The Baen Big Book of Monsters, page 46
He sat up with a jerky start, her voice still ringing in his mind.
The empty moonlit meadow lay like a great silver carpet before him, infinitely peaceful; even the shrilling of the tireless crickets was withdrawn in the distance. He must have slept for some while, for the shadow of the house formed an inky black square on the ground immediately below the window. The moon was sinking.
Hogan sighed, shifted the gun on his knees, and immediately grew still again. There’d been something . . . and then he heard it clearly: a faint scratching on the outside of the bolted door behind him, and afterwards a long, breathless whimper like the gasp of a creature that has no strength to cry out.
Hogan moistened his lips and sat very quiet. In the next instant, the hair at the back of his neck rose hideously of its own accord.
“Hogan . . . Hogan . . . oh, please! Hogan!”
The toneless cry might have come out of the shadowy room behind him, or over miles of space, but there was no mistaking that voice. Hogan tried to say something, and his lips wouldn’t move. His hands lay cold and paralyzed on the shotgun.
“Hogan . . . please! Hogan!”
He heard the chair go over with a dim crash behind him. He was moving toward the door in a blundering, dreamlike rush, and then struggling with numb fingers against the stubborn resistance of the bolt.
“That awful thing! That awful thing! Standing there in the meadow! I thought it was a . . . tree! I’m not crazy, am I, Hogan?”
The jerky, panicky whispering went on and on, until he stopped it with his mouth on hers and felt her relax in his arms. He’d bolted the door behind them, picked Julia up and carried her to the fireplace couch. But when he tried to put her on it, she clung to him hard, and he settled down with her, instead.
“Easy! Easy!” He murmured the words. “You’re not crazy . . . and we’d better not make much noise. How’d you get here? The road’s—”
“By boat. I had to find out.” Her voice was steadier. She stared up at his face, eyes huge and dark, jerked her head very slightly in the direction of the door. “Was that what—”
“Yes, the same thing. It’s a lot bigger now.” Greenface must be standing somewhere near the edge of the cottonwoods if she’d seen it in the meadow as she came up from the dock. He went on talking quickly, quietly, explaining it all. Now Julia was here, there was no question of trying to stop the thing with buckshot or rifle slugs. That idea had been some kind of suicidal craziness. But they could get away from it, if they were careful to keep to the shadows.
The look of nightmare grew again in Julia’s eyes as she listened, fingers digging painfully into his shoulder. “Hogan,” she interrupted, “it’s so big—big as the trees, a lot of them!”
He frowned at her uncomprehendingly a moment. Then, as she watched him, Julia’s expression changed. He knew it mirrored the change in his own face.
She whispered: “It could come right through the trees!”
Hogan swallowed.
“It could be right outside the house!” Julia’s voice wasn’t a whisper any more; and he put his hand over her mouth.
“Don’t you smell it?” he murmured close to her ear.
It was Greenface, all right; the familiar oily odor was seeping into the air they breathed, growing stronger moment by moment, until it became the smell of some foul tropical swamp, a wet, rank rottenness. Hogan eased Julia off his knees.
“The cellar,” he whispered. “Dark—completely dark. No moonlight; nothing. Understand? Get going, but quietly!”
“What are you—”
“I’m putting the fire out first.”
“I’ll help you!” All Julia’s stubbornness seemed concentrated in the three words, and Hogan clenched his teeth against an impulse to slap her face hard. Like a magnified echo of that impulse was the vast soggy blow which smashed at the outer lodge wall above the entrance door.
They stared, motionless. The whole house had shaken. The log walls were strong, but a prolonged tinkling of glass announced that each of the shuttered windows on that side had broken simultaneously. The damn thing, Hogan thought. It’s really come for me! If it hits the door—
The ability to move returned to them together. They left the couch in a clumsy, frenzied scramble and reached the head of the cellar stairs not a step apart. A second shattering crash—the telephone leaped from its stand beside Hogan. He checked, hand on the stair railing, looking back.
