Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (57 page)

The ground shivered with another earthquake rumble and Hannah broke into a run, trying to keep her balance as the road quivered under her feet.

~

Always one for the expedient choices, Sergeant Dillon used his baton to crack a window on the nearside of the museum, and together they scrambled into the dusty, poorly-lit interior of the building. Power was off in this part of the city, although emergency lights burned here and there, casting an alien glow over glass cases full of old relics.

Dillon panned his flashlight around, the beam coming to rest on the headless sculpture of a centaur. “What’s all this, then?”

“Ancient Greek stuff,” Hannah told him, without having to look. Her uncle had taken her to the British Museum so many times as a child, she practically knew the layout of the place by heart. She pointed. “Roman over there. Middle Eastern there, Egyptian….”

“Your uncle knows about it, does he?” Dillon followed her, peering into the cases they passed, scowling at thousand year-old death masks and bits of pottery.

“He knows about a lot of stuff,” she told him. Hannah left it at that.

She didn’t tell him about the more esoteric turn the old man’s research had taken in the last few years. Professor Frederick Brook had once been a noted expert on the mythology of dead civilizations, but she had come back from Army service to find he was drifting into areas of scientific study that at best were on the fringe, and at worst considered the domain of crackpots. He had taken to associating with so-called experts who were more part of the ‘flying saucer’ crowd than real scientists.

Hannah worried about him, about his reputation. And now, after the arrival of the Kaiju creatures, there was a part of her that worried he might have actually been on to something.

She called his name as they moved through the galleries, her voice echoing off the walls. Hannah heard movement up ahead and turned a corner; and there he was, scribbling something into a notebook under the glow of a portable lamp.

“My girl,” he said, as he always did when seeing her. He gave her arm an affectionate squeeze and he grinned behind his bushy, ill-trimmed beard. Affable and slightly unkempt, the professor looked as if Hannah and Dillon had come across him at Sunday tea-time, not in the heart of a city under siege by monsters.

Hannah was thankful for the long shadows that allowed her to swallow her emotions before Dillon could see them. But the elder Brook did, and his face changed, creasing with concern.

“Hannah, what are you doing here? It isn’t safe!”

“Too right, Prof,” said Dillon, pushing past to look along the gallery for anything that could be a threat. “This your kit, is it?” He indicated a pile of books, a tablet screen and a chunky electronic device that resembled a 1980’s cell phone. “We’ll take it and go.”

When Dillon made to gather up the gear, the professor stepped in and prevented him. “No, don’t touch that. My equipment is very delicate-” He trailed off as the device began to emit a low, regular series of chirps like a radiation counter.

“I came to find you,” Hannah said, and for a second she heard the voice of a lost little girl in her own words. “This is Rob Dillon, he’s a friend.”

“We brought a helicopter,” said the sergeant, by way of introducing himself. “So, if you please…” Dillon made a
follow-me
gesture.

“Hannah, you know I hate to fly,” said the professor, as if that would end the conversation.

Dillon let out a grim chuckle. “You
have
seen what’s out there, haven’t you? Big and scaly and as ugly as sin.”

“Not all of them are scaly,” the professor corrected, in a gently hectoring tone Hannah remembered well from her schooldays.

“Everyone else has evacuated!” she blurted, her frustration with him rising. “Why did you stay behind? We have to go, now!”

He looked at her sadly, his old eyes clear and firm. “This is important, Hannah. My work is vital.”

“I’m sure it is,” Dillon ventured. “You can do it back at Rochester. Come on now, old fella.” The sergeant reached out to grab the professor’s arm, but Hannah’s uncle was spryer than he looked, and he slipped out of the policeman’s grip.

“No!” he barked. “What I am researching may be the key to understanding those creatures out there! I can’t leave until I have all the data!”

“What I understand is that the Royal Air Force is going to bomb this city flat,” Hannah replied. “Maybe even use a nuclear weapon, if that’s what it takes.” They had all heard the rumors around the airstrip, and having seen one of the creatures at close hand, Hannah no longer doubted the need for such extreme actions. She felt that odd prickling sensation in her belly again and she sagged back against one of the display cabinets. “We don’t have time for you to be stubborn, Uncle Fred.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I’m doing. Not at all.” The professor shot a worried look at the device, which seemed to be some kind of scanner unit displaying frequency patterns, and then he snatched up a dusty hardback from the pile. “Look here.”

He opened it to a page that showed a Grecian urn lying on the deck of a boat, as if it had just been recovered from the seabed. Part of the surface had been cleaned off to reveal a design, a great, salamander-like animal towering over a Greek trireme in boiling seas. An inferno wreathed the creature and the wooden boat was rendered in flames.

“They named this mythic beast
Urogora
,” explained the professor. “A legend…just a story, or so we thought.” He thrust the book into Hannah’s hands and grabbed the tablet screen, tapping it to bring up a video clip. A fragment of news camera footage from the Australian Kaiju attack played in a loop. There on the screen was something very similar to the image on the ancient urn, mouth open wide as it spat torrents of fire at Sydney Opera House.

“You’re saying that’s the same thing?” Dillon’s eyebrows rose. “This U-row-whatever?”

The professor nodded. “These beings, the Kaiju. Their attacks were predicted by ancient civilizations. This may not be the first time they have come to our world…” He gathered up a sheaf of papers and showed them to Hannah. “Do you
see
?”

Shaking her head, trying to assimilate what her uncle was telling her, she leafed through the pages and saw more phantasmal beasts, some of them from crudely-rendered cave paintings,
others in marble carvings or shapes in copper and gold. She halted when she found a photo of a bear-like form made from green jade. Across its arms were strange markings and from its back grew spines like spars of ice.

