Kaiju: Deadfall

  Kaiju: Deadfall

  J.E. Gurley

  Copyright 2014 by JE Gurley

  1

  Wednesday, August 8, 2018 5:30 a.m. (PDT) San Francisco, California –

  If he had known he was going to die, Miles Candicott still probably wouldn’t have changed his routine, but he might have enjoyed his last morning on Earth more deeply. He was a habitual early riser, not for the opportunity to watch the sun rising over Eureka Peak, but to beat the early morning traffic. As on any other day, he left his Outer Sunset two-bedroom, 1950’s bungalow on Noriega Street at five in the morning and jogged to the Great Highway along the coast. From there, his trek would take him one mile north to Golden Gate Park, returning home for a shower and breakfast before leaving for his law office in downtown San Francisco.

  He had unfailingly performed this morning ritual for five years. At forty-one, he thought himself in better shape than when he turned twenty-five. He was single, enjoyed a full life both in and outside the gay community, and his salary was in the comfortable upper six-figure range. He embraced his lifestyle with gusto. As a native San Franciscan, he wished to be no other place in the world.

  The park was his favorite leg of the route. He relished the two mile jog along the deserted park trails. A light mist had rolled in from the ocean hiding the sidewalk, but he knew the path by heart. The streetlights created undulating pools of brightness. The nearby trees floated on a luminescent cloud. When the tops of the trees began to glow with reflected light, Miles glanced upwards to find the entire eastern sky aglow. Confused, he stopped to check his watch – 5:30 a.m. As he watched dumfounded, the sun grew brighter. Not the sun, he surmised. A meteor, a large one. Make a wish.

  The falling star moved quickly, growing larger as it approached, crossing the night sky like a herald of the morning to follow. His heart raced, not from the vigor of his run, but from the fear that he was the target of a celestial object that seemed to be zeroing in on him. Night turned to day, as the object lit up the sky overhead. He held his breath, fighting a growing panic, as the meteor shot overhead at a distance of less than a mile. The warmth of its heat touched his upturned face. A trail of smoke and flame followed the fireball as it descended. When the sonic boom it produced slammed into him, he clapped his hands over his ears and grimaced from the pain. Car alarms began wailing in the nearby neighborhoods. Dogs howled.

  Mouth open in awe, blinking his eyes against the bright glare, he watched mutely, as the fireball struck the water near the Farallon Islands some twenty-seven miles distant. Its impact illuminated the ocean, sending a plume of steam skyward, as millions of gallons of seawater vaporized in an instant. Seconds later, the cloud of steam turned to glowing vaporized rock as the object buried into the seabed. Just as the glow died, the ground began to tremble, a low rumble at first, but steadily growing stronger until the tremor knocked him to his knees. He braced himself with his hands. The leaves rustled as the trees around him shook violently. The sidewalk cracked beneath him; then buckled. He had experienced mild 4.0 tremors in his lifetime, and this one was much worse, a 5.0 or 5.5 at least.

  As if the gods had decided that quake alone hadn’t caused sufficient damage for such a cosmic event, deep beneath the earth, the San Andreas and Hayward Faults began to shift. Under tremendous pressure, rock ground against rock, echoing the impact of the meteor, sending spasms racing outward in all directions. The ground shook more vigorously like a tossed blanket, uprooting trees and knocking down power lines. Sparks flew from damaged transformers, starting fires. Around him streetlamps rocked violently until their bulbs cracked, plunging him into darkness. Soon, the earthquake rattled not only the coast, but the entire peninsula as it grew in magnitude, reaching a 6.0, and then pushing on to a devastating 7.5.

  Downtown, buildings constructed to handle the tectonic shifts prevalent in the area, swayed like pendulums. Glass building facades shattered, cascading shards of broken glass to the streets and sidewalks below. Older buildings collapsed altogether. Streets caved in. Fire hydrants ruptured, spraying geysers of water into the air. Fires erupted from broken gas mains.

  The Golden Gate Bridge swung wildly, undulating between the towers like a plucked guitar string, but it held, though early morning motorists feared for their lives. The Bay Bridge likewise became a high-tension spring. The pavement cracked and split, as the bridge bucked and twisted along its great length. Cables ripped from moorings, but the structure remained standing.

