The Official Godzilla Movie Novelization Omnibus (Godzilla, Godzilla: King of the Monsters) E-Book

Greg Cox

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 766

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The official novelization of the blockbusters Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the first two Godzilla films in Two powerful stories of human courage and reconciliation in the face of titanic forces of nature. Humanity stands defenseless when the awe-inspiring Godzilla rises to restore balance. Godzilla Ford Brody, a Navy bomb expert, has just reunited with his family in San Francisco when he is forced to go to Japan to help his estranged father, Joe. Soon, both men are swept up in an escalating crisis when an ancient alpha predator arises from the sea to combat malevolent adversaries that threaten the survival of humanity. The creatures leave colossal destruction in their wake, as they make their way toward their final battleground: San Francisco. Godzilla: King of the Monsters Members of the cryptozoological agency Monarch face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species—thought to be mere myths—rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity's very existence hanging in the balance.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

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Copyright

Godzilla

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

GODZILLA, GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Kong: Skull Island:The Official Movie Novelization

Godzilla vs. Kong:The Official Movie Novelization

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire -The Official Movie Novelization

GODZILLA: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION BY GREG COX

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS -THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION BY GREG KEYES

©2025 Legendary. All Rights Reserved.

GODZILLA TM & © TOHO CO., LTD.

MONSTERVERSE TM & © Legendary

TITAN BOOKS

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The Official Godzilla Movie Novelization Omnibus

(Godzilla, Godzilla: King of the Monsters)

Print edition ISBN: 9781835414026

E-book edition ISBN: 9781835414033

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: August 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2025 Legendary. All Rights Reserved.

GODZILLA TM & © TOHO CO., LTD.

MONSTERVERSE TM & © Legendary

Greg Cox and Greg Keyes assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (For authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

BOOK ONE

NOVELIZATION BY GREG COX

BASED UPON THE SCREENPLAY BY MAX BORENSTEINSTORY BY DAVID CALLAHAMBASED ON THE CHARACTER “GODZILLA” OWNED AND CREATED BY TOHO CO., LTD.

1954

Nature was at peace.

The turquoise waters of the South Pacific reflected a cloudless blue sky. A coral reef shielded a tranquil lagoon from the sea beyond. A handful of tiny islands formed a remote atoll that was barely a speck on maps of the region. Palm trees swayed above a white sand beach. Warm trade winds rustled thatch huts and coconut groves, as the islanders went about their daily tasks. Bare-chested men, their skin baked brown by sun, tended to their fishing nets and outrigger canoes. Women in white cotton dresses wove baskets and looked after the cooking fires. Naked children played in the sand and surf, chasing after crabs, seabirds, and each other. They slaked their thirst with coconut juice and feasted on breadfruit, bananas, and papayas. A young boy, only eight years old, swam like a dolphin in the warm, refreshing waters of the lagoon, enjoying what seemed like a perfect day in paradise.

Until...

A strange white wake entered the lagoon from beyond the coral reef. The glassy blue water churned and swelled, stirred by the passage of some vast, unfathomable mass beneath the surface. The boy cried out in alarm, and dived frantically out of the way, as a huge dark form rose up from the depths. On the shore, startled villagers dropped everything to gape in fear and wonder, shielding their eyes from the sun, as the conning tower of a large gray nuclear submarine surfaced with a blast of salty spray.

Moments later, the rest of the sub came into view, claiming the lagoon like an invading sea monster. More than three hundred feet long, the intimidating steel vessel dwarfed the islanders’ simple outriggers. Paddling in the water several yards away, the boy watched along with his people as a familiar red-white-and-blue flag unfurled via a mechanical winch. Despite his island’s remote location and relative isolation from the world, the boy recognized the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America. It had been less than a decade after all since the Americans and the Japanese had waged war over the scattered islands of the South Pacific, but the boy’s people had largely been left alone since then. He wondered what had brought the Americans back to the islands.

A shiver ran through the boy, despite the warmth of the sun and water. He knew somehow that the world as he knew it had just changed forever...

*   *   *

Weeks later, Navy helicopters raced away from the island, which had been radically transformed by its new owners. The boy, his friends, family, and neighbors—all 170 natives of the atoll—had been relocated to another island hundreds of miles away. The simple village had been razed. Thatch huts and fire pits were replaced by temporary utility structures, along with massive concrete bunkers built to protect cameras and other test equipment. Frightened pigs and goats were locked inside cages labeled “Test Animals.” Some had been shaved and coated in experimental lotions—in the interests of science. They squealed and grunted anxiously as the ‘copters departed, abandoning them on the island. An atomic bomb stayed behind to keep them company.

The bomb rested ominously atop a sturdy metal platform constructed by Navy engineers. It was a large, riveted metal egg over eleven feet in length and weighing more than ten thousand pounds. Hand-painted on its nose cone was a snarling lizard, with angry eyes and fangs, pinned inside the cross-hairs of a gun sight.

Fleeing the island, the ‘copters passed over the deck of a massive escort carrier floating several miles away from the test site. The USS Bairoko was a Commencement Bay-class carrier, nearly seven hundred feet long and displacing over ten thousand long tons. Commissioned too late to take part in the War, it had been named after the decisive Battle of Bairoko and pressed into peace-time service. The carrier housed over a thousand souls, including, on this particular mission, a number of scientific observers, many of whom waited tensely on the deck as crucial minutes ticked by. They stared out across the sea at the tiny atoll, which was only a smudge in the distance, and sweated in the heat and humidity. The sun blazed overhead, powered by the same thermonuclear reactions that were about to be unleashed on the defenseless islands.

In the ship’s bridge, a sonar screen tracked a large green dot advancing toward the atoll.

“Countdown commences at thirty,” a voice blared from the loudspeakers. “Twenty-nine... twenty-eight...”

The entire world seemed to hold its breath.

Beyond the carrier, the sea boiled white as a chain of immense, jagged fins broke through the churning froth. Shipboard observers looked on in awe, instinctively backing away from the jaw-dropping spectacle. Each fin was at least the size of a massive rock formation. The mind boggled at the thought of what they might be attached to.

