The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  At last it happens. The horn sounds and the gangplanks are raised and we are off! I sigh with relief; I had not realized how tense I had been. But fear had taken its hold on me, in all the long years of living with him; his presence in my life had made me fearful; the day he would get careless, or go too far, and leave me to be captured.

  No longer!

  England is a cesspit of corruption. It is too small, too confining. It looks not to the future, but to the past; it is rigid and unyielding. It is time for me to look elsewhere, to the New World, where a scientist may work in peace, where there is space to grow . . . and where he, too, could roam more freely, for it is a vast land and people may disappear there more easily; and never be seen again. Yes, he could be controlled, there. But for now he is dormant within me. He will not emerge on this voyage. Not unless I will it.

  A near-accident. Our huge bulk causes waves in the harbor. We nearly drown two smaller ships: The SS City of New York and the Oceanic. I watch them rise on the waves, thinking of the size and power of the Titanic, like the power that I, myself, hold within me. It is a power all human beings have; yet I alone have found the means of liberating it. Only in Japan, perhaps, is there science greater than mine—but that land is far and their experiments have taken them in a different direction to my own. No, I am confident in my heart, my potion is unique; and I, a true original.

  The passage out goes without a further hitch. The two smaller ships are not harmed, and I feel neither satisfaction nor disappointment. I stand on the deck and watch the harbor recede from view for a long time. I watch England grow smaller in the distance. I cannot wait for it to disappear.

  11 April 1912

  Cork.

  How I loathe the Irish!

  The docks swarm with these Irishmen and their equally squalid women. They come on board, several obviously drunk and singing riotously. I stand on the deck and smoke a cigar. A man of middle years and a somewhat stooped posture engages me in conversation. “You are a doctor?” he says, on noticing my black bag (I do not dare part with it. These Irishmen may steal a doctor’s bag as easily as they would slit a man’s throat!). “Yes, yes,” I say, “what is it to you?”

  Instead of taking offence he chuckles good-naturedly. “I myself am in the medical profession,” he says. I say, “Oh?” and roll the cigar in my mouth. “Yes,” he says, “I am a purveyor of the snake oil cure. Are you familiar with that panacea?”

  “Enhydris chinensis,” I say. “It is a medicine of the Chinese people, is it not?” I do not tell him I had studied it intensively; my research has increasingly taken me to study the obscure and arcane sciences of the East. “Yes,” he says, “it is a marvelous medicine, a cure-all.”

  I make a dismissive gesture and his moustache quivers at that. “Do you not agree, Sir?” he says. I tap my cigar and watch the ash blow in the wind. Will the ship never leave? I am unsafe as long as we are in these European waters. Have the bodies been found yet? Has Hyde been implicated? He is well known to the police. “Excuse me,” I say. “I meant no offence.”

  His good humor returns. He gives me his calling card and asks me to call on him once in New York, promising me a bulk discount on his stock. It is of the utmost benefit to any doctor, he assures me. I am glad to be rid of him. At long last the ship departs. There are thousands of us on board.

  12 April 1912

  At last, the open sea!

  The ocean is calm. The weather is mild. A sense of wild freedom grips me. The New World beckons! I have successfully avoided pursuit, capture. In New York I could start again, and the name of Jekyll will be forgotten. I pat my bag, thinking of the bottle it holds. Already I am craving it. In America I will make more of the potion. He wants to get out; I can feel him, pushing.

  13 April 1912

  A cold front. Strong winds and high waves. Nevertheless I brave the deck. I find being confined below excruciating, the press of people is repulsive to me. I take in the sea air but my attempts to light a cigar prove futile.

  Last night I tossed and turned, the need burning inside me. I could feel Edward leering inside me, pushing to be let out. I find myself regarding women with Hyde’s eyes, with his hunger. I see men and think of the blood coursing through them, and of the glint of knives. More than two decades ago when my experiments had just begun, he and I were sloppy. Jack, they had called him. I had less control of the formula then. The cold air revives me. Anticipation of the New World soothes me. I feel as though I have been given a second chance.

