Kaiju: Deadfall, page 16
“What is this place?” Costas asked breathlessly, as his lungs fought to suck in air. In spite of his protests to the contrary, transporting the heavy nuclear bomb was taking its toll on him.
While Costas rested, Gate examined the columns. Overlapping plates of the same material as comprised the creature’s exterior ran their entire length. The room shuddered. He reached out to steady himself against the column and jerked his hand back just in time to avoid losing it, as some of the plates slid together and then back to their original positions.
“I think they started the attack early,” he observed. He noted that the column radiated more heat after the movement. He attributed it to friction, but other mechanics might be at play.
“Maybe they gave up on us and started the attack early,” Costas said. “I hope they blow this thing to hell.”
Gate didn’t share the sergeant’s wishes. He turned his attention back to the columns. “These columns serve as shock absorbers, like our spine. They’re composed of the same ebony crystal as the exterior. There must be muscles inside, protected by the armor. That’s why the tentacles around the mouth are so prehensile and so invulnerable.”
Costas grinned. “Maybe we should have brought along some Kryptonite. Can we break its back?”
“We might cripple it,” Gate conceded, “but the bomb probably won’t kill it. Even immobile, it could still produce more Wasps.”
“Damn.” Costas resettled the heavy pack on his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Let’s push on.”
They threaded their way through the chamber, weaving around the columns. The small pools of light cast by their helmet flashlights did little to dispel the darkness of the cavernous room. Distant scraping sounds behind them could have been from more ebony plates sliding together, but Gate’s vivid imagination conjured images of horrible monsters crawling toward them. The two drones that had followed paths toward the rear of the creature were no longer broadcasting. As he watched, the remaining drone forward of them ceased functioning. They had no more views ahead. They were now moving blind.
“The drones are disappearing,” he told Costas.
“Ah. Must be this damned heat,” Costas said, as he wiped his forehead with his hand. “I’m about to conk out myself. It reminds me of this little whore I knew in Bangkok. She used to…”
“Later, sergeant,” Gate replied. He conceded that the increasingly debilitating heat could have damaged the drones, but he worried more about the Ticks or some other as yet unseen creature lurking in the darkness being the culprit for their demise. If they were treating the tiny drones as interlopers, how much more effort would the creatures put into expelling the human invaders.
“Let’s get this over with. I want to sit down and rest a spell. Just keep moving forward.”
Gate stopped walking. “Which way is forward?” In the darkness, he had become turned around.
“It must be that way,” Costas said, but then stopped and scratched his head. “It all looks the same. What does your gizmo say?”
Gate pulled out the LIDAR and turned it on. The machine mapped the immediate area, but the irregular rows of columns blocked the Laser scanning beam. He tried walking around with it, but it produced the same results. It was like trying to see through a forest. To make matters worse, the image was blurry as if the columns were moving, which he knew they were not.
“We’re lost,” he admitted.
Costas snorted. “Maybe we should have left a trail of breadcrumbs. Let’s go back to where we came in.”
“Which direction is that?” Gate asked him.
Another shudder ran through the creature, this one stronger than before. The columns nearest them ground together to absorb the shock. Either the creature was doing calisthenics or someone was attacking it. The scraping sounds grew louder, this time coming from behind and off to one side of them. Costas dropped the pack with the nuke and unlimbered his weapon. Seeing the wary look in Costas’ eyes, he checked to make sure his M16 was ready and played his flashlight along the rows of columns.
Thinking in two dimensions almost cost him his life. When the clicking and scraping sounds continued to grow louder with no sign of the creatures making them, acting on a hunch, he turned his light toward the ceiling. At first, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him in the poor light. The tops of the columns around them seemed to shimmer. Then, to his amazement, a dinner plate-sized creature the exact color as the columns launched itself across the space between two columns, giving Gate a view of its lighter underside, which bristled with a mass of tiny appendages that allowed it to grasp the columns. Nestled in the center of the legs, a mouth lined with tiny sharp teeth opened and closed menacingly. The thin, pancake-like creatures had no eyes, but Gate was certain they were aware of their presence.
