Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 194476089X ISBN 13: 9781944760892

Casa editrice: Ragnarok Pubns, 2017

Riassunto

A revised and updated 2nd edition, Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters is a collection of stories focused on strange creatures in the vein of Pacific Rim, Godzilla, Cloverfield, and more. Opening with a foreword by Jeremy Robinson&;author of Project Nemesis, the highest selling Kaiju novel in the United States since the old Godzilla books&;the collection features work from New York Times bestsellers to indie darlings. Authors include Peter Clines, Larry Correia, James Lovegrove, Gini Koch (as J.C. Koch), James Maxey, Jonathan Wood, C.L. Werner, Joshua Reynolds, David Annandale, Jaym Gates, Peter Rawlik, Shane Berryhill, Natania Barron, Mike MacLean, Timothy W. Long, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Kane Gilmour, Peter Stenson, Erin Hoffman, Howard Andrew Jones, Edward M. Erdelac, and James Swallow.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Tim Marquitz is co-owner of Ragnarok Publications. Jeremy Robinson is the bestselling author of more than 50 titles.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Kaiju Rising

Age of Monsters

By Tim Marquitz

Ragnarok Publications

Copyright © 2017 Tim Marquitz
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-944760-89-2

Contents

FOREWORD Jeremy Robinson, 
BIG BEN AND THE END OF THE PIER SHOW James Lovegrove, 
THE CONVERSION David Annandale, 
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER OF KUROHAKA ISLAND Kane Gilmour, 
OCCUPIED Natania Barron, 
THE SERPENT'S HEART Howard Andrew Jones, 
MONSTRUO Mike MacLean, 
THE BEHEMOTH Jonathan Wood, 
THE GREATEST HUNGER Jaym Gates, 
HEARTLAND Shane Berryhill, 
DEVIL'S CAP BRAWL Edward M. Erdelac, 
SHAKTARRA Sean Sherman, 
OF THE EARTH, OF THE SKY, OF THE SEA Patrick M. Tracy and Paul Genesse, 
THE FLIGHT OF THE RED MONSTERS Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, 
OPERATION STARFISH Peter Rawlik, 
WITH BRIGHT SHINING FACES J.C. Koch, 
THE BANNER OF THE BENT CROSS Peter Clines, 
FALL OF BABYLON James Maxey, 
DEAD MEN'S BONES Josh Reynolds, 
STORMRISE Erin Hoffman, 
BIG DOG Timothy W. Long, 
THE GREAT SEA BEAST Larry Correia, 
ANIMIKII VS. MISHIPESHU C.L. Werner, 
THE TURN OF THE CARD James Swallow, 

CHAPTER 1

BIG BEN AND THE END OF THE PIER SHOW

JAMES LOVEGROVE

THE FOREVER FUN PIER HAD stood for more than a century, surviving everything the world could throw at it: two wars, three recessions, innumerable storms, and the endless corrosive lick of salt water. But it was no match for a two-hundred-foot-tall sea monster and an almost as gigantic robot.

IRONICALLY, ON THE DAY THE pier was destroyed, owner Keith Brown was trying to decide its fate.

He was on the horns of a dilemma which were, to him, no smaller than the horns of the Kaiju currently wending its way up the English Channel towards his hometown.

On the one hand, he had a firm offer from an entertainment consortium to buy the pier. They would take it off his hands, lock, stock, and barrel, no questions asked, for a cash lump sum.

The money was not retiring money, not head-off-to-the-Bahamas-and-drinkmargaritas-for-the-rest-of-your-days money. Once tax was deducted and business debts paid off, there wouldn't be much left. Barely a few thousand. But the pier would not be his headache anymore; it would be someone else's, someone with deeper pockets and friendlier creditors.

On the other hand, Keith had been contemplating an insurance job. A fire would do the trick. A jerry can of petrol left in the fuse box room. A burning rag. It would look like an electrical accident, a stray spark from a circuit breaker igniting a terminal conflagration. The pier's ancient, weathered boards would go up like tinder. Its wooden superstructure would be a raging inferno in no time. The fire brigade would have no chance of saving it.

The benefit of this option was that the insurance company would cough up the pier's full market value, giving him twice the amount the entertainment consortium was tendering.