On the island, the test animals sensed what was bearing down on them. They squealed and bleated in panic, bucking and scrambling in their cages. Goats kicked violently against the bars, bloodying their hooves in their frantic attempts to break free. Pigs pawed at the unyielding metal floors of their cages, trying unsuccessfully to burrow to safety. Seabirds abandoned the islands in a flurry of flapping wings. Brightly colored fish fled the lagoon, preferring the dubious safety of the open sea to what was now approaching. Sharks and other predators fled as well.

On the deck of the Bairoko, the assembled scientists and military brass braced themselves for what was to come. Protective blast goggles were lowered over dozens of pairs of eyes, the better to witness the historic event. Documentary cameras whirred on tripods that had been lashed to the deck with multiple redundant cables. Ordinary crewmen, lacking special goggles, ducked and covered their eyes as the count-down neared its climax.

“Ten… nine… eight...”

A colossal form rose from sea like a living waterfall, hundreds of feet tall. The immense shape was shrouded by torrents of cascading water and foam, making it difficult to make out more than its gargantuan proportions. For a brief moment, a thundering, primordial roar bellowed across miles and miles of open sea, all but drowning out the amplified countdown.

“Three… two… one...”

A blinding flash of light erupted from island, followed by an immense fireball that could be seen from miles away. The glare was so bright that even the tinted lenses of the blast goggles were not enough to spare the observers aboard the ship, who were forced to avert their eyes. By the time they could turn their gaze back toward the blast site, a gigantic mushroom cloud was billowing up into the sky above the devastated atoll. The sight of the ominous cloud sent an instinctive shudder through all present. Matter itself had just been split apart at its most fundamental level.

A maelstrom of uprooted sand and debris exploded across the atoll, tearing off the tops of trees. The shockwave rippled out across the waves in all directions, racing faster than the speed of sound. The deafening noise of the blast hit the Bairoku mere seconds later: a deep, jarring rumble that shook the soldiers and scientists all the way down to the bone. It was a sound to rattle the very rafters of heaven and make a mockery of peace. The serenity of the islands was a thing of a past, as was, perhaps, the monstrous leviathan that has been briefly glimpsed during the final seconds of the countdown.

Or so the observers prayed.

1999

Dr. Ishiro Serizawa gazed out the side door of the helicopter as it soared over a lush green landscape. Below him stretched a sunlit tropical rain forest clinging to the rugged slopes of the Philippine highlands. Pines and other evergreens dominated the pristine mountainsides, while mahogany and bamboo groves thrived at the lower altitudes, painting a scenic portrait of pure, unsullied nature. A distinguished-looking man in his early forties, with receding black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, Serizawa enjoyed the view—until he spied his destination.

The strip mine cut like a gash through the verdant wilderness. Acres of natural beauty had been torn away to expose barren ridges of rock and soil. Ugly metal structures crouched upon shelves of naked bedrock that had been carved, blasted, and bulldozed into the side of the mountain. Shanty towns spilled down the slopes, providing housing for the thousands of laborers toiling in the hot midday sun. Mining, for copper, zinc, nickel, and other minerals, was a growing industry in the Philippines, but it came at the expense of the nation’s precious flora and fauna. Instead of abundant greenery, the mining complex was dirty, brown and lifeless. Serizawa winced at the damage done to the environment. The older he got, the more he thought that Nature was sometimes best left to its own devices.

His eyes narrowed as he spied what appeared to be a caved-in section of the mine. This was what had drawn him to this desolate location, all the way from his native Japan. He eyed the collapsed mine with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The early reports had hinted at something truly remarkable, well worth this exhausting journey. Serizawa couldn’t wait to see for himself.

The chopper touched down on a flattened stretch of mountaintop, not far from the cave-in. Outside, sweaty laborers operated mucking loaders, scoop trams, and other heavy machinery as they hurriedly excavated loose gravel and sludge from the collapsed mine. The logo of Universal Western Mining was emblazoned on the machinery. Filipino workers backed away from ‘copter, raising their arms to shield themselves from the dust and debris thrown up by rotors’ wash.

Finally, Serizawa thought. He unbuckled his seatbelt and climbed stiffly out of the ‘copter, followed by his colleague, Dr. Vivienne Graham. An attractive Englishwoman in her thirties, she had a dark brown hair cut sensibly short. She had been at Serizawa’s right hand for many years now. Her practical attire was rumpled from the trip.

Three other members of their team also exited the chopper and immediately got to work unloading duffel bags and gear. Serizawa took a moment to get his bearings. It felt good to set foot on solid ground and stretch his legs again. He glanced around, looking for someone to escort them to the discovery.

“Doctor Serizawa!”

A stocky, middle-aged American emerged from the chaos surrounding the mine, shouldering his way past busy workers and machinery alike. Perspiration shone on his ruddy face and had soaked through his clothes. Serizawa recognized the man as Oscar Boyd, one of the men in charge of the mining company. He and Serizawa had been in touch earlier.

“Thank God you’re here!” Boyd shouted over the whirr of the rotors. He joined Serizawa and his team. “It’s just a mess, I’m warning you. Just a total mess.”

A squad of armed guards, toting automatic weapons, accompanied Boyd. The men had the stony expressions and ice-cold eyes of hardened mercenaries or guerillas. Not exactly the most reassuring of welcoming committees. Serizawa and Graham exchanged worried looks. The presence of the guns and guards was unnerving, but they had come too far to succumb to second thoughts now. Serizawa trusted that the soldiers were only on hand to provide security, even if the amount of firepower on view struck him as excessive.

“They picked up a radiation pocket out here last month,” Boyd said, getting right down to business. He sounded anxious for whatever advice and assistance the scientists might be able to offer. Serizawa’s understanding was that Boyd was from the company’s main office and had not personally been on hand when the disaster struck. He sounded flustered and out of his depth. “And got all excited thinking they had a uranium deposit. They started stacking up the heavy machinery and...”

As he spoke, he guided them down a slope toward a nearby ridge. Serizawa stepped carefully over the rough, uneven terrain.

“The floor of the valley collapsed into the cavern below,” Boyd continued. “Just dropped away. Best guess right now is about forty miners went down with it.”

He stepped aside to let Serizawa and the others see for themselves. The team found themselves on a rocky ledge, looking out over the valley below—or what was left of it. A jagged chasm, at least a hundred feet long, had swallowed up the floor of the valley. Mangled machinery, shacks, boulders, and other debris could be dimly glimpsed within the shadowy rift, which appeared to descend deep into the Earth. Serizawa gazed down at the wreckage for several moments, taking it all in, before speaking again.

