The inane clamor from the TV grated on Joe’s nerves, making it hard to think. He moved to switch off the set, but had taken only a few steps when, without warning, the pictures on the wall started rattling. The ceramic cat vibrated off the bookcase and crashed to the floor, shattering into pieces. Just like Joe’s coffee cup at the plant fifteen years ago.
For a heart-stopping moment, he thought the tremors had returned already, but then he recognized the thundering whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of a helicopter flying low over the house. The chopper’s passage shook the rafters and the two men as well. They stared up at the ceiling in surprise, then back at each other. Neither of them knew why a ‘copter would be buzzing a house in the middle of the Q-Zone. It made no sense. This entire area was supposed to be a no-fly zone.
Then again, it was supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, too.
Joe decided that he and Ford were pressing their luck by sticking around. After his previous arrest, his old address might be the first house the authorities would search. They needed to get back to the docks with their prizes. In theory, Koruki, the pilot of the skiff, would be waiting for his signal to pick them up. Joe had promised the second half of his payment on their safe return to Tokyo.
But first: Joe took one last look around at the house where his family had once been so happy, where and Sandra had been together.
He suspected he would never set foot in it again.
The fading daylight did not make the return trip through the deserted city any less eerie. Lights flickered in the lifeless storefronts, while snatches of muzak or TV broadcasts escaped open doors and windows. Neon signs cast long, colored shadows on the weed-infested sidewalks. A clock tower started counting off the minutes again, for the first time in who knew how long. Ford didn’t like it. He preferred his ghost towns to be a little less animated, especially when he didn’t have a clue as to what was turning the lights back on.
I knew this was a bad idea, he thought.
Another helicopter buzzed by overhead, and the two men ducked beneath the tattered awning of a vacant sidewalk café to avoid being spotted. Ford tracked the chopper’s progress. It was flying northeast toward the horizon, where he now spotted what appeared to be a large metal structure in the distance. Glowing lights illuminated a towering assemblage of new scaffolding and facilities — right where the nuclear power plant used to be.
He looked to his father in confusion. “Are they rebuilding the plant?”
Joe stared at the distant complex intently, too transfixed by the sight to reply. You could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes as the former engineer tried to absorb this unexpected new development. And yet, Ford observed, his father didn’t appear to be too surprised to find something happening at the old site, just as he’d theorized earlier. For the first time in years, Ford actually felt like Joe Brody had a better grip on what was going than he did.
How weird was that?
He opened his mouth again, to ask his dad to explain, only to be interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an assault rifle being racked. Ford’s mouth went dry.
The men turned around to find a pair of uniformed Japanese soldiers standing behind them, their Howa assault rifles aimed at the trespassers. Neither soldier was wearing a radiation suit, just ordinary camo gear. They shouted at the Americans in a torrent of angry Japanese. Ford couldn’t make out what they were saying, but raised his hands in the air.
“What are they saying?” he whispered to Joe.
Belligerent expressions conveyed a lack of hospitality. More choppers thundered past overhead, heading for the mysterious new facility.
“We’re screwed,” Joe said.
EIGHT
The unmarked security van rumbled down an access road deep in the heart of the Q-Zone. It bounced as it crossed a wooden bridge. The bump jarred the bench beneath Ford, who grunted in response. Things were not going well.
He and Joe sat handcuffed to a steel rail in the back of the van, flanked by two unsmiling Japanese soldiers, who had so far ignored all of Ford’s urgent queries as to what was going to happen next. Ford didn’t know if the guards didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand his feeble attempts at Japanese, or if they were just under orders to not engage with the prisoners, but what they had here was a definite failure to communicate. Ford had even tried explaining that he was a U.S. Navy lieutenant, but to no avail. It was clear that this wasn’t going to get straightened out right away.
How on Earth was he going to explain this to his superiors? Or Elle?
Night had fallen, throwing the Q-Zone into darkness, but Ford watched through the rear window as the van drove past numerous military vehicles, heavy equipment, and construction cranes on their way to the massive facility they had spied earlier. The van pulled up to the gates, where a guard conferred with the driver in Japanese. He scoped out the prisoners before waving the van through. Ford guessed that they had arrived at their destination, whatever it was.
Some sort of top-secret base? On top of the old nuclear plant?
Their captors had strongly discouraged the prisoners from conversing with each other. Still, Ford shot a questioning look at Joe.
What the hell have you gotten us into?
A security van passed beneath the elevated steel gantry supporting Serizawa as he and Dr. Graham made their way toward an observation post above the pit. Both scientists wore protective radiation suits, having just toured the restricted level directly above the buried power plant.
“Fifteen years of silence,” Graham recounted, shaking her head. “Then two weeks ago, these pulses. As of yesterday, it’s up to one an hour and stronger every time. Whelan’s practically walking on air, calling it a living fuel cell. All this time absorbing radiation like a sponge… and suddenly it’s gone electric.”
Serizawa shared his colleague’s astonishment. These were truly stunning developments. He only wished he knew whether they boded ill or not. Unlike the esteemed Dr. Whelan, who was the chief scientist in charge of the operation, Serizawa was not entirely convinced that this was cause for celebration. Now in his fifties, he still remembered that devastated mine in the Philippines — and the many lives that had been lost there.
They stepped to a safety rail overlooking a gigantic sinkhole, even larger than the one they had encountered fifteen years ago. Graham signaled Serizawa that it was now safe to remove their safety masks. She gazed in awe at the sight below.
“Nature is spectacular,” she observed.
He shook his head. “Nature didn’t cause this. We did.”
Where the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant had once stood was an enormous pit, more than one hundred meters across. An elaborate multi-story edifice of steel scaffolding and catwalks lined the walls of the sinkhole, descending dozens of levels. Six towering construction cranes were in place around the rim of the pit, bracketing it. Spotlights illuminated the sinkhole. And this entire imposing superstructure, Serizawa knew, had been constructed to monitor a single biological specimen.
The cocoon rested on the floor of the pit, many meters below. Nearly as tall as the pit itself, it was a gnarled, rocky extrusion roughly the size of a fifteen-story building. A bioluminescent red glow came from deep within its thick translucent husk. It was many times larger and denser than the twin egg sacs they had discovered in the Philippines years ago. Its pointed tip curled down towards its base, so that it vaguely resembled a claw or pincer. Its roots were sunken deep into the mangled ruins of the collapsed nuclear power plant buried beneath it.