“The place is crawling with them,” Costas shouted. He didn’t wait to see if the creatures were attacking or simply doing their jobs. He fired a burst at the nearest pancake. The 5.56mm bullets tore holes through the flimsy skin, but did little apparent damage. The creatures backed away a short distance and continued to study them.
“Just my luck,” Costas said, “to be attacked by a stack of pancakes. They even secrete their own syrup. Look.”
Gate looked to where Costas was pointing and noticed the glistening spots of liquid left by the creatures as they moved away. Their function became a little clearer.
“I think they lubricate the columns,” he suggested.
“Then they’re harmless?” Costas asked.
“With those teeth?” he shook his head. “No, I think they’re quite capable of defending themselves.”
“Well, they ain’t bulletproof.”
To prove his point, Costas fired another burst into one of the pancakes. This time, he hit a vital organ, for the creature dropped to the ground, writhing as its edges curled and uncurled. A clear liquid seeped from its body. The teeth gnashed together several times before it stopped moving. As if in response to the murder of one of their brethren, the other pancakes began lifting one edge of their bodies and tapping the columns rhythmically in unison. The sound echoed through the columned chamber like a marching drum corp.
“Jesus, I think I made them mad,” Costas said.
Gate had reached the same conclusion. “I think you did, too. Perhaps we had better run.”
“Which way?”
“Any way,” he replied, as one of the pancakes launched itself toward them. Costas shot it mid leap, knocking it aside with a stream of bullets, but more began preparing to launch themselves at the intruders. “Now,” Gate urged.
Costas sprinted away, weaving a dizzying path through the columns with Gate close on his heels. He risked a glance back at their pursuers and wished he hadn’t. The pancakes couldn’t fly, but they made good use of the columns, leaping from one to the other, barely touching the surface before leaping again. If the creatures got ahead of them, they would have to stop and fight, a prospect he didn’t find encouraging.
They ran blindly with the pancakes in close pursuit, trying to keep to a straight line, an impossible task in the cavernous dark maze. The entire creature was less than a thousand feet in length, but his body ached as if he had run twice that distance. The hot air he sucked into his lungs was starved of oxygen. His injured ribs throbbed with each labored, gasping breath. He fought the urge to stop long enough to try to suck in more air. Costas with his heavy pack was tiring too, his steps faltering. He pushed himself along using the columns to remain upright.
Finally, the columns disappeared and they were surrounded by a reddish-brown material resembling limestone. Gate stopped long enough to take photos and to bury the tip of his knife into the soft wall before Costas yelled for him to keep up. The blade sank several inches before hitting a more resistant layer. A network of tiny tubules lay between the soft material and the hard. Slicing open one tubule, he discovered a network of miniscule threads bundled together.
“I think these are nerves,” he said. “The softer material must be insulation.”
“Not interested, Doc,” Costas called out. “We need to get out of here.”
The sound of pancakes clicking behind them punctuated Costas’ words. He didn’t think the pancakes would pursue them beyond the range of the ebony columns, but he didn’t want to put his theory to the test. Suddenly, they were blocked by a ceiling-high wall. Unlike the black columns or the creature’s exterior, the wall was composed of dark crimson-colored flesh covered in a fine filigree of tiny black lines.
“It’s a dead end,” Costas snapped in irritation. “What now?”
“I don’t know. We’re traveling blind.”
Costas narrowed his eyes and stared at him. “Great! You mean we’re lost.”
“We’ve been lost,” he reminded his companion.
Costas sat down with his back against the wall. “I guess I can rest now. At least it’s cooler here.”
Gate had noticed the drop in temperature as well but couldn’t account for the sudden change. Backing away from the wall, the air quickly grew warmer. He walked along the wall, hoping to find some seam, some gap that would indicate a passage beyond. The mosaic of whorls and spirals made no sense to him. They served no purpose that he could deduce other than decorative. The pattern was random.
