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  But it shut everybody up.

  Well, that and the earth shaking under their feet.

  Weirdly silent, everyone turned to stare at the volcano overlooking the town. Hell, it looked like their fake story was real, after all.

  The quaking grew stronger. Dust and small pebbles danced in the town square. Dogs howled off in the distance.

  The top of the mountain burst open, belching flame and black ash into the sky. Eerily, there was no sound, just the rapidly expanding cloud and ejecta streaming off like Roman candles.

  A few seconds later, the noise arrived, like a thousand bombs going off at once. Barnes felt the shock against his face.

  Things were getting more fun by the second.

  * * *

  A volcanic eruption on an inhabited island was bad enough in and of itself. But if Mark was right, this was just the beginning. He didn’t know what specifically to expect. With the exception of the MUTOs that Godzilla duked it out with in San Francisco, no two known Titans looked alike. To his knowledge, anyway. He’d been out of the loop for a long time. But if he had to, he would bet that whatever was sleeping in The Nest of the Demon was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. But it would be big, and it would be deadly.

  Amidst the smoke and flame, a silhouette drew up from the volcano and spread – yeah, wings. Big, burning wings that looked as if they were made from half-cooled lava. But at least this one only had one head…

  More than anything, this Titan resembled a flying reptile, but it wasn’t exactly that. It had a crest spearing out from the back of its skull, but its beak was a cruel hooked affair. Its wings looked like the black skin of a cooling lava flow, still molten within. And, of course, it was hundreds of times larger than any flying creature previously known. And it was on fire. Rodan rose from the volcanic furnace like the mythical phoenix, shedding flame and lava, reaching for the sky.

  But it did not take to the air. It seemed to be taking the situation in; eying the town, the Ospreys, the jets screaming by.

  “Got a catchy name for this one?” Mark asked Chen.

  “Local legends call it Rodan, the Fire Demon,” she informed him.

  “That’s comforting,” Mark said.

  “I’m picking up the ORCA,” Dr. Stanton said. “Looks like she’s piping into the base remotely.”

  That could be useful. They hadn’t recorded Emma’s Monster Zero soundtrack, but if he could compare the signal she was sending Rodan to the one she used on Mothra, he might be able to tease out how she was doing this.

  “Record it,” Mark said. “I need a sample.”

  Stanton nodded.

  “Guys,” Coleman said, “remember that tropical storm where we lost Monster Zero? Well, it’s changing direction. Guess where it’s headed now?”

  Mark looked at the radar image. It had not only changed direction – it was speeding up. Coming right at them.

  “That’s not possible,” Stanton said. “No storm moves that fast.”

  “Unless that’s not a storm,” Chen said.

  “Oh, man…” Coleman said, as realization dawned. Monster Zero wasn’t hiding in the storm. He was making it.

  “We need time to finish the evacuation,” Serizawa said.

  “Then you better hurry because it’s closing in fast,” Stanton said.

  Mark stared at the prehistoric beast in its nest of lava. If they fought this thing here, now, the people below would not only have to contend with the monster, but with the missiles sent askew, like the one that had nearly punched his ticket back in Antarctica, along with crashing aircraft, stray rounds of ammunition and who knew what else?

  But then he realized something. Maybe they didn’t have to fight it at all.

  “Serizawa,” Mark said. “Let it go.”

  Everyone stared at him in disbelief.

  “Seriously,” Stanton said. “What is wrong with you?”

  He pointed to the radar image of the approaching storm.

  “I think that thing is responding to Big Bird’s cries,” Mark explained. “That means it’s coming here for food, a fight or something more – intimate.”

  “What do you suggest?” Serizawa asked.

  * * *

  “All fighters, weapons free,” Colonel Foster said.

  She didn’t have to tell them twice. The jets streaked by, unloading their missiles at Rodan, the Fire Demon. Mark doubted conventional explosives would matter much to an animal that had napped for a few million years in a lake of molten rock, but it might just piss it off.

