Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters

by James Swallow

  That morning Keith had sent a round-robin email to all his employees in which he insisted that the pier would remain open unless, or until, Red Devil came within twenty miles of the town. He left it up to them whether to turn up for work or not. It was their choice, but he wanted those who were keen on earning a day’s pay to have that opportunity.

  He was, he thought, a fair boss. He had a light-touch, lenient attitude, reckoning you got more out of people the less you swaggered and shouted, and he paid generously, well above minimum wage, even though he could not realistically afford to. He suspected that if he had been harder-nosed, more bullying and miserly by nature, more of a Scrooge, the pier might not be in such a parlous state.

  But a pier should be fun, that was the thing. A pier should be a bright, happy place, a palace of dreams. If the workforce were relaxed and content and glad to be there, it would show. It would communicate itself to the punters, and they would be happy too—and spend more money.

  Gypsy Rose’s booth was shut. She had stayed home today. Perhaps she knew something no one else did. But Wheezy Bob was in his kiosk in the amusement arcade, where the shelves of the penny falls machines went back and forth in a ceaseless silvery tide and the one-armed bandits whistled and flashed their come-ons. Not that anyone was playing them. Wheezy Bob was alone, with nobody queuing to have their banknotes changed into change.

  “Busy today, Mr Brown,” he said. He had been with the pier longer than Keith. He had been young when Keith’s father took over. “Rushed off my feet.”

  “Want to take a fag break? I bet you’re dying to.”

  “And abandon my post when there’s work to be done?” Bob let out one of his raspy, phlegmy chuckles. A lifelong smoker, every one of his laughs sounded like a last gasp.

  “I think we can manage without you for five minutes.”

  Wheezy Bob fired off a yellow grin and shambled outdoors, fishing his roll-up tin from his pocket.

  Keith moved on. The rock and candyfloss stalls hawked their brightly colored wares, but no one was buying. The tables in the café were empty save for salt shakers and sugar dispensers. The souvenir shop, with its snow globes and brim-slogan bowler hats, waited for customers who weren’t coming. Jaunty Muzak—currently “I Do Like To be Beside the Seaside”—drifted ghostlike through the air. Everything glistened under a breath-light sheen of rain.

  Keith strolled right to the end of the pier. Here, next to the helter-skelter, stood a three-hundred-seat theater. In times gone by, its auditorium had resounded to hilarity and applause as comedians, novelty acts, singers, and dancers had followed one another onstage in riotous variety bills. Now it was a venue for performers at the tail end of their careers: once-notorious rock ’n’ rollers, aged crooners with suspiciously black hair, overweight gag merchants who had toned down the racism in their material but kept the mother-in-law jokes, conjurors who had never heard of street magic and still considered the old rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick an essential part of their repertoire. A full house was a rarity these days. Sometimes the box office was lucky to sell a dozen tickets.

  The entertainment consortium had plans to turn the theater into a nightclub. Rip out the seating, install a bar and a DJ podium, maybe some go-go cages. Call it something hip and happening but vaguely nautical such as Trident or Polaris. Why not give a sea-straddling hotspot the same name as a submarine-launched nuclear warhead? It made as much sense as anything, Keith thought.

  He leaned on the railing at the very tip of the pier. He was 150 meters out from the shoreline, his whole world behind him. Jade waves churned below, curls of ivory surf washing around the stilts. The impacts of the breakers thrummed through the huge hollow iron tubes and their lattice of cross-braces, as though the pier were some massive, intricate vibraphone. It was a deep and mournful sound, beat after low beat, the throb of nostalgia and loss.

  To sell? To burn?

  Either way, Keith would be left with nothing. Some cash in the bank, yes, but that wouldn’t truly compensate for what he had got rid of. It would never assuage his guilt. The pier was a family heirloom, something he was meant to preserve and pass on to his son, were he ever to father one. But he was unmarried—hadn’t found the right woman yet—and he was well into his thirties and all manner of clocks were ticking.

  Whatever he did, he had to look on it as a fresh start, a chance to begin again. The single hard fact was that he could not afford to keep the pier running, no matter how he tried. He was up to his neck in debt. The loans were piling up, interest aggregating on interest. Within the next twenty-four hours he would have to go for one or the other of the options available to him.

