Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse Read online

  MEGADRAK

  BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE

  Christofer Nigro

  Copyright 2017 by Christofer Nigro

  DEDICATIONS

  This first full-length novel of mine is respectfully dedicated to my grandmother, Gertrude “Trudie” Nigro, who has been such a gem throughout my life.

  Dedications also go to my mother, Patricia Nigro, for having dealt with me all these years; my late grandfather, Thomas Nigro, Sr., for his hand in raising me and all that entailed; my uncle Thomas Nigro Jr., for the same; and to the cherished memory of my aunt Connie Denisco, whose support and caring were of inestimable value to me.

  Deserved shout-outs must go to:

  Jean-Marc Lofficier, for giving me my first big break as a published author.

  Win Scott Eckert and Chuck Loridans, for giving me immense creative inspiration and accepting me into the esteemed circle that led me down this path.

  My fellow authors who have worked so hard to make kaiju a force to be reckoned with in the prose medium (you all know who you are! Cheers, guys!).

  My friends on The Godzilla Saga group for being the awesome people and kaiju-fans they are.

  And to the memory of Willis O’Brien, Merian C. Cooper, Ray Harryhausen, Ishiro Honda, Tomoyuki Tanaka, Eiji Tsuberaya, Akira Ifukube, and the other great creative minds who first unleashed daikaiju upon an unsuspecting world and fired up this author’s imagination since his earliest days.

  INCURSION #1: TOKYO, 1954

  CHAPTER 1: The Beginning of the End

  Goro Takiguchi had always enjoyed the simple life of a fisherman. His home village of Kenta was located roughly twenty miles west of Yokohama, within the Tokyo Prefecture that sprawls over the east-center portion of the great island of Honshu. A plentiful supply of giant blue-finned tuna has always thrived in the waters surrounding this area of the Pacific, allowing those of Goro’s vocation to eke out a reasonable living despite the impoverished conditions often faced by rural residents of the archipelago.

  The recent departure of the US Occupation forces from the island nation and the escalation of the US-supported post-war reconstruction efforts due to the “lucky tragedy” of the Korean War led to a fortuitous economic development: the metropolitan markets of the Tokyo Prefecture’s various special wards were now more than happy to buy all the fish Goro and his fellow inhabitants of Kenta could catch. And the supply was such that even without these regular sales throughout the prefecture, the town residents never had to worry about going hungry.

  Unfortunately, this quiet life of comparative security was soon to be shattered; Goro and the twenty-six-year-old fisherman’s fellow citizens of the more bucolic regions of Honshu were to become the epicenter of a nightmare that would easily surpass both the devastation of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  It was a nightmare that was destined to eventually engulf the entire planet, initiating a chain of horrific events that would forever alter the security of humanity’s exalted position on the planet’s food chain. That tragic turn of events for the world was about to begin here, on what appeared to be a pleasant summer morning in the quaint little hamlet of Kenta.

  Goro approached his favorite fishing location--a small but sturdy wooden deck constructed by his fellow villagers—soon after dawn commenced on June 23rd. When he arrived with his bamboo fishing rod in hand, he found his good friend and frequent partner-in-fishing Tatsuo already sitting at the deck and eagerly placing bait on the end of a metal hook. The thirty-seven-year-old man of modest looks and means evinced a wide beam on his weathered, tan countenance upon seeing the colorful sartorial selection his younger friend chose to wear that day.

  “You come to fish dressed in an aloha shirt?” Tatsuo asked with a wide grin. “It hardly matches your bucket hat, and if you hoped it would attract the fish I must say it’s much more likely to scare them off. It nearly scared me off!”

  “You are not so funny, Tatsuo,” Goro replied with a rumpled half smile. “This shirt cost me a lot of coins, not to mention the cost in both yen and hours it took getting a train from Yokohama to Tokyo. I had to go into Shibuya to acquire this wearable work of art. And it is not intended for catching fish, but for snagging a lady! As my father always advised, ‘A man must look his best if ever he wants to have a household to become the head of.’”

