Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters

by James Swallow

  Many people were saying this was the beginning of the end of the world. The sudden, inexplicable arrival of the creatures, the things the media were calling Kaiju after some Japanese word that meant “strange monster”. All around the planet, churches were packed, suicide rates were spiking, and everyone who had ever cried out about the end of days was claiming they had been right all along.

  It started slowly. A rash of peculiar sightings in remote regions. A town going silent in Africa. An unexplained earthquake in the Arctic. A liner lost at sea, the wreck found ripped apart. Then the first of the attacks came, a thing like a gargantuan salamander demolishing Sydney with firestorms and fury. Some said they were aliens that had fallen from space, others that they were products of science gone insane or the reborn manifestation of old myths.

  All that mattered was that they were everywhere now, dozens of them crashing across the Earth, fighting with humanity, fighting each other. And in their wake, there was nothing but devastation and death.

  Hannah tried to figure out what it all meant, but she came up empty. She wasn’t one for believing in brimstone and days of judgment – the pilot only cared about what she could see and feel, what she knew to be true. At this moment, that was as simple as family.

  India 99 passed over Battersea Park, and turned to come in low over the tide-swollen Thames, the dirty gray-green water empty of all river traffic. Hannah heard Patel mutter something under his breath that sounded like a prayer.

  “Did you see that?” he said. “In the park? All the trees were uprooted. There were marks on the ground, like footprints.” He frowned. “Big ones.”

  ~

  The shriek hit them before anyone could reply, powerful enough that it cut through the heavy drone of the Eurocopter’s rotor blades.

  It was the same noise Hannah had heard in the dark of the night, but louder, closer, angrier. Some animal-hindbrain part of her reacted with a jolt, the tiny fragment of primitive gray matter still buried in the human mind after millions of years of evolution, knowing instinctively the cry was the call of a predator. Her blood chilled. Nothing on Earth could make a sound like that, nothing that had come to be through natural means.

  “There!” called Bramwell, pointing out of the canopy toward the northwest, beyond the greensward of St. James’s Park.

  Hannah looked and saw a rolling front of heavy cloud a few miles distant, a mass of smoke from fires and the churn of dust from tons of crushed masonry. Huge shadows shifted inside the haze, indistinct forms crashing back and forth. They moved faster than any things of such size had a right to. For a split-second, a roil of cloud parted and she caught sight of a thick tail with twin barbs, curling and snapping at the air. It was blood red and shiny in the weak sunlight, scaled like the skin of a snake.

  The massive whipping form coiled and flicked back as something else in the haze came in to attack it. Hannah glimpsed vast, burning spikes lit by ethereal orange light, and then the cry came again, followed by the hollow boom of breaking concrete.

  “Two of them?” she wondered aloud. “Looks like they’re having a punch-up…”

  “Good,” snapped Dillon. “That means they’re occupied. As long was we don’t attract their attention, we may actually be able to get out of this alive.”

  Hannah nodded, and pushed India 99 forward, skimming the river as they passed the Houses of Parliament and the shattered stub of Big Ben. The upper third of the historic clock tower had been torn off and now it lay half-submerged in the shallows on the far embankment. Crossing Westminster Bridge, Hannah took the helicopter up as the river curved eastward ahead of them, and she sighted north toward the Bloomsbury district where the British Museum lay. Their destination was dangerously close to the edge of the dust clouds, and she weighed her choices. A direct path would be fastest, but if the Kaiju caught sight of them…

  “Bloody hell,” breathed Bramwell, scanning the route of the river through a pair of binoculars. “That big glass tower, the Shard…it’s gone. Everything up by London Bridge looks like there’s a bite taken out of it.”

  Hannah hesitated, part of her wanting to see the destruction with her own eyes. But that faded under a surge of fury that came up from her heart.

  London was her home. Born and bred in its streets, she loved the old city in a way that it was hard for her to articulate – as if in some manner the bricks and stone, the river and the streets, they were her own personal property. It was part of the reason she had come to work for the Met, to do something for the place that had made her who she was. To pay it back.

