Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse

by Christofer Nigro

  Koji turned his gaze to Sato, who still stood in front of him. “I am sorry for how I almost let my sorrow get in the way of my responsibilities. I will forever rue this day.”

  “It is all right,” Sato replied quietly. “You had been through too much to think with full clarity. What is most important is that you now understand the importance of overcoming your grief to do what must be done.”

  “I am pleased to hear that you both seem ready to make a report,” the major said. “Because an aircraft patrolling the ocean left its own report that it spotted what was likely the monster following a lifeboat headed for Tokyo Bay. That boat is believed to be carrying what remains of the crew from the final transport helicopter sent to evacuate Odaiba, which failed to arrive as scheduled and also failed to respond to any hails from the air base.

  “We declined to send another rescue copter to retrieve the small number of people in that boat, for fear the trailing kaiju would rise forth and destroy it on sight. This was an hour ago. Which means we have scant time to prepare for Megadrak making an incursion directly into the Tokyo Prefecture.”

  “Oh gods…” was all Koji could say in response as he and Sato both took on a countenance of horrific trepidation.

  ***

  Risa Kimura stood at the sandy plateau near the shore of Tokyo Bay, enjoying the calm scenery provided by the shimmering blue waves of the Pacific Ocean as she did so. She was highly enamored of the way in which the rays of the sun reflected off the water’s surface, as it provided a glimmering sheen that she found relaxing and symbolic of the great goddess Amaterasu’s solar eminence. Whenever the attractive housewife found a small flattened stone, she threw it into the waters to see how many times she could make it skip, a trick taught to her by her husband that she always found amusing.

  The petite twenty-three-year-old woman smiled as other pedestrians visiting the shore walked by her, as she was happy to be showing off her new toreador pants and stylish Sabrina shoes to all whom she crossed paths. In fact, she was not the least bit ashamed to make it obvious how much of a fan she was of the recent films imported from America, particularly the Audrey Hepburn feature Sabrina that was such a strong influence on her sartorial choices. Some of the less financially secure friends she knew mocked her for what they considered extravagant tastes, but the young woman shrugged such comments off. She was openly proud of the income her husband brought in as a minister at the Diet.

  Risa stopped for a moment to adjust the pale blue head scarf adorning her crown, under which her shoulder-length ebony hair was stuffed. The young woman really disliked how it shifted uncomfortably whenever she made certain movements.

  It was while she was neatly pushing her hair under the scarf when a distant buzzing sound caught her attention. Risa looked in the direction of the noise to spot a large bright-colored object approaching the shoreline. She lifted her sunglasses and cupped her right hand over the top of her eyes to get a better look and within moments the homemaker had clearly identified the fast approaching item as a lifeboat. It became obvious the buzzing sound emanated from a motor attached to the little vessel’s rear side. Upon closer inspection, the elfin woman could readily discern three human figures atop the small dinghy.

  Risa found herself both excited and concerned to find the usual mundanity of her pleasant but uneventful life broken. Hoping to be of some assistance, she ran up to the water while waving her arms and shouting, “Hey!”

  The male figure at the front of the inflatable raft waved back to her and shouted “Help us!” in what she recognized as an American accent. Her husband’s work with the recently departed occupation forces provided Risa with opportunities to meet several American military officers, so their distinct accent was by then instantly recognizable to her. In fact, she found herself wondering if the man at the helm of the boat was perhaps one of the American military troops who remained in Japan, ordinarily stationed at the Yokota Air Base.

  Upon hearing the plea for aid, Risa kicked her red shoes off and ran ankle deep into the water to meet the oncoming boat to see what use she could be. The housewife was no hero, and not particularly adventurous, but she did have a conception of duty to her fellow humanity.

  As the boat neared the surface, Risa could see that the American man at the front section was indeed a member of the American military. The young woman was taken aback by the series of cuts all over his face and arms; it was further apparent that the man was in pain and had just undergone a serious tribulation.

