Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (58 page)

~

Bramwell dropped into the pilot’s chair and slapped at the engine controls, frantically trying to spin up the rotors. He had watched Brook do it a hundred times.
How hard can it be?
Panic pushed him on, and he felt a surge of relief as the Eurocopter’s motors engaged. The drooping blades began to move, agonizingly slowly, slicing through the smoke as the parkland around them caught fire.

Patel craned over his shoulder. “Sarge, what are you doing? You’re not a pilot, you can’t fly this thing!”

“I’ll figure it out on the way!” he snarled back. “Unless you want to get out and start walking? No? Then shut the hell up!”

“Wait!” the young observer grabbed the other officer’s shoulder. “You can’t just go. Brook and Sergeant Dillon, we can’t leave them behind!”

Bramwell jabbed a finger at the canopy, pointing toward the side of the museum building across Bloomsbury Street. Fires were taking hold there, and part of the northern annex had crumbled into ruins. “They’re already dead! I never should have listened to that stupid girl-”

“No!” Patel grappled with Bramwell’s hands as he tried to pull on India 99’s control sticks. “I won’t let you!”

The sergeant let go of the cyclic and shot back his elbow, catching Patel in the chest and knocking him into the rear cabin. “Shut up. You’ll thank me later.” Sweat streaming down his face, Bramwell silenced the voice in his head echoing Patel’s words and worked the controls. He could hear the observer behind him, calling into his Airwave handset, trying to warn Brook and Dillon.

With a jerk, the helicopter slipped to the right, the skids bouncing over the grass – but it began to rise, wobbling and turning under the sergeant’s inexpert handling.

India 99 was just over five meters off the ground when a fast, low form burst through the foliage and leapt at the aircraft’s underside. Blurring like an image seen through rain-slick glass, the gecko-creature slipped across distance by some unknown, alien means. Its shiny blue skin still wet with river water, it had not given up the pursuit of its airborne prey. The Kaiju that Professor Brook had called Kagiza rose, jaws open wide, and clamped its mouth around the boxy fuselage of the helicopter.

Its body weight dragged India 99 back to earth with a thrumming whine as the helicopter’s twin Turbomeca engines overloaded. Kagiza landed, limbs splayed, and bit down on the machine. Rotors screeched and snapped as they chopped at the earth. With a burst of smoke and gasoline fire, India 99 exploded. The gecko-beast was blown back, trailing blood, flesh and shattered fangs. Bramwell and Patel perished, the life crushed from both men in an instant.

~

Dillon’s gut twisted as he heard Sanjay Patel die, the observer’s final cry of pain cut short over the crackling radio channel. He had liked the plucky young constable, liked Patel’s earnest manner and fresh-faced enthusiasm for the work of being a copper; and now the poor lad had been snuffed out like a doused candle, his future cut short by some monstrosity that had no right to exist outside of cartoons and comic books.

He’d raise a pint for Sanjay later, even one for that fool Bramwell, if they could get away. Now was no time to dwell. Their ride home was gone, and the British Museum was coming apart all around them. Dillon kept running, pushing the Prof before him as he went, desperate not to let anyone else get captured by the unfolding chaos.

Under the curve of a wide glass roof, they sprinted across the great atrium in the middle of the building, making for the main entrance. Fires burned everywhere, crackling through the contents of the gift shop and consuming priceless relics from cultures far away and long dead. Dillon had a sudden, bleak flash of London a thousand years from now, the dust of the city being sifted by some future archeologist trying to piece together the cataclysm that had destroyed it.

Then the thought was gone as he caught his leg on a broken piece of brick and fell in a heap. Hannah spun around, reaching out to pull him up, but he waved her away. “Look out!”

From where he had fallen, Dillon could see straight up, and in the center of his vision was a sagging section of roof support, the metal spars warped by the heat of the fireballs raining from the sky.
Even as the words left his mouth, a ragged section of the roof detached from the frame and came crashing down into the atrium.

He heard Hannah scream out her uncle’s name as the old man was struck by the falling girders.