  Tatsuo grinned again, exposing his ugly yellowed teeth. Goro always hated when he did that. “I am somehow convinced your father did not exactly have that shirt in mind when he gave you this pithy advice.”

  “Will you kindly stifle the negative comments, Tatsuo?”

  “Well, I see no evidence that shirt has worked for you thus far. It is good your job is catching fish and not women, hai?”

  Goro sighed in an exasperated manner as he sat beside his friend and regular colleague in tuna procurement. He was determined to wipe Tatsuo’s eye-sore of a smile from his sardonic visage, but since he didn’t have the heart to do it with his fist, he realized words would have to suffice. “Fire with fire,” as the ever-acerbic Tatsuo himself may have put it. He was thus quick to hurl a stark rejoinder at his fellow fisherman.

  “And I see no evidence that your drab attire and rotting teeth are working to your advantage in the task of lady-catching either. So, you should be thankful that the fish do not mind, otherwise you would be as poor in the pocket as you are in terms of companionship. Please do forgive my frankness, especially considering you never hesitate to speak with full candor yourself.”

  Unfortunately, this comment only served to trigger a display of Tatsuo’s unsightly beam rather than dispelling any further appearances of it.

  “My young friend, you just validated my point rather than refuting it. If I were inclined to visit the dentist and those over-priced garment shops in Shibuya, I too may look better. And I too may end up failing to secure a wife despite those expenditures, much the same as you. Will you next be spending countless yen on one of those television sets in the hope of showing greater appeal to a lady?”

  Goro finished securing a lure on his long bamboo pole before emitting a frustrated huff and flipping the wiry line into the murky waters. “You know, perhaps I will indeed save up for one of those televisions! They are selling widespread in America, and if our nation is ever to become as prosperous as them…”

  “You mean, should we strive to become more like the culture that dropped two atomic weapons on our land not even ten years past? Who occupied our home until just two years ago, and dictated policy to our parliament? Who put our leaders on trial in Tokyo for war crimes? Why wasn’t their President Truman put on trial for his decision to blow multitudes of people to oblivion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and relegate multitudes more to radiation poisoning?”

  “The war was initiated on our end, Tatsuo, and you know it! Prime Minister Hideki should never have thrown his lot in with the likes of those German fascists!”

  “Perhaps you should have the kōgan to tell that to the many innocents still blinded and horribly scarred by the toxic radiation of those bombs. That was as much the folly of Truman as of Tōjō. It was not our misguided PM who had the button of such a horrific weapon under his finger.”

  Goro tugged on his line in frustration, hoping to incite a tuna to take his bait, before turning back to his friend and continuing their heated exchange. “That is oversimplifying things! At least America is helping us recover.”

  Tatsuo displayed his abhorrent yellowed teeth again, only this time in gnashing vexation rather than in the form of his usual caustic smile.

  “Are those Western orokamono helping to reconstruct the eyes and tissue of the innocents burned away by the bla
st waves of those atomic weapons? Or giving others some antidote to their continually decaying flesh? Do you know they are continuing to unleash the radioactive hell from those bombs in the Bikini Atoll region? That is barely over 3,000 kilometers from us! And the purpose of that is to test their effectiveness for possible use against the Soviet Union, who were among the US’s ‘allies’ during the war!

  “Do you know what effects that unleashed radiation may have on the flora and fauna of the sea, which I needn’t remind you are the very forms of life we depend on for our food and livelihood?”

  Much to Tatsuo’s irritation and surprise, Goro failed to continue the argument, but instead tugged his bamboo rod while peering into the seaweed-filled waters.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Tatsuo threw his rod on the deck in annoyance.

  “Not now, Tatsuo,” Goro answered while never dropping the odd expression marring his plain features. “There is something wrong here. Something is caught on my line, but it… does not feel like a tuna. Hold on, I am going to try reeling it in.”

  The young procurer of aquatic food began tugging with all his might, and it soon became clear that whatever he was pulling in happened to be alive. “I can feel something tugging back, so my line isn’t just caught on a rock. Something living has taken the bait. Help me a bit, will you?”

