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

saluted and left.
    “Thank you for seeing me, Joyce,” her brother said.
    “What do you want?” She could guess, and she had little desire to waste what time remained to her. Given a choice, there was somewhere else she would much rather be.
    “I want salvation,” Bickford said. “For all of us. Isn’t that what we’re both trying to achieve?”
    “You could say that, but I’m not going to achieve anything standing here with you.”
    “Do you honestly think you can destroy the beast?”
    “I’m going to try.”
    “That isn’t what I asked.”
    She sighed. “Where is this going, Sam? Because I have better things to do than have another circular conversation with you.”
    He looked at the ground, and there, nervous before asking a favor, was her younger brother. Dark hair and beard graying now, though a long way from the iron her own hair had turned years ago. Still as slight as he had been in adolescence. There was little sign of the powerful speaker.
    “I need your help,” he said.
    “With what?” She was at a loss.
    “I need your belief, first.”
    “You won’t have it.”
    There was great pain in his eyes. “When you were younger, you gave it to father.”
    “Who didn’t deserve it.” That petty tyrant and hypocrite had deserved her fist. If he had lived long enough for her to reach adulthood, she would have given him that gift. Oh yes, she most certainly would have. Instead, she had to content herself with rejecting the patronym, and taking their mother’s maiden name instead.
    “But what he represented did deserve it,” Bickford said. “He was a poor churchman. That isn’t the fault of God.”
    She said nothing.
    He smiled gently. “You do have faith,” he said. “Even if you don’t think so. Think about what you’re doing. Can you truly believe you’re fighting something natural?”
    “It isn’t a god, if that’s what you mean.”
    “I don’t mean that. Not a god. Not God. But it is proof of His coming.” His smile went from kind to beatific.
    “Odd proof, killing hundreds of millions.”
    “They are safe at His side. Use your reason. It will bring you to faith. Consider the beast’s name…”
    “Not surprising it’s been called that. Given everything.”
    “We knew it as the Eschaton from the day it first appeared. All of us did. Everywhere.”
    She wanted to tell him he was wrong. She couldn’t.
    “And look at it!” he continued. “It makes no evolutionary sense whatever. An exoskeleton and an endoskeleton? A biped with four arms? It comes from the sea, and yet breathes—”
    “I know all this,” she said, cutting him off. Her brother was wrong if he thought this litany of impossibilities was going to bring her back to God. It was undermining the faith she needed in the value of her actions. It was destroying her hope that, even if she died today, she might, through her sacrifice, save some of the people of Manchester. Keep more of them safe than there would be without her. Keep Sandra safe. A bit longer anyway. Just a little bit longer. She didn’t think it was too much to ask to be allowed to fight for that illusion.
    “How can you consider something so unnatural and not see evidence of the divine?” her brother asked.
    “What it did in the Middle East, was that your idea of the Second Coming?”
    Bickford winced. “No,” he said, and she saluted him for his intellectual honesty. “It wasn’t. That was a time of revelation for me.”
    “I’m sure the people who died would have been glad to know they served a purpose.”
    His personal logic had too much momentum for him to notice her gibe. “We cannot be passive before the challenge of the Eschaton.”
    Caldwell stared. She swept her arm around the stadium, taking in the full panorama of the machinery of war. “How can you call this passive?”
    “It’s only a half-measure, and that’s why it’s failing. This has to be a crusade. We can’t just hurl a spear at the beast. The spear has to be