“I need to speak with the survivors,” he said.

*   *   *

A tin-roofed storage facility had been converted into an impromptu triage center. Dozens of injured and dying workers occupied rows of cots. Serizawa saw at once that all of the men were suffering from severe radiation burns. Blisters and ulcers and raw red patches afflicted their flesh. Some were still conscious, while the luckier ones had been rendered oblivious by morphine drips. Agonized moans and whimpers echoed off the walls of the building, whose sweltering atmosphere lacked any sort of air-conditioning. Doctors and nurses, overworked and overwhelmed, moved briskly among the rows of patients, doing what little they could to relieve the men’s suffering. Unlike their patients, the relief workers had donned hazmat suits for their own protection. Gas masks covered their faces.

Still in his traveling clothes, Serizawa felt uncomfortably exposed.

Graham inhaled sharply beside him, taken aback by the scale of the tragedy. Serizawa shared her horror. From what he could see of the men’s burns, few of the miners would last the week, while any survivors would be doomed to years of complications, cancers, and deformities before they finally succumbed to the radiation’s pernicious effects. His heart went out to them, knowing there was little that could be done for them at this point.

Steeling himself against the heart-rending sights and sounds, Serizawa approached one of the patients. The man’s face was so badly swollen that he looked barely human. Scorched skin peeled and blistered. His hair was falling out. The burns and swelling made it impossible to determine the patient’s age, but a glance at his chart revealed that the dying miner was only twenty years old.

So young, Serizawa thought, even as he forced himself to focus on the task at hand. Now was no time for sentiment. He needed hard data and information if the root cause of this catastrophe was indeed what he suspected. Many more lives might well be at stake.

One of his aides had rescued a portable radiation detector from their supplies. The handheld device included an external wand. Serizawa unslung the detector from his shoulder and switched it on. Drawing nearer to the cot, he pointed the sensor at the patient.

The detector clacked rapidly. The needle on the monitor spiked upward, into the red zone.

Serizawa backed away warily, alarmed by the results. He flagged down one of the busy nurses, whose face was largely concealed by her gas mask. He grasped the shoulder of her hazmat suit.

“Can you ask this man what happened?”

The nurse nodded. Leaning over the patient, she spoke to him in Tagalog. A hoarse, whispery voice escaped his cracked and swollen lips, but was far too faint to make out. She leaned in closer as the man repeated himself, gesturing feebly at Serizawa with a bandaged hand.

“He says,” the nurse translated, “that people like you… you came here, you raped the earth. You tore holes in her flesh… and now she’s given birth to a demon.”

The miner slowly rolled over in his cot, using the last of his strength to turn his back on Serizawa and the others. Serizawa did not attempt to refute the man’s accusation. He was more concerned with the “demon” the survivor had mentioned. Just the delirious ramblings of a dying man… or a warning?

“Not sure there’s a box for that on the insurance form,” Boyd said.

The foreman’s attempt at lightening the mood fell flat. Lost in thought, Serizawa drew an antique pocket watch from his jacket and quietly wound the stem. He found himself hoping that this was a false alarm, but the evidence against that was mounting. The next step was to see for himself, no matter the risks.

A hazmat suit landed loudly at his feet.

*   *   *

Fully suited up, the team made their way into the chasm, steadying themselves on guide ropes that had been set up for the rescue operations. Their flashlights did little to dispel the darkness as they entered a cavern descending steeply into the earth. The sound of his own breathing echoed hollowly inside Serizawa’s protective hood, which felt heavy and unwieldy. The weight of the suit, and his limited visibility, did not make the downward trek any easier.

Keeping one hand on the guide rope, he held the radiation sensor out before him. The clacking was nonstop now, the needle pegging the dial. Serizawa couldn’t help wondering about the quality and integrity of his hazmat gear. He suspected that Graham and the others were, too. None of them wanted to end up like those wretched souls in the triage center.

While Serizawa monitored the radiation levels, Graham documented the expedition with her digital camera. Periodic flashes lit up the cavern’s murky interior, exposing fractured stone walls and twisted metal debris. She gasped as a flash revealed a lifeless human hand extending from the rubble. Flashlight beams swung toward the hand, which belonged to a bloated corpse sprawled upon the rocks. A contorted face was frozen in an agonized rictus. Cloudy eyes gazed sightlessly into oblivion.

“They sent another fifty men down here to search for survivors,” Boyd explained, his voice muffled by his protective breathing apparatus. “Half the rescuers never made it back up, they were too weak.”

Serizawa did the calculations. That was over sixty-five fatalities so far, not including the doomed and dying men they had just left behind in the triage center. The death count was mounting by the moment and they hadn’t even confirmed the cause yet. He feared, however, that this was indeed far more than just a tragic mining accident.

Graham’s camera flashed again and again, finding additional bodies scattered in heaps through the cavern. Still more valiant rescue workers, Serizawa realized, who had perished before making it back to the surface. He admired their courage even as he mourned their sacrifice.

Squinting in the shadows, he looked away from the plentiful dead and studied his surroundings. Each flash from Graham’s camera offered a glimpse of roughly textured cavern walls and oddly curved calcite formations all around them. It was like exploring the interior of some alien moon or world fresh from the dawn of its creation. The rich, green splendor of the Philippine rain forest seemed very far away.

A work crew from the mine, drafted into service by Boyd, set up globe lights around the spacious interior of the cavern. Serizawa and Graham both gasped out loud as the first of the lights flared to life, giving them a better look at the scene in whole. Thick bands of a porous, calcite-like material ribbed the grotto.

“The rocks, right?” Boyd said, as though anticipating the scientists’ reaction. “I’ve been digging holes for thirty years, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Serizawa’s eyes widened as he grasped what he was seeing.

“No,” he said, his voice hushed in awe. “Not geological. Biological.” He raised his flashlight, concentrating its beam on the huge shield-shaped calcite formation that made up the ceiling of the grotto. At least twenty meters in length, its contours were clearly recognizable if you knew what you were looking for. “The ceiling... it’s bone. It’s the sternum. We’re inside a ribcage.”

