|
|
Chapter 113 – Monsters’ HolidayAlex looked out the window of the Cessna. She felt better. She was in a new uniform, and in a new thermal uniform, and she had gotten plenty to eat, and she was warm again. And Shar was just so happy to see her.
And Riley had given her four ibuprofens so she didn’t hurt so much. She was totally glad that stuff like ibuprofen and aspirin still worked for her, and didn’t do something weird to her biochemistry like make her turn purple or swell up like a balloon.
The Cessna had just passed Sendai, which looked like there had been some kind of explosion or something down near the docks, and nothing else. Maybe seven blocks of buildings were wrecked, and a small chunk of the docks, but most of the city looked great.
She sighed miserably. It could have been so much worse. And she couldn’t stop Mega-dino. She couldn’t come close to stopping it. She couldn’t even come up with a better name. And ‘Lennie’ was not a good name for it, even if Jack made Riley laugh with his impression, saying, “Tell me about the rabbits, George.”
She had liked the first half of the book “Of Mice and Men,” and she’d really felt sorry for Lennie, and she’d really wanted George to get to buy his rabbit farm, but then she really didn’t like what happened later in the book, and she’d cried a ton when she read the ending.
They were flying off the coast, because Jack was hoping he might spot ‘Lennie’ and be able to give Colonel Watanabe a heads-up. It seemed like the poor guy was in the hot seat again. Maybe he was just the most competent person for the really horrible job, so he got stuck doing the next horrible job, too, pretty much like Jack.
Jack pointed down at the water and asked, “What the hell is that?” Then he looked over at Shar and pretend-whispered, “Tell Barb I said ‘heck’, okay?”
Shar piped up, “Sure! Sometimes I say bad stuff, too. Does Alex say she’s gonna tell Aunt Barb on you, too?”
But Alex was looking at what Jack had seen. It looked like there was a thin line of white ice, maybe miles long and only about five feet wide, and you could tell which way it was going, because the older ice was breaking up in the waves and the newer ice to the south was more solid.
Riley muttered, “Hmm, that’s … new.”
Jack flipped on the sat phone and got his IT guys. “Hey, Moe, any news about ice with the Sendai situation?”
Jackryanrules hesitated, then said, “Let me look, colonel … No … nothing … Oh, wait, we have a report that a Yuki-onna appeared, demanded to know where the monster went, and then ran across the harbor, making an ice floe as she went. Since the Yuki-onna is a mythological faerie-spirit figure, that report didn’t exactly get high priority.”
Jack frowned. “Well, we’re seeing a line of ice heading due south, so maybe they really saw … something.”
“What’s a yucky-onna?” asked Shar, which Alex appreciated, so she didn’t have to ask.
Riley patiently explained, “The ‘yuki-onna’ means ‘snow-woman’. It’s from Japanese myth — kind of like fairy tales — where a snow-woman up in the mountains isn’t really a woman, she’s a kind of magical creature who maybe helps guys who are lost in the snow, or in some stories makes them get lost in the snow so she can steal the heat from their bodies, or … things like that.”
Shar asked, “So she’s got superpowers, too?”
The pilot said from his seat, “We’ve got your ice-person dead ahead.” He swung the jet a little to one side, so everyone could look out the passenger windows and see.
Alex took a peek. It looked like an icy, white statue of a woman standing on a chunk of ice maybe six or eight feet across, but it had to be freezing the water as it went, because it was moving really fast, and there was a line of ice trailing out behind it.
Jack asked, “Estimated speed?”
“Maybe eighty knots. It’s hard to judge, since we’re overtaking it pretty fast.”
Jack checked. “Tera? Think you’re up for another excursion into the weird? After all, we are the weirdoid conclusions.”
She remembered where he got that line, and she smiled. She hadn’t felt like smiling for a while, even if Jack had been trying pretty hard to cheer her up. She said, “Yes, sir. Can someone crack the exit door for me?”
Jack looked over at Shar. “We buckle our seat belts really tightly for this bit, because it doesn’t meet FAA regulations. Okay?”
“Okay! I’m all buckled in. Is it gonna suck all the paper and stuff down the aisle like in the movies?”
Jack smiled. “Nope, but there’s a lot of stuff in the movies that’s not real.”
Alex went silvery. Riley stepped over and cracked the door a couple of inches. The wind roared past, and she used the movement of the air to slide out easier. Then she dropped down toward the ice woman. Or whatever it really was.
She flew a lot faster than the ice was going, thanks to the speed she had from the Cessna. So she had no trouble catching up with the woman standing on the speeding slab of ice. She moved right alongside the ice and slowed down to maybe eighty-five miles an hour if she had to guess.