“There has to be a way through,” he said, running his hand along one ridge.
“You could try saying abracadabra,” Costas replied. “Give it up. We gave it a try and we failed. I say we set off the nuke and hope for the best.”
The thought of death by nuclear incineration didn’t appeal to Gate. He studied the wall again.
“Not yet. Just give me a few minutes.”
“Take your time. We’re not going anywhere.” As Gate studied the walls, Costas dropped his backpack and uncovered the bomb. The small cylinder didn’t look lethal – just a black metal canister eleven inches in diameter and five inches long with five-inch-diameter hemispherical protrusions at each end – but inside a deuterium core needed only a slight explosive shove to cause a chain reaction, producing a 250 ton TNT explosion. “Just in case,” he commented to Gate’s troubled expression.
“Don’t do anything hasty,” Gate urged.
Costas laid his M16 across his lap and faced the maze of columns from which the pancakes would emerge. He patted the nuke. “When I run out of bullets, I press the trigger.”
Costas’ eagerness to detonate the nuclear device spurred Gate to search harder for an opening. He retraced his steps along the wall. He played his flashlight up and down it, growing more frustrated by the minute. If it was a language, it made no sense to him. The lines had to serve some function. The wall separated them from something. Everything he had so far discovered about the creature intrigued him. If the aliens had set about designing a creature to use as a weapon, they couldn’t have produced a more perfect product. He began pacing back and forth, paying less attention to the wall and more to a question that continued to nag him, to tickle the back of his mind. He was missing something important but couldn’t lay his finger on it. He had been so set on finding the creature’s weakness that he had failed to see its strengths.
The creatures were combination tank and aircraft carrier, armored and powerful. They housed an air force of Wasps and manned with Ticks serving the functions of security personnel and Pancakes as oilers. Like a ship, its sections were separated by bulkheads. He was treating Nusku as a monster to kill. Perhaps, he should think of it as an organic machine and search for a method of disabling it.
As he paced, he saw it, a brief shadow high above, visible only at a certain angle. It was an opening thirty feet above the floor of the chamber barely wide enough for a person to crawl through, but he was certain it went through to the other side. Cooler air spilled from the opening.
“I found it,” he called out to Costas.
Just as he spoke, the distant sound of an explosion echoed down the chamber of columns. A ripple of flesh raced across the floor, knocking Gate down. He looked up just as the edges of the opening above him closed tightly.
“No!” he cried.
Now, they were truly trapped.
Ishom
20
Saturday, August 11, 10:50 a.m. (PDT) El Segundo, California –
After completely destroying San Luis Obispo, the alien behemoth Ishom took to the water again, marching into the Pacific Ocean to become a floating base of operations for the swarms of Wasps laying waste to the surrounding countryside. The men and women stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, home of the 30th Space Wing and a center for military satellite launches, waited breathlessly for the creature to descend on them, obliterating them, but they never came. Santa Barbara was likewise spared. This abrupt shift in the creature’s tactics mystified officials even as they breathed a sigh of relief. However, the respite was short lived, as Ishom sailed down the coast at twice its walking speed, coming ashore at El Segundo less than two hours later.
Corporal Elias Matheson, twenty-two, from Cape Hope, Missouri, squatted behind his .50 caliber machinegun atop the I-405 overpass at I-105, trying to keep his hands from shaking. He and his fellow members of the 40th Army Infantry had arrived an hour earlier from Los Alamitos, hastily set up a defensive perimeter, and waited. Rumors were rampant about the monster’s capabilities, but he didn’t see his pop gun of a weapon doing much when jets and missiles hadn’t. He was cannon fodder, and he didn’t like the feeling. His buddy, Tracy Hayes, a California native, sat beside him smoking a joint. Matheson didn’t mind marijuana as a recreational drug. He wasn’t above taking a few tokes himself, but he wanted his loader to be clear headed.
“Stay frosty, damn it,” he snapped at Hayes. “Don’t get all weirded out on me.”
