When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.
—Revelations 20:7–20:8
One-Eye smelled blood. Some of it was his own, but some belonged to the other apes. He was in the dark, in pain. What had happened? He struggled to recall as he pushed at the weight covering him. His back and sides ached where rocks pressed against him, but what lay on top of him was softer, furry. Still warm.
The Stranger. He had killed two apes in the hunting party with his traps. There had been another trap, but One-Eye had noticed it in time. When the rock fell, he had pulled his companion Knob over him, providing him shelter from the falling rocks.
It had worked, he realized. Knob was on top of him, dead. One-Eye was alive. Because One-Eye was smarter and faster than Knob.
He gathered his strength and pushed, heard a rock tumble. He pushed again, and again, until Knob shifted and more rock tumbled and he saw light, until he was out, standing again. He puffed.
The Stranger was still in sight, though distant. He could just make out his head through the trees.
One-Eye kicked at the rocks, walked around them. The rest of the apes that had been with him were all dead, so they would be of no help to him. He stood and heaved in lungfuls of fresh air, trying to decide what to do.
Twice One-Eye had attacked the stranger, twice with greater numbers. Both times he had lost the fight. The Stranger had done well against the Skar King. He had survived Shimo.
No, One-Eye would not follow the Stranger to fight him. But he could not go back to the Skar King, either. He had failed twice. The Skar King did not take failure well. One-Eye needed to bring the Skar King… something. He wasn’t sure what. But he wasn’t going to find it here.
One-Eye decided he would follow the Stranger, to see where he went. What he did. Maybe the Skar King would want to know that. If he could bring that knowledge to the Skar King, perhaps he would be forgiven. Or at least not beaten to death. He had his doubts, but it was better than going back completely empty-handed, and better than trying to live in exile.
He set off following the bigger ape, noticing the smaller tracks as he did so. Suko. Suko was still helping the stranger, still with him.
He growled in anger. He had a plan now. If he caught Suko alone, he would snatch him, bring him back for the Skar King to punish. That would surely earn him forgiveness. Maybe the Skar King would spend all of his anger on Suko.
Jia had gone off someplace with the kids. Ilene sat alone, considering things.
The trip to the Iwi Temple of Knowledge had been informative, but the queen hadn’t brought her there merely for a history lesson. First and foremost, it had been to convince her why they needed her daughter here, now. That it wasn’t just the Iwi who needed her help, but everyone on Earth. The distress call hadn’t been just for Godzilla, but for Jia, too. Intellectually, she understood. Emotionally, this was all much harder.
And although she didn’t believe that the queen was trying to deceive her in any way, a lot was still missing, and not just about Shimo and Mothra. There was too much she didn’t know about Jia’s actual role in all of this. How was she supposed to summon Mothra? Was it dangerous? How dangerous? Would she have to be there when the Titan war started? A fight involving maybe dozens of Titans, including one that had changed the very nature of life on Earth at least once, if not many times. One that looked like she might be bigger and more powerful than Godzilla?
She would never get the battle in Hong Kong out of her head, when Godzilla and Kong had gone three rounds. The collateral damage, the chaos. This would be far, far worse.
She thought back to the cave painting. She hadn’t said anything to Trapper, but at the time she had first seen it, the image had an… emotional effect on her. Who painted those two Titans? What had they felt? But she thought she knew. Awe. And fear. It came through in every line of the long absent artist’s composition, each shade of pigment.
In the painting, Godzilla had been shown using his powerful breath-beam. She hadn’t seen it in action back then—not in person, anyway—but she certainly had now. He had used it to violently evaginate Scylla into a city-sized bug splat only a few days ago.
But in the cave painting it looked like Godzilla’s most powerful weapon wasn’t doing anything to the other Titan at all. Except maybe making the larger Titan angrier. In fact, she thought Godzilla looked… worried. Now that she had first-hand experience with him, she found that impossible. Godzilla was like a tropical storm and could no more worry than a hurricane could. But whoever did the cave painting—maybe they had transferred their feelings onto Godzilla. Maybe they were worried he was going to lose.
