1941539114 (S) (15 page)

“The goddess is slain!” Akakios said, hoping his enthusiasm might endear him to the large man.

“These things were not meant for your eyes,” the Atlantean said.

Akakios stammered, unsure of how to proceed. Then he managed to say, “I—I won’t tell anyone what I saw, if that is what you want.”

“No,” a second voice said. “You won’t.”

Akakios turned and found a very ordinary man standing beside the giant. He was dressed like a traveler. A fellow witness perhaps. Then the man shed his clothes and fell to his hands and knees, his body bending and contorting, changing into something else. When he—
it
—looked up again, many more eyes looked upon Akakios, framed by bony horns and a sharp-toothed grin.

Akakios tried to shove himself away, but his body revolted. His skin cracked and made moving nearly impossible. “What are you?” he shouted as the transformed man stalked closer.

“I...am hungry.”

16

The wave of pressure that strikes Helicopter Betty pitches the vehicle forward and carries it for a moment, before releasing it into a free fall. Before we can recover from the blow, the thunderous sound of a MOAB detonating chases the pressure wave and tears through us. If the others are shouting, I have no idea. Even with headphones on, designed to protect the wearer from the constant beat of the rotor blades, the roar has set my ears buzzing. My body feels like it’s been liquefied, and I find myself puckering my asshole, just in case.

Warning lights flash across the dash. Betty’s insides have been shaken loose. The chopper levels out, but shudders violently. Woodstock is shouting, pulling on the controls. I’ve seen him go through a lot. I know what his surprised face looks like. This is different. This is worse. I can see it in his eyes. Betty’s fate is sealed.

Woodstock’s voice crackles to life in my ear, pushing its way past the buzz. “Satan’s taint!” He’s fighting the controls, somehow keeping us in the air despite the warning lights and the shaking.

“Can we make it back to shore?” I ask.

He glances at me, his mustache bending up with a lopsided smile. “Can a moose lick its asshole?”

“Umm, no?”

“God damn right, no.” The other side of his mustache lifts, completing the smile. “But I can get us close. Probably.”

“Before you do,” I say, and he grunts. Knows what I’m going to ask.

“Hold on,” he says, and he puts the chopper into a slow counterclockwise spin while keeping us heading toward shore. After turning ninety degrees, he stops, letting Collins and me look out the side window.

“I don’t see it,” Collins says. Lovecraft is once again cloaked in rising smoke and steam.

“It’s there,” I say, “watching, waiting.”

But is it in one piece?

Collins leans closer to the window, her forehead against the glass. “I see it.”

And then I do, too. A breeze thins out the smoke for a moment, revealing what looks like a ribbed cocoon. Shimmering greens and blues ripple through the broad sheets of flesh, revealing sinews and veins large enough to drive a car through. Despite its opacity and apparent thinness, the surface looks undamaged.

The cocoon separates.

Pushed from the inside out, the column of smoke bulges, rises and billows away, propelled by the opening cocoon.

Wings,
I think,
they’re wings.

I’ve been calling this thing Lovecraft because the tentacled face bears a striking resemblance to the fictional monster Cthulhu, created by weird fiction author, H.P. Lovecraft, and because Alicio Brice theorized that Lovecraft had been influenced by a Ferox, whose goal was to condition the human race to fear beings with similar appearances. But I still believed it was more coincidence than conditioning. This Kaiju’s obvious similarities to Lovecraft’s creature solidifies Brice’s theory. For me at least.

The monster stands up tall, revealing a bulky torso covered in random spines and tufts of undulating tentacles. Despite the wings, this thing seems inspired by sea life. Some of it is clearly Aeros, but they’ve merged that ugly mug with who-knows-what, from who-knows-where. The end result is this abomination, and I’m pretty sure every person on the planet will be scared shitless when they see it, whether or not they’ve been exposed to Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu.”

The Kaiju stretches its wings wide, curls its long arms and fists to the sky and then lets out an angry bellow, tentacles warbling, its ring of teeth splayed wide. It’s in one piece, but that doesn’t mean the bomb didn’t hurt it.

Energy flickers over the creature’s body and then it goes dark. The wings fold in tight. The tentacles pull down into smooth ribs. And then the beast lowers itself into the water, slipping into the depths, this time invisible from above.

