Goro’s harsh self-ruminating was interrupted by the sound of the truck’s engine starting as Donaldson turned the key in the ignition. The large vehicle zoomed off down the road just as the remainder of Captain Sterns’s squadron of jets appeared in the skies above them… and mere moments before Megadrak appeared on the horizon in all its formidable majesty.
***
Megadrak released an ear-piercing alligator-like roar that cascaded into a sinister serpentine hiss as a challenge to the air and ground constructs housing its tiny rivals. The kaiju braced itself for the explosive assault that it now realized was soon to come and prepared to unleash a multi-layer counter assault of its own.
“Drop the payload on that bastard!” Sterns barked into his mic. “Then Lemke and I will rocket fire its ass from the front! And no wise cracks about how that isn’t logical from a goddamned anatomical standpoint!”
A duo of F-51s under the direction of pilots named Asuri and Innes flew over the immense beast, and a blistering payload of bombs fell from their fuselage platforms. Megadrak was merely annoyed by the exploding barrage, but it was enough to get the creature’s attention for a few moments. This provided the opening that Sterns and Lemke needed to each unleash a pair of rockets. The twin craft veered upwards as the quartet of large explosive projectiles flared with incandescent fury against the azure bony plating covering the kaiju’s mid-to-upper torso.
The dragon-like monster bellowed in angry defiance just before retaliating via the spewing of a cloud of corrosive fog in the general direction of the jets. Every pilot was by now prepared for that deadly weapon in the kaiju’s nightmarish repertoire, so all managed to evade the lethal stream of radioactive mist. Megadrak released an enraged roaring hiss at its wasted expenditure of bodily emission and swiped its enormous talons at the ascending craft in a gesture of futile venting.
The row of Sherman tanks in front of the road then began firing their shells on cue, while Sterns and Lemke came in for another rocket salvo behind the immense creature. Billows of gray cloudy soot quickly encased the top portion of the kaiju as it was racked with stinging artillery from all directions.
“Ha ha!” Lemke guffawed into his mic. “I think we’ve got that ugly bastard on the ropes, Captain!”
“Lemke, watch your ass!” Sterns hollered back. “Don’t risk flying through the smoke…!”
Unfortunately, the first lieutenant was too elated to heed his superior officer’s command in time. His excitement in the act of unleashing his barrage caused him to lose sight of what his captain foresaw: the surprisingly cunning Megadrak might use the billowing smoke as a cover to swing its finned, whip-like tail upwards towards the offending aircraft. The beast’s keen hearing seemed able to determine exactly where and how far above it the two attacking jets were, and to somehow calculate when it was best to up-swing its powerful posterior limb.
The result was Lemke’s jet being whipped out of the sky like a tennis ball swatted by a racket. Sterns curved his jet aside just as he shouted the final command Lemke would ever hear. Nevertheless, he could not pre-determine the involuntary path taken by the first lieutenant’s craft after it was struck by the kaiju’s tail.
As a result, the right wing of Lemke’s careening jet smashed clear through Sterns’s fuselage. The captain was stunned by the sudden impact, but he was experienced enough to have preemptively positioned his hand on the eject switch just in case of this eventuality.
Lemke’s jet landed on a grassy area to the left of the road and erupted in a plume of orange flame. The pilot likely died before the impact, as Sterns was certain he caught a quick glimpse of the upper part of his second-in-command’s body pushed against the cracked pane in a red splatter, much like a bug that impacted against the windshield of a speeding car.
The captain was grateful that he would never have to find out if what he saw was anything more than a cruel trick played on his peripheral vision due to his being battered by the force of impact. His chair parachuted out of his doomed craft as intended, and the man descended to the ground a good half mile distant.
Thus, Asuri suddenly found himself the new ranking officer in charge of the air unit. The young Japanese pilot ordered the rest of the craft to ascend to a safe distance while he called the base to send for a recovery unit to retrieve Sterns and to receive new orders.
