Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse

by Christofer Nigro

  “Izumi! Kimiko!” he exclaimed as he ignored the piercing pain in his ribs to rush towards the door leading to the hallway outside his flat.

  CHAPTER 15: Deep Impact

  After about a minute following the dispatching of the giant worm in the corridor, Izumi was still bent over the fallen body of little Yuki Sasaki when she heard her husband call her name from across the corridor. She turned to see him standing just outside the door of their apartment, obviously in haggard shape but nevertheless intact.

  “Jun!” she called in response and ran to embrace her husband.

  “Ow!” he said in protest. “My ribs…”

  “I am so sorry!” she apologized. “And your mouth is bleeding. You’re hurt.”

  “Hai, but I think I will live. Wait, was there not another one of these things that went after you…?”

  “It is dead. We killed it. But it… killed Sasaki-san and hurt little Yuki before we could stop it.” The full emotional weight of that statement finally struck Izumi, and she began crying in her husband’s arms.

  “I am so sorry I wasn’t there to help.”

  “You had enough on your shoulders at the time. It can be forgiven.”

  “Wait, is Kimiko…?”

  “She is fine. Amaya has her now.”

  It was then that Jun noticed the deep round puncture wound on his wife’s right arm, and the deep purple swelling forming around it.

  “Your arm…?”

  “That happened when I was in the broom closet. One of the worm’s fangs poked into me. It hurts a lot but it will heal. Do not worry about it now.”

  “We need to get it looked at as soon as possible, Izumi. It looks really bad...”

  “There are more pressing things on our plate now, Jun! Please!”

  The man was taken aback, as he had almost never seen his wife react that way before. It occurred to him not to press the matter further now, particularly since what she said was correct. But should they escape this nightmare, he quietly resolved to make certain the issue was addressed at the earliest convenience.

  Izumi allowed herself to calm down and led her husband to the small crowd of their neighbors gathered around the torn and bleeding body of Mr. Sasaki. Aya was holding the still silent Yuki.

  Jun paused to give Kimiko a tight hug followed by a kiss on her cheek. “My sweet little blossom. Thank all the gods.”

  “I am so glad you are okay, Jun,” his sister-in-law told him through watery eyes.

  “Likewise,” he replied before joining his wife at Aya’s side to check on Yuki.

  “None of us are medical professionals,” one of the other gathered tenants, a middle-aged man named Ryota, noted aloud. “We need to get this boy to safety. But something serious is going on out there. I hear military jets and rocket fire outside. And then there is the matter of… something that hit the side of the building, something that appears to have caved in an entire section of it on the floor just above us. Has another war been declared?”

  “I need to explain something to all of you very quickly,” Jun said as he hugged his aching rib cage. “Then we must get out of here as quickly as we can.”

  ***

  Several miles away stood the National Diet Building, an immense structure with a somewhat pyramidal dome that houses the seat of the Japanese government.

  In one of the central chambers, about forty minutes earlier, stood Koji Sagawa and Dr. Daisuke Sato, both of whom were giving a full report to Lieutenant General Ryu Nakamura. The high-ranking military officer sat at the head of a large wooden table, and he quietly sipped a steaming mug of green tea as he listened to the incredible story recounted by the men before him. Though he would normally be inclined to dismiss the hysterical rantings of a “mere” Imotojima Island native like Koji, the latter’s words were supported by a professional and highly respectable scientist like Sato.

  Additionally, he was informed the surviving members of the evacuation crew, each of whom happened to be military men, were telling similar stories. Then there was the matter of the men assigned to the Imotojima evacuation mission who didn’t return.

  “And you say you believe this… daikaiju may invade the Honshu mainland?” the General queried with an expression that was part concern and part incredulity.