A clang and momentary grinding sound reminds me of our plight. We’re headed back to shore, but losing altitude. Starting at 18,000 feet might be what saves us. That, and Woodstock’s skill as a pilot.

“How we doing?” I ask.

“Let me put it this way,” he says. “Ain’t no way I’m putting her down in the drink with that fugly SOB swimming around out there. If I have to sprout wings and fly us there myself, I will.”

Betty jolts and coughs, but the rotor keeps spinning, just fast enough to keep us from plummeting out of the sky.

Bouncing and shaking our way back toward the coast, I contact Cooper and put things in motion. Lovecraft is gone. It’s not even showing up on sonar, which means it either has a way to avoid detection, or it’s hugging the sea floor. But we’re going to assume it’s headed toward the coast. For now, the military is standing by just outside Boston, ready to deliver a second round of entirely ineffective ordnance. But if we can make it back to dry land, that might not be necessary. I look down at the hard Zoomb case, now sitting between my feet. After hanging up with Cooper, I call Alessi.

“ETA?” I ask as soon as she picks up.

“Ten minutes. Are you okay?”

“Been a bumpy flight, and there aren’t any peanuts. Any trouble getting our assets in place?”

“None, and no questions asked. They even gave us a fighter jet escort.” Her delivery of this small bit of good news is followed up by a more glum, “It’s on the news, you know.”

I didn’t know, but how could it not be? “Let me guess: Lots of speculation, no real facts, and a lot of scared people.”

“A news chopper caught the last explosion from a
very
long distance. The image was pixelated, but clear enough to see something big still moving around after the blast. And everyone still alive on the coastline heard it.”

“Evacuations underway?”

“Slow, but yeah. It’s hard to evacuate people who need to be in hospitals. We’re doing what we can, though.”

In this case, her ‘we’re’ is Zoomb, not the FC-P, and I’m glad my inherited multibillion-dollar global corporation is doing something more than adding zeros to the bottom line.

“I’ll let you know when we’re on the ground.” I move my thumb to disconnect the call, but pause. “Thanks for being on top of this. If Endo were around, he’d—”

“Probably be pissing you off,” she says.

“Good point. Never mind then.”

“Thanks, though,” she says, and then hangs up.

The next thirty minutes are a slow motion, yet white-knuckled descent toward the ocean, where a real life sea monster lurks. It’s a big ocean, but I have a bad history of attracting trouble’s ugly attention. After several lurching falls and kick starts, the coastline emerges from the darkness. Normally, it would be easier to see, but most of the coastal cities have no power after the tsunami, and the sun isn’t up yet. The only lights I can see now in the pre-dawn gloom are the blue and red flashing of emergency vehicles.

“We’re going to make it,” I say, and I see Woodstock wince. “What?”

“Hate to break it to you, but seeing land and making it there are two different things. We’re just a thousand feet up and still dropping.”

Looks like we’ll be swimming after all, if we survive the crash at sea. “Cooper is tracking our GPS. I can have her send—”

“I said we weren’t going to make it to the mainland,” he says, “I didn’t say I was going to put the old girl down in the water.” He points out the windshield to the left. I have to lean forward, but then I see it. The bright beam of a lighthouse twitches past.

“I don’t see the island,” I say.

“Best I can do,” he says. “An’ if we get wet, the swim’ll be a short one.”

I give him a nod, and he says, “Buckle up!”

Collins and I glance at each other. We’ve been buckled and grasping various ‘oh shit’ handles for the last thirty minutes. Then we twist to the side and dive down. For a moment, I think we’re actually crashing, but we level out with a grind of gears that shakes the seat beneath me. The lighthouse is straight ahead, beaming its light into the cockpit every few seconds. The moonlit island comes into view, and my eyes widen. It’s less of an island and more of a collection of jagged rocks emerging from the ocean. The base of the lighthouse is actually submerged in the ocean, partially surrounded by the stony islet.

“Geezum crow,” Woodstock says, pulling hard on the control stick. “Going to be a rough one.”

The engine coughs.

The rancid scent of fuel smoke fills the cabin.