  14 April 1912

  The sea is very calm, but there is a chill in the air. It is a fine morning. I have spoken to no-one. It is a lonely life, sometimes. But I have him for company, always. The presence of the bottle in my bag reassures me. It will not be long now.

  14 April 1912

  An ungodly crash!

  I had just been climbing up to the deck when the entire ship groaned and creaked as if hit by some vast and monstrous hammer. I fell but found my balance. My black bag was with me and I assured myself the sample inside was intact. I hurried up the stairs, finding the decks in a confusion of people. What could this mean?

  “Sir?” I hear an officer speak near me, and I find myself pushed to the front, and realize the man resplendent in magnificent uniform further ahead is the captain. “Sir? We’ve hit something!”

  “It is an iceberg?” the Captain says, his manner outwardly calm. “No, sir,” the officer says. “It isn’t an iceberg. It’s a—”

  Someone screams. It is a high-pitched scream, but I cannot tell if it is made by a man or a woman. “Look up! Look at that—that thing!”

  As if on cue, the ship’s powerful spotlights come on at once, piercing the night, momentarily blinding me. I hear a terrible sound, a roar as of a thousand engines cranking up to their utmost power and beyond their breaking point.

  “It’s . . . it’s a—!”

  My God, I think, awed. How could anyone mistake this for an iceberg?

  It towers over the ship, and the Titanic looks like a toy in comparison. An enormous, beautiful monstrosity, like a cross between a gorilla and a whale: it opens its mouth and roars, and a lizard’s giant claws land with a deafening roar on the deck of the Titanic, splintering wood and cutting deep into the underlying levels. I hear screams, and see a man’s head explode like a wet red balloon where the monster had crushed it in its wake.

  “It’s a—!”

  “It’s a daikaiju,” I say, though they do not hear me. I breathe out. A giant kaiju! The scientist in me is enthralled. The beast within me is hungry. Hyde responds to the creature like a drunk; he bangs against the walls of his prison to be let out. Screams rise into the air. The monster, angered or afraid, lashes again at the ship. Its powerful tail slams into the side of it and the deck tilts alarmingly. Bodies fly through the air. “Abandon ship! Abandon ship!” Panic takes over the Titanic. “To the life boats!” A press of bodies as the people down below attempt to climb up to the open deck, to find escape. They shove and push each other in their panic. I see a woman trampled underfoot. I, too, try to make my way to the life boats, but the swell of people is too strong, and I am old; and panic rises in me as I am sidelined, pushed, shoved, hurt, and all the while the beast roars above our heads, lashing with talons and tail at the Titanic, ripping it slowly apart.

  “To the boats!” And there they go, while, unbelievably, the ship’s orchestra plays on, at least until the beast, annoyed, perhaps, by the noise, slashes at them with its claws and the music stops abruptly with a clatter of panicked notes. The ship tilts: we are sinking. I hear the boats dropping into the water, hear a gunshot ring out as officers attempt to control the manic passengers. “Children and women first!”

  And something breaks in me. Something that has no name, no label I could easily affix to it, like to a specimen bottle, or a beaker of potion. I can escape, I realize, and yet . . .

  “Doctor!” I hear the cry. “We need a doctor! Please, help!”

  A woman lying on the d
eck, holding an injured child in her arms. Her face is panicked. There is blood on the deck.

  I still tightly hold my black medicine bag. Now I open it. All of a doctor’s requirements are there. I could help them . . .

  I reach inside and find the bottle.

  The potion. My life’s work.

  I could help the child, I think. Or I could let out Mr. Hyde.

  I stare at the bottle in my hands. To swallow its contents would liberate me, would Hyde me, would allow me to fight my way to the life boats, and to escape, to live.

  I had lived half my life a monster, I realize; and that had led to my eventual ruin, and my disgrace, and finally my exile.