She tapped her earjack with her TK so she had a phone connection with Jack, and she went with her Terawatt voice. “Do you need any help?”
The ice woman turned her head to look at Alex. “You … You’re the American heroine Terawatt.”
Alex noticed right away that the woman had a strong Japanese accent when she spoke English, and she pronounced ‘Terawatt’ like it was ‘terra-wattu’. She ventured, “Yes, and I’m tracking down something very large and very dangerous.”
The woman slowly said, “Yes. I saw it. It … did this to me.”
Oh, crud. “How did it do this? We have scientists with experience in biochemical alterations. We might be able to help.”
The woman stiffly insisted, “There is no help for me. A wall full of chemicals exploded all over me. There is no way to tell what reactants formed, or in what amounts. Even if you could invent an antidote, I could not take it. Liquids freeze when they get near me, even if I do not want them to freeze.”
Alex insisted, “That doesn’t mean we can’t work out something. I’m Tera. And you are?”
“Yuki.”
“Wait a minute, your name is ‘snow’? Is that your code name?”
“No.” The woman looked at Alex like she was stupid. “My name is Sato Yuki. You would say Yuki Sato. My name is — was — Yuki. It sounds like the word for ‘snow’, but it is written differently.”
Alex figured she was batting pretty close to zero, but she tried anyway. “And I guess you’re chasing after Mega-dino because …”
“Because it … killed me. I cannot eat or drink like this, and if I fall asleep I may become covered in ice and suffocate. If I fall into the water I may become buried in an ice block. I cannot live for long like this. So I will track it down and do my best to kill it, or injure it so badly that others may kill it.”
Alex pointed out, “You do know you’ll probably get killed if you try that.”
The ice woman finally nodded. “Yes. But there is nothing else for me.”
Alex insisted, “You’re wrong about that. I’m sure my contacts can help you.”
Jack’s voice cut in on her earjack. “Sato Yuki. One of the possible missing people in Sendai. Chemist in a research lab overlooking the harbor.”
Riley’s voice came in. “We’re going to be running low on fuel soon, so we need to land in Tokyo and fill up before … ‘Mega-dino’ arrives. The way I see it, Tokyo may have a chance. If this thing is no longer being led, it’s going to come out of the water as close to the energy of the Tokyo electrical grid as it can. But there’s a big peninsula east of Tokyo. Boso Peninsula’s western side forms the eastern edge of Tokyo Harbor, but its eastern side is low-population. If our target comes out of the water there, it’s got most of a peninsula to cross before it gets to an industrial district or some of the hydroelectric stations. If it’s not that graceful on land, we might be able to stop it there.”
Jack said, “I’ll call Colonel Watanabe and see what he thinks.”
Riley added, “We’re going to land at Narita International Airport, which is a lot closer to you than Tokyo’s main airport, and it’s probably closer to Mega-dino’s landfall.”
Alex answered, “Roger that.”
Yuki asked, “Who are you talking to?”
Alex told her, “The people in that jet that passed overhead a couple of minutes ago. They’re tracking Mega-dino, too, and they’re working with your national defense forces.”
“Mega-dino is not a good name.”
Alex nodded. “I agree with you totally. But ‘oversized amphibious Tyrannosaurus-Iguanodon thing with a ginormous alligator tail’ doesn’t exactly have that snap.”
Yuki stiffly said, “It swims like a whale and it walks like an ape. I will call it … Gojira.”
“Ohhh-kay,” Alex carefully said. “Whatever you want.”
Riley’s voice came in through her earjack. “That’s pretty good. It’s a portmanteau of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale.”
Alex still thought Yuki was kind of stuck-up. She would have said Yuki was kind of ‘frosty’ but that seemed like a cheap crack, considering.
Jack said over the earjack, “We’re in a landing pattern, and we’ll be down soon. There’s a mountain range between us, so as soon as we land, we’ll lose line of sight. Did you take your helmet so you can switch to sat phone?”
Alex winced inwardly. “Umm … no.”
“Tera, Tera, Tera … What are we going to do with you? How far out from the shore are you now?”
She said, “Maybe two hundred yards.”
Jack said, “Well, with any luck, you’ll still have cellphone reception here and there.”
She pointed out, “As soon as we get near Mega-dino —”
“Gojira,” Yuki insisted.
Alex glanced at Yuki and gave in. “Okay, Gojira, we’ll lose any reception anyway. I did before. It’s probably a great big radioactive signal jammer.”
Jack said, “Cheer up. Maybe it’ll stop and go look for some giant squid for breakfast, and give us plenty of time to get ready for it. Anything else? We’re descending and about to lose line of sight with you.”
