Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 3

  The same courtesy was not extended to Big Ben. He stayed where he was, half-kneeling, head bent, as though genuflecting before some power far greater than even himself.

  Officially, there was no money to deal with him. The military performed a thorough examination and evaluation, after the fires inside him had burned themselves out. The conclusion was that Big Ben was beyond repair. This battle had been his last. The damage was too extensive. There were no funds available to keep him going. Nor were there any available to transport him elsewhere, to a breaker’s yard, say.

  An online petition to have Big Ben retrieved and refitted—revived—gained well over a million signatures, but the government steadfastly refused to listen. Big Ben had been expensive to run. He was uneconomic. He had done exemplary service in the name of his country, and his crew were to be awarded the Military Cross in recognition of their gallantry and bravery, but now, to all intents and purposes, this particular KRV was RIP. Just so much scrap metal.

  The good news? The government said it was prepared to invest in a joint European Union project to build a new set of KRVs that would defend the whole of the continent against the ongoing Kaiju threat. The existing fleet of European Kaiju Response Vehicles was starting to show its age, so it seemed logical that the EU countries collaborate to replace it with a generation of brand new super-KRVs. Germany would be doing the majority of the design and manufacturing, since Germany was the only Western nation with a still thriving industrial base. So it was there that the super-KRVs would be headquartered, and it was the German chancellor who would have final say over their command and deployment.

  The time for a solely British KRV had passed. “The future,” said the prime minister to parliament, “lies in this pan-European initiative, which I believe will bring us and our neighbors much closer, and presents a much more financially sound means of protecting ourselves against the most pressing danger of the modern era.”

  ~

  Big Ben remained just offshore, immobile, a husk, a relic. The sun shone on him. The rain rained on him. On stormy days, the waves crashed against him and burst into spray. Seagulls perched on his head and shoulders and streaked his metal hull white with their guano.

  ~

  Keith, like the landlord of The Sailor’s Rest, had not taken out act of Kaiju indemnity on his business premises. It was ruinously costly. Basically, no one but the ultra-rich could afford it. Insurers were obliged by law to offer the product but priced it so that hardly anyone would buy.

  After some wrangling with his insurance company, however, Keith did receive a token compensation payout amounting to just shy of £10,000.

  Nowhere near enough to rebuild the Forever Fun Pier.

  But Keith had an idea.

  ~

  Now you could visit Big Ben. You could reach him via a catwalk which extended from the last vestiges of the landward end of the pier. You could clamber inside him through a specially cut portal in his leg. You could travel up stepladders and traverse suspended walkways through his workings.

  You could inspect for yourself his burned-out engine and his emptied weapons pods. You could sit in his cockpit at the inactive controls and gaze out through the windscreens that were his eyes. You could imagine yourself piloting him into the fray, meeting a Kaiju head-on and giving that marauding leviathan what-for.

  You could purchase tea and cakes in the horizontal cylindrical chamber of his right thigh, looking out at the view through newly installed portholes. You could spiral down a helical slide built inside his arm, to land safely on an airbag cupped inside his hand. You could venture into a tunnel maze of cleaned-out fuel pipes and coolant ducts.

  The hero who had defeated eighteen Kaiju, Red Devil being the last of those, was now one of the south coast’s most popular attractions. Customers flocked. Some days, weekends, and bank holidays in particular, the queue stretched from the pier entrance halfway down the promenade.

  ~

  Keith had offered the government a thousand pounds for Big Ben.

  Eager to be shot of him, and of the responsibility for him, the government had come back with a counteroffer of fifty. Not fifty thousand. Fifty pounds.

  Keith spent the rest of the insurance payout on tidying up, refurbishment, the relevant permits, and promotion.

  The Forever Fun Pier was no more, and good riddance. It had never been anything except a millstone around Keith’s neck.

  The Big Ben Experience, though, was his, and his alone. Not a legacy. Something he had developed himself. His inspiration. His brainchild.

  Keith had faced an enemy older, heavier and more implacable than a Kaiju, an opponent who had sentiment and the weight of time on his side.

  And he had overcome.

  The Conversion

  David Annandale

  And did those feet in ancient time,

  Walk upon England’s mountains green?

  And was the Holy Lamb of God

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

  Tens of thousands strong, the choir sang “Jerusalem.”

  It was the seventh year of the Rage.

  ~

  The beast had come at last, and was there, in truth, any point in pretending that there was somewhere to run or hide?

  Chadwick Ginther didn’t think so. Neither did Matthew Carpenter. So they had driven from Manchester to the coast at Carmel Head. They would meet the inevitable upon its arrival.

  “I saw Bickford yesterday,” Ginther said.

  “Oh? Has he tempered his views at all?”

  “Hardly. Proceeding full steam ahead.”

  Carpenter shrugged. “Well, maybe he’s right.”

  “We’ll know soon enough, I expect.” Ginther surprised and pleased himself with his calm. He wondered if he would be able to keep it when the moment came.