  I look up at that titanic being towering over the ship. It is frightened, I think. Monstrous, yes: but also beautiful. And I am glad I have lived long enough to see one.

  I look at it for a long moment, and then I look at the bottle in my hands.

  “Please! Help him!”

  I could live a monster, I realized; or I could die a man.

  I stretch my arm as far back as it will go, then back, in one smooth motion, and throw the bottle as hard and as fast as I can into the roiling sea.

  Now I Am Nothing

  Simon Bestwick

  May 1942

  Below, a green meadow; the glittering band of a river; white-painted houses. A blue warm sky unmarked by the vapor trails of bombers. Along the riverbanks, trees burst into shocks of frothy white blossom.

  Rolf surveyed it all without reaction, trod out his cigarette and went inside.

  The church was pleasantly cool, also empty. He crossed to the confessional booth and stepped inside, pulling the curtain behind him. In the cool dark, smelling of wood polish and old incense, he waited. Footsteps clicked on the church floor. The curtain in the neighboring booth was pulled back, then drawn across again. A soft creak came from the booth as an unfamiliar weight tested the wooden seat.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” said Rolf.

  “How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “It’s my first.”

  Silence. Then the man in the neighboring booth turned his head away from Rolf and lit a cigarette. The match’s glow gleamed off gray hair around a balding pate and a green tunic with a colonel’s rank.

  The colonel settled back and released smoke. “Hauptmann Koenig?”

  “Yes, Herr Oberst.”

  “You know what is expected of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what will happen if you are caught.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is your last chance to turn back.”

  Rolf didn’t answer. Behind the screen, the colonel nodded. “Very well.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “The facility is a military compound in the Black Forest. A Waffen-SS garrison, near a small village called Schwartzberg.”

  Schwartzberg: black mountain. “Its purpose?”

  “Unknown. Highly classified. We know only it is a weapons program. It has been codenamed Projekt Wotan. There will be five of you. You will command. Your objective is to enter the Schwartzberg compound, ascertain the nature of Projekt Wotan. If possible, you are to sabotage it there; if not, you are to bring out any information relating to it so that alternative action can be planned. Any questions?”

  “When do I meet the others, and when do I begin?”

  “The others will be here in a moment. As to when—immediately. There is no time to be lost.” The colonel extinguished his cigarette. “You will find an envelope under your seat containing details of where you may find the equipment you’ll require. Now I must leave you.”

  The curtain rattled back, then was flicked closed. The colonel’s footsteps clicked away into the distance, militarily precise.

  Rolf reached under the seat, found the envelope. He slit it open with his thumbnail and read it.

  More footsteps clicked their way into the church. Several pairs.

  Rolf struck a match and set light to envelope and letter, dropping it to the wooden floor when the fire had burnt down almost to his fingers then treading it out. He stood, straightened his clothes, put a hand to the Walther pistol in his pocket, and stepped out of the booth.

  Four men, also in civilian clothes but standing to unmistakably military attention, stood in front of the front row of pews.

  Rolf went to them. For a moment there was silence; he studied them, and they studied the lean man, brown-haired and angular-faced, before them.

  “Hauptmann Koenig?” asked one, a slender dandyish man in his twenties with a neat blond mustache.

  Koenig nodded, his hand still on the Walther.

  The blond man nodded back. “Sergeant Mathias Kroll,” he said finally. “I grew up near Schwartzberg, sir. I know the area.”

  “Good,” said Rolf. He surveyed the others; there was a big ox of a man with a shaven head, another with cropped gray hair and an outdoorsman’s tanned, leathery face, and a blank-faced boy, barely out of his teens, who didn’t seem to blink.

  Kroll pointed them out. “This is Mueller,” he said, indicating the big man, who grinned, showing blackened, gappy teeth. “Reiniger—” the older man nodded “—and Stein.” The youngster gave no reaction, just studied Koenig with the blank, incurious eyes of a fish on a slab.

  Koenig looked back at Kroll. “We should get started,” he said.