  Risa soon also noticed a very disheveled young man and woman, the latter possibly even younger than her, sitting in the left corner of the boat’s aft side. They were likewise suffering from serious trauma. Her greatest shock, though, was the sight of a wrapped human corpse in the right corner of the ship’s rear, the true nature of the carefully swathed object being quite discernible from its shape and size.

  “Dear gods, what happened to you?” Risa asked as she reached her hand to help flight officer Les Duncan from the boat.

  “We need to get to the Diet immediately!” the American declared in fluent Japanese through a strained voice before almost keeling over.

  “You are hurt,” the young lady noted.

  “My back,” Les replied. “My back was injured when the copter crashed.”

  “Your copter crashed?” she lamented with great surprise. “We need to get you to a hospital immediately!”

  “No!” Goro exclaimed as he stood up and stepped into the shallow water. “He is right; we must get to the Diet! Great danger is heading towards us!”

  “What type of danger?” Risa enquired. “Did you get shot down by some foreign plane?”

  “Listen to me!” the fisherman implored. “Do you have a car?”

  “Hai,” the young woman answered.

  “Please drive us out of here,” Keiko requested while sobbing. “My mother is already dead, and many others are too. You must get us to the Diet.”

  “All right,” Risa agreed, now realizing that further arguing would not be prudent. “My car is over there.”

  Her pointed index finger indicated the general direction of where her vehicle was parked. The three survivors of the maritime copter crash looked to see a slate gray Datsun Phaeton parked just across from the cement walkway that led to the sand.

  “Come along now,” Risa said as Goro joined her to aid Les in walking over to the vehicle.

  “But we cannot just leave Mother there,” Keiko said, trembling as she struggled not to cry again.

  Goro was likewise forcing himself not to shed more tears as he responded. “We cannot fit Mother in that car with us, Imouto. We can send someone back here for her after we get to the Diet.”

  Keiko began crying despite her best efforts not to, followed by a distressed stomping of her foot before acquiescing to the severity of their circumstances.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” Risa said consolingly, trying to conceal how unsettled she was at seeing a dead body for the first time. She made sure to avoid mentioning the extent of her relief that Keiko agreed not to bring the body into the car with them.

  Goro and Keiko gave a slight nod in acknowledgement of Risa’s condolences.

  “My name is Risa,” the housewife said to the American military co-pilot she was helping to her car.

  “I’m… Les,” he returned through gritted teeth. “The two siblings with me… are Goro and Keiko.”

  “How much pain are you in, Les-san?” the young woman enquired.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I can make it. I’ve… had worse.”

  The co-pilot would soon learn that he may have had it easy up to this point. Because no sooner had he spoken those words than his party was startled by a very loud splashing sound from several meters behind them. That was immediately followed by an echoing cry that resembled a lion-like roar and a reptilian hiss combined into a single chilling caterwaul.

  Risa turned around to behold the largest and most incredible living creature she had ever see
n, or even conceived of in her mind, emerging from the depths of Tokyo Bay. It resembled nothing less than a dragon from Western legend, but of truly immense size and fully bipedal. It was a creature that could have stepped right out of the rich Shinto mythology of her homeland; a beast that looked as if it could be challenged by nothing less than a mystically armed Yamato Takeru, or one of the gods themselves.

  “No!” Keiko and Goro yelled in tandem while Risa simply stared in shell-shocked awe.

  Les slapped the young woman just firmly enough to knock her out of her stunned funk. “Risa-san! Get hold of yourself, woman! We have to get the hell out of here!”

  Les’s move was successful, as Risa’s adrenalin-fueled flight response promptly took over and she began pacing towards her car as quickly as was possible for a petite woman moving while helping to support a man on her shoulders. Les himself gritted his teeth so hard he worried their enamel might crack, but remained resolute in ignoring the pain spiking through his lower back and continue moving as long as necessary.

  Goro was dismayed over being slowed down yet again by having to help carry an injured man while pursued by Megadrak, but he was equally determined not to fail Les as he did Izo.

