“Animals,” he began, trying to explain. “All kinds. Any kind. Birds, lizards, whales, insects, millions of creatures are all talking all the time, with sounds we just can’t hear. Frequencies we can’t process. Bursts of sound so fast or subtle we can’t grasp it. Imagine the epic version of that. That’s what’s on the disks, the sound of some creature screaming.”
* * *
The control room, nicknamed the “crow’s nest,” was on the upper level of the installation, overlooking the pit. The tapered tip of the cocoon was almost level with the wide glass windows facing the sinkhole. State-of-the-art scientific equipment was crammed into the control room, along with a dedicated team of scientists and technicians. Monitors displayed readings from an impressive range of scanning devices, including infrared, spectrum analysis, backscatter x-ray, and others that Serizawa couldn’t immediately identify. Much of the apparatus bore labels reading “M.U.T.O.” A time-code ran across every screen.
“Ishiro,” Dr. Gregory Whelan greeted Serizawa as he and Graham entered the control room, after changing out of their radiation gear. The chief scientist was a balding Canadian about the same age as Serizawa. His eyes gleamed with excitement behind a pair of glasses. He had the buoyant attitude of a gambler who had just hit the jackpot. “Good timing. We’ve just had the luminary precursor. Seem to be due for another pulse.”
The lead technician, a man named Jainway, leaned forward to speak into a microphone. “Ten second warning. Ten seconds.”
Graham’s phone rang and she stepped away to take the call. She nodded apologetically at Serizawa as she took her leave of the control room, called away by some pressing matter. He joined Whelan by the windows, which offered a birds-eye view of the activity down on the floor of the pit. Suited observers manned the extensive assortment of scanners and recording devices aimed at the cocoon. They stared up at the huge, glowing specimen expectantly.
“Six, five, four,” Jainway counted down. He was a fit Caucasian in his early forties. A Midwestern American accent testified to the multinational nature of the operation. “Three, two, one…”
The air around the cocoon rippled as it emitted a luminous pulse. The translucent shell of the cocoon convulsed, shaking off a cloud of dust along with bits of outer husk. The spasm caused the entire pit and the attached scaffolding to tremble slightly, which Serizawa found more than a little unsettling. At the same, electric lights flickered throughout the facility. Industrial-sized backup generators, installed for just such occasions, kicked in automatically to override the power drain.
Serizawa nodded in understanding. This was precisely the phenomenon Graham had described to him: a powerful electromagnetic pulse that disrupted all power systems in the vicinity. Powered by the radiation the organism inside the cocoon had been absorbing all these years.
He wondered what else it was capable of.
* * *
Joe was talking a mile a minute now. It was as though a dam of depression had been broken by a manic need to make Ford understand. The words spilled out of Joe at a rapid-fire pace, while Ford struggled to keep up.
“… by that point, I had fifteen, twenty days of this signal pattern no one could explain. Pulses, getting stronger, faster, ‘til right before the last one—”
The dome light on the ceiling of the van dimmed suddenly. It sputtered erratically, like the lights back in town. The sudden flickering cut Joe off in mid-sentence. Falling silent, he looked up at the light anxiously.
Ford didn’t understand. “Dad?”
“It’s the same,” Joe said ominously, his worried gaze fixed on the flickering light.
Something about his father’s tone sent a chill down Ford’s spine. He tried to keep his dad focused and on track.
“Dad, you said ‘right before the last one.’” Ford prompted. “Right before the last one, what?”
Joe finally looked away from the sputtering light. He turned his haggard face toward Ford.
“Something responded.”
Responded? Ford still wasn’t sure what exactly his dad was getting at. Was he actually talking about some kind of animal? All he could tell for sure was that Joe was acting like this was a matter of life and death, and not just from fifteen years ago.
But before Ford could get his dad to elaborate, the van door slid open with a bang. Two armed guards, their granite faces reflecting how hardcore they were, invaded the back of the van. Without a word, they unhooked Joe from the security rail and muscled him none too gently away from the bench. They dragged him toward the open door.
