Chapter 1 (part 2): The First Incident.

"So the fleet completed it's mission to intimidate the Japanese, what happened next?" Penwood asked.

"Well, as we sailed back to port things on the ship were normal for the most part. There was however a lingering tension in the air. A subtle disquiet no one could put their finger on. I assumed it was simply battle nerves. No one was quite sure what the reaction from the Japanese would be. We were still in neutral waters and there was the possibility of being attacked. We had provoked them after all. Maybe they would do nothing, maybe they would retaliate? Nothing we could do but wait to see how things shaked out. All I knew at the time was there was something bad in the air and guys were on edge."

"The feeling only started to fade for me when I sat down in the mess hall. I met up with a good buddy on mine named Joe Meyers. I'd known Joe the entire time I'd been in the navy, straight from the beginning of boot camp until that moment. We were lucky enough to have been assigned to the same ship. He was in the bunk above me in boot and we hit it off right away. He must have been the most cocky s.o.b. I'd ever known though. A good guy, but more cock sure than any man ever had a right to be. I both loved and hated him for it. Oh, and did he ever love to talk. I don't think I'll ever love a woman as much as he liked to hear the sound of his own voice." Ryan chuckled. "The ladies loved him though. They ate up his confidence. It probably didn't hurt that he was a handsome fellow, the Blond and blued eyed bastard."

"Anyways, he was a couple years older than I was and I suppose I looked up to him. He always looked out for me. I remember while we were still in boot I told him I wanted to be a navy pilot and he talked me right out of it. He said that he had a buddy who was a camera operator who recorded carrier take offs and landings and that he'd seen way too much footage of planes either crash and burning or falling off the side of the ship. He said that it was way too dangerous of a job for a young fellow like myself and that I should stick with him on the deck. He went on and on about it at length. By the time he was done, I concluded that he was actually just afraid of heights, but he had also managed to make me re-think climbing into a cockpit. He should have been a used car salesman. Being the smooth talker that he was, he could probably convince a carpenter to buying pet termites." Ryan smiled.

"As we sat an ate it occurred to me that Joe was immune to the unrest that gripped the rest of the crew. He carried on like his usual self, jumping from topic to topic as he ate. I mostly just listened to him as usual. He was pretty confident that the Japanese would simmer down and behave themselves now that they had seen our ships in action. I wasn't so sure. Even with Joe's overwhelming optimism, I couldn't shake the underling feeling that something wasn't right."

"It took nearly two weeks to make it back to our home port in the Hawaiian islands. By the time we did, our mission had made headlines around the world. While it was fairly well received in counties like France and England who had lost countrymen in the attacks on shipping, it certainly did nothing to dispel the tensions between us and the Japanese. They still denied any involvement in the attacks and claimed that our ships had violated their coastal territory. To be fair, we in fact may have. We certainly got closer than we were meant to." Ryan noted.

"Still, there was no blood in the water and we had not damaged anything they owned, so the situation did not escalate drastically. The Japanese did deploy a fleet of their own to the area, but our forces had long since gone by the time they arrived and they knew it. It was just political posturing on their part to avoid looking weak. The world anxiously waited to see if there would be any more attacks."

"Well, despite not haven actually done much, we were given the hero's welcome when we got off the boat. Joe made me go out with him to the local night club just off the base grounds that night. Though I was very under age, the uniform made it pretty easy to get in. Soon after I tried my first taste of alcohol. Unfortunately I had no tolerate for the sauce at the time. The last thing I remember was Joe talking to some local girl and by the end of the evening I was being carried into the base hospital with an acute case of alcohol poisoning. Some first outing that turned out to be."

"Ha, what happened next?" Penwood asked with a laugh.

"Well when I came to the next morning, I had an needle in my arm pumping in fluids from a tube and my head felt like it had been split open. My first thought was how I was going to punch Joe right in his perfect smirking face the next time I saw him. I felt terrible and I probably looked just as bad. It took me a little while to collect my thoughts and acclimate myself to my surroundings. It didn't take me too long to figure out where I was, but no one was with me. After so may weeks of constantly being around a boat load of guys, it was jarring to be completely alone. And there was something else off-putting."