  San Francisco had suffered fire and quake damage once before in 1906 and had learned from the ensuing horrors. Some cities would have been flattened by such a tremor, but the city by the bay was made of sterner stuff. Fire departments rushed to extinguish the flames. Emergency vehicles raced to rescue trapped individuals. Police cars blocked streets and helped direct the injured to emergency medical care facilities. The damage would reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but the loss of life was minimal. However, the danger was not over.

  Far out to sea, a wave rose. Generated by the force of the impact, the wave rushed toward the coast, climbing higher as it approached shallower water. Miles knew about earthquakes and tsunamis. He rushed north trying to reach high ground on the bluffs along the northwestern point of the peninsula, no longer jogging, but now running for his life. The sidewalk was shattered, too dangerous to follow. He cut across the park, dodging or leaping over toppled trees that rose from the mist like hurdles, scraping his legs on shrubs and flowers.

  Around him, people were beginning to recover from the quake, stumbling from their homes, stunned and confused. He saw in their eyes the same fear that pushed him northwards. Perhaps, he should have warned them about the coming tsunami, but self-preservation was uppermost on his mind. He pushed forward in a blind panic, heart racing, his fear lending extra speed to his feet.

  He almost made it. He was just south of Sutro Heights Park when the rumble of the approaching tsunami began to shake the ground. At first, he thought it was an aftershock from the quake, but then he looked out to sea. Even in the pre-dawn darkness, he could see a giant wall of water descending on the peninsula. With a sickening feeling, he knew would never reach safety in time. He had nowhere to go. He stopped running and watched. The wave had climbed to seventy feet when it struck the shoreline and ripped into the low-lying structures along the coast with the fury of Neptune’s trident. The wave swept over him, crushing him instantly, and then dragging his lifeless body along with the tons of mud, silt, rock, and debris swept up by the onrush of water, a grinder pulverizing everything in its path.

  Within minutes the entire western side of the peninsula from the Presidio in the north to Pacifica to the south was inundated. The waters, laden with bodies and debris, crashed into the hills of Forest Knolls before sweeping back out to sea, carrying with it the litter of a destroyed city.

  The wave, most of it still concealed beneath the deeper water, marched through the Golden Gate Channel beneath the still shaking bridge, submerging Treasure Island, most of Alcatraz, and then swept along the wharfs of Oakland like a watery scythe. Moored ships, carried by the wave’s power, careened like giant metal juggernauts through the streets of the city, ending up blocks inland. The wave swept backwards across the bay into downtown San Francisco, washing away the wharves of the Embarcadero and the Presidio before lapping at the feet of the lofty Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, the Millennium Tower, and Forty Embarcadero Center.

  Thousands died. Tens of thousands were left homeless, but San Francisco had survived worse disasters. By sunrise, emergency teams had scattered throughout the city. By noon, thousands of volunteers were scouring the wreckage for survivors. The city would recover.

  Thirty miles out in the Pacific Ocean the earth was groaning again.

  2

  Thursday, August 9, 2018 2:30 a.m. (CDT) Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX –

  Doctor Robert Wingate Rutherford was familiar with panic. He understood it as part of his equations. It was a measurable number impersonally represented by a letter of the Greek alphabet. However, this time the panic reached out to touch him personally. Cold fingers gripped his heart and squeezed until icy tendrils of fear insinuated themselves throughout his body. It was a chill that sapped his strength and whispered, “Give up” in the ghostly voice of his high school gym teacher. Memories surfaced of a younger Gate Rutherford struggling to climb the knotted rope dangling from the ceiling amid the laughter of his friends. He had not given up then, nor would he now. He fought off the panic attack, dismissing what might happen, and concentrating instead on the facts.

  “Girra will hit the central mid-west,” he announced to his colleague, Joseph Palacio, an astrophysicist. The printout trembled in his long fingers as he spoke.

  Joe swallowed hard before asking, “Where in the mid-west?”

  Gate shook his head. He understood his friend’s concern. Joe’s family lived somewhere in Iowa. “Too many variables to tell.”

  “Guess,” Joseph urged with a pained expression, staring into Gate’s eyes with the intensity of a raptor.

  “Indiana, Illinois, Missouri … I just don’t know. It won’t matter much. Wherever it hits, it’s going to punch a hole a thousand feet deep and four miles wide.”

