Greg Cox - Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization

Joe didn’t react. His lips moved, as though he was talking to himself, but nothing audible emerged. Ford wondered if the strain of the last several hours had been too much for him. What if his dad had finally cracked for good — just as his insane theories were looking less crazy by the moment?

“Hey!” Ford said sharply.

“…dragging you back here.” Joe roused a little, at least enough to mumble audibly. He turned anguished eyes toward Ford, his battered spirits in some sort of hellish freefall. Guilt weighed down his voice. “I am, I’m totally insane. It’s a replay of fifteen years ago and it’s all my fault. Now I’ll lose you, too.”

Ford tried to snap his father out of whatever sort of post-traumatic depression had gripped him. “See that’s the crazy talking. That’s not going to help us. No one’s losing anyone.”

“They’re never going to let us out of here, Ford. Why would they? Now they’ve got the disks…”

“Disks? What disks? What are you talking about, Dad?” Ford leaned anxiously toward his father, desperate to get his dad’s full attention. The irony of the moment was not lost on Ford; after years of doing his best to tune out his father’s paranoid ramblings, he suddenly wanted more than anything to know exactly what was going through his father’s tortured mind. “ Look at me. I’m listening now, okay? Help me understand this.”

“I’m cursed, Ford,” the other man said despairingly. “Look what I’ve done.”

Ford wanted to shake him. “TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW!”

Joe flinched, blinking in surprise. The sheer intensity of Ford’s demand jolted him back to reality. His eyes came back into focus. He nodded gravely.

“Animals,” he began, trying to explain. “All kinds. Any kind. Birds, lizards, whales, insects, millions of creatures are all talking all the time, with sounds we just can’t hear. Frequencies we can’t process. Bursts of sound so fast or subtle we can’t grasp it. Imagine the epic version of that. That’s what’s on the disks, the sound of some creature screaming.”

The control room, nicknamed the “crow’s nest,” was on the upper level of the installation, overlooking the pit. The tapered tip of the cocoon was almost level with the wide glass windows facing the sinkhole. State-of-the-art scientific equipment was crammed into the control room, along with a dedicated team of scientists and technicians. Monitors displayed readings from an impressive range of scanning devices, including infrared, spectrum analysis, backscatter x-ray, and others that Serizawa couldn’t immediately identify. Much of the apparatus bore labels reading “M.U.T.O.” A time-code ran across every screen.

“Ishiro,” Dr. Gregory Whelan greeted Serizawa as he and Graham entered the control room, after changing out of their radiation gear. The chief scientist was a balding Canadian about the same age as Serizawa. His eyes gleamed with excitement behind a pair of glasses. He had the buoyant attitude of a gambler who had just hit the jackpot. “Good timing. We’ve just had the luminary precursor. Seem to be due for another pulse.”

The lead technician, a man named Jainway, leaned forward to speak into a microphone. “Ten second warning. Ten seconds.”

Graham’s phone rang and she stepped away to take the call. She nodded apologetically at Serizawa as she took her leave of the control room, called away by some pressing matter. He joined Whelan by the windows, which offered a birds-eye view of the activity down on the floor of the pit. Suited observers manned the extensive assortment of scanners and recording devices aimed at the cocoon. They stared up at the huge, glowing specimen expectantly.

“Six, five, four,” Jainway counted down. He was a fit Caucasian in his early forties. A Midwestern American accent testified to the multinational nature of the operation. “Three, two, one…”

The air around the cocoon rippled as it emitted a luminous pulse. The translucent shell of the cocoon convulsed, shaking off a cloud of dust along with bits of outer husk. The spasm caused the entire pit and the attached scaffolding to tremble slightly, which Serizawa found more than a little unsettling. At the same, electric lights flickered throughout the facility. Industrial-sized backup generators, installed for just such occasions, kicked in automatically to override the power drain.

Serizawa nodded in understanding. This was precisely the phenomenon Graham had described to him: a powerful electromagnetic pulse that disrupted all power systems in the vicinity. Powered by the radiation the organism inside the cocoon had been absorbing all these years.

He wondered what else it was capable of.

Joe was talking a mile a minute now. It was as though a dam of depression had been broken by a manic need to make Ford understand. The words spilled out of Joe at a rapid-fire pace, while Ford struggled to keep up.

“… by that point, I had fifteen, twenty days of this signal pattern no one could explain. Pulses, getting stronger, faster, ‘til right before the last one—”

The dome light on the ceiling of the van dimmed suddenly. It sputtered erratically, like the lights back in town. The sudden flickering cut Joe off in mid-sentence. Falling silent, he looked up at the light anxiously.

Ford didn’t understand. “Dad?”

“ It’s the same ,” Joe said ominously, his worried gaze fixed on the flickering light.

Something about his father’s tone sent a chill down Ford’s spine. He tried to keep his dad focused and on track.

“Dad, you said ‘right before the last one.’” Ford prompted. “Right before the last one, what? ”

Joe finally looked away from the sputtering light. He turned his haggard face toward Ford.

“Something responded.”

Responded? Ford still wasn’t sure what exactly his dad was getting at. Was he actually talking about some kind of animal? All he could tell for sure was that Joe was acting like this was a matter of life and death, and not just from fifteen years ago.

But before Ford could get his dad to elaborate, the van door slid open with a bang. Two armed guards, their granite faces reflecting how hardcore they were, invaded the back of the van. Without a word, they unhooked Joe from the security rail and muscled him none too gently away from the bench. They dragged him toward the open door.

“Hey!” Joe protested in Japanese. Ford could barely make out the gist of it. “Slow down! Where are we going?”

“Whoa!” Ford added, alarmed by the soldiers’ rough treatment of his father. He lunged forward as far as his cuffs would allow. “You’re gonna hurt him!”

Snarling, one of the soldiers shoved Ford back against the wall. Ford tugged uselessly at his restraints. Still handcuffed to the rail, he could only watch in dismay as the men hustled Joe away from the van. And away from Ford.

“Hey! Hey wait!” he shouted. “Where are you taking him? HEY!”

The soldiers ignored his frantic cries. They slammed the door shut behind them.

With full power restored by the generators, the equipment within the crow’s nest monitored the pulse. Glowing screens, tracking emanations all along the electromagnetic spectrum, registered a continuous spike that only gradually diminished in intensity before subsiding altogether.

“That was twelve-point-two seconds,” Jainway reported. “We’re trending exponentially and—” He rapidly worked his keyboard, collating and translating the latest data from the pulse. “—that’s our new curve.”

A distinctive waveform appeared on a central display screen. The pattern displayed a series of rising peaks, starting small at first, but quickly increasing in size and frequency. Serizawa examined the display in fascination. The pattern matched no biological phenomenon he was familiar with.