“Hey!” Joe protested in Japanese. Ford could barely make out the gist of it. “Slow down! Where are we going?”
“Whoa!” Ford added, alarmed by the soldiers’ rough treatment of his father. He lunged forward as far as his cuffs would allow. “You’re gonna hurt him!”
Snarling, one of the soldiers shoved Ford back against the wall. Ford tugged uselessly at his restraints. Still handcuffed to the rail, he could only watch in dismay as the men hustled Joe away from the van. And away from Ford.
“Hey! Hey wait!” he shouted. “Where are you taking him? HEY!”
The soldiers ignored his frantic cries. They slammed the door shut behind them.
* * *
With full power restored by the generators, the equipment within the crow’s nest monitored the pulse. Glowing screens, tracking emanations all along the electromagnetic spectrum, registered a continuous spike that only gradually diminished in intensity before subsiding altogether.
“That was twelve-point-two seconds,” Jainway reported. “We’re trending exponentially and—” He rapidly worked his keyboard, collating and translating the latest data from the pulse. “—that’s our new curve.”
A distinctive waveform appeared on a central display screen. The pattern displayed a series of rising peaks, starting small at first, but quickly increasing in size and frequency. Serizawa examined the display in fascination. The pattern matched no biological phenomenon he was familiar with.
A hand tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find David Huddleston, the base’s head of security, behind him. He was a tall, brusque American who took his duties very seriously.
“Dr. Serizawa,” he said. “We arrested two men in the Q-Zone—”
Whelan was annoyed by the interruption. “Can this wait? Have Dr. Graham take a look.”
“She did, sir,” Huddleston replied. “She sent me.”
Whelan glanced around, as though noticing for the first time that Graham was no longer present. Serizawa recalled her being called away during the countdown to the pulse. Intrigued, he gave Huddleston his full attention. He trusted Vivienne’s judgment, and wondered what about the trespassers was so significant.
“One says he used to work here,” Huddleston said.
At the old nuclear power plant? Serizawa found this provocative enough that he let the security chief escort him downstairs to the antechamber of a utility room that had apparently been converted into a makeshift interrogation room. He found Graham waiting for him outside the utility room, while an armed soldier stood guard at the locked glass door to the larger room beyond. A table held what Serizawa assumed to be the trespassers’ confiscated belongings: a duffel bag, a couple of American passports, a vintage Geiger counter, a flashlight, and other odds and ends.
Looking troubled, Graham nodded grimly at Serizawa as he arrived. They peered through the clear glass door as one of Huddleston’s subordinates, an American named Fitzgerald, attempted to question the distraught prisoner, whom had been identified as Joseph Brody, a one-time nuclear engineer, formerly employed by the doomed Janjira facility. Serizawa wondered what had brought the man back to this site, some fifteen years later. He noted that Brody was wearing a battered brown radiation suit, minus the hood.
“I want my son,” Brody demanded, visibly upset. “I want to see him. I want to know he’s alright.” He pointed accusingly at the guard posted outside the door. “This guy, he knows where he is. I want my
son and I want my bag and my disks and I want to talk to the person who’s in charge here. I know what’s going on, okay?”
Serizawa listened with interest. Just how much did Brody truly know about what now occupied this site? And what might have caused the disaster so many years ago?
Fitzgerald tried to calm the prisoner. He had a shaved skull and an intimidating manner. “Mr. Brody—”
“You’ve been telling everybody this place is a death zone,” Brody ranted. “All the while you’ve been hiding something out there! My wife died here! You understand? Something killed my wife and ten other people, and I deserve answers!”
Serizawa recalled that several lives had indeed been lost during the meltdown, although the death toll could have been much, much worse had not all necessary emergency measures been taken in time. Curious, he rifled through the man’s possessions, finding a framed family photo, along with over a dozen obsolete zip disks and a collection of graphs and printouts.
“I thought all the data from that day was lost,” he whispered to Graham.