“Nope. Over and out,” she finished. She pulled out her tPhone and made sure it was switching to regular cellphone coverage, even if she didn’t have a whole lot of hope if they were far away from any cell towers.
Alex had thought Japan was all over-built cities, but it looked like that was just the movies and anime she’d seen. The coast they were zooming past was beautiful and more like a big park.
And her cell coverage just winked out. Maybe it was a lack of cell towers. Maybe it wasn’t. She carefully announced, “Yuki, be on the lookout for a big bulge of water coming up toward the beach.”
* * *
Jack was on the horn again with Colonel Watanabe. “Yeah, we’re guessing it’s going to come up on the east side of the Boso Peninsula, if I’m pronouncing that right.”
“Your pronunciation is fairly good, colonel. And your information has been extraordinarily helpful so far. We are making sure that two squadrons of F-15s are going to be ready at Iruma, as soon as we have a location for the threat.”
Jack said, “I liked Mega-dino, but someone else named it Gojira.”
“Given the pictures we have received from Sendai, that seems … appropriate.”
Jack told him, “Give all the credit to Sato Yuki. It looks like she got splashed with mutagenic chemicals when Gojira hit Sendai, and she’s pretty angry about it.”
“Are you … Are you saying that Gojira just created Japan’s first superheroine?”
Jack grimaced. “Maybe. It looks like she has ice powers. From what she told Terawatt, she can’t drink anything because it freezes first, so she’s expecting she’s going to die pretty soon anyway. Unless one of your people can talk her out of it, she’s likely to make a suicide run at Gojira.”
Shar asked, “Can I go outside, Uncle Jack?”
He covered the speaker with his hand. “Yes, but only if you stay near Major Finn. If anything goes wrong, I want you back in here and buckled in your seat as fast as you can. Got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
He went back to the colonel. “We don’t know what this thing might be vulnerable to, so let your F-15s carry as wide a range of weapons as you can.”
* * *
Shar walked forward in the jet and smiled at the nice co-pilot. “Hi! Colonel Jack said you were s’posed to pop open the cargo bay for some stuff for Major Finn?”
“Sure thing, button.”
She gave him a big smile and got out of the jet before Major Finn noticed the cargo bay was even open. This was the thing she wasn’t supposed to get the nice sergeant to put in the cargo hold, not her uniform.
And she was scared. Really, really scared. Things had gone super good so far, but this thing wasn’t supposed to be ready. And she could die trying to make it work. But she just knew Alex and the lady needed her help. She could feel it.
She skipped over to Major Riley and smiled. “Uncle Jack said he needed you inside to help with something I wasn’t supposed to hear? And I was s’posed to stay right here and wait for you to come back?”
Major Riley gave her a big smile and said, “Okay, but you stay right where Sergeant Scott can see you. Okay?”
“Okay!”
As soon as Riley stepped into the jet, she yanked the snowboard-jet and the helmet out of the hold, slipped on her earjack, tugged on her helmet, hopped onto the board, got her shoes in the clamps, and crossed her fingers.
She started with the two outer rockets first, and as soon as she was lifting off, she set fire to all six rockets. The pressure almost made her knees buckle, and she shot up into the air.
In seconds, her earjack buzzed. She knew who it was, but she answered anyway.
“CHARLENE VICTORIA MACK! You get your little butt back here right this second, or I am gonna tell Aunt Barb and Uncle George! You are gonna be in so much trouble you can’t imagine!”
She went ahead and answered. “I’m really sorry, Uncle Jack, but I gotta. I just know it, the same way I knew Alex was in trouble. I can feel it. The big thing’s coming this way, and I gotta try!”
“SHAR! That is not doing what I said! You don’t know how to fly that thing, or how to steer it, or how to land it! You could get really hurt! You could DIE! I need you to get back here and let me talk you through a landing!”
She whimpered a little, but she said, “I gotta go. I love you and I love Auntie Willow, but I gotta help Alex. I gotta!”
By then she was so far away she couldn’t make out the jet, much less Uncle Jack. She leaned forward a little too much and quickly put her hands out in front of her to blast off a bunch of fireballs from her hands. That scooted her back up where she wanted. Then she put her left hand off to the side and fired off a couple more fireballs, which tilted her enough to her right. She fired all the rockets and jetted toward the mountains that were hiding Alex.
And the monster.
* * *
Alex gulped. The bulge of water looked like it did before, although this time the bulge looked even larger. Maybe it was because this was daylight. Maybe it was because those nuclear anti-sub missiles fed it more radiation and made it get even bigger.