“The Inuit people call her
Tornaq
,” said the professor. “She is the fury of the Arctic made real. And there are more!” His voice rose as he snatched at the papers, waving them at Hannah and Dillon. “
Gaonaga
.
Kagiza
.
Taligon
. Names unspoken for thousands of years, but the knowledge of their coming was given to our ancestors. I know this, my girl. By God, it is true, all the things I was pilloried for by my peers, all
fact
!”

He didn’t see her gripping the photo of the one he had named Taligon; the monster made of bone spikes, armored scales and orange-hued crystal. Hannah glared at the image, transfixed by it.
Remembering
.

Dillon ran a hand over his head. “You’re saying all that
Mysterious World
bollocks about ancient astronauts is real?”

Outside, there was another low rumble as titanic opponents clashed miles distant, but the professor didn’t seem to hear it, nodding at the other man’s question. “In a way, Sergeant Dillon. I have found a set of commonalities to all the ancient cultures that feared and revered these beasts.” He became enthused as he explained. “All of them speak of unseen ‘masters’… An ephemeral god-race that act like the pantheon of old Greek myth, meddling in the affairs of our world by influencing the creation or unchaining of these creatures. These kings and queens of the monsters, these
Kaijujin
, they are what bring the beasts to Earth! It is their sport, just as you or I might play a game of cards…” His tone turned bitter. “And they have returned to plague our world.” He gestured around them. “Even now, they’re watching us. Watching this city fall.”

Dillon shook his head. “You get a lot of folks questioning your sanity, do you?”

“Yes,” admitted the old man. “But not so much now.” He held up the scanner device, scooping the rest of his materials into a battered leather satchel with the other hand. “A friend, a physicist of my acquaintance, built this. She believed like I do. She discovered a rare kind of cosmic radiation that occurs around all incidences of Kaiju activity… Not just in the beasts themselves, you understand, but in the events that surround them, even the circumstances of their birth…” He waved the scanner in the air, and the unit’s chirping quickened. “I believe it is some sort of residual effect, a by-product of the Kaijujin exerting their influence into our dimension. A telepathic fingerprint, if you will.”

“Right,” said Dillon, after a moment. “I have to say, mate, I have no idea what you’re on about. Science was never my strong suit. But clearly you believe what you’re saying, and I know
enough to know that you need to talk to smarter people than me about your…” He trailed off. “Kay-ju-jus.”

The professor didn’t answer. The noise from the scanner was growing louder with every passing second.

~

Patel shot Bramwell a look and instinctively shrank closer to the parked helicopter. A low, bone-deep murmur resonated through the streets. It was unmistakably an animal growling, but one huge and powerful and very close. In the wake of the noise, the ominous silence fell again.

“You reckon they’re gone?” said Bramwell. The sergeant whispered the question, his eyes wide. Patel had never seen the man so afraid before. Now Brook and Dillon had left them, it was as if Bramwell had given up on maintaining the pretense of a brave face.

For the past few minutes, the two men had listened to the slow, steady approach of the battling beasts, the unearthly snarls and the crash of breaking masonry. Now there was nothing, and their fears filled the stillness for them.

When the creature screamed again, the shock of it made Patel cry out in surprise. There was a scuffling, crashing thunder, and a huge shape rose in the sky. It blotted out the sun as it spun over them; a crimson-skinned monster covered with bone spikes and a great crest like the helmet of a samurai. Something had gathered up this gigantic alien creature and hurled it bodily through the air. Strange, luminous blood rained down on them from wounds in the red beast’s flesh as it passed over their heads and collided with the Centre Point tower two blocks south. The Kaiju vanished into a howling torrent of gray smoke, falling out of sight as the office building collapsed on it, burying it under a heap of glass and rubble.

A storm of bright sun-fire lit the clouds and the red thing’s opponent took to the air, rising on a surge of crackling energy. Revealed in all its obscene glory, the second creature was some kind of mutant therapod dinosaur, all talons and spines and mottled scaly armor. Misshapen crystal spars emerging from its broad back cast a rippling light over everything, and in defiance of gravity, wings made of fire snapped at the air, lifting it up to survey the damage it had done.

“We have to get out of here!” shouted Bramwell, vaulting into the helicopter’s cockpit. “
Right bloody now
!”

Fire began to rain from above, fat orbs of flame streaking away from the creature’s wings to blast blackened pits in the buildings all around them.

Hannah stared at the picture of the beast with the spines and the flame-wings.
Taligon
; a name from an Arabian myth, a tale told by nomads of a sky-demon that stalked the desert bearing death for the unworthy. This was the thing that had killed her lover John only two weeks ago, and the pain of his loss was so raw and so strong it was as if it was happening again, right now.

Crashing across the countryside from where it had made landfall on the Welsh coast, the monster had obliterated everything that lay before it – and in one of the cars it had immolated as it flash-burned the traffic on a highway, Hannah Brook’s fiancé had died in agony

She had been there that day. In the dark corners of her heart, she wished she had died there, too, but some quirk of callous fate had decided otherwise. The fires had spared her, the blast throwing her free while poor John burned with her name on his lips. Hannah could not understand
why
she still lived.

She crushed the picture in her hand as a rumble shook the walls of the museum and Hannah snapped back to the moment.

Her uncle staggered, trying to keep his balance as he peered at the screen of the scanner device. “I don’t understand…” he began, glancing toward Hannah and then back to the unit. “The energy patterns… Something is different, it’s nearby...”

The questions forming on his lips never had time to coalesce. With a scream of tortured air, a ball of flame crashed into the roof of the British Museum, and the building shuddered violently. Stone and steel spilt as the structure cracked.

“
Run
!” bellowed Dillon. “This place is gonna come down on us!”