Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

road. To their right, a field and hills were between them and the coast. They couldn’t see the military operations from here, beyond the occasional helicopter or fighter passing overhead. The sound of the deployment was white noise. It could pass for the crash of surf.
    Carpenter glanced up from his notes as a squadron streaked toward the sea, engines scraping the early afternoon raw. “Give them credit,” he said. “They’re still trying.”
    “Their way of coping,” Ginther answered. “Same as we’re doing. Same as Bickford, though he won’t admit it.”
    “I suppose so.” Carpenter turned to Ginther, and the fear beneath his brittle detachment was visible. He rubbed absently at his chin. “Do you think Bickford could be correct?”
    Ginther paused before answering. Thirty years of collegial disagreement urged him to say no. The knowledge that he would die today made him hesitate. “Maybe he’s half-right,” he said. “I don’t believe he has a more direct line to the truth than we do. Anyway, whether he’s right or wrong, what does that change about today?”
    Carpenter did not look reassured. “What comes after.”
    Ginther shook his head. “About that, Bickford’s wrong.” He was more emphatic this time. He could feel his own anxiety growing with Carpenter’s. He didn’t want that.
    “But in the footage of the thing, I see elements that—”
    Ginther interrupted. “Footage taken by missile cams and fleeing journalists. Hard to see anything conclusive.”
    “And its name?”
    “That is troubling,” Ginther admitted.
    There were quiet for a bit, then. They finished eating. There was farmland to the left, and Ginther heard sheep bleating. Fifteen years of living in England, and the sound was still a novelty for him. It was a verdant isle echo that made his heart lurch with an Arcadian nostalgia that was no less acute for being false.
    “Plenty of time for reading, the last few days,” Carpenter said. The universities, along with so much else, had shut down when confirmation of the approach had been received. “Been going back over a lot of Blake. Yeats, too.” He was staring at the hills. Clouds were starting to roll in. Their shadows crawled down the slopes. “You?”
    “The Eddur, mostly.” A return to the familiar. He had found no comfort there. Only a discomfiting relevance.
    The thunder of guns began, joined moments later by the shrieks and deeper blasts of rockets.
    “Genuflection,” Ginther muttered.
    “An act that still has meaning,” Carpenter said as they climbed out of the car.
    “But no effect.”
    They walked a few steps into the field and stopped. They watched the hills. They waited while the thunder of the genuflection grew louder and more desperate.
    They didn’t wait long. As the clouds gathered strength and turned the day from the la st light of joy to the first gray of the end, the beast surged over the hills. Ginther’s eyes widened. Awe shot his chest with agony. He looked up and up and up, and he thought, Forever .
    Carpenter said, “It’s all true,” and the words were a sob of holy terror.
    The beast crossed the hills in a single stride. It was bipedal. Though its shape suggested a towering carnosaur, it had the chitinous exoskeleton of a crab, even to the ends of its four great, clawed hands. In the shape of the head, Ginther saw a dragon, but perhaps because of the eerie, translucent blue of its eyes, he also saw a wolf. Its jaws were immense. When they opened, they did, as they should, look as if they could touch earth and sky. Its tail, covered in the same armor as the rest of its body, doubled its already staggering length. Its coils were ready to embrace the globe.
    “The horns,” Carpenter whispered. “The horns.”
    Yes, the horns. The beast had one head, not seven, but it had ten horns. They surrounded its skull like a huge, twisting, iron crown.
    With a second stride, the beast was halfway across the field. The earth shook and cracked. The