“Not in the way I want to fight.”
And there it was. The Bickford hubris. Unlike the father, it was tempered in the son by kindness, and a generosity that sometimes tipped, Caldwell believed, into naiveté. She liked to believe the yokes she had borne through her childhood and then her adult life had purged the worst of that inheritance from her. But in Bickford, in this moment, the legacy was huge. Still, she was curious now. “And what way is that?”
“I am leading a prayer service in Manchester Stadium.”
“I’d heard. Quite a gathering of political extremists turned out for you, or so I understand. The same crowd that was still declaring England immune a week ago.”
That made him squirm. “There are some–” he began.
“The same crowd that would curb stomp the likes of me, given half a chance.”
“That isn’t what I’m preaching,” he said, almost pleading now. “You know me better than that. But the doors are open to all. How can I turn away anyone who has the genuine need to pray?”
“Prayer and spiritual help. That’s all you’re doing? I’d assumed you had ironic symmetry in mind.”
He looked hurt. “Symmetry, yes. I would never feel scorn for what you’re trying to do.”
“Even though I’m wrong.”
“Half-wrong,” he corrected. “And so are we, without your help.”
Finally, she thought. The point. “Which would involve what?”
“I need one of your vehicles. A rocket launcher.”
“Just one? Is that all? Will an M270 do the job?”
He nodded. He never had been good at irony. “I don’t know anything about the different kinds. I trust your judgment.”
“And you’re going to drive and operate it yourself?”
“Of course not. We’ll need a crew, too.”
“And this is going to make a difference how?”
“Its rockets will be blessed. The prayers of thousands will speed them on their way. Their flight will be true.”
“This will kill the Eschaton.” Her voice didn’t hold quite as much disbelief as it should have. Her command was also an act of faith, and she couldn’t utterly dismiss Bickford’s hope without hurting her own.
He was impervious to all doubt. He was still smiling, and this time, he raised his eyes to the sky. “Once you admit the nature of the Eschaton, once you see the proof that it embodies, then you know that what I propose cannot fail. The Hand of God Himself will strike the beast down.” He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, as if basking in the light of Heaven. Overhead, the evening clouds were dirty with the smoke of distant fires.
Caldwell waited, silent, for Bickford to finish his moment of communion. When he looked at her again, she said, “Go back to the stadium, Sam. Do what you can for that flock of yours.”
“Please don’t dismiss this out of hand. Will you think about it? After all, what difference will one launcher make?”
What difference would a thousand make? He didn’t have to say it. The thought came unbidden. “Go back to the stadium,” she said again. “I have work to do.”
In the distance, but not nearly far enough, came the sound of explosions and the earthquake-deep boom of immense footsteps. And then the roar. That roar.
The roar of the end of all hope.
~
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
~
She had thought she would ride out for the front lines. No, that was wrong. She had hoped she would have to do that. That would have meant the lines held long enough for her to reach them. That would have meant they held at all.
They didn’t.
The explosions, the footsteps, and the roar approached with all the mercy of a storm surge. The stadium defenses had time to make ready, and then, lit by the spotlights, the Eschaton appeared. Caldwell felt her eyes widen. The monster loomed high above the outer walls of Old Trafford. The field shook with the simultaneous fire of dozens of cannons and rockets. The bombardment, apocalyptic at ground level, was reduced to insignificance when it hit the Eschaton.
Streaks of fire became tiny blossoms against the articulated shell of the beast. With its next step, its lower leg smashed through the walls. As if kicked, Stretford End blew apart, its mosaic of red and white seats flying like confetti. The steel from the superstructure became a rain of javelins. Concrete chunks as big as cars catapulted across the field. Caldwell leaped aside to avoid a piece that hit the ground and rolled towards her, crushing the command tent. The Eschaton waded into the stadium. It stood on the wreckage of Challenger main battle tanks and AS-90 self-propelled Howitzers. It lowered its head, taking in its foes with eyes whose judgment was clear, alien, and absolutely frozen. It opened its jaws wide. Its chest rumbled, and there was the sound of a great wind being sucked away.
