Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

experimented with a weapon known as the Oxygen Destroyer, trying to wipe out Godzilla and Ghidorah with a single missile.

The missile had nearly killed Godzilla, and in fact at first they thought it had—but it hadn’t had any noticeable effect on Ghidorah, and Ghidorah had then proceeded to take command of more than a dozen Titans, many still in containment. The results were devastating, and it soon became clear that nothing in the human arsenal could stop Ghidorah, who seemed intent on stripping the world back down to its bedrock bones. Subsequent studies of Ghidorah’s DNA had suggested that the three-headed dragon was so genetically different from the other Titans—and life on Earth in general—that it might not even be a native of the planet. Mark doubted that; it seemed extreme to invoke an extraterrestrial origin when there was so much they still didn’t know about the evolution of any of the Titans. But for whatever reason, Ghidorah was different. While many of the Titans—Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Behemoth—seemed to be dedicated to preserving some sort of global balance—part of a failsafe system to keep the environment from going too far off of the rails—Ghidorah was certainly not that. If it had been able to continue on its rampage, projections suggested that the only thing left alive on the planet at this point would be Ghidorah and certain bacteria.

But it had not succeeded; Godzilla had ended it, and soon after, more than half a dozen Titans, summoned by Ghidorah to kill Godzilla, had instead literally bowed down to him.

But that complete obeisance was short-lived; a few of the Titans had clearly had their fingers crossed behind their backs while they were bowing. Scylla, that truly weird chimera of arthropod and cephalopod, had attacked the coast of Georgia, apparently in an attempt to feed on an A-bomb that had been lost at sea there for decades. Godzilla had kicked Scylla so badly it had fled all the way down to an island near the tip of South America, where it had hibernated in a freezing lake. Behemoth, who had broken out of the containment center near Rio de Janeiro, had settled peacefully down in the Amazon, where its presence was clearly a healing influence on the human-ravaged rainforests there. When Behemoth was attacked by Amhuluk—another Titan that refused its Godzilla-mandated bedtime—the big lizard showed up and weighed in on that too, tipping the confrontation in favor of Behemoth. Then he had gone into the deep sea, reappearing to deal with a rogue human operation in the Sea of Okhotsk and freeing the octopus-like Titan Na Kika to return to her rest at the bottom of the sea.

And then, someplace in the South Pacific, Godzilla had vanished.

It was not the first time. It was well established by that point that Godzilla and other Titans could use parts of Hollow Earth to take short-cuts in their journeys. But this time Godzilla stayed away, out of sight, as he had been in the decades, and perhaps centuries, leading up to his appearance in 2014, when he had come from some deep hiding place to destroy the insectile MUTOs in their rampage from Japan to San Francisco. After that emergence, Monarch had been able to keep tabs on Godzilla, tracing a fairly stable pattern of patrol through the vast currents of the world’s oceans. He had briefly emerged to battle yet another MUTO, a fight Emma had been involved in, but other than that he had remained quiet, but visible, at least to Monarch.

But these last few years, nothing. Houston Brooks and Nathan Lind conjectured that Godzilla had returned to the deeps of Hollow Earth. It seemed to Mark as plausible an explanation as any, and as far as he was concerned, good riddance. Godzilla might have proven he was nominally an ally of humanity, but whatever his motivations, the collateral damage of any Titan contest was devastating. He no longer believed that the only good Titan was a dead Titan, but he certainly believed in letting sleeping Titans lie.

And now Godzilla was awake. That could not be good.

He spent most of the day confirming the status of the other Titans. A few, like Godzilla, had gone somewhere off the map, but most of them were right where they were supposed to be, according to Monarch surveillance. He could not rule out the possibility that one or more of the Titan locations had been compromised by terrorists, and that the surveillance data was misleading, but everyone he shouted out to came back with the right answers.

So he did the only other thing he could do—continued tracking the one Titan that was out there and on the go.

But off the coast of French Guiana, about seventy klicks east of the Îles du Salut, Godzilla vanished without a trace. The bioacoustic and radiation signatures just vanished, and the underwater drones tracking him at a distance also lost contact.

By that time, Chloe had come back in for the night watch. He thought she looked tired and disheveled; she had put her hair up in a band. He hadn’t seen her wear it like that before. He felt for her. He remembered his first experience with a Titan.

“That’s past the mouth of the Amazon,” she noted. “So he’s not likely checking in on Behemoth. Do you think he’s headed for Isla de Mara?”

“Nobody home there,” Mark said. “Unless Rodan laid eggs or something. Nothing left of the outpost. But there are still people in the area, so put it on the map. But at this point he could literally be going anywhere. I’m putting out an all-points bulletin, and then I’m going home. Call me if anything comes up, and I mean anything.”

“Yes, sir,” Chloe said.

*   *   *

The night passed peacefully, with no sign of the Titan. When he returned to work, Kennan was on duty. He was a tall, serious fellow around thirty who retained only a whisper of his native Jamaican accent.

By noon Mark was starting to believe he