Whatever. She needed to go back to the Temple of Knowledge and go over the texts more closely. And she needed to get some answers from the Iwi. Which meant finding Jia and interrupting her good time.
She was working her way up to do that when a sound, something like a big horn, began echoing through the city. It sounded very much like an alarm of some sort.
She intended to learn what that was. Just as soon as she found Jia.
Jia wasn’t hard to find. She was with the queen and a number of other Iwi, all in a hurry. Jia nodded as she joined them.
What’s going on?
I don’t know, Jia said. They’re opening something.
Already ahead, she saw a group of the Iwi were pushing some sort of wheel. No. Not a wheel, exactly. The axis it turned on was arranged vertically, and it turned horizontally. Like the capstan that raised the anchor on a tall ship. The capstan—if that’s what it was—was overgrown with vines, as if it hadn’t been used in a long, long time.
They’re opening something, Jia had said. But what? She hadn’t seen any gates, or drawbridges—anything like that.
But in the next instant she got it. They were opening the sky. Or at least the energy curtain that kept their civilization protected.
And coming through the mountain-sized gap in the field—was Kong.
Ilene had seen Kong beaten up before. And just now, he was very beaten up. He had one arm clenched against his chest, as if he couldn’t use it. Although the tree line hid him from the waist down, he was clearly limping, badly.
She glanced at Jia and saw her daughter was on the verge of tears.
It’s okay¸ she signed. Kong is tough. You know this. He’ll be okay.
This isn’t a tooth, Jia signed back. And if the Skar King is coming—it could be too much for him. I need to see him.
The queen approached and put a hand on her shoulder. With a nod of her head, she indicated that they should follow her.
The queen guided them up a steep cliffside path to a level, rocky shelf overlooking the valley. From there, they had a better view as Kong approached.
“Oh my God,” Ilene said.
Kong wasn’t alone. A smaller ape with reddish hair was helping him walk. Smaller was a relative term, of course. The other ape was still bigger than any land mammal usually found on the surface world.
He found his family, Jia signed.
I see that, Ilene replied. It seemed like everyone was discovering where they belonged. But thinking back to what they had just learned about the other apes down here, was that a good thing?
“Is that a mini-Kong?” Bernie asked as he and Trapper climbed up from behind.
“How’d those guys find this place?” Trapper wondered.
“He must have sensed Jia,” Ilene replied.
Kong swayed, staggered and fell. The little ape hooted in consternation. Ilene’s heart fell. Kong was in even worse shape than she’d thought.
Jia stepped forward, her face twisted by concern. Kong groaned, then raised himself slowly to a sitting position, extending a finger longer than a car toward the girl. On hands and knees, Jia lifted one hand and leaned out to touch the tip of the huge digit.
Kong slowly sank back. He raised his hand and signed.
I lost home, he said. Then he groaned and lay back against the cliffside.
Jia rocked back on her haunches and cast a look at Ilene. What can we do? She didn’t sign it, but Ilene got it anyway.
She shook her head. I don’t know.
Kong pulled his arm up, and she now saw why he was favoring it. It looked burnt, sort of, but the fur wasn’t singed.
“That looks bad,” she said.
“It’s worse than bad,” Trapper said. “Those aren’t burns. It’s frostbite.”
Frostbite. Kong had been hurt by something cold.
The small ape—she saw now it was actually a very young ape, a juvenile at best—touched Kong’s injured arm and made a plaintive sound.
“What was it?” Trapper said. “The power to cover the Earth in a new Ice Age?”
“Yeah.”
“Who does that sound like?”
Ilene glanced at the queen. She seemed stricken. She also knew what it meant. Trapper had asked earlier how long they had. Not very long, it looked like. The little ape was evidence that Kong had found more Great Apes. He seemed to have also met the Skar King—and Shimo. And she had done this to him.
“I’d better go take a look,” Trapper said.