  “Hai!” Koji replied with impassioned conviction. “I know it will come here next! It will kill us all if you do not hunt it down and…”

  Sato interjected in a cooler manner. “Nakamura-kun, Koji speaks the truth. What he says is a real possibility, and his state of mind is a direct result of a close encounter with that monster, as well as the giant mutant parasitic worms we have conjectured feed off it. Both present a separate but connected threat and must be dealt with. If you do not, it is my professional opinion that every human being in the Pacific—perhaps across the globe—will be imperiled.”

  “Please listen to him!” Koji shrieked.

  “Simmer down, young man,” Nakamura insisted. “I understand you are distraught, but professional courtesy will be maintained at all times in your dealings with me.”

  Before another word could be exchanged at the tense meeting, an unauthorized interruption once again ensued when the door leading into the chamber burst open and in came the irksome journalist Ren Honda. Behind him walked three other civilians: the siblings Goro and Keiko Takiguchi and Risa Kimura. All of them were in an overwrought state of mind that was quite evident.

  “Okay, we really need to talk to the prime minister!” Ren proclaimed. “Is he in here?”

  “Who in the hell are you?” Nakamura queried as he rose from his chair in a state of pique. “And how did you get in this building, let alone this chamber?”

  “There was actually hardly anyone in the building to stop us,” Ren retorted. “We brought an injured co-pilot here, and we got some of the few people we did find in the building on the way up here to get him rushed to the government hospital in Yokohama. This was the only room we heard any voices coming from, so we stepped in. But all of that is not important right now. Can you call the prime minister in here?”

  “Unbelievable,” Sato uttered while shaking his head. “Honda-san, you have never ceased to amaze me in the worst possible ways since we met, but this is truly an outrage…”

  “More importantly,” Nakamura interjected, “why would the Diet be so sparsely populated now? It is the most heavily defended building in the prefecture!”

  “The kaiju is here in Japan!” Keiko screamed, bringing everyone in the room to attention. “My mother is dead! Do you hear me? She is dead! And so are many others on Odaiba. And so will be countless people on the mainland now!”

  “No…” Koji and Sato mumbled in tandem.

  “What are you saying, young woman?” the slightly rotund but well-built steel-haired military officer queried.

  “My sister is saying that we will all be dead soon if the government fails to deal with this!” Goro yelled. “So, you had better listen to that cockamamie journalist and call the prime minister now!”

  ***

  “All right, Lemke and I are going to strafe the bastard with bombs,” Captain Kenny Sterns said to his squadron, “and then I want Benton, Kinsey, and West to let loose the rockets and teach that son of a bitch the meaning of ‘Holy Moses’!”

  “I’m on it like a flea on fur!” Lemke said as he swerved his Mustang through the sky in double formation with his squad leader.

  The two fighter jets flew just thirty meters above the angry kaiju and each dropped a pair of hardpoint incendiaries over its sprawling head. The bombs blew up on impact with its skull, but the explosions merely rattled the beast for a moment. Nevertheless, the distraction worked as intended, since the dragon-like kaiju instinctively shut its eyes and covered its face with both hands.

  Benton, Kinsey, and West saw this as their cue to fire two rockets directly at the kaiju. Four of the fast-moving projectiles struck their mark at various points on the monster’s ginormous form, startling it and knocking the
monster back towards the tenement behind it. The other two rockets struck the lower floors of the building, blowing large portions of the structure’s bottom section to pieces.

  “I really hope there are no civilian tenants left in that building,” Kinsey said in his microphone.

  “I share the feeling,” Capt. Sterns lamented in response, “but we have no recourse for niceties. An evacuation command was sent over all radio and television channels by Nippon, so we need to focus on hitting that monster with everything we have so it doesn’t get any further than Akihabara. The Diet is now being evacuated just in case, with just a few essential personnel left behind.”

  When the kaiju smashed up against the building, the entire edifice shook violently and the walls of the fourth through sixth floors began caving inwards. This occurred just as Jun, Izumi, Amaya, and their five fellow tenants were making their way down the staircase, with Izumi carrying her daughter Kimiko and Amaya now holding the still unconscious little Yuki. Part of the collapsing wall fell on Ryota, pinning him to the ground, while other falling debris barely missed the rest of the party.

