Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse

by Christofer Nigro

  The pilot’s expertise paid off as the copter quickly ascended mere seconds before the mighty kaiju could reach and trample it. The pilot pushed on the throttle and swerved upwards to neatly dodge being swatted out of the air by a swing from one of the monster’s gigantic scaly hands.

  “Shit, that was close!” the pilot exclaimed. “But we’re airborne, and we should make it to Honshu in about twenty minutes.”

  The Takiguchi family understood enough of the pilot’s spoken English and relieved tone to realize the success of their evacuation, and the three warmly embraced. They each cried as they did so, shedding both tears of gratitude that they escaped with their lives, and of sorrow over the loss of Izo.

  Unfortunately, the dreaded Megadrak was not to give up so easily. Its rage was at a boiling point, and the herculean beast decided to chance projecting a stream of its toxic mist. The smoky substance with a light violet iridescence spewed from its open maw like a rapidly moving cloud, and it managed to envelop the retreating copter at a point near the limits of the kaiju’s projection range. That failed to subject the flying vehicle to the full potential effects of the mist, but it was enough to start a rapid tarnishing of the rotors. The pilot and co-pilot immediately noticed the deleterious effects of this on the helo.

  “Bob, the back rotor is failing!” the pilot warned.

  “It is the mist!” Goro shouted. “The Megadrak’s oral mist is radioactive and corrosive! It will wreck the copter and kill us!”

  That proved to be no idle declaration as the copter began careening out of control and descending towards the briny blue waters of the Philippine Sea. The pilot did his best to work the controls to make as gentle a landing as possible in the water several hundred meters from the shore of Odaiba. Nevertheless, he knew the chances of a soft landing was quite unlikely with the degree of damage incurred by the copter.

  “We’re going down!” the pilot exclaimed. “Hold on and brace yourselves, I’m going to try to make a smooth landing on the water’s surface!”

  The three members of the Takiguchi family screamed and embraced each other again, each hoping to shield the others as best they could from the impending impact. The pilot and co-pilot continued to do their best to secure as controlled a descent and landing as they possibly could. That noble effort failed, however, when the rotor detached and spun away from the copter like a metallic whirling dervish when they were still several meters up. The corrosive properties of the mists had done an unexpectedly fast job of eating through the hub and the nut which connected the blades to the trunnion bearing.

  “The rotor is gone, Bob!” the co-pilot shouted as he saw the large metal object spin away from the craft like an enormous shiny top.

  The pilot didn’t reply. He simply braced himself and prayed to Jesus that his family would be okay without him. Seconds later, the hurtling craft smashed onto the surface of the water. The impact caused the craft to flip over, with the strong window panes cracking in several places and the tail of the copter bending in half.

  Everything was silent around the fallen helo for several minutes, until a banging sound could be heard from inside the canopy. This came from the side of the door that wasn’t submerged, and a minute later the damaged enclosure was kicked open from within. Les emerged painfully, as several small shards of glass had penetrated his face and arms, but thankfully none punctured either an artery or one of his eyes.

  The man looked out and saw no sign of the kaiju, but he did not expect the relentless creature to give up the attack if it realized that not all the people within the copter had died in the crash. He stepped back into the thrashed copter to check the status of the other passengers.

  Bob, the pilot, was still buckled unmoving in his seat, his face down against the control panel.

  “Bob, are you all right?” Les asked as he shook his friend. The co-pilot received no response. He turned the man over to see that his face was literally caved in; it had smashed against the collective-pitch lever when the copter hit the water.

  The dejected flight officer quietly laid his friend back down and moved to see to the evacuees seated in the back of the canopy. Les found the Takiguchi family all huddled together in the center of the seating row. While the co-pilot heard the distinctive sounds of weeping and breathing, he also saw large amounts of blood spattered over them. That was when he knew that while life remained among them, they did not survive the crash intact.

  As Les crawled over to the family he saw Goro and Keiko holding Gei tightly. The Takiguchi matriarch’s mouth and eyes were wide open in a vacuous and agonized expression. A large shard of metal had broken off the side of the canopy’s hull and perforated her neck; most of her body’s blood supply had spurted from her punctured jugular and stained her clothing and seat a bright crimson.

  Though matron had quickly bled out, both her young adult children appeared devoid of serious injuries. Their emotional state was another story. Les knew he needed to get their composure together if they had any hope of surviving.

  “I sympathize with your loss,” he said as gently as he could manage in fluent Japanese. “Bob is dead too, and he was a good friend of mine, so I share your pain. But I need your help in getting the inflatable lifeboat out of the copter so we can continue to the mainland. That giant beast might be upon us at any moment.”

  “I am not leaving my mother here,” Keiko said through a bloody lip further moistened by flowing tears.

  “I know you’re terribly upset over your loss,” Les continued, “and I understand. But she is gone, and we need to see to our own survival. A single Zodiac inflatable can hold up to five, and we will bring her body with us to ensure a proper burial. Okay?”

  The two siblings remained holding their mother and crying, after which Les put his hand on Goro’s shoulder.

