Chapter 10

“Mom, this isn’t the greatest place in the world to be right now,” Tina complained. The Gryphon, which only moments before had seemed ready to recommence its attack on the unconscious Gojira, had begun to circle again. She had the unmistakable sense of being watched. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing here?”

Jill led her around a twisted, twenty foot high section of broken girders; they were ankle deep in pulverized concrete. In fact, she wasn’t headed for the South Tower at all, but an abandoned fuel tanker on Church Street.

“If Aaron and his friend can’t get that collar off Godzilla, the Gryphon will kill it and then everything is lost. I don’t think anything short of an atomic bomb is going to touch that thing.”

“That’s not such a bad idea,” Tina said, continuing to track the circling monster. Then it hit her what she had just said. “Someplace else, of course. Not here.”

“No, not here,” Jill said distractedly. She had discovered their way cut off by the collapsed eastern corner of the building directly to their left. They’d have to climb or go back around.

“Uh, oh,” Tina said.

Jill looked up to see the Gryphon dropping straight at them, claws extended, mouth gaping and a dozen hideous snakeheads whipping back and forth. It had purposely made its attack in silence. “Run!” she screamed.

They ran back the way they had come, weaving in and out of crumbled masses of structural columns and beams, forced at the narrowest point to within ten feet of the burning building. The tight spot saved their lives. The Gryphon smashed down onto the pile of debris, its wingspan too great to fit between it and the face of the five-story building. It swiped at them with its huge left forepaw, screaming in frustration when it missed. The mountain of debris, already unstable, shifted beneath the beast’s weight, and sent it tumbling down the side, momentarily trapping it against the side of the building. It was the only opportunity Jill and Tina would have.

“Come on!” Jill cried, grabbing Tina’s hand, and heading around the south end of the debris pile. The tanker truck was fifty yards ahead, the cab and part of the shiny silver tank visible above the rubble. They ran as fast as the terrain would allow, as behind them, the Gryphon flailed against the side of the building, trying to regain its feet. If that happened before they reached the truck...

“Mom? You really think we need a diversion?” Tina cried out.

All Jill wanted now was to get away. The fact that she was still running toward the truck was sheer coincidence.

The Gryphon howled in angry triumph. The sound rose up behind them until it became clear the bat-lion was once again airborne; with every footfall Jill felt their chances of survival dwindling away. She steeled herself against a blue-white bolt of furious energy or the body-shredding blow of a huge forepaw. But neither came. Looking back over her shoulder, she discovered that the Gryphon had traded distance for altitude; it was moving straight up, preparing to unleash a blast of energy, not necessarily at them, she felt, but at the tanker truck. Had it surmised what it was?

She changed directions, heading parallel to the road, away from the truck and its deadly cargo. She remembered the scene of destruction in Traveller, Utah; if the creature had discovered the joys of pyromania, it would try to fry them the way it had the mad waitress.

Tina yanked at her hand. “Wait, Mom!”

Jill looked back. With her and Tina getting out of range of any explosion caused by the tanker, the Gryphon had changed its ploy and was now swooping directly for them again, tucking its wings and building up for an energy discharge. Jill looked around desperately for a place to hide. There was only the elevated pedestrian walkway crossing Church Street. She headed for it. The Gryphon was so close behind that she heard the crackle and pop of the charge building along its wings and felt a tingling on her skin. Her hair stood on end. They would never make it.

“Mommmmm!” Tina cried.

And then Gojira roared.

Aaron held on for dear life. The tank had shifted so suddenly upon Godzilla’s reawakening that he had been thrown off his feet. His slide had been cut short by the line tied to Fleer’s harness, but now Fleer was forced to hold onto the restrainer coupling with both hands, to keep from being dragged after Aaron. The timer had not been set.

Gojira roared again. It was not much, as angry defiant bellows go, certainly not up to pre-restraining-collar standards, more a clearing of the throat. It had been enough to make the Gryphon break off its attack on Jill and Tina, though. Aaron could see them now, emerging at a run from beneath the pedestrian walkway above Church Street.

“What do you have left to do?” Aaron yelled up.

Fleer looked at the cache of explosives. “Place two more blasting caps. Set the damned timer. Get the hell off this fucking thing.”

Aaron worked himself onto his hands and knees, then into a crouch. He walked himself back up the rope to Fleer’s position, a look back over his shoulder showing him Jill and Tina, standing on the opposite side of Church Street now, looking up. He wished he had a way to contact her.