The drawback? Well, if he was caught and convicted of arson, there'd be no payout. Instead, there'd be a hefty fine and a stretch in jail. Besides, how could he burn the pier down? It had been in his family for four generations. His great-grandfather built it. His grandfather paid off the last of the initial bank loan. His father presided over the pier's long, slow decline as a going concern. Keith inherited a sizeable overdraft and a crumbling, barely profitable business that incurred eye-watering overheads in maintenance and upkeep and was dependent on the vagaries of tourist crowds and the British summer.

But it was still the Brown family pier, their livelihood since 1885. Keith's attachment to it went beyond the merely financial; was rooted in his psyche. The pier was in his DNA, in his soul. Its rusty cast-iron stilts were his legs. Its white-and-blue finials and cupolas were his brain, his dreams. Its rickety helter-skelter was his heart.

THE KAIJU, NICKNAMED RED DEVIL, toiled eastward up the Channel, inbound from the Atlantic. Sometimes he swam, thrashing himself along with great sweeps of his tail. Other times, when his feet could reach the seabed, he waded, neck deep. Puffs of smoke curled from his cavernous nostrils with every exhalation. His horns rose proud like two galleons.

Already he had downed a Portuguese Puma attack helicopter just off Madeira, incinerating it with a single fiery exhalation, and had crippled a French naval frigate.

A Royal Navy Astute-class hunter-killer submarine was now shadowing his progress, awaiting word from the top brass. If Red Devil strayed too close to the British coastline or looked as though he was attempting landfall, the sub's captain could be ordered to unleash Spearfish heavy torpedoes and try to blow the beast's legs out from under him.

This was a precaution, though, a last-resort measure. Subaquatic Kaiju kills were hard to pull off and, more often than not, simply resulted in an even more irate monster.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom's very own special defence measure was being prepped for action in its hangar at the Deepcut Barracks in Camberley, Surrey.

Big Ben.

The alert level at Deepcut was high amber, meaning that, if necessary, in under half an hour the engine could be cycling, the weapons primed, and the three-man pilot team installed in the cockpit, ready to go.

Should Red Devil decide not to circumnavigate the British Isles but instead strode out of the sea onto the nation's sovereign territory, Big Ben would be deployed to intervene.

KEITH, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, WAS keeping half an eye on Red Devil's approach. BBC News 24 was tracking the monster step by step, with maps and satellite surveillance, like meteorologists monitoring the course of a hurricane. Talking heads — defense officials, Kaiju experts, naturalists — debated the likelihood of the creature actually attacking the country. The consensus of opinion was that Red Devil would bypass the south coast and carry on up the North Sea, making for the Arctic Circle. Possibly, he might stop off at Denmark or Norway en route, to snack on Scandinavians. This view, however, was offered more in hope than expectation, as was the similar notion the creature might prefer France to the UK. Once Red Devil reached the Straits of Dover he would be as close to either nation as could be, more or less equidistant from both. Who was to say he might not turn right instead of left and go in search of Gallic cuisine?

Kaiju were hopelessly unpredictable. Those who anointed themselves experts on the beasts were more like educated guessers than anything. Gypsy Rose Petulengro, who told fortunes in a booth on the Forever Fun Pier, would have been a better predictor of a Kaiju's movements than any of them. Her tarot cards and crystal ball were at least as reliable and credible as the prognostications of these amateur know-alls. The only thing they were interested in was a TV channel inviting them into the studio and crossing their palms with silver.

THE TOWN WAS QUIET AS Keith bicycled down to the pier that afternoon. Traffic was thin to nonexistent, pedestrians few and far between. The hotels had the hollow look of the dead — their guests having gotten into their cars and headed back home. The fish and chip shops lacked paying customers, and several had closed up, with hand-scrawled signs in the windows saying they would reopen once the all clear was given.

Along the south coast there had been an exodus inland. Anyone who had somewhere else they could go to, had gone there.

The seafront was somewhat busier than the center of town. There were a few determined dog walkers, a handful of elderly local residents who were damned if they were going to let some sea monster interfere with their daily constitutional, and the inevitable gaggles of Kaiju chasers who were camped out along the promenade, cameras at the ready, waiting on tenterhooks for Red Devil to lumber by.

