Her phone chimed, prodding her onward toward her day. Every part of her morning was programmed into the phone as a series of reminders. Otherwise, she languished in the shower, or ate too slowly, or forgot to iron her clothes...and without fail, she’d show up late to an audition, which was the quickest way to lose the part, unless your last name was Lawrence or Johansen. Do they even have to audition?
She picked up the phone and headed for the bathroom. Normally, she’d hit the exercise bike first, then eat, then shower, but today’s early audition meant skipping all that and eating an energy bar on the way. In the bathroom, she shed her clothing, turned the shower to scalding hot and waited for the steam to start rising. While LA, to her, was hot all year long, especially now in the summer, she still hadn’t broken the habit of taking a hot shower.
Steam curled up over the shower curtain, and she pulled it open. She put one foot in the shower and stopped.
Was the ground shaking?
Another earthquake? She stood still, attuning her body to the floor beneath her feet. She could take a few steps back and be in the doorway, a not bad place to take cover during a bad earthquake, but she was on the second floor. If a bad quake hit, she’d feel better being outside. But here she was, buck naked and living next door to a guy she called ‘Dirty Phil,’ partly because he was a grubby kind of guy, but also because he was a leering perv. If she had to run outside because of an earthquake, she was going to do it fully clothed.
The shaking returned, rumbling steadily under her feet. She’d felt several quakes since moving to LA ten years prior, but none felt like this. They normally came in waves, lifting up and then sliding away. This was constant.
Increasing.
Maybe the wave is still coming? she thought. If so, it was going to be huge.
She yanked her foot out of the shower, bolted into the bedroom and reached for her clothes. The shorts went on first, commando style. She started to pull the tank top over her head, but she turned to leave. She could dress while running. But as she neared the door, a loud crash pulled her eyes toward the window.
I’m too late, she thought, turning, muscles coiling in preparation to run through the living room, out the front door and down the steps to the palm tree-filled courtyard.
But what she saw outside the window locked her in place, not because standing still was a better idea, but because some primal part of her brain knew that running or not would have no bearing on how things played out. She finally understood the deer-in-headlights phenomenon that everyone in Maine talked about. She could see into the future. Her fate was set. She was going to die.
The creature outside her window, charging down the hill, through Montrose and on a trajectory that would take it to the more densely populated cities of Burbank, Glendale and Los Angeles beyond, was not Nemesis. But as it emerged through the haze, she could see some of Nemesis in it—the bright orange patches that could set cities on fire, and the overlapping plates of armor—but the comparison ended there. This...was a giant spider, with a wicked looking tail that whipped back and forth, shattering homes and lives. The creature itself was a hundred feet long, and nearly as wide thanks to its eight legs, but the tail added another hundred to its reach.
The worst thing about the monster wasn’t its appearance, massive size or shocking speed. It was that as it ran down the hillside, flattening everything in its path, it was also plucking people up—from where they stood outside, through building windows and out of cars—and cramming them into its mouth, gobbling them down. It was like its many eyes, limbs and tail were working in tandem to guide it forward and simultaneously feast on the smorgasbord of humanity. There were ten million people in Los Angeles county. If this thing was just here to eat...as Nemesis had done on its way to Boston, it could act like a lawn mower, carving a path of destruction up and down the valley, tearing people from every nook and cranny of the over-populated cities beyond Montrose.
All of this flitted through her senses and mind in the two seconds it took the Kaiju to close the distance. As the monstrous form reached her building, and plowed right through it, Brearley clutched her arms over her head and ducked. She wasn’t in a doorway. Wasn’t protected by anything other than her own hands.
But she survived.
A breeze tickled her arms, and she lifted them away from her head. The back wall of her bedroom still stood, though the window was cracked. But the side walls and the entire front of her apartment, along with most of the building, was crushed to the ground. She looked up at the spider Kaiju as it continued down the hill, lifted Dirty Phil in one of its long arms and shoved his screaming form into its gnawing mouth.