  Now these things were here, heedlessly laying waste to her city. Destroying everything she cared about. Hannah felt an odd, stabbing pain in her belly and tensed, but the feeling faded even as it happened.

  Then she saw the motion of the river below, the unnatural writhing of the water as something large and quick moved beneath the surface. “Down there!” she shouted, as she stamped on the rudder pedals, turning the helicopter into a pivoting tail-slide.

  In a blast of white froth, the murky waters of the Thames exploded and a sinuous, lizard-like form burst out of the river, a wide arrow-head mouth snapping open and shut as it tried to grab India 99 in its fanged maw. Hannah retreated back and away as the beast leapt up, shaking off water, to land splay-legged across the rail lines of the Hungerford Bridge.

  “What the-?” Bramwell never finished his sentence as the creature released a chittering bark and blinked its yellow, slitted eyes at them, each as wide as a man was tall. There was savagery there, savagery and cunning.

  Hannah’s mind flashed back to a childhood outing to the zoo, to the gecko enclosure in the reptile house. This thing seemed to share some physical similarity to the small lizards she had seen sunning themselves on rocks, but only in the most limited sense. It was bright azure blue, its scales shimmering even in the dull morning light, bony spines and a serrated tail lending it a ferocious aspect. It cocked its head, blinking again, and Hannah remembered something else from that day; she remembered seeing a gecko pull a fat fly straight out of the air and chew it down whole, swallowing the buzzing insect – wings, body and all.

  “Look out!” called Dillon as the lizard-creature coiled and leapt at them. Impossibly, it seemed to blur through the air, moving almost instantaneously.

  Hannah slammed the stick hard over and sent India 99 into a dive that put them dangerously close to the water. The Kaiju snatched at them and missed, scrambling over the embankment, quickly pulling itself up over the high Ferris wheel frame of the London Eye.

  “You said there were only two of them!” said Patel.

  “Evidently not!” Hannah shot back.

  The blue-skinned creature crushed the passenger pods of the landmark as it climbed, and the wheel’s steel spars began to twist and distort under its weight. A clawed hand swatted at the helicopter and Hannah felt the backwash as it cut the air in front of them.

  “Did you see it move?” Patel continued. “How did it do that?”

  “We’ve got to get away from this thing!” said Dillon.

  “It’s too late, it saw us,” called Bramwell. “We go on, it’s gonna follow us…”

  “Then let’s give it something to chew on.” Hannah deliberately turned the helicopter back toward the Kaiju, pointing India 99’s nose directly at the creature’s snout. She nodded toward a control panel in front of Bramwell. “Give him a tan!”

  “Okay…” Bramwell grabbed at the small joystick that controlled a barrel-shaped pod set on a gimbal mount under the helicopter’s fuselage.

  Along with the thermal camera, the police helicopter’s other main weapon in the war on crime was something they called ‘the nitesun’, a searchlight array capable of putting out a blazing thirty million-candlepower beam. In the daytime, its effectiveness was lessened, but it was the only defense they had – and at such close range to the creature and with those big eyes…

  “Smile, you ugly sod!” spat Dillon as Bramwell aimed the nitesun at the Kaij
u’s head and stabbed the switch.

  A shock of brilliant sodium-white light washed out the creature’s scaly face and it recoiled away with a deafening squeal. In a strangely human motion, it brought up its clawed hands to shield its face and staggered backward, colliding with the bent spars of the London Eye.

  “It’s blinded!” shouted Bramwell. “Go!”

  Hannah hunched forward against the straps of her pilot’s chair, almost as if the act would make the aircraft move faster. She took India 99 up and away, accelerating across Savoy Street, the Strand, and out over Covent Garden. Behind her, Patel was struggling to look back along the line of the fuselage.

  “I don’t see it,” he said. “I think we got clear.”

  The pilot said nothing, unwilling to test their luck. Up high now, skating along the bottom of the low cloud, the wounded city presented more of itself to her. North of the river, the destruction was far worse than she had expected.

