Kaiju Apocalypse (13 page)

“LT!” a voice shouted over the comm link of his helmet. He faintly recognized Kirby’s voice. “We've reached the target! It's a bunker of some kind!”

“Can you get into it?” McCoy asked, getting to his feet. He dumped the empty magazine onto the street and slapped a fresh one in.

“Yes sir! It looks as if a Mother Kaiju had a go at trying to dig into it. A good portion of the bunker is exposed including its main door,” Kirby replied, the excitement evident to McCoy over the comm channel. McCoy motioned at the Gunny, who waved in reply and came trotting over. Kirby continued to chatter into the comm. “Grimes was able to get the door open. We're inside and holding, but the entrance isn't large enough to get the Dogkillers inside! They've formed up and created an external defensive perimeter right outside the door. So far, it’s keeping the Dogs off us, but I don’t know how much longer they can hold! We need some support, sir!”

“Let’s move, people!” Gunny shouted, his bellow cutting through the sounds of battle like a knife. The surviving squads began to move, slowly at first, but with greater confidence as the Dog Kaiju were pushed back by the combined firepower of the four squads.

McCoy rounded a corner in the street and the battle for the bunker came into view. The remaining three Dogkiller suits were fighting for their lives, their main guns turning waves of incoming Kaiju to pulp. Kirby and Grimes stood in the doorway of the bunker, adding fire from their rifles to the bloodbath that was taking place around the half-buried structure.  The bunker itself looked like a giant metal box, six feet or so below street level. The claw marks of a massive Mother Kaiju stretched across the whole area from where the beast had been trying to dig into it. McCoy hoped that Mother Kaiju was long gone, because there was not a hope in Hell for them if she was lingering about.

McCoy didn't slow as he approached the entrance to the bunker. He dove, barreling passed the two soldiers as he headed for the open door, the Gunny hot on his tail. Kirby and Grimes stopped firing as they moved to allow him inside. McCoy clambered to his feet and began to fire into the mass of Kaiju to cover the remaining troop’s entrance into the bunker.

The shock of seeing no one else alive out there almost caused him to stop shooting. He blinked for a moment, stunned, before he looked over at Kirby.

“Get that door closed!” McCoy roared. Kirby stared at him in disbelief.

“
But sir, the Dogkillers...” Kirby started to say. The Gunny pushed past him and grabbed the door’s controls.

“Nothing we can do for them, son,” the Gunny said, not unkindly, as he activated the door’s controls. “They can’t fit in here, and if we leave the door open, our mission has failed. And boys? This mission cannot fail.”

As the five-ton, titanium-reinforced door began to slide close, McCoy watched one of the last Dogkiller suits fall. A larger-than-normal Dog Kaiju jumped through the air at it, taking its armored head clean from the armor's shoulders with a single swipe of its clawed and scaly hand. Kaiju eyes, filled with hate and rage, met McCoy’s human ones for a brief instant. The lieutenant felt a cold shiver strike deep into his soul as the door clanged shut.

*****

“Please understand, ma’am, that the secondary team hasn’t swept through everything yet,” Sergeant Tim Fishlock told Kitty as she stepped out of the airlock onto Tango Zeta 3.  “We've done a rough and tumble recon of this station, but... well, ma’am, there's some weird stuff over here. Stuff I’ve never seen before to be honest with you.”

Fletcher stood beside Kitty, his engineering kit in hand. He had been ready to enter the station, but now paused at the sergeant’s words. He shot a concerned look at Kitty, who was looking past the sergeant’s bulky frame and into the station. She blinked and looked back up at the large soldier.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘weird stuff’?”

“According to Captain Whitmire’s orders, you’re the ranking individual here, ma'am.  Maybe it would be best if you took a look for yourself,” Fishlock said, obviously relieved to pass the responsibility over to someone else. “Yeop, Greenwood, get over here!”

Two of Fishlock's men rushed over at the sound of his booming voice.

“Sergeant, I really don’t think...” Kitty’s voice trailed off as Fishlock turned a steely eye on her.

“Escort the lady and her friend to that mess in the aft section,” Fishlock ordered. “You know the one I’m talking about.”

“Sergeant? You said we didn’t–” Yeop began to protest but quickly cut himself off. He nodded briskly. “Roger that. Ma’am, sir, if you’ll follow us?”

“Um, actually,” Fletcher looked sheepishly at the sergeant. “I really need to get to engineering. I need to make sure the power and life support are going to stay on while we're here.”

“Fine,” Fishlock answered in a stressed-out tone. “You're with me then.”

“This way, ma'am,” Yeop said, leading Kitty deeper into the station as Fishlock and Fletcher turned and walked down another passageway into another part of Tango Zeta 3. Greenwood followed Kitty and Yeop closely, his rifle, like Yeop's held at the ready. While neither soldier had his finger on the trigger, they were close enough to doing so to make the civilian mildly perturbed.

“You guys seem a bit nervous,” Kitty said and made a small motion at their rifles. “Is there something going on that I need to know about?”

“Don't you worry about a thing, ma’am,” Greenwood told her. “We got you covered.”

Along the path to wherever it was Yeop and Greenwood were taking her, Kitty noticed strange markings and damage to the walls of the station's corridors. What appeared to be a fine layer of rust coated the walls in random spots, creating a patchwork look all throughout. Here and there, they would pass a mangled corpse lying on the floor and blocking their route, which Yeop would nudge aside with his boot as gently as he could manage. The bodies were in a strange state of decomposition; as if something onboard the station had accelerated their decay rate, while allowing the membrane to remain mostly intact across the body. That alone was very strange. Decomposition was a tricky thing to gauge in an artificial environment like the Tango Zeta 3 station, but it didn't take a doctor to see that something was very wrong with the corpses. Their skin was dried and withered, as one would expect from a body that was not subjected to any form of humidity. However, even her untrained eye could see that there was a distinct and disturbing rot beneath it all.

