Read on for a free sample of I, Kaiju
Author Bio
Eric S Brown is the author of numerous series including the Kaiju Apocalypse series (with Jason Cordova), the Bigfoot War series, the A Pack of Wolves series, the Homeworld series (with Tony Faville and Jason Cordova), the Jack Bunny Bam Bam series, and the Crypto-Squad series (with Jason Brannon). Some of his stand alone books include War of the Worlds plus Blood Guts and Zombies, World War of the Dead, Last Stand in a Dead Land, Into the Light, Sasquatch Lake, and The Weaponer to name only a few. His short fiction has been published hundreds of times throughout both the small press and by larger publishers in markets like the Grantville Gazette and Baen Books’ Onward Drake anthology. He has also done the novelizations of films like Boggy Creek: The Legend is True and The Bloody Rage of Bigfoot. The first book of his own Bigfoot War series was released as a feature film from Origin Releasing in September of 2014 and the Walmart Corporation adapted his short story “The Babble Creek Monster” into a short cartoon that was released in October 2014. Eric also writes an ongoing comic book news column for a regional newspaper called The Guide. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and children where he continues to write tales of hungry corpses, giant monsters, and blazing guns. .
I, Kaiju
It came from the deep, the really deep.
A cliché, I know, but no one would ever believe a squid could grow this big, be this strong, and have skin harder than turtle shell. I couldn’t believe it, not yet, not without seeing it with my own eyes.
This animal is why I have come all this way. This discovery is the reason I left a well-paid job, my home, my car, and my family.
I was over a thousand miles away when I received the news, stood at the coffee pot before my next lecture. The email came through to my phone and hot coffee was almost spat all over my colleagues. Colossal Squid, said the email, and they wanted me to investigate. It was a no brainer. I left my students with another professor and responded to the Marine Biological Association (MBA) with the affirmative.
The MBA had wanted me here, and I wanted to be here.
I was on a plane the very next day. The neighbours had the cat and the rent was paid for six months. Winter expedition clothes were thrown into a case, and I was back in the field at forty.
For a marine biologist like me, this day is a dream come true.
The Antarctic wind whips through the site bringing snow, ice, and cold. The corners of every window have frosted, and the air always has a faint smell of fresh fish and pine. As quick as the bluster came, it went. Someone must have opened the hatch, another Doctor I presume.
They will come. Doctors like me will travel from all over the world to see her on this small slice of British Antarctic Territory. They will all want a piece of her too, but if she was caught in British waters then I am sure that the Marine Biological Association of the UK will secure her. I was here to secure her for them, I think.
The expedition details were nothing more than to investigate. Investigate I will, but then I am bringing her home.
The rest of the briefing material I received from the MBA only detailed how she was caught – Subject A was brought to the surface by an underwater earthquake measuring 8 Richter magnitude. The force collapsed the shelf under which Subject A had been living. Local fisherman had reported sights of a ‘prehistoric beast’ which were filed at Port Lockroy. Permission was given to Stephen Walsh, of the Port Lockroy United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust, to commission the fisherman to capture the Subject.
Subject A is believed to be Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni, or Colossal Squid, from the Cranchiidae family. However, early reports suggest a ‘crab-like’ shell deployable at will.
I had to see her. There was no question. This was what I live for.
I press my hand against the cold glass and peer through. The tank is easily seventy feet tall, but the water inside is murky. I can see her colossal outline, a silhouette of tentacles and wonder and splendour, and it makes my heart beat louder than a pair of old trainers in a tumble dryer. She is a real beauty. The murk swirls around, and I briefly glimpse flashes of purple flesh, the brief spy of circular sucker rings with serrated teeth inside, and the hooks; I can only imagine how big her beak must be.
She has ten tentacles in total. Eight are of equal size and she has two more that are longer than the others for feeding. At the end of the two longer ones are flat areas that look a bit like feet – flat and round like plates. In normal squids these would be a few inches in size but hers are the same size as all of me.
This is why I wanted to be a biologist, for discoveries like this. I am one in maybe only twenty or thirty people to have seen this species alive like this.
“Doctor Lawson?” said a familiar voice over my shoulder. I turned to face her. Doctor Gwyneth Mathews, Gwen. The two of us had graduated Plymouth together, both with honours in Marine Biology. We finished the same year and are the same age, but time has been kinder to her than me. She still has that long auburn hair that reached her hips and that petite frame. “It is you!” she beams, “Or should I call you Professor Lawson now?”
“It’s me,” I smile back, “and no, I still prefer Doctor. I find Professor somewhat more pretentious, and students ridicule pretentious. Have you just gotten here, Gwen?”
