Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization (3 page)

High above his head, a ragged hole in the ceiling opened up onto the outside world—almost as though
something
had burst outward from the depth of the cavern, leaving the ruptured sac behind. He exchanged more apprehensive looks with Graham. This was far more than they had anticipated.

Hours later, as their chopper ferried them away from the site, Serizawa got a birds-eye view of the giant sinkhole that had broken through the floor of the jungle. Nearly sixty meters in diameter, the hole was even bigger than it had looked from below. But that wasn’t all that alarmed him. Beyond the gaping pit, a massive drag mark stretched across the hilly rain forest, leaving a trail of crushed and uprooted trees and foliage. Acres across, the trail gouged a disturbingly wide path toward the north end of the island—and the open Pacific beyond.

Serizawa could only wonder what had emerged from the pit.

And where it was heading now.

The alarm clock jolted Ford Brody from sleep. One minute he’d been dreaming about riding a dragon through outer space, the next he found himself back in his bedroom in suburban Japan. Dawn streamed through the window curtains. Only nine years old, the boy smacked the snooze button on the clock and buried his face back into his pillow. Maybe he could get in a few more moments of sleep before his mom dragged him out of bed.

Then he remembered what day it was.

His eyes lit up and a mischievous smile spread across his face. He slid out of bed and tiptoed across the floor, which was littered with toy soldiers, tanks, and dinosaurs. Just last night, right before going to bed, he’d staged an epic battle between the miniature army-men and a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex. As usual, the dinosaur had won…

The glow of a heat lamp caught Ford’s eyes. Despite his big plans for the morning, he detoured over to his terrarium to check on the butterfly cocoon dangling from a branch inside the glass case. To his slight disappointment, the cocoon had not hatched overnight. He impatiently tapped on the glass, trying to provoke a response, but the pupa inside the cocoon refused to cooperate.

Oh well
, Ford thought, shrugging.
Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, he had other business to attend to. There was a reason he had set the alarm to wake him up an hour early. He had a lot to accomplish before his dad woke up.

But as he snuck out into the hall, still in his pajamas, he was dismayed to hear Joe Brody’s voice coming from his office at the end of the corridor. Creeping closer, Ford saw his dad pacing back and forth across the work-filled office, talking urgently into the phone:

“—I’m asking—Takashi—
Takashi
—I’m asking for the meeting because I
don’t
know what’s going on. If I could explain it, I’d write a memo.”

Shaking his head, Joe ran a hand through his unruly reddish-brown hair. Early morning stubble dotted his anxious face. Glasses perched on his nose. He threw an exasperated look at Ford’s mom, Sandra, who hovered in the doorway to the office, listening intently to her husband’s side of the conversation. Her short black hair needed combing, and she had a robe on over her nightgown. Ford didn’t understand what the problem was, but he figured it had something to with his parents’ work at the nuclear power plant. The family had relocated from San Francisco a few years ago so that they could both get good jobs at the plant.

“Because Hayato said it had to come from you,” Joe said impatiently.

His mom heard Ford shuffling behind her. She turned away from the office to spot him in the hallway. He crept up beside her, distraught over this unexpected turn of events.

“He’s
awake
?” he whispered.

Her face transformed in an instant, going from concerned professional to sympathetic mom right away. She knelt down to look Ford in the eye. She mussed his light brown hair.

“I know!” she whispered back. “He got up early.”

Ford’s heart sank. Of all mornings for there to be a problem at the plant. “What’re we gonna do?”

“Get dressed,” she instructed him, flashing a conspiratorial smile. “I’ll figure it out.”

* * *

Sandra watched her son scamper back to his room before turning her attention back to more grown-up affairs. Joe barely looked up as she re-entered the office, which was neatly organized despite all the graphs and reports piled about. Printouts of an unidentified waveform pattern were spread out atop his desk, alongside a stack of zip disks.

