“I got eyes, Lemke!” Captain Kenny Sterns quipped back. “I want you and Fillman to start off this little soiree by strafing that big bastard with the machine guns. Fire at will!”
In immediate compliance with Sterns' commands, the trio of jets in the front formation unleashed a barrage of high-caliber gunfire from their AN/M2 Brownings on the difficult-to-miss target a mere sixty meters below them. The tiny projectiles of piercing hot lead bounced off the enormous dragon-like beast’s hide without penetrating it, their only discernible effect being to further enrage the monster. The super-beast opened its gullet and forcefully exhaled a stream of its corrosive mist at the offending aerial objects.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Capt. Sterns yelled into his microphone, which immediately transmitted the command to his fellow pilots.
The three in front formation all did as bade, and both the captain and Lemke avoided getting enveloped by the radioactive fog. Unfortunately, Fillman failed to time the movement quickly enough, as he had never been required to evade something of an intangible nature before; hence, his craft was quickly swallowed by the strange gullet-projected cloud. The last sounds the rest of the squad heard from this man was his horrified and agonized screams as his craft—along with his skin and muscle tissue—rapidly disintegrated under the sizzling effects of Megadrak’s oral mist.
“Captain, Fillman’s craft is coming apart!” Lemke exclaimed in startled unbelief.
“Learn that my goddamned eyes work as well as yours, Lemke!” the captain shouted in reply over the intercom system. “And that bitch wasn’t affected by the gunfire. We need to break out the heavy shit. Lemke, turn your jet around with me and ready the HVARs for launch. Fire when you see the whites of that bastard’s eyes. Let’s show the damned thing that no one and nothing takes one of our own without paying the price! And for God’s sake, watch out for that foggy stuff it blows out of its mouth!”
As Lemke followed his squad leader on another power dive, they both did the mental math required to target their quarry. The beast again opened its mouth, and the deadly radioactive mist began seeping out of each side of its jaws in whiffing white clouds with a vague but distinct purple iridescence. This the pilots recognized as the kaiju preparing an exhalation that would fire another lethal stream at their craft. They were thus prepared, and they each launched a pair of their T64 high-velocity aircraft rockets.
Two of the high impact projectiles struck Megadrak in its neck area, with a third exploding on the armor plate covering its immense sternum. The fourth rocket went off course and hit the street a few meters away from it, creating a destructive detonation that sent a pair of automobiles flipping through the air. Two fleeing civilians were in one of them with the hope of starting the vehicle and fleeing the city, a goal they would never accomplish.
The main effect on the kaiju was to knock its head aside, thus spoiling its intention of using another stream of mist against the fighter craft. It remained on its feet, however, undeterred and angrier than ever by the unexpectedly stinging assault.
Unfortunately for Jun and Izumi Goya’s family in the nearby tenement, this initial rocket attack on the Beast of the Apocalypse would have another effect that was to prove highly detrimental to them.
CHAPTER 14: The Worms Are Back, and There’s Gonna Be Trouble
When the H.V.A.C. rockets struck Megadrak’s incredibly thick hide, they did manage to blast away several of its surface scales. These were the same folds of skin that specimens of the giant mutant Glyceracon worms often took refuge under to parasitize the kaiju’s loose radioactive skin cells and the blood vessels close to the surface of its hide.
When some of these scales were blown off, a trio of the adult giant annelids were likewise ejected from their mobile, living home. Two of them happened to crash directly through the front window of the Goya family’s apartment, which was close to level with the kaiju’s lower neck.
The third of the trio of extricated worms bounced off the side of the tenement and plummeted to the ground where it landed on the roof of one of the remaining intact automobiles. It was stunned and somewhat injured, but still living. A bit of time would pass, however, before this third Glyceracon would factor into events again.
Just a few minutes before the worms were dislodged from the kaiju’s hide, Izumi Goya was curled up underneath the kitchen table, holding her little daughter Kimiko tightly in a protective embrace. The incredibly loud sound and extreme shaking of the building that occurred due to Megadrak smashing its hand into Amaya’s apartment had caused the young housewife to grab her daughter and dive underneath the makeshift barrier. She did her best to force herself not to scream and risk exacerbating the already intense terror that the wailing little Kimiko was experiencing.