  The white contrails of the rockets converged on the monster. They popped on him like bottle-rockets, and seemed to do about as much damage.

  But the winged behemoth had certainly noticed them. His angry gaze searched the skies, dismissing the smaller craft and centering his glare on the Argo.

  It didn’t matter whether the missiles had actually caused Rodan pain. What Mark was counting on was the monster interpreting their attack as a challenge to his dominance; an invasion of his territory by another flying top-tier predator. And no self-respecting giant burning monster bird thing could let that slide, could he?

  “I think we got his attention,” Mark said.

  “Everyone strap in,” Foster said. “All ships follow our lead!”

  The Argo banked hard and ran like hell, the jet fighters right behind her. Pissed, Rodan leapt free of the volcano, spreading his wings and taking to the air, dragging flame and lava, smoking like a burning fuel dump.

  The chase was on.

  * * *

  Mariana gripped Mateo’s hand harder as the demon emerged from the volcano and sat enthroned in flame. Her great-grandmother’s tales of Rodan had scared her when she was little, but no words she or anyone else could say could ever live up to the terrifying reality. Satan himself could not be as terrible. Was this the apocalypse? Had the end times come?

  “Mateo, we must run faster,” she said.

  The boy turned to look at Rodan, his face transfigured by terror.

  “Don’t look,” she said. “Just run. And say a prayer.”

  As her grandson began mumbling a prayer, she said her own.

  God protect my little one, she whispered. Keep my Mateo from harm.

  But she knew God heard everything, not just what was spoken aloud. So he knew what was in her heart.

  You took my Marisol too young. You owe me.

  * * *

  They reached the square, but the crowd was thick, and everyone was behaving like they were crazy. Men and women she had known her whole life elbowed her back. They were changed, her people, changed by the wakened demon. He had hardened their hearts.

  But at least she and Mateo were in a queue. The soldiers were doing their best to get everyone on a helicopter, she could see that. But there might not be time.

  She looked back. The demon was still in his nest. Maybe he would stay there a while longer, maybe they would get to the helicopter…

  But then the monster lifted his wings, beat them like a gargantuan bird of prey. He tore free of the mountain and flew toward the village.

  Then no one was in line anymore. There was no point; they fled in terror, but Mariana didn’t. She stared at Rodan as he approached, watched as the most distant houses in the village seemed to bow down beneath the wind from those terrible wings. Black smoke followed him as if the sky itself was on fire.

  The thunder, she remembered from her great-grandmother’s stories.

  And then the thunder came. She recognized it as a sonic boom like those caused by the fighter jets that sometimes did maneuvers over the sea, but this one shook her to her bones. She still held Mateo’s hand, but she knew she had failed him. Down the street the debris-laden wind came, but she could not make herself move.

  Then someone grabbed her, dragged her from where she stood rooted, pulling her and Mateo into a lane between buildings.

  And then the wind struck, stronger than any hurricane wind she’d ever felt. Roofs tore from the buildings above her;
windows became glittering confetti. The blast picked up cars and sent them end over end through houses and streets. Those still in the square were swept from their feet.

  The wind caught Matteo and tried to carry him off, but one of the soldiers grabbed him, kept him from being hurled away by the thunder of the demon’s wings.

  “Hang on, kid!” the man shouted.

  The wind died as quickly as it had come. Mariana gaped at the devastation of her town, at the lava pouring from the volcano.

  “Come on, you two,” the man who had saved them said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “What about our house?” Mateo asked, as they followed the soldiers.

  “We have our lives,” she told him. “For that we must thank God, and these men and women. I almost lost you, Mateo. How could I bear that? All of our things, our house – they don’t matter. These people have preserved for us the only thing that matters. Our house can be replaced.”

  In the distance, the volcano rumbled. They might die yet, she realized. They probably would.

  “Now, be strong,” she told her grandson. “Pay attention to the soldiers. Do what they say, and we will be fine.”

