Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (56 page)

“We’re committed,” he said simply.

Hannah nodded. “Thanks, lads,” she told them, a swell of pride rising briefly in her chest.

They flew on in silence for a while before Dillon called out from the cabin behind her. “How we gonna do this, then?”

“We should follow the river.” His nose buried in a map, Patel traced a finger along the line of the Thames. “The smoke won’t be so thick over water.”

“Copy,” said Hannah, shifting her hands on the cyclic and collective sticks.

Patel opened his mouth to say something else, but then the observer caught sight of the streets passing below him and he lost the words. Hannah remembered the studious young constable was from south of the river, brought up somewhere in Streatham – and they had to be flying over his part of town at that very moment.

She chanced a look out of the cockpit as they flew over the tops of apartment buildings. Nothing moved down there, no people, no vehicles. At junctions, traffic lights were still operating, forgotten in the chaos of the evacuation and signaling at empty streets. Here and there she saw evidence of small, human-scale disasters – an elevated railway station crammed with stalled trains, a vehicle on fire that had been left to burn, a school playground filled with lines of luggage abandoned in the rush to escape.

“You see anyone?” Dillon asked, craning his neck.

It flashed past so quick she could only register the sight as a fractional image, but from the corner of her eye, Hannah saw a bed sheet that had been painted with the words ‘The End Is Nigh’ tethered to the balcony of a tower block. Four bodies, large and small, hung at the ends of ropes that had been tied to a balcony rail, necks broken.

Many people were saying this was the beginning of the end of the world. The sudden, inexplicable arrival of the creatures, the things the media were calling
Kaiju
after some Japanese word that meant “strange monster”. All around the planet, churches were packed, suicide rates were spiking, and everyone who had ever cried out about the end of days was claiming they had been right all along.

It started slowly. A rash of peculiar sightings in remote regions. A town going silent in Africa. An unexplained earthquake in the Arctic. A liner lost at sea, the wreck found ripped apart. Then the first of the attacks came, a thing like a gargantuan salamander demolishing Sydney with firestorms and fury. Some said they were aliens that had fallen from space, others that they were products of science gone insane or the reborn manifestation of old myths.

All that mattered was that they were everywhere now, dozens of them crashing across the Earth, fighting with humanity, fighting each other. And in their wake, there was nothing but devastation and death.

Hannah tried to figure out what it all meant, but she came up empty. She wasn’t one for believing in brimstone and days of judgment – the pilot only cared about what she could see and feel, what she knew to be true. At this moment, that was as simple as
family
.

India 99 passed over Battersea Park, and turned to come in low over the tide-swollen Thames, the dirty gray-green water empty of all river traffic. Hannah heard Patel mutter something under his breath that sounded like a prayer.

“Did you see that?” he said. “In the park? All the trees were uprooted. There were marks on the ground, like footprints.” He frowned. “Big ones.”

~

The shriek hit them before anyone could reply, powerful enough that it cut through the heavy drone of the Eurocopter’s rotor blades.

It was the same noise Hannah had heard in the dark of the night, but louder, closer,
angrier
. Some animal-hindbrain part of her reacted with a jolt, the tiny fragment of primitive gray matter still buried in the human mind after millions of years of evolution, knowing instinctively the cry was the call of a predator. Her blood chilled. Nothing on Earth could make a sound like that, nothing that had come to be through natural means.

“There!” called Bramwell, pointing out of the canopy toward the northwest, beyond the greensward of St. James’s Park.

Hannah looked and saw a rolling front of heavy cloud a few miles distant, a mass of smoke from fires and the churn of dust from tons of crushed masonry. Huge shadows shifted inside the haze, indistinct forms crashing back and forth. They moved faster than any things of such size had a right to. For a split-second, a roil of cloud parted and she caught sight of a thick tail with twin barbs, curling and snapping at the air. It was blood red and shiny in the weak sunlight, scaled like the skin of a snake.

