A/N: I do not own any Godzilla characters.

Chapter 4: Glitch

MONARCH OSPREY – THE SKIES ABOVE OKLAHOMA

The Osprey sped to the southwest towards New Mexico, hovering just below the cloud cover. They had decided that was the safest place for them to stay, so that they could still see where they were going, but could head into the clouds at a moment's notice if they saw any inbound Titans.

Ove two hours before, they had passed over the ruins of Louisville, Kentucky, which looked as though it had been ravaged by Behemoth. The majority of the buildings in the city had been destroyed and overgrown with the dense foliage that Behemoth left behind wherever he went. The Kentucky Derby racetrack looked as though it had been dug up by Behemoth's gigantic tusks, as a sizeable crater was now present where it had used to be.

"Damn, I used to go there every year," Stanton said. "Loved it, and now it's gone."

"Really?" Emma asked. "All this is going on and you're thinking about the Kentucky Derby?"

"We're flying right over it. It's right there, staring me in the face."

"About 90 minutes to arrival at Carlsbad," Coleman announced. "We've stalled long enough. We need to figure out who's going where once we reach Gobekli Tepe."

"I'm staying there," Nathan volunteered. "I want to be there when that monster is freed."

"What aren't you telling us about that thing, Dr. Lind?" Stanton asked. "I mean, you leave us all wondering with mentioning wanting 'closure' with this monster, and then don't say any more about that."

"I've told you all you need to know. Some secrets aren't meant to be shared."

"Fair enough. We'll get you drunk later and ask you again then." Nathan glared at Stanton, and he abruptly changed course, "Anyway, I want to stay at Gobekli Tepe too."

Within the next few seconds, Barnes and Chen also volunteered to remain at Gobekli Tepe for the unearthing of the Titan.

"Okay, I'm seeing a trend here," Coleman said. "All of us can't stay at Gobekli Tepe. Some of us need to go with the Ospreys hunting down Sekhmet."

"We'll go after Sekhmet," Emma said, gesturing to Mark and Madison. "The team that goes with them needs to know how to operate the ORCA."

"I want to stay with the team that's freeing the Titan, though," Madison said.

"Maddie, no, I don't want you there when that thing is freed. We don't know anything about it, what its powers are, anything."

"Going after Sekhmet is hardly safe!"

"Your mom's right, Madison," Mark said. "At least going after Sekhmet we know more or less what we're up against. It's not safe, but it's safer."

Madison frowned but didn't protest further.

"Okay, so the three of you are going after Sekhmet," Coleman said. "And Stanton, Barnes, Chen, and Dr. Lind want to stay at Gobekli Tepe. I'll come after Sekhmet too then, just so our teams are evenly split. Four going on each mission."

"Cut the crap, man. You're scared of the monster, aren't you?" Stanton asked.

"Yes, I am, but fear is a natural response. It…it puts the body on alert. It's a natural defense mechanism. I'd rather be afraid that be…completely nonchalant about this like you seem."

Suddenly, the altitude indicator screen went blank. "Uh…," Barnes, who was flying the Osprey said. "What the hell just happened?"

"What is it?" Chen asked.

"The altitude indicator is gone."

"It'll probably come back up in a few seconds. Little electrical glitch or something," Stanton said. "Besides, we can see we're not about to crash into anyth-"

The Osprey suddenly filled with music that sounded like it belonged in an amusement park midway. Simultaneously, the altitude indicator screen turned back on, but no longer displayed the altitude. Instead, it showed a strange image of a person with the head of a dog licking a lollipop.

"What the hell is that?" Stanton asked, leaning closer. "Did someone screw around with the Osprey's systems or something?"

"C'mon, come back up!" Barnes said, banging his fist on the control panel next to the screen.

As he did, the screen went black again. But a second later, blood-red lettering traced its way across the screen:

ENTROPY WAS ALWAYS TOO BLOODY HAPPY FOR ME

Everyone jumped back, and Barnes yelled, "Jesus Christ, what the hell does that mean?"

"Hit it again!" Stanton said.

"What?"

"This!" Stanton banged his fist on the control panel next to the screen. It fizzed out once more, and then resumed displaying the altitude indicator.

"What…was that?" Coleman asked.

"I have no idea," Barnes said.

"'Entropy was always too bloody happy for me,'" Emma repeated. "What does that mean?"

"Entropy…that's the theory that everything tends towards disorder, right?" Coleman asked.

