Godzilla: The Official Movie Novelization

ELEVEN

The transport chopper roared through the sky toward the USS Saratoga, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered super-carrier more than a thousand feet in length. One of the largest warships ever constructed, the Saratoga rose twenty stories above the water and was accompanied by a sizable naval strike group composed of smaller frigates, cruisers, an oiler, a supply ship, and other support vessels. Aboard the ‘copter, Ford stuck close to his dad while trying to keep up with their rapidly changing situation. One minute, he and Joe had been stuck in the ruins of the base, the next they had been hustled aboard a waiting chopper…

Hang on, Dad, he thought. Just a few more minutes.

A medic struggled to keep Joe alive, monitoring the battered engineer’s vital signs, but seemed to be fighting a losing battle. Captain Hampton and a pair of civilian scientists looked on as Joe feebly clung to life. Ford still wasn’t quite sure why he and his dad were now getting special treatment, after being arrested as trespassers before, but he wasn’t about to question this unexpected turn of events. All that mattered was keeping his father alive. They had a second chance to rebuild their fractured relationship, and Ford didn’t want to lose that. He wanted his father back.

“You were right,” Ford said, squeezing Joe’s hand. His eyes welled up. His throat tightened. “I’m sorry.”

Joe gazed up at Ford through bloodshot eyes. His voice was weak and raspy as he struggled to speak. Ford leaned in to hear him.

“Whatever it takes,” he said faintly. “You have to end this…”

He began to slip away, perhaps for good.

“Dad—”

“Whatever it takes…”

“Dad, stay with me!” Ford exclaimed. “Dad!”

Joe’s eyes lost focus, staring somewhere beyond this world. Ford watched helplessly as the medic scrambled to save his failing patient, who was fading fast…

The Saratoga’s Combat Direction Center, located below decks, was packed and buzzing. Banks of monitors and work stations, manned by uniformed analysts, were jammed with data feeds. Armed services personnel, sporting the uniforms of several allied nationalities, were crammed into the war room, which reminded Serizawa of the crow’s nest back at the base. The overhead lights were kept dim to increase the visibility of the various screens and graphic displays. A backlit table map projected the creature’s potential courses, as calculated by the incoming data. As the simulations ran, dotted lines crossed the ocean, branching off in all directions, but with most heading east across the Pacific. Each dotted line was accompanied by a flurry of algorithmic probability data: wind speed, currents, altitude, weather conditions, and so on. Quietly observing the operations, Serizawa was just selfish enough to be relieved that the creature appeared to be winging away from his homeland.

Not that anywhere in the world was truly safe at the moment.

“Okay! Listen up!” Captain Hampton said, taking the floor. To say that his manner was “brisk” would be an understatement. “Quiet please!” He waited, but not for long, for the general chatter and hubbub to die down. “Briefing is up. New faces. New info. From here out, we do not try to move quickly, we will move quickly.” He turned to introduce a figure to his right. “Admiral?”

A senior officer, with cropped white hair and a lean, taciturn face, stepped forward. He gestured at a monitor displaying a blurry image of the creature that had emerged from the cocoon. Hushed voices murmured in awe.

“Good afternoon,” the admiral said crisply. “This is our needle in a haystack, people. A ‘massive unidentified terrestrial organism,’ which from this point forward will be referred to as ‘MUTO.’ The world still thinks this was an earthquake, and it would be preferable if that were to remain so. It was last sighted heading east across the Pacific. However, this… animal’s electromagnetism has been playing havoc with radar, satellite feeds, you name it, leaving us, for the moment, blind as bats.” A frown deepened the well-earned creases on his face. “I emphasize ‘for the moment’ because I have every confidence in the world that you will find it. We have to.”

His remarks concluded, he surrendered the floor and sought out Serizawa at the back of the room. He extended his hand.

“Doctor Serizawa,” the admiral greeted him. “William Stenz. We’re glad to have you aboard.”

Serizawa accepted Stenz’s hand and bowed slightly. He spied Graham beckoning to him from the open hatchway to the command center. He had dispatched her earlier to examine Joe Brody’s findings. He nodded back to her in acknowledgment. He was anxious to hear what she had to say.

“Will you excuse me, Admiral?”

Joe Brody’s face looked more at peace than it had been for at least fifteen years. His eyes were closed forever, seeing only the next world. Ford could only hope that, whatever had become of his father’s tortured spirit, somewhere Joe was gazing on his wife’s beloved face once more.

Ford stood by numbly in the Saratoga’s well-equipped medical bay as the body bag holding his father’s remains was zipped shut. A medic offered him a sympathetic look, but Ford was too stunned to respond. The tears would come in time, he hoped, but right now he just felt drained and lost. San Francisco seemed more than a world away. He wondered how he was going to break this news to Sam. The boy had never really known his grandfather. Would he even understand that now he never would?