  A path of wreckage and obliteration crossed the landscape from east to west, vanishing into mist somewhere over Shoreditch, carving in a curved line kilometers long all the way to Euston and the fire clouds. Buildings lay in fragments, pounded to rubble, and in places the earth itself had been shredded and torn, opening ancient sub-basements and underground stations to the air. The road of ruin was like a vast black arrow pointing at Regent’s Park, piercing the green heart of London. All this had taken place in a day, a monstrous assault on a city that had weathered the bombardments of two world wars, terrorist strikes, and civil unrest, and never buckled. A dark, foreboding mood collected in Hannah’s chest as the full reality of her reckless endeavor became clear to her.

  She held the controls tightly, balancing on the edge of a new choice. If we turn back now…

  Hannah felt Sergeant Dillon’s hand resting on her shoulder. “Brooky,” he said quietly over the helmet intercom. “You’re the aircraft captain. Where to now?”

  Below them, a green oval had appeared in among the blocks of townhouses. “Bedford Square,” she said, recovering her strength. “Stand by, I’m taking us down.”

  ~

  An eerie quiet fell as India 99’s rotors slowed to a halt. Even in the hours before dawn, amid the city’s streets there was always the faint rush of distant traffic, the sounds of life. Now there were only the irregular tremors in the depths of the ground, echoes of leviathan footfalls that felt too close for comfort.

  Hannah scrambled from the helicopter, snatching up an emergency medical kit to sling over her shoulder. Dillon climbed out after her, grabbing a police-issue Airwave radio handset.

  Patel and Bramwell hesitated in the open hatchway. Both of them were reluctant to step out, as if to do so might alert the creatures stalking the city as to their presence. Patel’s hand dropped to the Taser in his belt and Dillon gave a gallows-humor sneer. “If you see one of ‘em, you’re gonna use that, are you?”

  Chastened, the other man nodded glumly. “I suppose not. They probably wouldn’t notice anything short of a rocket launcher.”

  “So stay unnoticed,” Hannah told them. “You only swat the bugs you see, right?”

  “We’ll stay with the chopper,” insisted Bramwell. “Get your uncle and then tab it back here, fast as you bloody can.”

  Out to the east, there was a sudden skirling bellow that rattled windows all around the square, and orange fire reflected off the clouds. In the distance, part of a spiny shape appeared over the rooftops and then vanished again, the mass of it slamming into the side of the cylindrical BT Tower; one of London’s oldest skyscrapers, they watched it tilt slowly away like a felled tree.

  The ground shivered with another earthquake rumble and Hannah broke into a run, trying to keep her balance as the road quivered under her feet.

  ~

  Always one for the expedient choices, Sergeant Dillon used his baton to crack a window on the nearside of the museum, and together they scrambled into the dusty, poorly-lit interior of the building. Power was off in this part of the city, although emergency lights burned here and there, casting an alien glow over glass cases full of old relics.

  Dillon panned his flashlight around, the beam coming to rest on the headless sculpture of a centaur. “What’s all this, then?”

  “Ancient Greek stuff,” Hannah told him, without having to look. Her uncle had taken her to the British Museum so many times as a child, she practically knew the layout of the place by heart. She pointed. “Roman over there. Middle Eastern there, Egyptian….”

  “Your uncle knows about it, does he?” Dillon followed her, peering into the cases they passed, scowling at thousand year-old death masks and bits of pottery.

  “He knows about a lot of stuff,” she told him. Hannah left it at that.

  She didn’t tell him about the more esoteric turn the old man’s research had taken in the last few years. Professor Frederick Brook had once been a noted expert on the mythology of dead civilizations, but she had come back from Army service to find he was drifting into areas of scientific study that at best were on the fringe, and at worst considered the domain of crackpots. He had taken to associating with so-called experts who were more part of the ‘flying saucer’ crowd than real scientists.

  Hannah worried about him, about his reputation. And now, after the arrival of the Kaiju creatures, there was a part of her that worried he might have actually been on to something.

  She called his name as they moved through the galleries, her voice echoing off the walls. Hannah heard movement up ahead and turned a corner; and there he was, scribbling something into a notebook under the glow of a portable lamp.