The mother of one instinctively laid down as close to the floor as possible over her daughter while their ears were assaulted by the sound of falling plaster pelting the top of the table they hid under. She said a quiet prayer to her ancestors that none of those pieces of debris would be large and heavy enough to crush the flimsy shield that she and her precious daughter found themselves relying upon for safety.
Izumi knew that such a destructive event—whatever it may have been—would promptly bring her husband and sister running down from the latter’s apartment to their side… provided they weren’t killed by whatever seemed to hit the upper floor where Amaya’s flat was located. The dedicated housewife forcibly banished such thoughts from her head, lest she completely lose the clarity of mind she now sorely needed to keep her daughter safe. The unmistakable sounds of American fighter jets soaring at low distance in the sky outside suggested to her that Japan was once again under attack by a foreign military.
My dear ancestors, no! Is Korea attacking us for helping the Americans? Did the Americans become our enemies again for some reason? Please, please do not let them drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo, please!
The woman’s alarm caused such horrific scenarios to run through her mind involuntarily, as if on a kaleidoscope of nightmare imagery. Little was she aware that what had actually attacked Japan was something far more “foreign” than anything she could possibly have imagined; something that was actually spawned the very atomic forces she feared on such a deep personal level.
The situation was about to get far worse, however, since that was the moment when the two forcibly displaced Glyceracon crashed through her windows, landing on the throw rug that covered the right side of her front room.
The sound incited Izumi to hurriedly crawl out from under the table with Kimiko in tow, and run to the entrance leading from the kitchen to the main room of the flat. There she saw one of the stunned giant annelids, which was moving its anterior region back and forth repeatedly to shake off the disorientation wrought by its sudden displacement to an entirely new environment. The second had landed behind a large chair and was not visible to Izumi’s view.
The young woman was unable to stop herself from screaming in terror at the ghastly sight of such a horrifying creature violating the previously taken-for-granted sanctity of her home. The sound of her shriek seemed to “break” the giant annelid from its stunned stupor, which alerted it to the close presence of suitable prey. The tube-shaped monstrosity thus began slithering towards the seemingly hapless Izumi, who still held Kimiko in her arms.
This spurred the woman to flight, and she managed to run into a broom closet located inside the kitchen and to slam its door shut. The worm began bashing its head region against the door several times, causing the horror-stricken woman and daughter sequestered inside to scream for their lives.
Izumi held Kimiko tightly and said, “Do not worry, little blossom! Daddy and Auntie Amaya will be here to help us soon.”
A second later the four fangs from the annelid’s extended proboscis penetrated through the thin wood of the door. One of them pierced a half inch into Izumi’s left arm, which was raised to hold her daughter. The homemaker yelped from the pain and began reaching for the broom stored there to u
se as a makeshift weapon. However, she found herself unable to grab it in the extremely cramped space afforded by the closet’s tiny interior.
It was a few seconds after this that the apartment door leading into the kitchen burst open, with Jun and Amaya rushing in.
“Izumi, we need to get out of…!” he stammered just as he and his sister-in-law noticed the grotesque tubular creature seemingly biting into the closed door of the broom closet.
His words were cut short at the sight of the freakish creature before him, as if what he had just seen in the now destroyed apartment above wasn’t terrifying enough.
Amaya was the first of the two to speak. “Is that some kind of… anaconda?” It was then that she heard the screams of her sister and niece within the closet. “Jun! Izumi and Kimiko are trapped in there!”
Izumi’s spouse didn’t waste a micro-second contemplating what the reddish hose-like monstrosity actually was. All that concerned him was that it was threatening his wife and daughter, and he quickly grabbed an aluminum foot stool they kept in the corner of the kitchen. The man ran over to the preoccupied Glyceracon and smashed its head with the rough-and-ready metal object he now wielded. The blow succeeded in forcibly detaching the worm’s anterior section from the thin door of the closet.