  Although...

  There was a third way.

  The sea was coldly inviting. How about...?

  No. That would never do. No way. Keith Brown was many things but he was not a coward.

  A herring gull alighted on the railing beside him, fixing him with a jaundiced eye. Irritably he waved the bird away.

  “Flock off,” he said, and the gull, in response, squawked and shat on the boards near his feet.

  ~

  At Deepcut Barracks, initiation was complete.

  Big Ben stood to attention, ready.

  He was 150 feet tall, one thousand tons of metal and armament, a towering man-shaped hulk, with fists as large as Range Rovers and a head the size of a double-decker bus.

  He was high-tech ordnance galore—heat-seeking missile, 120mm cannon, million-volt neuromuscular incapacitator. He was a hexacomb-reinforced armored shell built around cathedral-column servomotors and actuators, powered by a 250,000-horsepower engine salvaged from a decommissioned aircraft carrier. He was ingenuity and resourcefulness and make-do.

  He was not the world’s tallest Kaiju Response Vehicle. That honor went to America’s colossal Major Mayhem, who could go eye to eye with Lady Liberty on her pedestal. Nor was he the mightiest. Russia’s fission-powered Spirit of Chernobyl claimed that title. He wasn’t even the most recent. Japan was pumping out new marques of KRV at the rate of a dozen a year, in order to counteract the vast numbers of Kaiju that spawned from the nests in the icy deeps of the Mariana Trench.

  Truth be told, Big Ben was one of the scrawnier, cruder models. He was over ten years old and bore the scars and dents from nearly a score of Kaiju defence actions. Famously, his left leg was stiff after his bruising fracas with Charlie Two Heads off Lundy Island in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, and the paintwork on his shoulder was still charred and blackened after it had been scorched by Dragon Breath’s flames during the Battle of Coventry.

  Of course these injuries could have been repaired. “But,” said the Department of Kaiju Affairs, “budget cutbacks, economic slowdown, austerity, time to tighten our belts, we’re all in this together, blah blah blah.”

  In any case, people didn’t mind. They liked Big Ben just the way he was, flaws and all. He was cranky, dogged, temperamental, a little bit battered, but still game. He was, in a word, British.

  ~

  Wheezy Bob tapped Keith on the shoulder, breaking him out of his glum reverie.

  “Sally’s just told me. Red Devil’s about an hour away. Last place you want to be is on this old pier, stuck out like bait on a pole. Those nutters on the promenade, they might think it’s a good idea serving themselves up to him, but anyone with any sense’ll get to cover.”

  They powered down the pier. Lights winked out. The machines in the amusement arcade fell still. The Muzak was silenced.

  At the turnstile the three of them went their separate ways, Sally to her mum’s house, Wheezy Bob to his bungalow and his parrot and his photos of his late wife, and Keith to the nearest pub that was still serving.

  ~

  Why Red Devil turned inland at the precise point he did could never be fully explained. Even the so-called Kaiju experts couldn’t fathom the beast’s motivations and mindset. Kaiju were impulsive creatures. They were driven by hunger and a love of wanton destruction. Maybe Red Devil just felt peckish and
decided it was time for a snack. Maybe the Kaiju chasers on the seafront caught his fancy and lured him in, like a display of food in a deli window. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, for them; the right place at the right time, for him.

  He strode through the threshing shallows, making small tsunamis with his shins. His scaly crimson hide glowed like an atomic sunset. His yellow eyes gazed down from a height of two hundred feet with sulphurous pitilessness. His footfalls were temblors, miniature earthquakes.

  The Kaiju chasers became the Kaiju chased. Panicking, they dropped their cameras and ran. All at once, their monster spotting hobby was no longer fun. They had gone from spectators to unwilling participants. Thrillseekers, sanctuary seekers now, fled this way and that along the promenade, making for doorways and hiding between parked cars or in bus shelters or behind the benches where, on normal days, weary old people sat and stared at the horizon, contemplating distances and ends.