  The tremor-inducing footsteps of the mighty kaiju as it waded from its waist-deep position in the water to step landside onto the great island of Honshu served to spur Keiko’s flight towards Risa’s waiting Datsun. Since the young Takiguchi woman was free from the burden of aiding Les, she made a point to run ahead of the other members of her party to open all four doors on her newfound ally’s luxury vehicle to hasten the ingress of her fellows.

  Moving as fast as either possibly could under the circumstances, Risa and Goro pushed Les into the back of the vehicle while Keiko entered beside him. The Sabrina-wearing owner of the Datsun jumped behind the wheel and started the engine as Goro entered the passenger side with due haste.

  Please, please do not let the engine flood, Risa continually said to herself as she stomped her foot down on the accelerator. The vehicle immediately sped off with scant time to spare before the kaiju would have stomped on it with a titanic foot.

  The giant beast immediately began pursuing the car at breakneck speed, its tremendous gait keeping pace even as the vehicle reached its top speed. The crisscrossing nature of the roads leading around the hilly areas of the Kanto region managed to aid the fleeing car in confusing the kaiju, but it also made it more difficult for its terror-stricken driver to maintain control over the automobile.

  “Where the hell do we go?” Risa inquired in a panic.

  “To the Diet!” Goro snapped.

  “No, not there!” Les rejoined while still obviously struggling with pain akin to that of a spear being jabbed into the small of his back. “We can’t lead it into a populated area! Let alone the heart of the government!”

  “And my husband works for the government!” Risa added pointedly. “He may be at the Diet now! I will not lead this gigantic thing there!”

  “Then where can we go?” Keiko queried histrionically as Risa drove haphazardly on a dirt road leading around the Kanto region.

  “I do not know, okay?” Risa responded tersely.

  “Hold it together, Risa-san!” Les shouted before wincing in agony due to the toll the bumpy ride was taking on his injured back. “Just keep going! Try to lose it in the plains!”

  “That will leave us wide open!” Goro yelled.

  “It will give… the Defense Force time to rally against it… before it can reach a populated area,” Les choked out through the biting pain.

  “This road leads to Ōta!” Risa stated.

  “That’ll bring us through… Haneda Airport,” Les noted aloud. “We can’t go there! Too many civilians… staff can’t be warned in time.”

  “But the military must know about Megadrak’s presence in Tokyo!” Goro shouted. “The airport should be evacuated by now!”

  “We don’t know that for certain, goddamn it!” Les retorted before yelping in agony and bunching over.

  “Les, try to calm down!” Keiko said. “Your injuries…”

  It was then Goro noticed the foggy smoke engulfing the vehicle. “No! The creature’s oral mist has surrounding the car!”

  “The engine is overheating!” Risa elucidated upon realizing that driving at top speed for so long had finally taken its toll on the vehicle.

  “You have to keep going!” Goro insisted as he breathed a palpable sigh of relief that the foggy smoke was “only” the car overheating.

  “I cannot see the road anymore!” Risa screamed as the car began swerving out of control.

  In a desperate bid to avoid being crushed by the still pursuing Megadrak, Risa turned the wheel to the left and the car drove off the road and smashed into a large knoll located several meters onto a field of grass. A few meters to the side of it was an intersection leading to another road, but the car’s engine had blown. Every passenger in the smoking Datsun were painfully aware they could never outrun the pursuing giant reptile on foot in such a barren, open space.

  Suddenly, however, the sound of another vehicle abruptly screeching to a halt on the intersection just above the hill could be heard. The passengers looked up to see a white Subaru with none other than photo-journalist Ren Honda at the wheel. He beeped the horn to further get their attention.

  “You see we do not have all day!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Get out of that Datsun and get into this car!”

  Three of the steaming vehicle’s four doors opened. Keiko began pulling the now fully insensate Les out of the car’s back seat.

  Goro’s first instinct was to tell her that the military co-pilot must be left behind, but his conscience would not allow him to. He just could not leave another man to die at the hands of that monster, no matter how precarious the situation.