Keith pedalled past a coachload of Japanese tourists who, from what he could gather, had forgone a trip to Brontë country in favor of coming down south to snap shots of the latest behemoth to emerge from the Romanche Furrow breeding grounds. There were news crews from as far afield as Italy and Spain, along with casual opportunists who lived in the vicinity and knew pictures and footage of Kaiju could earn them a few quid when sold to the papers or the right online outlets.

A drizzle was falling but the mood was oddly festive. Nobody seemed to think Red Devil would get it into his head to besiege the town. Why would he be interested in a faded, if still architecturally lovely, seaside resort? Kaiju were drawn to bright lights, big cities. They loved to topple a skyscraper or knock down some cultural landmark in the course of their ravenous rampages.

There was nothing here for Red Devil. There weren't even that many people for him to pluck up in his taloned clutches and cram into his hungry maw. Portsmouth, Southampton, Brighton, the major conurbations to the west — any of them would be attractive to him, a human smorgasbord spread out for him to gorge on. Or he might round the rump of Kent and travel up the Thames Estuary to slake his hunger on London itself, a capital feast.

But not this humble little gathering of Victorian villas and Edwardian terraces perched on the end of a railway spur. This shingle-beached nowhere which in long-ago, simpler times had been the holiday destination of choice for large swathes of the British working class and, before that, a Mecca for genteel urbanites seeking the restorative powers of sea water and salt breezes as an antidote to smog, stench, and tuberculosis.

Cocooned in kagoules and cheeriness, believing they were safe, the Kaiju chasers chattered and speculated. Keith left them to it. He leaned his bike against the railings outside the Forever Fun Pier, his pier, and passed under the entrance arch.

Sally, the kid manning the turnstile, barely glanced up as Keith went through. She was concentrating on her iPhone, alternating between catching Red Devil updates and texting friends. She was eighteen, a responsible girl with a disabled mother to support.

That morning Keith had sent a round-robin email to all his employees in which he insisted that the pier would remain open unless, or until, Red Devil came within twenty miles of the town. He left it up to them whether to turn up for work or not. It was their choice, but he wanted those who were keen on earning a day's pay to have that opportunity.

He was, he thought, a fair boss. He had a light-touch, lenient attitude, reckoning you got more out of people the less you swaggered and shouted, and he paid generously, well above minimum wage, even though he could not realistically afford to. He suspected that if he had been harder-nosed, more bullying and miserly by nature, more of a Scrooge, the pier might not be in such a parlous state.

But a pier should be fun, that was the thing. A pier should be a bright, happy place, a palace of dreams. If the workforce were relaxed and content and glad to be there, it would show. It would communicate itself to the punters, and they would be happy too — and spend more money.

Gypsy Rose's booth was shut. She had stayed home today. Perhaps she knew something no one else did. But Wheezy Bob was in his kiosk in the amusement arcade, where the shelves of the penny falls machines went back and forth in a ceaseless silvery tide and the one-armed bandits whistled and flashed their come-ons. Not that anyone was playing them. Wheezy Bob was alone, with nobody queuing to have their banknotes changed into change.

"Busy today, Mr Brown," he said. He had been with the pier longer than Keith. He had been young when Keith's father took over. "Rushed off my feet."

"Want to take a fag break? I bet you're dying to."

"And abandon my post when there's work to be done?" Bob let out one of his raspy, phlegmy chuckles. A lifelong smoker, every one of his laughs sounded like a last gasp.

"I think we can manage without you for five minutes."

Wheezy Bob fired off a yellow grin and shambled outdoors, fishing his roll-up tin from his pocket.

Keith moved on. The rock and candyfloss stalls hawked their brightly colored wares, but no one was buying. The tables in the café were empty save for salt shakers and sugar dispensers. The souvenir shop, with its snow globes and brim-slogan bowler hats, waited for customers who weren't coming. Jaunty Muzak — currently "I Do Like To be Beside the Seaside" — drifted ghostlike through the air. Everything glistened under a breath-light sheen of rain.

