Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization (12 page)

Another deafening wail could be heard above the tumult. He forced his way along the gantries, drawn by the sound of the creature. The terrifying screech was proof that he wasn’t crazy after all, that he had been right all along.

He hoped Ford understood that now.

* * *

Trapped in the van, Ford found himself forgotten in the midst of an increasingly hellish nightmare. Fleeing workers and emergency crews raced past the van by the dozens, oblivious to the desperate American handcuffed inside the vehicle. The cuffs dug into his wrist as he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle his hand free. He shouted frantically at the people running by.

No one listened or even glanced in his direction. They were all too busy trying to get away from… what?

* * *

Joe crept along the gantry toward the pit. One level below, a crew of unusually courageous emergency workers warily approached the edge of the giant sinkhole. All at once, some enormous creature, its exact contours obscured by darkness and a net of heavy steel cables, shoved up against its cage. An angry screech conveyed its displeasure at being trapped.

The earsplitting cry convinced the workers to turn and run like hell. Joe didn’t blame them; it was a natural response to the gargantuan monster trying to force itself out into the world. He would have run himself if he hadn’t spent the last fifteen years looking for answers. This could be his last chance to find out exactly what had destroyed the plant years ago—and why Sandra died.

Luckily for the fleeing mortals, the creature retreated back into the pit after its failed attempt to breach the net. Brody was impressed by the size of the cage, admiring the foresight and ingenuity of the engineers who had designed and implemented the ambitious safety measure. The creature’s bellicose howl faded away. It appeared the cage had worked.

Thank God
, Joe thought. He wanted desperately to lay eyes on the creature, but that didn’t mean he wanted to see it run amok.
That monster’s caused enough havoc already.

Then a giant black appendage rose up through a gap in the cables. Joe’s eyes bulged at the sight. At first he thought it was a limb of some sort, but then he realized that it was actually
just a single hooked claw.
His mind reeled at the sheer scale that implied. For the love of God, how big was this thing?

The crooked talon hooked onto the taut steel cables, gripping them. It began pulling downward on the net, exerting tremendous force. The heavy cables stretched and strained at their moorings. The catwalks overlooking the pit started to tip precariously as they were wrenched loose, so that they dangled at alarming angles above the sinkhole and the creature below. All six cranes, each over 150 feet tall, began to tip toward the pit like fishing poles being dragged down by an over-sized catch. Twisting metal squealed as if in agony.

Joe gasped as the gantry quaked beneath him. He stumbled backwards, away from the railing. Suddenly the ingenious steel “cage” didn’t seem quite as impressive—or reassuring—as it had been only moments ago. Hearing metal shriek, he spun around and saw the groaning cranes begin to buckle and bend catastrophically. The veteran engineer foresaw the collapse only seconds before it unfolded. One by one, each crane gave way in sequence, crashing down like a row of towering dominoes. More workers raced in terror from the falling cranes, each of which had to weigh at least two hundred tons. The screams of the trapped crane operators were drowned out by the din of warping steel and one earth-shaking impact after another.

Jesus Christ
, Joe thought.
It’s tearing this whole place down!

One of the cranes toppled over, falling straight toward Joe. Adrenalin and reflexes kicked in and he dived for safety only a heartbeat before the top of the crane crashed onto the gantry right where he had been standing moments before. It felt like another tremor had struck, rolling Joe across the walkway. Amazed to find himself still alive, he staggered to his feet and looked around.

Several fleeing workers had not been so lucky. They lay crushed beneath the fallen crane. Heads, limbs, and torsos had vanished, buried beneath the heavy piece of construction equipment. Spreading pools of dark arterial blood, looking almost black in the night, seeped out from beneath the mangled steel. Joe could tell at a glance that most of the victims had been killed instantly.

He wondered if they were the lucky ones.

* * *

This is insane
, Ford thought.
I can’t die like this!

He fought the handcuffs with all his might. His wrist was raw and bleeding, but the cuffs still refused to yield. The perverse absurdity of his situation was enough to drive him nuts. He could disarm a bomb in the middle of a battlefield, but he couldn’t get out of a damn van when this entire place was coming down on top of him?