As he started down the cliff, Kong’s little friend began screeching, then turned and ran off through the forest.
* * *
One-Eye watched as the strange cloud-web parted and another place was revealed, with weird, colorful mountains going up from the ground and hanging from the sky. Beyond and above he saw… the way up. The holes in the land-sky that led to the Surface World. The place the Skar King dreamed of. The place denied him for so long. The place he hated and desired.
And One-Eye had found it. One-Eye knew where it was.
Now the Skar King needed One-Eye.
He squinted. There were things there, many of them. Like the little ape-creatures with no fur they had killed at the strange shelter. These, too, were ancient enemies, prey to be hunted by the Skar King. But besides Stranger, there were no others of the size to oppose them. Not like last time.
One-Eye turned away and began running through the jungle.
The Skar King was never grateful. But he could be less angry. And this could make him much less angry. At One-Eye, anyway.
* * *
Trapper made his way down the cliff and approached the big guy. Kong growled.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Nobody likes a dentist.” He got his pocket doc out and began taking temperature, pulse, blood pressure—all without touching Kong. Handy, that, when you were dealing with something that could crush you without ever noticing.
Ilene was still up on the cliff, but they had two-way radios that fortunately weren’t affected by the interference that kept them from contacting Monarch—probably because of the short range involved.
“Trapper,” she said. “He looks really hurt.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s not great. I’m seeing nerve damage, significant tissue loss.”
“So what are we saying?” she asked. “He’s not gonna last a day in here with only one arm.”
“Communications with the surface are still out,” he said. “But if I can get back to the outpost, I think there might be some supplies that we can use.”
“I don’t think a massive cast is gonna solve the problem.”
“I wasn’t talking plaster of Paris,” he replied. “I was thinking more along the lines of… uh… Project Powerhouse.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“Oh, I’m deadly serious,” he replied. “That prototype was almost finished when they pulled the funding.”
He waited through the pause as she thought it through. “All right,” she said. “So what are you still doing here?”
“I love you, too, Doc,” he said. Then he grinned and looked over at Kong. “Just hang in there, old boy. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
* * *
Up on the cliffside, Ilene was coming to grips with the fact that she had just given the go-ahead for a project that Congress had shut down in no uncertain terms. There would be hell to pay for that, and she would be the one paying it.
But then again, Congress probably wouldn’t be convening if D.C. was buried under two kilometers of ice. First things first.
She turned to find Bernie right in her face.
“Project Powerhouse?” he said. “What is—what is that, exactly?”
If Trapper succeeded, Bernie was going to find out soon enough. If they survived this fight, probably everyone would. Not telling him would only ensure he asked her about it again every five minutes.
“After Mechagodzilla, we realized that there were some threats that even Kong couldn’t face,” she explained. “So we started working on some minor augmentations.”
“Oh,” Bernie said, nodding. Then his eyes snapped back up. “Wait. What kind of augmentations?”
She smiled. “I’ll bet you can get there on your own.”
“No,” he said. “Really? Apex tech.”
She nodded. “Simmons was crazy, but he was also a genius. The problem with Mechagodzilla was that he used one of Monster Zero’s skulls to channel energy he didn’t fully understand. So it went rogue and killed him. But the cybernetic aspects of his work—the nuts and bolts of building a Titan-sized mech—he was way ahead of his time. We figured we could find a use for some of that.”
“What was left of Mechagodzilla was disappeared,” Bernie said. “Every scrap of it. Moved to Area 51.”
“Area…” She frowned. “Aren’t you listening? No. What was left of it went to our labs, none of which, I promise you, are in Nevada.”
“So Project Powerhouse was based on mech tech. But it’s not another robot. Something for Kong.”
She shrugged. “Anyway. Making one of the strongest Titans even stronger didn’t go over so well, so we got shut down. Lucky for us, the prototype had already been transported to Hollow Earth for testing. It’s stored in the armory—at Outpost One.”
“The Outpost the Skar King and his apes trashed.”