  Sitting in the passenger seat of Carpenter’s car, eating a ham and chutney sandwich, he found it hard to believe in that approaching moment. It was too abstract. Carpenter had parked by the side of the road. To their right, a field and hills were between them and the coast. They couldn’t see the military operations from here, beyond the occasional helicopter or fighter passing overhead. The sound of the deployment was white noise. It could pass for the crash of surf.

  Carpenter glanced up from his notes as a squadron streaked toward the sea, engines scraping the early afternoon raw. “Give them credit,” he said. “They’re still trying.”

  “Their way of coping,” Ginther answered. “Same as we’re doing. Same as Bickford, though he won’t admit it.”

  “I suppose so.” Carpenter turned to Ginther, and the fear beneath his brittle detachment was visible. He rubbed absently at his chin. “Do you think Bickford could be correct?”

  Ginther paused before answering. Thirty years of collegial disagreement urged him to say no. The knowledge that he would die today made him hesitate. “Maybe he’s half-right,” he said. “I don’t believe he has a more direct line to the truth than we do. Anyway, whether he’s right or wrong, what does that change about today?”

  Carpenter did not look reassured. “What comes after.”

  Ginther shook his head. “About that, Bickford’s wrong.” He was more emphatic this time. He could feel his own anxiety growing with Carpenter’s. He didn’t want that.

  “But in the footage of the thing, I see elements that—”

  Ginther interrupted. “Footage taken by missile cams and fleeing journalists. Hard to see anything conclusive.”

  “And its name?”

  “That is troubling,” Ginther admitted.

  There were quiet for a bit, then. They finished eating. There was farmland to the left, and Ginther heard sheep bleating. Fifteen years of living in England, and the sound was still a novelty for him. It was a verdant isle echo that made his heart lurch with an Arcadian nostalgia that was no less acute for being false.

  “Plenty of time for reading, the last few days,” Carpenter said. The universities, along with so much else, had shu
t down when confirmation of the approach had been received. “Been going back over a lot of Blake. Yeats, too.” He was staring at the hills. Clouds were starting to roll in. Their shadows crawled down the slopes. “You?”

  “The Eddur, mostly.” A return to the familiar. He had found no comfort there. Only a discomfiting relevance.

  The thunder of guns began, joined moments later by the shrieks and deeper blasts of rockets.

  “Genuflection,” Ginther muttered.

  “An act that still has meaning,” Carpenter said as they climbed out of the car.

  “But no effect.”

  They walked a few steps into the field and stopped. They watched the hills. They waited while the thunder of the genuflection grew louder and more desperate.

  They didn’t wait long. As the clouds gathered strength and turned the day from the last light of joy to the first gray of the end, the beast surged over the hills. Ginther’s eyes widened. Awe shot his chest with agony. He looked up and up and up, and he thought, Forever.

  Carpenter said, “It’s all true,” and the words were a sob of holy terror.

  The beast crossed the hills in a single stride. It was bipedal. Though its shape suggested a towering carnosaur, it had the chitinous exoskeleton of a crab, even to the ends of its four great, clawed hands. In the shape of the head, Ginther saw a dragon, but perhaps because of the eerie, translucent blue of its eyes, he also saw a wolf. Its jaws were immense. When they opened, they did, as they should, look as if they could touch earth and sky. Its tail, covered in the same armor as the rest of its body, doubled its already staggering length. Its coils were ready to embrace the globe.

  “The horns,” Carpenter whispered. “The horns.”

  Yes, the horns. The beast had one head, not seven, but it had ten horns. They surrounded its skull like a huge, twisting, iron crown.

  With a second stride, the beast was halfway across the field. The earth shook and cracked. The next step would bring the finish to Ginther and Carpenter. Though his terror was mounting to new heights, Ginther had no will to run. He accepted what was coming.

  So did Carpenter. “The name is right,” he said.

  “Yes.” Ginther could barely hear his own breaking voice. “Yes, it is.”

  He stared at the monster of many mythologies, and beyond them all. He stared as it took that fatal step. He stared to the very last as the crushing shadow came down over him, and he joined Carpenter in a cry that was only possible in the presence of the end of all things.

  The Eschaton had come.

  ~

  And did the Countenance Divine,

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here,

  Among these dark, Satanic Mills?

  ~

  Evans poked his head in the command tent, looking both sheepish and irritated. “Sorry to bother you, brigadier,” he said. “Bit of a problem at the gates. That clergyman who’s been in the news insists on seeing you. Won’t take piss off for an answer.”

  Joyce Caldwell sighed. “Show him in, captain.” Better get this over with.

  Evans was surprised. “Are you sure? Brigadier, we could—”

  “He’s family.”

  The captain’s eyebrows were high on his forehead. “Oh,” he said. “Right,” he said, and managed to swallow his questions. He withdrew.

  Caldwell walked out of the tent to wait. Around her, the playing field of Old Trafford was an armed camp on the move. The Eschaton was approaching. The beast was within a few kilometers of Manchester’s western suburbs. Troops, tanks, self-propelled artillery, and multiple rocket launchers headed out from the mustering grounds. A large contingent remained. If the Eschaton broke through the lines and entered the city, Caldwell hoped to draw it to the stadium, where a high concentration of firepower might make a difference.

