Kaiju Apocalypse (23 page)

“What is your delay?” Dr. Bach asked over the comm. She glanced back at the horrible visage and realized that the device, which would probably end the world was far better to look at than the old man on the screen. It shocked her a little upon realizing this.

“Why didn’t you just use one of your drones to activate the bomb?” she asked. “If it’s so easy to activate, why didn’t you just do it remotely?”

“Fail-safe reason,” Dr. Bach replied with obviously thinning patience. “The designer implemented a DNA-sequencing lock on the scanner. Only a human can activate it, not a drone.”

“Or a Kaiju,” she muttered. Dr. Bach laughed. It was a wet, harsh sound.

“That would have been ironic,” the doctor said. “Go over to the device and place your hand on the small screen on the left of the keypad.” Curri followed his instructions. On the screen comm, Dr. Bach nodded weakly, his breathing in labored gasps. “Now type in the following numbers: 3–0–3. That should do it.”

Curri obediently punched in the numbers. The machine buzzed and began to beep. “Now what?” She looked back at the comm screen. “Now what happens, Dr. Bach?
Dr. Bach?!
”

On the screen, the doctor was staring blankly at the screen, eyes unseeing. Behind him, Curri could just make out the signs of a machine struggling to keep the man as alive as it could. Something, and she wasn’t sure what, had overtaxed the man’s last bits of strength and energy. It rendered him unconscious, and probably put him into a coma. He would be of no more help to her, she figured. She looked away from the face of the wizened old man on the screen and back to the device. A small digital counter on the left of the DNA lock that she had activated was counting down. It took her a moment to translate the seconds counting down into something she recognized.

Three minutes. She had three minutes until the world ended by her hand.

Her mouth was dry. The bunker shook slightly as a Mother Kaiju outside began to strike the protective walls. Dust fell from the ceiling, as the shaking grew more concentrated. Curri stared at the device for a moment before she shifted her eyes to the doctor’s slack face on the screen. Seeing no help there, she sat down on the floor and pressed her back against the wall. She stared numbly at the device as paneling began to fall from the ceiling, a not-so-subtle reminder of the Mother Kaiju who was above and trying to stomp a way into the bunker.

One minute left before the device fully activated, Curri’s hands began to shake more as a deafening roar blasted through the bunker. She faintly heard the screams of the rest of her tribe as the Mother cracked open the walls of the bunker. The screams faded as the victorious howls of the Dog Kaiju filled her ears. She would have wept for them, but she had no more tears to shed. Not now, not ever.

The device activated. The floor beneath it disappeared as drills took it down into the Earth, accelerating to over ten times the speed of sound as it moved with single-minded purpose and determination. The resulting sonic boom ruptured her eardrums, and the flash from the propellant, which fueled the device, blinded her. She would have screamed in pain, but Curri’s mind was completely and utterly broken. She sat there, deaf and blind, and waiting to die.

The device bore deeper into the Earth, driving for the core. Theoretical physics clashed with actual reality as the neutron bomb within the device triggered. The Veryhs module, which contained cold dark matter, a substance which had only been theorized about a mere twenty years before. The Veryhs module shook and began to break apart as the nanoseconds began to tick by, cold dark matter infusing the neutron bomb.

The neutron bomb, enhanced by the collapsing Veryhs module, created, for the briefest of instances, a small, dark matter fueled neutron star at the very heart of Earth’s core. Pressure from the core immediately collapsed the star, causing what physicists call an “event horizon.” Within this, a small space approximately fifteen meters wide disappeared from existence. Nanoseconds later, more of Earth’s core disappeared as the black hole began to devour the planet from within.

Within two beats of Curri’s heart, Earth ceased to exist.