In the meantime, Kelley O’Reilly, now in command of the ground force, had resolved to see to it that Megadrak wouldn’t make a beeline for the descending chair of the air squad’s ejected captain.
“Hit ’im with everything we’ve got!” O’Reilly barked into his mic. “See that its attention is on us and not on Captain Sterns!”
The turrets of each tank let loose a high-powered barrage that successfully gained Megadrak’s attention, but without much more effect than that. The monster released another angry roaring hiss as its primitive but adroit mind realized that these constructs were simply trying to prevent it from reaching its original prey—the trio of Goro, Risa, and Koji—which it remembered to be fleeing the scene minutes earlier in another of the humans’ mobile constructs.
What degree of intelligence a kaiju possessed was undetermined, including how dissimilar its thought processes may be to conventional animals known and understood by human science. One fact did seem to become clear since Megadrak’s rampage began, however: whatever limits on their reasoning capabilities, the kaiju could experience what humans would describe as a desire for vengeance.
The ruthless resolve of the giant beast combined with this vengeful streak to seemingly assure a relentless pursuit of the specific rivals who had aroused its ire; that is, unless they could get far enough away to evade its ultra-keen sensory apparatus, or some force could deter its pursuit, whichever may come first. And once the kaiju targeted explicit human beings as “primary prey,” successful escape appeared far less common than the reverse.
Hence, Megadrak’s next roaring hiss was one of pure determination to enact this primitive understanding of vengeance. The giant beast accordingly stomped towards the line of tanks that dared to bar its way. The monster’s intention was to smash the little metal vehicles aside as further proof of its superiority to anything its rivals for global dominance could possibly throw against it.
“All tanks move to the side, pronto!” O’Reilly ordered.
Each of the armored vehicles turned to move as commanded, five to the left of the road and the other half to the right. Despite their making way for Megadrak, the gargantuan reptile was not about to overlook the attempt of these human-controlled objects to obstruct its path.
The gargantuan creature swiped its tail from one side to the other upon moving through the path made for it by the retreating tanks, which served to knock the last tank on each side into colliding with the one in front of it. This caused all the armored vehicles in both lines to cascade into the one before it in a ghastly, magnified version of Dominos that would have been comical to behold if not for the human soldiers who were maimed or summarily terminated with the action.
As each tank lay on its side with no sign of human activity around it, Megadrak grabbed and lifted the two closest to it, holding one in each palm. It then turned to the other tanks on each side and showered all of them with a spray of its acidic oral mist, as if to insure nothing that may have remained alive inside the constructs would remain living for long. An audible crackling sound reminiscent of eggs cooking on an oven plate could be heard as the corrosive fog began rapidly eating through the thick metal hull of the armored vehicles.
Megadrak anticipated the five remaining jets launching another attack, and so it had resolved to knock them out of the sky in a manner that would preserve the supply of corrosive mist produced by its gullet sacs. The creature’s primeval reasoning capability proved spot on as Asuri led the remaining jets out of the clouds for another assault.
“It is time to show what a soldier of the Rising Sun can and will do to protect his homeland, monster!” Asuri cried as he battered the gi
ant creature’s face with machine gun fire.
The lead pellets did no more than severely annoy the kaiju as they ricocheted off its more sensitive facial tissues, which included its eyes, lips, and flared nasal cavities. Megadrak responded by hurling one of the tanks skyward.
“Incoming!” the British pilot Innes shouted into his mic.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Asuri yelled immediately afterwards.
Asuri swerved his jet out of harm’s way, while Innes and the pilot Kentai did the same. However, the other two in the back formation—Hiller and Taylor—each had one of their wings smashed off by the airborne tank before they could veer away in time.
“I gotta eject!” Hiller announced before hitting the appropriate lever and doing exactly that.
Taylor never ejected, as he was apparently too stunned by the force of the tank hitting the wing, and his craft quickly plummeted to the ground several meters to the right of the road. Its impact with the grass-covered earth was accompanied by an explosive eruption of fuel-ignited flame.