Keith strolled right to the end of the pier. Here, next to the helter-skelter, stood a three-hundred-seat theater. In times gone by, its auditorium had resounded to hilarity and applause as comedians, novelty acts, singers, and dancers had followed one another onstage in riotous variety bills. Now it was a venue for performers at the tail end of their careers: once-notorious rock 'n' rollers, aged crooners with suspiciously black hair, overweight gag merchants who had toned down the racism in their material but kept the mother-in-law jokes, conjurors who had never heard of street magic and still considered the old rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick an essential part of their repertoire. A full house was a rarity these days. Sometimes the box office was lucky to sell a dozen tickets.

The entertainment consortium had plans to turn the theater into a nightclub. Rip out the seating, install a bar and a DJ podium, maybe some go-go cages. Call it something hip and happening but vaguely nautical such as Trident or Polaris. Why not give a sea-straddling hotspot the same name as a submarine-launched nuclear warhead? It made as much sense as anything, Keith thought.

He leaned on the railing at the very tip of the pier. He was 150 meters out from the shoreline, his whole world behind him. Jade waves churned below, curls of ivory surf washing around the stilts.

The impacts of the breakers thrummed through the huge hollow iron tubes and their lattice of cross-braces, as though the pier were some massive, intricate vibraphone. It was a deep and mournful sound, beat after low beat, the throb of nostalgia and loss.

To sell? To burn?

Either way, Keith would be left with nothing. Some cash in the bank, yes, but that wouldn't truly compensate for what he had got rid of. It would never assuage his guilt. The pier was a family heirloom, something he was meant to preserve and pass on to his son, were he ever to father one. But he was unmarried — hadn't found the right woman yet — and he was well into his thirties and all manner of clocks were ticking.

Whatever he did, he had to look on it as a fresh start, a chance to begin again. The single hard fact was that he could not afford to keep the pier running, no matter how he tried. He was up to his neck in debt. The loans were piling up, interest aggregating on interest. Within the next twenty-four hours he would have to go for one or the other of the options available to him.

Although ...

There was a third way.

The sea was coldly inviting. How about ...?

No. That would never do. No way. Keith Brown was many things but he was not a coward.

A herring gull alighted on the railing beside him, fixing him with a jaundiced eye. Irritably he waved the bird away.

"Flock off," he said, and the gull, in response, squawked and shat on the boards near his feet.

AT DEEPCUT BARRACKS, INITIATION WAS complete.

Big Ben stood to attention, ready.

He was 150 feet tall, one thousand tons of metal and armament, a towering man-shaped hulk, with fists as large as Range Rovers and a head the size of a double-decker bus.

He was high-tech ordnance galore — heat-seeking missile, 120mm cannon, million-volt neuromuscular incapacitator. He was a hexacomb-reinforced armored shell built around cathedral-column servomotors and actuators, powered by a 250,000-horsepower engine salvaged from a decommissioned aircraft carrier. He was ingenuity and resourcefulness and make-do.

He was not the world's tallest Kaiju Response Vehicle. That honor went to America's colossal Major Mayhem, who could go eye to eye with Lady Liberty on her pedestal. Nor was he the mightiest. Russia's fission-powered Spirit of Chernobyl claimed that title. He wasn't even the most recent. Japan was pumping out new marques of KRV at the rate of a dozen a year, in order to counteract the vast numbers of Kaiju that spawned from the nests in the icy deeps of the Mariana Trench.

Truth be told, Big Ben was one of the scrawnier, cruder models. He was over ten years old and bore the scars and dents from nearly a score of Kaiju defence actions. Famously, his left leg was stiff after his bruising fracas with Charlie Two Heads off Lundy Island in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, and the paintwork on his shoulder was still charred and blackened after it had been scorched by Dragon Breath's flames during the Battle of Coventry.

Of course these injuries could have been repaired. "But," said the Department of Kaiju Affairs, "budget cutbacks, economic slowdown, austerity, time to tighten our belts, we're all in this together, blah blah blah."

In any case, people didn't mind. They liked Big Ben just the way he was, flaws and all. He was cranky, dogged, temperamental, a little bit battered, but still game. He was, in a word, British.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Kaiju Rising by Tim Marquitz. Copyright © 2017 Tim Marquitz. Excerpted by permission of Ragnarok Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Ragnarok Pubns
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 194476089X
• ISBN 13: 9781944760892
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 2
• Numero di pagine: 498
• Redattore: Marquitz Tim, Sharps N. X.
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile