Greg Cox - Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization

Damn it!

He yanked his boot loose a moment too late. The pit exploded in flames behind him, throwing burning debris in all directions. The force of the explosion flipped Ford and sent him flying away from the blast. An enormous fireball erupted from the butchered heart of Chinatown.

Thick black smoke enveloped Ford and everything went dark.

The fireball rose high into the stormy sky. The billowing conflagration was visible all the way down to the ravaged Financial District, where a primeval battle for survival was playing out on a Brobdingnagian scale. The explosion caught the monsters’ attention, interrupting their elemental fight to the death.

The female started in shock, sensing the danger to her nest. Her limbs drew back spasmodically. Her red eyes rolled in their sockets. Instantly forgetting about Godzilla, she yanked her fangs from his neck and bounded away from him. Landing heavily on the razed street, she scurried away from the fight, heading back uphill toward Chinatown. A keening wail betrayed her distress… and fury.

Intent on her burning nest, she rushed right past the troops bearing the warhead, ignoring the minuscule soldiers as they hauled the bomb downhill through the Financial District toward the bay. A collective shudder went through the men as the nightmarish arthropod briefly crossed their path, but they did not question their good fortune when she left them alone. Leaving Chinatown behind, they hustled as quickly as they could with their ticking burden, making it another block before a gigantic clawed foot slammed down from the sky directly in front of them. They tilted their heads back in order to take in the awe-inspiring owner of the foot.

No longer outnumbered, Godzilla rose to his feet and roared ferociously at the sky. Blood poured from deep gashes on his throat, but he was free of the female’s biting jaws at last. He bared his fangs at the flying male, taunting him, and swung his tail back and forth. Scarred fins shed loose chunks of scale and bone. Godzilla raised his clawed fists and waited for his remaining foe.

The enraged male took the bait. It dived at its enemy, but this time Godzilla was ready for him. Unencumbered by a second foe, he lunged forward and caught the MUTO’s left wing in his jaws. He bit down hard, shredding its hard protective sheath and the veiny membrane beneath. His fangs punched through the scales covering the underside of the wing.

The male screeched and spat, flapping wildly in a frantic attempt to free his wing. His entire body bucked and twisted, but Godzilla just bit down harder, clenching his jaws to keep his prey from escaping. Broken scales, the size of roof tiles, fell from Godzilla’s jaws onto the rubble below. The wing crunched beneath his fangs. Ichor spurted into his mouth.

Godzilla tasted victory.

Desperate and dying, the male tore himself free, leaving a huge segment of wing behind. The shredded segment twitched between Godzilla’s jaws for a moment or two before going limp and lifeless. He spit the chewed-up wing parts onto the street and growled menacingly at the crippled parasite.

Who was winning now?

Screeching in agony, the male fluttered erratically above the ruins. Barely able to stay aloft, the MUTO was mortally wounded, but Godzilla wasn’t done with him yet. With the last of his strength, Godzilla charged at the injured creature. Battered and bleeding, he drove the male through a fifty-story skyscraper two blocks away, destroying the building. Thousands of tons of glass and steel and concrete caved in around the monsters, entombing them in a mountain of fresh debris. The male’s dying howl was lost in the deafening roar of the skyscraper’s collapse. A tremendous cloud of smoke and dust rose to hide the destruction.

The city streets shuddered.

Another tremor, even stronger than before, shook the blacked-out subway station. Dust and debris fell from the ceiling and the subway entrance caved in. Trapped in the dark with dozens of equally panicked strangers, Elle screamed as the impact knocked her off her feet.

Sparks sprayed from the bottom of the damaged warhead as the soldiers dragged down it down an evacuated pier at Fisherman’s Wharf. A tour boat offering “See the bay” cruises was tied up in a slip. Cursive writing on its prow identified the boat as the Angel of the Bay. Commandeering the vessel, the troops lugged the warhead up the gangway.

Quinn raced ahead of his men to reach the helm. Prying open the ignition panel, he struggled to hot-wire the vessel, while keeping one eye on the bomb and the burning city behind them. The monsters appeared occupied at the moment, but it was only a matter of time before one of the MUTOs started tracking the recovered warhead. Quinn wanted to be well out to sea before that happened.

He realized that the odds that he and his men would be able to get away from the bomb before it exploded were shrinking by the minute, but he couldn’t think about that now. Their lives would be a small price to pay if they saved San Francisco from going the way of Hiroshima. That would still leave the rampaging monsters to deal with, but someone else was going to have to get that job done. Just keeping the warhead from destroying the city was good enough for him.

He trusted that every one of his men felt the same.

The pier rattled and shook. Looking up, Quinn spotted the female charging onto the hilltop where Chinatown had once been. Lieutenant Ford’s work, no doubt. The eight-legged creature was silhouetted against the blazing fire consuming her nest. Quinn smiled grimly. He hoped the murderous monster choked on the fumes.

So much for your babies, bitch.

Now they just needed to get the bomb clear of the city. Sweating, he revved the engines, which fired up noisily. The ship’s lights came on.

All right , Quinn thought. That’s more like it!

An anguished wail roused Ford from unconsciousness. At first he thought maybe it was just the ringing in his ears, left over from the explosion, but then his eyes fluttered open to see the female towering above him, howling over the destruction of her nest. Her charred carapace had seen better days, but she still looked perfectly capable of wiping Ford out with one flick of a claw.

Like the MUTO, Ford was in bad shape. His flight suit was torn and scorched. Soot caked his face and his hair and eyebrows were singed. Blood seeped from countless cuts and scrapes, some serious. Nothing seemed broken, but his already-battered body felt as though it had been dragged for miles behind a locomotive. His mouth tasted of blood and ash and a couple of his teeth were loose. Every muscle ached and his head was throbbing. The ringing in ears melded with the wail of the angry MUTO.

Ford held his breath, hoping to escape the monster’s notice. A racking cough threatened to escape his chest, but he clenched his jaws to hold it in. He had survived the female’s attack on the missile train. Maybe he could do so again, or had his luck finally run out?

The MUTO’s glowing sensors twitched and her huge anvil-shaped head began to swing toward Ford. Sprawled helplessly amidst the rubble of a demolished street, he figured he was a goner. He could only pray that he was buying time for Quinn and the others to get the warhead out of the city. His biggest regret was that he hadn’t managed to reunite his family one last time.

Goodbye, Elle. I’m sorry I didn’t make it back to you.

He braced himself for the end, hoping it would be quick at least, but then the female paused and turned her attention downhill instead, where the deck lights of a tour boat could be glimpsed through the smoky haze. Pivoting atop her mammoth limbs, she lumbered downhill toward the waterfront. Ford guessed that she was going after the other soldiers — and the warhead.