Kaiju Winter: An End Of The World Thriller

by Jake Bible

  Then he jumps to his feet, his eyes glued to his arm. He smoothens down the hair, but it stands back up instantly. He looks around and kneels next to his bag, tossing stuff out onto the floor until he finds a small, plastic water bottle with the presidential seal on the side. He thought he was stealing it for a memento, but now knows it could be the most important water bottle ever.

  He pours some water on his arm and watches as the hair slicks down and clumps up. He swirls it with his finger and then gasps at what he sees.

  “Oh no,” he mutters. “No, no, no. I fucked up. Oh, shit, I fucked up big time.”

  He grabs his cell phone and dials a number he was given.

  “Yes, this is Dr. Blane Hall,” the man almost shouts into the phone. “I need to speak to the president immediately!” He listens for a second. “Yes, it’s an emergency! I’ll hold, but we may not have much time!”

  He starts to pace the hallway, getting frustrated with every second that passes.

  Finally, “Dr. Hall, this is President Nance. I was told it was urgent. What do you need?”

  “Sir, I was wrong,” Dr. Hall says. “The hole, it didn’t have tails in it, sir.”

  “What are you talking about? What changed your mind?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Hall says, rushing his words. “But those things weren’t tails, sir.”

  “Then what were they? We all saw them.”

  “They were cilia, sir.” He waits, but doesn’t get a response and figures the man doesn’t know what cilia are. “Like hairs on some organisms. We have them in our tracheas and other mucosal areas. They are usually microscopic, because of their size ratio to the organism they are on. That means, sir, that if I’m right, the organism in that hole is beyond the size of anything we have ever seen.”

  He waits some more, but still no response.

  “Mr. President, did you hear me? Whatever is in that hole could be thousands of feet tall. And considering your men didn’t find traces of nuclear radiation, I’m thinking the nukes may not have killed it, sir, but fed it! Hello? Mr. President?”

  He looks down at his phone and realizes the signal has been lost. He’s about to dial again when he feels a buzzing in his head and a cramping in his stomach.

  Then the lights go out.

  He runs to the window at the end of the hall and looks out on the city around him. For blocks and blocks he sees nothing but darkness.

  “Oh, no, not again,” he whispers. “Oh, shit, it’s coming.”

  ***

  “Dr. Hall?” President Nance shouts. “Did we lose him? Someone call him back!”

  “Sir, we can’t,” Joan says. “We’ve lost all communication with the outside world.”

  “We’ve what?” President Nance asks. “How?”

  Joan looks over at one of the techs.

  “Another EMP, Mr. President,” the tech says. “As far as we can tell it’s affected the entire country.”

  “It what?” President Nance asks. “How is that possible? Unless...”

  “Unless the supervolcano erupted again,” Joan says.

  “Dear, God,” President Nance says, his features looking ancient and haggard. “If the EMP was big enough to cover the whole country, then what is coming up out of that hole this time?”

  No one in the situation room answers his question. They all just let it hang there, lost in their individual fears. The world as they know it, gone forever.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Nests: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

  Author’s Note:

  Why, yes, this will be another series! Thank you for asking.

  Seriously,Kaiju Winter has been conceived as a four book series from the beginning. Some may think I cliffhangered y’all, but I didn’t. This is the first part to a much longer narrative. It does end suddenly, but only after the major conflict is resolved, i.e. shit gets nuked.

  What now? You’ll have to wait and see! And don’t worry, if you didn’t get enough Kaiju in this one then rest assured that the next novel,Kaiju Storm, will have uber amounts of Kaiju. It’ll be a veritable Kaiju buffet!

  So thanks for reading and hanging with me during my entrée into a new genre. It has been a blast writing about giant monsters and I can’t wait to share the next chapter in this saga!

  Cheers!

  Jake Bible lives in Asheville, NC with his wife and two kids.