She was really, really hoping it wasn’t the second thing.
Yuki was heading right for the bulge. Alex went, too. They were coming up behind it, and Alex thought maybe their best bet was catching Gojira while his head was only halfway out of the water and all the rest of him was underwater.
Yuki leaned forward on her ice floe, and touched the water in front of her. The ice just shot ahead of her, like she was freezing thousands of gallons at once. The ice reached the bulge, and the bulge froze solid, too.
Then Gojira kept going forward, out from under the frozen bulge, and the bulge flipped into the air like a plastic bowl. Alex realized that several thousand pounds of solid ice were going to land right on top of Yuki and squish her.
Alex dived onto the ice floe, going silvery as she went. She tackled Yuki and pulled her into the silvery morph as she went. Then she pulled Yuki back away from the incoming ice, even though Yuki was too heavy for Alex to fly her out of danger.
Holding Yuki in her morph was like sticking her face into a pile of dry ice. She’d never felt anything so agonizingly ice-cold in her life. It felt like Yuki was sucking the life out of her. It felt like the cold was turning her into a frozen block of silver. She screamed in agony and let go.
The incoming ice hit just ahead of them and shattered as it flipped the ice floe over. Alex found herself getting thrown into the air. Yuki was flying upward, too. Alex grabbed Yuki with her TK and heaved upward for all she was worth.
Yuki and the ice on her clothes together were too much to hold up while keeping herself in the air.
But not by a lot. Instead of plunging down into the cold water, Alex stayed in the air and Yuki drifted downward. Yuki stared at the water, and it froze into a new ice floe before she touched down.
Gojira was now out of the water up to its shoulders. It turned its massive, reptilian head toward Yuki and opened its mouth to blast Yuki to pieces.
Alex darted forward across Gojira’s face and hit it in the eyes with a massive blast of lightning. It really didn’t like that. It roared so loud Alex thought she might go deaf. But Alex kept going across to its other side, so it wouldn’t attack Yuki. As she flew, she set off more big lightning arcs, trying to get it to follow her. It turned its head toward her, but it was still moving up out of the water and toward the beach.
Yuki darted in on her ice floe and reached out as Gojira’s torso rose up out of the water. She was so close Alex was afraid she’d be crushed. Yuki didn’t seem to care. She touched the water pouring off the monster, and it froze instantly. Thousands of gallons of water froze on contact, solidifying all over the monster’s side and arm. But Yuki kept working. As Gojira rose higher and higher out of the water, Yuki froze more and more water along its side, until there was a massive wall of ice going from its armpit down to its hip, pinning its left arm to its side.
Alex flashed another spray of lightning to distract the thing from what Yuki was doing, and Yuki jetted alongside the monster. Alex wondered if they could cripple it by freezing water all over its side. Maybe they could make it so it couldn’t climb over the mountains of the peninsula to get to Tokyo. Maybe …
Gojira let loose with a monstrous blast of what Jack was still calling ‘nuclear halitosis’. Alex darted behind its head to avoid being incinerated.
At the same time, it lashed out on its left with its enormous tail. Yuki and her ice floe were hurled through the air. Alex darted around behind the monster, avoiding its angrily glowing dorsal spines, and dived for where Yuki was going to hit the beach.
She wasn’t going to get there soon enough.
She couldn’t reach Yuki fast enough, but she could slow the ice-caster down. Alex used all her spare TK to grab Yuki and pull upward. Alex already knew it wouldn’t be enough, but she knew she could slow Yuki’s fall enough that she might have a chance to get to her before Yuki hit the sandy shore.
Yuki realized what was happening and stretched out her arms and legs. A wide, flat area of ice formed in mid-air like a thin coin that Yuki was embossed on, and Yuki started floating downward. It wasn’t much of a parachute, but as long as Alex could take a hundred pounds of weight off the thing, it was falling more like a parachute and less like a boulder.
Gojira roared again and writhed as it tried to break the ice off its left side. Alex pulled Yuki’s ice ‘parachute’ off to the side so it wouldn’t be smashed by Gojira’s flailing tail, and she wondered how they could get it back in the water so Yuki could freeze more of it.
When Alex heard the sounds of jets, her first reaction was excitement, as she assumed the jets were coming to her rescue. Her second reaction was wincing, as she realized what was probably going to happen.
She used her TK and she pulled Yuki and her ice-parachute as far off to the side as she could. Jets opened fire on Gojira, and rockets tore forward to explode against its immensely thick hide. Bullets tore through the air, the tracers telling Alex where the lethal rounds were going. Bombs exploded around its feet.