Dillon scrambled to his feet, but even as he moved to Hannah’s side, he knew it was already too late for the professor.

The old man lay against a slab of stone, a spar of metal protruding from his chest. Blood grew in a red blossom across his tweed jacket and he gulped in a shaky breath of air. “Oh dear,” he managed, his words soft. “That’s torn it.”

Even as he spoke, the color was draining from his cheeks. Dillon had seen injuries like this before at road traffic accidents, and he knew that the elder Brook’s life would be measured in moments.

Tears streaming down her face, Hannah took up the professor’s hand, and he gave a wan smile, touching her cheek. “My girl. So glad you are here. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She was shaking her head, refusing to accept what was happening, but the old man had already given himself over to the truth. He flashed a look to Dillon and the sergeant gave him a grave nod. The professor returned it, and that was communication enough.
I’ll make sure she’s okay
, Dillon vowed.

“I came to save you,” said Hannah. “You’re all I have left.”

“No,” he told her. “You have your friends. And you
have
saved me, Hannah. You did it every day. You
will
save me.” With effort, he pointed at the leather satchel containing his scanner device and notes. “Take that. Get it out of here, get my work to the right people. Sergeant Dillon was right, it needs to be…seen by people in the know…” He coughed, and pink foam collected on his lips. “You’ll save me Hannah, you’ll prove to all the people who thought I’d lost my mind…that I was…I was
right
.”

“Uncle…”

“I do love you so, my girl.” He squeezed her hand. “You have to survive…
Both of you
.”

The words were a great effort, and they were his last. The professor’s eyes became glassy and dull, and Dillon bit back a rush of sorrow as the old man’s fingers slipped from Hannah’s grasp.

Outside, the firestorm had not abated, and the building continued to shake, destroying itself by inches. Dillon took a breath and placed a hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “Brooky. We’ve got to go.”

“Everyone is dead,” she breathed, so softly he almost didn’t hear her over the noise. Hannah flinched and clutched at her gut.

“Not
everyone
,” he insisted. “Not yet.”

The pilot gave a slow nod, then leaned in to plant a delicate kiss on the old man’s face. In the next second, Hannah’s expression shifted and all the terrible emotions churning inside her had been shut away. She took up the satchel and shot Dillon a hard look. “We need to get to the river. Without the chopper, it’s the only other fast way out to the cordon.”

Dillon nodded and pointed into the street. “I got an idea.”

~

The black Porsche convertible had been probably been dumped by some rich city banker in the panic following the evacuation, but Dillon made good use of the car by hotwiring the ignition and sending them pell-mell down on to the Kingsway, back in the direction of the Thames. Hannah gripped the door frame for dear life as the sergeant pressed the Porsche’s pedal to the firewall and mounted the pavement, scraping paint off the car as it grazed low walls and bollards.

She risked a look over her shoulder and regretted it. The blue lizard creature, Kagiza, was coming at them in a loping run, and for a second Hannah thought it would have them, but then the bigger, red-hued monster emerged from a side-street. Rains of dust and wreckage streaming off its shoulders, it grabbed the tail of its smaller rival, whipping it off the ground in a jerk of motion.

Gaonaga, she remembered, that was the crimson beast’s name. It slammed Kagiza into the glass frontage of an office building and left it for dead. Hannah saw it turn to watch them flee, in time to see the massive, spiked form of Taligon fall from the sky and barrel into it.

Taligon and Gaonaga crashed together with a thunderous blast of noise, talons and teeth flashing as they attacked one another. Alien fire sparked between them, conjured from within the flesh of the beasts, and Hannah flinched as an overspill of lambent energy crawled over the roadway behind them.

Her fear went away for a moment, and she suddenly understood what that cameraman up in Newcastle had experienced – a true moment of shock and awe at the sight of the battling Kaiju, a clarity. Nothing would be the same now these creatures walked the earth. The world would forever be changed by them…and by whatever powers were compelling these colossal beasts into existence.

Then Taligon was bounding down the road after them, jaws snapping in anger, and that fleeting moment of wonder hardened into new terror. The thing that had taken those she loved was now coming for Hannah Brook, and her gut stiffened with sympathetic pain. She heard the scanner unit inside the satchel chattering wildly as the monster’s shadow fell over them.