  “My girl,” he said, as he always did when seeing her. He gave her arm an affectionate squeeze and he grinned behind his bushy, ill-trimmed beard. Affable and slightly unkempt, the professor looked as if Hannah and Dillon had come across him at Sunday tea-time, not in the heart of a city under siege by monsters.

  Hannah was thankful for the long shadows that allowed her to swallow her emotions before Dillon could see them. But the elder Brook did, and his face changed, creasing with concern.

  “Hannah, what are you doing here? It isn’t safe!”

  “Too right, Prof,” said Dillon, pushing past to look along the gallery for anything that could be a threat. “This your kit, is it?” He indicated a pile of books, a tablet screen and a chunky electronic device that resembled a 1980’s cell phone. “We’ll take it and go.”

  When Dillon made to gather up the gear, the professor stepped in and prevented him. “No, don’t touch that. My equipment is very delicate-” He trailed off as the device began to emit a low, regular series of chirps like a radiation counter.

  “I came to find you,” Hannah said, and for a second she heard the voice of a lost little girl in her own words. “This is Rob Dillon, he’s a friend.”

  “We brought a helicopter,” said the sergeant, by way of introducing himself. “So, if you please…” Dillon made a follow-me gesture.

  “Hannah, you know I hate to fly,” said the professor, as if that would end the conversation.

  Dillon let out a grim chuckle. “You have seen what’s out there, haven’t you? Big and scaly and as ugly as sin.”

  “Not all of them are scaly,” the professor corrected, in a gently hectoring tone Hannah remembered well from her schooldays.

  “Everyone else has evacuated!” she blurted, her frustration with him rising. “Why did you stay behind? We have to go, now!”

  He looked at her sadly, his old eyes clear and firm. “This is important, Hannah. My work is vital.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Dillon ventured. “You can do it back at Rochester. Come on now, old fella.” The sergeant reached out to grab the professor’s arm, but Hannah’s uncle was spryer than he looked, and he slipped out of the policeman’s grip.

  “No!” he barked. “What I am researching may be the key to understanding those creatures out there! I can’t leave until I have all the data!”

  “What I understand is that the Roy
al Air Force is going to bomb this city flat,” Hannah replied. “Maybe even use a nuclear weapon, if that’s what it takes.” They had all heard the rumors around the airstrip, and having seen one of the creatures at close hand, Hannah no longer doubted the need for such extreme actions. She felt that odd prickling sensation in her belly again and she sagged back against one of the display cabinets. “We don’t have time for you to be stubborn, Uncle Fred.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I’m doing. Not at all.” The professor shot a worried look at the device, which seemed to be some kind of scanner unit displaying frequency patterns, and then he snatched up a dusty hardback from the pile. “Look here.”

  He opened it to a page that showed a Grecian urn lying on the deck of a boat, as if it had just been recovered from the seabed. Part of the surface had been cleaned off to reveal a design, a great, salamander-like animal towering over a Greek trireme in boiling seas. An inferno wreathed the creature and the wooden boat was rendered in flames.

  “They named this mythic beast Urogora,” explained the professor. “A legend…just a story, or so we thought.” He thrust the book into Hannah’s hands and grabbed the tablet screen, tapping it to bring up a video clip. A fragment of news camera footage from the Australian Kaiju attack played in a loop. There on the screen was something very similar to the image on the ancient urn, mouth open wide as it spat torrents of fire at Sydney Opera House.

  “You’re saying that’s the same thing?” Dillon’s eyebrows rose. “This U-row-whatever?”

  The professor nodded. “These beings, the Kaiju. Their attacks were predicted by ancient civilizations. This may not be the first time they have come to our world…” He gathered up a sheaf of papers and showed them to Hannah. “Do you see?”

  Shaking her head, trying to assimilate what her uncle was telling her, she leafed through the pages and saw more phantasmal beasts, some of them from crudely-rendered cave paintings, others in marble carvings or shapes in copper and gold. She halted when she found a photo of a bear-like form made from green jade. Across its arms were strange markings and from its back grew spines like spars of ice.