Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters
Read Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Online
Authors: James Swallow,Larry Correia,Peter Clines,J.C. Koch,James Lovegrove,Timothy W. Long,David Annandale,Natania Barron,C.L. Werner
Published by
RAGNAROK PUBLICATIONS
Crestview Hills, Kentucky
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Worldwide Rights
KAIJU RISING
AGE OF MONSTERS
Copyright © 2014 All rights reserved.
Edited by Tim Marquitz and Nick Sharps
With editorial assist
ance by D.L. Seymour
Designed by J.M. Martin
Cover by Bob Eggleton
Interior Art by Robert Elrod, Chuck Lukacs, and Matt Frank
Published by Ragnarok Publications | www.ragnarokpub.com
Editor In Chief: Tim Marquitz | Creative Director: J.M. Martin
Kaiju Rising
Age of Monsters
"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy. They do not attack people because they want to, but because of their size and strength, mankind has no other choice but to defend himself. After several stories such as this, people end up having a kind of affection for the monsters. They end up caring about them."
— Ishiro Honda
Big Ben and the End of the Pier Show – James Lovegrove
The Conversion – David Annandale
Day of the Demigods – Peter Stenson
The Lighthouse Keeper of Kurohaka Island – Kane Gilmour
The Serpent’s Heart – Howard Andrew Jones
The Greatest Hunger – Jaym Gates
Devil’s Cap Brawl – Edward M. Erdelac
Of the Earth, of the Sky, of the Sea – Patrick M. Tracy and Paul Genesse
The Flight of the Red Monsters – Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Operation Starfish – Peter Rawlik
With Bright Shining Faces – J.C. Koch
The Banner of the Bent Cross – Peter Clines
Dead Man’s Bones – Josh Reynolds
The Great Sea Beast – Larry Correia
Animikii vs. Mishipeshu – C.L. Werner
Jeremy Robinson
A jolt rolls through the boy’s bedroom floor. A truck going by?
No
, he thinks,
too powerful
. Eyes wide, he stands slowly and turns toward an east-facing window. A streak of blue ocean cuts across the view, a mile off and two hundred feet below. The water of Beverly Harbor is hard to see through the maples lining the backyard, but his imagination fills in the blanks. He’s spent enough time on the coast of his home town to mentally render the craggy shoreline.
The window grinds open. Early summer heat, thick with recent rain flows into the room. The wet metal screen, warming in the sun, smells so strong he can taste it. Staring out at the ocean view, the boy mindlessly picks at the chipping paint covering the wood between window and screen.
He watches, patiently waiting, until...
Thrum
.
The room shakes again.
He’s coming
, the boy thinks.
The distant ocean swells. A massive form pushes up, the film of water falling away in great sheets of hissing foam. The monster is huge. Massive. Larger than the boy remembered. Fully exposed, rising high above the ocean and higher above the boy’s home, the gargantuan roars.
Smiling, the boy watches the creature’s approach.
Buildings implode under foot.
Others explode.
Smoke rises. People flee. Chaos reigns.
And yet, the boy smiles.
A flash of blue light flickers along the spines lining the green behemoth’s back. The light bursts from the giant’s mouth, carving an arc of destruction through familiar neighborhoods, through the cemetery, through Shane Dillon’s house.
Yes...
The monster, a Kaiju of epic proportions, stands at the bottom of Prospect Hill, atop which the boy’s house is located. And yet, it towers over the boy, turning its head down and roaring again.
Blue light flickers.
The monster turns it eyes downward, connecting with the boy’s for a moment.
The boy smiles and speaks for the first time. “Godzilla.”
The story I just told you isn’t fiction (so calm down Toho), it’s a memory. The boy is me, circa 1983. I’m nine years old. It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’ve just returned home from a victorious soccer match. I’ve shed my shin guards, but I’m still wearing my orange jersey, number 37, and cleats. However, I’m not thinking about the game, I’m thinking about how I spent my morning before the game.
Creature Double Feature
, which aired in the Boston area from 1977–1983, was my Saturday morning routine. The show introduced me to Godzilla, Gamera, King Kong and the slew of Kaiju they battled. I was also exposed to other monsters like zombies, gargoyles, vampires and a variety of aliens, but none got so thoroughly lodged in my imagination as the city destroying giants.
In my room, I imagined Godzilla rising from the ocean, which I could barely see, and laying waste to my hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. In the winter, I became Godzilla, stomping up and down the snow-plowed roads, using chunks of snow for buildings, roaring, as I laid waste to the neighborhood.
Flash forward thirty years, I’m an author. I’ve written 40+ novels and novellas, and nearly all of them feature monsters—aliens, ancient Nephilim, Greek myths reborn and modern legends, but no Kaiju. While I personally consider all my monsters Kaiju, which means ‘strange beast’ in Japanese, I had yet to conjure a beast capable of flattening a city. Then, two and a half years ago, I decided to fulfill some childhood fantasies, and Nemesis was born.