  * * *

  Rodan caught up with the fleet far quicker than seemed reasonable, hell-bent on destroying the threat to his domain. Gold Squadron – their jet escort – flew interference, trying to slow the monster’s advance, but they were paying an awful price. As Mark watched, Rodan snatched jets from the sky with its clawed feet and sent them flaming toward the ocean below. When it caught the Argo, they wouldn’t fare any better.

  But they didn’t have to stay ahead of him forever. Just long enough to get where they were going.

  But even that would be a challenge.

  Rodan was still burning, Mark noted, like an aircraft going down, trailing black smoke. At first he’d hoped that was a good sign. But now he saw the locals had it right. Rodan was a fire demon, carrying the blaze with him wherever he went, just as Godzilla had his blue radiation and Monster Zero his golden-lightning stuff.

  Maybe the Monarch scientists had it wrong. They kept telling him the Titans were part of the natural order, but he didn’t see it. How could that be natural? Maybe the Titans didn’t arise when the rest of life on Earth did. What if they weren’t part of life as we know it at all? What if they came from before, when there was no water or free oxygen, when everything was a volcanic hellscape, the atmosphere a perpetual lightning storm, when radiation sleeted from the sky and pulsed from the ground at levels that would strike a human dead in the time it took to draw a breath of the poisonous atmosphere. The Earth was like that for billions of years, before it started to rain, the sky to cool, seas to form. Before bacteria. Before the first photosynthetic organism started pumping oxygen into the air. Plenty of time for another kind of life to evolve based on some other chemistry that didn’t need water or oxygen. It was easy to believe, watching the terrible flaming bird gain on them, that life as they knew it was just a pale attempt to imitate what came before, those earlier creatures that mostly perished when the rains arrived. Only a few adapted, survived to live in an oxygen atmosphere, became immortal…

  No, not immortal. The MUTOs had been killed. The rest of them could be as well.

  * * *

  Griffin had almost been caught off-guard by Rodan’s sonic boom, or whatever the hell that was. In the last seconds she had managed to turn the rotors to plane mode and kick into the wind, but that hadn’t saved the craft from being dinged up pretty well by flying debris. She was running diagnostics, swearing under her breath as they loaded up the refugees.

  “Is it gonna fly?” Barnes asked Griffin.

  “Maybe,” she said. “One of the engines is damaged, I can’t tell how bad. There may be more. Might be better to put her in the shop, you know?”

  “We have to get these people out of here,” Martinez said, nodding at the handful of villagers that remained.

  “Why?” Griffin asked. “Big Bird already took off, chasing the Argo. They’re probably safer here than up in the air.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far,” Barnes said, pointing to the volcano. Another gigantic plume of ash had just belched out of it, bigger than the last, but rather than just rising into the air, this looked like an avalanche or mudslide coming down the mountainside.

  “Okay,” Griffin said, “I say we get the hell out of here.”

  “Everybody strap in,” Barnes yelled. “Now.”

  Griffin started the engines and turned the rotors up. One of the engines coughed, and smoke started to pour out.

  “Yeah,” Griffin said. “Hang in there, baby.”

  The Osprey seemed reluctant to leave the ground, and the smoking engine was making a funny noise.

  Barnes looked back at the volcano; the wall of ash was coming, and fast.

  “Hurry it up, Griffin,” he said. “Some shit’s about to go down!”

  “You worry too much, Chief,” Griffin said. “You need to do some yoga or something. Relax.”

  Martinez was trying to calm the passengers down. “It’s all right,” he was saying. “This is normal. Griffin here is the best pilot on the team.”

  “I’m the only pilot on the team,” Griffin said. “But I’ll take it.”

  They were picking up speed now, but it still didn’t look like they were going to make it.

  “Above it,” Barnes said. “We need to be above it.”

  “What’s ‘it’, anyway?” Griffin asked.

  “Pyroclastic flow,” Barnes said. Griffin arched her brows at him, skeptically.

  “Hey,” he said. “I took a geology class. It’s not just the heat and ash, there also gas—”

  “Just hang on, Chief,” Griffin said.

