Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization (14 page)

* * *

Serizawa and his team had been assigned guest quarters upon the
Saratoga.
Even on a ship as large as the super-carrier, space was at a premium so the cramped cabin was a tight squeeze, but they were making do. Monarch scientists worked beside Navy technicians, monitoring data feeds at various workstations, even as he and Graham each spoke urgently on their respective phones.

“Yes,” he reported in Japanese, “the patterns match, but I can’t crack the significance.”

Joe Brody’s antique zip disks, rescued from the M.U.T.O. base, were stacked on a desk beside Serizawa’s research materials. Scattered photos and reports held fragments of a history that began years before Serizawa was born: grainy images of a gargantuan creature rising from the sea six decades ago, archive photos of an atomic bomb blast on a remote Pacific atoll, shots from the Philippine mine disaster, reports on the Janjira nuclear plant disaster, and updates on the singular cocoon found on the site afterwards.

It appeared that he and Brody had been colleagues of a sort, pursuing similar lines of investigation all these years.

What a pity
, he reflected,
that we never knew each other existed.

He overheard Graham dealing with the public-relations issue. “Yes, sir,” she said into her phone. “Media is reporting an earthquake. The cover’s holding for now, but if it—”

A knock at the hatchway interrupted both phone calls. Graham went to answer it.

“Dr. Serizawa?” Petty Officer Thatch stood in the doorway. He had Ford Brody with him, still wearing part of a rundown radiation suit that had seen better days. The man’s wrist was chafed, but his handcuffs had been removed en route to the carrier. Serizawa nodded at Thatch that it was all right for him to leave Ford with them. Ford’s passport had been found among his belongings; a quick investigation had confirmed that he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, currently on leave. Thatch departed and Graham escorted Ford into the room.

Ford, who looked more than a little shell-shocked, approached the desk warily. His eyes widened as he spotted the photos spread out across the desk, which Serizawa made no effort to conceal. Ford was visibly taken aback by the startling images. Serizawa sympathized; what these pictures displayed would be shocking to the young man, who had just lost his father as well. His entire world had changed overnight.

“Mr. Brody, my condolences,” Serizawa said.

Ford stared at them. Pain, anger, and confusion all seemed to simmer inside the unfortunate young man, who was understandably overwhelmed by recent events. Powerful emotions played across Ford’s face, while his body language was tense. Serizawa began to fear that the grieving lieutenant would be of little use to their investigation. Judging from his reaction to the photos, Ford was apparently not fully conversant with his father’s theories.

Graham tried to secure Ford’s cooperation anyway. “We’re deeply sorry for your loss, Lieutenant. But I’m afraid we need your help. Your father’s data—”

“No, you first,” he snapped. His nerves and temper were obviously at the breaking point. “Who are you people?”

* * *

Graham shot a questioning look at Serizawa, letting him make the call. He nodded, regarding Ford with sympathy. This man had been through so much already. He deserved to know what his father had given his life for.

“Come in please, Mr. Brody. Come in and we will show you.”

Ford stepped deeper into the cabin. Graham shut the door behind him.

* * *

Flickering images played upon the wall of the cabin. Hooked into Graham’s laptop, a portable digital projector provided relevant visuals as Serizawa attempted to explain.

“In 1954,” he began, “the first time a nuclear submarine ever reached the lowest depths, it awakened something.”

“The Americans first thought it was the Russians,” Graham added. “The Russians thought that it was the Americans. All those nuclear tests in the Pacific? Not tests…”

“They were trying to kill it.” Serizawa indicated the ancient film footage from the 1950s.
“Him.”

Ford’s jaw dropped. Breaking eye contact with Serizawa, he looked more closely at the projected images of the 1954 A-bomb detonation, the bomb with the cartoon lizard inscribed on its cone, a mushroom cloud rising over the once-tranquil Pacific Ocean, and, finally, impossibly, the grainy silhouette of a titanic beast rising up from the sea, a row of jagged fins dimly visible along its spine.

“An ancient alpha predator,” Serizawa explained.

