Epilogue

 

 

Admiral Hutchinson had been rushed to the bunker buried under the mountains of Colorado. The President was dead. A winged Kaiju had overtaken Air Force One en route and taken the plane apart with its beak. The last anyone had seen of Air Force One was a satellite image of the winged Kaiju picking through its wreckage. The dead Kaiju were even more dangerous than the live ones. Like their dead human counterparts, they too hungered for the flesh of the living.

 

On the upside, their hunger wasn't limited to live human flesh. They hunted the surviving living Kaiju as well. During his own flight to the bunker, the admiral had witnessed a clash between two of the titans. A living beast that reminded him of something from a Godzilla film had been locked in lethal combat with another that resembled a cross between a giant dog and fish. The dogfish thing's body was covered in ulcers that bled slime like purplish goo and it was clearly dead. However, that didn't stop it from going after the lizard-like one in a hunger driven rage.

 

The admiral sat alone in the room he'd claimed as his office. A half empty bottle of vodka sat on his desk as he read over the latest batch of reports on the world outside. What little remained of the US military had concentrated in the middle portion of the country and were engaged fighting a desperate holding action against not only the Kaiju, who now had free rein of the land and oceans alike, but also the dead. The rest of America had been abandoned. The hungry dead outnumbered the living by somewhere close to five to one in the US now and things were only getting worse.

 

The vice president was a twit and incapable of making the hard calls that needed to be made so Admiral Hutchinson ordered him to be shot. Leadership of the entire remainder of the human race in America had fallen to Hutchinson in the process since General Ston had been lost in the initial outbreak of what most folks were calling “The Bryson Virus.” It wasn't a position he wanted, but that didn't matter. Someone had to be in command if anyone was going to survive. It didn't help matters that many of those left alive blamed the military for causing the dead to rise up and turn on the living.

 

Admiral Hutchinson would have preferred to be leading those that remained from the US battle carrier group that had been ordered south to Antarctica. Neither the Kaiju nor the dead could deal with the cold very well and that was just about the only advantage the human race had at the moment. Sending the battle carrier and its fleet that far south would protect it, he hoped, because otherwise the oceans belonged to the Kaiju as much as the once great cities of man now belonged to the dead.

 

He reached for the bottle of vodka and stopped himself as his hands touched its glass surface. Tears welled up in his eyes as he released the bottle and buried his head in his hands. There was only so much one man could endure, he told himself. Maybe this was the end of the world. Maybe it wasn't, but either way, the future of humanity rested in his hands.

 

 

The End

 

Read on for a free sample of Murder World: Kaiju Dawn