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

situation now, his attention was drawn to a gaping hole in the wall. Through the jagged concrete frame, he saw a round mass of circuitry suspended on scaffolding. Attached to it was a flip-out screen scrolling data, going so fast he only caught a little of it—running defensive gait analysis … updating predictive algorithm… And this all came with a soundtrack, too, an awful rhythmic pulsing. He stared, wondering what the thing could be, somehow knowing at the same time that whatever-it-was was why he was here.

And it opened its eye and stared at him. His heart seemed to wiggle in his chest. It wasn’t an eye, but a mechanical aperture with something behind it, something glowing red…

“What the hell is that?” he said.

Then he became aware that the whole building was coming down around him. Time to get out.

Skull Island

Kong had been increasingly restless since he had speared the “sun” in the biodome enclosure, but he seemed especially agitated as the new day wore on. As Ilene feared, he had begun testing the other boundaries of his containment. When building the structure, where possible, they had hidden its limits behind natural features, so he wouldn’t be suspicious. He was familiar, after all, with cliffs and canyons as barriers or at least impediments to movement. But given the breadth of his reach, there were a few spots they’d had to hide with nothing more than dense vegetation or the illusion of sky, and he had zeroed in on one of those.

But he didn’t start pounding at it as she feared he would. Instead, he tore out the tall bamboo and pressed himself against the unnatural barrier—more like he was listening for something than trying to get through. And he seemed—uncertain.

And then, in the afternoon, he suddenly stood to his full height and began hooting, pounding his chest.

A threat display. She hadn’t seen that since—well, not since Kong’s battle with the Titan Camazotz. What the hell was going on?

Maybe Zo-Zla-halawa, Jia signed.

Probably not, Ilene replied. But it might very well be something outside of the barrier, a surviving Skullcrawler, maybe. She should probably look into that.

She and Jia went back to their little prefab cottage near the entrance of the dome. They had larger quarters in the facility, but crossing through the storm was a pain, and sometimes they spent a day or two on-site. And Jia was more comfortable here, in the little fragment of the world she had lived in for most of her life, near the Titan who had adopted her just as surely as Ilene had.

She went to her workstation and began going through the perimeter camera footage and motion sensor data, but nothing bigger than a squirrel showed up.

Then she noticed the alert on her phone. It was a silent one, so it probably wasn’t an emergency, but it was marked urgent.

It turned out to be a Monarch general mailing for her clearance level, and urgent didn’t begin to cover it. She threw it to her larger screen and watched in horror as the footage displayed Godzilla crashing into a coastal community. Where was this?

The answer was Pensacola, and the footage was in real time. It was dark, night-time in the States.

Moments after she started watching, Godzilla stopped his advance into the city and returned to the sea. The cause of his retreat was as much a mystery as his attack. But that was for someone else to work out; she had a puzzle of her own to worry at.

Kong. He must have somehow sensed Godzilla was active again. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

But how? Pensacola was half a world away. And why was Godzilla attacking there? The lead report was by Mark Russell, maybe the greatest surviving expert on the Titan, but he didn’t seem to have discerned any motive behind the attack.

Whatever the reason, Godzilla was back from his vacation. And if the past was a prologue that meant he was likely to start seeking out threats to his alpha status.

The only Titan that currently fit that description was Kong.

A quick check on Godzilla’s trajectory showed he had made a swing by Skull Island earlier and given it a pass. That was a relief, because it meant that the island was still somehow protecting Kong from Godzilla’s attentions. But it made her wonder…

Further inspection confirmed her suspicions. Kong had hurled his spear at the “sun” during Godzilla’s nearest approach to the island. It might be a coincidence, but Kong had spent a long time in the biodome without losing control. Maybe the fact that Godzilla was out there, on the prowl, had triggered his fight-or-flight instinct. Well, except Kong did not have the “flight” component of that. Or maybe it wasn’t that extreme; maybe he had the vague sensation that there was something dangerous out there, beyond his island.

One thing she did know. If Monarch tried to move Kong off of the island, Godzilla would know instantly. And given what she suspected about the relationship between the two Titans, that would not have a happy ending for anyone…

Tallahassee Magnet High School, Pensacola

Normally, Madison wouldn’t have been bothered very much by the intentionally audible snickers from Lara and Alicia as she walked by them. She’d stood toe-to-toe with a three-headed dragon, after all, so what were a couple of mean girls compared to that? Of course, if she was honest with herself, she knew those two things didn’t go together. Yes, Titans were objectively more frightening than teenaged girls; Ghidorah had terrified her nearly beyond reason. She had dealt with that because she had been on a mission, and because there had been no option. Coping with kids her own age—that was an option. She had been homeschooled for years, and her memories of elementary school hadn’t prepared her for high school. She had assumed making friends would be easy. But if you were even slightly weird here, it was a problem, and she was more than slightly weird. But that was okay.