She glanced at Brody’s collection. “Guess he was doing homework.”
Leafing through the confiscated material, Serizawa froze as he came upon a crumpled computer printout of a certain waveform pattern. He recognized the rising series of crests immediately. It was the same curve he had just observed on the monitors upstairs.
Snatching up the printout, he turned excitedly toward Graham—just as the overhead lights flickered once more, even more noticeably this time. The electromagnetic pulses from the cocoon were indeed increasing in intensity.
“See?!” Brody exclaimed, as though in vindication. “There it is again! It knocks out everything electrical for miles!” The foundations beneath their feet rumbled as the lights continued to waver, despite the best efforts of the backup generators. Brody grew louder and more agitated. He shouted fervidly like a prophet of doom. His face grew flushed and the tendons in his neck stood out. “It’s what caused this whole thing, and it’s happening again. IT’S GONNA SEND US BACK TO THE STONE AGE!”
A technician from the control room rushed into the antechamber. “Dr. Serizawa, they need you upstairs! We have a problem.”
Serizawa glanced back and forth between Brody and the confiscated printout. Was it possible that this crazed American engineer knew something they didn’t? He stared apprehensively at Brody and their eyes met through the glass door between them. Serizawa wanted to stay and question the man directly, find out what precisely Brody knew about the events of fifteen years ago, and how they related to what was happening today, but the technician from the crow’s nest hovered in doorway, waiting anxiously.
He hastily gathered up Brody’s possessions and rushed to answer the summons. He shouted back at Huddleston and the guard.
“Keep that man here! I need to talk to him!”
Graham accompanied Serizawa as they raced back to the control room, which was now in a barely controlled frenzy. The elation and excitement of only a few minutes ago had been supplanted by an almost palpable sense of panic. Emergency alerts and warnings flashed urgently on almost every screen and console. Buzzers and sirens sounded. Alarmed technicians shouted over each other.
“Just seconds apart!” Jainway called out.
Another man, whose name Serizawa didn’t know, stared in dismay at the readings before him. “—stronger, broad spectrum!”
Whelan paced back and forth, chewing on his nails. His earlier jubilance had vanished completely, replaced by obvious signs of worry and agitation. The power and intensity of the pulses were exceeding all their expectations and precautions. His historic breakthrough was turning into a disaster.
“Any radiation leakage?” he asked fearfully.
A larger tremor shook the crow’s nest as the cocoon emitted an even stronger pulse. Serizawa staggered across the quaking floor to the windows overlooking the pit. Down below, the mammoth cocoon flexed and heaved, causing great hunks of its rocky outer shell to shear off and crash onto the metal grille covering the floor of the pit. Tiny figures, their movements hampered by their cumbersome radiation suits, scrambled for safety as the chunks of the shell tumbled down onto the expensive equipment like a rockslide, smashing portions of the sensor array to pieces. The impact of the fragments slamming into the metal floor echoed off the walls of the pit. As the outer layer of the cocoon disintegrated, more and more of the infernal red glow within it was exposed.
“What the hell is it doing?” Jainway asked.
“Gamma levels still zero,” his fellow technician reported, with audible relief. “It’s sucked all three reactors dry.”
Serizawa held out Brody’s printout. “It’s done feeding.”
Puzzled, Whelan grabbed the document from Serizawa. He peered at it uncomprehendingly. “What’s this?”
“Fifteen years ago,” Serizawa explained. “It’s what caused the meltdown.”
Graham had put the pieces together as well. “It was an electromagnetic pulse,” she said, chiming in. “That’s what it’s building to, converting all that radiation.”
“We need to shut down,” Serizawa said.
Whelan blanched at the prospect. “You’re sure this is authentic?”
Serizawa nodded, wishing he’d found out about Joe Brody’s findings years ago. The exact connection between the meltdown and the cocoon had always been unclear, but Serizawa now realized that an EMP produced by the larva had shut down the plant’s safety systems back in 1999. His grave expression and bearing convinced Whelan to heed his warning.