Jun was determined to keep up the pace of his assault, and he was quick to strike the annelid before it fully recovered whatever passed for its faculties. The second hard blow knocked its head down to the tiled surface of the kitchen floor.
“Amaya, get Izumi and the little one out of here!” He then pressed the stool down over the monster coelomate’s head in an attempt to hold it down as long as possible. “Do it now!”
Amaya stamped her feet and waved her arms about several times to break herself out of her rattled state of confusion. She then rushed to broom closet’s damaged door and pulled it open.
“Izumi! We have to get out of here!” she shouted.
Amaya’s younger sister exited the closet just in time to see her husband grappling with the nightmarish creature that attacked her. Its cylindrical lower body was coiled about him, and he struggled to resist the punishing constriction that assailed his ribs and internal organs just long enough to enable his wife and daughter to escape.
“Jun!” his wife exclaimed at the sight of her imperiled husband fighting so desperately to save his family.
“Izumi, come on!” Amaya insisted while pulling on her sister’s arm.
“No!” Izumi replied while shoving her daughter into her older sibling’s arms. “Take Kimiko out of here, I have to help Jun!”
That decision was taken out of her hands when the other worm that had plunged into their home had by now recovered from the impact and slithered into the kitchen at unsettling speed. It raised its frontal region into the air and disgorged its fanged proboscis in the direction of the prey it now sensed. The mutant coelomate then resumed its undulating trek—this time towards Izumi, Amaya, and Kimiko.
The two terrified women retreated out the corridor of the hallway, with the slinking tubular grotesquerie in fast pursuit. The zig-zagging, undulating motion made by the tubular creature as it pursued its prey were many leagues beyond disturbing whenever one of the sisters glanced over their shoulders to see how much space separated them from the horror that sought to consume their lifeblood.
As they rushed down the corridor several of the remaining residents were gathered about the opposite end of the hallway to mutually commiserate over the violent commotion occurring around their building.
One of them, an elderly gentleman whom the ladies only knew as Mr. Sasaki, was holding his five-year-old grandson Yuki while he tried to console the woman, Aya, who lived across the hall from him. Sasaki and Aya turned as the shrieking Izumi and Amaya raced past them. The older man was too startled to react in time to evade the monstrosity that followed on their heels.
The giant worm coiled about both him and his hapless grandson, causing them to cry out in a combination of horror and pain as they were taken down to the floor. Aya yowled in terror and fell back against the corridor wall, stamping her feet and screaming prayers to her ancestors. It was clear she would be useless to aid Mr. Sasaki as the Glyceracon plunged its fanged proboscis several inches into the man’s gaping mouth, where they embedded into the soft flesh of his upper throat.
Izumi stopped just short of running down the steps leading to the building exit five floors down upon hearing the screams from behind her.
“Come on, Izumi!” Amaya hollered as she held her niece tightly in an effort to calm the little girl’s panicked screeching. “We need to go!”
“Sasaki-san and his grandson!” she yelled in reply. “We have to help them! Everyone else is too terrified!”
“No! You need to think of your daughter first!”
“What if it was Kimiko in that thing’s coils instead of little Yuki? We must help!”
Izumi was crafty enough to know she wasn’t likely to extricate Mr. Sasaki and his grandson from the monster annelid alone. Thus came the realization that she would have to rally the five people looking on in shock to the cause; otherwise, two of their own would surely die, to be followed by more afterwards if the creature wasn’t dealt with.
“We all have to help him!” Izumi screamed at them. “All of us together!”
By that point Mr. Sasaki had ceased calling for help, and his body was simply undergoing spasms while a deep sucking sound emanated from his mouth as the giant worm drank its fill from the soft flesh within. The man’s eyes were open wide with no visible movement of his pupils. Yuki was likewise silent, his fragile little bones broken under the python-like spirals of the giant coelomate’s cylindrical form.