  Kroll gave a tiny smile. “We’re ready when you are, sir.”

  The five men filed out.

  Once I was a patriot.

  For God, the Fuehrer and the Reich. I believed in this. That is why I went to Russia, as a proud soldier of the Wehrmacht. As did many old friends of mine, and friends I made.

  And so I saw my friends die: blown apart by shells and grenades, roasted alive by flamethrowers, torn open by bullets, gouged and hacked by bayonets, crushed by tanks and masonry.

  For God, the Fuehrer and the Reich.

  Once I was a patriot.

  Now I am nothing.

  Dawn, and a faint ground mist. Light dappling the forest floor, through the spiny branches of the fir trees. But no bird sang. Rolf couldn’t help noting that.

  Kroll took point. He crawled on his belly through the earth and old dried pine needles, and Rolf and the others crawled after him. Kroll squirmed down into a shallow bowl scooped into the ground and stopped just short of its upper edge, slipping a pair of field-glasses out from under his tunic and squinting through them.

  Rolf drew alongside him. They were perhaps twenty meters from the edge of a clearing; from there to the main gates of the Schwartzberg camp another thirty meters stretched. And up an incline, to boot; not a particularly steep one, but still enough to slow down their approach at a time when speed would be of the essence.

  Through the trees he could make out the high barbed-wire fences, the watchtower and the floodlights and the wooden huts huddled up against the flank of the stark, rock-ribbed hill behind them. Thirty meters? Might as well have been thirty kilometers; there’d be a machine gun mounted in the watchtower to cut down anyone straying near without authority.

  “A little strange,” said Kroll. “Don’t you think?”

  “What’s that, sergeant?”

  “You’d think they’d want us to assassinate the Fuehrer—that or one of the other Party bigwigs. Himmler, Goering—Goebbels perhaps. But instead, we’re here. Undermining our own war effort. Doesn’t that strike you as odd, sir?”

  “We have our orders, sergeant.”

  “I’m not questioning them, sir. Just . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “The Ivans aren’t going anywhere, sir. Sooner or later we’ll have a big fight on our hands with them. And then there are the British. Even if they get rid of the Fuehrer, there’ll still be a war to fight. Or end. So why destroy a weapon? Unless they’re afraid of it too—”

  “That’s enough, sergeant.”

  “Sir.” Kroll lowered the glasses. He was frowning.

  “Something?”

&nbs
p; “See for yourself, sir.” Kroll passed the glasses across. Koenig raised them to his eyes and peered through them. The fence and the guard tower sprang into focus. Koenig’s eyes strayed to the hill. There was very little vegetation on it that he could see, little earth to cloak the black bones of whatever odd rock it was made from. A thought occurred: “Is that the black mountain?” he asked.

  “So they say.”

  “Not much of a mountain.”

  “They say it was once bigger.”

  Huts studded the parade ground. Accommodation, a canteen, a generator hut. Doubtless there would be an infirmary and armory too. And at the back he saw a tall, hulking building with a pointed roof that put him in mind of a chapel of some sort—this, he guessed, would be their target, the hub of Projekt Wotan, whatever it might be. Only one thing was missing.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Kroll. “No sign of anyone. Anywhere.”

  And then Koenig saw it, and was still. “That’s not entirely true, sergeant. See? There?” He handed the glasses back to Kroll. “Look at the watchtower. Just below the platform.”

  A moment later he heard Kroll draw a sharp breath in, and he knew the sergeant had seen the same thing he had: the body of an SS soldier, hanging by his neck from the watchtower.

  They crept to the edge of the wood, rising to stand as they did. All the while, from the camp there came no sound. And still there wasn’t even the faintest hint of birdsong, as the sun continued to rise.

  “All right,” said Rolf. “Get ready.” He drew back the bolt on his Schmeisser. Kroll and Stein did the same, while Rhinemann and Mueller cocked their Mauser rifles.

  “What now?” whispered Kroll.