“What in the world happened here?” Kitty asked, though she had a nagging sensation that she didn’t really want to know.

“Not a clue, ma'am,” Yeop admitted. “Our corpsman said it wasn’t like anything he had ever seen. Honestly, we were hoping that Captain Whitmire would give us a few doctors, biologists, or something. He didn't send over any med techs, just you and a whole bunch of engineering types. Guess he didn’t figure on anything over here being out of the ordinary.”

“You said your corpsman hadn’t seen anything like it before?” Kitty looked around. “Where is he now?”

“Hold one, ma’am,” Yeop said and clicked his comm. “PO Esper, report to Delta Checkpoint.”

A minute later, a short, squat man of indeterminate age ambled into the corridor. He gave Kitty a curt nod before he looked over at Yeop. “What’s up, Corporal?”

“Tell Ms. Kitty here exactly what you told me,” Yeop said. The corpsman blinked, confused.

“I don’t know what to say, Corporal,” Esper said. “I said it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before–”

“Before that,” Yeop cut him off. The shorter man’s face paled.

“That was just me running my mouth, Corporal,” Esper protested. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Tell her anyway,” Yeop ordered. Esper sighed.

“I said that it looked like those experiments I read about during the Second World War,” the corpsman explained at last. “You know, the ones that the Nazis ran on the Jews, and what the Japanese did to the Chinese? Just... some really messed up crap, ma’am. Inhumane. But it reminded me of some mad scientist’s experiments, but on a level that’s gonna give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”

Kitty was beginning to wish that she hadn’t volunteered to come over to the station. “Looks like he’s right about that,” Kitty agreed.  She knelt over a nearby corpse and whipped out her pocket sensor. She ran it over the head and neck portion of the corpse, but the results were inconclusive. She frowned and moved the sensor down. The result was the same.

Her knowledge of biology was very limited, though she knew enough to recognize that whatever had happened to the corpse on the ground was not a natural occurrence. She pushed the sensor closer to the body and tried to get a better reading. The sensors flickered for a moment before data began to stream across the small screen.

Kitty’s eyes tracked the information for a moment before she began to nod. The sensor would need a few minutes to process her findings, but it wasn’t immediately dangerous, whatever it was. She put the sensor away and looked up at the three soldiers standing nearby.

“This is fascinating,” Kitty said. “Thanks for bringing this to my attention.”

“This wasn’t what we wanted to show you, ma’am,” Yeop shook his head. “This is... a smaller part of what we found.”

“There’s more?” Kitty asked, eyes wide.

“It gets much, much worse, ma’am,” Esper said. “You have a strong stomach?”

“I can hold my own,” Kitty proclaimed.

“Good enough for me,” Yeop said and motioned towards a door at the end of the corridor. “Greenwood, Esper, escort the lady down the hall.”

“You’re not coming?” Kitty asked, surprised.

“Rank hath its privileges, ma’am,” Yeop said. “I don’t want to see that mess anymore than I need to.”

Kitty glared at him, not sure what to make of his warning or reticence. She followed the soldiers down to the aforementioned door and pulled her sensor unit out again. Kitty stretched it out in front of her. The bio-readings on the other side of the smashed door were off the chart with activity, but nothing showed as a real life form, at least not in the sense of a human or Kaiju. The data was there, but much like the corpse she had inspected moments before, the results of the data were inconclusive. Gathering her courage, Kitty walked to the doorway and peered into the room.

“God have mercy on us all,” she breathed as her eyes took in the mass of living, writhing tissue that covered the room's floor and dangled from its ceiling. The whole place was alive with a slime-slicked flesh that moved and oozed about like flowing blood. It moved like one organism, pulsing and throbbing in a peculiar beat. It was flesh, and yet it was not. The sensors began to go crazy as it began to pick up dangerous biologically hazardous readings in the room. She gagged as the smell hit her nose. Kitty took a step back away from the door.  “Burn it. Burn it all. Now!”

Half an hour later, the room had been cleared. Fishlock's men had sealed it and torched the mess inside with improvised flamethrowers taken from the Tango Zeta 3 station's own arsenal. Yeop, it seemed, was an amateur pyromaniac who was able to whip up three flamethrowers from an old welding kit, leftover fuels and a few pressure valves. Kitty ordered all the bodies littering the station disposed of as well. They were gathered up by soldiers in bio-gear and jettisoned into space. Kitty had one of the soldiers collect a small sample of the stuff from inside the room before it was burnt. She kept it, along with her own sensor readings, to take back to the
Argo
for someone more qualified to take a look at. Only then did she return to her original mission aboard Tango Zeta 3. 

Yeop and Greenwood stayed with her as she headed for the station's bridge and began the long process of hacking into and downloading the sensor and comm logs. After another hour of cursing and futility, she managed to crack it. She felt like ripping her hair out once she was in, though. Just as the Captain had feared, the station's encryptions were more advanced and based off a completely different algorithm than the ones being used aboard the
Argo
. Kitty still managed to gain some access to them, though, and got what little of the data she could pull secured for transport back. She could've started plowing through it all right there if she had wanted, but Kitty wasn't staying on the station any longer than she
had
to. For all she knew, she and the entire group had been exposed to whatever had killed the station’s crew and created the fleshy mass on the station. They would all need to go through a long decontamination shower and be held in isolation before being allowed return to the
Argo
proper.