  “Are you insane?” Ren hollered from his vantage point on the intersection. “You will never make it dragging him like that! He is a total liability!”

  “Goro, he is right!” Keiko screamed in her brother’s ear in a very uncharacteristic manner that chilled him. “I will lose you like we lost Mother!”

  “I will help!” Risa shouted.

  “You have exactly ten seconds,” Ren stated, “and then I am getting the hell out of here!”

  The three grabbed Les by his arms and used their combined strength to drag him up the hill and over to the car with minimal time lost. Keiko and Goro sat in the back seat with the still incoherent man sprawled on their laps, while Risa jumped into the passenger side. Megadrak had by now stomped onto the grass and was charging towards the newly arrived vehicle like a cheetah in pursuit of its prey.

  “Hold on!” Ren exclaimed as he floored the accelerator.

  The car sped off just in time to avoid a stream of Megadrak’s oral radioactive mist. Every inch of flora on the hillside touched by the foggy expulsion quickly withered and died, while the rocks on the surrounding terrain sizzled and cracked into countless tiny pieces.

  “That was close!” the journalist noted as he continued to accelerate his Subaru.

  “You were following the kaiju, weren’t you?” Goro inquired.

  “Of course I was!” Ren snipped. “I was scoping out the vicinity of Tokyo Bay because I had picked up a lead that the Megadrak was heading there while following some boat. I was not about to let some other photographer be the first one to get pictures of the kaiju arriving on the mainland! Fancy finding out that you were on that boat, huh? What are the odds? It was like one of those coincidences you see in those exported American picture shows!”

  “How is your friend?” Risa turned and asked.

  “He is breathing, but he is not responsive,” Keiko answered.

  “Where are we headed?” Goro inquired.

  “I am driving us through the airport!” Ren responded. “Hold the wheel for a second!”

  Goro did as he was asked despite being puzzled over the request. As Goro held the car steady, the reporter leaned out the window a
nd snapped a quick photograph of the fast pursuing Megadrak.

  “Ha! What a photo!” the journalist said while he resumed control of the car.

  “Are you serious?” Goro complained.

  “I am serious about being a journalist, if that is what you mean,” Ren replied.

  “You endangered us by doing that!” Goro exclaimed angrily.

  “I saved you all, you fool!” Ren retorted. “So, indulge me a bit, alright?”

  “The monster is gaining!” Risa hollered from the back seat.

  “I see the airport coming up now!” Ren stated. “I will veer towards it and try to lose that thing amidst the airplanes.”

  “What about the people there?” Risa asked.

  “If they are not smart enough to scatter when they see this thing coming,” Ren snipped, “then the gods of common sense have declared them unfit to live.”

  Keiko looked out the back window and noticed the familiar foggy discharge beginning to billow forth from the sides of Megadrak’s open maw.

  “The monster is going to fire that mist at us again!” she warned.

  “Hold on!” the photo-taking driver yelled as he swerved the car off the side of the road and through a field of grass leading directly into the airport.

  Megadrak’s subsequent stream of radioactive mist once again barely missed the speeding vehicle as it wafted across the road and caused the asphalt to sizzle and bubble. The gleaming Subaru sped directly onto the tarmac of the airport and began crisscrossing between the five landed planes situated there. It was a maneuver Ren was hoping to confuse the kaiju with, and to possibly shift its rage onto the parked airplanes.

  The small number of Haneda employees present on the field immediately retreated in various directions upon seeing the monster approach, save for one who was quickly snatched off the ground in the beast’s Brobdingnagian hand. The kaiju’s appetite seemed to once more require organic satiation, since it crunched the tiny screaming captive in its herculean jaws and swallowed the remains.

  The beast’s piercing green eyes next came upon the planes on the tarmac. It immediately recognized the crafts as some of the constructs that frequently housed the small human beings it instinctually perceived as rivals to its status as the global apex predator. It thus crushed four of them underfoot, crumpling their strong steel hulls as easily as a person may do the same to a Styrofoam container.