McCoy didn't slow as he approached the entrance to the bunker. He dove, barreling passed the two soldiers as he headed for the open door, the Gunny hot on his tail. Kirby and Grimes stopped firing as they moved to allow him inside. McCoy clambered to his feet and began to fire into the mass of Kaiju to cover the remaining troop’s entrance into the bunker.
The shock of seeing no one else alive out there almost caused him to stop shooting. He blinked for a moment, stunned, before he looked over at Kirby.
“Get that door closed!” McCoy roared. Kirby stared at him in disbelief.
“But sir, the Dogkillers...” Kirby started to say. The Gunny pushed past him and grabbed the door’s controls.
“Nothing we can do for them, son,” the Gunny said, not unkindly, as he activated the door’s controls. “They can’t fit in here, and if we leave the door open, our mission has failed. And boys? This mission cannot fail.”
As the five-ton, titanium-reinforced door began to slide close, McCoy watched one of the last Dogkiller suits fall. A larger-than-normal Dog Kaiju jumped through the air at it, taking its armored head clean from the armor's shoulders with a single swipe of its clawed and scaly hand. Kaiju eyes, filled with hate and rage, met McCoy’s human ones for a brief instant. The lieutenant felt a cold shiver strike deep into his soul as the door clanged shut.
*****
“Please understand, ma’am, that the secondary team hasn’t swept through everything yet,” Sergeant Tim Fishlock told Kitty as she stepped out of the airlock onto Tango Zeta 3. “We've done a rough and tumble recon of this station, but... well, ma’am, there's some weird stuff over here. Stuff I’ve never seen before to be honest with you.”
Fletcher stood beside Kitty, his engineering kit in hand. He had been ready to enter the station, but now paused at the sergeant’s words. He shot a concerned look at Kitty, who was looking past the sergeant’s bulky frame and into the station. She blinked and looked back up at the large soldier.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘weird stuff’?”
“According to Captain Whitmire’s orders, you’re the ranking individual here, ma'am. Maybe it would be best if you took a look for yourself,” Fishlock said, obviously relieved to pass the responsibility over to someone else. “Yeop, Greenwood, get over here!”
Two of Fishlock's men rushed over at the sound of his booming voice.
“Sergeant, I really don’t think...” Kitty’s voice trailed off as Fishlock turned a steely eye on her.
“Escort the lady and her friend to that mess in the aft section,” Fishlock ordered. “You know the one I’m talking about.”
“Sergeant? You said we didn’t–” Yeop began to protest but quickly cut himself off. He nodded briskly. “Roger that. Ma’am, sir, if you’ll follow us?”
“Um, actually,” Fletcher looked sheepishly at the sergeant. “I really need to get to engineering. I need to make sure the power and life support are going to stay on while we're here.”
“Fine,” Fishlock answered in a stressed-out tone. “You're with me then.”
“This way, ma'am,” Yeop said, leading Kitty deeper into the station as Fishlock and Fletcher turned and walked down another passageway into another part of Tango Zeta 3. Greenwood followed Kitty and Yeop closely, his rifle, like Yeop's held at the ready. While neither soldier had his finger on the trigger, they were close enough to doing so to make the civilian mildly perturbed.
“You guys seem a bit nervous,” Kitty said and made a small motion at their rifles. “Is there something going on that I need to know about?”
“Don't you worry about a thing, ma’am,” Greenwood told her. “We got you covered.”
Along the path to wherever it was Yeop and Greenwood were taking her, Kitty noticed strange markings and damage to the walls of the station's corridors. What appeared to be a fine layer of rust coated the walls in random spots, creating a patchwork look all throughout. Here and there, they would pass a mangled corpse lying on the floor and blocking their route, which Yeop would nudge aside with his boot as gently as he could manage. The bodies were in a strange state of decomposition; as if something onboard the station had accelerated their decay rate, while allowing the membrane to remain mostly intact across the body. That alone was very strange. Decomposition was a tricky thing to gauge in an artificial environment like the Tango Zeta 3 station, but it didn't take a doctor to see that something was very wrong with the corpses. Their skin was dried and withered, as one would expect from a body that was not subjected to any form of humidity. However, even her untrained eye could see that there was a distinct and disturbing rot beneath it all.
“What in the world happened here?” Kitty asked, though she had a nagging sensation that she didn’t really want to know.
“Not a clue, ma'am,” Yeop admitted. “Our corpsman said it wasn’t like anything he had ever seen. Honestly, we were hoping that Captain Whitmire would give us a few doctors, biologists, or something. He didn't send over any med techs, just you and a whole bunch of engineering types. Guess he didn’t figure on anything over here being out of the ordinary.”
“You said your corpsman hadn’t seen anything like it before?” Kitty looked around. “Where is he now?”
“Hold one, ma’am,” Yeop said and clicked his comm. “PO Esper, report to Delta Checkpoint.”