Before Boyd could process that, the rest of the globe lights popped, flooding the vast cavern with cold white light. Serizawa turned about, taking in the entire scene. Now that he knew what to look for, the impossible truth was right before his eyes. Gigantic rib bones, curving upwards like the buttresses of a medieval cathedral, formed the walls of the “cavern.” A bony spine, composed of huge, boulder-sized vertebrae, ran across the floor beneath their feet, stretching the length of several football fields. Serizawa realized that he was literally standing on the long-buried backbone of some incredibly gargantuan lifeform.

Graham stepped away from Boyd, before the speechless foreman could start pelting them with questions. Like Serizawa, she rotated slowly to absorb the full magnitude of what they had discovered. Her eyes were wide behind the visor of her gas mask. She drew closer to Serizawa.

“Is it Him?” she asked quietly. “Is it possible?”

Serizawa shook his head. “This is far older.”

A hush fell over the cavern as everyone coped with Serizawa’s stunning revelation. Boyd shook his head in disbelief, while some of the work crew looked like they were on the verge of bolting. Serizawa recalled the myth of Jonah and the whale, as well another legend native to the small Japanese fishing village where he’d grown up...

“Guys!” a voice called out from deeper within the cavern. It belonged to Kenji, a young graduate student who had recently joined Serizawa’s team. “You gotta see this!”

The urgency in Kenji’s voice could not be missed. Serizawa and the others hurried toward him, while trying not to stumble over the rubble and vertebrae. They found Kenji standing under a beam of natural daylight shining down from above. The sunshine lit up more of the cavern’s interior, allowing an even better view of the colossal skeletal remains, but that was not what immediately caught Serizawa’s attention. His eyes were drawn to yet another astounding discovery.

Two gigantic sac-like encrustations hung like barnacles from the colossal breast bone that formed the ceiling of the cavern. Each the size of a large boulder, the sacs had a rough, gnarled texture that might have formed from some kind of hardened resin or other secretion. Even more than the skeletal structure of the cavern, the sacs appeared unmistakably organic. Serizawa, whose background was in biology, thought that they resembled the egg sacs of some unknown organism, albeit of unprecedented proportions.

He aimed the radiation sensor at the closest sac, which elicited a flurry of clacking from the detector, but when he turned the sensor toward the further sac, the clacking died off noticeably. The detector registered only the pre-existing background radiation of the cavern.

Interesting, he thought. Theories and possible explanations began to form within his brain. Although he had devoted much of his career to the covert study of unknown megafauna, he had never encountered specimens like these before. Was it possible that...?

“That one,” Kenji pointed out. “The one that’s broken. It’s almost as though something came out of it...”

Indeed, one of the enormous sacs appeared to have shattered from the inside. Giant chunks of its husk were strewn about the floor of the cavern, dozens of feet below the ruptured specimen. Serizawa made a mental note to have every fragment collected for analysis. The nature of material might provide valuable clues into what sort of organism had produced it.

“Wait,” Kenji said. Fear entered his voice as the full implications of his observation sank in. “Did something actually come out of there?”

Serizawa refrained from replying. There were too many unsanctioned ears present and he had no desire to start a panic. Instead he headed toward the sunlight, joining Kenji in a wide circle of warm golden light. Tilting his head back, he peered upward.

High above his head, a ragged hole in the ceiling opened up onto the outside world—almost as though something had burst outward from the depth of the cavern, leaving the ruptured sac behind. He exchanged more apprehensive looks with Graham. This was far more than they had anticipated.

Hours later, as their chopper ferried them away from the site, Serizawa got a birds-eye view of the giant sinkhole that had broken through the floor of the jungle. Nearly sixty meters in diameter, the hole was even bigger than it had looked from below. But that wasn’t all that alarmed him. Beyond the gaping pit, a massive drag mark stretched across the hilly rain forest, leaving a trail of crushed and uprooted trees and foliage. Acres across, the trail gouged a disturbingly wide path toward the north end of the island—and the open Pacific beyond.

Serizawa could only wonder what had emerged from the pit.

And where it was heading now.

1999

The alarm clock jolted Ford Brody from sleep. One minute he’d been dreaming about riding a dragon through outer space, the next he found himself back in his bedroom in suburban Japan. Dawn streamed through the window curtains. Only nine years old, the boy smacked the snooze button on the clock and buried his face back into his pillow. Maybe he could get in a few more moments of sleep before his mom dragged him out of bed.

Then he remembered what day it was.

His eyes lit up and a mischievous smile spread across his face. He slid out of bed and tiptoed across the floor, which was littered with toy soldiers, tanks, and dinosaurs. Just last night, right before going to bed, he’d staged an epic battle between the miniature army-men and a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex. As usual, the dinosaur had won...

The glow of a heat lamp caught Ford’s eyes. Despite his big plans for the morning, he detoured over to his terrarium to check on the butterfly cocoon dangling from a branch inside the glass case. To his slight disappointment, the cocoon had not hatched overnight. He impatiently tapped on the glass, trying to provoke a response, but the pupa inside the cocoon refused to cooperate.

Oh well, Ford thought, shrugging. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, he had other business to attend to. There was a reason he had set the alarm to wake him up an hour early. He had a lot to accomplish before his dad woke up.

But as he snuck out into the hall, still in his pajamas, he was dismayed to hear Joe Brody’s voice coming from his office at the end of the corridor. Creeping closer, Ford saw his dad pacing back and forth across the work-filled office, talking urgently into the phone:

“—I’m asking—Takashi—Takashi—I’m asking for the meeting because I don’t know what’s going on. If I could explain it, I’d write a memo.”

Shaking his head, Joe ran a hand through his unruly reddish-brown hair. Early morning stubble dotted his anxious face. Glasses perched on his nose. He threw an exasperated look at Ford’s mom, Sandra, who hovered in the doorway to the office, listening intently to her husband’s side of the conversation. Her short black hair needed combing, and she had a robe on over her nightgown. Ford didn’t understand what the problem was, but he figured it had something to with his parents’ work at the nuclear power plant. The family had relocated from San Francisco a few years ago so that they could both get good jobs at the plant.

“Because Hayato said it had to come from you,” Joe said impatiently.

His mom heard Ford shuffling behind her. She turned away from the office to spot him in the hallway. He crept up beside her, distraught over this unexpected turn of events.

“He’s awake?” he whispered.

