Titan Wars: Rise of the Kaiju

by M. C. Norris

  Skyler gripped the podium, as a wave of vertigo knocked her right out of the moment, and made her wonder if she would even remain standing. By the manner in which audience members were glancing all about, gripping the armrests of their chairs, it appeared as though she was not the only one to have experienced the sickening sensation of motion. She gazed past the crowd to the glass walls of the ballroom that overlooked the city in its twilit splendor, and the gentle rise and fall of the glittering horizon suggested that in fact, the building was actually swaying. This was the tallest structure she’d ever been in, and she supposed that it was probably engineered with some flexibility

  “—that are astonishingly complex,” she repeated, sweeping a lock of blonde hair from her eyes, “and if my friends and colleagues didn’t die in vain, then Europa must become our new horizon. That ocean moon, and every wonderful mystery hidden beneath its icy crust, are our manifest dest—”

  Skyler shrieked into the microphone as the building lurched back, throwing her off balance as New York’s twinkling horizon disappeared beneath the windowsill, and the glass wall tilted up toward the stars. The sample canister toppled off the podium, knocking its lid loose as the empty vessel struck the floor and rolled crazily across the stage. Skyler’s wheelchair took off in reverse. It bisected the stage, slammed into the backdrop, and then began racing forward toward the crowd as the building lilted back in the opposite direction. The wheelchair collided with a floor light, detonating the bulb with a pop and a flume of sparks before dumping offstage to crash into the orchestra pit. Skyler screamed again, covering her head as sharp reports like gunshots cracked the air. Fissures streaked across the walls of glass.

  “Oh, my God.” In her pocket, her phone began to vibrate.

  The building sagged forward, scrolling downward through the stars until it offered a stomach-turning view of a glittering corridor plunging down between buildings, where something unspeakable awaited. Skyler gasped down at the rippling mass of amber, and noticed the play of lightning trapped within it. Exuding billowing clouds of steam, the mass gathered itself into a knot, and thrust forward again, oozing through the gauntlet of mirrored glass.

  Dropping to her hands and knees, Skyler scrambled across across the stage as the building canted backward again. She hooked a floor light with the crook of her cane, grimacing as her legs swung pendulously over the slick surface of the stage. People in the front row toppled out of their seats like shelved dolls, tumbling toward the stage. The lights flickered, and then cut out completely. The ballroom was enveloped in blackness.

  With a titanic groan, the skyscraper lurched forward again, and this time with more momentum than before. She was going to be sick. Her body swung by the end of her cane, until her heels caught the anchored podium. Bolts of agony shot up through the titanium rods in her legs. Stars raced across the heavens as the building bent at the waist to gawp down at its own footings. The snap of thick glass was as loud as a shot from a high-powered rifle. The ominous sound evoked a collective scream. The ululation of the crowd arose in one terrible wail, as the entire translucent wall of glass carved loose from its frame like jagged chunks of glacial ice. They seemed to pirouette toward the streets in slow motion, scooping great gouges of glass and steel from neighboring buildings as they knocked around, amassing a deadly avalanche of debris.

  Skyler clung to her cane, staring straight down into the pits of Hell. Those seated nearest to the missing wall weren’t so lucky. Sucked from their chairs by the vacuum of pressure change, they sailed stiff and strange into oblivion. The glimmering street below was a smoldering trench. Cartwheeling people vanished into the river of mist.

  “Ms. Hale, I’ve got you.” One of the backstage hands slid toward her on his belly, clinging to the leading edge of the stage. He reached for her cane, and seized its metallic crook in one hand. “Hold tight, and don’t let go.”

  Skyler nodded. Trusting him, she released her foothold on the podium, and allowed her rescuer to drag her back, inch by inch, through the backstage door. A man wearing headphones, evidently a member of the technical crew, took notice of their situation. He crawled over to her opposite side, took hold of her arm, and together, the three rose. The building continued to sway, but it seemed to be stabilizing. Using the walls for occasional support, they stumbled through a dark maze of tilting corridors. The building moaned and popped, while the screams of the ballroom grew more distant.

