Project Hyperion (A Kaiju Thriller) (Kaiju #4)

The sky went bright with a loud crack and a crash of thunder. Lightning arced across the city, and a massive ball of glowing light appeared. It was yellow and swallowed several city blocks. The sphere crackled and pulsed as if it were made of pure energy. As it grew, the electrical phenomenon engulfed building after building. Security cameras around the city captured hazy, static-filled images of the creatures that eventually emerged. The first people to encounter them were torn apart. But even more people, still living, and screaming and gibbering, were dragged away into the spitting ball of fire.

After nearly twenty minutes, the globe of devastation sucked both sound and light out of the world before it winked out of existence. The crater left behind was immense. Buildings on the edge of the giant divot toppled inward, killing hundreds more still hiding in their apartments. Later, rescue workers would find that everything at the edge of the dome had been severed cleanly—buildings, roads, Metro tunnels and even human bodies, which littered the edge of the circumference of the effect. Over a million dead in just a few minutes.




Karachi, Pakistan

3 November, 0600 Hrs



AS DAWN BLED light into the sky over the city, it brought thunder and lightning. But there were no clouds in the sky.

Karachi and its environs had grown from an estimated population of five million in 1980 to over twenty million—many of them refugees from successive wars in neighboring Afghanistan, first against the Russians, then against its own people and finally against the Americans. The city eventually took measures to purify the putrid and smog-coated air by planting more gardens and building more parks. Traffic was diverted onto high-speed overpasses. Still, the city continued to grow and grow, as refugees poured in.

The newest arrival appeared just as the noisy city was waking up. The ball of light hovered in the air, just a foot off the black asphalt, between the open doors of Jinnah International Airport and the McDonald’s restaurant that sat just opposite. Hundreds of crows complained at the interruption of their normal morning routine, scavenging food from nearby trash cans and along the edges of the road. They took flight, fleeing the intruding brilliance and cawing. The ball was no larger than three feet in diameter initially. But then it grew quickly and when it stopped, the fast-food franchise and a good portion of the airport were enveloped. Lightning crackled out of the center of the blinding sphere, blasting people and nearby structures.

The noise was deafening. As a repeated sound of thunder boomed, the cracks of bone-shaking sound pierced the morning air. Screams added to the din. Then something came out of the light, tearing into anything with flesh and rending it in seconds. The attacking thing moved too quickly to be seen in the dazzling light.

Then, with no warning, the piercing noise stopped, leaving only silence in its wake.

The light disappeared.

The sphere of devastation came and went in just ten minutes, but it took a scoop of the city with it. Cleaved buildings stood with their plumbing and electrical wires exposed; the ground was a perfectly smooth crater where previously asphalt, cars and pedestrians had been. It was as if a small sun had briefly made an appearance right on the surface of the Earth, clawing away all she held, until nothing remained. The tally of the number of dead or missing would take weeks, but in the end, it would be in the tens of thousands.




Seoul, South Korea

3 November, 1000 Hrs



THE CABLE CAR that took visitors up to the top of Namsan Mountain, and the huge communications tower on top of the mountain, began to shake violently, before a blast of lightning severed the cable completely.

Fifteen people sat inside the car that had nearly reached the top of its 1900-foot journey up a graduated height of 500 feet in altitude. The car plummeted 60 feet to the ground before they began to bounce and slide down the mountainside, leaving long grooves in the soil. Despite the impacts and jolts, all fifteen people survived the fall with nothing more than broken bones, multiple contusions and various cuts and scrapes.

They were the lucky ones.

As they plummeted down the mountain on one side, a sizzling globe of death appeared on the other side of the steel and concrete 777-foot tower at the summit of the mountain, chewing a hole in everything it touched. Spreading out in an arc of chaos and destruction, the unknown phenomenon scoured the northwest side of the mountain, erasing the Jung-gu and Seongdong-gu neighborhoods before imploding and leaving nothing more than a scar on the ground that stretched three miles in diameter.




Cairo, Egypt

3 November, 0300 Hrs



AT THREE IN the morning, even a behemoth like Cairo slumbers. The incessant honking of vehicle horns dies down for just a few hours. They would start again around 5 a.m., but the cacophony would be softer than usual.

The Egyptians, even in the middle of the night, were the first to mobilize military units against the phenomenon, their forces on a constant ready standby, after the recent events of Arab Spring.