Her face transformed in an instant, going from concerned professional to sympathetic mom right away. She knelt down to look Ford in the eye. She mussed his light brown hair.

“I know!” she whispered back. “He got up early.”

Ford’s heart sank. Of all mornings for there to be a problem at the plant. “What’re we gonna do?”

“Get dressed,” she instructed him, flashing a conspiratorial smile. “I’ll figure it out.”

*   *   *

Sandra watched her son scamper back to his room before turning her attention back to more grown-up affairs. Joe barely looked up as she re-entered the office, which was neatly organized despite all the graphs and reports piled about. Printouts of an unidentified waveform pattern were spread out atop his desk, alongside a stack of zip disks.

“… my data starts two weeks ago,” he explained into the phone. “I’ve got fourteen days of anomalous signal; pulsing between seventy five and a hundred kilohertz, then suddenly today it’s like the same thing but an echo. I’ve ruled out the turbines, internal leakage, we’ve checked every local RF, TV and microwave transponder. I’m still sitting here with two hundred hours of graph I can’t explain.” He paused, listening to someone at the other end of the line. “No—No—the fact that it’s stopped is not reassuring. That’s not good, that’ s not the message here.”

He belatedly noticed Sandra waiting by the doorway. He placed a hand over the phone’s receiver. “What’s going on?”

“Your birthday?” she reminded him. “Someone is preparing your ‘surprise’ party...”

Understanding dawned on his face, but she could tell this was the last thing on his mind right now. Flustered, he nodded at her, acknowledging that he’d gotten the message, but making no effort to get off the phone. He held up his hand, signaling that he needed a few more minutes.

Sandra frowned, giving him a gently chiding look, but let him get back to his call. Lord knew she understood how troubling this new data was. She shared her husband’s worries.

“... But that’s—hang on—that’s exactly my point,” he insisted. “The moment these pulses stopped is when we started having the tremors.” He irritably shuffled a stack of zip disks from his desk. “With all due respect, Takashi, and honor. Respect and honor. With all of that, okay? I’m an engineer and I don’t like coincidences and I don’t like unexplained frequency patterning near a plant that’s my responsibility. I need a meeting. Make it happen.”

He was still arguing with Takashi as she left to check on Ford, who had already gotten into his school uniform. They waited until Joe disappeared into the master bedroom to change for work, then hurriedly hung a string of cardboard letters over the archway of the office door. The handmade sign read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!”

Grinning, she and Ford admired their work. They high-fived each other. Ford beamed in anticipation of his dad’s reaction.

But when Joe emerged from the bedroom, freshly shaven and wearing a suit and tie, he walked right by the banner without even noticing. His phone was glued to his ear and he spoke rapidly in Japanese on his way out the front door. “Come on,” he called out to Sandra and Ford, switching back to English. “We gotta go!”

Crushed, Ford looked up at Sandra. “It rocks,” she assured him. “He’ll see it when he gets home, I promise.”

Her comforting words appeared to do the trick. The absolute trust on his face tugged at her heart. Nodding, he grabbed his backpack and dashed out the door after his father. Sandra followed them, vowing to herself that, freaky signals or no freaky signals, she would see to it that her son was not disappointed.

Besides, it was Joe’s birthday after all. He deserved a celebration—after he got the higher-ups at the plant to listen to him.

*   *   *

“Later, Dad!”

Ford sprinted past the family car on his way to the bus stop. Seated behind the wheel, Joe waved distractedly at the boy, while wrapping up his call.

“Good. Finally,” he said in Japanese. “Thank you.”

Sandra slid into the passenger seat beside him. She clipped a “Janjira Power” ID badge to the lapel of her jacket and handed a matching badge to Joe.

“He made you a sign, you know.”

A sign? A pang of guilt stabbed Joe as he realized what she meant, and that he had been utterly oblivious to whatever she and Ford had cooked up for his birthday. Contrite, he put down his phone and looked over at his wife. He’d had no idea …

“He worked so hard,” she said. “I think what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna come home early. I’ll take the car and pick him up and we can get a proper cake.”

Joe was grateful that she was on top of this—and letting him off so easily. “I’m gonna practice being surprised all day. I promise.”

To prove his sincerity, he generated his best “Holy Shit!” expression. His eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped as though he had just won the lottery. The effort teased a laugh from Sandra. He smirked back at her, enjoying the moment. Which couldn’t last, unfortunately. Not with the matter preying on his mind.

“Look,” he said, “I need to know it’s not the sensors. I can’t call this meeting and look like the American maniac. We get in, don’t even come upstairs, just grab a team and head down to Level 5—do 5 and the coolant cask—just check my sensors. Make sure they’re working.”

“You’re not a maniac,” she assured him. “I mean, you are, just not about this.”

He appreciated her effort to lighten the mood, but he had too much on his mind to joke around right now. “There’s got to be something we’re not thinking of.”

“Happy birthday,” she said stubbornly.

He turned toward her. An infectious smile penetrated the cloud hanging over him, and reminded him just how lucky he really was. The corners of his lips lifted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.

She leaned forward and kissed him warmly on the lips. Despite all his worries and frustration, he responded to the kiss, keeping it going even as he fired up the ignition. They reluctantly disengaged as he pulled away from the curb and headed towards the plant, which loomed prominently on the horizon.

His birthday would have to wait.

*   *   *

The Janjira Nuclear Power Plant perched above the coastline, dominating the skyline overlooking the Sea of Japan. Thick white plumes of steam vented from the plant’s cooling towers, while the reactors themselves were secured within three imposing structures of steel and concrete that had been built to withstand even a crashing 747. Adjoining buildings housed the turbines, generators, pumps, water tanks, storage units, machine shops, administrative offices, and other essentials. A row of transmission towers rose from the switchyard adjacent to the plant. High-voltage power lines transmitted freshly generated electricity to the nearby city and points beyond.

After parking the car in the lot, Joe and Sandra hurried off on their respective tasks. Within minutes, Joe was marching briskly down a corridor, trailed by Stan Walsh, his best friend and partner in crime. Another transplanted American, Stan was a few years older than Joe, who was counting on Stan to back him up when they met with Hayato and the others. Joe gulped down black coffee on the run. “#1 DAD” was emblazoned on his mug, a title Joe doubted he was entitled to this morning.