“… my data starts two weeks ago,” he explained into the phone. “I’ve got fourteen days of anomalous signal; pulsing between seventy five and a hundred kilohertz, then suddenly today it’s like the same thing but an
echo
. I’ve ruled out the turbines, internal leakage, we’ve checked every local RF, TV and microwave transponder. I’m still sitting here with two hundred hours of graph I can’t explain.” He paused, listening to someone at the other end of the line. “No—
No
—the fact that it’s stopped is
not
reassuring. That’s not good, that’s not the message here.”

He belatedly noticed Sandra waiting by the doorway. He placed a hand over the phone’s receiver. “What’s going on?”

“Your birthday?” she reminded him. “Someone is preparing your ‘surprise’ party…”

Understanding dawned on his face, but she could tell this was the last thing on his mind right now. Flustered, he nodded at her, acknowledging that he’d gotten the message, but making no effort to get off the phone. He held up his hand, signaling that he needed a few more minutes.

Sandra frowned, giving him a gently chiding look, but let him get back to his call. Lord knew she understood how troubling this new data was. She shared her husband’s worries.

“… But that’s—hang on—
that’s exactly my point
,” he insisted. “The moment these pulses stopped is when we started having the tremors.” He irritably shuffled a stack of zip disks from his desk. “With all due respect, Takashi, and honor. Respect and honor. With all of that, okay? I’m an engineer and I don’t like coincidences and I don’t like unexplained frequency patterning near a plant that’s my responsibility. I need a meeting. Make it happen.”

He was still arguing with Takashi as she left to check on Ford, who had already gotten into his school uniform. They waited until Joe disappeared into the master bedroom to change for work, then hurriedly hung a string of cardboard letters over the archway of the office door. The handmade sign read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!”

Grinning, she and Ford admired their work. They high-fived each other. Ford beamed in anticipation of his dad’s reaction.

But when Joe emerged from the bedroom, freshly shaven and wearing a suit and tie, he walked right by the banner without even noticing. His phone was glued to his ear and he spoke rapidly in Japanese on his way out the front door. “Come on,” he called out to Sandra and Ford, switching back to English. “We gotta go!”

Crushed, Ford looked up at Sandra. “It rocks,” she assured him. “He’ll see it when he gets home, I promise.”

Her comforting words appeared to do the trick. The absolute trust on his face tugged at her heart. Nodding, he grabbed his backpack and dashed out the door after his father. Sandra followed them, vowing to herself that, freaky signals or no freaky signals, she would see to it that her son was not disappointed.

Besides, it was Joe’s birthday after all. He deserved a celebration—after he got the higher-ups at the plant to listen to him.

* * *

“Later, Dad!”

Ford sprinted past the family car on his way to the bus stop. Seated behind the wheel, Joe waved distractedly at the boy, while wrapping up his call.

“Good. Finally,” he said in Japanese. “Thank you.”

Sandra slid into the passenger seat beside him. She clipped a “Janjira Power” ID badge to the lapel of her jacket and handed a matching badge to Joe.

“He made you a sign, you know.”

A sign?
A pang of guilt stabbed Joe as he realized what she meant, and that he had been utterly oblivious to whatever she and Ford had cooked up for his birthday. Contrite, he put down his phone and looked over at his wife. He’d had no idea …

“He worked so hard,” she said. “I think what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna come home early. I’ll take the car and pick him up and we can get a proper cake.”

Joe was grateful that she was on top of this—and letting him off so easily. “I’m gonna practice being surprised all day. I promise.”

To prove his sincerity, he generated his best “Holy Shit!” expression. His eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped as though he had just won the lottery. The effort teased a laugh from Sandra. He smirked back at her, enjoying the moment. Which couldn’t last, unfortunately. Not with the matter preying on his mind.

“Look,” he said, “I need to know it’s not the sensors. I can’t call this meeting and look like the American maniac. We get in, don’t even come upstairs, just grab a team and head down to Level 5—do 5 and the coolant cask—just check my sensors. Make sure they’re working.”

“You’re not a maniac,” she assured him. “I mean,
you are
, just not about this.”

He appreciated her effort to lighten the mood, but he had too much on his mind to joke around right now. “There’s got to be something we’re not thinking of.”

“Happy birthday,” she said stubbornly.

He turned toward her. An infectious smile penetrated the cloud hanging over him, and reminded him just how lucky he really was. The corners of his lips lifted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.