  “Somebody help me!” Ryota screamed, and Jun instinctively turned to come to his aid, followed closely by another tenant, a young man named Berry.

  Before they could try to move the heavy barrier that had Ryota pinned, the reverberations of the kaiju falling back against the upper floors and two rockets striking the bottom floors continued to destabilize the structure.

  More large chunks of masonry fell from the ceiling, with one particularly large piece landing on the pinioned older man and crushing his head, resulting in a sight not unlike a melon being struck by a mallet. A smaller but still sizable chunk struck Berry on his right shoulder, causing him to yell in pain as he fell to his knees.

  “Ryota is gone!” Jun hollered as he helped his younger neighbor to his feet. “We need to keep moving! No delay!”

  The rest of the party took heed and began heading down the stairs as quickly as they could, with Izumi and Amaya being somewhat slower due to the children they each carried.

  “Be careful, these stairs are unstable!” Jun reminded the rest just before grabbing his injured ribs and nearly keeling over under the weight of the also injured Berry.

  “Jun!” Izumi cried. “Your ribs are cracked, maybe broken; you cannot do this.”

  “I will get Berry-san,” another of the tenants, a thirty-four-year-old man named Tomiyama, offered. “Let me take over, Goya-san.”

  As promised, Tomiyama quickly hefted Berry’s arm around his shoulder, thus relieving the pain-ridden Jun of the burden.

  “Easy now, Berry-san,” Tomiyama said to Berry, as the young man winced in agony due to his shattered collarbone.

  The situation was soon to worsen, however, as the three fighter planes doubled back for another strafe on Megadrak.

  “Fire at will!” Sterns commanded the trio of craft, and each of them released another pair of rockets at the towering beast.

  This time, though, the kaiju was more prepared. It exhaled a stream of toxic mist at the projectiles soaring towards it, and the foggy substance instantly began corroding the metal casing of the rockets. This resulted in the explosive projectiles prematurely detonating several meters from their intended target.

  The kaiju kept respiring its mist at the resulting wall of flame in the sky, and its oral vapor had already proven exceedingly flammable. The foggy inhalant passed through the brief wall of fire created by the multiple rocket detonation and emerged from it as a stream of ultra-hot flame. The streaming inferno quickly engulfed Benton’s and Kinsey’s jets, and the two men were instantly roasted alive in the ersatz ovens their crafts had become.

  “Dear Jesus!” West muttered loudly after he managed to veer his jet out of the ultra-sized blowtorch’s range just in the nick of time.

  A moment earlier, as Megadrak turned in the direction of the descending craft to spew its mist, the beast’s enormous tail spun about and smashed clear into the third floor of the building behind it. This was right beneath the floor where Izumi’s party was heading down the staircase, and the destructive impact caused it to partially collapse beneath them. It was by now obvious the entire building would be coming down within mere minutes.

  Amaya was standing directly over a section of the stairs as it began collapsing, with Tomiyama and the debilitated Berry walking a few feet behind her. The woman jumped forward when the stairwell started breaking apart, while the latter two stepped back; however, they weren’t quick enough to avoid slipping into the opening chasm.

  On their side of the crevasse, Tomiyama managed to grab onto a broken portion of the metal railing. The injured Berry, however, went plummeting into the fissure where the stairway had once been. The young man’s body was impaled on a jagged piece of metal as he hit the floor several meters below, his intestines torn out and exposed like thin pinkish tubes.

  Amaya, who was holding the unconscious little Yuki, also began falling from her side of the abyss, until her brother-in-law—who was directly in front of her—managed to grasp her shirt just in time. Unfortunately, a piercing agony erupted through his injured rib cage as he did so, and worse than that, Amaya’s shirt began tearing.

  “Amaya!” Izumi yelled. “Do not drop Yuki! We will pull you both up! Aya-san, please take my daughter!”

