Kaiju Rift

by Ian Woodhead

Callum had already left the group and was about to vanish around the corner. He stopped. “Guys, you have to see this. I think I’ve found our way up!”

  Harry allowed the others to pass him and followed at a distance, watching Copperfield. As he reached the edge of the resin coated building, the others had already left his sight. He turned the corner and found exactly why Callum had sounded so excited.

  The familiars had constructed an earth ramp, which progressed from the road up to the top of the tank. The ramp was wide enough for all of them to walk up, side by side. Callum was already halfway up by the time he reached the bottom. His companion had opened his rucksack and had distributed a handful of the glass containers to both Gavin and Copperfield.

  So why was he still hesitant to join them? Apart from the obvious, Callum and Copperfield were now rushing to the top with Gavin just behind them. Harry swallowed down the suppressed hesitation and rushed up the slope. If this worked, he did not want to miss out on destroying a creature which was partly responsible for murdering untold billions of humans throughout thousands of worlds.

  Harry ran up the first couple of metres. He slowed down and then stopped. He gazed at the floor. Small stones and gravel were vibrating across the ground! “Get down!” he screamed. “Lie on the floor!” Harry staggered backwards, urging the others to do as he said. The ground shook harder.

  He moaned in terror when gallons of that crimson gunk slopped over the edges and two vast shapes rose up, out from beneath the liquid.

  Both Callum and Copperfield were already on the floor. The hybrid creature had already fired off half a dozen shots but even at close range, the fleshmelta shots just bounced off the Goliath’s thick armour.

  Gavin had not moved. He stood rooted to the spot, frozen. Callum reached up and grabbed the youth’s leg, just as three serpentine tendrils emerged from under one of the Goliaths. They all wrapped around Gavin’s body and pulled the screaming boy into the belly of the beast.

  “Come on!” he cried. “Get back down here.” Harry dropped to one knee and fired off several salvoes while the remaining two scrambled up and ran back down the slope. His shots were just as ineffective as the shots fired from the hybrid, but they made him feel better.

  The others had almost reached him when dozens of foot-soldiers slid down thick cords, dropping out of openings under the two Goliaths.

  Both Harry and Copperfield managed to hit three of the enemy troops, but they just kept sliding out from under the two monsters.

  “Retreat back to that bus!” Harry pulled Callum back while running backwards and firing shot after shot.

  The hybrid had not moved.

  “Copperfield, get back here!”

  The hybrid looked over his shoulder. “Callum, throw me your rucksack.”

  Several foot-soldiers had almost reached the slope. Harry turned his fleshmelta on them, dissolving three before the remaining soldiers either ran back or dived off the slope and hid. Copperfield caught the rucksack. He held it in one hand while running up the slope and firing at any foot-soldier stupid enough to get in his way. Harry stayed where he was, doing his best to provide cover. He knew it couldn’t last. His fleshmelta was almost out of energy.

  “Oh God, I don’t believe it. I think he’s going to make it to the top!”

  Harry heard Callum but dare not agree as his ears had just picked up the unmistakable sound of bio-tanks trudging towards them. His fleshmelta died on him. He stood up and saw the next street was full of bio-tanks coming towards him. Harry grabbed Callum. “Time to go, we’ll die if we stay here.”

  “Wait, man! Just hang on for another couple of seconds. Copperfield has almost reached the top.”

  Harry saw him getting ready to throw the rucksack at the same time as several more cords suddenly snaked towards the hybrid, snatched him up, and pulled him into the beast.

  “Oh God! I see what you mean. Harry, we need to get out of here!”

  “It’s too late for that, my friend.” Harry nodded towards their only cover which was now swarming with foot-soldiers. The creatures silently stared at them with their fleshmeltas aimed at both Harry and Callum. He looked back at the bio-tanks. They had all stopped as well.

  “I don’t get it. Why are we not dead already?”

  “Do you still have your knife, Callum?”

  “You’re shitting me! How is that going to stop them?”

  “It’s for you. After the damage we have inflicted upon them, I suspect that the two Goliaths have something special planned for us.”

  “We almost did it, man,” said Callum. He brought the knife out. “Yeah, we showed those bastards.”

  Harry took hold of his friend’s wrist. “Wait, perhaps we haven’t completely lost. Look!”

  The first Goliath, the one which had snatched Copperfield, lurched to one side. It pulled one of its legs out of the fluid and attempted to straighten itself.

  A low groan rippled through the assembled foot-soldiers and bio-tanks before the Goliath emitted an ear-piercing child-like scream.

  “It must be Copperfield! It’s working. It’s bloody working!”

  Harry kept his gaze fixed on the two monsters. He heard the thump of what he believed to be explosives detonating inside that Goliath. The monster slumped forward and crashed into the side of the tank. Intense blue fire engulfed the Goliaths.

  “We’ve really done it!”

