Kaiju Corps

  KAIJU CORPS

  Matthew Dennion

  Copyright 2017 by Matthew Dennion

  www.severedpress.com

  This book is written with fond memories of the Tokusatsu Television shows and movies that I loved as a kid, and to my sister who indulged my brother and me by letting us watch those movies without arguing over TV time!

  Prologue

  Endless emptiness surrounded the Signal as it made its way through the vast abyss of space. The Signal had no understanding or concern of things such as life, time, or distance. The Signal simply continued to hurtle through the cosmos, looking for the next planet that had sufficient technology to receive it. Once the Signal had found a planet that had the required level of technology to upload itself into, the Signal would cascade over the planet and insert itself into that planet’s systems. Then it would continue its journey through space. While the Signal itself would continue its never-ending journey, the part of itself that it uploaded into the planet’s technological systems would carry out its programming and then return home.

  The Signal had reached hundreds of planets. Each of those planets carried sentient lifeforms on it prior to the Signal arriving. After the Signal had uploaded itself into a planet’s technology, the planet’s resources and populations were decimated, leaving only a sufficient amount of each to maintain a breeding population.

  The ever-widening Signal was quickly approaching a solar system. The Signal passed over the small planet of Pluto, the frozen rock known as Uranus, the ringed planet Saturn, and the gaseous giant Jupiter. The Signal cascaded over the red planet known as Mars and then it headed for the one planet in the solar system that had the sufficient level of technology required to upload itself into. The Signal made contact with the planet’s satellites where it quickly began reprogramming them. The Signal then continued toward the planet itself where it began to infiltrate the databases of every computer system on the planet. It would be several days before any of the planet’s inhabitants would notice what was occurring to their systems, but by that point, it would be far too late for the population of the planet to act. The fate of the planet’s population was sealed. Within three months, two-thirds of the living organisms on the planet would be deceased, and most of the remaining third would be sent into space on the long journey back to where the Signal had originated from. A small breeding population of the remaining organisms would be kept alive to ensure a steady supply of the resources they provided.

  Chapter 1

  Catskill Mountains Horsemen Facility

  The warm water from the shower poured down Nick’s body as the steam filled his bathroom. Nick took a series of deep breaths and once he had slowed his heart rate, he sat down. He had just completed another training exercise, and as usual, the training had taken a lot out of him both physically and mentally. The warm shower helped his body to relax as his bones and muscles shifted back into their original positions. Nick focused on the sound of the falling water and he used the steady white noise to calm his mind. He kept quietly repeating, “I am Nick. I am a human being. I am in control of myself.” Nick repeated those words for over ten minutes before he finally let other thoughts enter his mind. His Instructors had taught him that reminding himself that he was a human with a name was crucial to his ability to maintain a sense of self and a normal life.

  Nick laughed sarcastically to himself, “A normal life. As if that was ever an option for me.” He could feel his back muscles twitch beneath his skin and he knew that it meant he needed to calm himself down. He took a series of deep breaths and thought back to his decompression training. His Instructors had taught him that focusing on his life and the things that were important to him as a human would help him retain control of himself. Nick closed his eyes and he tried to think about what a normal life meant in regards to him and the other three members of the Kaiju Corps.

  Nick thought back on what was defined as his life by the Instructors. Nick and his fellow Kaiju Corps members were genetically engineered by a group of individuals who called themselves The Horsemen, as in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse mentioned in the Bible. The Horsemen are a group that is composed of some of the greatest scientific minds in the world. They come from nearly every country on the planet and yet they answer to no single nation. The Horsemen know that the extinction of the human race is an inevitability. One way or another, the time would come when humanity would cease to exist, as did all species of living things. What the Horsemen tried to do was to limit the causes of the extinction and to prolong humanity’s existence for as long as possible. There were potential extinction level threats that the Horsemen could influence subtly like Global Warming or overpopulation. There were some threats that there was nothing they could do about, like the potential of the super volcano under Yellow Stone National Park erupting and covering the earth in a planet-wide cloud of ash.

  Then there were the threats that could only be addressed through force, such as power-mad dictators armed with weapons of mass destruction or the threat of extraterrestrial invasion. In order to deal with these possible threats, the Horsemen had created the Kaiju Corps. The Horsemen gathered human embryos and subjected them to genetic modification. The embryos were infused with steroids, hormones, both extinct and living animal DNA, as well as controlled doses of radiation. After years of failed attempts, the Horsemen were finally able to have four of the embryos grow into infants. The modifications that were done to these infants would give them the ability to protect the world from even the direst physical threats. The infants that were engineered by the Horsemen would have the ability to turn into the gigantic creatures that the film industry had dubbed kaiju.

