-sonic emission.
He had multiple hearts, and there was good evidence that he could regenerate limbs and, in fact, virtually any part of his body.
The elevator came to a stop; Ikande stepped out.
One of the techs, Jane Harris, looked up from her instruments as he came in. Otherwise, the lab was empty.
The large window faced one of Kraken’s eyes. It was closed and had been closed since they found him. Jin, the paleobiologist, thought he was in the middle of a sleep cycle that might last another decade, unless he was threatened.
They had been quite careful not to make him feel threatened.
“Anything new?” he asked.
Harris shook her head. “No, nothing. Same as always. All functions are there, but at very low levels. How about topside? Any more Titans cut loose?”
He shrugged. “Nothing new there, either. I almost feel slighted. Why wouldn’t our big fellow be invited to the ball?”
“Don’t even say it,” she replied. She frowned.
“What?”
She fiddled with her equipment.
“Nothing, I guess. There was just a little spike, but it went right back down. No, wait…”
The com light suddenly blinked on. He answered it.
“Ikande here.”
“Dr. Ikande, it’s Jen. We just got a flood of reports. Titans have been released in at least four other locations, simultaneously.”
“Released? By terrorists?”
“It’s unclear, Doctor. Things are kind of chaotic at those sites.”
“Of course they are,” he said. He looked back at Jane, who was now frowning in earnest. “What is it?” He demanded. “Is he waking up?
If he was, the containment field should still hold him, but there was no way to be certain of that. If he woke like the other Titans,
it would be best to use the kill switch. Emma had clearly thought of something the rest of them hadn’t.
“No,” Jane said. “The opposite. His hearts are shutting down, one by one.” She looked over at him. “He’s dying.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. It’s like he’s having an allergic reaction or something. Everything’s dropping off, including radiation signature.”
He stared at Kraken’s lidded eye, trying to decide how he felt. This creature had been put in his charge, and he had failed it. He knew how many of the Monarch scientists – like Serizawa – felt about the creatures.
On the other hand, if it died naturally, he wouldn’t have to pull the kill switch.
“Did you get all of that, Jen?” he asked.
“I did,” she replied. “I… don’t understand.”
“Call it in,” he said. “Tell Castle Bravo we’ll be sending them our data. Maybe whatever happened to—”
His words stopped in his throat. Kraken’s eye was open, staring at him.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Turn on the containment field.”
“Done,” Jane said. “Doctor, I’m still getting nothing. This says he’s dead.”
“His eye is open!”
“Maybe some postmortem reaction—” but then she broke off, too. One of the tentacles was suddenly right there, pushing against the containment field – no, pushing through it, effortlessly.
“What is happening?” Ikande yelled.
“The field works on living Titans,” Jane said, getting up from her workstation, knocking a coffee cup off. It shattered on the floor. “Kraken still doesn’t read as alive.”
“I…”
His skin prickled, and suddenly he felt very cold as understanding dawned.
Oh, shit.
Protective coloration was only the surface of what this thing could do. It could mimic other states. It could make sonar think it wasn’t hearing anything, disguise its radiation signature.
Play dead.
The tentacle was reaching for them, but it wasn’t here yet. He bolted toward the kill switch.
But the tube suddenly collapsed and water rushed in with such force that it almost knocked him out. He saw the other tentacle that had reached around from the back, quietly wrapped around the elevator tube. He got his bearings and tried to swim toward the surface, but Kraken was way ahead of him, grappling the floating base and dragging it down by the middle. Ikande kicked desperately, until something took hold of his leg and yanked him back down.