"I wasn't sure if it was just a symptom of my first hangover, but I noticed something very strange that morning outside of my window. For about an hour straight I saw birds flying by, hundreds, if not thousands of them, flocking together and all flying in the same direction. It looked as though they were leaving the main island going to the next one over. It was really bizarre. I've seen birds migrate before on the mainland, but this was something different. Generally when birds flock together they are of the same species. What struck me as particularly odd was the variety in this flock. There was a little bit of everything I'd seen on the island in it. I had not been on the stationed there for very long, so I thought maybe that was just how things worked there." Ryan frowned slightly recalling.

"I didn't have much time to think it over. There was a knock at my door and before I even had time to even say, come in, a young navy nurse was in my room. And I'll tell you this son: what a sight she was! I think my heart might have stopped for a second or two. I must have went a little haywire upstairs, because she asked me something that simply didn't register. She must have thought it was medical related, because before I knew it she was looking over the IV drip, checking to make sure there was nothing wrong with it. I felt a little embarrassed about it to be honest. She looked over the line and took my hand to see if it was leaking from the needle stick. I lost a breath as her hand touched mine and I suddenly felt like I was sitting under a heat lamp. I prayed that her eyes stayed down on her work."

"Well, nothing is wrong here." She said, my ability to understand English had returned to me. I had a second to caught a breath. "You must still be trying to get your land legs back under you sailor." She looked up and smiled at me.

"Uh, yeah. I had a bit of a rough night... I think... I don't actually remember much of it." I admitted jokingly.

"I bet." She chuckled back. "I was here last night when they dragged you in."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I hope I wasn't too much trouble."

"Don't be, you were a model patient. You did not complain or make peep the whole time really." She explained to me. "And you're the only person in this whole ward, so you've quietly kept me company my whole shift. I think you were pretty much dried out by the time they got you here, so there haven't been any messes to clean up. Otherwise you have not been overly demanding thus far."

"Oh, I'm glad."

"That reminds me, your buddy said that he was going to check up on you today." She added. "He left with a young lady after dropping you off last night."

"That sounds about right." I grimaced thinking about Joe abandoning me there. "I'd actually better report in before I'm missed, Mrs... ?"

"Miss... Baxter, but call me Shauna." She smiled at me again. "I think we'd better wait for your IV to finish before cutting you loose. It'll help get some of that green out of your cheeks."

It was about that moment I realized my uniform was sitting on a chair next to the bed, clean and neatly folded. I immediately came to revelation that I had in fact been changed into a hospital gown while I was unconscious and not wearing any pants. I felt ice run cold in my veins as I wondered if Shana had been the person who striped me down to my buckskins."

"What's wrong?" She had noticed the unsettled look on my face.

"Well, I was just wondering how long the IV still had." I lied, saying anything I could to avoid tipping my hand to what I was really thinking about. "I don't want to be labeled as AWOL."

"Oh, Joe said that he was going to smooth things over with your C.O."

"He did?" I cringed at the thought. Our commanding officer, Captain Turner, was a newly promoted, by the book, skipper and had already cast a sharp eye at Joe and I as a pair of unruly young sailors. While the Houston was out on training exercises, a tub of strawberry ice cream had mysteriously gone missing and the Captain had the entire ship searched from top to bottom trying to find any evidence of where it went. Joe and I had not left any to be found, but he had always suspected us. Now we had given him the perfect opportunity to come down on us hard. I knew I was going to be in real trouble once I reported back in.

"It'll be ok." She seemed to sense what I as thinking. "Things usually turn out better than how it goes down in our heads. You made a mistake that is minor in the scheme of things." My fear melted away in the light of her reassuring smile.

"You know, you are very kind, and I think..." CURRRGGGKKKKKKkkktttttt!