  Harry kept hold of Callum and began to walk up the slope. He heard his friend asking him to get off him, but Harry ignored that. Strange forces pulled on his body. The fire reached out and surrounded both men.

  Callum started to shriek. Harry wanted to tell him to calm down, that everything was going to be okay. The Goliath was going back to Harry’s world, where he and his unit would turn these evil creatures into bloody mush.

  They had done it.

  Epilogue

  It took Callum a whole ten minutes to figure out that Harry had pulled him into another world. It wasn’t Harry’s world either. He remembered Harry telling him of the century of devastation caused by those monsters. He said that stinking mud, mixed with powdered rubble covered most of the land. The man had described hell to them.

  This world looked so much like the world he had left, only perhaps with a few more airships, tanks, jeeps and soldiers.

  He stood on the roof of a multi-storey carpark. Harry was beside him, clutching his fleshmelta tight. Callum had lost his shotgun somewhere along the way. From what he had seen, it didn’t think it would be too difficult to pick up another weapon. “We have entered a war zone,” said Cullum.

  Harry nodded. “Yes, so it seems.”

  The Goliath, the one still standing, had brought the fighting to a complete stop. Callum had no idea who was fighting who, nor did he care. It had now reached the edge of the city. The Goliath had already lost most of its fliers to small arms fire and well as the occasional rocket fired from buildings on the outskirts. Harry had already informed Callum that it would soon replenish its stock with either flesh stored inside it or from the fresh meat it had already accumulated as it progressed through the city.

  “What do we do now?”

  The man turned to Callum. “What else can we do? We must finish this.”

  The End?

  Read on for a free sample of Kaiju Rampage

  Kaiju Rampage

  Captain Daichi watched his crew hard at work on the deck of the Hiroaka. The day had just begun, but already the ship’s hold was filling up with fish from her nets. Daichi had never seen the kind of loads his men were hauling now before in his life. It was almost as if something out there in the water was driving the fish his way. He whispered a prayer of thanks and smiled. This was Daichi’s first run as captain. He had feared he would not live up to the expectations of his father and let the old man down. Even at the age of thirty-one, Daichi was somewhat afraid of the old man. Though his father was pushing eighty, he could still make his words cut deeper than the sharpest of swords.

  The two
of them had never seen eye to eye. Daichi had never wanted to be a part of his father’s fishing company, much less the captain of the old man’s best remaining boat. Daichi had dreamed of being a writer, going to America, and becoming a star. At first, he had some success. He had sold his first ever story to a paying magazine and almost immediately got an offer to write one for another. That sort of thing was rare in the writing world, and Daichi allowed himself to believe that he could make it. He spent the next few years doing his best. His work sold, he made money, but it was never quite enough or dependable enough to be all he did in terms of a job.

  Daichi’s father had been there for him, if at a price. His father had given him just enough work to keep him afloat and chasing his dream for a time. After five years had passed, his father became more and more demanding of him, pushing more and more work onto him. His father’s health had begun to fail with age. The old man needed someone who could take over and continue to bring honor to the family name. Daichi was the only son. He had three sisters, but his father wanted him, not them. His father held with the old ways and wanted Daichi to surrender his failed dream to step up and do what he had been born to do.

  When this fishing season had started, the old man had given Daichi a choice. Take over as captain of the Hiroaka or leave the family business behind for good. Daichi had known it was no idle threat. Either he stepped up or he was out. His self-published sales were down, and short stories weren’t paying what they used to, not that it had ever been enough. With his rent already close to being late and a stack of bills on his desk, Daichi was left with no choice. Now, here he was on the deck of the Hiroaka, doing the job he had sworn as a child he would never do.

  The Hiroaka was an old ship, only weighing in at a displacement of around one hundred and fifty tons. Her entire crew, counting Daichi himself, was composed of two dozen sailors. She ran nearly one hundred feet from bow to stern. What she lacked in size and crew, though, she more than made up for in the tech aboard her. Her sonar and comm. gear was top of the line. That fact was one of the few things Daichi liked about her.

  Natsuo approached him wearing a concerned expression that gave Daichi cause for worry.

  “Good morning, Natsuo,” Daichi offered.

  “Captain Daichi, sir,” Natsuo responded with a quick nod of his head. “I would be most grateful if you would accompany me inside.”

  “Is my father calling again?” Daichi asked. His old man, though wheelchair bound, had followed him to sea in a sense, thanks to the very state of the art gear that Daichi liked that the Hiroaka had onboard. Even in the worst of storms, the ship’s communications worked flawlessly.

  “No, Captain Daichi,” Natsuo told him. “There is something you must see.”

  Daichi grunted his consent and moved to follow Natsuo to the heart of the small ship where her helm controls and sonar station were. Tomo, the ship’s comm. and sonar specialist, was there waiting for them. Tomo got up from his station as Daichi entered. He gave Daichi a quick bow of respect.

  “What is it, Tomo?” Daichi asked. “Natsuo has been rather vague about why you needed me here.”

