Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters by James Swallow, David Annandale, James Lovegrove, Larry Correia, Peter Clines, C.L Werner, Timothy W. Long, J.C. Koch, Natania Barron Read Free Book Online Page A

absolute truth. She could well believe it was the divine hand itself that rose to strike the abomination that had dared lay waste to the world.
    She could believe all these things. She did not, because the far greater belief that she had been fighting was now upon her.
    The Eschaton reached an arm forward. With sovereign contempt, it batted aside the Hand of God. The explosions were the sad dissolution of faith.
    For a few seconds more, the Eschaton did nothing else. It seemed to be waiting for the full significance of the moment to fall upon the assembly. Beside the Panther, Evans had collapsed into a ball, his head to the ground, defeated. Caldwell looked back at Bickford. Bereft of his illusion, he had fallen to his knees. The full truth of what he had been telling his sister was hitting him. There was a divine force at large in the universe, and he was looking at it. His mouth hung open in an agony of awe.
    Caldwell faced the immensity. The Eschaton rumbled. The terrible sucking sound began once more. The fullness of epiphany rocked Caldwell. She was battered by the belief that was knowledge, the knowledge that this was the only deity her world would ever know.
    Caldwell didn’t fight the truth, but she didn’t surrender. She flew beyond grief and despair, and seized the only weapon left to her: defiance. Standing upright to the last, she howled at the Eschaton. She shouted into the dread second of final silence.
    She was roaring still when the Eschaton opened its jaws wide and gave them all their baptism.



Day of the Demigods
    Peter Stenson
     
    Picture this: a reclining, hundred-twenty foot stud propped up on his elbow, giving you a slight wink and suggestive spread of his legs. He’s the rarest mix of pure strength and sensual contours. His stomach is like a stacked row of cars, nothing but rock hard definition. He’s got a linebacker’s neck. His facial structure is nothing but Eastern Block rigidity. His lips are the soft pillowy promises of every romantic comedy; his incisors are Afghani mountains. This stud has the body shape of God, if God were in the form of his Greek sea counterpart carved out of a slab of marble killer whale.
    Yeah, now it’s coming to you.
    This vision so unimaginable it verges on comical.
    But put those doubts aside, because that beautiful, seven ton stud stretched out beneath Los Angeles, working one off while giving a peace sign to his own dazzling reflection in the city’s liquid sewage, that’s this guy, Sweetgrass, the motherfucker who’s about to take Hollywood by storm.
    And why shouldn’t I?
    My pedigree is the wet dream of every dog breeder. Like all sea-born Kaiju, I was conceived during a blue moon in the depths of the Southern Pacific. But unlike my fellow reptilian counterparts, my mom, God-rest-her-soul, was a bit of a…let’s just call her promiscuous . She was into groups, inter-species gangbangs, and so there you have it, me, a smorgasbord of the ocean’s baddest creatures. Mix that with the rumor that my great-great grandfather on my mother’s side was Godzilla’s second cousin…yeah, Hollywood, here I come.
    Which is where I belong.
    Not swimming at the base of oceanic trenches. Not like all my brothers and sisters who think they’re achieving separate but equal by cowardly hiding. Fuck that noise. I tell them this, and they laugh. They tell me I’m a mutt bastard, and go ahead and see how much Hollywood would love a freak monster with some obvious giant octopus blood in my heritage (full disclosure, they’re correct about the damned octopus. Instead of a tail, I have a giant gelatin hump with three flaccid tentacles that drag behind me like the lace of a wedding gown). But fuck it. I’m amazing from the front.
    I drink the sewage underneath Gold’s Gym in West Hollywood twice a day, and the piss of those dudes has enough Andro to make every muscle (sans my ghetto booty) hard as blood diamonds. Which brings me to my point: Hollywood loves beauty, but