I stopped dead in mid sentience. I had been interrupted by an intensely intrusive noise from out the window in the harbor. It sounded similar to when a train first starts moving, a thunderous clacking of metal on metal. This was louder, longer, and somehow different. It was so loud that it echoed across the entire harbor. If anyone was still asleep in those early hours of the morning, they weren't anymore.

"What was that...?" I got out of bed and went to the window to investigate. I opened it up and looked out. I didn't spot anything unusual though. I had wondered if there had been a collision between to large ships, but there were none to be found. There was however an odd wake in the water nearby the passage that lead to the open ocean out of the harbor. It was big enough that when it hit the beach the water rolled up far past the beach line and up into the grass by about 30 yards. "What the heck?" I sat at the window confused. "What could have caused that?"

"What's going on?" Shauna asked from behind me, stepping in to see out.

"I honestly don't know." I answered her. "I feel like we just missed something though."

That was when it happened. The moment my life changed forever. I stood there wide eyed and stupefied. Shauna's mouth dropped open. An enormous form rose out of the bay waters. It was bigger than a battleship, much bigger. I just stood there frozen, dumbfound by what I saw outside my window. 'It couldn't be real.' I remember thinking. I was still asleep and everything up to this point had to be part of it. What I was seeing was impossible.

Then the creature stepped into the shallows just next to the docked ships and stood there. It was perfectly still for a few moments. I didn't see them at the time, but there were men on the docks who had stopped in their tracks, just under the beast. Anyone within sight of the creature were staring at it not knowing what to do. The whole base stood still in shock. A forty meter high quadrupedal beast had crawled out of the water and was standing in the middle of the harbor, dwarfing everything around it. It looked like a dinosaur, but much too large to compare to anything on record.

It had several horns at the top of it's head and a single horn above his nose like a rhinoceros. It's face was long and drawn out, somewhat similar to a crocodile and it had rows of jagged, serrated teeth. It also had an armor carapace studded with long, sharp spikes. It's tail was longer than it's body and was likewise covered in spikes.

Finally, it started to move again. It opened it's mouth let out a roar that seemed to split the sky and shook me to my core. I remember my knees felt weak from vibration. The men on the docks went from shock to terror in that instant. Broken out of their trance, they began to retreat in mass from the dock area and out of the path of the beast. It moved through the docked ships an onto the docks. It effortlessly smashed it's way through the buildings in front of it. I could distinctly hear yelling and screaming at that point and I fell out of my own stupor. The reality of the situation was starting to take hold. This thing was really there and attacking us. People were dying. Mass confusion and chaos was unfolding outside.

I scrambled to get my clothes on. I knew I had to get back to my ship to fight it. In my hast, I unknowingly torn out my IV in the process. I was bleeding down my arm and onto the floor. Shauna stopped me as I tired to leave the room and threw on a hasty bandage. She ask me what we should do. I told her to make her way to the nearest bomb shelter and to stay there until it was over. She nodded and started for the door. I flew out behind her and got out of the building as quickly as possible. I realized as I got outside that I could feel the impact of the beast's massive footfalls as it trampled the base around it.

"How could something so big exist?" I asked myself trying to regain my footing.

I turned my head and spotted it again. It had made it's way to the oil storage tanks near the southern docks. It lumber it's way into them and they exploded under it's weight. I thought for sure that it had just managed to kill itself. A wall of smoke and flames engulfed it entirely, but to my horror and disbelief it emerged only a moment later. It simply billowed out a huge puff of black smoke out it's nostrils, otherwise it seemed unconcerned by the fire around it.

It continued back into the bay waters and the fire that still clung to it's body was extinguished. After it hit the water it made a B-line towards the row of cruisers in front of it. I realized the the Houston was the second ship in the row and the monster was heading directly towards it. I ran as fast as I could to get closer. I knew there was nothing I could do, but I needed to see what was happening. As I crested a small hill nearby the burning oil depot, I could see the main turrets on the Houston turning to fire at the approaching monster.