  Joe’s nostrils flared, as he clenched his meaty fists. “It might miss.”

  Gate didn’t share his friend’s misplaced optimism. While his predictions were based on many variables, the mathematics was an exact science. Numbers don’t lie. False hope was worse than no hope. It clouded the mind and prevented a r
ational exploration of the problem.

  He shook his head. “Look, don’t hold out any false hope, Joe. Ishom didn’t miss. Girra and Nusku are coming for us like they were aimed at the Earth.”

  Joseph squinted at Gate with his tired brown eyes over the top of his square-framed glasses, while raising a bushy eyebrow. “Aimed?”

  “Just a figure of speech. The two objects passed just distant enough from Jupiter and Mars to avoid their gravitational wells, and just high enough above the ecliptic to avoid the asteroid belt. It’s bad luck, but inevitable given the solar system’s violent history.”

  Gate grinned, but then thought better of it when he realized he was frightening his friend. Joe had a wife and a child – a family, responsibilities – whereas he was single, throwing himself fully into his work for lack of an outside life. While dying didn’t particularly appeal to him, he wouldn’t be missed. He decided to offer Joe a grain of hope.

  “New data might prove me wrong.”

  Joe shook his head. “You’re never wrong.”

  “I deal in what ifs. That’s a fanciful way of saying, I guess.”

  “You guess better than most scientists do research. You’re a natural born star gazer.”

  “I haven’t used a telescope in five years,” Gate reminded him.

  “I haven’t ridden a bicycle in ten, but I bet I still could. It’s a learned thing you don’t forget. With you it’s number crunching.”

  Gate didn’t argue. To him, numbers were pieces of a puzzle, each digit or bit of data fitting neatly together until the complete picture was revealed. This time, the picture looked bleak indeed. He stood, stretching his aching muscles. He had been sitting for four hours. He ran his right hand through his short sandy brown hair, leaned against his desk and arched his back, popping his vertebrae. It usually helped relieve the tension in his back.

  “Jesus, Gate,” Joe chided. “You keep doing that and you’ll snap your spine.”

  Gate laughed. “My mother always told me that’s why I’m so tall.”

  At six-one, he was four inches taller than Joe was and thin where Joe was stocky. Some called him lanky. Having once seen himself in a mirror while dancing, he tended to agree with that assessment, but he was not skinny. His slender frame belied his well-toned muscles. He might be desk bound, but he still performed his morning ritual of sit-ups and pushups to keep in shape.

  “NASA moved the Disturbance Reduction System satellite into position to get a closer look at the next two objects,” Joe offered.

  “Good, the DRS can give us a definitive reading on the object’s mass.” A frown crossed Gate’s face. “I’m of the opinion that the first object, Ishom, massed less than the initial observations indicated.”

  Joe looked at him curiously. “Why?”

  “From the few radar images we got, it was massive enough to wipe out San Francisco and inundate the entire West Coast.”

  “It did enough damage. My God, Gate, thousands of people died, maybe tens of thousands.”

  Gate winced at the words tens of thousands. He had often blithely annihilated millions of people in his catastrophe scenarios, but they had been imaginary numbers, not real people. He had even once used San Francisco as a target in one of his disaster scenarios. The strike the day before had been like calling up ghosts. He grabbed his chest and took a deep breath, but a dull ache remained.

  “You okay?” Joe asked.

  The look of concern on his friend’s face brought a smile to Gate’s lips. He exhaled slowly, nodded, and said, “It just hit me hard for a second. I’ll be okay.”

  In truth, he wasn’t sure he would ever be okay again. As a catastrophist working for NASA, he had always expected an event such as this, but the reality was difficult to grasp. He sighed with relief several times over the past few years as Near Earth Orbiting masses had come disturbingly close to striking the planet, any of which could have killed thousands of people. Even then, his numbers had been certain, his faith in them true. His faith in the current numbers was just as true, and they predicted disaster.

  “I suppose I had better inform the Director.”

  Joe glanced at his watch. “It’s two-thirty. You’ve been working eighteen hours straight. You must be exhausted. Besides, I’m sure the Director’s pretty busy right now. Between monitoring the Lunar One mission and keeping track of Girra and Nusku, he has his hands full.”