  Red Devil thundered up the shingle beach, water pouring off him in cataracts. He scooped up a handful of petrified Japanese tourists and gobbled them down like sushi. He snatched a news cameraman off the ground, tossed him in the air, and caught him in his mouth like a teenager with a peanut. The cameraman, to his eternal credit, kept filming even as he vanished inside the monster’s gullet.

  Screams and wails of despair echoed up and down the seafront. Red Devil bellowed in return, a bomb blast of noise that rattled window frames and shattered panes. He roved to and fro along the roadway like some gargantuan terrier, sniffing out cowering humans, skewering them on an index finger talon and devouring them. Some he popped into his mouth whole like canapés, others he savoured, chomping them down in two or three bites as though they were gingerbread men or Jelly Babies.

  A fat purple tongue rolled around his lizardy lips in satisfaction. Something akin to a smile creased his serpentine features. The eating was sparse but good, and his prey tasted all the better for the terror-triggered adrenaline that spiced their blood.

  ~

  In the pub, The Sailor’s Rest, Keith and the other patrons supped their pints and prayed Red Devil would leave them alone.

  “Feed first, smash property afterwards,” said one of the regulars into the timorous silence that filled the room. “That’s the pattern. I just hope the bastard doesn’t head this way.”

  “You and me both, mate,” said the landlord, with feeling. “My bloody insurance doesn’t cover acts of Kaiju. The premiums are too buggering high. He wrecks this place, I’m bankrupt. Orders, anyone?”

  “What I don’t understand,” said a man to Keith’s left, “is why we don’t try nuking the nests again.”

  “Because last time it only made them more bloody pissed-off,” said the pub’s resident smartarse, who organised and theater the monthly quiz night. “And bigger. Some of them were vaporised. The rest seemed to absorb the radiation and grow fat on it. Sucked it up like mother’s milk. Classic case of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

  “Still reckon we should do it again. More bombs this time. Saturate the seabed with them.”

  “And poison half the world’s oceans into the bargain? Just not worth it. We’re better off taking our chances with the occasional rogue Kaiju that goes walkabout.”

  A tremendous roar from outside made everyone jump and grip their glasses all the more tightly.

  “Was that closer? Or further away?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t tell.”

  “If we can hear him, he’s too near.”

  “Sod this. I’m going home. The wife’ll be wondering where I am.”

  “Are you crazy? Stay put. At least if you’re indoors, he can’t see you.”

  “Phone her. She’ll understand.”

  “You’ve obviously not met my wife.”

  “Big Ben,” said someone. “They’ll have launched him by now. Where is he? He’s got to be coming. Got to be.”

  Keith nodded. Everyone nodded.

  The landlord switched on the TV. People consulted their phone screens.

  Big Ben.

  Where was Big Ben?

  ~

  Sprinting south-east through the leafy woods of Surrey and the grassy wealds of Sussex. Pounding over the ridge of the North Downs. Past Guildford. Past Crawley. Past Haywards Heath. Heading for the South Downs. His giant thumping strides shaking the earth, startling cattle. Seventy miles an hour cross-country, eighty, ninety-five. Gathering speed. Legs pumping, arms swinging. The urgency of his mission prompting him to hurdle busy motorways, take a shortcut right through the middle of Gatwick airport, leap over lakes, bound across farmland as though fields were chessboard squares, until at last the coast was within sight, the sea a strip of murky green beneath a gray, gray sky.

  ~

  Red Devil had progressed to the demolition phase of his rampage. His belly was full enough. After the slaughter came the wanton property damage.

  He took out a couple of seafront hotels with a single, crushing blow.

  He picked up the little motorised tourist train that shuttled back and forth along the promenade and whipcracked it like a bushman killing a snake. Its carriages separated and flew.

  He lashed out with his saurian tail and flattened the convention center, which had been built in the 1970s in the Brutalist style, all concrete and angles, despite considerable local opposition and protest. Few tears would be shed over its passing.

  He stomped on the old cinema, which had lately been repurposed as a bingo hall.

  Then his attention was drawn to the Forever Fun Pier.

  It seemed to be asking to be destroyed. Poking out into the sea like that. Presenting itself. A provocative finger of manmade structure.