A minute later, a short, squat man of indeterminate age ambled into the corridor. He gave Kitty a curt nod before he looked over at Yeop. “What’s up, Corporal?”
“Tell Ms. Kitty here exactly what you told me,” Yeop said. The corpsman blinked, confused.
“I don’t know what to say, Corporal,” Esper said. “I said it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before–”
“Before that,” Yeop cut him off. The shorter man’s face paled.
“That was just me running my mouth, Corporal,” Esper protested. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Tell her anyway,” Yeop ordered. Esper sighed.
“I said that it looked like those experiments I read about during the Second World War,” the corpsman explained at last. “You know, the ones that the Nazis ran on the Jews, and what the Japanese did to the Chinese? Just... some really messed up crap, ma’am. Inhumane. But it reminded me of some mad scientist’s experiments, but on a level that’s gonna give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”
Kitty was beginning to wish that she hadn’t volunteered to come over to the station. “Looks like he’s right about that,” Kitty agreed. She knelt over a nearby corpse and whipped out her pocket sensor. She ran it over the head and neck portion of the corpse, but the results were inconclusive. She frowned and moved the sensor down. The result was the same.
Her knowledge of biology was very limited, though she knew enough to recognize that whatever had happened to the corpse on the ground was not a natural occurrence. She pushed the sensor closer to the body and tried to get a better reading. The sensors flickered for a moment before data began to stream across the small screen.
Kitty’s eyes tracked the information for a moment before she began to nod. The sensor would need a few minutes to process her findings, but it wasn’t immediately dangerous, whatever it was. She put the sensor away and looked up at the three soldiers standing nearby.
“This is fascinating,” Kitty said. “Thanks for bringing this to my attention.”
“This wasn’t what we wanted to show you, ma’am,” Yeop shook his head. “This is... a smaller part of what we found.”
“There’s more?” Kitty asked, eyes wide.
“It gets much, much worse, ma’am,” Esper said. “You have a strong stomach?”
“I can hold my own,” Kitty proclaimed.
“Good enough for me,” Yeop said and motioned towards a door at the end of the corridor. “Greenwood, Esper, escort the lady down the hall.”
“You’re not coming?” Kitty asked, surprised.
“Rank hath its privileges, ma’am,” Yeop said. “I don’t want to see that mess anymore than I need
to.”
Kitty glared at him, not sure what to make of his warning or reticence. She followed the soldiers down to the aforementioned door and pulled her sensor unit out again. Kitty stretched it out in front of her. The bio-readings on the other side of the smashed door were off the chart with activity, but nothing showed as a real life form, at least not in the sense of a human or Kaiju. The data was there, but much like the corpse she had inspected moments before, the results of the data were inconclusive. Gathering her courage, Kitty walked to the doorway and peered into the room.
“God have mercy on us all,” she breathed as her eyes took in the mass of living, writhing tissue that covered the room's floor and dangled from its ceiling. The whole place was alive with a slime-slicked flesh that moved and oozed about like flowing blood. It moved like one organism, pulsing and throbbing in a peculiar beat. It was flesh, and yet it was not. The sensors began to go crazy as it began to pick up dangerous biologically hazardous readings in the room. She gagged as the smell hit her nose. Kitty took a step back away from the door. “Burn it. Burn it all. Now!”
Half an hour later, the room had been cleared. Fishlock's men had sealed it and torched the mess inside with improvised flamethrowers taken from the Tango Zeta 3 station's own arsenal. Yeop, it seemed, was an amateur pyromaniac who was able to whip up three flamethrowers from an old welding kit, leftover fuels and a few pressure valves. Kitty ordered all the bodies littering the station disposed of as well. They were gathered up by soldiers in bio-gear and jettisoned into space. Kitty had one of the soldiers collect a small sample of the stuff from inside the room before it was burnt. She kept it, along with her own sensor readings, to take back to the Argo for someone more qualified to take a look at. Only then did she return to her original mission aboard Tango Zeta 3.
Yeop and Greenwood stayed with her as she headed for the station's bridge and began the long process of hacking into and downloading the sensor and comm logs. After another hour of cursing and futility, she managed to crack it. She felt like ripping her hair out once she was in, though. Just as the Captain had feared, the station's encryptions were more advanced and based off a completely different algorithm than the ones being used aboard the Argo. Kitty still managed to gain some access to them, though, and got what little of the data she could pull secured for transport back. She could've started plowing through it all right there if she had wanted, but Kitty wasn't staying on the station any longer than she had to. For all she knew, she and the entire group had been exposed to whatever had killed the station’s crew and created the fleshy mass on the station. They would all need to go through a long decontamination shower and be held in isolation before being allowed return to the Argo proper.
It was going to be a very dull three days, she knew.