Nemesis is a Godzilla-sized Kaiju that stomps down the New England coast, all the way to Boston. On the way, she (yes, she) makes a stop in Beverly Harbor, rises from the ocean and wipes out a good portion of my hometown. The child in me had been waiting a long time to tell that story. Even more than that, the home base for the government agency tasked with handling the Kaiju threat in the story, is located at the top of the hill I grew up on.
A short time later, the movies
Pacific Rim
and the new
Godzilla
were announced, and Kaiju started getting attention. I released
Project Nemesis
in November of 2012, eight months before the release of
Pacific Rim
, which helped Kaiju become a household term. Project Nemesis quickly became the bestselling original Kaiju novel—ever. A bold claim, sure, but let’s dissect it.
The word ‘original’ means a non-Godzilla novel, because if we look at the history of novels, the only other Kaiju novels of note, up to this point, were the Godzilla novels published in the 1990s. The fourth novel in the series,
Godzilla vs the Robot Monsters
was published in 1999. The fifth novel in the series,
Godzilla and the Lost Continent
was written, but never published...meaning the series failed. I suspect this would be different now, but the result was that between 1999 and 2012, there wasn’t a single noteworthy Kaiju novel published.
Which means that my claiming
Project Nemesis
is the bestselling original Kaiju novel is 1) Accurate, and 2) Not especially impressive. Kaiju, as a genre, has been largely ignored by the publishing world. But thanks to technological advances in publishing, small presses and self-publishers now have the ability to tackle subgenres considered too risky by large publishers. Unfortunately, the genre (as of writing this foreword) is still largely represented in popular fiction by
Project Nemesis
and its sequel,
Project Maigo
.
But not for long.
Enter
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters
. This collection of Kaiju shorts continues the traditions begun by Kaiju pioneers, bringing tales of destruction, hope and morality in the form of giant, city destroying monsters. Even better, the project was funded by Kickstarter, which means
you
, Dear Reader, made this book possible. And that is a beautiful thing. It means Kaiju, in pop-fiction, are not only alive and well, they’re stomping their way back into the spotlight, where they belong. Featuring amazing artwork, stories from some of the best monster writers around and a publishing team that has impressed me from the beginning,
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters
is a welcome addition to the Kaiju genre and an anthology of epic proportions. My inner nine-year-old is shouting at me to shut-up and let you get to the Kaiju. So, without further delay, let’s all enjoy us some Kaiju Rising.
-- Jeremy Robinson, bestselling author of
Project Nemesis
and
Island 731
Big Ben and the End of the Pier Show
James Lovegrove
The Forever Fun Pier had stood for more than a century, surviving everything the world could throw at it: two wars, three recessions, innumerable storms, and the endless corrosive lick of salt water.
But it was no match for a two-hundred-foot-tall sea monster and an almost as gigantic robot.
Ironically, on the day the pier was destroyed, owner Keith Brown was trying to decide its fate.
He was on the horns of a dilemma which were, to him, no smaller than the horns of the Kaiju currently wending its way up the English Channel towards his hometown.
On the one hand, he had a firm offer from an entertainment consortium to buy the pier.
They would take it off his hands, lock, stock, and barrel, no questions asked, for a cash lump sum.
The money was not retiring money, not head-off-to-the-Bahamas-and-drink-margaritas-for-the-rest-of-your-days money.
Once tax was deducted and business debts paid off, there wouldn’t be much left. Barely a few thousand. But the pier would not be his headache anymore; it would be someone else’s, someone with deeper pockets and friendlier creditors.
On the other hand, Keith had been contemplating an insurance job.
A fire would do the trick. A jerry can of petrol left in the fuse box room. A burning rag. It would look like an electrical accident, a stray spark from a circuit breaker igniting a terminal conflagration. The pier’s ancient, weathered boards would go up like tinder. Its wooden superstructure would be a raging inferno in no time. The fire brigade would have no chance of saving it.
The benefit of this option was that the insurance company would cough up the pier’s full market value, giving him twice the amount the entertainment consortium was tendering.
The drawback? Well, if he was caught and convicted of arson, there’d be no payout. Instead, there’d be a hefty fine and a stretch in jail. Besides, how
could
he burn the pier down? It had been in his family for four generations. His great-grandfather built it. His grandfather paid off the last of the initial bank loan. His father presided over the pier’s long, slow decline as a going concern. Keith inherited a sizeable overdraft and a crumbling, barely profitable business that incurred eye-watering overheads in maintenance and upkeep and was dependent on the vagaries of tourist crowds and the British summer.