  Aya controlled her building panic enough to hold the still screaming child as Izumi carefully made her way towards her husband to help him extricate her sister and the little Yuki. But the instability of the stairway was growing worse every passing moment, and the housewife was aware she had but seconds to act.

  “Give me… the boy,” Jun forcibly uttered despite the pain tearing through him.

  “Please help me!” Amaya screamed, her dangling legs flitting above the chasm directly beneath her.

  “Amaya… just do it,” Jun said through gritted teeth, as he forced himself to maintain his grip despite the cauldron of agony his upper abdomen had now become.

  His sister-in-law pushed herself to follow her brother-in-law’s demand without thinking about anything else. As a result, she successfully lifted the still unconscious Yuki up to where Jun could grab hold of him. Despite the sensation of being stabbed in the side of his chest with a dull knife, Jun knew he could only hold the boy up with his other arm for a few seconds at most.

  Thankfully, Izumi reached her husband before his strength could give out. She lifted the boy out of his left hand while the last of his neighbors, a portly thirty-seven-year-old man named Mizuki Tanaka, grabbed his right arm with both hands to help him lift his sister-in-law.

  “Keep your grip on her, Goya-san,” Mizuki said. “I will get her.”

  “Please hurry!” Amaya screeched. “My shirt is tearing! I am going to fall!”

  “You are not going to fall!” Izumi yelled in reassurance. “Reach up and grab Mizuki-san’s hand! You can do it, sister!”

  Amaya reached up as far as she could just as the scaffolding underneath them began cracking and giving way. Mizuki grabbed the woman just seconds before her shirt would have torn off completely, and Izumi helped him quickly pull her up.

  Jun lay on his side, his rib cage a mass of burning agony, as the portion of the stairway collapsed underneath him. His body landed on a tilted chunk of fallen stairway, only to slide down into a second crevice that led down into the building’s basement far below. Within seconds, he was completely out of his wife’s line of sight. No one saw where his body landed, but it didn’t appear as if anyone could have possibly survived such a fall.

  “Jun!” Izumi screamed. “Nooooooo! Do not leave me!”

  The newly designated widow found her own screams of grief and horror overwhelmed by those of Tomiyama, who still hung precariously from the remaining portion of a metal railing on the opposite side of the stairwell’s former location. The man’s shoulder socket had been severely strained upon grabbing the makeshift metallic lifeline, leaving him in great pain. He knew he could not hold on much longe
r.

  “Somebody… help me!” he pleaded.

  Aya closed her eyes reproachfully and choked out a response. “We cannot help you, Tomi-san! I am so sorry…”

  “No!” he wailed in response. “You have to help me, please! I cannot hold on much longer. My shoulder is hurting!”

  Izumi was by then inconsolable and crying in her rescued sister’s shoulder. Amaya cradled Yuki in one arm while holding her sister consolingly with the other. The older sibling was shedding tears over both the loss of her brother-in-law Jun, who lost his life while saving her own, and the utter helplessness she felt over being unable to halt the impending loss of Tomiyama. She had to do something, at least, even if only to offer sympathetic words.

  “I am sorry too,” Amaya said through tear-moistened eyes. “We cannot get across the hole where the stairway collapsed. But we will stay with you until you… let go.” The woman burst out crying after muttering those words and sunk her dampened face into Izumi’s dark hair.

  Mizuki simply stood looking forward without saying a word, his eyes and expression blank as if trying to force himself to process not only his failure to save Jun, but also the second such failure that was about to occur right in front of him.

  “Please help!” were the last words ever uttered by Tomiyama, as less than two seconds later he finally lost his grip and fell into the same deep chasm that had claimed Jun Goya just minutes earlier.

  The fall was quickly followed by the sound of the man’s body crashing into large chunks of masonry at the bottom of the fissure. Everything was then mercifully quiet down below, with only the incessant sobbing of the remaining tenants breaking the silence.

  CHAPTER 16: Stark Trek: The Wrath of the Kaiju