Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Read Online Free PDF

next step would bring the finish to Ginther and Carpenter. Though his terror was mounting to new heights, Ginther had no will to run. He accepted what was coming.
    So did Carpenter. “The name is right,” he said.
    “Yes.” Ginther could barely hear his own breaking voice. “Yes, it is.”
    He stared at the monster of many mythologies, and beyond them all. He stared as it took that fatal step. He stared to the very last as the crushing shadow came down over him, and he joined Carpenter in a cry that was only possible in the presence of the end of all things.
    The Eschaton had come.
    ~
    And did the Countenance Divine,
    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
    And was Jerusalem builded here,
    Among these dark, Satanic Mills?
    ~
    Evans poked his head in the command tent, looking both sheepish and irritated. “Sorry to bother you, brigadier,” he said. “Bit of a problem at the gates. That clergyman who’s been in the news insists on seeing you. Won’t take piss off for an answer.”
    Joyce Caldwell sighed. “Show him in, captain.” Better get this over with.
    Evans was surprised. “Are you sure? Brigadier, we could—”
    “He’s family.”
    The captain’s eyebrows were high on his forehead. “Oh,” he said. “Right,” he said, and managed to swallow his questions. He withdrew.
    Caldwell walked out of the tent to wait. Around her, the playing field of Old Trafford was an armed camp on the move. The Eschaton was approaching. The be ast was within a few kilometers of Manchester’s western suburbs. Troops, tanks, self-propelled artillery, and multiple rocket launchers headed out from the mustering grounds. A large contingent remained. If the Eschaton broke through the lines and entered the city, Caldwell hoped to draw it to the stadium, where a high concentration of firepower might make a difference.
    If. Hoped. Might . She knew better. Everyone did. But duty demanded acting as if they didn’t. She held tight to duty. There wasn’t much else to hold, as city after city, and nation after nation, burned in the Rage.
    Seven years ago, it would have been an honor to be charged with Manchester’s defense. Seven years ago, she would have been laboring under the blessed illusion that her efforts might bear fruit, and that she might save the city. That was before the American East Coast, and the holocaust in the Mid-West, and the end of California. That was before Tokyo, before Moscow, before Mumbai, and Sydney, and Lagos, and Berlin, and Paris, and Shanghai, and… The list was endless, a Domesday Book of annihilation. Was there any reason to think that her very conventional forces would succeed where much vaster armies, and measures far more extreme, had been swatted aside? No, there was not. Nuclear craters marked the failures of the most desperate moves.
    There was no order to the devastation. The path of the Eschaton’s march followed no pattern. There was no way to predict which city would be next. The only true certainty was that the time would come to every major population center. That hadn’t stopped the rise of some false certainties. For seven years, the Eschaton had not approached the British Isles, and Caldwell had seen the belief grow, among those who sought comfort in the nurture of intolerant myth, that this was the result of divine intervention. Albion, said the men with minds like fists, was Chosen. To keep it safe, to keep the protection of the Almighty, it was necessary to expel the people who did not look or think or love like the men with minds like fists. And if the tottering government did not expel them, then it would be necessary to hurt them very badly. In the last few years, Caldwell had spent so much time quelling or clearing up the aftermath of humanity’s worst impulses that the arrival of the Eschaton had almost been a relief.
    Almost.
    Maneuvering through vehicles and soldiers, Evans delivered Sam Bickford to Caldwell. “Thank you, captain,” she said. “That will be all.” Evans