I’ll make it up to Ford later, he promised himself, after I get to the bottom of this.

A local engineer, Sachio Maki, hurried up to Joe with an anxious expression on his face. He nervously thrust a file of reports at Joe. Juggling his coffee cup, Joe flipped through the folder, which contained some seismographic readings he had never seen before. His eyes bugged out for real this time.

“Whoa.” He froze in his tracks, caught off-guard by the data. “What is that?”

“Yes,” Maki confirmed. “Seismic anomaly.”

The region had been experiencing a number of small underground tremors recently, but nothing this dramatic. “This is from when?” Joe asked urgently.

“Now,” Maki said. “This is now.”

Joe blinked, not quite grasping the truth. When Maki said “now” did he really mean...?

“This graph is minutes, not days,” Maki explained, spelling it out. “This is now.”

“What?”

“Wait,” Stan said, trying to keep up. “Seismic’ as in what? As in earthquakes?” He peered over Joe’s shoulders at the graphs. “Are those earthquakes?”

Joe shook his head. “Earthquakes are random, jagged. This is steady, increasing.” He flipped rapidly through the remainder of the report, his eyes tracing the steady upward path of the vibrations’ intensity over time. “This is a pattern.”

Just like the inexplicable signals he had been monitoring.

*   *   *

Following Joe’s instructions, Sandra headed straight for the sub-level corridors beneath the primary reactor building, pausing only briefly before a large open doorway. Warning signs, printed in Japanese, marked the boundary before them. This was where the buck stopped: the containment threshold where sturdy barriers could be deployed to seal off the area beyond in the event of a significant radiation leak. While the existence of the barriers should have been reassuring, the necessity of them was something she generally preferred not to think about. There hadn’t been a Chernobyl-type disaster since 1986, thirteen years ago, but nobody in the industry wanted to take any chances.

She had rounded up a four-person team to assist her in the inspection. They quickly climbed into full-body radiation suits, as required by the Level 5 safety protocols. Multiple layers of thick protective material, along with a self-contained breathing apparatus, made the uncomfortable suit both hot and heavy to work in. Internal helmet lights illuminated their faces. Sandra took pains to maintain a cool, confident expression on hers.

“Alright,” she said, leading the way. “Let’s make this quick.”

*   *   *

Caught up in the anomalous new seismic data, Joe moved more slowly down the hall toward his meeting. He barely registered Stan fretting beside him.

“Can I be your Rabbi here for a minute?” Stan pleaded, sounding like he was on the verge of another ulcer. He popped an antacid. “Before you go in there and pull some China Syndrome freakout on these guys, keep in mind that we are hired guns here, okay?”

Joe understood that Stan was worried about their contracts and careers, but there were bigger issues at stake here, like the safety of the plant and the surrounding community.

“I have operational authority in my contract, Stan.”

This didn’t seem to allay Stan’s anxieties. If anything, he sounded even more apprehensive. “You pull this off-line, it’ll be three months before we get back up.”

You think I don’t know that, Joe thought, but before he could reply the fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Joe glanced up in confusion. Now what?

A second later, a sudden rumble shook the entire building.

*   *   *

The tremor hit even harder down on Level 5. Sandra’s team froze in surprise. One of her team members, Toyoaki Yamato, looked at her in alarm. “What was that?”

The overhead lights flickered momentarily, but then the subterranean rumbling stopped. Sandra held her breath for a moment, waiting to see if the tremor had truly subsided, before taking charge again. She tried her best to keep her voice steady.

“Just a little farther,” she stated. “Let’s check the cask and get out of here.”

The other workers nodded and quickened their pace. Nobody wanted to linger in the containment area longer than possible.

Including Sandra.

*   *   *

Joe could feel the tension in the plant’s control room the minute he and Stan arrived. Banks of sophisticated control panels, gauges, and monitors, manned by a crew of largely Japanese technicians, lined the walls of the chamber, while the main work desk occupied the center of the room. Windows looked over the plant grounds. Glass partitions isolated various support cubicles. Anxious voices exchanged technical data in Japanese.

Joe spotted the men in charge, Haruo Takashi and Ren Hayato, huddled over a bank of monitors. All eyes turned toward Joe, the hubbub of voices quieting somewhat. He could tell right away that there was more bad news coming.

Some birthday this is turning out to be.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

Takashi turned to face him. The Deputy Plant Administrator was a slim young man, who looked like he was having a bad day as well. “Maybe not such a good time for a meeting,” he suggested.

“Agreed,” Joe said, pushing the seismic graphs on Takashi. “Have you seen this?”

Takashi nodded toward the bank of monitors he had been glued to before. Hayato, the Senior Reactor Engineer, stepped aside so that Joe could see for himself. Joe immediately recognized the distinctive waveform snaking and pulsing across the monitors. It was the same pattern that he had been staring at for days.

“Do we have a source?” he asked crisply. “Where’s the epicenter?”

Takashi threw up his hands. He was more rattled than Joe had ever seen him. “We keep trying... nothing...”

Joe shook his head. “It’s got to be centered somewhere.”

Hayato spoke up. “No one else is reporting. We’ve contacted every other plant in the Kanto region, Tokai, Fujiyama... they’re unaffected.”

Joe wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. “Are we at full function?”

Takashi nodded. “Perhaps we should be drawing down. To be safe.”

“Is that my call?” Joe asked.

“Right now, maybe yes,” Hayato conceded. He was an older man with graying temples, only a few years from retirement. “We’re trying to reach Mr. Mori, but he’s not answering.”

Joe wasn’t inclined to wait on the owner of the company. Those weren’t profit-and-loss charts on the monitors. This was a safety issue.

As though to drive that point home, another tremor rattled the building. This one was felt even harder and sharper than before. Joe felt the weight of dozens of eyes upon him. He made up his mind.

“Take us off-line,” he said.

Stan balked. A shutdown could cost millions—and possibly their jobs. “Joe...”

“Do it. Wind it down.” He issued the order in Japanese. “Seal down the reactors.”

There was a brief moment of hesitation before the room erupted into a quiet frenzy of activity. Joe suddenly found himself at the eye of storm, overseeing emergency measures he had expected to go his entire career without implementing. The full import of his decision hit home and he felt weak in the knees. A cold sweat glued his shirt to his back. What if he had over-reacted and pulled the plug too soon? This could be the biggest mistake of his career...

Breathe, he reminded himself. Think.

He put down his coffee cup on a nearby table, figuring that his heart was already racing fast enough, thank you very much. Diagrams and blueprints were strewn across the table, along with a selection of walkie-talkies on a tray. He snatched one up and started scanning through the channels, searching for a signal. He needed info and he needed it now, damnit.

And he needed to know that Sandra was okay.

Before he could get hold of her, the mug started vibrating across the table, spilling coffee onto the blueprints, which were also shaking as well. Joe glanced in alarm at the monitors, where the pulse pattern was spiking into a new shape. A stronger, secondary jolt, accompanied by a deep sonic thrum that Joe could feel all the way to his teeth, rattled the glass windows of the control room. The walls shook.

Even worse, all the monitors and other electronics lost power for a second, briefly killing the lights, before they popped back on again. Startled technicians swore and shouted and scrambled to check their systems. Agitated voices competed with each other, everybody talking at once.

“No status!” Takashi blurted. “Everything’s rebooting!”

“Calm,” Joe insisted, trying to maintain order. “No yelling.”

Takashi got the message, settling down. He regained his composure as Joe raised his voice to be heard over the clamor.

“All personnel not needed for SLCS procedure should begin to evacuate the plant,” Joe announced. “You know the drill.” SLCS referred to the Standby Liquid Control System, which could be deployed to shut down the reactors in case the control rods failed to insert. He waited long enough to see his order being carried out before raising the walkie-talkie to his lips. A recorded announcement blared over the intercoms in the background. He placed a hand over his ear to tune it out. “Sandra? Sandy, can you hear me? You need to get back up here!”

At first there was no response, as he urgently spun through the channels, but then he heard his wife’s voice over the receiver, broken up by bursts of static:

“—ear me... anyone co... this is... report... damage to t—”

1999

The sub-level monitoring station was practically useless. Every screen was either flickering or dead, making it practically impossible to get reliable readings on the reactor core and cooling systems. Sandra kept one eye on her team, who were trying unsuccessfully to bring the equipment back on-line, as she worked the walkie-talkie.

“It’s shaking hard down here, Joe. Do you copy?”

Yamato stepped away from an uncooperative screen. “We’ve lost the monitors!” he reported. He was sweating visibly behind the visor of his helmet.

“Sensors are down,” another technician confirmed.

The team turned toward Sandra, waiting for her to make the call. She hesitated, knowing how much Joe was counting on her to get him the data he needed, but it looked like that wasn’t going to happen. The escalating tremors and blackouts had thrown a monkey wrench in their plans, and forced her to put the safety of her crew ahead of her mission. This was no place you wanted to be during an earthquake... or whatever this was.

“We’re turning back,” she declared. “Let’s go!”

*   *   *

Yet another tremor shook the control room, nearly throwing Joe off-balance. He grabbed onto the table to steady himself. Overhead light fixtures swayed violently even as the fluorescent bulbs went dead. All the electronics crashed again, while dust was shaken loose from the ceiling. The discarded coffee cup vibrated towards the edge of the table. Joe lunged for the mug, hoping to rescue it in time, but he was too late. It crashed to the floor and shattered.

So much for “#1 DAD.”

The tremor subsided and the lights blinked back on. Everybody held their breath, waiting for the next shock, before frantically trying to resume the shutdown procedure, if it wasn’t too late already. No one, least of all Joe, knew when the next tremor would hit—or how big it might be.

“Joe, are you there?” Sandra’s voice broke through the static. “We’re heading back through the containment seal—”

He clutched the walkie-talkie to his ear.

Hurry, he thought. Please hurry!

*   *   *

Sandra and the others raced back the way they’d come, moving as fast as they could in the heavy radiation suits. She prayed that was fast enough.

“You need to get out of there,” Joe urged via the walkie-talkie. “If there’s a reactor breach, you won’t last five minutes, suits or no suits.” She could hear the fear in his voice even through the static. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” she responded, breathing hard. “We’re coming—”

A sonic pulse cut her off, thrumming louder than before. The floor quaked beneath her feet, causing her to miss a step. She threw out a hand to brace herself against a wall, and could feel the vibration even through her insulated gloves. The lights flickered and—

*   *   *

A massive jolt rocked the building to its foundations, as though it had been struck by a titanic sledge hammer. In the control room, Joe and the others were thrown to the floor. The exterior windows shattered, spraying broken fragments onto the floor, while a glass partition cracked down the middle. A file cabinet toppled over, spilling old paperwork over the floor tile. Empty desk chairs bounced and rolled about.

Sprawled on the floor, not far from the broken coffee mug, Joe rode out the tremor, keeping his face covered. Not until the shaking stopped did he cautiously lift his head and look around. Checking to make sure his glasses were still in one piece, he painfully peeled himself off the floor. His nerves were jangled, and he was bruised from the fall, but he was relieved to see that the control room was more or less intact. His eyes sought out the master control monitors, which, miraculously, were still running. Stan, Takashi, and the others began to clamber to their feet as well. Nobody seemed seriously injured, at least not here in the control room.

But what about Sandra and her team?

He peered up at a video monitor. Closed-circuit TV footage showed a crew in full radiation suits dashing though the reactor unit’s sub-levels. He didn’t need to make out Sandra’s face to know who was leading the team. He pointed anxiously at the screen.

“Sandra and her crew,” he exclaimed. “They’re in the containment area!”

Takashi looked aghast. “Why?”

Joe didn’t have time to explain. “Oh shit,” he muttered. What had that last shock had done to the reactor?. He dashed for the exit, shouting back over his shoulder at Takashi. “Put the safety doors on manual override!”

“I can’t do that!” the deputy engineer protested.

Joe didn’t want to hear it. He shouted back from the doorway.

“PUT THE DOORS ON MANUAL!”

*   *   *

Sandra and the others raced down a concrete corridor, which felt twice as long as she remembered. A stairway, leading to an upper level, finally appeared before them.

Thank God, she thought. Maybe we can still get out of here in—

Another jolt nearly threw her off her feet. Yamato stumbled, but she grabbed onto him and kept him from falling. The cumbersome radiation suits made every movement clumsier than it ought to be, and were unbearably hot as well; she was half-tempted to shuck the suit, but that would be insane. For all she knew, there could be a leak at any minute.

The team squeezed into the cramped, dimly lit stairwell. They were all panting now, weighed down by the heavy suits and breathing gear. Sandra’s muscles ached and her legs felt like they were made of lead, but adrenalin and panic kept her and the others climbing for their lives.

If they could just make it past the containment threshold…

*   *   *

An emergency stairwell led from the control room to the primary reactor unit. Joe rushed down, taking the steps two or three at a time. His heart pounded in his chest, going a mile a minute, while he prayed that Sandra was heading toward him from the opposite direction. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could count on Takashi to keep the containment doors open.

Don’t stop, he silently pleaded with her. Don’t slow down for a second. Please!

Reaching Level 5 in record time, he burst out of the stairwell and skidded to a stop right before the entrance to the containment area. A large button, surrounded by emergency instructions in both Japanese and English, was installed in the wall to one side of the entrance. Joe peered down the long corridor beyond, hoping desperately to see Sandra and the others running toward him, but the hallway was eerily silent and empty, as though it had already been evacuated. He was tempted to run into the corridor to find Sandra, but there was no time to suit up and somebody had to stand by to trigger the manual controls, just in case the worst-case scenario played out, which was looking more and more likely by the moment.

C’mon, Sandy, he thought. Where the hell are you?

A closed-circuit video camera was mounted in a corner where the walls met the ceiling. Joe hoped to God that Takashi was still watching this. He shouted up at the camera.

“Takashi! Tell me this door is on manual!”

The other man’s voice emerged from the comm system. “Manual, yes, but Joe—we’re starting to breach, you understand me?”

He understood all right. This was the nightmare that every nuclear engineer dreaded, the one that kept them up at nights, thinking about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. He feared there was nothing he could to do to save one or all of the reactors.

But maybe he could still save his wife.

“I’m right here,” he told Takashi, as forcefully as he could. “As soon as they’re through, I’ll seal it!”

He hoped that would be enough to Takashi’s finger off the panic button, but he wouldn’t blame the other man for playing it safe. Takashi didn’t have the love of his life still in the danger zone.

“Sandra?” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Can you hear me? I’m here, honey. I’m at the door!”

*   *   *

She held on tightly to the walkie-talkie as she and the others sprinted breathlessly down yet another seemingly endless corridor. Steel-toed rubber boots pounded against the hard concrete floors. The crew had made it up the stairs, but they still had a ways to go before they were beyond the containment area. Joe’s voice, coming over the walkie-talkie, urged her on, even though his words were fragmented by harsh blasts of static:

“—ere—for you—checkpoin—aiting—”

Emergency klaxons started blaring behind them like angry foghorns. Flashing red annunciator lights turned the sterile white corridors incarnadine. Sandra glanced back behind her, as did the rest of her team. Panic gripped her heart. They all knew what the sirens and flashing lights meant and why the klaxons were getting louder and closer by the moment. The danger posed by the tremors was no longer just a terrifying possibility. The fiery genie inside the reactor had escaped its bottle and was chasing after them.

They were going to die, unless they made it to safety in time.

*   *   *

Takashi was alone in the control room. The rest of the staff had already deserted the premises, including Hayato. The older man had volunteered to stay behind, but Takashi had convinced him to take charge of the evacuation instead. Hayato was a family man, with a wife, children, and several grandchildren who needed him, while Takashi had put his career ahead of any serious relationships so far. The young engineer stared in horror at a hallway schematic of the lower levels. Blinking red icons indicated the rapid spread of radiation throughout the corridors. His eyes widened in dread as stayed at his post, torn between his duty to contain the disaster and his purely human concern for his friends and co-workers. He could only imagine how excruciating this must be for Joe Brody, even as Takashi worried whether the American engineer would really be able to do what was necessary, no matter the cost.

Takashi wasn’t sure he could, not if it was his true love at stake.

*   *   *

Joe stared anxiously past the threshold, frozen in fear. He listened numbly to Takashi’s fractured voice over the intercom. Static interference mangled the transmission, rendering it barely comprehensible:

“Brody—we—ah—each—”

“What?” Joe asked, straining to make out what was being said. “Say again?”

“Catastrophic radiation breach!”

Joe had thought he couldn’t be any more scared, but this nightmare just kept getting worse and worse. Utter horror transfixed him. This couldn’t be happening...

“Seal the corridor,” Takashi pleaded, “or the whole city will be exposed!”

*   *   *

Keep going, Sandra thought. Just a little further!

Terror overcame exhaustion as she and her crew sprinted down a corridor, despite the best efforts of the earthquake to slow them down. An earth-shaking rumble caused the floor to quake beneath their feet, tossing them from one side to another. Yamato tumbled headfirst onto the concrete floor, forcing Sandra to turn back and help him to his feet. His visor had survived the fall intact, thank goodness, and they were about to resume their flight when—

The air rippled behind them as a billowing cloud of radioactive vapor and particulate matter blew in from the far end of the corridor. The oncoming vapors set off the radiation sensors in the ceiling, causing the emergency klaxons to sound directly overhead. Flashing red lights accompanied the sirens. The hot gases and steam rushed toward Sandra and the others with frightening speed. Unable to outrun it, her eyes wide with horror, she braced herself as the cloud blasted past them like a red-hot gust of wind, knocking them all to the floor. Buffeted by the blast, she felt the heat of the vapors through the multiple layers of her protective suit. She held her breath instinctively, despite the gas mask protecting her air supply.

Oh my God, she thought. Have I been exposed?

But that wasn’t the worst part. The cloud kept on going, triggering sirens further ahead. It flooded down the corridor toward the containment threshold. Sandra and Yamato traded stunned looks. They all knew what would happen if the irradiated cloud reached the checkpoint first, what would have to happen for the safety of the entire community. They needed to be on other side of that boundary before it was too late.

Panicked, they all scrambled to their feet and ran madly for the checkpoint.

*   *   *

“Five seconds... four seconds...”

Takashi counted down over the intercom as Joe stood like a statue right outside the containment area, staring bleakly at the empty corridor beyond. He remembered kissing Sandra in the car less than an hour ago, tried to remember the last thing he said to her before they went their separate ways this morning. Had he said he loved her, or even said goodbye?

He knew he couldn’t wait much longer.

“Joe,”