“Lieutenant Brody, sir?”

A young petty officer intruded on Ford’s grief, as gently as he could. His voice held a distinctly Midwestern accent.

“Would you please come with me?”

Serizawa and his team had been assigned guest quarters upon the Saratoga. Even on a ship as large as the super-carrier, space was at a premium so the cramped cabin was a tight squeeze, but they were making do. Monarch scientists worked beside Navy technicians, monitoring data feeds at various workstations, even as he and Graham each spoke urgently on their respective phones.

“Yes,” he reported in Japanese, “the patterns match, but I can’t crack the significance.”

Joe Brody’s antique zip disks, rescued from the M.U.T.O. base, were stacked on a desk beside Serizawa’s research materials. Scattered photos and reports held fragments of a history that began years before Serizawa was born: grainy images of a gargantuan creature rising from the sea six decades ago, archive photos of an atomic bomb blast on a remote Pacific atoll, shots from the Philippine mine disaster, reports on the Janjira nuclear plant disaster, and updates on the singular cocoon found on the site afterwards.

It appeared that he and Brody had been colleagues of a sort, pursuing similar lines of investigation all these years.

What a pity, he reflected, that we never knew each other existed.

He overheard Graham dealing with the public-relations issue. “Yes, sir,” she said into her phone. “Media is reporting an earthquake. The cover’s holding for now, but if it—”

A knock at the hatchway interrupted both phone calls. Graham went to answer it.

“Dr. Serizawa?” Petty Officer Thatch stood in the doorway. He had Ford Brody with him, still wearing part of a rundown radiation suit that had seen better days. The man’s wrist was chafed, but his handcuffs had been removed en route to the carrier. Serizawa nodded at Thatch that it was all right for him to leave Ford with them. Ford’s passport had been found among his belongings; a quick investigation had confirmed that he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, currently on leave. Thatch departed and Graham escorted Ford into the room.

Ford, who looked more than a little shell-shocked, approached the desk warily. His eyes widened as he spotted the photos spread out across the desk, which Serizawa made no effort to conceal. Ford was visibly taken aback by the startling images. Serizawa sympathized; what these pictures displayed would be shocking to the young man, who had just lost his father as well. His entire world had changed overnight.

“Mr. Brody, my condolences,” Serizawa said.

Ford stared at them. Pain, anger, and confusion all seemed to simmer inside the unfortunate young man, who was understandably overwhelmed by recent events. Powerful emotions played across Ford’s face, while his body language was tense. Serizawa began to fear that the grieving lieutenant would be of little use to their investigation. Judging from his reaction to the photos, Ford was apparently not fully conversant with his father’s theories.

Graham tried to secure Ford’s cooperation anyway. “We’re deeply sorry for your loss, Lieutenant. But I’m afraid we need your help. Your father’s data—”

“No, you first,” he snapped. His nerves and temper were obviously at the breaking point. “Who are you people?”

Graham shot a questioning look at Serizawa, letting him make the call. He nodded, regarding Ford with sympathy. This man had been through so much already. He deserved to know what his father had given his life for.

“Come in please, Mr. Brody. Come in and we will show you.”

Ford stepped deeper into the cabin. Graham shut the door behind him.

Flickering images played upon the wall of the cabin. Hooked into Graham’s laptop, a portable digital projector provided relevant visuals as Serizawa attempted to explain.

“In 1954,” he began, “the first time a nuclear submarine ever reached the lowest depths, it awakened something.”

“The Americans first thought it was the Russians,” Graham added. “The Russians thought that it was the Americans. All those nuclear tests in the Pacific? Not tests…”

“They were trying to kill it.” Serizawa indicated the ancient film footage from the 1950s. “Him.”

Ford’s jaw dropped. Breaking eye contact with Serizawa, he looked more closely at the projected images of the 1954 A-bomb detonation, the bomb with the cartoon lizard inscribed on its cone, a mushroom cloud rising over the once-tranquil Pacific Ocean, and, finally, impossibly, the grainy silhouette of a titanic beast rising up from the sea, a row of jagged fins dimly visible along its spine.

“An ancient alpha predator,” Serizawa explained.

“Millions of years older than mankind,” Graham said, “from a time when the Earth was ten times more radioactive than it is today. The animal — and others like it—consumed that radiation as a food source. But as radiation levels on the surface naturally subsided, these creatures adapted to live deeper in the oceans, farther underground, absorbing radiation from the planet’s core. The organization we work for, Monarch, was established in the wake of this discovery. A multinational organization, formed in secrecy, to search for him, study him, learn everything we could.”

Ford stared at the footage. The images were blurry, but the creature’s gargantuan proportions and general outline were clear.