  “Something’s happening,” the stagehand said, between gasps for breath.

  “What is it?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Tokyo, London, and Seattle all got hit,” the technician replied.

  “Hit? Hit by what?”

  “I don’t know, but now it looks like it’s our turn.”

  “Our turn for what?”

  “There’s a stairwell up ahead.”

  “We’re on the two-hundredth floor!”

  “We can’t take the elevators, obviously. There’s no choice but to take the stairs.”

  “Guys,” Skyler interrupted the arguing men. “I saw something. There’s something down there on the streets, between the buildings. Something strange.”

  “There’s obviously a lot going on down there.”

  “No.” Skyler gently pulled free of her handlers. “What I saw was something huge—something alive.” She returned the men’s incredulous stares. “You don’t understand. We can’t go down there.”

  “We sure as heck can’t stay here,” the technician replied. “I feel like this building could come down any second. Just listen.” The technician hovered just outside the stairwell door. Somewhere beneath the screams and sirens, the rush of wind through missing walls, the skyscraper’s entire structure emitted a basal moan, not unlike the tormented hull of a sinking ship. “It’ll take us thirty minutes if we start right now. How long do you think this building will remain standing?”

  “I don’t want to die like this,” the stagehand whispered, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  “Me neither.” The technician shoved open the stairwell door. “Rather die with both my feet on the ground than be splattered all over it.”

  “Agreed.”

  Skyler’s phone began to vibrate in her pocket again. The light from the screen glowed softly through the fabric. “Use your flashlights on your phones,” she said, groping for hers, while the men went for their own devices.

  Within seconds, beams of white light swept through the blackness of the yawning shaft. Ribbons of mist rose with a foul draft of air that billowed up from the stairwell’s depths. A sharp odor burned the linings of their nostrils, and made them start to cough. The stench was sour, almost like vinegar, yet it stung the throat and lungs.

  “God, what’s that stink?” the stagehand asked, covering the lower half of his face.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It smells like chemicals or something.”

  Skyler stepped onto the landing, where the men were peering over the rail down into the abyss, holding their noses. She moved past them, and stared down the first flight of stairs. Drawing a deep breath, she gripped the rail. One step at a time. She would just have to take it one step at a time.

  “Hey, whoa,” the stagehand said, as she picked her way down the first flight. “You don’t have to do that on your own.”

  “I’m good,” she replied. She supposed that the men had every reason to be confused by her capability, given the way in which she’d been presented at the symposium. Just a poor, broken cripple, fighting to live a normal life. Maybe it used to be that way, but not anymore, and she’d never for a second felt broken. The pain in her legs was manageable. She no longer suffered those excruciating bolts of agony if she moved the wrong way, as had been the case for eight months following the shooting. These days, her discomfort was more of a latent pain, an almost constant ache that throbbed deep down in the bone marrow. It bothered her most often at night, hours after she’d moved the wrong way, when she laid awake for hours wis
hing away the memory of the skinned face of her personal demon. Two hundred flights of stairs would ensure a week’s worth of sleepless nights, but after fourteen surgeries, she’d become so familiar with nightmares and pain that it was just her way of life.

  “Look at this,” the technician said, casting his beam of light over a thin coating of mucus on the concrete walls. “This is where that smell is coming from.”

  The translucent goo appeared to be flowing. There was definitely some motion. Little particles caught in the rivulets were drifting along like debris in a stream. However, the most bizarre aspect was the flow’s direction. It wasn’t sliding down the stairwell walls, as one might expect from the law of gravity. Instead, the stuff was flowing up.

  “What in the world is that crap?”