He couldn’t see the entry door from there. The fire roared and danced in the hearth, as if it enjoyed being shaken up so roughly. The head of the eight-point buck had bounced from the wall and lay beside the fire, glass eyes fixed in a red baleful glare on Hogan. Nothing else seemed changed.
“Hogan!” Julia cried from the darkness at the bottom of the stone stairs. He heard her start up again, turned to tell her to wait there.
Then Greenface hit the door.
Wood, glass, metal flew inward together with an indescribable explosive sound. Minor noises followed; then there was stillness again. Hogan heard Julia’s choked breathing from the foot of the stairs. Nothing else seemed to stir.
But a cool draft of air was flowing past his face. And now there came heavy scraping noises, a renewed shattering of glass.
“Hogan!” Julia sobbed. “Come down! It’ll get in!”
“It can’t!” Hogan breathed.
As if in answer, the lodge’s foundation seemed to tremble beneath him. Wood splintered ponderously; there was the screech of parting timbers. The shaking continued and spread through the entire building. Just beyond the corner of the wall which shut off Hogan’s view of the entry door, something smacked heavily and wetly against the floor. Laboriously, like a floundering whale, Greenface was coming into the lodge.
At the bottom of the stairs, Hogan caught his foot in a roll of wires, and nearly went headlong over Julia. She clung to him, shaking.
“Did you see it?”
“Just a glimpse of its head!” Hogan was steering her by the arm along the dark cellar passage, then around a corner. “Stay there. . . .” He began fumbling with the lock of the cellar exit.
“What will we do?” she asked.
Timbers creaked and groaned overhead, cutting off his reply. For seconds, they stared up through the dark in frozen expectation, each sensing the other’s thoughts. Then Julia gave a low, nervous giggle.
“Good thing the floor’s double strength!”
“That’s the fireplace right above us,” Hogan said. I wonder—” He opened the door an inch or two, peered out. “Look over there!”
The dim, shifting light of the fireplace outlined the torn front of the lodge. As they stared, a shadow, huge and formless, blotted out the light. They shrank back.
“Oh, Hogan! It’s horrible!”
“All of that,” he agreed, with dry lips. “You feel something funny?”
“Feel what?”
He put his fingertips to her temples. “Up there! Sort of buzzing? Like something you can almost hear.”
“Oh! Yes, I do! What is it?”
“Something the thing does. But the feeling’s usually stronger. It’s been out in the cold and rain all week. No sun at all. I should have remembered. It likes that fire up there. And it’s getting livelier now—that’s why we feel the buzz.”
“Let’s run for it, Hogan! I’m scared to death here! We can make it to the boat.”
“We might,” Hogan said. “But it won’t let us get far. If it hears the outboard start, it can cut us off easily before we’re out of the bay.”
“Oh, no!” she said, shocked. She hesitated. “But then what can we do?”
Hogan said, “Right now it’s busy soaking up heat. That gives us a little time. I have an idea. Julia, will you promise that—just once—you’ll stay here, keep quiet, and not call after me or do anything else you shouldn’t?”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“I won’t leave the cellar,” Hogan said soothingly. “Look, darling, there’s no time to argue. That thing upstairs may decide at any moment to start looking around for us—and going by what it did to the front wall, it can pull the whole lodge apart. . . . Do you promise, or do I lay you out cold?”
“I promise,” she said, after a sort of frosty gasp.
Hogan remained busy in the central areas of the cellar for several minutes. When he returned, Julia was still standing beside the exit door where he’d left her, looking out cautiously.
“The thing hasn’t moved much,” she reported, her tone somewhat subdued. She looked at him in the gloom. “What were you doing?”
“Letting out the kerosene tank—spreading it around.”
“I smelled the kerosene.” She was silent a moment. “Where are we going to be?”
Hogan opened the door a trifle wider, indicated the cabin immediately behind the cottonwood stand. “Over there. If the thing can tell we’re around, and I think it can, we should be able to go that far without starting it after us.”