  “Sir, we have to get out of here,” he said, still gently but with a touch of firmness, “and your sister’s life depends on it as well as your own. All right?”

  Goro slowly unwrapped his arms from his mother’s blood-soaked corpse and looked up at the co-pilot. He revealed a bleeding gash on his forehead and eyes swollen by incessant tears.

  “What… what do you need me to do?” the fisherman asked.

  “We need to pull open that hatch over there, retrieve one of the lifeboats, and inflate it,” Les replied. “Then we need to attach a motor to the back of it and conduct a quick inspection to make sure it’s fully operational, as it may have been damaged when we hit the water.”

  Goro quelled his deep emotional pain as best he could to follow Les’ instructions. Together, they quickly pulled a rigid neoprene Zodiac lifeboat out of the copter and promptly inflated it using a CO2 canister. Next, they attached a working motor to the mount fitting on its aft section.

  Upon completion of the task several minutes later, the two men made a point to look back towards Odaiba to see if Megadrak was anywhere in sight. They saw nothing more than the outline of the island in the distance, along with several gulls cawing as they casually flitted about the waves seeking their next meal. The heat of the sun shined on the scene before them, and all seemed perfectly calm and even serene.

  “Sir, we need to get out of here while we still can,” Les explained. “You need to go back in there and get your sister out. Wrap your mom in one of the blankets you’ll find in the same hatch where we got the boat, and help your sister carry her here. I’ll get the motor running in the meantime.

  “Look, I know you two are really hurting, but chances are that monster is still around. And if it is, it’s going to hear the sound of the motor once I rev it up. So understand that you two have to get in the boat very quickly after I start the motor.”

  “I understand,” Goro replied quietly as he moved back into the heavily damaged canopy of the copter’s fuselage.

  Les activated the motor and looked around nervously for any sign that Megadrak was nearby. Still all was calm, but he knew this could change at any moment; the beast had proven as unpredictable as i
t was relentless and powerful. He thus resisted the urge to either become complacent or give way to panic. He well knew that not only did he require his full wits about him, but he didn’t need his bowels to become overly agitated since he had no way to relieve himself prior to reaching Honshu; at least not in a manner that would respect both his privacy and the sensibilities of his two passengers.

  The co-pilot said a silent prayer to God that Goro wouldn’t have too much difficulty convincing his sister to leave the thrashed remains of the copter behind.

  Within seconds of the motor being started, he saw a very melancholic Goro and Keiko Takiguchi step out of the craft with the wrapped body of their mother carried between them. Les respectfully took the revered body of Gei into his arms and gently set her down in a corner of the inflated lifeboat. That accomplished, he quickly reached out and aided the two siblings in stepping down and finding a comfortable place to sit in the raft.

  Les used a retrieved compass to determine the proper direction towards Honshu and set the inflatable boat in that direction. The motor seemed to be running smoothly, and there was still no sign of Megadrak’s presence.

  While en route to the mainland the co-pilot did his best to ignore the pain of his several tiny puncture wounds. His only response to them was to periodically pull out one of the offending little glass shards. He also did his utmost to overlook a growing pain in his lower back that felt like a burning stab wound. Goro and Keiko sat together in a single corner holding each other’s hand for support, both completely silent with tears streaming from their eyes as they looked ruefully at the covered body of their beloved mother in the opposite corner of the boat.

  They would make it back to the mainland intact. What they failed to see, however, was the submerged Megadrak peering at them from many meters behind as the great beast stealthily followed the lightly colored—and thus high visibility—raft toward Tokyo Bay.

  CHAPTER 11: The Heat is On

  Koji Sagawa sat with a dejected expression as he glared at the covered body of his recently departed friend, Professor Akira Watanabe. For the hour following the scientist’s agony-ridden passing, the young naturalist refused to budge from beside the hospital bed holding the revered but now silent organic shell of the professor. Koji’s tortured mind vacillated between fantasies of revenge taken against Megadrak, silent prayers made to the gods for dealing with this deadly threat, and lengthy minutes of blank introspection.

  The sorrowful youth looked up as the door opened behind him and zoologist Dr. Daisuke Sato entered.

  “Are you alright, Koji-san?” Sato inquired quietly.

  The expressive glare provided to the scientist by the recipient of his query gave Sato the only answer required.

  “I am aware that was rhetorical, and I extend full condolences for your loss. Not only that, but to be frank, we need to give as much info to the government as we can about the Megadrak, as they need to mount a defense. No one knows when the kaiju may turn its attention directly to the main islands of Japan.”

  Koji’s facial muscles trembled with emotion as he responded. “You saw what you saw, Sato-kun. Fill out the report yourself. With due respect, you are not the one who suffered any loss. The worms that mutated by feeding off that monster took both Greene and the professor from me. I may not have been long acquainted with Akira, but we endured much together during the single day I knew him. He was also there for me when Greene was… taken.

  “And what those things did to so many people I grew up with and loved, and how the kaiju trampled the only home I ever knew out of existence—this forced me and everyone else who survived to uproot ourselves abruptly and come here, with no planning, no preparation, no actual place to live, leaving everything behind.