  Nick was one of those infants. When he was young, he always had the sense that there was someone else inside of his body. Like all of his fellow Kaiju Corps members, Nick had amazing physical skills when he was an adolescent. He could run at the speed of an Olympic track star and he was strong enough to bench press a car. It wasn’t until Nick reached puberty that his other-self first emerged. Nick’s Instructors had made him fully aware of what would one day happen to him. That he would eventually find that he had the ability to turn into a giant monster. When it first happened, Nick was only fourteen years old. He vividly remembered the pain that accompanied his first change. He felt as though his bones and muscles were forcing their way out of his skin. He can still remember the first time that he felt the pain of his skin ripping apart as the kaiju within him tore through his body. Nick looked down to see everything around him shrinking as he grew to an enormous size. He would later be told that his kaiju-self had grown to a size of nearly two hundred feet tall.

  As he watched everything around him shrinking, Nick noticed that it wasn’t just his size that was changing. The entire structure of his body was morphing into something new. Nick looked at his hands to see long green claws covered in scales. He turned his thick and powerful arm over to see a long fin-like appendage that stretched from his wrist to his forearm. He then noticed that his shoulders and chest were covered in a thick caprice that resembled the back of a crocodile. He looked further down his body to see that scales covered the lower half of his torso and thighs. Both of his knees had short but thick horns protruding out from them. He moved his foot and he noticed that what had once been five toes had merged into three thick digits. One digit extended out from the base of his foot while the other two had shifted to the sides of his feet to support the weight of his massive body. Nick recalled trying to speak only to hear an earthshaking roar emerge from his mouth.

  Nick walked over to the side of the installation, and it was there that he first saw his face. His face had merged into something like a combination of a lizard and a fish. His jaw now protruded forward and he opened his mouth to see l
ong serrated teeth. His eyes had been elongated and stretched further back on the side of his head. His hair was gone and it was replaced by a fin that ran from between his eyes to the back of his head. When Nick saw his reflection, his mind was overwhelmed with rage. He can remember staring at the wall of the installation as a painful burning sensation began to form in his throat. A second later, a huge fireball erupted from Nick’s mouth and exploded against the wall. From that point on, he could only remember snapshot memories of his first transformation. He could remember vague images of a small town and people running away from him. His next memory was of the cool and calming ocean.

  When Nick regained his senses, he was aboard a large yacht owned by the Horsemen. Nick can remember waking up and seeing one of the Instructors sitting next to him. The Instructor leaned forward, held out his hand, and said, “Hello, Nick. I am one of your Instructors and my name is Timothy.” Timothy had explained to Nick what had occurred after he had seen his reflection in the side of the installation. “When you saw your kaiju-self, you became overwhelmed with rage. It seems that in your kaiju form, you have the ability to project bursts of flames with temperatures reaching those of volcanic magma. You burned and smashed through the installation. You then destroyed several towns before the military attacked you and drove you out to sea. They followed you for as long as they could, but your kaiju-self was able to move faster than even their fastest ships, and when you dove beneath the water, their planes lost sight of you.”

  Nick can remember shaking with fear when he heard the news. He recalled looking at Timothy. “Did… did anyone die as a result of what I did?”

  Timothy placed his hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Several hundred people died, but none of those deaths are your fault.” Nick began to tear up, and for the first time, one of Nick’s Instructors hugged him. “Those deaths are my fault, Nick. Mine and the rest of the Instructors. We should have been better prepared for what would happen when you changed. We should have worked with you more on being psychologically prepared for what would happen when you first became a kaiju. We failed you, Nick. We failed you and all of those people that died.” Timothy pulled away and looked Nick in the eye. “I can’t bring those people back to life or remove the pain that you feel over their deaths. What I can do is promise you that going forward, we are going to learn from this tragedy and use what we have learned to save billions of lives.”

  Timothy let go of Nick then he picked up the television remote. He turned it on to show a CNN news feed. The television was running footage of the devastation that Nick had left in his wake. The ticker at the bottom of the screen kept running a line that said, Leviathan causes havoc in Asia. Timothy gestured to the screen. “As I said, this is a horrible tragedy but we can take something from it.”

  Nick shook his head as his eyes filled with tears. “What can we possibly take from this?”

  Timothy walked up to the screen and pointed to the ticker. “Your kaiju-self is going to need a name and this news station has just given it to you. The world is now aware of the existence of Leviathan.”

  As painful as the memory of Nick’s first transformation was, he always thought about it when he needed to consider the high points in his life. This was a high point for him because up until then, none of his Instructors had told him their names. They were simply referred to as Instructor. They had also been indifferent to Nick. The Instructors were not callous or neglectful to Nick; they had simply carried out their duties without offering much encouragement or emotional support. When Nick had met Timothy, he immediately knew that he had found someone he could confide in. From that day on, Timothy was there for Nick after each and every one of his transformations. He was also there for Nick on a personal level. He helped Nick with other life skills, such as learning to drive a car, shaving, and how to better interact with the other members of the Kaiju Corps outside of training. Timothy quickly became the father that Nick had never had and never knew he was missing. With Timothy’s help, Nick quickly learned how to retain his human intelligence when he was in his kaiju form.