“Here we go!” called Dillon, slamming the car through a slalom of parked double-decker buses and out on to the embankment near Temple Pier.

Taligon’s heavy footfalls were so powerful that their encroaching impacts made the lightweight sports car bounce off the tarmac, and suddenly Dillon lost control of the vehicle. They collided with an iron fence and the Porsche’s emergency airbags deployed with a crump of displaced air.

Dazed, Hannah pulled herself from the seat as darkness fell all about her. She felt a strange static charge tickling her skin. It was some side-effect of the great creature’s internal stores of energy, leaking out into the air. Too afraid to look up, she dragged Dillon from the driver’s seat and on to the road, her uncle’s heavy satchel pulling on her shoulder as she moved. The sergeant was barely conscious, knocked almost insensate from the car’s crashing halt.

Propping herself under his armpit, Hannah marshaled all the effort she could and pulled him toward the pier, crying out with exertion.

She felt a slow gale of furnace-hot air waft over her. It was dry and it stank of rotting meat. Taligon’s breath clogged her throat as the creature’s huge jaws levered open. Unable to stop herself, Hannah looked back and saw the Kaiju glaring at her, mouth open and hideously fanged, a baleful fire-glow building in its throat.

All at once she wanted to know why the beast had such hate for her. Hannah had never felt so small, so inconsequential in her life. First John, then home and her uncle – why did these gargantuan fiends want to destroy everything about her?

Defiance bubbled up from inside Hannah and she shouted at the creature. “Do you hear me?” she bellowed. “Are you listening, Kaijujin or whatever you are? Just leave us alone! We’ve done nothing to you! This is our home, not yours!”

If it understood her, Taligon gave no sign. Instead, it reeled back and gathered death-fire in its mouth, seconds away from release.

A great red blur came out of nowhere and shouldered into the spined Kaiju with a violent crunch of bone and flesh. The crested creature Gaonaga attacked its counterpart with brutal, swift ferocity, and Hannah staggered back as the road cracked and broke under the force of it.

Without waiting to see how the fight would play out, she half-ran, half-stumbled down the pier with Dillon’s weight upon her. A small pilot boat was still tethered to the end of the jetty, and she tipped her friend into the gunwale. In a few moments, Hannah had cast off and set the engine running. The boat’s prop engaged and it lurched away from the pier and into the swell of the Thames, too slow for comfort. She pulled on the wheel as they moved into open water, trying to steer between the shapes of road vehicles that had been hurled into the river during some other clash between the invaders.

Then Hannah’s heart sank as she glimpsed the broken spine of a buckled bridge up ahead. The roadway of Waterloo Bridge had fallen into the river and blocked off the route west. She could see spars of smashed concrete protruding from the water and knew that any attempt to pass through them would doubtless see the pilot boat’s hull torn open. Hannah cursed, her shout joining the thunder of battle sounding out around her.

Nearby, Gaonaga and Taligon continued to fight back and forth along the northern bank, trading lightning-fast blows and jets of ethereal energy that laid waste to everything around them. For a moment, she thought that the crimson-skinned Kaiju would fall to the relentless fire-shock attacks of its scaled opponent, but then Gaonaga charged, head lowered like an enraged stag, and it gored Taligon with the sickle-sharp crest growing from its brow. Taligon went down in a cloud of dust and she heard the deep growling rasp as Gaonaga’s chest rose and fell in panting gasps.

Then, slowly and deliberately, the red beast turned toward the river and waded out toward the boat. Hannah shrank back against the helm as Gaonaga moved steadily toward the little craft. It seemed to take care not to swamp the boat, lowering itself until its enormous saurian head was almost as the same level.

It looked directly at her, eyes narrowing with something that could only be
intelligence
. She began to wonder – had this one been
protecting
them? Gaonaga’s great green eyes were not those of a wild beast or a calculating predator. This alien life form belied a mind that could understand, perhaps even reason…if only she knew how to communicate with it.