He stopped tugging on cuffs, recognizing the futility of his exertions.

I’m sorry, Elle, Sam
,
I tried my best.
His heart broke at the prospect of never seeing his family again.
I always meant to come home to you.

A falling crane hit the rear of the van like a giant hammer, shearing off the rear doors and sending the parked vehicle into a spin. Ford cried out, but had no time to react to this heart-stopping shock. Held in place by the cuffs, which yanked viciously on his wrist and arm, he tumbled violently inside the spinning van. His body slammed into the interior wall, knocking the breath from him. Whiplash twisted his back. For an endless moment, his world turned into a bruising carnival ride.

Then, finally, the van came to rest several yards away from its starting point. Dazed, his heart racing, Ford found himself staring out the missing back half of the van, which now faced the heart of the mysterious complex. The facility was apparently constructed around an enormous pit where Ford guessed the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant had once stood. Compared to the crashing din of moments ago, there was a sudden silence—until he heard what sounded like sturdy steel cables straining against some inconceivable force.

The animal
, he realized.
The one Dad tried to tell me about.

That chilling, mind-boggling realization was enough to snap him out of daze and take stock. It occurred to him that the crashing steel crane might have been a blessing in disguise. Hurriedly checking the security rail, he felt a surge of excitement as he saw that the sturdy steel had been cracked by the accident. It took him a few anxious moments, but he managed to slide the cuffs of the rail, setting him free at last.

Yes!
he thought.
That’s more like it!

Wasting no time, he clambered out of the wrecked van by way of its missing back half. His radiation suit was still clumsy and uncomfortable, but, this close to the old reactors, he wasn’t about to take it off—even if none of the guards had been wearing them before. He kept the helmet and gas mask in place.

He glanced around the darkened base, trying to get his bearings. The fallen crane lay between him and a steep ridge beyond. Steel catwalks and scaffolding spread across the ridge like overgrown foliage, but he could still dimly glimpse the pit beyond. Metal cables continued to creak and groan. He started toward the scaffolding, wondering how on Earth he was going to find his father in this chaos, when frantic pounding seized his attention. He quickly spotted where it was coming from.

A Japanese crane operator was trapped inside the control booth of the capsized crane. The compartment was partially caved-in, so that there was barely enough room for the man inside, and the exit door was a twisted mass of crumpled metal. It was going to take a blowtorch, or maybe the “Jaws of Life,” to extricate the operator from the crushed compartment. The man’s face was bloodied and contorted with fear. His fists hammered against the cracked window of the booth. From the looks of things, his legs were probably broken. Frankly, it was a miracle he was still alive.

He locked eyes with Ford, who hesitated, uncertain what to do.

I need to find my father
,
but…

* * *

Ford!

Joe spotted his son from his elevated vantage point atop the quaking gantry. Ford was down below, still wearing the same secondhand radiation suit, and staring at the crushed operator booth of one of the fallen cranes. Joe watched with growing concern as Ford stepped over a tangle of steel cables stretching between the crane and the net above the pit. The cables went taut as the creature tugged again at the bars of its cage, dragging the cables toward the pit. Distracted by some drama below, Ford didn’t seem to realize that he was standing in the path of the cables, which were shifting toward him.

“Ford!”

Ford was too far away to hear Joe’s shouting over all the other commotion. Frantic, Joe rushed along the wobbling gantry, forcing his way past a stampede of terrified workers. He had to fight not to get carried backwards by the crush of bodies fleeing. Joe waved his hands in the air, yelling at the top of his lungs.

“
Ford!
”

But Ford still couldn’t hear him. Unaware of the danger posed by the moving cables, he appeared intent on rescuing somebody trapped in the crane’s demolished control booth. The cables jerked again with another powerful tug from below, which also jolted the gantry beneath Joe. The elevated steel walkway creaked and teetered, tossing Joe from side to side. His elbow smacked painfully into a guardrail, but Joe barely noticed. He sprinted further across the unsteady gantry, even as everyone else scrambled in the opposite direction. The fear-maddened crowd thinned out, clearing his way, as he raced to get within earshot of his son. His eyes widened in horror as the taut cables began to drag the entire crane toward the pit.