She nodded. “They wouldn’t have known what it was. And if anything survived that mess, this thing probably did. The armory looked more-or-less intact. We can hope. That’s about all we’ve got right now.”
* * *
One-Eye found that running was harder than he’d thought it would be. His injuries tired him, and he could not keep up the pace he wanted. That worried him—the Skar King would not accept his weakness as an excuse for being slow to bring him the news. Nevertheless, he spent more of the trip walking than running.
When he drew near to the Living Caves, it dawned on him that the Skar King only had to think he had nearly killed himself running, so when he knew he didn’t have far to go, he ran as fast as he could, trying to ignore the pain. It would seem as if he had never let his wounds slow him down.
That was how he arrived, his legs shaking, lungs heaving. The dutiful red-stripe, ignoring all pain to serve his master.
When One-Eye arrived, pushing through the other red-stripes, the King was eating.
Predictably, on seeing him return alone—without the others, without Suko or the Stranger’s head—the Skar King was furious. He was always angry, but at the moment he was angry at One-Eye. So before the Skar King could kill him, he began trying to explain, in the way apes did, with short single-thing-and-do sounds, with gestures.
The Skar King’s anger was great; it was like a mountain of stone. But his hunger for what lay above on the surface—and his grievance at having been denied it for so long—that was something that could break a mountain. As the King understood—about the place, the holes in the land-sky—that mountain of anger toward One-Eye shattered and reformed into a much bigger one. He dashed his food against the wall. He rose to his magnificent height, full of fire and fury. And as he howled, One-Eye remembered. It wasn’t just the Skar King’s grievance, it was all of theirs. They had been beaten. They had been imprisoned, all because they wanted what was theirs. What they had been promised. They, the apes were the mountain of rage, and the Skar King was the peak.
For so long, their wrath had meant nothing, had been good for nothing. They had turned it against each other, and it had made them strong. Ready. Each ape was a weapon in the Skar King’s hand. But they were no longer tired. No longer defeated. No longer was their rage turned inward. Like the soft-hot red rock that burst from the ground, they had been released, and they would burn everything in their path.
No more would the very air scorch their throats. No more eating scraps and pushing rocks. When the Skar King took back the World Above, all of his apes would be kings. Even One-Eye.
After that, things happened very quickly. They had been ready for so very long. They gathered their weapons. Shimo was brought from her prison, her shackles removed and replaced with chains that the Skar King could use to control her as he rode upon her back. The many wives of the Skar King were moved to a deep cavern and put under guard.
And for the first time in more time than could be counted, the army of the Skar King marched.
Lunch came around and Hampton told her staff to take it. The break room was only about thirty seconds away, and whatever Godzilla was doing, he seemed to be taking his time. She stayed at her desk and poked her way through the conch samosas from the food truck near the front gate, studying the data streaming back from the submarine and aerial reconnaissance. The energy levels continued to increase, and the signature continued to become weirder.
Laurier came back early and fiddled around at her post.
“You eat already?” Hampton asked.
“I guess I’m not that hungry,” Laurier replied.
“You okay?”
Laurier nodded, but her expression said otherwise.
“You’re doing fine, you know,” Hampton said. “I was going to tell you that in your performance review.”
“I… thank you. I just feel… maybe a little out of my depth?”
“No? With Godzilla?”
“With all of it,” Laurier said. “If we make a mistake… if I make a mistake… the consequences…” She flapped her hands a little.
“You think anything we do or don’t do makes any nevermind to these Titans?”
Laurier’s eyebrows arched. “You don’t? Isn’t that why we’re here?”
Hampton shrugged. “There’s a lot more to the equation here than the Titans. Mostly, there’s people. Governments and the people who run them. Corporations. Taxpayers. Their fears, their delusions, their hubris. Ours, too. Monarch isn’t immune, either. A lot of nonsense in our ranks as well. We thought we could contain these monsters. We tried to put a leash on Scylla just a little while ago. You saw how that turned out. Godzilla’s doing something, that’s plain enough. You think we can stop him?”