  Red Devil gravitated towards it. Fire was mounting in the back of his throat. He had energy again after his arduous transatlantic trek. The human meat slowly digesting in his belly was stoking his inner furnace. It was time to unleash hell.

  Then he heard it: thud, thud, thud. From far off. Coming closer. Getting louder.

  Red Devil swung round in time to see Big Ben come pounding across the swells of chalk cliff to the west of town.

  Full steam ahead.

  Britain’s one and only Kaiju Response Vehicle homed in on the monster, and battle was joined.

  ~

  They closed and clinched. They battered and brawled.

  Red Devil had a good fifty feet of height on Big Ben. He outweighed the KRV by many tons. He had thousand-degree fire—organic alcohol sparked by a bioluminescent gland located in his soft posterior palate.

  But Big Ben had weaponry, and grit, and a crew who were dedicated to defending their homeland and fellow countrymen, even if it cost them their lives.

  Their names, for the record, were Captain Alistair Hargreaves, Co-Pilot Melissa Jackson, and Bombardier Desmond Somersby.

  Though the underdog, Big Ben acquitted himself well and with honor. He hit Red Devil with everything he had. The Kaiju’s cries of pain and distress could be heard thirty miles away.

  Big Ben did his best to divert the fight away from the main part of town. He grappled Red Devil down the beach and into the sea. The two of them wrestled ankle-deep in the water, dredging up enough muddy sand to make the water as thick and turbid as a chocolate milkshake.

  Gradually they wore each other down. It became a war of attrition. Red Devil bled a kind of satanic green ichor from his wounds. Big Ben bled oil.

  A kick to Big Ben’s already damaged leg left him limping, barely able to stand upright.

  The crew fought with the controls to compensate and adjust. They unleashed a volley of armor-piercing anti-tank shells that tore gouges out of Red Devil’s hide.

  The combatants were within just a few yards of the pier.

  Big Ben was failing now, internally. His systems were crashing, his servos juddering. The cockpit was ablaze with warning lights. A cacophony of alarm signals whinnied and hooted. He planted his good leg, putting all of his weight on it, and beleaguered Red Devil wit
h punches that would have flattened a mountain.

  The Kaiju retaliated with a sweep of his tail that nearly toppled the KRV. Big Ben grabbed hold of the monster, mostly for support.

  Then he reared back and headbutted him.

  Red Devil staggered backwards, and with that, half of the Forever Fun Pier was gone. Trampled. Timbers became splinters and flinders. Iron stilts snapped like wheat stalks. The theater was knocked clean off into the sea. The helter-skelter fell pell-mell.

  Big Ben pressed home the advantage. He jolted Red Devil with his neuromuscular incapacitator—essentially a jumbo-sized Taser. As frying Kaiju flesh sizzled, Big Ben hammered the beast’s skull repeatedly. He could reach now, because Red Devil had collapsed onto his haunches amid the debris of half the pier.

  Beneath Big Ben’s fist, something broke. Bone. Bone broke like a slab of marble. A crack in the Kaiju’s cranium.

  Red Devil’s yellow eyes registered surprise and fear. Not to mention agony.

  He flailed. A gout of fire jetted from his mouth, but it was feeble compared with previous bursts, more cigarette lighter than flamethrower.

  Big Ben hammered again, and again, and one more time, right between Red Devil’s horns.

  Then it was over.

  The beast let out a tumultuous, gasping sigh and his eyes rolled and acid-green blood spurted from his slitty nostrils, and all at once he slumped sideways, straight into the intact half of the pier, which immediately became no longer intact.

  Big Ben fell, too. He sank onto one knee. His arms went limp. His head bowed. Smoke began pouring from vents and crevices in his back. It was black and noxious, evidence of catastrophic mechanism breakdown.

  The crew, very sensibly, performed an emergency evacuation.

  They swam ashore, leaving their inert KRV smouldering beside the body of the defunct Kaiju and the few sparse, shattered remnants of the Forever Fun Pier.

  Cleanup units arrived, and for the next fortnight the entire seafront was cordoned off as they carved up Red Devil’s corpse into manageable chunks, which were then trucked off in container lorries to be incinerated before the rotten meat became a health hazard.