“Secure the grid!” the scientist ordered. “Wildfire protocols!”
Jainway pressed a button, sounding an alarm. He relayed Whelan’s orders into his microphone. “All personnel, clear the first perimeter, immediately!”
Klaxons blared throughout the base. Crimson warning lights flashed and rotated. Outside the crow’s nest, the generators were cranked up to full capacity as the six looming construction cranes went into operation. Gears engaged and motors roared as the cranes stretched a net of thick steel cables above the pit.
Just in case anything tried to escape.
NINE
Wailing klaxons penetrated the walls of the security van, causing Ford to start in alarm. He knew emergency warnings when he heard them. All hell was breaking loose somewhere.
Desperate to figure out what was happening, he peered out the rear window of the van. He spotted heavy steel cables winding from the base of a towering construction crane, which had just swung into action. He couldn’t make out what the cables were attached to.
Radios squawked outside the van. Ford saws guards rushing past.
“Hey!” he shouted, trying to get their attention. Had everyone forgotten that he was handcuffed inside the van? He yelled over the blaring klaxons. “HEY!”
His shouts went unheeded. Whatever crisis was underway clearly took priority over one inconvenient American trespasser. Ford realized he was on his own, right on top of a buried nuclear power plant. He remembered the radiation helmet tucked in his belt and hastily put it back on. He used his free hand to refasten it to the suit.
Better safe than sorry.
* * *
Serizawa watched from the crow’s nest as the tech crews on the lower levels of the pit scrambled out of the way as the huge wire “cage” descended, sealing the cocoon inside, even as another layer of the outer shell shook loose, sloughing onto the floor of the pit with tremendous force. Serizawa offered a silent prayer for the workers below, hoping they would not be crushed by the stony fragments, which were as hard and brittle as volcanic rock.
Agitated voices filled the control room. The pulses, coming faster and faster, were growing steadily in strength. Arguments broke out among the panicky scientists and technicians as they debated the correct response to the escalating crisis. Emergency measures were hurriedly deployed, but Serizawa got a definite sense that matters were spiraling out of control. Besieged by critical reports and queries from the staff under his
command, Dr. Whelan looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. It appeared now that they had all severely underestimated the forces—and the creature—they had sought to contain. Whelan’s dreams of solving the world’s energy crisis were turning into a nightmare.
“Grid secure!” Jainway called out as the high-tension netting stretched taut above the quivering cocoon. The technician let out a sigh of relief, which Serizawa feared might be premature. After all, the cage had never been tested.
The announcement quieted the tumult inside the control room. Overlapping voices trailed off as all heads turned toward Whelan, who was pacing back and forth before the windows. Everyone present knew what came next. Jainway’s hand hovered above a switch. He looked to Whelan for the go-ahead.
“Say the word,” the technician said.
Whelan, for his part, appeared overwhelmed by the responsibility that had fallen on him. He looked in turn to Serizawa, who sympathized with the stricken scientist. This was no easy decision.
“So much we still don’t know,” Whelan moaned, agonizing over the potential loss to science.
Down in the pit, the cocoon shuddered again, shedding yet another layer of shell. Great chunks of the cocoon rained down on the metal flooring, which began to buckle beneath the avalanche. With each layer, more and more of the unearthly effulgence at the core of the cocoon could be seen, although the organism within remained hidden from view.
But for how much longer?
“Kill it,” Serizawa said.
Whelan let Serizawa make the call. He nodded to Jainway, who threw the switch.
Thousands of volts electrified the metal grille at the base of the cocoon. Bright blue flashes crackled across the flooring. The cocoon sizzled and convulsed as the electricity arced across its outer shell, jolting it with bolts of artificial lightning. Smoke rose from its cracking outer shell. Floodlights and fuses blew, throwing the entire pit into darkness. Graham gasped, and Whelan looked away from the window. In theory, whatever was growing inside the cocoon had just been electrocuted.