Greg Cox - Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization

Several fleeing workers had not been so lucky. They lay crushed beneath the fallen crane. Heads, limbs, and torsos had vanished, buried beneath the heavy piece of construction equipment. Spreading pools of dark arterial blood, looking almost black in the night, seeped out from beneath the mangled steel. Joe could tell at a glance that most of the victims had been killed instantly.

He wondered if they were the lucky ones.

This is insane , Ford thought. I can’t die like this!

He fought the handcuffs with all his might. His wrist was raw and bleeding, but the cuffs still refused to yield. The perverse absurdity of his situation was enough to drive him nuts. He could disarm a bomb in the middle of a battlefield, but he couldn’t get out of a damn van when this entire place was coming down on top of him?

He stopped tugging on cuffs, recognizing the futility of his exertions.

I’m sorry, Elle, Sam, I tried my best. His heart broke at the prospect of never seeing his family again. I always meant to come home to you.

A falling crane hit the rear of the van like a giant hammer, shearing off the rear doors and sending the parked vehicle into a spin. Ford cried out, but had no time to react to this heart-stopping shock. Held in place by the cuffs, which yanked viciously on his wrist and arm, he tumbled violently inside the spinning van. His body slammed into the interior wall, knocking the breath from him. Whiplash twisted his back. For an endless moment, his world turned into a bruising carnival ride.

Then, finally, the van came to rest several yards away from its starting point. Dazed, his heart racing, Ford found himself staring out the missing back half of the van, which now faced the heart of the mysterious complex. The facility was apparently constructed around an enormous pit where Ford guessed the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant had once stood. Compared to the crashing din of moments ago, there was a sudden silence — until he heard what sounded like sturdy steel cables straining against some inconceivable force.

The animal , he realized. The one Dad tried to tell me about.

That chilling, mind-boggling realization was enough to snap him out of daze and take stock. It occurred to him that the crashing steel crane might have been a blessing in disguise. Hurriedly checking the security rail, he felt a surge of excitement as he saw that the sturdy steel had been cracked by the accident. It took him a few anxious moments, but he managed to slide the cuffs of the rail, setting him free at last.

Yes! he thought. That’s more like it!

Wasting no time, he clambered out of the wrecked van by way of its missing back half. His radiation suit was still clumsy and uncomfortable, but, this close to the old reactors, he wasn’t about to take it off — even if none of the guards had been wearing them before. He kept the helmet and gas mask in place.

He glanced around the darkened base, trying to get his bearings. The fallen crane lay between him and a steep ridge beyond. Steel catwalks and scaffolding spread across the ridge like overgrown foliage, but he could still dimly glimpse the pit beyond. Metal cables continued to creak and groan. He started toward the scaffolding, wondering how on Earth he was going to find his father in this chaos, when frantic pounding seized his attention. He quickly spotted where it was coming from.

A Japanese crane operator was trapped inside the control booth of the capsized crane. The compartment was partially caved-in, so that there was barely enough room for the man inside, and the exit door was a twisted mass of crumpled metal. It was going to take a blowtorch, or maybe the “Jaws of Life,” to extricate the operator from the crushed compartment. The man’s face was bloodied and contorted with fear. His fists hammered against the cracked window of the booth. From the looks of things, his legs were probably broken. Frankly, it was a miracle he was still alive.

He locked eyes with Ford, who hesitated, uncertain what to do.

I need to find my father, but…

Ford!

Joe spotted his son from his elevated vantage point atop the quaking gantry. Ford was down below, still wearing the same secondhand radiation suit, and staring at the crushed operator booth of one of the fallen cranes. Joe watched with growing concern as Ford stepped over a tangle of steel cables stretching between the crane and the net above the pit. The cables went taut as the creature tugged again at the bars of its cage, dragging the cables toward the pit. Distracted by some drama below, Ford didn’t seem to realize that he was standing in the path of the cables, which were shifting toward him.

“Ford!”

Ford was too far away to hear Joe’s shouting over all the other commotion. Frantic, Joe rushed along the wobbling gantry, forcing his way past a stampede of terrified workers. He had to fight not to get carried backwards by the crush of bodies fleeing. Joe waved his hands in the air, yelling at the top of his lungs.

“ Ford! ”

But Ford still couldn’t hear him. Unaware of the danger posed by the moving cables, he appeared intent on rescuing somebody trapped in the crane’s demolished control booth. The cables jerked again with another powerful tug from below, which also jolted the gantry beneath Joe. The elevated steel walkway creaked and teetered, tossing Joe from side to side. His elbow smacked painfully into a guardrail, but Joe barely noticed. He sprinted further across the unsteady gantry, even as everyone else scrambled in the opposite direction. The fear-maddened crowd thinned out, clearing his way, as he raced to get within earshot of his son. His eyes widened in horror as the taut cables began to drag the entire crane toward the pit.

“ Ford! Get back now! ”

Ford heard his father shouting. Startled, he looked up to see Joe staring down at him from an elevated walkway. He couldn’t quite make out what his dad was yelling, but the utter terror on Joe’s face was clear enough. Metal scraped loudly against the pavement, throwing off sparks, as the collapsed crane surged toward Ford. Hundreds of tons of lethal metal and machinery threatened to flatten him like a runaway train.

He dived out of the way, forced to abandon the trapped operator. The crane swept past him, carrying the operator to his doom. Their eyes met briefly before the control booth, along with the rest of the crane, was yanked into the waiting pit. Ford wondered briefly if the man had a family…

Joe kept shouting at him from above. Scrambling to his feet, Ford looked up at his father again — just as the plummeting crane hauled down the entire elevated gantry Joe was standing on. Ford barely had time to register what was happening before the metal scaffolding collapsed, taking Joe with it. Crumpled steel landed in a heap at the edge of the giant sinkhole, atop a jutting concrete ridge.

“DAD!!!”

Ford rushed toward the wreckage, praying that Joe was still alive somewhere in the towering pile of debris. He couldn’t lose his father now, not like this! He needed to apologize to his dad for never really listening to him, for thinking he was crazy all these years. Who knew that it was the world that had gone mad — and that Joe Brody was the only person sane enough to see that?

The ruins of the collapsed gantry loomed before him. A thick cloud of dust and pulverized concrete rose from the debris. He was almost there—

Something huge and heavy slammed into the pavement in front of him, blocking his path. A glistening black column suddenly stretched high above his head. Stumbling backwards, it took Ford a second to grasp that what he was seeing was an enormous spiked claw, attached to a limb the size of a redwood.