“On site? Oh no, I was here as quickly as I could be after she was spotted. I was working at the Cabo de Hornos National Park in Southern Chile when the MBA called me to say she had been seen. I was with the fisherman the next day, the day they caught her. I was there to make sure the catch was humane and with the least distress to her. That was the only service the MBA commissioned me for, but I have not been able to leave her since and I am here for free and on my own accord.”
“Working for free? Why?”
“Have you seen her, Mike?”
“I have seen glimpses of her. Her skin is purple like the twilight that night in Svalbard. Do you remember? We were watching the whales under the purple sky and we…” – we kissed. Gwen flinches at the memory. Stop reminiscing you old fool, she’s a married woman now. “I can see the size of her silhouette, and I am already excited. I want to see more but the water is pretty murky in there.”
“Yes, it seems to be one of her defences. When the fishermen tried to pull her on deck she kept barraging them with stones and sand that she must have stored from the sea bed. And that is not all she can do.”
“It’s her armoured skin that the MBA mentioned, right?”
“Right. It’s like no other cephalopod in existence. It can harden and yet remain fully flexible. It hardened so much during the catch that she managed to cut a hole right through the tugger’s hull at the bow with a flailing tentacle. Her two dactylus are more like clubs and they are not lined just with suckers like a Giant Squid, but also barbed hooks that run from the dactylus and all the way down her feeding tentacles. They can be retracted or shot out in attack.
“She isn’t just a sixty foot, two thousand pound Colossal Squid, Mike. She is something more, something else.”
Gwen frowned. This was what we have been waiting for all of our professional careers and yet she is frowning.
“What is it, Gwen?” I ask her. He blue eyes quiver with tears at the question and she has to bite her top lip.
“It sounds strange, but being there when they caught her has left me feeling like I am responsible for her. I am like a mother, and she is my young.” Gwen always wanted children. I wonder why she and Bill never had any. “She needs protecting, Mike.”
“What do you mean? What is it, Gwen?”
“I don’t know how long we will be able to keep her. Sure, she’s currently under ownership of the British Antarctic expeditions on behalf of the MBA, but only to keep her alive, and only until the fishermen that caught her have found a more suitable buyer.”
“A buyer? So the MBA have paid the British Antarctic expeditions to catch her and keep her alive, but they won’t pay to keep her safe?”
“They have made an offer, but I have heard it wasn’t enough.”
“Who would outbid them?”
“The United States government, that’s who would, and probably has. They are interested in her defences - her skin, her teeth, that sand spraying, and we haven’t even seen her ink yet. I have heard from one fisherman that the US military want to use her biology to implement new technologies into their soldiers, planes, and subs.
“We won’t keep her here, Mike. We just won’t.”
Gwen leaves with tears in her eyes. I am ready to follow, to chase after her and tell her it would be okay, but I can feel other eyes on me.
I turn and I see her now, see her in her full glory. Eight long tentacles all lined with suckers and teeth, and two longer feeding tentacles with flat dactylus on the ends. The dactylus are covered in even more suckers and round razor teeth and barbed hooks.
Above the dark purple tentacles stands a great head with two orbital eyes and above that is a great pink mantle she wears like a helmet. I can see that some of her tentacles are floppy, floating like reeds in a lake, but others are stiff and hard, like stilts or crutches, and they support her as if she stands on the bottom of the tank.
It’s crazy, but I wonder of the possibility of her walking on land. The atmosphere wouldn’t sustain her but still, she might have the ability to walk on land for a short time. She really is something else.
The beak is hardly visible on a normal squid, but hers is giant, no, colossal. It even hangs down past her buccal mass and the top of her limbs. It is long, curled, and a deep black. Huge eyes, over twenty inches each, are on opposite sides of her head. They look out with a complete three hundred and sixty degree field of view. The orbs are the biggest I have ever seen. The dark blue and black colours make me think of her deep, watery home.
“It took the moving of the Earth itself,” I whisper, “an earthquake of unprecedented power just to bring you to the surface, to bring you to us, to me. Gwen and I will do our best to keep you safe. It is what we do.”
Her eyes meet mine and widen. And then she is gone as suddenly as she had appeared.
Stones and sand and debris circle in her tower-block sized tank, shot out by some unseen defence mechanism. All Cephalopods, bar only a few octopuses, had the ability to squirt ink, but I have never observed this before. And now I imagine how much ink she must have in that body and I can’t help but smile. Such a beast she is, so beautiful and full of wonder.
I press my hand back on the tank and look at the small plaque hastily stuck to the side;
Subject A - ‘Annabelle’
Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni
They have named her Annabelle. A Colossal squid with evolved defences and offences never seen before, with enough strength and teeth to kill any shark or whale, and they call her Annabelle.