“We must disarm that beast before it throws the other tank!” Asumi said to Innes and Kentai. “I will launch a rocket between its forearm and inner elbow, and I want you two to simultaneously do likewise on my mark!”
All three men truly hated to take the lives of the occupants in that tank, but they all knew if these men weren’t already dead, there was really no way to save them at this point. They were soldiers, Asumi told himself as the trio of remaining jets headed into formation. They knew the risks, and I must not allow the Megadrak to use their vehicle to take more of our lives. Kentai’s and Innes’ minds were host to very similar sentiments.
As the kaiju began preparing to hurl the tank at the jets upon their approach in formation, the three rockets were unleashed as Asuri ordered.
Megadrak could not have anticipated where the projectiles would be aimed, and each struck the kaiju’s scaly throwing arm between its wrist and inner elbow as intended. The explosions impacted a few nerve clusters under the creature’s ultra-thick hide as Asuri had hoped, and it dropped the tank as a result. The armored vehicle fell nearly fifty meters, and it was reduced to almost half its previous width upon impacting with the ground.
The three pilots each said a silent prayer that the men inside died a swift death if they hadn’t already expired prior to being dropped, as their bodies had certainly been pulverized when the tank hit the ground.
Megadrak was not to be undone by this setback, however. As a torrent of flames from the triple rocket barrage cascaded over the hide of its right arm, the kaiju raised the limb into the air once more and spewed a stream of its oral mist over its extended limb and towards the sky. The highly flammable gaseous substance again turned into the equivalent of a gigantic blowtorch, its deadly flames projected towards the trio of F-15s that remained in the sky.
“Evasive!” Asuri bellowed as he and the other two craft strove to do exactly that.
The commanding officer managed to dodge the fiery stream, as did Innes. Kentai, however, darted only enough to prevent the main body of his vessel from being swathed by the infernal torrent. His right wing was struck and quickly set aflame.
“I must eject!” he said. “Lieutenant, permission to first withdraw from the area so the kaiju does not blast me from the sky when I parachute down?”
“Granted!” Asumi replied.
Kentai thus turned his craft around and accelerated to the right so he would quickly reach a safe distance from Megadrak before he ejected from his burning jet.
Asumi ordered his remaining pilot, Innes, to ascend so that the kaiju would not be inclined to lift and hurl another of the tanks at them. He then radioed Yokota Air Base to apprise them of the dire situation and to request what their subsequent orders would be.
Megadrak released a triumphant roaring hiss as it perceived its final few airborne attackers to be making a hasty retreat from the new master of this territory.
The great beast was likewise satisfied that the quiet, radioactively eroding tanks on the ground signaled the death of every human being holed up inside of them. It therefore resolved to waste no more time at its present location and followed the wafting scent of the three human beings it was determined to hunt down and kill, much as a feline would track a rodent it knew to be hiding somewhere within a nearby alley.
The monster took off down the road with its usual enormous strides, enabling it to move at a speed that could overtake all but the fastest ground vehicles within minutes. The military truck that Donaldson used to transport Goro, Risa, and Koji—along with two seriously ill military officers—to the Akihabara Train Station remained the target of its hunt. At this pace, the titanic creature would arrive within a half hour, and this didn’t bode well for the evacuation proceedings being conducted there.
***
The departing kaiju had thankfully missed a quartet of soldiers who kicked their way out of the weakened hatches of the two tanks upended furthest to the right of the road. This they managed to do before the thick armored hull could be fully dissolved by the acidic mist.
“Don’t let any of that foggy substance touch you!” First Lieutenant and field medic Robert Hellman’s voice uttered as he crawled free of the hatch.
“I know that,” O’Reilly’s voice followed. “No need to mother me! I’m a soldier and your commanding officer, not your little brother.”