  A professional writer since 2009, Jake has a record of innovation, invention and creativity. Novelist, short story writer, independent screenwriter, podcaster, and inventor of the Drabble Novel, Jake is able to switch between or mash-up genres with ease to create new and exciting storyscapes that have captivated and built an audience of thousands.

  He is the author of the bestselling Z-Burbia series for Severed Press as well as the Apex Trilogy (DEAD MECH, The Americans, Metal and Ash).

  Find him at jakebible.com. Join him on Twitter and Facebook.

  1

  The sky sat heavy above us like a rock positioned to fall off a cliff. The ground was the tangible ghost of the world we had once known. The houses that remained sat expectantly, leaning slightly like brittle bones waiting for the break. They leaned away from the direction the blasts had come, their backyards forever painted a moonlike gray.

  We were short on food and some of the highways were still on fire.

  We kept looking out of the front door, the screen rusted and peeling at the top. It reminds me of the screen door to my parents’ old house and Ma, when she was battling the worst of her cancer. She would complain about the flies coming in through the screen door when I’d prop it open in the hot summer months. Sad as it seems, I miss both the flies and Ma with equal measure.

  From time to time, we look out into the mornings, staring at the colors of the sky—of the peach that wants badly to be orange—the only colors it seems the world can recall. It’s just me, Kendra, and the baby. Sometimes the baby will cry, letting us know it needs to be fed. Sometimes it cries to let us know it needs to be changed. Sometimes it just cries to be making noise. No matter what type of wail leaps from its tiny little mouth, it reminds me of the fires and the screaming. It reminds me of Ma getting trapped under the wheels of that big green government truck when the men came with their folders, their forms, and their guns.

  I lost count of how long ago that had happened. Kendra swears it couldn’t have been more than a year, just before I met her, but to me, it seems longer. I can still smell the smoke from the burning roads. I can still smell burning rubber and a chemical scent that seems to have replaced every other smell the world once had to offer. The honeysuckle that clung to the spring breezes I knew as a child was now the scent of cinder and smoke. The smells of engine exhaust and mowed lawns had been stripped from the world and replaced by the stench of bodies and the burning of the world.

  As I sit here, looking out of the window, I can smell it all. I’m dressed in a pair of shorts that are too big for me. My hips are clearly outlined through my skin, as are my ribs.

  “Why do you keep looking out of the door?” Kendra asks me on occasion. She’s right. I do stand by the door a lot.

  “Someone will come soon,” I usually say. “Someone good. We can’t be the only good ones left.”

  She leaves me alone after that. She’ll go tend to the baby, or walk to one of the abandoned houses on the other side of the flattened fields behind us to rummage in the pantries and cellars.

  I sometimes wish she had have been on one of her little excursions when I saw the shapes of two people walking down the driveway that day. The driveway connects the house and its obliterated yard to the dead highway. The driveway is just a ghost; it was a long smudge of earth that was likely traveled every single day not too long ago. A husband and wife, probably on the way to, and back home from work. A mother and father, taking their kids to baseball practice or church.

  These were nice thoughts, but as I watched the two emaciated figures drawing closer, those images were as fan
tastical as my boyhood dreams of one day walking on Mars, or curing the cancer that seemed to run on my mother’s side of the family.

  When I saw the people walking down the driveway, I instantly looked over to Kendra. She was reading an old paperback, its cover stripped, its pages pleasantly yellowed.

  “Visitors,” I told her.

  She let out a sound that was part sigh and part gasp. She set the book down and reached under the couch where we kept the rifle.

  2

  Both of the approaching figures were carrying guns; one carried a pistol and the other what I thought looked like an AK-47. The weapons looked heavier than the people that held them. As they got closer, I saw that they were both men. One appeared to have what Kendra simply called The Rot. You could see it in his face. His left cheek was yellowed, the area around his eyes swollen, his ear drooping as if there was an invisible weight attached to it. I suspected that within a day or two, it would fall off.

  We’d always assumed this was a side effect of the nuclear radiation people got—usually people that had lived close to the nuke sites.

