Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization Read Free Page A

looking for. “The ceiling… it’s bone. It’s the sternum. We’re inside a ribcage.”
    Before Boyd could process that, the rest of the globe lights popped, flooding the vast cavern with cold white light. Serizawa turned about, taking in the entire scene. Now that he knew what to look for, the impossible truth was right before his eyes. Gigantic rib bones, curving upwards like the buttresses of a medieval cathedral, formed the walls of the “cavern.” A bony spine, composed of huge, boulder-sized vertebrae, ran across the floor beneath their feet, stretching the length of several football fields. Serizawa realized that he was literally standing on the long-buried backbone of some incredibly gargantuan lifeform.
    Graham stepped away from Boyd, before the speechless foreman could start pelting them with questions. Like Serizawa, she rotated slowly to absorb the full magnitude of what they had discovered. Her eyes were wide behind the visor of her gas mask. She drew closer to Serizawa.
    “Is it
Him
?” she asked quietly. “Is it possible?”
    Serizawa shook his head. “This is far older.”
    A hush fell over the cavern as everyone coped with Serizawa’s stunning revelation. Boyd shook his head in disbelief, while some of the work crew looked like they were on the verge of bolting. Serizawa recalled the myth of Jonah and the whale, as well another legend native to the small Japanese fishing village where he’d grown up…
    “Guys!” a voice called out from deeper within the cavern. It belonged to Kenji, a young graduate student who had recently joined Serizawa’s team. “You gotta see this!”
    The urgency in Kenji’s voice could not be missed. Serizawa and the others hurried toward him, while trying not to stumble over the rubble and vertebrae. They found Kenji standing under a beam of natural daylight shining down from above. The sunshine lit up more of the cavern’s interior, allowing an even better view of the colossal skeletal remains, but that was not what immediately caught Serizawa’s attention. His eyes were drawn to yet another astounding discovery.
    Two gigantic sac-like encrustations hung like barnacles from the colossal breast bone that formed the ceiling of the cavern. Each the size of a large boulder, the sacs had a rough, gnarled texture that might have formed from some kind of hardened resin or other secretion. Even more than the skeletal structure of the cavern, the sacs appeared unmistakably organic. Serizawa, whose background was in biology, thought that they resembled the egg sacs of some unknown organism, albeit of unprecedented proportions.
    He aimed the radiation sensor at the closest sac, which elicited a flurry of clacking from the detector, but when he turned the sensor toward the further sac, the clacking died off noticeably. The detector registered only the pre-existing background radiation of the cavern.
    Interesting
, he thought. Theories and possible explanations began to form within his brain. Although he had devoted much of his career to the covert study of unknown megafauna, he had never encountered specimens like these before.
Was it possible that…?
    “
That
one,” Kenji pointed out. “The one that’s broken. It’s almost as though something came out of it…”
    Indeed, one of the enormous sacs appeared to have shattered from the inside. Giant chunks of its husk were strewn about the floor of the cavern, dozens of feet below the ruptured specimen. Serizawa made a mental note to have every fragment collected for analysis. The nature of material might provide valuable clues into what sort of organism had produced it.
    “Wait,” Kenji said. Fear entered his voice as the full implications of his observation sank in. “Did something actually come out of there?”
    Serizawa refrained from replying. There were too many unsanctioned ears present and he had no desire to start a panic. Instead he headed toward the sunlight, joining Kenji in a wide circle of warm golden