Just shy of them. Gasping, coughing, she pushed shattered metal and plastic off of herself, still staring at the gaping hole.
“No fair,” Bernie gasped. “I wanted to hear the rest of that speech.”
The guards and techs were gone, Madison noticed. Obliterated by Simmons’s creation or running for the closest exit.
Was Mechagodzilla done? Or would it kill the rest of them?
But a look through the gaping hole in front of her revealed the mechanical Titan had turned its attention to the far end of the arena. It blasted the wall with its red breath and tore through the stone like it was wet papier mâché.
Beyond, the golden rays of the rising sun shone through the smoke on what was left of the city of Hong Kong.
* * *
“So much for Kong,” Mark said, as Godzilla turned back towards his original target.
“Sir,” the tech said. “We’re getting that signal again. The weird one. It’s coming from inside the Apex complex. But it’s—it’s really strong now. Off the charts.”
“Maybe we’re finally going to see what Simmons has planned,” Guillerman said.
“Yeah,” Mark replied. “I’m afraid you might be right about that. If I were you, I would increase the evacuation radius.”
“Already done,” the director said.
Before Godzilla could reach the Apex building, a string of fireballs erupted on the hillside, opening up a huge breach in the stone beneath. A red beam blasted through, gutting the nearest buildings in eerie imitation of Godzilla’s energy weapon. The mountainside collapsed, revealing a huge hole, and emerging from it, silhouetted against the fire and tumult was—something fantastic. Crackling with crimson energy, it stepped into the light, and roared, a sound like nothing Mark had ever heard, and he had heard his share of Titans hold forth.
But this thing…
He watched in horror as it “breathed” its red beam through the city, torching dozens of buildings.
“What in God’s name is that?” Mark asked. As he watched, it crushed forward through the city toward Godzilla. And Godzilla began a charge. The new thing—it looked a lot like Godzilla. But it also looked built, not grown. And that set it apart from any Titan he had ever seen.
“It’s like some kind of robo-Godzilla,” he said. “Simmons, what the hell have you done?”
“More like a Mechagodzilla,” Guillerman said. “But that’s beside the point. What I want to know is—which one are we rooting for?”
Mark shook his head. It had been clear when Godzilla faced off against Ghidorah. And just now he had been rooting for poor old Kong. But this time…
“Heaven help me,” Mark said. “I just don’t know.”
The mechanical Godzilla launched a fusillade of missiles at Godzilla, causing him to break stride, but not stopping him.
* * *
From the ruins of the control room, Madison, Josh and Bernie now had an excellent view of the fight via the huge hole Mechagodzilla had punched in the mountainside. As the two giants grappled, it quickly became clear the mechanical Titan was faster and stronger than the real Godzilla—and Godzilla was worn down from his fight with Kong.
The guy in the skull is controlling it, Madison thought. All we have to do is get the helmet off of him.
But when she tried to return to the control room inside of Ghidorah’s skull, she found that it had also been annihilated when Mechagodzilla killed Simmons. She found no sign of the pilot.
So, nothing to be done there.
She glanced at the control panels that were still functioning. They showed a fully functioning Mechagodzilla and power readings that appeared to her to be ridiculous.
Something had happened. The mechanical Titan didn’t need a pilot anymore.
She looked out through the gap in the wall in time to see the Mechagodzilla suddenly ablaze, as rockets on its back fired, giving it a power assist as it punched Godzilla again, hurling the flesh-and-blood Titan through the city.
“It’s thinking for itself now,” she told the others. “We have to warn Monarch.”
“Or stop that thing ourselves,” Josh said.
“How do we do that?” Madison asked.
Josh was looking at the control console.
“That thing is still linked to a satellite,” he said. “If we can figure out the password, we can shut it down.”
“Okay,” Bernie said, as Josh started in at the console.
Outside, Mechagodzilla knocked the real one back once more—and then unleashed its own energy beam. Godzilla was hurled backward to sprawl in the rubble; the scales on his chest were now glowing like embers. He tried to get up, but the cyborg monster was there, grabbing Godzilla’s arms and biting into his thick hide.
Godzilla roared, but to Madison’s ears, it was more of a groan. He was losing.
* * *
Nathan found what seemed like a safe spot to set the HEAV down, and the three of them climbed out. He realized then that in concentrating on flying the vehicle, he had somehow missed something crucial. Kong was still down, but Godzilla was still fighting—this time with a weird, robotic version of himself.
“What the … hell is that?” he wondered.
He stood, transfixed for a moment, watching the bizarre scene. The mechanical monster had claws that whirled like drill bits and blazed with energy. It punched Godzilla repeatedly, then grabbed him and began slamming him into buildings.
Then he realized Ilene was running off through the rubble-strewn streets. Further in the distance—ahead of Ilene—he saw Jia, racing toward the fallen figure of Kong.
* * *
Jia had never been anyplace so strange, so unsettling. Everything smelled wrong, like the machines back home, but everywhere and everything. What she had taken at first to be strange cliffs and rock formations she now saw were more like termite hives kicked open, filled with little spaces. Except here the termites were people; as if Awati buildings back home had grown and multiplied to fill up the whole world.