  If. Hoped. Might. She knew better. Everyone did. But duty demanded acting as if they didn’t. She held tight to duty. There wasn’t much else to hold, as city after city, and nation after nation, burned in the Rage.

  Seven years ago, it would have been an honor to be charged with Manchester’s defense. Seven years ago, she would have been laboring under the blessed illusion that her efforts might bear fruit, and that she might save the city. That was before the American East Coast, and the holocaust in the Mid-West, and the end of California. That was before Tokyo, before Moscow, before Mumbai, and Sydney, and Lagos, and Berlin, and Paris, and Shanghai, and… The list was endless, a Domesday Book of annihilation. Was there any reason to think that her very conventional forces would succeed where much vaster armies, and measures far more extreme, had been swatted aside? No, there was not. Nuclear craters marked the failures of the most desperate moves.

  There was no order to the devastation. The path of the Eschaton’s march followed no pattern. There was no way to predict which city would be next. The only true certainty was that the time would come to every major population center. That hadn’t stopped the rise of some false certainties. For seven years, the Eschaton had not approached the British Isles, and Caldwell had seen the belief grow, among those who sought comfort in the nurture of intolerant myth, that this was the result of divine intervention. Albion, said the men with minds like fists, was Chosen. To keep it safe, to keep the protection of the Almighty, it was necessary to expel the people who did not look or think or love like the men with minds like fists. And if the tottering government did not expel them, then it would be necessary to hurt them very badly. In the last few years, Caldwell had spent so much time quelling or clearing up the aftermath of humanity’s worst impulses that the arrival of the Eschaton had almost been a relief.

  Almost.

  Maneuvering through vehicles and soldiers, Evans delivered Sam Bickford to Caldwell. “Thank you, captain,” she said. “That will be all.” Evans saluted and left.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Joyce,” her brother said.

  “What do you want?” She could guess, and she had little desire to waste what time remained to her. Given a choice, there was somewhere else she would much rather be.

  “I want salvation,” Bickford said. “For all of us. Isn’t that what we’re both trying to achieve?”

  “You could say that, but I’m not going to achieve anything standing here with you.”

  “Do you honestly think you can destroy the beast?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  She sighed. “Where is this going, Sam? Because I have better things to do than have another circular conversation with you.”

  He looked at the ground, and there, nervous before asking a favor, was her younger brother. Dark hair and beard graying now, though a long way from the iron her own hair had turned years ago. Still as slight as he had been in adolescence. There was little sign of the powerful speaker.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  “With what?” She was at a loss.

  “I need your belief, first.”

  “You won’t have it.”

  There was great pain in his eyes. “When you were younger, you gave it to father.”

  “Who didn’t deserve it.” That petty tyrant and hypocrite had deserved her fist. If he had lived long enough for her to reach adulthood, she would have given him that gift. Oh yes, she most certainly would have. Instead, she had to content herself with rejecting the patronym, and taking their mother’s maiden name instead.

  “But what he represented did deserve it,” Bickford said. “He was a poor churchman. That isn’t the fault of God.”

  She said nothing.

  He smiled gently. “You do have faith,” he said. “Even if you don’t think so. Think about what you’re doing. Can you truly believe you’re fighting something natural?”

  “It isn’t a god, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t mean that. Not a god. Not God. But it is proof of His coming.” His smile went from kind to beatific.

  “Odd proof, killing hu
ndreds of millions.”

  “They are safe at His side. Use your reason. It will bring you to faith. Consider the beast’s name…”

  “Not surprising it’s been called that. Given everything.”

  “We knew it as the Eschaton from the day it first appeared. All of us did. Everywhere.”

  She wanted to tell him he was wrong. She couldn’t.

  “And look at it!” he continued. “It makes no evolutionary sense whatever. An exoskeleton and an endoskeleton? A biped with four arms? It comes from the sea, and yet breathes—”

  “I know all this,” she said, cutting him off. Her brother was wrong if he thought this litany of impossibilities was going to bring her back to God. It was undermining the faith she needed in the value of her actions. It was destroying her hope that, even if she died today, she might, through her sacrifice, save some of the people of Manchester. Keep more of them safe than there would be without her. Keep Sandra safe. A bit longer anyway. Just a little bit longer. She didn’t think it was too much to ask to be allowed to fight for that illusion.

  “How can you consider something so unnatural and not see evidence of the divine?” her brother asked.

  “What it did in the Middle East, was that your idea of the Second Coming?”

  Bickford winced. “No,” he said, and she saluted him for his intellectual honesty. “It wasn’t. That was a time of revelation for me.”

  “I’m sure the people who died would have been glad to know they served a purpose.”

  His personal logic had too much momentum for him to notice her gibe. “We cannot be passive before the challenge of the Eschaton.”

  Caldwell stared. She swept her arm around the stadium, taking in the full panorama of the machinery of war. “How can you call this passive?”

  “It’s only a half-measure, and that’s why it’s failing. This has to be a crusade. We can’t just hurl a spear at the beast. The spear has to be blessed.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that there were no believers who took up arms anywhere else in the world? Or here, for that matter?”