“No,” she said. “That’s what worries me.”
Hampton sat a little straighter in her chair. “I met Godzilla once, did you know that? Not like this, over a monitor, but actually face to face.”
“I didn’t,” Laurier said.
“Honolulu,” Hampton said. “It was Godzilla’s coming out party, wasn’t it? He showed up to fight the first MUTO. Between the tsunami he brought ashore with him and the fight, he did as much or more damage to the city as the other monster.”
“It must have been terrifying.”
“My room was on the twentieth floor of a hotel,” she said. “I didn’t even know what was happening until the MUTO scraped one side of it off, and my room was suddenly open-air. So, yeah, pretty terrifying. The floor was tilted, and I was hanging onto the bathroom door, trying not to fall to my death. The MUTO was still there, you know. I was sure he was about to finish the job and knock the whole building down. He was coming straight for me. Well, not me, personally, but, you know. And then Godzilla blindsided him, knocked him away from the hotel. The fight went off in a different direction.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Here’s the thing,” Hampton said. “There was a second there when all I could see was Godzilla. He looked right at me, or at least I thought he did. That’s when I really thought I was dead. And he could have knocked the MUTO in any direction, including straight into me. But he didn’t. He pushed it the other way.”
“Are you saying he saved your life?”
Hampton shrugged. “I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t. I mean, he did, but did he mean to? Maybe he didn’t even see me. But maybe he did, and he made a choice. I’ll never know, and even if I did I could never know why. What does Godzilla see when he looks at one of us? A lot of people died in Honolulu. A lot of them died because of Godzilla. I lived because of him.”
Laurier stared at her, clearly trying to think how to respond.
“It’s just this,” Hampton said. “He’s responsible for me being here, doing this job. And that sort of makes me feel responsible for him. For whatever he does, good or bad. I’d like to think he’s a force for good, but good and bad have nothing to do with Godzilla. He is what he is. And on balance, despite the damage he’s caused, he’s done more to help humanity than to hurt it.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Nobody is objective about Godzilla. Least of all me. I almost turned down this job because I know I’m not completely clearheaded when it comes to him. In the end, I decided I should be here for the same reason. But I’ll tell you this—you can study a hurricane all you want. But you can’t change its course or weaken its windspeed. But you can sure as hell figure out where it’s going and get people out of the way.”
“But he isn’t a hurricane. The military almost killed him once. With the oxygen destroyer.”
“Yeah. That’s a good point. And we saved him from dying at least once,” Hampton replied. “But we’ve never been able to tell him what to do. And we never will. No more than I’ll ever know if he took pity on me that day.”
“So…”
“We do our jobs. We do our best.”
Laurier nodded. “Thanks.”
“You’ve got a signal there,” Hampton noticed.
Laurier blinked and looked at her board.
“It’s the helicopter.”
“Put them on and get everyone back in here. You’re doing okay, Laurier. Just hang in there. You’ll be good.”
“Thank you, Director,” she said. “Putting them through.”
“Monarch Base,” the radio voice said. “We’ve got movement inside of the ice mass.”
She could see it; flashes and light like lightning within a thunderhead, if the cloud were ice and the lightning was of a weird red-violet color. The ice began to distend until it exploded, Godzilla erupting from it, stretching his huge frame upward, opening the jagged lines of his maw to scream at the sky.
“Oh my God,” Hampton said. “He’s changed.”
“Yeah,” Laurier said, studying the screen. “The computer is still analyzing, but his dorsal plates seem to be charged with Tiamat’s energy. His molecular density has increased, too.”
His spines looked bigger, too, Hampton thought. Craggier. And they were glowing constantly, as were the gill slits on his neck—and his eyes.
“One god eats another,” Hampton said, “and gains her powers for himself.”
“It looks like he somehow incorporated Tiamat’s DNA into his.”
“Same thing,” Hampton said. “Now we know what he was doing in there. Now what will he do with it?
Laurier shook her head slowly, her expression stunned.