  I opened the screen door and stood on the porch. I held my hands out to my sides, revealing my palms to let them see that I was unarmed. Kendra and I have only a single weapon—an ancient Remington rifle that we keep stashed beneath the couch—but we ran out of ammunition several weeks ago when we had to ward off a rogue group of scavengers. The single round loaded into it was all that was left.

  I nodded to the men and they nodded back in return. Seeing my empty hands, they lowered their guns. Behind me, from inside the house, the baby started to cry. Kendra knew his cries better than I did, but it sounded like the “feed me” cry.

  “How old is the kid?” one of the strangers asked, nodding towards the house. No introductions, no fake pleasantries.

  “Why?” I asked.

  One of the men was licking the area where his lips had once been. Now there were scabs and chapped skin. He blinked his eyes like he was sleepy, as if he were trying not to pass out on the spot. The other hefted his gun in a way that was meant to let me know that they had the guns, so they’d be asking the questions here.

  “Ain’t seen a baby in weeks. It was sick. Its mama had left it on the road.”

  “Where was that?” I asked.

  They both ignored my question. One of them braved a step onto the porch. The other, the one with the pistol, stood firmly behind.

  “Got any weapons?” the man creeping onto the porch asked.

  “One.”

  “What is it?”

  I didn’t say anything. This was how most conversations had gone for the last fourteen months or so. If you came across a stranger, you automatically suspected that not only were they out to kill you, but that you likely had possessions that you’d be worth killing to get.

  Behind me, the baby kept crying. The cries were escalating into tight little screams. I also heard the very slight sounds of Kendra getting up from the couch.

  “We’re going to come in,” the man said. To stress his point, he trained the barrel of the AK-47 directly at me.

  A lump formed in my throat and a fear that had become all too familiar washed through me. I raised my hands and took a step back. As I did, the man on the porch stepped forward .His partner stepped up onto the porch and joined him.

  Taking my step backwards, my eyes still on them, I saw Kendra’s shape pressed against the wall just out of the corner of my eye. The barrel of the Remington was outstretched, hidden by the wall but no less than three inches from being exposed by the doorway. Without really being able to see her, I could tell that she was shaking.

  The man with the AK stepped into the house. I don’t think he had time to actually see Kendra before the Remington filled the house with thunder. Behind it was a disgusted cry from Kendra.

  The man staggered hard to the right. His partner froze on the porch, screaming. Ignoring the blood and other unidentifiable matter that had suddenly appeared on the wall, I sprang for the partially headless man and grabbed his gun. It felt heavy in my hands, like metal had been welded into my bones.

  His screaming partner was too slow to react. I had the AK trained on him before his dead partner had even hit the floor. I squeezed the trigger and popped of five shots. The man’s screams were cut off abruptly and he did a jerking dance backwards. The fifth shot forced him back just far enough to fall off of the porch.

  He fell onto the dead lawn, made one lurching motion with his left arm, and then went still.

  The recoil of AK-47 still thrummed in my hands. The living room smelled like gun smoke and fresh blood. Kendra looked blankly at the Remington and slowly released. It was the third time in the past six months she had used it, but it was the first time she’d been forced to kill someone. The haze in her eyes told me right away that she was not handling it well.

  She handed the rifle to me and I could tell that she was on the verge of some sort of emotional collapse. She looked to the floor and I thought she was going to cry or scream.

  The baby was screaming bloody murder from the back room now, his little breaths hitching in what Ma had always referred to as a double-clutch cry.

  “I’ll tend to him if you clean this up,” Kendra said. Even her voice seemed distant. Her face, usually quite pretty, was contorting into something between sorrow and disbelief.

  “Okay.”

  I propped the Remington and the AK against the wall as she headed for the back of the house. She was already unbuttoning her shirt to free her beast for the baby to eat.

  I heard her cooing at him between his cries. As he calmed down and eventually quieted, Kendra’s muffled whimpers replaced them.

  Nests is available from Amazon here