  “With good cause, Captain,” Tomo said. “We did not want to cause a panic.”

  Daichi’s eyebrows rose at the bizarre disclosure. “Panic? What are you talking about, Tomo?”

  “Look for yourself, sir,” Tomo told him, gesturing at the sonar screen.

  Daichi studied the screen. At first, he didn’t have a clue what Tomo was trying to show him, but then he saw it. The blip was so large Daichi had thought it was just part of the screen.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “We don’t know, Captain,” Natsuo told him. “Whatever it is, though, it’s coming straight for us.”

  “And fast, too,” Tomo added. “It’s moving at twenty knots.”

  Daichi glanced back at the sonar screen, quickly doing the math in his head. “So we have about ten minutes until whatever that is reaches us?”

  Tomo and Natsuo nodded in unison.

  “Could it be a ship?” Daichi asked. “Have you tried hailing it?”

  “I don’t think it’s a ship, sir,” Tomo said. “Something about the way it moves. . .”

  “We have tried making contact with it, Captain,” Natsuo informed him. “On every channel available to us. There has been no reply.”

  Daichi rubbed at his cheeks with the fingers and thumb of his right hand. “I am man enough to admit I don’t have an answer to this one. Both of you are more experienced with all this. What do you suggest we do?”

  “Run, Captain,” Tomo said almost instantly. “We certainly can’t fight something that size and that fast if it’s hostile. The Hiroaka is a fishing boat. Yes, we have some small arms aboard in case of pirates but nothing that could give us a chance against something like that.”

  “I have to agree, sir,” Natsuo nodded.

  “The men are in the middle of pulling up the nets,” Daichi protested. “All the fish in them here will be lost if we run. And what we will tell the rest of the crew? Won’t running cause exactly the sort of panic you were hoping to avoid?”

  Neither Natsuo nor Tomo had an answer.

  “You said this thing is moving at twenty knots correct?” Daichi asked, still weighing his course of action.

  “Yes, Captain,” Tomo replied.

  “The Hiroaka’s max speed with her engines at full is only eighteen knots,” Daichi reminded them. “If we run and whatever that thing is decides to come after us, we won’t be able to outrun it.”

  Natsuo and Tomo stared at him, waiting for his orders.

  “The call is yours, sir,” Natsuo said. “Whatever you decide to do, though, Captain, I suggest we do it quickly.”

  “Fine,” Daichi grunted. “Tell the crew what’s going on and pass out what weapons we do have aboard. There’s no point in keeping them in the dark at this point. They’ll know something is badly wrong as soon as we give the order to abandon the nets.”

  Daichi paused, taking a breath before continuing. It hurt him to give up the fish, but he could see no other option. “Tell them to drop the nets. Tomo, get down to the engines and make sure we get all the speed out of them that we can. Natsuo, set a course away from whatever that thing, maximum speed.”

  Tomo and Natsuo hurried to carry out his orders while Daichi moved to watch the chaos that began on the ship’s deck as soon as Natsuo started barking orders through the loudspeakers.

  The crew outside looked absolutely terrified as they cut loose the nets they had been reeling up. He could see in their faces, even from where he was looking out the window of the small control room of the ship. The fear in those expressions only grew as Natsuo ordered the men to pass out the weapons from the ship’s weapon lockers.

  Daichi’s attention became focused on the horizon beyond the Hiroaka’s forward deck. He picked up a nearby pair of binoculars and raised them to his eyes. Out there in the distance, he could see the something massive cutting through the waves towards the ship. Daichi felt sick as the full scale of its size sunk in. The thing was many, many times the size of the Hiroaka.

  Natsuo was spinning the wheel around madly, turning the Hiroaka away from the approaching contact. Daichi could already see that even with the engines straining at full power, it wasn’t going to be enough.

  Some of the sailors on the deck who had already been given small arms opened fire at the massive creature streaking towards the ship. Shotguns thundered and pistols cracked rapid succession. Daichi had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at how futile their shots seemed given the size of the thing coming at them.

  In the last instant before the creature plowed into the Hiroaka, it rose partially up out of the waves. Its head was horned. A great horn protruded from each side of its skull, and a third larger one rose from the middle of its forehead. Its body was covered in thick scales that reminded Daichi of the scales of python, all yellow and black. It gave a roar that left everyone aboard the Hiroaka screaming in pa
in and clutching their ears before the creature dropped its head back into the water. The window in front of Daichi blew out. Shards of glass exploded, burying them in his flesh. Blood spurted in splashes of bright red from one piece ripped open the side of his neck. Daichi stumbled backwards to collapse onto the floor.

  The monster struck the Hiroaka at a speed well over twenty knots. The hull of the fishing vessel folded inward with the squeals of rending metal. The impact was so great that the Hiroaka was lifted from the surface of the ocean and sent toppling over onto its side before it completely broke apart as the monster plowed through it, tearing it to pieces.

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