The massive whipping form coiled and flicked back as something else in the haze came in to attack it. Hannah glimpsed vast, burning spikes lit by ethereal orange light, and then the cry came again, followed by the hollow boom of breaking concrete.

“Two of them?” she wondered aloud. “Looks like they’re having a punch-up…”

“Good,” snapped Dillon. “That means they’re occupied. As long was we don’t attract their attention, we may actually be able to get out of this alive.”

Hannah nodded, and pushed India 99 forward, skimming the river as they passed the Houses of Parliament and the shattered stub of Big Ben. The upper third of the historic clock tower had been torn off and now it lay half-submerged in the shallows on the far embankment. Crossing Westminster Bridge, Hannah took the helicopter up as the river curved eastward ahead of them, and she sighted north toward the Bloomsbury district where the British Museum lay. Their destination was dangerously close to the edge of the dust clouds, and she weighed her choices. A direct path would be fastest, but if the Kaiju caught sight of them…

“Bloody hell,” breathed Bramwell, scanning the route of the river through a pair of binoculars. “That big glass tower, the Shard…it’s gone. Everything up by London Bridge looks like there’s a bite taken out of it.”

Hannah hesitated, part of her wanting to see the destruction with her own eyes. But that faded under a surge of fury that came up from her heart.

London was
her
home. Born and bred in its streets, she loved the old city in a way that it was hard for her to articulate – as if in some manner the bricks and stone, the river and the streets, they were her own personal property. It was part of the reason she had come to work for the Met, to do something for the place that had made her who she was. To pay it back.

Now these things were here, heedlessly laying waste to her city. Destroying everything she cared about. Hannah felt an odd, stabbing pain in her belly and tensed, but the feeling faded even as it happened.

Then she saw the motion of the river below, the unnatural writhing of the water as something large and quick moved beneath the surface. “Down there!” she shouted, as she stamped on the rudder pedals, turning the helicopter into a pivoting tail-slide.

In a blast of white froth, the murky waters of the Thames exploded and a sinuous, lizard-like form burst out of the river, a wide arrow-head mouth snapping open and shut as it tried to grab
India 99 in its fanged maw. Hannah retreated back and away as the beast leapt up, shaking off water, to land splay-legged across the rail lines of the Hungerford Bridge.

“What the-?” Bramwell never finished his sentence as the creature released a chittering bark and blinked its yellow, slitted eyes at them, each as wide as a man was tall. There was savagery there, savagery and cunning.

Hannah’s mind flashed back to a childhood outing to the zoo, to the gecko enclosure in the reptile house. This thing seemed to share some physical similarity to the small lizards she had seen sunning themselves on rocks, but only in the most limited sense. It was bright azure blue, its scales shimmering even in the dull morning light, bony spines and a serrated tail lending it a ferocious aspect. It cocked its head, blinking again, and Hannah remembered something else from that day; she remembered seeing a gecko pull a fat fly straight out of the air and chew it down whole, swallowing the buzzing insect – wings, body and all.

“Look out!” called Dillon as the lizard-creature coiled and leapt at them. Impossibly, it seemed to blur through the air, moving almost instantaneously.

Hannah slammed the stick hard over and sent India 99 into a dive that put them dangerously close to the water. The Kaiju snatched at them and missed, scrambling over the embankment, quickly pulling itself up over the high Ferris wheel frame of the London Eye.

“You said there were only two of them!” said Patel.

“Evidently not!” Hannah shot back.

The blue-skinned creature crushed the passenger pods of the landmark as it climbed, and the wheel’s steel spars began to twist and distort under its weight. A clawed hand swatted at the helicopter and Hannah felt the backwash as it cut the air in front of them.

“Did you see it move?” Patel continued. “How did it do that?”

“We’ve got to get away from this thing!” said Dillon.

“It’s too late, it saw us,” called Bramwell. “We go on, it’s gonna follow us…”

“Then let’s give it something to chew on.” Hannah deliberately turned the helicopter back toward the Kaiju, pointing India 99’s nose directly at the creature’s snout. She nodded toward a control panel in front of Bramwell. “Give him a tan!”