“Millions of years older than mankind,” Graham said, “from a time when the Earth was ten times more radioactive than it is today. The animal—and others like it—
consumed
that radiation as a food source. But as radiation levels on the surface naturally subsided, these creatures adapted to live deeper in the oceans, farther underground, absorbing radiation from the planet’s core. The organization we work for, Monarch, was established in the wake of this discovery. A multinational organization, formed in secrecy, to search for him, study him, learn everything we could.”

Ford stared at the footage. The images were blurry, but the creature’s gargantuan proportions and general outline were clear.

“We call him
Godzilla
,” Serizawa said.

The name was derived from a legend of the islands: a mythical king of monsters known as
Gojira
. The name had been Americanized by the U.S. Military during their initial attempts to bomb the newly discovered behemoth out of existence.

“The top of a primordial ecosystem,” Graham elaborated. “A god for all intents and purposes.”

Ford gaped at the images, struggling to process what he was hearing and seeing.
“Monsters…”

“That is one word for them,” Serizawa agreed. He used a handheld remote to call up images of the “cavern” in the Philippines. “Fifteen years ago, we found the fossil of another giant animal in the Philippines. Like Godzilla, but this creature died long ago,
killed
by these…” Close-ups of the MUTO spores appeared on the wall.

“Parasitic organisms,” Graham said. “One dormant, but the other hatched. Catalyzed when a mining company unknowingly drilled into its tomb. The hatchling burrowed straight for the nearest source of radiation, your father’s power plant in Janjira, and cocooned there. Absorbing the radioactive fuel to gestate, grow.”

“Until it hatched like a butterfly into the creature you saw,” Serizawa. “We call it a MUTO.”

The biology, in fact, was fairly basic, albeit on a monstrous scale. The larval form of various insects and arthropods were basically eating machines, consuming massive amounts of nutrients before creating a cocoon in which to undergo the metamorphosis into their adult stage. Serizawa called up an image of the massive cocoon, which had been discovered fifteen years ago atop the ruins of the Janjira plant, not long after the earlier disaster in the Philippines.

“You’re saying you knew about this…
thing
… the whole time?” Ford shook his head, trying to take it all in. “And kept it a secret? Lied to everyone?”

Serizawa remembered a family photo he had found among Ford’s effects.

“You have a son, Mr. Brody. Would you tell him there are monsters in the world? Beyond our control? We believed that horror was better kept buried.”

“But you let it
feed
?” Ford said. “Why not kill it when you had the chance?”

“It was absorbing radiation from the reactors,” Graham said. “Vast doses, like a sponge. We worried killing it might have released that radiation, endangering millions.”

Serizawa nodded. “The MUTO
caused
the catastrophe, but also
prevented
it from spreading.” Without the cocoon, and the immense pupa developing inside it, the quarantine zone would have indeed been the radioactive wasteland they had let the world believe it was. “That’s why Monarch’s mission was to contain it, to study its biology. To
understand
it.”

But, yes,”
he thought regretfully,
we waited too long.

“We knew the creature was having an electrical effect on everything within a close proximity,” Graham said. “What we didn’t know was that it could harness that same power in an EMP attack.”

Footage from Janjira showed the winged creature unleashing its electromagnetic pulse—a heartbeat before the pulse shorted out the monitors.

“Your father did,” Graham said. “He predicted it.”

“What else did he say?” Serizawa asked. “Anything at all?”

“I—I don’t know,” Ford confessed, his voice cracking. “I always thought he was crazy, obsessed.
I didn’t listen
.” He ran a hand through his hair, overwrought, while he visibly struggled to recall his father’s theories. “He said it was some kind of animal call. Like something… talking.”

“Talking?”
Serizawa sat up straight. Was Ford implying there was more than one signal?

Ford nodded. “Yeah, he was studying something.
Echolocation
.”

Serizawa and Graham stared at each other in shock. Ford clearly had no idea what a bombshell he’d just dropped, but the two scientists immediately grasped the implications. They glanced down at an indistinct snapshot of the majestic creature from the ocean’s floor, last seen sixty years ago.

Could they truly be dealing with… him?

“If the MUTO was talking that day,” Serizawa reasoned, “your father must have discovered something
talking back
.”