"Right. Too happy…?"

"I can't do this," Nathan interrupted. Everyone turned to see him looking pale, leaning against the wall of the Osprey. "Dr. Lind, are you okay?" Mark asked, rushing over to him.

"It…it's back. I…I could hear it." Nathan pointed to his head. "In…in my head. I heard it."

"Heard what? Heard what?"

"The voice…the horrible voice…." Before Nathan could say anything else, he slumped over and slid down the wall to the floor.

"What happened? Is he okay?" Emma asked, a fraction of a second before the others all expressed similar concern.

Mark checked Nathan's neck for a pulse. "He's alive." Everyone sighed with relief. "I think he just…fainted or something."

"What did any of that mean?" Madison asked.

"It sure seemed like Dr. Lind knew," Chen said. "Or at least had some partial idea."

"Yeah, just like it sure seems like there's stuff he isn't telling us about the Titan at Gobekli Tepe," Mark said. "Can't help thinking they're connected."

"Oh, without a doubt," Stanton said. "The only trouble's gonna be squeezing the information out of him without…literally squeezing it out of him."

Suddenly, Nathan awoke, his eyes flying open. "Uh…why's everyone standing over me like that?" he asked.

"Don't you remember fainting?" Coleman asked.

"Wha…oh, yeah." Nathan stood up, a bit shakily at first. "I'm fine now, though. That was just…something else."

"You said something about a voice," Barnes said. "Before you fainted. What did that mean?"

"Oh, that. That was…nothing. Just forget it."

Stanton rolled his eyes. "Dude, you can't just keep leading us on like this and then not telling us stuff."

"I already told you things I've learned about the Titan we're going to free. Isn't that enough?" Nathan snapped.

"It's just that there's a difference between telling us 'things' about it and telling us 'everything' about it. Which, given the nature of our mission here, I think we deserve to know."

"And some information is private."

"What do you mean private?" Mark asked.

"Yeah, were you…involved with this thing?" Stanton joked.

"Leave. It. Alone," Nathan said. He sat down in the back of the Osprey.

Everyone else exchanged questioning looks but didn't ask Nathan any more for the time being.

MONARCH OSPREY – ABOVE CARLSBAD CAVERS, NEW MEXICO

A while later, Barnes announced, "We're here."

Everyone walked to the front of the Osprey to look out the windshield. Below them was a building with a circular path in front of it. An extension of the path led into a nearby hill, in the side of which the entrance to the caverns was visible. "Put her down in front of the building there," Nathan said. "That's the visitor center. There's bound to be maps of the caverns in there."

The Osprey touched down in front of the visitor center, and the team opened the rear ramp. The sky was slightly overcast, but rays of sunlight shone from just above the western horizon. "Everyone grab a parachute," Nathan said. "We don't know what the gravity inversion will be like when we enter the Hollow Earth, and we might need the parachutes for that. And a flashlight each for the caves too."

"Good thinking," Emma said, grabbing a parachute and flashlight along with everyone else.

The team crossed the path to the visitor center, but found the doors to be locked. "Go figure," Stanton said. "They abandon this place but still lock the doors."

"Be right back," Barnes said. "There's a fire extinguisher on the Osprey."

Barnes headed back to the Osprey, then returned with the fire extinguisher. He smashed the bottom of the fire extinguisher into the doorknobs, breaking them off. He then shoved the doors open, admitting the team into the building.

Everyone clicked on their flashlights, illuminating the interior of the building, which was mostly dark save for a few sporadic areas lit by sunlight. Darkness aside, the building looked like it would have any other day, providing a brief reprieve from the apocalyptic atmosphere present everywhere else. They headed over to the reception desk, and saw a stack of pamphlets on the caves on one end of the desk. Nathan grabbed one and spread it out on the desk, weighing it down on the corners with nearby paperweight souvenirs.

"We're here, in the visitor center," he pointed to the top of the map. "Since nobody's here, I doubt the elevators leading to the Big Room will be operational. We're gonna have to take the natural entrance then." He pointed to the entrance to the cave that was at the end of a path from the visitor center. "After that, we go down the Main Corridor, and turn left at the giant iceberg. After that, another tunnel leads us to the Big Room. At the far end of the Big Room is the Bottomless Pit. That's where we need to go."

"Bottomless?" Emma asked. "I assume it's not actually bottomless."

