October 15, 4:59 p.m.
The docks of Kobe, Japan
Daigoro Itou was freezing, even in the warmth of the early afternoon, but that sort of thing had long since stopped causing him any real alarm. The nerve condition was slowly robbing him of his ability to properly discern temperatures, and the pain that was replacing his former sensitivity was growing worse every day. He sat on the dock, slowly sipping from the bottle he carried with him. He was never one to drink much – two of his older brothers had problems enough with alcohol to warn him away – but with the diagnosis getting worse, it no longer seemed to matter.
Minoru, his oldest brother, had tried to help him when news of his condition arrived, but for all his money, there was nothing he could do to find a cure. Koichi even offered to send him to the United States, where a clinic in Colorado was reportedly working on finding a cure for his very disease. He was too proud, though – Minoru and Koichi were both out of the house by the time Daigoro was born, leaving him with two other elder brothers who ignored and tormented him. Although his oldest brothers had proven their worth to him as family time and again, he still couldn’t bring himself to accept their charity. He was in his sixties, after all. He’s had a long enough life. The only question would be whether anyone would comment on how the youngest of the Itou brothers was the one to go first.
His feet dangled out over the water, and he leaned forward from the dock, looking south across the sea. Maybe there was one other question – whether he was going to allow this stupid, terrible, humiliating disease to waste away at him, or whether he would end it himself, with honor. It would be easy, he thought. A short push off the dock and he’d be in the water, and there was nobody nearby to watch him, nobody who would suddenly rush to his rescue. Even if there was somebody in the vicinity, who would go to such lengths to save a scrawny old man? He took another sip from his bottle and looked down into his reflection. The old man below had the same eyes he’d had as a boy – bright, smart – but those eyes had been worn down with fatigue, pain, and since the diagnosis, grief. He wondered, fleetingly, what that boy would think if he saw him now. That boy, the one who had always snuck down to the movie theaters, tagging along with his older brothers in the hopes of being taken in to a monster movie with them, the boy who had harbored dreams of becoming a moviemaker himself before reality set in and he found himself in a clerical job that slowly wrung the life out of him, the boy who’d never found love and was facing a death that would come alone (and whether it came in some sterile hospital or beneath the waves of the ocean, did it make a difference?)… what would that boy say to him if he could see him now?
“Get on with it, Daigoro,” he whispered to the boy inside. “Get on with it and put me out of this agony. You’ve already squandered my entire life, why prolong my death?”
And that seemed to settle the matter. He took one last sip from his bottle, and was about to cap the bottle when he looked out across the waves and saw a quaking in the water. Some 300 yards away, he saw the sea itself shake and bulge, massive waves rolling away from the same spot in the ocean. The water rushed out in all directions, coming in and lapping against the dock. Each successive wave was getting bigger, and soon it would perhaps even crest the dock itself. Daigoro smiled. He may not have to do anything at all. He could just let the waves take him.
Beneath the dome of water, rising before him, Daigoro saw a shape begin to form. It was enormous, massive, a head the size of a tank. If it was attached to a body, the whole thing would be able to walk up to the building where he’d toiled for years and push it over. And in fact, the monolithic beast he saw looked as though it would gleefully do just that. The water continued to fall away and Daigoro – and judging from the screams behind him, the rest of the people on the docks – began to see just what was approaching. It was an enormous thing swimming up from the ocean with front flippers that moved much like a seal. Behind the flippers, though, it flailed a pair of clawed arms as long as mature pine trees. It reached out with those arms and grasped a ship that had been coasting in towards the dock. The arms, each with three long fingers and one stubby appendage that could have been a thumb, crushed the center of the ship. It buckled and crunched like the middle of a toothpaste tube, and the thing pushed it away. It was sinking already, and those deckhands that survived the initial attack were diving off into the water – on the far side of the ship from the monster, Daigoro noted.
The thing’s head was elongated like a horse, and with the same big, baleful eyes, but its eyes flowed with a green fire, and instead of a snout, its long nose ended in a tremendous beak like a turtle. The entire thing was covered in a thick, brown skin that moved and even creaked like rubber as it flailed through the water and pulled itself towards the shore. Daigoro watched, gaping, hands trembling as the beast grabbed a dock some half-mile to the east and began to pull itself onto the shore. When Daigoro saw knees appear, coming out of the waves, he knew the thing would be able to walk, and its devastation would be able to spread itself virtually anywhere. As the thing pulled itself to shore and began to shamble, on all fours, away into the city, Daigoro looked down into his trembling hands. He still had the bottle in one, the cap in the other. He looked back up at the beast, at the enormous tail that was gliding out of the water and snapping back and forth, crushing cars and boats as it flailed.
Daigoro reached out over the water, tilted his hand, and poured the contents of his bottle into the sea. Colorado, eh? Perhaps he should give Koichi’s offer a second thought.