Giant Squid are often preyed upon by Sperm Whales and Pilot Whales, but not this one, not Annabelle. She would be too strong, too quick. Scientists believe that ancient Cephalopods had external shells way back during the Triassic period, but she has got hers back somehow. The start of my paper will certainly question the classification of her as Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni. I will suggest that she is an entirely new species.
She is a killer from the deep, an alpha species.
I read through her records kept on a flipchart near to the tank. Her size and weight make her the biggest Cephalopod ever caught. Testing hasn’t progressed further than weighing and measuring and counting teeth and suckers. “Sixty feet,” I murmur, “sixty feet and only just adolescent by my reckoning.”
“Impressive, isn’t she?” asks a dark figure stood in the corner. I can smell cheap cologne and cigarette smoke. How long has he been there? Has he heard Gwen and I speak?
The man steps out into better light. He is certainly not a fisherman. His suit is as expensive as the glasses sat on his stump of a nose, and both worth more than the entire contents of my suitcase. He runs a hand through his thin, grey hair, and for a moment I think the motion will take the rest of his mop with it. “Allow me to properly introduce myself, my name is Ron Whitmore,” he says with the driest of smiles.
He is American. Maybe Gwen was right. What other reason would there be for an American to be all the way here in British Antarctic Territory? He wasn’t a Doctor, which was obvious. “I’m Doctor Michael Lawson,” I say, and shake his cold, un-gloved hand. I can’t help but feel that his skin is a lot colder, icier, than mine.
“I know who you are, Doctor Lawson.”
“And who are you, other than Ron Whitmore, of course?”
“I am the Chief of The Department of Defence for the United States of America and I have been -”
“So it is true,” I cut in. “She is going to the States.” Whitmore nods. “Doctor Mathews will not be happy,” I mutter under my breath but loud enough so he knows of my distain. After all, we are in British Antarctic Territory, and she was caught here too.
“Doctor Mathews will see reason, Doctor, she will. Who do you think brought the two of you here? The MBA alone? We have read your papers and research. We know that there are no two people who know more about giant Cephalopods than the pair of you.”
“What are you proposing?”
“I am offering a job each for the pair of you. Annabelle will be moved to a secure location in the Nevada Desert for further testing and understanding. We want her secrets, and we want you and Doctor Mathews to come too, to help us understand her biology and weaponry.”
“Have you asked Gwen, I mean, Doctor Mathews?”
“I was hoping you would. Once you both see that you will have unlimited, uncensored access to a modern wonder of the world, a wonder of the deep, well, I hope that you will see reason.”
“How long do we have here?”
“We sail for San Diego tomorrow. The plans are already in place whether the two of you come for the journey or not.”
Whitmore gloves his hands and bids me farewell, for now. I leave the tank chamber and look for the living quarters. I pass by my bags that are still at the bottom of the ladder that leads up to the hatch. I don’t think there is a need to unpack.
I find Gwen alone at a desk in the quarters. She hasn’t unpacked her things either. She knew Annabelle would never stay here all along. No matter whom the buyer was, Annabelle would not have stayed. I put a hand on her shoulder, “You were right. The Americans have bought her.”
“Did they say what for?”
“Not for preservation, that’s for sure. Weapon technology for the Department of Defence, or so the shady salesman implied anyway. They will take her to the Nevada desert tomorrow by freight ship first.”
“It is such a waste, Mike. I wanted to study her more, observe her feeding, her behaviour. I want to understand what her species need to thrive so we could help make it so!”
“We still can! They gave the call to get us here. They want us to go with them, Gwen.”
“To help make weapons for the Americans?”
“Yes, that, but think of the research we can do! Twenty four hours, seven days a week access to her. But they only want us as a pair. Please consider it, Gwen.”
She lifts a diagram from the table. It is a rough sketching of Annabelle that she has been working on. I have always loved her sketches. She sketched me once, I remember. It was a caricature – I had a fat paunch, a podgy face, and thinning air. It was like she had glimpsed into the future and seen me as I am now.
She taps her sketch. “Look at the size of her mantle,” she beams, “her head, her eyes, and her beak. Okay, Mike, I will come with you, but only to study Annabelle more.”
“Can I ask why the sketch decided it for you?”
“It is her brain, Mike. Look at the size of the head that mantle sits on. I am sure that a brain of that size must be capable of independent thought. I first thought it when I spoke to her.”
“Thought what?”
“I believe she is sentient, Mike. She can hear and see and think. Annabelle
is capable of cognitive thought, and I wish to prove it. Even if I have to help create weapons, I will prove it.”
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