  The ropes of slime thickened, gaining mass and viscosity as they slithered skyward like a snarl of vines. Then, after an unsettling rush of momentum, the slime paused. When the flowing motion ceased, Skyler noticed a draft of sour air rushing up from the floors below. The acidic reek intensified, until the stairwell air became ineffable. Coughing into their fists, they stood bewildered in an acrid torrent, watching the vines of mucus growing thicker. The stuff was moving again, sliding upward, reaching. It almost felt as though something down below was hauling itself up.

  “We need to get out of here,” Skyler said. “We can’t go down there. I told you!”

  The technician doubled over, retching in the fumes. He reached for the wall, as if to stabilize himself, inadvertently palming his hand in the slithering goo. His scream barely escaped his throat before a rush of slime had filled it, surging up his arm to flood his mouth and nostrils. He clawed at the invading entity, but he could not fight what he couldn’t grab. The mucous tightened, slamming his body flat against the wall, where the stuff enveloped him.

  “God, what the hell is going on?”

  Flesh dissolved with such speed that the man’s grinning skull had already deliquesced to a pale stain in the flow before his empty headset went clattering to the landing. A small collection of items tumbled down from the wall. Coins bounced down the stairs. Keys, a few credit cards, and a belt buckle were the last bits of evidence that a living human being had ever been standing beside them. In the blink of an eye, he’d contributed himself wholly to the living stream.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Skyler shouted, hobbling back up the staircase.

  “There’s nowhere to go!”

  He was right. Skyler knew that he was right, but she wasn’t ready to accept that the gelatinous horror that she’d seen down on the city streets was already oozing up through the core of their building with the dark designs of a serpent slithering toward a nest of helpless chicks. She wasn’t ready to accept death on its own terms, so long as there remained a place to which she could flee, like the ballroom, where she could lose herself amongst the crowd. However, the dark thought that she could not escape, the one looming behind all of the others in her mind, was a sort of dread certainty that this monster was one of hers. Amidst the thousands of screaming people, Skyler alone knew exactly what was happening, and why. She’d brought the thing here. It was all her fault.

  She threw open the stairwell door, where the howling of tormented souls resounded through lightless halls. It was disorienting and hellish in its dissonance. Below it all, the skyscraper released another lugubrious groan up through its stairwells and shafts. Skyler could feel it inside her chest. Her breaths quickened, and her eyes began to dart. It was happening. The monster was coming, and she wasn’t getting out. No one was. The whole building was coming down.

  The crowd compressed against one wall of the ballroom. They were a trapped herd of animals, paralyzed by the presence of some predator in their midst. No one dared attempt to exit the room. There were open stairwells on either side, but one glance in those directions and the reason for the crowd’s reluctance became apparent. A rippling tide of amber oozed from those routes of escape, boiling up from beyond the stairwell doors to spill across the ballroom floor. The exits were choked with the same living mass that continued to haul its immense bulk ever higher into the skyscraper. These extremities were akin to its slithering tentacles. The crowd let out a scream as the building lurched toward the open wall. A few lost their balance. Stumbling, they grabbed for one another as they slid, only to raft entangled together over the precipice. The whole building was hanging by a thread.

  Center stage, Skyler had become a spectator in a weird reversal that had shifted the show out into the audience. For months, she’d worried about tonight’s event. All along, she kept telling herself that it was just a case of stage fright, and that everything was going to be fine. As she watched in horror as whole panels in the domed glass ceiling detonated, showering broken glass down onto the crowd, she began to wonder if her anxieties leading up to tonight hadn’t in fact been a glaring premonition that she’d chosen to ignore.

  Amber gel gushed from ventilation ducts in the walls. It coiled on the floor in writhing ropes. The brushed steel doors of the defunct elevators trembled and shifted in their frames. The shiny panels bulged outward, buckled, and ruptured with volcanic force. An avalanche of pressurized goo that had been building up inside the elevator shafts exploded out into the ballroom, engulfing everything in its path.