  Tatsuo grumbled but quickly put his own rod down to answer his friend’s request for aid. Neither of the two men were athletically endowed for their respective age groups, but their combined strength proved sufficient to overcome the resistance of what was on the other line and successfully reel it in. After seeing what Goro had caught, however, both men immediately wished they had not.

  Hanging from the hook of Goro’s line was an organism that outwardly resembled a caterpillar of freakishly large size with a reddish-hued warty hide and no visible eyes. The worm-like creature also possessed a wide maw bearing four large projected fangs that it was using to grasp onto the line’s metal hook. The hideous creature was slightly over fifteen inches long, and the end of its tail bobbed back and forth of its own accord while its anterior mouth remained latched onto the barb of Goro’s hook. The movement of the tail served as a continuous reminder that this anomalous grotesquerie was a living creature evidently spawned on the same planet the men called home.

  “What in the name of my revered ancestors is that?” Tatsuo queried.

  Goro, for his part, was so taken aback by the sight that he dropped his rod on the deck’s wooden surface. “I cannot answer that as I’ve never seen anything like it before. I have never seen any type of worm or caterpillar move like it does, either, with that weird sort of spasm. What a horrible-looking thing!”

  As the younger fisherman stepped back due to an involuntary urge to put distance between himself and the hideous annelid, Tatsuo startled his friend even further by walking up to the writhing thing and picking it up by the end of its tail. He subsequently held the bizarre organism from his fingertips to inspect it. Goro found himself both sickened and alarmed by this bold action.

  “Tatsuo! You shouldn’t touch that thing! We have no idea what it is, and I think we should just kill it.”

  Tatsuo was careful to hold the elongated wriggling creature a few feet from his face as he looked at it with a combination of revulsion and fascination.

  “You worry too much, little man. It is simply a worm of some sort. I have handled critters like this all my life, and this one is simply exceptionally large and ugly—”

  Much to Goro’s horror, his friend’s reassuring statement was ironically and abruptly cut off as the spindly creature swiftly bent itself back and locked its squarish maw onto Tatsuo’s wrist. Its four needle-like teeth sunk deep into the man’s skin, and blood spurted from the perforated epidermis like a mini-geyser.

  The besieged fisherman screamed in agony as he grasped the nightmarish annelid’s tail and desperately attempted to yank it out of his flesh. However, the curved shape of its tail enabled the worm to firmly maintain its grip, and all Tatsuo succeeded in doing was causing the torrent of blood spewing from the wound to become larger. Goro immediately went into a full state of panic.

  “Tatsuo! Stop pulling on it, you’re ripping more blood vessels open! Tatsuo, listen to me, damn it!”

  But Tatsuo’s own state of panic was so severe that he refused to take heed. He thus continued pulling fruitlessly on the worm as waves of agony and nausea assailed him. A combination of extreme pain, blood loss, and panic caused him to fall on the surface of the deck. He then continued to scream and yank at the horrid annelid while lying on his back.

  “Get it off of me! Please get it off! It hurts!”

  “Tatsuo, please hold on!” Goro pulled the metal hook off his rod and rushed towards his beleaguered friend. “I do not have a knife on hand, but I am going to puncture its neck with my fishing hook! Do not worry, I will get that thing off of you!”

  Goro grabbed the anterior portion of the worm situated directly under its jaws to hold it in place, despite how much this forced him to resist the urge to dry heave. He then attempted to rip open the mystery worm’s mottled red flesh with the sharp end of the metal fishing hook.

  “Damn it, Tatsuo, stop your squirming and hold still! I cannot cut into it when you are thrashing like that!”

  Tatsuo was now beyond panic-stricken, however. “Get it off me! Please get it off!”

  Goro was determined not to give up on the man who was practically his only friend. He thus continued his attempt to cut into the worm despite fighting a compulsion to faint. The joint horror of seeing Tatsuo’s blood pouring out of his skewered wrist, and his being forced to make physical contact with the most horrible-looking animal he had ever seen, was almost more than the young man could bear.