The ice on its side shattered and fell to the shallows where Gojira was standing. Gojira launched a long burst of its energy breath at the jets, but they were all out of range. Fortunately. Alex didn’t think a jet could survive flying through that stuff.
The jets wheeled about and came in for another pass. Gojira’s dorsal spine glowed white-hot, and suddenly Alex could see a fierce shimmer around the monster. Was it …?
Oh, crud. Gojira’s wounds were slowly healing, and now it had that forcefield around it again. The bullets sparked where they hit. The missiles and bombs exploded without getting to Gojira’s thick hide. The remaining ice melted off.
The jets had just managed to make things worse. Way worse.
She watched as the jets zoomed way out to sea and made a ragged bunch of turns. It looked like they weren’t communicating with each other anymore. Alex figured it was Gojira’s signal jamming deal. She just couldn’t figure out how it was cranking out so much energy without dying of hunger.
Or maybe it was dying of hunger. Maybe it didn’t have anything it could recognize as food, and it would die of starvation. In a month or two. Unfortunately, in two months it could probably destroy most of the big coastal cities on the planet.
Gojira turned to face the ocean, and its dorsal spines glowed ferociously. It looked up at the jets and it let out a long blast of its energy breath. The jets zoomed in and opened fire once again, even though most of the jets were out of missiles by then.
Whatever that breath was, it wasn’t safe to fly through. Three jets were a little too low, and when they went through the tail end of the breath stuff, their engines burst into flame. Alex watched as the jets went burning past her and the pilots ejected way over the land, so they could parachute down in relative safety.
Alex watched as the remaining jets soared back toward wherever they came from. She wondered what else the Japanese could try, because she was pretty sure they wouldn’t use a nuclear bomb, and she didn’t know if one would even work on something that hadn’t been stopped by Russian nuclear underwater bombs.
Yuki shrugged her way out of her ice parachute and summoned more ice under her feet. Then she zoomed over toward Alex on her ice-slide thing that really looked a lot like Yuki had been taking lessons from X-Men comics.
Yuki yelled, “We must attack while it is still in the water!”
Alex pretty much thought the same thing, even if it was only in water up to its ankles. She called out, “I’ll distract it and try to lead it out further!”
Yuki didn’t nod or say ‘okay’ or even ‘thank you’, which was not like Alex thought Japanese people were, but Yuki was kind of … obsessed. With the jets gone, Alex flew up at Gojira’s face, while Yuki zoomed across the water at the thing’s ankles.
Unfortunately, the monster pretty much ignored Yuki and focused all its attention on Alex. She flew around so she was between it and the ocean, and she hit it in the head with everything she had. It turned to face her, and took a swing at her with one immense arm. Its claws were bigger than she was, so that was a major problem. She darted back away from its arm and threw another lightning bolt at its head.
It opened its mouth to blast her to smithereens. She jetted straight up, and just missed being incinerated. But it just tilted its head back and tried to blast her out of the air. She swooped around behind its head, even if she really didn’t want it to turn around and go back onto the land.
But it was ignoring Yuki, so it had two arms, a nuclear blast mouth thing, and a tail to use on her. She overlooked the tail.
It nearly hit her dead on. At the last second she spotted it out of the corner of her eye. She darted downward and went silvery, but it still clipped her. And getting clipped by something the size and speed of a runaway train was not a good thing.
The brutally painful impact nearly knocked her out. She went flying downward and smashed into the sand so hard she made a crater. Yuki wasn’t helping, either. Yuki was totally focused on making an immense ice cuff around its ankle.
Alex looked up to see Gojira leaning forward and opening its mouth to incinerate her and everything around her.
* * *
Shar was flying so fast she didn’t think she’d be able to breathe without her helmet on. But she’d been able to ‘feel’ where Alex was, so she was heading in the right direction. And there it was.
Oh, my God, that thing was huge! It looked like it was too big to be real!
Shar zoomed in and saw Alex get splatted out of the air like a fly. And that stupid ice lady was just ignoring Alex and putting ice all over the monster’s ankle, which was just dumb.
And the monster was gonna roast Alex! Shar had to stop it! She zoomed straight at it and fired off as many fireballs as she could before she crashed into it. It thrashed that huge tail at Alex, too, so Shar aimed a bunch of fireballs that way, too.
The monster stopped aiming at Alex and opened its mouth at Shar. And that was when Shar figured out there were a couple of problems.
She didn’t know how to stop.
And one of her biggest fireballs hit that tail and got bounced off to the side. Right on top of the ice lady.
Shar watched as the fireball exploded right on that cake of ice and destroyed it.
And she was heading straight for the monster’s stomach at over a hundred miles an hour. That was going to hurt. A lot.