by Greg Keyes
Then one of them – the leader, she thought – turned his gaze on them. His eyes were empty, cold, like the eyes of a shark. Her mother pulled her close.
But then the man was no longer looking at them. His attention shifted to Mothra, and the faintest of smiles touched his lips. As the ORCA continued its rhythmic song, Mothra roared so loudly Madison thought the very stone would crack.
THREE
From Dr. Chen’s notes:
The minokawa-bird is as large as the Island of Negros or Bohol. He has a beak of steel, and his claws too are of steel. His eyes are mirrors, and each single feather is a sharp sword. He lives outside the sky, at the eastern horizon, ready to seize the moon when she reaches there from her journey under the earth.
The moon makes eight holes in the eastern horizon to come out of, and eight holes in the western horizon to go into, because every day the big bird tries to catch her, and she is afraid. The exact moment he tries to swallow her is just when she is about to come in through one of the holes in the east to shine on us again. If the minokawa should swallow the moon, and swallow the sun too, he would then come down to earth and gulp down men also. But when the moon is in the belly of the big bird, and the sky is dark, then all the Bagobo scream and cry, and beat agongs, because they fear they will all “get dead.” Soon this racket makes the minokawa-bird look down and “open his mouth to hear the sound.” Then the moon jumps out of the bird’s mouth and runs away.
All the old men know about the minokawa-bird in the ulit stories.
—A myth of the Bagobo people
of the Southern Philippines.
Senate Hearing Chamber, Washington D.C., United States
Ishiro Serizawa was no stranger to hearings. He’d been involved in a number of them.
Some were more important than others. Today he found himself gazing at the seal of the United States on the wall behind the senators assembled for the meeting on their elevated platform, the barrier of dark wood panels that separated the interrogators from those interrogated. This hearing was one of the important ones. Tensions between Monarch and the government had been growing now for five years. They were close to coming to a head. The committee chair was Claire Godine. She was smart, powerful, assertive. As a senator from Hawai’i, a state both the MUTOs and Godzilla had made very destructive tracks through, she was no fan of Titans. Or Monarch.
Presently, she and the rest of the committee were regarding Monarch’s Head of Tech, Sam Coleman, as he filled the presentation screen with a montage of Titans.
“What we are witnessing here, Senators,” Sam said, “is the return of an ancient and forgotten superspecies. Godzilla, the MUTOs, Kong. We believe that these ‘Titans’ and others like them provide an essential balance to our world. And while some may pose a threat, Monarch is uniquely prepared to determine which of these Titans are here to threaten us, and which of these Titans are here to protect us.”
“Thank you for the fifth-grade history lesson, Mr. Coleman,” Senator Godine said. “But we still haven’t heard one good reason why Monarch shouldn’t fall under military jurisdiction or why these creatures shouldn’t be exterminated.”
Coleman walked back to his seat. Serizawa glanced over at Admiral Stenz, who was also looking sidelong at him. They had worked together five years ago. He thought Stenz respected him. But his military mind was – limited, in some situations. Serizawa knew where a lot of the push to kill the creatures came from.
“Monarch was tasked with finding and destroying these radioactive monsters,” Godine went on. “But you either can’t or won’t tell us how many there are, or why they’re showing up. So, maybe it’s time for the military to put them down.”
“Killing them would be a mistake,” Serizawa said. “They returned because of us. It was our atomic testing that awoke Godzilla. Other creatures like the MUTOs from strip mining and seismic surveys. But these are not monsters, they are animals, rising to reclaim a world that was once theirs.”
“It almost sounds like you’re protecting them, Dr. Serizawa,” the Senator said. “As if you admire them.”
“I admire all forms of life,” Serizawa replied. He stood up. “Senators, if you hope to survive, we must find ways to coexist with Titans. With Godzilla.”
“A sort of symbiotic relationship, if you will,” Dr. Vivienne Graham – his friend and protégé of many years – added, from the seat to his left. “Like the lion and the mouse.”