  After much effort, Goro finally managed to sink the hook deep into the annelid’s hide on the spot he estimated to be the equivalent of its throat; he then did his best to tear it open. The creature’s skin was tough, but the fisherman pulled the embedded metal point hard enough to successfully rip a deep fissure in the rubbery layer of tissue which passed for its skin. A reddish ichor poured out of the gash, but the wretched thing continued to hold firm on Tatsuo’s severely bleeding arm as if its own life depended on it.

  Tatsuo began screaming while repeatedly kicking one of the deck’s thick wooden support posts in a futile attempt to relieve the pain. Goro quickly became even more desperate to wrench that vile creature out of his good friend’s flesh.

  “Tatsuo, please hold on! I will get it off, I promise!”

  Soon his friend ceased his frenzied movements and piercing screams and lay almost still. Tatsuo’s pupils had rolled up into his head and his mouth was gaping wide open. The tortured, very audible raspy breathes he was taking were very disturbing to the ear.

  “Hold on, Tatsuo! Please hold on!”

  The fisherman was determined to keep that vow and get his comrade through this terrifying tribulation. Now that Tatsuo had stopped struggling, Goro let his friend’s bleeding arm drop to the ground, after which he began repeatedly stomping on the worm’s warty body as hard as his leg and the sole of his foot could muster in tandem. The young man’s anger enabled him to smash the heel of his sandal down even harder.

  At first, little discernible damage seemed to be occurring to the tough creature. That only incited Goro to stomp down even harder and faster, screaming a stream of invective in rage and frustration as he did so.

  “Get off of him, you disgusting little bastard! Get off of him!”

  After what seemed like an eternity of incessant pounding, Goro noticed an expanding puddle of blood-like fluid flowing from underneath the worm and onto the wooden floor surrounding it. He responded to that by pushing himself past his normal level of endurance to continue the stomping, his accompanying verbal attacks aiding his need to vent throughout the ordeal.

  After several minutes of this, the creature’s sausage-shaped form was reduced to a flattened state with bloody fluid and wh
at resembled pulped internal organs pouring out of its gullet. Next, Goro himself for what, in his estimation, needed to be done next.

  The fish-catcher forced himself to grab the flattened mass of the annelid’s neck with his bare right hand and attempt to pull it away from Tatsuo’s maimed wrist. The young man pooled the remainder of his stamina into the task, and to his utmost relief the horrid creature proved sufficiently injured that its jaw no longer held tight when yanked. The “head” of the worm was ripped away successfully, albeit at the cost of taking a small chunk of Tatsuo’s flesh with it, which remained in the thing’s surprisingly powerful jaws. Another torrent of blood gushed out of Tatsuo’s wound once the worm was pulled free.

  Goro gave forth a final shout and kicked the gory remains of the worm off the deck and into the water. He next bent over and vomited uncontrollably for almost a minute as the adrenalin rush wore off and the full enormity of what he had just witnessed and done sunk in. This was followed by his falling to the hard wooden surface of the deck in a state of near-exhaustion.

  After taking several deep breathes, the young fisherman exerted every remaining iota of his will to crawl over to Tatsuo’s idle form and see to the man’s condition rather than passing out. Goro did this despite having to crawl through his own spattered vomit to reach his friend.

  “Tatsuo, please speak to me!” Goro shouted as he grabbed his insensate comrade and shook him.

  The only response to that stimuli was what sounded like a brief agonized moan and an involuntary twitching of the right side of the Tatsuo’s still-gaping mouth. It was only then that Goro calmed down enough to realize that he had to tie something around his friend’s arm to staunch the blood loss, or he would likely bleed out.

  Goro was also aware he had to get the man proper medical attention without delay. However, few people in the village owned a vehicle and the closest hospital was in Yokohama. This would entail running to the nearest neighbor’s home (at least fifteen minutes by foot) and getting them to call an ambulance, which would take at least twenty-five minutes at top speed to get from there to Kenta, and the same amount of time to get back. Further, this would all hinge on Goro summoning up enough energy to do all of this when he felt extremely queasy and lightheaded.