  “You could not begin to understand, Sato-kun, because wherever on the mainland your home may be, I am certain it remains intact. As does the life you had when we met; as does your comfortable job with the government. And allow me to mention that everyone you knew and loved prior to this day still exists in your life.”

  “I know it may seem heartless of me to get too firm with you now, Koji-san. But you have a responsibility to the entire nation to see to it that the tragedy that befell you and all other residents of your island does not occur to anyone else. You were part of the whole incident long before I arrived on the scene, and you have a brilliant mind well-suited to making zoological observations. Consequently, you have no ethical right to forswear your duty to the greater good for the sake of endless mourning and self-pitying in solitude.”

  Koji stood up with such force that he knocked over the chair he had been sitting on. “How dare you! How dare you judge me and insult me after…”

  Sato firmly swatted Koji’s jutted index finger out of his face. “I dare because it had to be said! It was not my intention to insult you but merely to pull you out of this self-indulgent dereliction of your duty to the people of Japan!”

  “My people are those who lived on Imotojima! While your parliament may claim it as part of Japan, I do not consider it so!”

  “The fact remains that your people are here now. Not only that, but soldiers from the Japanese Self-Defense Force spent the last few hours extricating your people from the island by fighting those worms, some of them being maimed and killed in the process. The Megadrak threatens the entire region of the South Pacific, and not just your small island where its depredations began!

  “And do not forget that beyond Japan is a world full of over three billion people! Are your concerns for others truly confined to such narrow geographic parameters? And simply because those were the only people you knew personally? The world is filled with innocent and caring people who have families much like those you knew on the island, and these innocents will suffer the same horrible loss you and your fellow islanders did—but many may be spared such a fate if you act responsibly by sharing what you know with the proper authorities.

  “Make that monster pay for what it did by resisting the urge to allow yourself to be broken and emotionally debilitated by the tragedy it inflicted upon you! You are better than that, damn it! And you know that, if nothing else, you owe it to the people on your island who died!”

  “You insolent son of a bitch!” Koji yelled as he grabbed Sato by the lapel of his white lab coat.

  After shaking the scientist about for a moment, however, the youth suddenly released his grip on Sato’s clothing. He covered his face and shed several more tears before slowly retracting his moistened hands from his countenance. After doing so, his entire expression had changed. It retained all the anguish it had before, but no longer was it dominated by sorrow so much as a sense of what could best be described as purposeful determination.

  “Ancestors forgive me, but you are right,” the Imotojima native said. “Let us make the report and help the armed forces blow that horrible beast out of existence.”

  Sato put a hand on Koji’s shoulder. “I understand it is difficult for you under the circumstances. But I want you to know that, despite everything, I am very proud of the fortitude and character you are now showing. The people you lost would be equally proud. You honor what their lives meant, and by doing this you will help us avenge them.”

  A moment after that, the door burst open again, and Major Matsumoto entered in his usual brash fashion. He wasn’t alone, however. With him was none other than photo-journalist Ren Honda, whose lack of the fedora he was so fond of wearing and overall disheveled look made it appear that he had just been to Hell and back. The two men already in the room were about to learn that in this case, appearances did not deceive.

  “Major, you are letting that… man in here again?” Sato said.

  “For now, at least,” Matsumoto replied. “He just returned from Odaiba and is fresh from an encounter with the Megadrak you men spoke of.”

  “I actually had to boat all the way back from Odaiba!” Ren grumbled as he pulled away from the major’s grip and fixed his sports jacket. “That damned dragon or whatever it is alm
ost killed me, and it totally wiped out Odaiba! It seems to kill people for the holy hell of it, too! Like it just hates us or something!”

  “The monster showed up in Odaiba…?” Sato interjected as Koji looked on with a startled mien. “But is this not exactly the time when a lot of tourists will be there, visiting the park?”

  “A lot of tourists were there,” Ren corrected in his inimitable fashion, “as in past tense. Megadrak killed a bunch of them, and the rest were evacuated. It killed the pilot who coptered me there, thrashed the copter itself, and almost made me a memory too. I am lucky I got out of there to tell this tale, considering my editor made me boat all the way back, but you just have to see the incredible pictures I got! Thank the gods I didn’t break my camera, as I almost lost that too. As if everything else wasn’t enough! If I ended up losing the film on top of it all…”

  “Shut up for a moment!” Koji exclaimed. “The kaiju rampaged through another island…?”

  “I have photographic proof right here!” Ren said excitedly as he pointed to his prized Canon.

  “Get this showboating fool out of here before I break that camera over his head!” Koji demanded as he clenched his fists and took a step towards the journalist.

  “You do that and you can count on getting a bill!” Ren responded with an extended finger until the major grabbed him. “More than that, I will take you to court and sue the holy hell out of you for the loss of this film! It is doubtlessly worth more than thirty years of your annual income! Hell, probably forty!”

  “You served your purpose, so now are out of here!” the major said as he dragged Ren to the door and shoved him outside.

  “You almost made me drop my camera, you haughty goose-stepping son of a bitch…” was the last thing the photographer was heard saying before his voice was cut off when Matsumoto slammed the door shut.