  Nick opened his eyes and then stood up in the shower. He stretched his neck from side to side as he thought about the other people in his life that brought him joy. Nick rolled his shoulders to loosen them up as he focused on the only other people on Earth that he felt close to. Those people were the other infants who had been modified like him. They were the people who would join him in forming the Kaiju Corps.

  The first person who came to mind was Nick’s best friend and the man whom he considered to be his brother, Jerome. As the only two male members of the Kaiju Corps, Nick and Jerome shared a special bond. Nick stood about six feet tall and he was of Caucasian descent while Jerome was of African descent and stood over six foot six. Due to the fact that they had both undergone the same enhancements as embryos, they shared similar physical abilities. As the two male members of their small group, they shared a special bond. They were born at the same time, they were raised together, and they saw each other as brothers.

  When they were young, they often played together without the restrictions that were placed on their interactions with the females. Before Nick had met Timothy, Jerome was the only person in existence that Nick looked at as a source of emotional support. Nick and Jerome understood each other in a way that no one else could. They could relate to each other as children, and now that they were each in their early twenties, they could relate to each other as young men. Even more than the bond they shared as friends and brothers, they shared a closer bond of having the shared experience of having an other-self that was a giant monster.

  While they shared the ability to morph into a kaiju, there were dramatic differences in their experiences as monsters both physically and mentally. While Nick became the scaled Leviathan, a reptilian creature that was at home in the water, Jerome changed into the winged creature that was a master of the skies. Nick recalled that shortly after his initial transformation, Jerome came to see him. Jerome was eager to learn from Nick how he had forced himself to transform into Leviathan. Nick tried to explain to Jerome that he truly had no idea how the transformation had first occurred. Nick can specifically recall telling Jerome that it, “Just sort of happened.”

  In the weeks following Nick’s transformation, Jerome had pushed himself hard trying to transform into a kaiju. Nick recalled how Jerome would push himself to the point of physical exhaustion in hopes that it would trigger his initial transformation. Nick could still see Jerome sitting in the large hangars of various installations where he would meditate for hours on end in an attempt to transform himself. When the transformation finally occurred for Jerome, he handled it far differently than Nick had. Nick could recall Jerome’s initial transformation with complete clarity. Jerome was attempting to pick up a six-ton forklift. The weight was twice the maximum limit that Jerome had previously lifted. He was straining to move the forklift when his skin began to split as feathers protruded through it. Jerome quickly began growing in size as feathers continued to sprout across his body and massive wings grew out of his shoulder blades.

  Nick watched in awe as Jerome grew and lifted the forklift off the ground as if it was a child’s toy. When Jerome had finished transforming, he stood at roughly one hundred and eighty feet tall. Jerome still had the body structure of a human with a torso, powerful arms, and two thick legs. His body was covered in feathers and the wings that had grown out of his back looked similar to the wings of an eagle. They extended out from his shoulders and the tips of his wings ended parallel to his calves. Jerome’s feet and hands ended in sharp raptor-like talons. His face had taken on the visage of a hawk and his head was wreathed with long pointed horns.

  While Nick could recall every detail of how Jerome had appeared physically, it was Jerome’s mental state that stuck with Nick. Nick had lost his mind after his first transformation, but Jerome was in total control of his kaiju-self. While Nick had been scared and terrified of his kaiju-self, Jerome immediately accepted who he was, and
instead of seeing himself as horrific like Nick did, Jerome saw himself as a majestic and noble creature. Jerome was able to move his new body around with ease. The massive beast that was the kaiju-self of Jerome gestured for the large doors of the hangar that he was in to be opened. The Instructors complied with the kaiju’s request. Jerome’s kaiju-self walked out of the hangar and then he stretched his wings to their full capacity. He flapped them several times and then he took off into the air. He would return several hours later amongst several reports of a giant flying monster. When Jerome’s kaiju-self landed, he immediately started to change back into his human form. Jerome walked into the hangar to find Nick and the Instructors waiting for him. Jerome looked around at everyone in the hangar and he only said one thing, “Garudasaurus. From this point on, my kaiju-self shall be referred to as Garudasaurus. In honor of the god, Garuda, and the mighty dinosaurs that had once ruled this planet.” Jerome then calmly exited the hangar and headed for his quarters.

  It was obvious to Nick, and to the Instructors, that another change had occurred to Jerome in addition to becoming a kaiju. Jerome had clearly established that he was the person to be the field leader of the Kaiju Corps.

  Jerome was met by an Instructor named Thomas who served the same role for him as Timothy did for Nick. The difference was where Nick needed support in dealing with his change, Jerome needed guidance in how to be a leader.

  Nick turned around in the shower and arched his back. He was two-thirds of the way through his de-escalation process. His mind was focusing on the good things in his world that made life worth living. Thinking of his first meeting with Timothy gave Nick a sense of support and security. Recalling his relationship with Jerome and his brother’s ability to control his kaiju-self helped to give Nick a sense of both pride and inner strength.