  Gate stretched his neck and yawned. Had it been so long? “I guess it will wait until morning. There’s nothing we can do about Girra anyway.”

  “Who came up with the names? They sound like Japanese monsters.”

  Gate shrugged. “Ishom, Girra, and Nusku were Babylonian gods of heavenly fire. Someone thought it appropriate.” He paused. “They didn’t realize just how appropriate.” He looked at Joe and noticed the dark circles under his friend’s eyes. “You’ve been here as long as I have. It’s time we both got some sleep.”

  Joe rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, I guess so. Melissa must be worried.”

  Gate smiled. Melissa, Joe’s wife, never worried about her husband. He was as devoted as husbands come. He had been a guest in Joe’s house many times and considered Melissa one of the finest women he had ever met. His smile faded when he remembered that her family lived in southern Indiana, not a hundred miles from Joe’s folks. Even if he determined that Indiana was the target of the meteor strike, he couldn’t warn her. In every disaster, public panic exacerbated the problem. Blind, uncontrolled evacuation from a potential disaster proved almost as deadly as the event itself.

  The secrecy surrounding his current project was astronomical, the potential for panic enormous. The first object, Ishom, had eluded the orbiting telescopes, sneaking in unobserved. Almost before the tremors had stopped in San Francisco, astronomers were searching for any companions. They found two. If the data was correct, the two objects approaching the planet were each over three-hundred meters in diameter. Each would strike the planet at fourteen kilometers per second, leaving an impact crater seven kilometers wide and half a kilometer deep. He shook his head to clear it. He would never be able to sleep if his mind insisted on dwelling on facts and figures. To Gate, more puzzling than the lower-than-expected mass, was the fact that the three objects were spaced almost exactly twenty-four hours apart. That seemed to defy the odds.

  As he and Joe left the building, he noticed lights on in several offices. Others were burning the midnight oil tracking Girra hoping for a few degrees alteration in its course that would send it sailing harmlessly past Earth and into the sun. He didn’t hold out much hope. The numbers didn’t lie, and they all seemed to be against them. The objects had entered the solar system from north of the ecliptic plane, so it was unlikely it had originated in the Oort Cloud. They had avoided the enormous gravity well of Jupiter that gobbled up many of the system’s stray asteroids and missed Mars by a hundred thousand kilometers, passing just near enough to bend its path directly toward Earth. Girra would pass by the moon close enough to cast a shadow but would not strike it. It had been a Perfect Storm of chance. If he believed in a vengeful God, he would call it divine providence. He was sure many would, once news of Girra and Nusku became public. He thanked the stars that he wasn’t the one that had to reveal its presence.

  He glanced up at the night sky above Houston. A few wispy clouds streaked the waning crescent moon. He placed his thumb over the dark disk, and peered at the area just to the right and above the moon, but saw nothing. Unlike a comet with a highly visible tail, Girra was too dark and still too far away to be discernible to the naked eye, but soon an amateur astronomer would spot it, and the secret would be out. All their secrecy would mean nothing then.

  “See you in the morning.”

  Gate dropped his hand to his side and looked at Joe, as he climbed into his Mini Cooper. He had tried to ride in Joe’s car once. That’s all it took. Half an hour of sitting scrunched into the tiny vehicle had been enough. “Yeah, I’ll be here at six. I have to watch Girra come down. There’s something strange about it.”

  Climbing into his Acura, the heavy guitar riffs of Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll blasting from KLTE hit him like a hammer blow after the near silence of his office. He was in no mood for anything with energy that might interfere with the sleep he needed so badly. He punched the dial to KTSU, one of Houston’s jazz stations. The soothing strains of John Coltrane that the radio offered up were less of an assault to his overloaded senses. The mellow jazz was like a glass of warm milk. He only hoped he could make it home before he fell asleep. Luckily, he met few cars on the two-mile drive to his apartment. He expected most normal people were in bed at two-thirty a.m. on a Thursday morning. By the time he parked his car and opened the front door, his eyelids were drooping. Before he could undress, his cell phone rang. The opening strains of Holst’s The Planets Suite he had chosen as his ring tone weren’t as sweet at such an early hour. He knew it couldn’t be good news.