Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse

by Christofer Nigro

  I need to lie down, just for a few minutes. But I dare not right now, because I must first tie something around Tatsuo’s arm, or he is going to bleed to death. I am unable to do this, but Tatsuo’s life depends on me to do otherwise. Please, ancestors, let me find the strength. And please do not let me throw up again…

  CHAPTER 2: It Came from Beneath the Sea

  Captain Hiro Kobayashi had been commanding the twenty-meter-long pole and line fishing vessel Ao Iruka for over ten years. Vast swaths of the Pacific Ocean and the Philippine Sea served as his regular sailing grounds, and he used to frequent the Marshall Islands to catch his share of tuna. Such was no longer the case following the US Bravo Hydrogen Bomb Test that had been conducted around the Bikini Atoll a few months earlier. The Japanese government warned him to always keep a wide berth of more than 2,000 kilometers from the heavily irradiated area.

  The hydrogen bomb test in question was fifteen megatons of explosive power, which made it a thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima nine years earlier. No less than three of the smaller islands in the region were instantly vaporized, and the native Bikinians were showered with lethal radioactive fallout.

  This catastrophic product of the ongoing Cold War between the American and Soviet “superpowers” greatly limited the fishing opportunities of Captain Kobayashi and his crew. The seasoned sailor could scarcely imagine what the radiation did to the animal life living in the South Seas region, both in the ocean and on the surrounding atolls.

  Little was the captain and his crew aware that they were soon about to find out; in fact, the entire world was about to endure the wrath of nature’s vengeance in a manner that few besides a Biblical literalist could have imagined.

  The Ao Iruka found itself traveling on calm waters on that same pleasant summer morning on June 23rd. Kobayashi made his rounds to the fore-section of the large ship, asking each of his men tending the lines what they had thus far caught. Much to his chagrin, none of them had snagged a single bite regardless of having been at sea for almost two hours.

  “Are you certain?” the captain asked Aoki, one of his line men.

  “Would I lie to you, sir?” Aoki replied in rhetorical fashion.

  “Produce fish and not sarcasm for me, or you will soon find yourself floating back to the mainland on a life preserver.”

  “Heh. Please forgive me, sir. It has been a fruitless morning for all, and I was only hoping to relieve some tension.”

  “I am aware of that, Aoki, but this is no way to accomplish it. Usually these waters are bountiful at this time of year. I cannot help but wonder…”

  The captain’s spoken pondering was interrupted when one of his men came running towards him from the other end of the ship. This crewman, an Izu Island native named Kika, was assigned the task of monitoring the area with a Geiger counter. Appropriately, he had the box-shaped device in hand as he approached his superior officer.

  “Sir, I need to tell you something!” Kika exclaimed in a clearly overwrought manner. “The device just detected a surge in radiation that was well above the ‘safe’ range!”

  “That is impossible!” Kobayashi said. “Have we accidentally gone off course and gotten much closer to the restricted zone than we intended?”

  “No, Kobayashi-sama, we have not,” Kika reassured him. “I made a point to check that before disturbing you with this. The surge happened abruptly, despite our being in an area deemed safe from serious radioactive contamination.”

  “By all the holy!” came a protestation from Kim, an expatriate from Korea who was also serving as a line man on the Ao Iruka. “Sir, could those American lunatics have detonated another bomb? But this one closer to the mainland?”

  “Of course not!” Captain Kobayashi replied. “We would have been radioed to leave the area. The Americans are our allies now, and I am certain they would have warned us. At least, I am confident they would.”

  Kim fell to the floor in a lotus position of prayer common to the Buddhist faith he practiced. “Great Avalokiteshvara, please preserve my meaningless life…”

  The captain was quite perturbed with Kim’s sudden dereliction of duty, even in the face of possible ratiocinative contamination. “Get up, you imbecile! We have no time for...”

  Kobayashi found his spiel cut off by a sudden massive churning of the water just a few meters off the ship’s starboard bow. It looked and sounded as if an enormous swath of the sea was foaming or burning directly beneath the surface. The great disturbance generated waves that rolled into the Ao Iruka with the force of a powerful underwater detonation. This served to knock several of the men off of the seats positioned in front of their respective lines and poles.

  The fears of the old Buddhist seaman Kim were soon to be borne out, if in an indirect manner, when the cause of the severe underwater disturbance finally revealed itself. The head and neck of a huge reptilian beast of truly Brobdingnagian proportions rose to the surface an uncomfortably close distance from the ship. Judging by the size and bulk of the creature’s upper body, it appeared to be bipedal and would tower no less than fifty-five meters if standing on solid ground.

  The monster’s head was shaped much like that of a dragon, albeit one of Western rather than Eastern legend. It had cerulean-hued, scaly skin decorated with imposing dark stripes that resembled the patterns on a tiger’s coat. The monster’s cranium sported large pointed ears that looked almost canine as opposed to anything possessed by a member of the class Reptilia. The ears had a webbed texture to them, resembling the characteristic neck frill of chlamydosaurus lizard.