Serizawa settled back into his seat.
“Or the scorpion and the frog,” Godine said. “So you’d want to make Godzilla our pet?”
“No,” Serizawa said. “We would be his.”
Everyone laughed at that. As if he had been joking.
From the corner of his eye he saw Vivienne pull out her phone. As the laughter died down, she tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned she showed him the message on the little screen. He knew she wouldn’t do that unless it was something urgent.
And it was.
Sam was still desperately tried to salvage the hearing.
“Uh, no, uh, no actually,” he said. “That’s not what Dr. Serizawa meant. No one is implying that we would be Godzilla’s – or anyone’s…”
“Sorry, we need to go,” Vivienne interrupted. Serizawa stood up as she did. They quickly made their way toward the exit.
“Dr. Serizawa, Dr. Graham,” Godine called after them. “This hearing is not adjourned. Dr. Serizawa! I hope you understand the consequences of walking out that door.”
He ignored her.
* * *
Sam watched Serizawa and Graham leave, embarrassed and wondering what the hell was going on. He turned back to the committee. He clicked on an icon in his presentation.
“Uh, you know what, Senators?” he said. “While I confer with my colleagues here, I’m gonna set you up with a very brief and pretty fun documentary on Titan reproduction. I think this is the one where the genitals are blurred out but if not, you can leave a comment with my assistant.”
As images of the MUTOs came up, he hurried after Graham and Serizawa.
* * *
Jebel Barkal, Sudan Monarch Outpost 75
“So, there you go, Sergeant Nez,” Esmail said. “Jebel Barkal. The place where the world began.”
Master Sergeant Margaret Nez tilted her head a little to the side and squinted her eyes against the hot Sudanese sun. The place where the world began didn’t look like much, just a little mountain, maybe a hundred meters high, flat on top. It wouldn’t look that out of place in her New Mexican birthplace. Well, except for the pyramids scattered around it. Smaller and narrower than the pyramids she’d seen in Egypt.
“Is it?” she said.
“So my ancestors said,” Esmail replied, “and the Ancient Egyptians believed so too. In the beginning the world was covered in water, and then this mountain, Jebel Barkal, rose up out of it. Then the god Atum was born, and things got busy after that.”
“Uh-huh,” Nez said.
Esmail was a local, a zoologist, and an employee of Monarch. He’d met her at the dusty little airport in Merowe and driven her here, proudly displaying his knowledge of the various empires that had ruled this place in ancient times. How there were more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt, and so forth. She judged him to be around the same age as her daughter, early twenties. She was glad he spoke English. Her Arabic was pretty decent, but the Sudanese dialect of Arabic was… challenging.
“Your people have similar legends, yes?” Esmail said.
“My people?” she said.
“Native Americans. You’re Navajo?”
“Diné,” she corrected. “Yeah. Our story is we came out of a hole in the ground. Got chased around by monsters for a while until these two brothers killed them all.” She shrugged. “I grew up on the Checkerboard Rez. My folks didn’t talk about that stuff much.”
“But you believe in monsters, don’t you?” Esmail said.
“After Godzilla flattened San Francisco, who doesn’t?” sh
e said. “I take it there’s one right here, someplace, or we wouldn’t be here.”
“So you were briefed?” Esmail asked.
She nodded. “The army had to clear me before they loaned me out to Monarch. But they were light on details. So what is it? Another big lizard? A bug thing?”
“Mokele-Mbembe,” he said.
“Sir?”
“Mokele-Mbembe,” he repeated. “The name comes from a legendary creature in the tales of the people of Zimbabwe. The name means ‘One who Stops the Flow of Rivers.’”
“Okay,” she said. “So is it a lizard, or a bug, or…”
“Closer to a snake, I guess,” he said. “Or maybe an elephant. You’ll see.”
“Okay.” She shifted her rucksack, so it dug into a different part of her shoulder.
He noticed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I get excited. You’d like to put your things down and have a cold drink, I’m sure.”