Gripped by a sense of extraordinary urgency, he turned to Graham. “Go back through the data, search for a response call.”

She sat down at her laptop, while the projector continued to cycle through the relevant images. Serizawa slumped down into a chair. Ford stared at the wall, trying to make sense of it all. It was a lot to absorb.

“This parasite… it’s still out there,” he said. “Where’s it headed?”

“The MUTO is still young, still growing,” Serizawa said. “It will be looking for food.”

“Sources of radiation,” Graham added, glancing up from her laptop. “We’re monitoring all known sites, but if we don’t find it soon…”

Her voice trailed off, not needing to say more.

“It killed both my parents,” Ford said. “There must be
something
we can do.”

Serizawa had his doubts, at least as far as humanity’s ability to cope with the threat.

“Nature has an order, Mr. Brody. A power to rebalance.”

He stared up at the wall, where Godzilla could be glimpsed once more. The U.S. Army had attempted to destroy the beast with an atomic bomb, but no remains had been found afterwards. Some believed (or hoped) that Godzilla had been completely vaporized by the blast, but that may have been wishful thinking.

“I believe he is that power.”

A bugler played taps, but only a small honor guard was in attendance. Standing on the wide rear deck of the
Saratoga
, as the sun slowly sank into the horizon, Ford saluted stoically as his father’s body was put to the rest. He had shed the battered radiation suit, but was still wearing rumpled civvies he’d left Joe’s apartment in. Serizawa was also present as Joe Brody’s flag-draped body slid off the deck into the sea. It disappeared quickly beneath the churning waves.

Goodbye, Dad
, Ford thought.
I wish you could go home with me.

It occurred to him that neither his father nor his mother had a proper grave, but that was not something he wanted to dwell on at the moment. Petty Officer Thatch was waiting off to one side, maintaining a respectful distance while Ford bid farewell to his father, but Ford knew he had to get going if he wanted to make it back to Elle and Sam. He stared for a few more minutes at the endless expanse of ocean that was now Joe Brody’s final resting-place before walking over to Thatch.

It was time to go.

Thatch escorted him across the carrier’s expansive flight deck, which was noisy and abuzz with activity. Aside from “the island,” a multi-level command center topped by a towering array of radar and communications antenna, the top deck of the Saratoga was a flat expanse used as a runway to land and launch a wide variety of aircraft. There was also room to park a few dozen planes, although the majority of the carrier’s eighty-plus aircraft were stored below decks in the hangar bay. A transport chopper was loading off to one side of the runway. Busy seamen worked quickly and efficiently to stow their gear aboard the helicopter as it prepped for take off. Ford quickened his pace, not wanting to be left behind. Thatch shouted to be heard above the clamor.

“Right now we’re fifty miles off Hawaii,” Thatch explained. “This transport will take you there. You’re on a commercial flight back to San Francisco.”

Ford was grateful for the arrangements made on his behalf, especially given everything else that was going on. He saluted Thatch as he boarded the chopper and quickly found a seat. He spotted Serizawa watching from the deck a short distance away.

The chopper’s rotors were already spinning up. Within moments, the helicopter lifted off from the flight deck, carrying Ford away from the
Saratoga.
In the fading twilight, he made out a faint smudge of land in the distance, which he knew to be the islands of Hawaii. His next stop on his way back to his family. In all the chaos and tragedy of the last forty-eight hours, there’d been no chance to even try to get in touch with Elle back in San Francisco. He wished he was bringing back better news.

Peering down from the chopper, he spied the tiny figure of Dr. Serizawa. The Japanese scientist watched the helicopter depart before turning back to reenter the ship. Ford had left his father’s research aboard the ship. With any luck, it would prove useful to the people in charge of figuring out what to do about the giant winged monster on the loose.

If not, the whole world could be in serious trouble.

* * *

The TV news was on in the background as Elle and Sam fixed dinner in the kitchen. Although the sound had been muted, a crawl played across the bottom of the screen:

“EARTHQUAKE ROCKS NORTHERN JAPAN – NUCLEAR Q-ZONE SHAKES.”