But it was still the Brown family pier, their livelihood since 1885.
Keith’s attachment to it went beyond the merely financial; was rooted in his psyche. The pier was in his DNA, in his soul. Its rusty cast-iron stilts were his legs. Its white-and-blue finials and cupolas were his brain, his dreams. Its rickety helter-skelter was his heart.
~
The Kaiju, nicknamed Red Devil, toiled eastward up the Channel, inbound from the Atlantic. Sometimes he swam, thrashing himself along with great sweeps of his tail. Other times, when his feet could reach the seabed, he waded, neck deep. Puffs of smoke curled from his cavernous nostrils with every exhalation. His horns rose proud like two galleons.
Already he had downed a Portuguese Puma attack helicopter just off Madeira, incinerating it with a single fiery exhalation, and had crippled a French naval frigate.
A Royal Navy Astute-class hunter-killer submarine was now shadowing his progress, awaiting word from the top brass. If Red Devil strayed too close to the British coastline or looked as though he was attempting landfall, the sub’s captain could be ordered to unleash Spearfish heavy torpedoes and try to blow the beast’s legs out from under him.
This was a precaution, though, a last-resort measure.
Subaquatic Kaiju kills were hard to pull off and, more often than not, simply resulted in an even more irate monster.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s very own special defence measure was being prepped for action in its hangar at the Deepcut Barracks in Camberley, Surrey.
Big Ben.
The alert level at Deepcut was high amber, meaning that, if necessary, in under half an hour the engine could be cycling, the weapons primed, and the three-man pilot team installed in the cockpit, ready to go.
Should Red Devil decide not to circumnavigate the British Isles but instead strode out of the sea onto the nation’s sovereign territory, Big Ben would be deployed to intervene.
~
Keith, like everyone else, was keeping half an eye on Red Devil’s approach. BBC News 24 was tracking the monster step by step, with maps and satellite surveillance, like meteorologists monitoring the course of a hurricane. Talking heads—defense officials, Kaiju experts, naturalists—debated the likelihood of the creature actually attacking the country. The consensus of opinion was that Red Devil would bypass the south coast and carry on up the North Sea, making for the Arctic Circle. Possibly, he might stop off at Denmark or Norway en route, to snack on Scandinavians. This view, however, was offered more in hope than expectation, as was the similar notion the creature might prefer France to the UK. Once Red Devil reached the Straits of Dover he would be as close to either nation as could be, more or less equidistant from both. Who was to say he might not turn right instead of left and go in search of Gallic cuisine?
Kaiju were hopelessly unpredictable.
Those who anointed themselves experts on the beasts were more like educated guessers than anything. Gypsy Rose Petulengro, who told fortunes in a booth on the Forever Fun Pier, would have been a better predictor of a Kaiju’s movements than any of them. Her tarot cards and crystal ball were at least as reliable and credible as the prognostications of these amateur know-alls. The only thing they were interested in was a TV channel inviting them into the studio and crossing their palms with silver.
~
The town was quiet as Keith bicycled down to the pier that afternoon. Traffic was thin to nonexistent, pedestrians few and far between. The hotels had the hollow look of the dead—their guests having gotten into their cars and headed back home. The fish and chip shops lacked paying customers, and several had closed up, with hand-scrawled signs in the windows saying they would reopen once the all clear was given.
Along the south coast there had been an exodus inland.
Anyone who had somewhere else they could go had gone there.
The seafront was somewhat busier than the center of town.
There were a few determined dog walkers, a handful of elderly local residents who were damned if they were going to let some sea monster interfere with their daily constitutional, and the inevitable gaggles of Kaiju chasers who were camped out along the promenade, cameras at the ready, waiting on tenterhooks for Red Devil to lumber by.
Keith pedalled past a coachload of Japanese tourists who, from what he could gather, had forgone a trip to Brontë country in favor of coming down south to snap shots of the latest behemoth to emerge from the Romanche Furrow breeding grounds.
There were news crews from as far afield as Italy and Spain, along with casual opportunists who lived in the vicinity and knew pictures and footage of Kaiju could earn them a few quid when sold to the papers or the right online outlets.
A drizzle was falling but the mood was oddly festive.
Nobody seemed to think Red Devil would get it into his head to besiege the town. Why would he be interested in a faded, if still architecturally lovely, seaside resort? Kaiju were drawn to bright lights, big cities. They loved to topple a skyscraper or knock down some cultural landmark in the course of their ravenous rampages.
There was nothing
here
for Red Devil. There weren’t even that many people for him to pluck up in his taloned clutches and cram into his hungry maw. Portsmouth, Southampton, Brighton, the major conurbations to the west—any of them would be attractive to him, a human smorgasbord spread out for him to gorge on. Or he might round the rump of Kent and travel up the Thames Estuary to slake his hunger on London itself, a capital feast.