*****
Nathan sat alone in his briefing room. The news seemed to be getting worse with every passing hour the Argo maintained orbit around Earth. Though the Argo was still in communication with the two Phoenix combat shuttles on Earth, she had lost contact with the remnants of the force still on the ground. The shuttle pilots only knew that the unit had came under heavy Kaiju attack, which they had provided air cover for, while the soldiers attempted to regroup. Just as quickly as the Kaiju attack had begun, the comms of the men on the ground went silent, as though something had simply cut off their signals at the source. The captain’s gut told him not to give up on the unit just yet. McCoy was in charge down there, and the man had a knack for pulling off miracles and keeping people alive.
When the shuttles he had dispatched to Tango Zeta 3 station returned, he had hoped for a brief instance that they'd bring some insight with them into what happened on Earth while the Argo was gone. Answers were in short supply, though. To make matters worse, it was possible that the entire team that he had sent over to the station had been exposed to some sort of biological outbreak. He had been forced to send them all into isolation, and now Kitty and the others sat in individual decontamination chambers awaiting their fate. Assuming they hadn't brought back something lethal with them that would tear through the Argo's inhabitants like wildfire, it would still be days, at a minimum, until he could get Kitty to parse over the data on the bridge where he could watch over her shoulder. Still, it wasn’t a complete loss. He had ordered that she be allowed to work on sorting through it all, while she was in isolation, but even so, it wasn’t quite as good as having a full system, such as her normal duty station on the bridge.
In truth, the only good news he had received was the confirmation that the station contained the fuel that the Argo sorely needed for eventual departure from Earth’s orbit and their subsequent search for a new home. That, too, would take hours to transfer all the fuel over to the Argo, but at least it was good to know the fuel was there for the taking. If he had to risk, or even sacrifice, a few dozen crewmembers to get it onboard, then he would not hesitate to do so. A few dozen lost in order to save the other thousands of souls on the Argo that remained in cryo-sleep was more than a fair trade. Humanity had to survive somehow.
Nathan got up from behind his desk and paced back and forth across the open portion of the room. He hated waiting with a resolute passion, but at the moment, it seemed that was all there was to do. Nathan changed his path as a thought struck him. He headed for the large observation window behind his desk. Not a true window but a computer monitor from which he could see a perfectly rendered Earth as the cameras saw it, it was still close enough or him to often forget that it was just a projection. He stood in front of it and stared out at the planet below. Gone were the luscious greens and whites colors on the planet’s surface from the days before the Kaiju War. Twisted shades of grays and unnaturally deep blues replaced them, making the world appear as dead as the race that had once dominated the top of its food chain.
His intercom buzzed suddenly, interrupting his musings. He grumbled and acknowledged receipt.
“Sir!” Tiffanie called over the comm system. “You're needed on the bridge!”
“On my way,” Nathan answered, while taking one final, lingering look at the changed and decimated planet below that the human race had once called home. His home. His birthplace and, for the billions of souls left behind, a mass grave. He wondered just how history would record the event.
Assuming that there would be anyone around to write it, at least.
He stepped onto the bridge. Tiffanie stood at the sensor station next to Yamilé, the young woman who had taken over for Kitty during her forced absence. From the looks on their faces, he could easily guess that whatever it was they needed him for, it wasn't going to be good news.
“What is it?” Nathan snapped as he walked over to where the duo was stationed. He instantly regretted his tone.
“Captain, the sensors are picking a massive geothermic and tectonic disruption in the southeast area of where Pacifica once stood,” Yamilé said hastily, as if she were unsure of herself and the readings. “Coming from... eighteen kilometers from beneath the surface.”
“And that means?” he asked. “An earthquake?”
“Erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, wide-spread seabed disruptions,” Tiffanie explained. “It's like the entire ocean bed in that area is tearing itself apart.”
“That’s where the Mariana Trench was, isn’t it?” Yamilé wondered aloud.
“I don't see why this concerns us,” Nathan said. “Earth has always been seismically active, even after the events precluding to the Kaiju War. Especially in that area. The Ring of Fire, remember? Besides, we're leaving as soon as things are resolved with the team on Lemura. Focus on your job.”
“It's like nothing the sensors have ever seen before, sir,” Yamilé told him. Tiffanie nodded as Yamilé continued explaining. “The affected area is hundreds of miles wide or larger. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but it's as if the entire Pacific Plate is tearing itself apart down there.”
Nathan sighed and rubbed his temples. “Is the disturbance close enough to affect our team down in L
emura?”
“No sir,” Yamilé answered. “Not unless it gets bigger and kicks off the biggest tsunami mankind has ever seen.”
“Then take all the readings you want for scientific proposes, I suppose, but don't bother me with it again unless it becomes a more direct concern to our team on Lemura. Understood?”
“Yes, Captain,” Yamilé answered glumly, clearly disappointed with his reaction to her discovery.
*****
“What the Hell is this place?” McCoy asked as he and Grimes walked slowly through the twisting system of corridors inside the bunker. He ran a hand along the concrete walls and whistled.
“Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, sir” Grimes said. “I'm just glad its door appears to be holding. If not for that door, sir, we’d all be dead.”
Kaiju Apocalypse II Page 4