"No. It's about 140 feet deep, and at the bottom it widens out a bit. According to Monarch's scans of the area, there should be a tunnel at the bottom of the pit that leads down at a steep angle. We have no idea how far down that goes, but the Hollow Earth tunnel energy seems to be coming from deep in there."

"Is it strange that going into a set of dark, unexplored tunnels is the part of this journey I'm dreading the least?" Coleman asked.

"You read my damn mind," Stanton said.

"Let's keep the map," Mark said. "We'll need it if we get lost down there."

"Good thinking," Nathan said. He removed the paperweights and stuffed the pamphlet in his pocket.

"We don't have any time to waste," Chen said. "Let's get going. We'll be losing enough surface time with the time we spend in the Hollow Earth."

The team left the visitor center to find that it had grown more overcast outside. "And look at that, the clouds are returning," Stanton said. "What a friggin' surprise."

Coleman turned to the cave leading into the hills. "I…take back what I said. Hollow Earth is what I'm dreading the least."

"I'm imagining the Hollow Earth as something like Mother Nature's personal laboratory. You never know what sort of crazy shit we might run into down there."

"Yeah, but I just hate that we have to go into a bunch of dark tunnels to get there."

"There's eight of us, each with a flashlight," Madison said. "That should be quite a bit of light."

"That's true," Coleman said as everyone set out down the path towards the cave entrance.

Suddenly, a blast of forked, green lightning twisted into the clouds far to the northeast. "Holy shit," Mark said. "Is that Ghidorah?"

"It's gotta be," Coleman said. "But that blast of lightning would have to be…gigantic for us to be able to see it hundreds of miles away."

The lightning remained visible through the cloud cover overhead as it shot higher and higher through the atmosphere. A few seconds later, several successive rumbles resonated from the sky. "What now?" Stanton groaned. "What the heck hasn't Ghidorah done at this point to wreck the planet?"

"Why would he want to blast a bunch of lightning into the sky?" Chen asked. "What's up there that he'd want to attack?"

"Not humans, that's for sure," Emma said. "The only aircraft that have been flying since all the Titans were awoken are the Ospreys Monarch sent to track the Titans down. And I doubt Ghidorah would spend that much energy to destroy a few Ospreys that strayed near him."

"Should we go into the caverns now or wait and see if anything happens?" Coleman asked.

"I say we wait for a couple minutes," Barnes said. "I wanna see what comes of this. For all we know, Ghidorah caused that…glitch with the Osprey's systems somehow, and I want to see if this is related to it."

"It wasn't Ghidorah," Nathan said.

"How do you know?" Chen asked. "Those strange things that came up on the screen…did you see them somewhere before?"

Suddenly, a burning object streaked through the cloud cover. "What's that?" Mark asked. "It doesn't look like an Osprey. What is…oh no."

"Is that a satellite?" Madison asked.

Another flaming object broke through the clouds near the eastern horizon as the closer one crashed to the ground several hundred yards away. Once the flames from the impact started to abate, everyone could see that it was in fact a satellite.

"Why the hell did Ghidorah go after a couple satellites?" Stanton asked.

"Unless he didn't just go after a couple," Chen said. "He probably went after all of them to cripple our communications."

"Good thing we got out that call to the Ospreys in the Middle East before we left Philly, then," Coleman said.

"The big guy learned fast," Stanton said. "I mean, it hasn't even been a week since he was freed, and he already learned about satellites? Geez."

"We're on our own, then," Nathan said. "No communication with anyone else until we come out the Hollow Earth tunnel near Gobekli Tepe." He rubbed his hands together. "Might as well head into the caverns and just get this done and over with."

Everyone flicked on their flashlights again and set off down the path to the cave. Upon reaching the entrance, they took a deep breath and headed into the depths of the earth.

A/N: So I'd initially planned on Chapter 4 covering the entire journey through Carlsbad Caverns as well as the Osprey flight there. But that chapter would've been excessively long given all the stuff I have planned for the caverns (*sinister, knowing smile…*), and I figured I could insert a bit more foreshadowing with the Osprey's glitch. Besides, the combined chapter would've taken longer to write, and I'd rather reward your patience with something than leave you hanging even longer :)

For the record, I've never been to Carlsbad Caverns. I'm relying on an online map to know what the caves look like, but I have no idea what the visitor center looks like – that's why I shied away from describing it.

Please R&R and stay tuned for the continuation!