“
Ford! Get back now!
”

Ford heard his father shouting. Startled, he looked up to see Joe staring down at him from an elevated walkway. He couldn’t quite make out what his dad was yelling, but the utter terror on Joe’s face was clear enough. Metal scraped loudly against the pavement, throwing off sparks, as the collapsed crane surged toward Ford. Hundreds of tons of lethal metal and machinery threatened to flatten him like a runaway train.

He dived out of the way, forced to abandon the trapped operator. The crane swept past him, carrying the operator to his doom. Their eyes met briefly before the control booth, along with the rest of the crane, was yanked into the waiting pit. Ford wondered briefly if the man had a family…

Joe kept shouting at him from above. Scrambling to his feet, Ford looked up at his father again—just as the plummeting crane hauled down the entire elevated gantry Joe was standing on. Ford barely had time to register what was happening before the metal scaffolding collapsed, taking Joe with it. Crumpled steel landed in a heap at the edge of the giant sinkhole, atop a jutting concrete ridge.

“DAD!!!”

Ford rushed toward the wreckage, praying that Joe was still alive somewhere in the towering pile of debris. He couldn’t lose his father now, not like this! He needed to apologize to his dad for never really listening to him, for thinking he was crazy all these years. Who knew that it was the world that had gone mad—and that Joe Brody was the only person sane enough to see that?

The ruins of the collapsed gantry loomed before him. A thick cloud of dust and pulverized concrete rose from the debris. He was almost there—

Something huge and heavy slammed into the pavement in front of him, blocking his path. A glistening black column suddenly stretched high above his head. Stumbling backwards, it took Ford a second to grasp that what he was seeing was an enormous spiked claw, attached to a limb the size of a redwood.

No
, he thought.
It’s not possible. No animal can be that big!

Then another jointed black limb stretched up from the depths of the pit and smacked down on the ground several yards behind Ford.

And another.

And another.

Ford froze in terror. For a moment, all he could hear was his own breathing inside the gas mask and the rapid thumping of his heart. Nothing in his Navy training or combat experience had prepared him for the sight of the colossal creature rising up out of the darkness of the pit like a living mountain. An iridescent black exoskeleton, made of a hard shell-like substance, covered a vaguely insectile behemoth with at least six limbs of varying sizes. Two sturdy hind legs, with “backwards”-jointed ankles, supported the bulk of the creature’s weight, while a pair of elongated middle limbs extended from the beast’s armored shoulders. A much smaller pair of forearms, resembling those of a praying mantis, protruded from its upper thorax. Glittering red eyes peered out from beneath a flat triangular skull that almost looked like a rattlesnake’s. Saliva dripped from a huge hooked beak. The sheer scale of the creature beggared the imagination. It had to be nearly two hundred feet tall.

This was no mere “animal,” as his father had predicted. This was a monster.

The beast kept rising higher and higher, straightening to reveal its true, incredible size. Its titanic form blocked out the sky, hiding the stars. Its immense shadow fell across the sprawling base. Ford waited for the monster to squash him like a bug, but it paid no attention to him. Instead it hunched and grunted, heaving as though undergoing some kind of internal convulsion. Its armored back began to buck and bulge violently. For a moment, Ford allowed himself the hope that the monstrous creature was dying for some unknown reason. Perhaps an adverse reaction to the environment or the radiation in the pit? Or maybe the creature was simply too big to survive. Was it possible he was witnessing its death throes?

Please
, Ford prayed.
There’s no room in this world for a monster like this.

But then its molting back split open in two long parallel gashes, dozens of feet long. Glistening prongs of flesh emerged from the ruptured carapace, unfurling grotesquely into sleek black wings that reminded Ford of a stealth fighter. Blood pumped into the wings causing them to grow stiff and rigid. Thick veins supported a scaly membrane. They stretched and flexed, wet and shimmering. A hard black sheath, that appeared to be made of the same glossy substance as the creature’s exoskeleton, protected the underside of the wings.