“We call him Godzilla,” Serizawa said.

The name was derived from a legend of the islands: a mythical king of monsters known as Gojira. The name had been Americanized by the U.S. Military during their initial attempts to bomb the newly discovered behemoth out of existence.

“The top of a primordial ecosystem,” Graham elaborated. “A god for all intents and purposes.”

Ford gaped at the images, struggling to process what he was hearing and seeing. “Monsters…”

“That is one word for them,” Serizawa agreed. He used a handheld remote to call up images of the “cavern” in the Philippines. “Fifteen years ago, we found the fossil of another giant animal in the Philippines. Like Godzilla, but this creature died long ago, killed by these…” Close-ups of the MUTO spores appeared on the wall.

“Parasitic organisms,” Graham said. “One dormant, but the other hatched. Catalyzed when a mining company unknowingly drilled into its tomb. The hatchling burrowed straight for the nearest source of radiation, your father’s power plant in Janjira, and cocooned there. Absorbing the radioactive fuel to gestate, grow.”

“Until it hatched like a butterfly into the creature you saw,” Serizawa. “We call it a MUTO.”

The biology, in fact, was fairly basic, albeit on a monstrous scale. The larval form of various insects and arthropods were basically eating machines, consuming massive amounts of nutrients before creating a cocoon in which to undergo the metamorphosis into their adult stage. Serizawa called up an image of the massive cocoon, which had been discovered fifteen years ago atop the ruins of the Janjira plant, not long after the earlier disaster in the Philippines.

“You’re saying you knew about this… thing… the whole time?” Ford shook his head, trying to take it all in. “And kept it a secret? Lied to everyone?”

Serizawa remembered a family photo he had found among Ford’s effects.

“You have a son, Mr. Brody. Would you tell him there are monsters in the world? Beyond our control? We believed that horror was better kept buried.”

“But you let it feed?” Ford said. “Why not kill it when you had the chance?”

“It was absorbing radiation from the reactors,” Graham said. “Vast doses, like a sponge. We worried killing it might have released that radiation, endangering millions.”

Serizawa nodded. “The MUTO caused the catastrophe, but also prevented it from spreading.” Without the cocoon, and the immense pupa developing inside it, the quarantine zone would have indeed been the radioactive wasteland they had let the world believe it was. “That’s why Monarch’s mission was to contain it, to study its biology. To understand it.”

But, yes,” he thought regretfully, we waited too long.

“We knew the creature was having an electrical effect on everything within a close proximity,” Graham said. “What we didn’t know was that it could harness that same power in an EMP attack.”

Footage from Janjira showed the winged creature unleashing its electromagnetic pulse — a heartbeat before the pulse shorted out the monitors.

“Your father did,” Graham said. “He predicted it.”

“What else did he say?” Serizawa asked. “Anything at all?”

“I–I don’t know,” Ford confessed, his voice cracking. “I always thought he was crazy, obsessed. I didn’t listen.” He ran a hand through his hair, overwrought, while he visibly struggled to recall his father’s theories. “He said it was some kind of animal call. Like something… talking.”

“Talking?” Serizawa sat up straight. Was Ford implying there was more than one signal?

Ford nodded. “Yeah, he was studying something. Echolocation.”

Serizawa and Graham stared at each other in shock. Ford clearly had no idea what a bombshell he’d just dropped, but the two scientists immediately grasped the implications. They glanced down at an indistinct snapshot of the majestic creature from the ocean’s floor, last seen sixty years ago.

Could they truly be dealing with… him?

“If the MUTO was talking that day,” Serizawa reasoned, “your father must have discovered something talking back.”

Gripped by a sense of extraordinary urgency, he turned to Graham. “Go back through the data, search for a response call.”

She sat down at her laptop, while the projector continued to cycle through the relevant images. Serizawa slumped down into a chair. Ford stared at the wall, trying to make sense of it all. It was a lot to absorb.

“This parasite… it’s still out there,” he said. “Where’s it headed?”

“The MUTO is still young, still growing,” Serizawa said. “It will be looking for food.”

“Sources of radiation,” Graham added, glancing up from her laptop. “We’re monitoring all known sites, but if we don’t find it soon…”

Her voice trailed off, not needing to say more.

“It killed both my parents,” Ford said. “There must be something we can do.”

Serizawa had his doubts, at least as far as humanity’s ability to cope with the threat.

“Nature has an order, Mr. Brody. A power to rebalance.”

He stared up at the wall, where Godzilla could be glimpsed once more. The U.S. Army had attempted to destroy the beast with an atomic bomb, but no remains had been found afterwards. Some believed (or hoped) that Godzilla had been completely vaporized by the blast, but that may have been wishful thinking.

“I believe he is that power.”