  They had just barely cleared the buildings, and then only because most of them were missing their tops. She tilted the rotors forward and gunned it. They dropped about ten feet during the switch as the wings sought to catch wind.

  “We’re not going fast enough,” he yelled.

  Then the wind hit them from behind. He smelled sulfur, and his eyes and nose burned.

  It felt like a giant’s hand had just slapped the Osprey in the back.

  Barnes smelled sulfur and ash now, and realized he couldn’t breathe.

  * * *

  Ahead of the Argo stirred a storm that blotted the sky, a boiling mass of iron-colored clouds with burning hearts of lightning.

  They were fleeing one monster right into the mouths of another, Mark thought. Wonderful. Whose plan had this been?

  Oh, right. His.

  “Argo to Gold Squadron,” Stanton broadcast. “Let’s lure this turkey away from the mainland and straight toward Monster Zero – ETA, two minutes.”

  “Copy,” the reply came back. The pilot was on-screen, along with his handle, Cobra. “Start the clock.”

  Gold Squadron doubled back and fired on Rodan. A few missiles hit him, which didn’t faze the beast much at all. He lifted to fly above the squadron; just as they were beneath him, he clapped his wings with such force that three jets were simply slapped from the sky by the shock wave. The same beat of his wings sent him straight up, like a burning spear aimed at heaven, where he vanished into the clouds.

  Was Rodan breaking off the attack? Had they managed to get through that rocklike hide?

  But then he came screaming back down from a different angle, like an eagle stooping on sparrows, catching the jets off-guard, crushing two of them with his clawed feet and biting one as it exploded. The wreckage spun down to the ocean below.

  Cobra was still there, but Rodan was right behind him and gaining fast.

  “On my six!” the pilot shouted. “I can’t break off! Ejecting!”

  Mark watched as the pilot’s ejection seat rocketed from the doomed plane.

  Rodan swallowed the pilot, seat and all. Cobra’s monitor went offline.

  “Cobra’s raptor is off the team,” Stanton announced. “ETA to Monster Zero, sixty seconds.”

&
nbsp; Rodan’s snack hadn’t done much to deter him; he was coming up swiftly on the main squadron.

  “Duster two-two-three,” Foster said. “He’s on your tail! Get out of there!”

  “I’m losing control. I’m losing—”

  Her craft spun away and crashed into the sea.

  Then Rodan rolled, its flaming, pinioned wings sweeping though the air as if drilling a hole in the sky. It seemed to happen in slow motion, but Mark watched in horror as the spinning monster’s wings swatted jets from the sky like bugs. When Rodan finished his roll, Gold Squadron no longer existed. The pilot feeds winked out in quick succession. The Argo was alone.

  “We lost the squadron,” Stanton said. “ETA to Monster Zero, thirty seconds.”

  Engines whining, the Argo rattled as they raced into the hurricane, Rodan right smack in their rear-view. The sun vanished as they were engulfed in the rolling fringes of the tempest. The Argo shuddered as lightning struck her, repeatedly.

  “ETA to Monster Zero, ten seconds,” Stanton said.

  It was too late. Rodan had caught up with them. He reached out to grab the Argo with his talons.

  Lightning flared again, and a three-headed silhouette appeared through the clouds. Heads and claws darted for them. Rodan screeched and veered away, abandoning his pursuit of the Argo.

  But there was Monster Zero, right there. Rodan had the right idea.

  “Dive!” Foster commanded. “Dive!”

  Weight vanished as the craft turned down and dropped. Above them, the two Titans crashed together, locked claws, and began to fall, writhing and twisting, biting and clawing at each other.

  Gravity returned as the Argo finally leveled out, little more than inches above the water. The pilot kicked the engines into high gear, trying to get as far from the monsters as possible – as quickly as possible.

  How are we still alive? Mark wondered.

  But it had worked. All of these things wanted to be top dog. Monster Zero had been on his way to put Rodan in his place already; they had just sped up the process.

  Stanton was glued to the radar.

  “Jesus,” he said. “They’re killing each other.”

  “Better them than us,” Mark said.