Julia didn’t answer; and he moved off into the dark again. Presently she saw a pale flare light up the chalked brick wall at the end of the passage, and realized Hogan was holding a match to papers. Kerosene fumes went off with a dim BOO-ROOM! and a glare of yellow light. Other muffled explosions followed in quick succession in various sections of the cellar. Then Hogan stepped out of a door on the passage, closed the door and turned toward her.
“Going up like pine shavings!” he said. “I guess we’d better leave quietly. . . .”
“It looks almost like a man in there, doesn’t it, Hogan? Like a huge, sick, horrible old man!”
Julia’s whisper was thin and shaky, and Hogan tightened his arms reassuringly about her shoulders. The buzzing sensation in his brain was stronger, rising and falling, as if the energies of the thing that produced it were gathering and ebbing in waves. From the corner of the cabin window, past the trees, they could see the front of the lodge. The frame of the big entry door had been ripped out and timbers above twisted aside, so that a good part of the main room was visible in the dim glow of the fireplace. Greenface filled almost all of that space, a great hunched dark bulk, big head bending and nodding slowly at the fire. In that attitude, there was in fact something vaguely human about it, a nightmarish caricature.
But most of Hogan’s attention was fixed on the two cellar windows of the lodge which he could see. Both were alight with the flickering glare of the fires he had set; and smoke curled up beyond the cottonwoods, rising from the far side of the lodge, where he had opened other windows to give draft to the flames. The fire had a voice, a soft growing roar, mingled in his mind with the soundless rasping that told of Greenface’s returning vitality.
It was like a race between the two: whether the fire, so carefully placed beneath the supporting sections of the lodge floor, would trap the thing before the heat kindled by the fire increased its alertness to the point where it sensed the danger and escaped. If it did escape—
It happened then, with blinding suddenness.
The thing swung its head around from the fireplace and lunged hugely backward. In a flash, it turned nearly transparent. Julia gave a choked cry. Hogan had told her about that disconcerting ability; but seeing it was another matter.
And as Greenface blurred, the flooring of the main lodge room sagged, splintered, and broke through into the cellar, and the released flames leaped bellowing upwards. For seconds, the vibration in Hogan’s mind became a ragged, piercing shriek—became pain, brief and intolerable.
They were out of the cabin by that time, running and stumbling down toward the lake.
A boat from the ranger station at the south end of Thursday Lake chugged into the bay forty minutes later, with fire-fighting equipment. Pete Jeffries, tramping through the muddy woods on foot, arrived at about the same time to find out what was happening at Hogan’s camp. However, there wasn’t really much to be done. The lodge was a raging bonfire, beyond salvage. Hogan pointed out that it wasn’t insured, and that he’d intended to have it pulled down and replaced in the near future, anyway. Everything else in the vicinity of the camp was too sodden after a week of rain to be in the least endangered by flying sparks. The fire fighters stood about until the flames settled down to a sullen glow. Then they smothered the glow, and the boat and Pete left. Hogan and Julia had been unable to explain how the fire got started; but, under the circumstances, it hardly seemed to matter. If anybody had been surprised to find Julia Allison here, they didn’t mention it. However, there undoubtedly would be a good many comments made in town.
“Your Pa isn’t going to like it,” Hogan observed, as the sounds of the boat engine faded away on the lake.
“Pa will have to learn to like it!” Julia replied, perhaps a trifle grimly. She studied Hogan a moment. “I thought I was through with you, Hogan!” she said. “But then I had to come back to find out.”
“Find out whether I was batty? Can’t blame you. There were times these weeks when I wondered myself.”
Julia shook her head.
“Whether you were batty or not didn’t seem the most important point,” she said.
“Then what was?”
She smiled, moved into his arms, snuggled close. There was a lengthy pause.
“What about your engagement in the city?” Hogan asked finally.
Julia looked up at him. “I broke it when I knew I was coming back.”