They fired as the creature got close, but they were in too much of a hurry to aim properly. Both cannons missed their mark and there was no time for them to reload for a second try. The monster was on them only five seconds later. The sailors aboard were utterly helpless against it now. It rose out of the water and came down hard on the cruiser. The Houston's hull bucked under the weight and was breached almost immediately. The Houston turned on it's side and started to sink.

"Joe?!" I thought bitterly as the creature swiped it's clawed paw at the cruiser behind the Houston and ripped it open too. From there it moved on towards the eastern section of the base leaving the other cruisers in the line untouched. It came back on land and toppled even more buildings as it continued to rampage onward.

At that point, I realized there were men in the water from the two destroyed cruisers. I found a small boat nearby. I jumped into it and started the engine. It was a slow vessel, but I got over to the men in the water quickly enough to make a difference. I helped the first dozen or so on board, but it filled up all too quickly. Worse, Joe was not among the survivors I found. But I had to put that behind me. I recognized that there was no way I would be able to get all the men still in the water aboard, but I found a long spool of rope and got an idea.

I anchored the rope to a clamp on the stern side of the boat and threw it out towards the remaining men. They seemed to understand what I was planning and began to grab onto the it. Before I knew it, I had about twenty sailors towing behind me. We were actually closer to Ford Island at that point, so I started towards it. We passed Battleship row and I could see the crews of those ships scrambling to get them battle-ready. Fortunately the creature was no where near them. It had shattered several more buildings and reentered the bay once again moving north towards the rows of destroyers anchored there. It sunk several of them without any difficulty.

By this time, several fighter wings had scrambled off of Ford Island. I could hear their engines hum above us as our little ship reached the shore. They dove down towards the creature an open up on it. The machine guns rounds hit home, but bounced right off of it. The creature barely seemed to take notice of them. After a second flight of fighters peppered it with bullets near it's face, the creature turned it's head and changed direction. To my horror, it was coming right at Ford Island. I had just helped the remaining sailors onto the beach when I realized it was approaching us. It was like a bad joke. I ran towards the airbase and found an unmanned AA cannon. The machine guns from the planes had not been effective, but I thought maybe something of a higher caliber would prove otherwise.

The thing lumbered back onto shore and I took careful aim with the 40 mm cannon. It took some doing to position the gun on my own, but the creature was slow by nature and I was able to line up a shot. I gritted my teeth and finally I fired. The shell zoomed out of the barrel and flew right into the creatures face. It exploded and I hooted in triumph.

The victory was short lived though. When the smoke had cleared I could see the my attack had done no obvious damage, and worse still, the creature had barely seemed to notice it. I sank into the firing seat defeated. There was nothing I could so to harm it. I couldn't even slow it down. Only then did I realize how very helpless I was against it. Futility had only been a word for me before then, but after that day, I understood what it truly meant.

I sat there as it continued to wreak havoc across the airfield, destroying several hangers and parked planes. I saw men crushed as buildings collapsed on them. One poor man from the ground crew was trying to pull his buddy out from under the rubble, but it was already too far late for him. I thought back to Joe and I wept. Why where we so helpless against this thing? There were fires burning all over the base and oil from damaged ships filled up the harbor. The base was devastated and I thought for sure I was going to die there.

An officer from one of the cruisers pulled me from the AA battery and told me we needed to seek shelter. As we ran across the shattered airfield, I could see that the battleships had started to move from their moorings and were moving to catch up with the creature who had made his way to the western section of the base. The battleships formed into a battle line in the creature's path and open fire at him at point blank range. I saw several 14 inch shells explode against it's hide.

Unlike earlier attacks, the main cannons from the battleships did do some damage. The creature toppled to it's side in a daze. It regained its composure and retreated into the waters of the bay before the battleships could unload a second volley at it. It disappeared into the channel and out into the open sea.

Thus ended the first incident.