But not this humble little gathering of Victorian villas and Edwardian terraces perched on the end of a railway spur.
This shingle-beached nowhere which in long-ago, simpler times had been the holiday destination of choice for large swathes of the British working class and, before that, a Mecca for genteel urbanites seeking the restorative powers of sea water and salt breezes as an antidote to smog, stench, and tuberculosis.
Cocooned in kagoules and cheeriness, believing they were safe, the Kaiju chasers chattered and speculated.
Keith left them to it. He leaned his bike against the railings outside the Forever Fun Pier, his pier, and passed under the entrance arch.
Sally, the kid manning the turnstile, barely glanced up as Keith went through.
She was concentrating on her iPhone, alternating between catching Red Devil updates and texting friends. She was eighteen, a responsible girl with a disabled mother to support.
That morning Keith had sent a round-robin email to all his employees in which he insisted that the pier would remain open unless, or until, Red Devil came within twenty miles of the town.
He left it up to them whether to turn up for work or not. It was their choice, but he wanted those who were keen on earning a day’s pay to have that opportunity.
He was, he thought, a fair boss.
He had a light-touch, lenient attitude, reckoning you got more out of people the less you swaggered and shouted, and he paid generously, well above minimum wage, even though he could not realistically afford to. He suspected that if he had been harder-nosed, more bullying and miserly by nature, more of a Scrooge, the pier might not be in such a parlous state.
But a pier should be fun, that was the thing.
A pier should be a bright, happy place, a palace of dreams. If the workforce were relaxed and content and glad to be there, it would show. It would communicate itself to the punters, and they would be happy too—and spend more money.
Gypsy Rose’s booth was shut.
She had stayed home today. Perhaps she knew something no one else did. But Wheezy Bob was in his kiosk in the amusement arcade, where the shelves of the penny falls machines went back and forth in a ceaseless silvery tide and the one-armed bandits whistled and flashed their come-ons. Not that anyone was playing them. Wheezy Bob was alone, with nobody queuing to have their banknotes changed into change.
“Busy today, Mr Brown,” he said.
He had been with the pier longer than Keith. He had been young when Keith’s father took over. “Rushed off my feet.”
“Want to take a fag break?
I bet you’re dying to.”
“And abandon my post when there’s work to be done?”
Bob let out one of his raspy, phlegmy chuckles. A lifelong smoker, every one of his laughs sounded like a last gasp.
“I think we can manage without you for five minutes.”
Wheezy Bob fired off a yellow grin and shambled outdoors, fishing his roll-up tin from his pocket.
Keith moved on.
The rock and candyfloss stalls hawked their brightly colored wares, but no one was buying. The tables in the café were empty save for salt shakers and sugar dispensers. The souvenir shop, with its snow globes and brim-slogan bowler hats, waited for customers who weren’t coming. Jaunty Muzak—currently “I Do Like To be Beside the Seaside”—drifted ghostlike through the air. Everything glistened under a breath-light sheen of rain.
Keith strolled right to the end of the pier.
Here, next to the helter-skelter, stood a three-hundred-seat theater. In times gone by, its auditorium had resounded to hilarity and applause as comedians, novelty acts, singers, and dancers had followed one another onstage in riotous variety bills. Now it was a venue for performers at the tail end of their careers: once-notorious rock ’n’ rollers, aged crooners with suspiciously black hair, overweight gag merchants who had toned down the racism in their material but kept the mother-in-law jokes, conjurors who had never heard of street magic and still considered the old rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick an essential part of their repertoire. A full house was a rarity these days. Sometimes the box office was lucky to sell a dozen tickets.
The entertainment consortium had plans to turn the
theater into a nightclub. Rip out the seating, install a bar and a DJ podium, maybe some go-go cages. Call it something hip and happening but vaguely nautical such as Trident or Polaris. Why not give a sea-straddling hotspot the same name as a submarine-launched nuclear warhead?
It made as much sense as anything,
Keith thought.
He leaned on the railing at the very tip of the pier.
He was 150 meters out from the shoreline, his whole world behind him. Jade waves churned below, curls of ivory surf washing around the stilts. The impacts of the breakers thrummed through the huge hollow iron tubes and their lattice of cross-braces, as though the pier were some massive, intricate vibraphone. It was a deep and mournful sound, beat after low beat, the throb of nostalgia and loss.
To sell?
To burn?
Either way, Keith would be left with nothing.
Some cash in the bank, yes, but that wouldn’t truly compensate for what he had got rid of. It would never assuage his guilt. The pier was a family heirloom, something he was meant to preserve and pass on to his son, were he ever to father one. But he was unmarried—hadn’t found the right woman yet—and he was well into his thirties and all manner of clocks were ticking.