Caldwell knew what was coming next. Everyone in the stadium did. They had read the intelligence. They had seen the footage. But the mythic could not be understood until it was experienced.
Infantry ran for mirages of cover. Caldwell crouched low behind the rubble that had destroyed the tent. The heavy armor fired one last time, a gesture of defiance as brave as it was useless.
The Eschaton breathed death on Old Trafford. The doom took the appearance of a beam of braided impossibility. It was white, crystalline flame. The beast turned its head from left to right, spreading the blast across the entire field. Behind her shelter, Caldwell felt the horror pass just over her head. She bit back a cry of agony as frostbite and incandescence reached through her fatigues.
Silence fell, ghastly with anticipation. Caldwell raised her head. The Eschaton stood there, cloud-breaker, sky-killer, looking down on its work. The fallen walls of the stadium and everything within them were encased in flames of ice. Human, vehicle, and ruin were twisted into immobilized writhings of absolute torment.
For a few seconds, Caldwell stared at a tableau. Hell was motionless. It had a grace that came with perfect extremity. Then the explosion came, the ice becoming motion, becoming a solar flare. The heat forced Caldwell down again. She was surrounded by wall of flame thirty meters high. The Eschaton raised its arms and roared. It drowned out the firestorm. For a moment, she expected to see chunks of the sky fall earthward, smashed by the Jericho blast of the roar.
The beast strode onwards, leaving the burning, broken toy of the stadium.
Caldwell watched it go. Beast, she thought. That’s what it is. A beast. One we can’t kill, but it isn’t anything more. She was holding back something profound. She knew what it was, and at the same time refused to acknowledge it, even as a false possibility. She refused to let the impulse turn into a thought that might defeat her.
The fire kept her trapped for a quarter of an hour. When it died down enough that she could leave her shelter without being incinerated, she made for a gap in the flames. It had once been the East Stand but the Eschaton had gone this way. Evans and a few other survivors joined her in escaping the burning stadium. Very few.
Smoke rolled through the falling night. The city was lit by the glow of its own pyre. Where the Eschaton walked, it left a spreading wake of ice, then fire. The burn was already a kilometer wide. The beast wasn’t following streets. Caldwell watched it head northeast, roughly parallel to the canal, smashing its way through the city blocks. Buildings toppled at its touch. Its tail swept back forth behind it, bringing down the few towers that survived the initial moment of its passing.
Caldwell tasted the bile of failure. It was a failure she had known was coming. That didn’t make it any easier to accept. She had lost her city. Thousands were already dead. Soon, the casualties would number in the tens of thousands. Then the hundreds of thousands. There had been no evacuation. There had been no time to move over two million people and nowhere to send them. Those who could had taken refuge in basements and underground car parks. Most pe
ople had no choice but to hide in their homes. Now those homes burned and fell. Some, that the Eschaton smashed with its fists, flew as they disintegrated.
She saw the world ending at the hands of a being so huge that to see it was to know it as the source of awe. She knew that Bickford was right, but still, even now, she held back the full realization. If she followed her thoughts to their inevitable conclusion, she might not be able to fight any longer. Perhaps her brother was also lying to himself.
She headed south, dodging flames and climbing over wreckage until she reached an area that was still undamaged. She found more fragments of her battlegroup there. She commandeered a Panther Light Multirole Vehicle. Evans drove.
“Manchester Stadium,” she told him, then got on the radio. It took her a few minutes to contact the crew of a viable M270, but she found one, and directed the launcher to meet up with her at the stadium. She would give Bickford his holy weapon. “Do not engage,” she ordered. “Am I clear? Your arrival on-site is the priority.”
The streets were clear of civilian traffic, and they made rapid progress up Stretford Road. Caldwell looked out the passenger window of the LMV. In the gaps between blocks, she watched the Eschaton’s progress. When they reached the open area at the intersection with Princess Road, she asked Evans to stop.
