“In 1954,” he began, “the first time a nuclear submarine ever reached the lowest depths, it awakened something.”
“The Americans first thought it was the Russians,” Graham added. “The Russians thought that it was the Americans. All those nuclear tests in the Pacific? Not tests…”
“They were trying to kill it.” Serizawa indicated the ancient film footage from the 1950s. “Him.”
Ford’s jaw dropped. Breaking eye contact with Serizawa, he looked more closely at the projected images of the 1954 A-bomb detonation, the bomb with the cartoon lizard inscribed on its cone, a mushroom cloud rising over the once-tranquil Pacific Ocean, and, finally, impossibly, the grainy silhouette of a titanic beast rising up from the sea, a row of jagged fins dimly visible along its spine.
“An ancient alpha predator,” Serizawa explained.
“Millions of years older than mankind,” Graham said, “from a time when the Earth was ten times more radioactive than it is today. The animal — and others like it—consumed that radiation as a food source. But as radiation levels on the surface naturally subsided, these creatures adapted to live deeper in the oceans, farther underground, absorbing radiation from the planet’s core. The organization we work for, Monarch, was established in the wake of this discovery. A multinational organization, formed in secrecy, to search for him, study him, learn everything we could.”
Ford stared at the footage. The images were blurry, but the creature’s gargantuan proportions and general outline were clear.
“We call him Godzilla,” Serizawa said.
The name was derived from a legend of the islands: a mythical king of monsters known as Gojira. The name had been Americanized by the U.S. Military during their initial attempts to bomb the newly discovered behemoth out of existence.
“The top of a primordial ecosystem,” Graham elaborated. “A god for all intents and purposes.”
Ford gaped at the images, struggling to process what he was hearing and seeing. “Monsters…”
“That is one word for them,” Serizawa agreed. He used a handheld remote to call up images of the “cavern” in the Philippines. “Fifteen years ago, we found the fossil of another giant animal in the Philippines. Like Godzilla, but this creature died long ago, killed by these…” Close-ups of the MUTO spores appeared on the wall.
“Parasitic organisms,” Graham said. “One dormant, but the other hatched. Catalyzed when a mining company unknowingly drilled into its tomb. The hatchling burrowed straight for the nearest source of radiation, your father’s power plant in Janjira, and cocooned there. Absorbing the radioactive fuel to gestate, grow.”
“Until it hatched like a butterfly into the creature you saw,” Serizawa. “We call it a MUTO.”
The biology, in fact, was fairly basic, albeit on a monstrous scale. The larval form of various insects and arthropods were basically eating machines, consuming massive amounts of nutrients before creating a cocoon in which to undergo the metamorphosis into their adult stage. Serizawa called up an image of the massive cocoon, which had been discovered fifteen years ago atop the ruins of the Janjira plant, not long after the earlier disaster in the Philippines.
“You’re saying you knew about this… thing… the whole time?” Ford shook his head, trying to take it all in. “And kept it a secret? Lied to everyone?”
Serizawa remembered a family photo he had found among Ford’s effects.
“You have a son, Mr. Brody. Would you tell him there are monsters in the world? Beyond our control? We believed that horror was better kept buried.”
“But you let it feed?” Ford said. “Why not kill it when you had the chance?”
“It was absorbing radiation from the reactors,” Graham said. “Vast doses, like a sponge. We worried killing it might have released that radiation, endangering millions.”
Serizawa nodded. “The MUTO caused the catastrophe, but also prevented it from spreading.” Without the cocoon, and the immense pupa developing inside it, the quarantine zone would have indeed been the radioactive wasteland they had let the world believe it was. “That’s why Monarch’s mission was to contain it, to study its biology. To understand it.”
But, yes,” he thought regretfully, we waited too long.
“We knew the creature was having an electrical effect on everything within a close proximity,” Graham said. “What we didn’t know was that it could harness that same power in an EMP attack.”
Footage from Janjira showed the winged creature unleashing its electromagnetic pulse — a heartbeat before the pulse shorted out the monitors.
“Your father did,” Graham said. “He predicted it.”
“What else did he say?” Serizawa asked. “Anything at all?”
“I–I don’t know,” Ford confessed, his voice cracking. “I always thought he was crazy, obsessed. I didn’t listen.” He ran a hand through his hair, overwrought, while he visibly struggled to recall his father’s theories. “He said it was some kind of animal call. Like something… talking.”
“Talking?” Serizawa sat up straight. Was Ford implying there was more than one signal?
Ford nodded. “Yeah, he was studying something. Echolocation.”
Serizawa and Graham stared at each other in shock. Ford clearly had no idea what a bombshell he’d just dropped, but the two scientists immediately grasped the implications. They glanced down at an indistinct snapshot of the majestic creature from the ocean’s floor, last seen sixty years ago.
Could they truly be dealing with… him?
“If the MUTO was talking that day,” Serizawa reasoned, “your father must have discovered something talking back.”
Gripped by a sense of extraordinary urgency, he turned to Graham. “Go back through the data, search for a response call.”
She sat down at her laptop, while the projector continued to cycle through the relevant images. Serizawa slumped down into a chair. Ford stared at the wall, trying to make sense of it all. It was a lot to absorb.
“This parasite… it’s still out there,” he said. “Where’s it headed?”
“The MUTO is still young, still growing,” Serizawa said. “It will be looking for food.”
“Sources of radiation,” Graham added, glancing up from her laptop. “We’re monitoring all known sites, but if we don’t find it soon…”
Her voice trailed off, not needing to say more.
“It killed both my parents,” Ford said. “There must be something we can do.”
Serizawa had his doubts, at least as far as humanity’s ability to cope with the threat.
“Nature has an order, Mr. Brody. A power to rebalance.”
He stared up at the wall, where Godzilla could be glimpsed once more. The U.S. Army had attempted to destroy the beast with an atomic bomb, but no remains had been found afterwards. Some believed (or hoped) that Godzilla had been completely vaporized by the blast, but that may have been wishful thinking.
“I believe he is that power.”
TWELVE
A bugler played taps, but only a small honor guard was in attendance. Standing on the wide rear deck of the Saratoga, as the sun slowly sank into the horizon, Ford saluted stoically as his father’s body was put to the rest. He had shed the battered radiation suit, but was still wearing rumpled civvies he’d left Joe’s apartment in. Serizawa was also present as Joe Brody’s flag-draped body slid off the deck into the sea. It disappeared quickly beneath the churning waves.