She leaned forward and kissed him warmly on the lips. Despite all his worries and frustration, he responded to the kiss, keeping it going even as he fired up the ignition. They reluctantly disengaged as he pulled away from the curb and headed towards the plant, which loomed prominently on the horizon.

His birthday would have to wait.

* * *

The Janjira Nuclear Power Plant perched above the coastline, dominating the skyline overlooking the Sea of Japan. Thick white plumes of steam vented from the plant’s cooling towers, while the reactors themselves were secured within three imposing structures of steel and concrete that had been built to withstand even a crashing 747. Adjoining buildings housed the turbines, generators, pumps, water tanks, storage units, machine shops, administrative offices, and other essentials. A row of transmission towers rose from the switchyard adjacent to the plant. High-voltage power lines transmitted freshly generated electricity to the nearby city and points beyond.

After parking the car in the lot, Joe and Sandra hurried off on their respective tasks. Within minutes, Joe was marching briskly down a corridor, trailed by Stan Walsh, his best friend and partner in crime. Another transplanted American, Stan was a few years older than Joe, who was counting on Stan to back him up when they met with Hayato and the others. Joe gulped down black coffee on the run. “#1 DAD” was emblazoned on his mug, a title Joe doubted he was entitled to this morning.

I’ll make it up to Ford later
, he promised himself,
after I get to the bottom of this.

A local engineer, Sachio Maki, hurried up to Joe with an anxious expression on his face. He nervously thrust a file of reports at Joe. Juggling his coffee cup, Joe flipped through the folder, which contained some seismographic readings he had never seen before. His eyes bugged out for real this time.

“Whoa.” He froze in his tracks, caught off-guard by the data. “What is
that?
”

“Yes,” Maki confirmed. “Seismic anomaly.”

The region had been experiencing a number of small underground tremors recently, but nothing this dramatic. “This is from when?” Joe asked urgently.

“Now,” Maki said. “This is
now
.”

Joe blinked, not quite grasping the truth. When Maki said “now” did he really mean…?

“This graph is minutes, not days,” Maki explained, spelling it out. “This is now.”

“
What?
”

“Wait,” Stan said, trying to keep up. “Seismic’ as in what? As in earthquakes?” He peered over Joe’s shoulders at the graphs. “Are those earthquakes?”

Joe shook his head. “Earthquakes are random, jagged. This is steady, increasing.” He flipped rapidly through the remainder of the report, his eyes tracing the steady upward path of the vibrations’ intensity over time. “This is a
pattern
.”

Just like the inexplicable signals he had been monitoring.

* * *

Following Joe’s instructions, Sandra headed straight for the sub-level corridors beneath the primary reactor building, pausing only briefly before a large open doorway. Warning signs, printed in Japanese, marked the boundary before them. This was where the buck stopped: the containment threshold where sturdy barriers could be deployed to seal off the area beyond in the event of a significant radiation leak. While the existence of the barriers should have been reassuring, the necessity of them was something she generally preferred not to think about. There hadn’t been a Chernobyl-type disaster since 1986, thirteen years ago, but nobody in the industry wanted to take any chances.

She had rounded up a four-person team to assist her in the inspection. They quickly climbed into full-body radiation suits, as required by the Level 5 safety protocols. Multiple layers of thick protective material, along with a self-contained breathing apparatus, made the uncomfortable suit both hot and heavy to work in. Internal helmet lights illuminated their faces. Sandra took pains to maintain a cool, confident expression on hers.

“Alright,” she said, leading the way. “Let’s make this quick.”

* * *

Caught up in the anomalous new seismic data, Joe moved more slowly down the hall toward his meeting. He barely registered Stan fretting beside him.

“Can I be your Rabbi here for a minute?” Stan pleaded, sounding like he was on the verge of another ulcer. He popped an antacid. “Before you go in there and pull some China Syndrome freakout on these guys, keep in mind that we are hired guns here, okay?”

Joe understood that Stan was worried about their contracts and careers, but there were bigger issues at stake here, like the safety of the plant and the surrounding community.