To the north, she witnessed the Eschaton reach Beetham Tower. The sleek glass monolith, the tallest skyscraper in Manchester, was gossamer-thin before the monster. The Eschaton looked down on it. Its four arms grasped the building. The monster ripped the upper two-thirds of the tower from their base. It raised the building over its head, then hurled it to the ground. The impact shook the city. The Eschaton turned then, breathing annihilation around a full 360 degrees. Caldwell looked away when the flames rose. Sandra’s apartment was just off St. John’s Gardens. The neighborhood had just ceased to be.
“Let’s go,” she told Evans. She tried to take comfort in the knowledge she wouldn’t have time to grieve for very long.
The Panther arrived in Sports City. The M270 was there less than five minutes later. Caldwell stood beside the LMV and listened to the prayer rise in waves from the interior of the stadium. She felt her jaw clench. The old anger was still there. Bickford’s faith would never be hers. The best she could do was hope his was well-placed.
Inside the stadium, the lights were on, and Bickford’s amplified voice resounded. He had managed to have generators installed. The stands were full. There was barely room on the field for the vehicles to maneuver. Bickford was on a stage before the north stand, leading a choir of fifty thousand in hymns of praise. Caldwell had never seen her brother in full flight before. She had known he was successful in his calling. He had been leading his own army for years now. But on those rare occasions they had crossed paths during their adult lives, he had still been the quiet, kind brother who was too willing to defer to authority.
She wondered whether anything was different now. As he worked the stage, she saw power, confidence, a commanding ecstasy, and all of it was in the service of another Authority. The enveloping rush of tens of thousands singing in unison was intoxicating, and it was easier for her to believe, in this moment, that hope could be real. She clung to her duty to try anything to save the city. It was her shield against despair, against mourning, and against a darker belief that, as it threatened to emerge from the darkness, had the terrible contours not of faith, but of knowledge.
Bickford stopped in mid-prayer when she reached the stage. He beckoned for her to join him. She shook her head, refusing to be part of the spectacle. She knew her brother was sincere in his desire to do good, but she distrusted an instinct for glory that was another inheritance from their father, even if he didn’t seem fully conscious of it.
He came down from the stage to greet her. As he did, the stands quieted, but only for a moment. When the noise of Manchester’s death rushed in from beyond the walls, the crowd launched back into “Bread of Heaven” with redoubled fervor. If the song was loud enough, the people could hide from what was coming.
“Thank you,” Bickford said. “I knew you would feel the touch of the—”
She cut him off. “I didn’t feel anything.” That was a lie, but she was suddenly afraid of hearing the word divine. “Prove to me that I should, Sam. Make this work.”
“It will work, but not because of me.” He hugged her, then turned back to the stage. One foot on the stairs, he paused and looked at her. “It will come, won’t it?”
She almost laughed at the horrific irony of his question. “How could it not?” she answered. “Have faith.”
He smiled. “Of course. Please wait for my signal before launching.” He bounded up the stairs. In the center of the stage, he raised his arms and spread them wide. The people stopped singing. “Our deliverance is at hand!” he shouted, and the cheer washed over Caldwell like a tidal wave.
It chilled her. The cold came not because of the belief of others, but because of her own. Denial became slippery. Faith was contagious, and it terrified her as the battlefield never had. The fear was worse than the terror she and every solider under her command had experienced at the first sight of the Eschaton. The fear was worse because it sprang from that encounter. Seeds had been planted at Old Trafford. They had sent roots down to the heart of her identity. As the futility of all her training, of all her decades of experience was revealed, something grew. Now the hymns were bringing this thing to the point of its malignant bloom.
Explosions drew closer. The doom-rhythm of the Eschaton’s footsteps drowned out the crowd. The people faltered. Bickford did not. “The Lord is our Shepherd!” he reminded them. “We shall not want. Now, especially now, we shall not want.”