  Its mouth was filled with a double row of razor-sharp teeth, each longer than two meters. Its fearsome visage was completed with eyes that had piercing, neon green irises and a slate-gray tongue that displayed a lengthy extension whenever its massive gullet opened. Thin wisps of silvery mist fluttered from its maw, looking much like a person’s visible exhalations in freezing weather.

  A short moment after the reptilian leviathan reared its head from beneath the water’s surface, its massive torso followed, revealing a natural bluish-gray bony armor covering the dragon-like beast’s chest. Its powerful arms were also now visible, the several-meter-thick limbs ending in enormous hands with four fingers sporting sharpened talons; it possessed an opposable thumb which indicated the monster was capable of making fists and grasping objects much as primates can.

  The reptilian titan opened its enormous mouth and released a great resounding cry that suggested a strange hybrid of a crocodile-like roar and the sputtering hiss of a cobra, but amplified to a superlative degree.

  Each of the line men on the ship let go of their rods and stood watching the incredible sight unfolding before them with startled awe. Captain Kobayashi uttered a whispered prayer to his ancestors as he realized what was about to happen. His first instinct was to send Kika back to the other side of the ship with instructions to turn the vessel around and head back to the mainland as quickly as its engine would propel it, but his thoughts belayed that order.

  We will never make it in time. I must brace myself and prepare for the end with honor. As must the rest of the crew. The gods have decreed we shall not see land again.

  The captain therefore stood his ground and prepared to meet his maker with venerable stoicism. Some of the rest of his crew did likewise, whereas others panicked and rushed for the lifeboats. They knew there was an insufficient number of escape vessels to evacuate everyone, but each man who chose flight was determined to make sure it was someone else, and not them, who would be forced to remain on the doomed fishing vessel.

  Final moments like this tend to bring out either the best or the worst of men was Captain Kobayashi’s final silent musing to himself.

  Nevertheless, despite the best efforts of the crew’s majority, only one emergency vessel carrying two passengers made it off the ship.

  A full quarter of the remaining staff found themselves directly beneath the giant beast’s house-sized, scaly blue hand
as the four-fingered appendage slammed down on the ship’s hull with the force of a huge battering ram. Each of these people were pulverized like a small swarm of bugs crushed beneath the tire of a car, their once living bodies reduced to nothing more than scarlet smears against the scaly blue palm of the gargantuan predator. The surface of the ship caved in with the tremendous impact, and the vessel was splintered in half upon being pummeled by that gigantic reptilian hand.

  The men who weren’t immediately crushed found themselves falling into the water and clinging to shards of debris from the vessel’s shattered remains in a desperate bid to stay alive. It was a gambit they would lose within scant moments as the giant monster sunk its titanic jaws downwards and scooped up a dozen men, much as a person would use a spoon to scoop a dollop of rice flakes.

  The horrified screams of the men caught in the leviathan’s mouth were simultaneously cut off as the monster clamped its vice-like mouth closed. Lengthy strings of human intestines fell from crevices between the monster’s freakishly large teeth. A piece of one of these hose-like organs landed on the face of the sole surviving crewman not aboard the lifeboat, who scarcely seemed to notice as he urgently clung to a large piece of wood jutting out from the remainder of the ship.

  This wretched soul wasn’t to be the sole survivor for long, however. The gargantuan beast’s keen hearing promptly picked up on the man’s terrified shrieks and spoken prayers, and the monster responded by reaching down and grasping the hapless fisherman. The tiny human began screaming and shouting supplications to his ancestors louder than before as he was lifted over fifty meters into the air. There he found himself inspected up close by a nearly luminescent green eye that was larger than his own body. The sailor retched in revolted horror as he was moved close to the giant bipedal reptile’s flared nasal openings and sniffed a few times, as if to determine his edibility.

  The helpless man’s fervent prayers were to go unanswered as the leviathan, whose culinary requirements had already been sated that morning, simply closed its hand and crushed the man into a tiny mass of splattered blood and mashed internal organs.

  The two seemingly lucky souls who escaped on the small life boat rowed the oars as quickly as they could, hoping to make it back to the mainland alive. There they hoped to both find safety from the dragon in their midst and to warn their native country of what was out there.

  They were convinced they would succeed in returning intact until the giant beast looked in their direction, opened its mouth, and exhaled a stream of what resembled a dull white misty cloud with a vague violet iridescence interposed around its billowy texture.

  The strange projected mist that engulfed the escaping life boat would prove to be an even worse fate than being caught in the monster’s grasp.

  CHAPTER 3: The Island of Doomed Souls

  Professor Akira Watanabe stood looking at the bizarre annelid specimen lying on the white sands of the tiny Imotojima Island. In his over twenty-five years as a renowned marine biologist, he had never once cringed when gazing upon any of the bizarre life forms he routinely studied; this anomalous little creature, however, filled him an equal degree of bafflement and revulsion.

  Beside him stood Koji Mutabyashi, an equally perplexed and more than a little shaken island native who served as a local amateur naturalist. The professor was set on the task of finding out exactly what this bizarre specimen was and how it could possibly fit into the established animal kingdom. Another young man indigenous to the atoll, an islander of British colonial descent named Greene, stood about five meters away on a rocky shoal. There he continually probed the water with a long wooden stick, hoping to dredge up a living specimen of the mystery worm.