“Okay…” Bramwell grabbed at the small joystick that controlled a barrel-shaped pod set on a gimbal mount under the helicopter’s fuselage.

Along with the thermal camera, the police helicopter’s other main weapon in the war on crime was something they called ‘the nitesun’, a searchlight array capable of putting out a
blazing thirty million-candlepower beam. In the daytime, its effectiveness was lessened, but it was the only defense they had – and at such close range to the creature and with those big eyes…

“Smile, you ugly sod!” spat Dillon as Bramwell aimed the nitesun at the Kaiju’s head and stabbed the switch.

A shock of brilliant sodium-white light washed out the creature’s scaly face and it recoiled away with a deafening squeal. In a strangely human motion, it brought up its clawed hands to shield its face and staggered backward, colliding with the bent spars of the London Eye.

“It’s blinded!” shouted Bramwell. “
Go
!”

Hannah hunched forward against the straps of her pilot’s chair, almost as if the act would make the aircraft move faster. She took India 99 up and away, accelerating across Savoy Street, the Strand, and out over Covent Garden. Behind her, Patel was struggling to look back along the line of the fuselage.

“I don’t see it,” he said. “I think we got clear.”

The pilot said nothing, unwilling to test their luck. Up high now, skating along the bottom of the low cloud, the wounded city presented more of itself to her. North of the river, the destruction was far worse than she had expected.

A path of wreckage and obliteration crossed the landscape from east to west, vanishing into mist somewhere over Shoreditch, carving in a curved line kilometers long all the way to Euston and the fire clouds. Buildings lay in fragments, pounded to rubble, and in places the earth itself had been shredded and torn, opening ancient sub-basements and underground stations to the air. The road of ruin was like a vast black arrow pointing at Regent’s Park, piercing the green heart of London. All this had taken place in a day, a monstrous assault on a city that had weathered the bombardments of two world wars, terrorist strikes, and civil unrest, and never buckled. A dark, foreboding mood collected in Hannah’s chest as the full reality of her reckless endeavor became clear to her.

She held the controls tightly, balancing on the edge of a new choice.
If we turn back now…

Hannah felt Sergeant Dillon’s hand resting on her shoulder. “Brooky,” he said quietly over the helmet intercom. “You’re the aircraft captain. Where to now?”

Below them, a green oval had appeared in among the blocks of townhouses. “Bedford Square,” she said, recovering her strength. “Stand by, I’m taking us down.”

~

An eerie quiet fell as India 99’s rotors slowed to a halt. Even in the hours before dawn, amid the city’s streets there was always the faint rush of distant traffic, the sounds of life. Now there were only the irregular tremors in the depths of the ground, echoes of leviathan footfalls that felt too close for comfort.

Hannah scrambled from the helicopter, snatching up an emergency medical kit to sling over her shoulder. Dillon climbed out after her, grabbing a police-issue Airwave radio handset.

Patel and Bramwell hesitated in the open hatchway. Both of them were reluctant to step out, as if to do so might alert the creatures stalking the city as to their presence. Patel’s hand dropped to the Taser in his belt and Dillon gave a gallows-humor sneer. “If you see one of ‘em, you’re gonna use that, are you?”

Chastened, the other man nodded glumly. “I suppose not. They probably wouldn’t notice anything short of a rocket launcher.”

“So
stay
unnoticed,” Hannah told them. “You only swat the bugs you see, right?”

“We’ll stay with the chopper,” insisted Bramwell. “Get your uncle and then tab it back here, fast as you bloody can.”

Out to the east, there was a sudden skirling bellow that rattled windows all around the square, and orange fire reflected off the clouds. In the distance, part of a spiny shape appeared over the rooftops and then vanished again, the mass of it slamming into the side of the cylindrical BT Tower; one of London’s oldest skyscrapers, they watched it tilt slowly away like a felled tree.