Nevertheless, Kelley O’Reilly stumbled as he tried to stand upon wrenching himself out from the hatch. It was clear to him that his left leg was broken, and he had to put aside his soldier’s pride if he wanted to avoid all contact with the remaining wafts of radioactive mist that still billowed about the road area.
“Scratch that!” O’Reilly said. “Mother me for just as long as it takes you to drag me away from that cloud o’ death!”
Hellman quickly helped the lieutenant colonel move far enough from the disabled tanks to be safe from the gradually dissipating mist. Ogata and Otaro crawled out of the next closest tank, with the latter having to sit down and await Hellman’s ministrations since his right arm appeared broken. Two thin streams of blood dripped from deep cuts atop Ogata’s crown, but he seemed otherwise unharmed.
“Orders, Lieutenant?” Otaro queried as he held his throbbing arm.
“Your orders are to stay put until Hellman is done securing a tourniquet on my leg so he can come and see to that arm of yours, Otaro,” the colonel replied.
“Prepare yourself, Lieutenant,” Hellman said as he put his fingers on the officer’s compound fracture.
“Ugh. Go ahead and do it,” O’Reilly said as he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth in preparation for the imminent surge of agony. “I’m not in ‘little brother’ mode any longer, soldier.”
Hellman pushed the slightly protruding leg bone back into place with a quick shove.
“Nnnghhgh!” is a phonetic approximation of the strained sound O’Reilly uttered as he bit his lower lip. “Jesus!” He then took a few deep breathes before talking further. “All right, now… get this leg fixed up, and give me a stick of that morphine while you’re digging in that bag of yours.”
“Will do, sir,” Hellman said as he continued to rifle through the medicine bag he was glad he made a point to extricate from the tank along with himself.
“Ogata…” O’Reilly continued, “your orders are to walk around the other tanks… while avoiding contact with whatever is left of that mist, obviously… and see if there are signs of more survivors among our ground troops before those tanks melt down completely. Then we should get in contact with whatever is left of the air support and see what the hell we’re supposed to do next. We failed to hold the line… and we gotta hope a lot of people in Tokyo get evacuated before they’ll have to pay the price for our failure.”
CHAPTER 22: Throw Mama (and Many Others) from the Train
Donaldson screeched the military truck to a stop in front of the Akihabara Train Station. Several waiting lines of citizens rushed about in harried fashio
n as police officers, backed up by a few uniformed soldiers of the Self-Defense Force, did their best to guide them onto each arriving train in as orderly a fashion as possible under the circumstances.
The lieutenant of the ground forces division looked beyond the crowd to a military evac copter that was situated upon a hastily constructed helipad a few meters distant, and which he knew to be awaiting the arrival of two patients.
“That copter is for Colonel Nakamura and Rickard,” Donaldson explained to his three civilian passengers as they disembarked. “Those medics heading towards us with the stretchers will get them safely on board, and we’ll fly them to a military hospital in Yokohama.”
“I hope they will be okay,” Risa said as she looked at the pale, sallow complexion of the unconscious men still seated upright in the back of the truck.
“I do too, Kimura-san,” Donaldson said in a tone surprisingly soft for a gruff soldier like himself.
Risa smiled slightly, enamored to hear such a tone emitted from a man of the fighting forces.
The medics quickly arrived as expected. “What is their condition?” one asked as they approached the vehicle.
“I’m not a medic myself,” Donaldson responded, “but I can still tell you it’s not good. As reported, they’re poisoned by mutated worm venom. They’re breathing, but it’s shallow, and they have very weak pulses. And they look like hell, as you can see.”
The Japanese medics worked with swift efficiency, and within a few minutes Nakamura and Rickard were carried over to the copter, which was already prepped for fast departure. And a few minutes after that, the copter was in the air and headed for a government-run medical facility in Yokohama. The police and soldiers on the scene had to push several frenzied citizens away from the copter, since a crowd gathered about complaining as to why these two people were being so quickly spirited away while the rest had to wait in a series of lines for available trains.
Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse Page 23