  “And you say you found this… thing just offshore here, Mutabyashi-san?”

  “Greene and I came across it together,” Koji responded. “Oh, and please call me Koji. We on the island have no hang-ups over being addressed by our first name. But anyway, Greene and I were scooping in the sand for crustaceans a few feet into the water when we accidentally caught that. It was squirming and alive, but Greene was freaked by the sight, so he smashed it with his cudgel over and over until it died.”

  “Sorry, Professor,” Greene said in a native accent while turning away from his task for a moment. “But that thing was ugly as sin, and it scared the holy light out of me. So, I just reacted and…”

  “Do not worry, young man, I understand,” Akira replied reassuringly. “I have seen everything when it comes to annelids—or so I thought, until now—and this specimen has unsettled me as well.”

  “I thought it was some species of worm, though,” Greene said.

  Akira sighed gently. “An annelid is the scientific taxonomy for worms.”

  “Why are scientists taxed for studying worms?”

  “Huh? No! ‘Annelid’ is a name for worms, Greene-san.”

  “Oh.”

  “But you do not know what type of annelid species it is?” Koji queried.

  “Based on my admittedly cursory examination,” Akira responded, “it appears to be some sort of… well, extreme mutation of a Glycera dibranchiata.”

  “You mean a common bloodworm?” Koji said with obvious fascination.

  “You know your nomenclature, young man,” Akira replied with a quick smile of admiration. “The pale ruddy color, shape, and superficial morphology seem to suggest it belongs to the Annelid phyla. But… the surface of the hide, the number of polypodia around the ‘head’ region… all of these features appear… well, off. And…”

  The salt and pepper haired older man paused, as if his tongue hesitated to express the words he was thinking.

  “And what, Professor?” Koji queried impatiently.

  “This may not be an accurate assessment due to the severity of the mutation, but…” The scientist again hesitated to say the words, but this time prodded himself to continue. “It appears this worm may only be a… larva.”

  “Are you serious, Professor?” Koji asked, instinctively gesticulating in surprise. “If you’re correct, and that thing is only in the equivalent of its larval stage, then the adult specimens must be… well, truly huge. And if the progression through the stages to adulthood occur as fast in these mutated specimens as they do in normal members of the phylum…”

  The voice of the youthful, brown-skinned naturalist trailed off and a truly horrified expression took over his countenance as he pondered the implications of the professor’s conjecture.

  “But you could be wrong, Professor,” Koji finally said. “I mean, I didn’t know that bloodworms of even conventional morphology existed in these waters. Perhaps…”

  “Hey, I think I saw something moving in the sand right offshore!” Greene suddenly hollered from his position on the large rocky ledge.

  “What exactly do you see, Greene-san?” Akira asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Greene replied. “Maybe if I prod the sand over it a bit more…”

  Before anyone could react, Greene was startled beyond measure as a giant bloodworm similar to the one lying dead on the beach shot up from beneath the muddy clumps of sand like a hideous warty hose. This one differed from the previous specimen by being considerably larger, exceeding four meters in length.

  The enormous annelid projected a five-foot-long proboscis from its anterior maw, from which four razor-sharp copper-metallic fangs emerged. The extended bowel wasted not a single moment before burying its fangs into the flesh and bone of Greene’s face, obscuring his features and muffling the sound of his further screams.

  The hapless man was then quickly pulled into the water by the horrible pipe-like monstrosity. The front part of Greene’s body was imbedded up to his waist in the sand, and his legs underwent a series of spasms as the surrounding water began turning a deep red.

  “Dear Lord and Lady!” Koji screamed. “Did you see that? We have to help him…!”

  “We must retrieve him before he drowns!” Akira shouted in response.

  The disparately aged men
of science promptly ran over to aid Greene. The utter horror of what they were experiencing was at least mitigated by the fact that his moving legs and waist were still visible above the water. The question remained as to whether they could pull him out of the mutant annelid’s toothy grip before the man drowned. Luckily, Professor Akira Watanabe wasn’t exactly inexperienced in circumstances like this.

  “Koji, I have dealt with something like this before when a moray eel grabbed a colleague,” Akira said with great haste. “Grab his legs and pull while I use that paddle to pry him free of the worm.”

  Koji was too overwrought to even consider questioning the older man’s orders. To the contrary, he needed someone to take charge of the matter at hand, to relieve him of the temptation to wrap himself into a despairing fetal position and beg the gods for intervention. The young naturalist did as he was told and grasped his friend’s legs just below the ankle in as secure a grip as his athletic arms could manage.

  In the meantime, Akira had retrieved the paddle he saw in a nearby fishing canoe and rushed back to the fracas as quickly as his legs would carry him. While Koji continued pulling Greene’s legs away from the water, the scientist repeatedly thrust the paddle into the roughly three feet of thick sand, carefully aiming where he believed the giant worm was concealed.

  He could discern where the monstrous coelomate was sequestered from the approximately five-foot diameter circular that concentrated around Greene’s captive form. That, along with his keen mathematical mind, enabled Akira to hit the intended mark just beneath the sand with almost every single powerful jab of the hard bamboo oar.