“That’d be nice,” she said.
“Come along.”
A sturdy-looking fence had been set up around the ancient cemetery. The gate guards saluted her after checking her I.D. Inside of the fence, rows of temporary barracks had been set up. Nez didn’t see any place to hide a monster, though. Maybe inside one of the pyramids, although they weren’t all that big. There were other ruins, too – ancient palaces and temples, all mostly leveled by wind and time.
Esmail pulled up to one of the larger prefab buildings. Guards met them at the door, saluted, and let her through.
“Colonel Freer will be back tomorrow,” he explained. “We can really get into your duties and such then. But in the meantime, I’ve been cleared to show you the big boy. I’ll walk you to your quarters, and we’ll meet in the canteen at, let’s say 1100?”
She nodded.
Her quarters were spare, but serviceable. It had a real bed and not a cot, which amused her a little bit. Monarch wasn’t a military organization, and it showed in the details as well as the big picture. Most of the military equipment and personnel came from the government.
She washed her face and took a quick spit-bath, changed her shirt and ran a comb through her short – still mostly black – hair. Then she went to meet Esmail.
He took her across the compound to another building. Inside that was a cylindrical pit, with walls of cut and fitted stone. In the floodlights it looked like a gigantic deep well, but with a stairway spiraling down its walls.
“This was under one of the structures,” he said. “About two meters below and capped with stone. Shall we go down?”
She nodded, and they continued. The harsh light picked out inscriptions on the stone, pictographs, or perhaps hieroglyphs.
“Most of the structures upstairs are anywhere from about twenty-three hundred years old to about three thousand,” Esmail explained. “This stuff down here is… older. The archaeologists think it could be more like fifteen or twenty, which is nuts, because human civilization isn’t supposed to stretch back that far.”
They reached the bottom of the shaft, which opened into a low stone chamber buttressed by columns carved to resemble strange, inhuman figures.
One side of the structure was collapsed, and further in, that rubble had been dug out and shored up with much more modern hardware. The result was an immense cavern.
Lying in it was something equally huge.
It was too big to take in all at once. She strained to pick out details in the dim light, to factor out the containment rigging from the thing it contained.
It was coiled up like a snake. But something big lay in the middle of the coils, suggesting that what she was looking at wasn’t a snake, but something with a massive, snake-like tail. The coils hid most of the details of the central body and head, but the wicked-looking curve of a horn stuck up from it, pulsing with a very faint green light.
She hadn’t exactly told Esmail the truth. Her parents hadn’t talked about the stories of her people, the Diné, very much, but a lot of the older people in her family did. They spoke often of the Naayéé, the ancient alien god-giants who had once plagued their ancestors. Tsé nináhálééh, the Rock Monster Eagle, Yé’iitsoh, the Big Giant, Shash na’alkaahi, the Tracking Bear Monster. Déélgééd the Horned Monster.
She didn’t get the shivers. But her belly felt like it was full of caterpillars.
“Maybe this guy is why we never heard of those earlier civilizations,” she murmured.
“Yeah,” Esmail said. “Maybe.”
* * *
Jonah pushed the dead body of a Monarch tech from his chair, checked to make sure the seat wasn’t bloody. No sense in staining his clothes. It was clean, so he sat down. The dead man was still signed in, so it was no trouble to find the other containment sites. He copied them out. Just in case the data he’d come by five years before was obsolete.
There were more of them than he’d thought. That was good – the more the better.
He was just finishing up when Asher arrived.
“Colonel,” Asher said.
“Are Dr. Russell and her daughter secure?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We’ve got them in the Osprey. We’re ready any time you are.”
“Good.” He noticed Asher staring at the man he’d pushed out of the chair. “Something bothering you?”
“No, sir,” he said.
“We’re at war,” Jonah said. “There are casualties in war.”
“I don’t question that,” Asher said.
Jonah smiled, a really genuine smile he almost never brought out.
“Yes, you do,” he said, softly. “You’re young, yet. You still care for… these. After all, they are our species. Evolution built us to care for them. But evolution isn’t always right, is it?”