It was still about an hour before dawn. They walked back to the blackened, twisted mess that had been the lodge building, and stood staring at it in silence. Greenface’s funeral pyre had been worthy of a Titan.
“Think there might be anything left of it?” Julia asked, in a low voice.
“After that? I doubt it. Anyway, we won’t build again till spring. By then, there’ll be nothing around we might have to explain, that’s for sure. We can winter in town, if you like.”
“One of the cabins here will do fine.”
Hogan grinned. “Suits me!” He looked at the ruin again. “There was nothing very solid about it, you know. Just a big poisonous mass of jelly from the tropics. Winter would have killed it, anyway. Those red spots I saw on it—it was already beginning to rot. It never really had a chance here.”
She glanced at him. “You aren’t feeling sorry for the thing?”
“Well, in a way.” Hogan kicked a cindered two-by-four apart, and stood there frowning. “It was just a big crazy freak, shooting up all alone in a world where it didn’t fit in, and where it could only blunder around and do a lot of damage and die. I wonder how smart it really was and whether it ever understood the fix it was in.”
“Quit worrying about it!” Julia ordered.
Hogan grinned down at her. “Okay,” he said.
“And kiss me,” said Julia.
Tokyo Raider
INTRODUCTION
Now to close with the second story set in Japan, the kaiju capitol of the world, this one by New York Times best-selling author Larry Correia. The tale is part of his Grimnoir universe. For those who’ve wondered what happened to the characters after the conclusion of Warbound, the third novel in the Grimnoir trilogy, this yarn will provide some of the answers, along with exciting action scenes and—at no extra cost—the giant robot to end all giant robots.
Best-selling author and Hugo Award finalist Larry Correia is hopelessly addicted to two things: guns and B-horror movies. He has been a gun dealer, firearms instructor, accountant, and is now a very successful writer. He shoots competitively and is a certified concealed weapons instructor. Larry resides in Utah with his very patient wife and family. His first novel, Monster Hunter International, is now in its fourth printing. In addition to the four novels in the best-selling Monster Hunter International series, he has written the popular Grimnoir trilogy, Hard Magic, Spellbound and the Hugo Award nominated Warbound, combining alternate history, urban fantasy, and the hard-boiled private eye genre in one delirious mixture.
Tokyo Raider
by Larry Correia
Adak, Alaska
1954
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
The Colonel of the 2nd Raider Battalion was pouring himself a cup of coffee and looking a bit more surly than usual. He returned the salute and gestured at the chair on the other side of his desk. “Take a seat, Lieutenant.”
The building was quiet. The office walls around them were covered in maps of the Imperium. If—or more likely, when—there was war with the Japanese, this place was going to be hopping, but until then the Marines on the island of Adak had to watch and wait, train, freeze, and shoo caribou out of the barracks. The colonel was normally in a rotten mood before he had his coffee, so Joe got ready for another ass-chewing. He was the new guy, and he didn’t fit in. Those made for a bad combination.
Luckily, the colonel got right down to business. “We got a priority magical transmission. Since everybody forgets about us stationed out here on the ass end of nowhere, the commo boys get excited when their window actually starts talking to them. They woke me up, telling me that the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet himself had special orders for one of my butter bars.”
So much for keeping his head down.
“Turns out my new junior platoon leader is some big shot back in the states. I knew you were a Heavy. File says you’re really good at manipulating gravity, and you’re qualified on a Heavy Suit, but nobody told me you were supposed to be some sort of genius wizard.”
“I wouldn’t say genius. It’s all in my file. I have a degree in magical engineering from MIT and a master’s from the Otis Institute.”
“You went to college at what, twelve?”
“I graduated when I was nineteen, then I joined the Marine Corps, sir.”
“Why the hell you ended up . . . Never mind. Whatever you’ve done impressed somebody. Congratulations, Lieutenant, you’re going to Japan.”
That was certainly unexpected. “Japan, sir?”