After several seconds of impassioned pleading, Izumi managed to spur the four people standing back at the far end of the corridor out of their torpor. As if directed by remote control they followed the housewife to aid the worm’s victims. Aya likewise broke out of her own state of shock after witnessing the others do the same. She quickly added her strength to that of Izumi and the other four, and the sextet grabbed the creature’s hideous body and began attempting to wrench its coils away from the two people ensnared by them.
Amaya stood back at the entrance to the stairway with Kimiko in her arms, a look of turmoil on her visage as she struggled over whether to join the effort to save Sasaki and his grandson, or to put priority on family by getting herself and her niece to safety.
“Pull!” Izumi continually repeated as she and her five fellow tenants did exactly that.
The creature proved quite strong, and succeeded in holding onto its prey for several minutes. Finally, though, the combined strength and determined effort of the six people won out and the worm was violently yanked off the two victims it had entwined. As was usually the case, however, this came with considerable cost, as the older man’s tongue was torn out of his mouth along with the worm’s exterior fanged bowel. His body jolted as fountains of blood flowed from his still gaping orifice. Yuki rolled out of the creature’s hose-like spirals and onto the floor, quiet and unmoving.
“You son of a bitch!” Izumi exclaimed as she and the other five struggled to hold the writhing monstrosity in their collective grip. “Kill it! Smash it!”
The sextet combined their might to push the creature hard against the floor while they collectively stomped on its more vulnerable anterior region. Aya ran to the side of the wall where a fire extinguisher was stored and returned within seconds to repeatedly bludgeon the worm’s head with the large metal canister.
The monstrous annelid released a series of unnerving squeaks as its frontal area was relentlessly besieged by the heels of six enraged, adrenalin-fueled people, coupled with Aya’s repeated blows from the fire extinguisher. The creature’s proboscis was promptly flattened while a hybrid pool of its own crimson circulatory ichor and Mr. Sasaki’s ingested blood oozed out of its maw, to congeal into a thick, sticky puddle on the hallway floor.
Over the course of several mi
nutes the creature ceased moving as its head and exterior bowel were reduced to a spattered pulp. The party of six each leaned back against the wall and inhaled deeply for a few minutes to catch their breath and wind down their adrenal surge. After regaining a bit of energy, Izumi sauntered over to the fallen, damaged forms of Mr. Sasaki and Yuki.
She could barely stand to look at the older man, whose blood-dripping open mouth and wide open unblinking eyes made it obvious he had passed from this world. The housewife then walked over to Yuki and gently moved him from his side to his back. Amaya walked over with a still-crying Kimiko cradled to her breast.
“Is little Yuki okay?” she asked in a strained voice.
“He is… breathing,” Izumi replied glumly, “but he is quite badly hurt. I do not know how much, though, as I am not a doctor.”
***
Several minutes earlier, Jun Goya continually struck the front section of the Glyceracon in his kitchen his with the aluminum stool in his hands. The mutant annelid still tightly encircled his body, and a stream of blood began dribbling from his lower lip as he felt his ribs begin to crack under the formidable constriction.
The dreadful creature was unable to get a more secure grip, however, since it was under recurrent assault from its intended victim. Flecks of blood-colored fluid spurted from its maw every time it was hit, and one of its fangs was broken off.
The giant worm finally went for broke and lunged its damaged head at the exposed skin of Jun’s throat. Its movements were slowed due to the injuries it received, so the attempted attack was countered by a particularly forceful strike from the man’s makeshift weapon. This one knocked the mutant annelid’s head close to the floor. Encouraged by the damage this inflicted to the loathsome beast, the store clerk released a howl of rage and followed up with several more such blows.
After a few minutes, the apartment resident managed to crush the monster coelomate’s ventral portion into a mass of flattened reddish tissue. The Glyceracon’s crushing grip relaxed upon its expiration, and the triumphant Jun fell to his now ichor-drenched kitchen floor in both fatigue and relief. After taking several deep breaths, he pushed himself back to his feet and his mind returned to his main priorities.
Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse Page 15