  “There’s no way out of here,” the stagehand said, backing toward the hopeless corridors from which they’d just escaped. “We’re all going to die.”

  Skyler didn’t know what to say to him. She couldn’t argue. He appeared to be right, and she wasn’t in a position to offer anyone else sympathy. She just watched him go, knowing well enough, as the stage door closed behind him, that was the last time that she would ever see that man.

  The phone in her pocket began to vibrate. Twice, she’d ignored the unknown caller, presuming it to be someone affiliated with tonight’s event, or with the two-year research program she’d conducted for the Allied Navy. Certainly, it was bound to be someone worried about her. Even though she didn’t have any close friends or family left, someone out there was watching the news, and they were concerned for her safety. It terrified her to answer that call, because if she did, she’d be forced to admit to the lone voice in the darkness just how dire her situation was, and that would be her acceptance of death. With the last spot of safe ground shrinking by the second, and the entire skyscraper threatening to crumble beneath the weight of the climbing behemoth, she was being pressed closer to the acceptance of that finality, but she wasn’t quite there yet. The unknown call was filled with emotional portents, because whoever was on the line might be the last person with whom she would ever speak.

  “Hello?”

  “Ms. Skyler Hale?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve locked onto your location. Do not move. Stay exactly where you are.”

  The line went dead. Skyler looked from her phone to the gaping hole in the ballroom wall, where a thumping helicopter ascended from the abyss, piercing the gloom and chaos with a lance of brilliant effervescence. Groveling masses shielded their eyes like sinners before an angry god, as the chopper positioned itself over the fragmented dome. A great pop lurched the skyscraper a few more degrees, and another wail arose from the damned. A few more souls were swallowed. Arms outstretched toward the heavens, pleading. Desperate fingers raked at the shaft of blinding light.

  A spot of darkness preceded unfurling cordage. A tethered harness tumbled through the open ceiling, and down onto the stage. Wails of lament escalated to primal screams. The mob turned on Skyler. With wild eyes and bared teeth, they rushed the stage. American hero no more, she’d been devalued by death’s dark promise. They were going to rip her apart. The slackened line straightened, and the harness began to rise.

  “Grab the rope!”

  Skyler obeyed the booming command that resounded from the heavens. She seized the rope, hugging the harness to her breast, and rose as the unforgiven clambered onto the stage. Her toes left the ground as their claw
s raked her legs. A single shoe she gifted them. It tumbled down into their midst, as she soared like a locust from the pits of the damned, gilded in silvery brilliance.

  The building emitted an agonized groan, just her body passed through the jagged portal, and the whole structure started to topple. Skyler stole a last glimpse over her shoulder, and looked upon the fate from she’d been spared. Waves of amber gel rushed in from all sides to envelope the screaming crowd, liquefying the forsaken as the gutted corpse of America’s tallest skyscraper thundered upon the wasteland.

  Chapter Three

  The baboon licked a goober of meat off the sandstone, and sat there smacking its chops. They were such awful creatures. Each was so possessed with avarice that one could not be tethered within reach of the other during feeding time, or they would rip out each other’s throats. The second creature emitted a grunt, following the scraps of thrown flesh with its eyes, with an almost childlike expression of entitlement. It should’ve learned by now that it wasn’t getting anything to eat.

  He liked to torment them. For two years, he chose to feed one over the other, until its belly was fat and round. Day after day, he would continue the treatment until the eyes of the starved began to hollow with madness. When at last the ghoulish one was unleashed upon its fattened brother, he observed the depths of a baboon’s depravity. Then, their respective roles would be switched. That was his game. Week after week, he fostered a profound hatred in those animals for everything in life but an orange bowl of human flesh. It consumed them. Without windows or other stimulation, that bowl could be the only thought festering inside their rotten minds, such that his control over them was absolute. However, their master remained hidden behind a screen during those feeding sessions, such that no sense of dependence on a living person would ever corrupt the pure minds of his savage addicts to human flesh.