Asher swallowed and tried to smile.
“Well there was the dodo,” he said. “And the platypus – that doesn’t seem quite right.”
“You know what I mean,” Jonah said.
“I do, yeah,” Asher said. “Look, what you did for me – nobody ever did anything like that for me before. I’m with you all the way to the end, no matter what. I’ll kill a thousand more like this if you tell me it’s necessary. I’m just not necessarily going to like it.”
“I know that,” Jonah told him. “But we’ve got it all right here in our hands, now. We can do everything we’ve dreamed of. It’s not the time for hesitation.”
“Yes, sir,” Asher said. “I understand that.”
Jonah nodded. “We’ve got the passcodes and Monarch gear?”
“Waiting on you, sir.”
“Let’s go, then,” Jonah said. “I’m done with this place.”
* * *
The metallic scent of blood mingled with that of pine and juniper. Overhead, a few vultures had already caught on, and were beginning their slow, patient surveillance. The songbirds had fallen silent, except for the crows and jays hacking out warnings to their kin.
The pack was feeding.
Mark had watched them take the elk down, albeit from a good distance. How long they had been running it he didn’t know, but by the time he located them the beast was too tired to put up a fight. A single wolf wouldn’t have had much of a chance against an adult elk like this one, but wolves worked together. They communicated, coordinated, and executed. They followed their Alpha. And now they feasted on their prey while their pups played.
Crouched behind a fallen tree, taking in that primal scene, under the wide blue sky with trees and mountains towering around him, Mark felt as he imagined the first human to behold these splendid creatures had. The admiration for them. The sense of kinship. The affinity between man and wolf had been so strong that some wolves had joined human packs, back in the day, and eventually became dogs.
And some humans had joined wolf packs.
He clicked more pictures, wondering if Maddie would like them, if there was any sense in sending her any more. She hadn’t answered any of his emails in a long time.
He couldn’t blame he
r. She had been so young, and when she needed him most he’d fallen apart. He had been no good to her, to Emma, to anyone. But it still hurt. She was his Maddie, his daughter.
His only child.
She was almost his only tether to that other world, the world of cities and airplanes and the swarming masses. The connection felt weaker every day. Soon he would have no reason to ever go back there.
He took out his digital recorder and set up a shotgun mike. He was here to work, after all, not just take in the sights. Funding went away if you never produced any results, especially when the people funding you were already a little dubious of your research. But he was sure he was on to something. Pack predators used a variety of sounds to communicate in obvious ways, depending on the species. Some of his earlier work had been with killer whales and dolphins, where much of that communication was outside of the range of human hearing. He was convinced that other pack hunters like wolves also relied on sub-vocal signals to maintain pack cohesion. To help them sense the Alpha and read his intentions.
But to prove that, he needed data.
The magnified sounds of the wolves came in through his headphones—the snarls and sharp barks, the sound of flesh tearing, the whimper of a pup.
But then he started adjusting through all of that, tuning out the extraneous sound, zeroing in on the literal heart of the beast, until all he heard was a rhythmic thub, thub, thub.
For a moment Mark knew true bliss. He was where he belonged, doing what he was supposed to be doing, and any doubts he had were swept away as by a mountain stream.
A faint growl and scuff of leaves brought him out of it. He looked over his shoulder. The Alpha, Okami, was about three meters behind him. His fangs were bared, and the ruff of his neck stood up.
Crap.
Mark slowly pulled out the .45 from its holster and pointed it at the beast.
Their gazes locked; Okami growled and showed all his teeth. The moment hung there. Mark felt the beat of his own heart. And although his microphone wasn’t pointed at the Alpha, he thought he could feel Okami’s pulse matching his own. He’d felt connected to the imposing creature since he’d first seen him, and now, in this moment of life and death, the bond was stronger than ever. Okami led his pack and protected them. He knew what human beings were capable of. He wasn’t the one out of line here.