The Eschaton appeared, blotting out the night sky visible through the roof of the stadium. As distant as its cold eyes were, as minute as humans must be from its perspective, Caldwell felt as if the monster saw and passed a verdict on every soul present. The Eschaton stepped on the west stands, crushing thousands to wet ruin. It was amongst them now, the mountain that had come with fury to destroy the city. And then it waited, as if its actions and those of the insects before it were a form of dialogue.
Or the call and response of prayer.
Bickford began to sing. His voice carried over the screams of the injured and dying. The people, embracing the hope he promised and the faith he provided, joined in.
Tens of thousands strong, the choir sang “Jerusalem.”
~
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
~
“Now,” Bickford said.
Caldwell couldn’t tear her eyes away from the Eschaton. How could she be reading something beyond the animal, however immense, in its posture? How could she be seeing intent? Yet she knew that she was. The blossoming inside her began. Even so, she was able to give the order to the crew of the rocket launcher.
Bickford shouted, “Behold the Hand of God!”
The hymn reached its climax. The faith of the thousands was tangible, and Caldwell felt it fly upwards with the rockets. As the fragments of seconds stretched to aeons, she could well believe she had helped forge a holy weapon. She could well believe her brother spoke the absolute truth. She could well believe it was the divine hand itself that rose to strike the abomination that had dared lay waste to the world.
She could believe all these things. She did not, because the far greater belief that she had been fighting was now upon her.
The Eschaton reached an arm forward. With sovereign contempt, it batted aside the Hand of God. The explosions were the sad dissolution of faith.
For a few seconds more, the Eschaton did nothing else. It seemed to be waiting for the full significance of the moment to fall upon the assembly. Beside the Panther, Evans had collapsed into a ball, his head to the ground, defeated. Caldwell looked back at Bickford. Bereft of his i
llusion, he had fallen to his knees. The full truth of what he had been telling his sister was hitting him. There was a divine force at large in the universe, and he was looking at it. His mouth hung open in an agony of awe.
Caldwell faced the immensity. The Eschaton rumbled. The terrible sucking sound began once more. The fullness of epiphany rocked Caldwell. She was battered by the belief that was knowledge, the knowledge that this was the only deity her world would ever know.
Caldwell didn’t fight the truth, but she didn’t surrender. She flew beyond grief and despair, and seized the only weapon left to her: defiance. Standing upright to the last, she howled at the Eschaton. She shouted into the dread second of final silence.
She was roaring still when the Eschaton opened its jaws wide and gave them all their baptism.
Day of the Demigods
Peter Stenson
Picture this: a reclining, hundred-twenty foot stud propped up on his elbow, giving you a slight wink and suggestive spread of his legs. He’s the rarest mix of pure strength and sensual contours. His stomach is like a stacked row of cars, nothing but rock hard definition. He’s got a linebacker’s neck. His facial structure is nothing but Eastern Block rigidity. His lips are the soft pillowy promises of every romantic comedy; his incisors are Afghani mountains. This stud has the body shape of God, if God were in the form of his Greek sea counterpart carved out of a slab of marble killer whale.
Yeah, now it’s coming to you.
This vision so unimaginable it verges on comical.
But put those doubts aside, because that beautiful, seven ton stud stretched out beneath Los Angeles, working one off while giving a peace sign to his own dazzling reflection in the city’s liquid sewage, that’s this guy, Sweetgrass, the motherfucker who’s about to take Hollywood by storm.
And why shouldn’t I?
My pedigree is the wet dream of every dog breeder. Like all sea-born Kaiju, I was conceived during a blue moon in the depths of the Southern Pacific. But unlike my fellow reptilian counterparts, my mom, God-rest-her-soul, was a bit of a…let’s just call her promiscuous. She was into groups, inter-species gangbangs, and so there you have it, me, a smorgasbord of the ocean’s baddest creatures. Mix that with the rumor that my great-great grandfather on my mother’s side was Godzilla’s second cousin…yeah, Hollywood, here I come.
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 4