Woodstock puts the chopper into a slow spin, descending toward a ragged chunk of stone that looks just large enough to catch the chopper’s skids. We slow a bit, but then something clangs. The rotor snaps to a stop, and the chopper spins on its axis.

The list of things I hate seems to grow every year, but one of the very first things on the mental tally is the Tilt-A-Whirl. I puked a centrifugal-fueled ring all over my classmates in seventh grade. It even got in Jenny Stillwater’s mouth. The incident scarred me for life, the bright side being that no one saw from where the spew originated. But
I
knew. And if I had a repeated episode now, Collins and Woodstock would definitely know.

So I tighten my core, swallow hard and then scream when I see the ground rushing up. The skids hit hard, catching on the stone and slamming my head into the side door. I recover from the blow fast enough to realize we’re tilted at a pretty severe angle, but no longer in the sky. I glance out the side window and see a rotor blade wedged into the ocean below, holding us in place.

Then, with a groan, the blade rotates and the chopper topples off the rock. My seatbelt tugs hard against my body, and nearly Heimlich maneuvers the puke out of me, but I survive our second fall with little harm done. As water rushes into the cab, the plastic case between my feet jostles loose and falls. I reach for it, but it’s Collins who catches it, just above the water. She’s already unbuckled and righted herself. She’s bleeding from a gash on her forehead, but she seems alright otherwise.

“We sinkin’?” Woodstock asks. He digs into his pocket, plucks out a toothpick and inserts it in his upside down mouth.

“Just a few feet of water,” Collins says. “Probably dry land when the tide is out.”

“Well, that’s sumthin’ I s’pose. Now, help an old man down.”

After a few minutes of falling and cursing and crawling and splashing, we clamber onto the rocky shore
.

Woodstock pauses to give Betty a salute. “You done good, girl.”

Then we hoist ourselves onto a metal platform built several feet above the high tide line and head for the granite lighthouse’s door.

“Graves Light,” I say, reading the sign beside the door. I grin at Woodstock. “Well, you managed to crash us on the most foreboding island in Boston Harbor, so that’s great.”

“Better than the ocean,” he says.

“Touché.”

Collins tries the door and upon finding it locked, kicks it in. The door moves in just a little bit, and then bursts outward, nearly knocking us off the platform. Water pours out from the inside, washing past our already wet legs. After the water clears, I step inside. Glass crunches beneath my feet. The windows, top to bottom, are blown out, evidence of the tsunami’s passing. Five flights of spiral stairs later, I’m winded and looking out the watchroom window. Boston is barely visible in the glow of an early rising summer sun still over the horizon. Inside an hour, we’ll be able to see without a problem, but do we have an hour?

I climb the last flight from the watchroom to the lantern room. The harsh light forces my eyes closed until it passes, then I find the door and step out onto the catwalk, leaving the musty lighthouse interior and entering the humid, sea-scented outdoors once more. I put my hands on the railing, and look down. An array of solar panels are mounted to the tower, just below my feet. That’s how it still has power. I turn from the view of a darkened, partially rebuilt Boston and look north up the lightless coast.
This has to end sometime,
I think. Then I spot motion off to my right as something is caught in the lighthouse’s beam. My mind replays the image frozen into the back of my eyelids, and I see it for what it was.

A wave.

A big ass wave.

Taking some small comfort in the fact that the granite lighthouse is still standing after the last wave that struck the coast, I dive back inside, crashing into Collins and Woodstock, and tumbling the three of us down the spiral staircase, just as the structure rumbles from an impact.

17

“What the heck is wrong with you?” Lilly asked as Maigo backed away from the massive, stoic head with glowing red eyes. The masked face, armored and ancient, was clearly not alive, but the thing radiated power. “I mean, yeah, it’s freaky and intimidating, but it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.”

Maigo didn’t stop backing away until her back was against the tall spire rising up through the island’s core. Maigo could be all kinds of weird, Lilly knew, but after what she’d lived through, she was rarely afraid. Aside from the fear of becoming a monster, which she didn’t mention much around Lilly on account of her catlike appearance, Lilly found it hard to believe any kind of external force could affect Maigo so profoundly. She looked mesmerized. She looked...lost.