Hayes laughed. “Weird? Man, how weird do you think this shit is?” He waved his joint toward the beach. “That mother-humper is going to stomp our asses like it was police payback time at a riot. We’re sitting here like chumps when we should be hauling our sorry asses out of here.” He took another drag and exhaled slowly. “Hell, we should go where it’s done been, not where it’s coming.”
“If we don’t stop it, it’ll flatten LA,” Matheson countered, though Hayes’s words made sense to him. So far, nothing had slowed any of the creatures down. He didn’t think their pitiful line of machineguns and mortars would make much difference.
“Screw LA, man. I’m from San Diego. LA sucks! This place don’t mean shit to me. I’m here just like you are, another dumbass jarhead following orders.”
“If we abandon our post, that’s desertion. They’ll shoot us.”
“You got that right, but when everyone’s running east, what say we run north? I got me a friend up in the mountains. She’s real fine. Maybe she’s got a friend for you. Sure beats dying.”
Hayes’s grip on the .50 caliber tightened. He glanced away from Hayes so his buddy wouldn’t see the indecision in his eyes. His body urged him to run, but he was a soldier. He had a duty. His father hadn’t run in Vietnam, had he? Maybe he wanted to as badly as I do.
“No, I’m staying.”
Hayes shook his head slowly. “You’re a fool, man. I’ll hang here with you, but as soon as I see someone run past me, I’m out of here so fast you’ll call me the Flash.”
Matheson nodded. “Okay. We stay. Afterwards … I don’t know yet.”
Hayes’s grin widened. “That’s all I’m asking, man. We do our bit for king and country, and then we haul ass for parts unknown. Hell, man, we’ll be heroes, standing up to the big bad monster that ate LA.”
The sound of heavy gunfire from Point Mugu Naval Air Station filled the pit of his stomach with acid. He could just make out the jets overhead, as they dove down toward the sea, firing their missiles. The monster was almost upon them. He noticed a dark cloud low to the horizon.
Great, we’re going to fight in the rain.
Then, the cloud broke apart, became individual dots, and he knew it was Wasps. He had heard about them. They were something he could fight. The Wasps made quick work of the jets from Point Mugu. Then he watched in horror as they changed directions. He knew it was simply matter of perspective, but it looked as though they aimed directly at him. A group of AH-1F Cobras and UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters roared over the interstate low to the ground, aiming for the center of the alien formation. He was so engrossed by the battle that at first, he failed to see Ishom, as it rose from the sea and strode ashore at the Chevron refinery.
“Look at that mother humper,” Hayes exclaimed. “It must be a hundred and fifty feet high.”
Matheson’s throat had suddenly become too dry to answer. He nodded instead.
Hayes stood. “We gotta get the fuck out of here.”
“Sit down,” Matheson shouted. He looked again at Ishom striding ashore, crushing buildings in its path like a rampaging crab. The urge to flee was on him too, but he resisted. “We’ll run when the others do.”
To his surprise, Hayes resumed his position holding the belt of .50 caliber ammunition prepared to feed it to the machinegun as Matheson fired.
The helicopters flew straight into the swarm of Wasps firing their Gatling guns and cabin-mounted .50 caliber machineguns. Their maneuver divided the swarm into two separate sections. Learning from earlier failures by other attack groups, each chopper’s fire covered the other, creating an impenetrable field of fire. He took heart at the number of creatures falling from the sky. Then, almost as if closing a fist, the two halves of the cloud closed in. He watched one gunner yanked from his chopper and left flailing in midair. Before he hit the ground, a Wasp grabbed him and jabbed him with its stinger. The gunner immediately went limp.
Helicopters began spiraling to the ground, as Wasps dove into their rotors in a kamikaze assault. Two out-of-control Blackhawks collided and exploded. Pieces of metal and burning men rained to the ground. A few helicopters managed to slip away from the melee, but Wasps swarmed after them. Within minutes, no helicopters remained.