Jill realized that no helicopter gunships remained to thwart the creature. The single remaining Apache, evidently depleted of armament, slowly circled off in the distance, over the New Jersey shore. And the Blackhawk hovering above Gojira’s head was Aaron’s and the other man’s only way off. That left it up to them.

“I have an idea,” Jill said.

Tina panted right beside her. “What?”

“It involves the diversion.” She indicated the tanker truck, parked a block away.

Tina complained, “I thought we were the diversion.”

Keeping an eye on the bat-lion as it circled the tower--it was gaining altitude, she saw, preparing to make another power-dive on the tower’s base, to finish off Gojira once and for all--Jill lead her daughter toward the truck. The cab door was locked. Frustrated, she looked about for a manageable-sized chunk of debris, picked up a piece of concrete the size of a softball and threw it through the driver’s side window.

“Mom, you’re getting to like this destruction business just a little too much,” Tina joked.

“I take after my daughter.”

After she had climbed up, felt inside for the door handle, pulled it up and let herself into the cab, Jill used a left-behind New York Yankees baseball cap to sweep the bulk of the broken glass off the seat. She checked the ignition for the key, above the visor, under the floor mat ... no good. “You can hot-wire this thing, right?”

“God, Mom,” Tina said, climbing up and hunkering for a look under the dashboard, “what exactly would you do without me?” There was no missing the sound of happiness in her voice. She rooted around, then yanked down a bundle of brightly colored wires in a spiral, plastic harness, dug in her front pocket and came up with the small red pocketknife with the Swiss Army emblem.

“Remember,” Jill said,” ‘red wire to white, green to green’.”

Tina giggled. “My Mom, the hot-wire artist.”

“Better than your smash-and-grab queen. Just get the truck started, dear.”

“Yes, Mom.”

While Tina separated the wires from the bundle, sliced them with her pocketknife and stripped the ends down to bare wire, Jill rooted around in the back of the cab for anything useful. She gazed thoughtfully at a pair of road flares sitting in the bottom of a roadside emergency kit, took them out and sat them beside her on the seat. She had an idea.

“Almost ready?” she asked, just as the powerful diesel engine fired up. Tina rose free of the dash, all smiles and a look of exaltation. “Way to go, kiddo. Now ... can you drive it?”

The smile faltered. “Drive it?” She looked from the big, oversized steering wheel to the tall, slender stick of the shift-lever. “I don’t know. I can try, I guess.”

Jill slid across the seat and helped Tina get behind the wheel. She looked like the subject of a joke-greeting card, Jill thought, small hands gripping the huge black wheel, feet thrust out, barely touching the pedals. As she kissed her on the cheek for encouragement, Tina depressed the clutch, wrangled the shift-lever over into the position generally accepted as being first gear ... and promptly ground the gears with a resounding screech.

“Yikes!” she cried.

Laughing, Jill gave her a big hug and told Tina her plan. “See that building over there?” She pointed to the glass-fronted office building at the northeast corner of Church and Vesey Streets. It had the kind of high frontage that Jill surmised enclosed a multi-story atrium.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to ram this truck right down its throat. Can you do that, Tina?”

Tina blinked in astonishment. “Mom, I wasn’t trying to encourage you, you know.”

“Just remember to jump clear before you crash through the window, dear. And run. Run fast, okay?”

“And what are you going to do?” Tina asked. Her voice and demeanor reflected her anxiety.

“Don’t worry. I’ll run really fast too.”

Road flares in hand, Jill climbed out, leapt to the ground and ran the ten feet back to the big silver fuel tanker and she began climbing the undercarriage. Tina watched through the cab’s rear window and gave her the thumbs up, to which Tina responded with one of her own.

The ladder welded to the front of the tank was just out of her reach and, tucking the flares into her belt--she was suddenly aware again of the loaded gun pressing into the small of her back--she leapt up and snagged the bottom rung. Fighting for a foothold, she finally managed to get her right foot onto the rung and pulled herself into a standing position. She motioned for Tina to go. Tina looked none to happy about it but, resolutely, she turned around in and thrust the shift-lever into gear. She released the clutch, and the big rig lurched forward.

“Way to go, Tina!”

Jill heard her daughter laugh. Then, announcing to the world that the family Llewellyn was alive, full of piss and vinegar and on the move, Tina gave the hand signal instantly recognizable to every kid in America, and laid on the air horn.

“Blaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnt! Blaannnnnnt! Blaannnnnnt! Blaannnnnnt!”

The big semi gained speed and impacted the first of many vehicles in its way: a dark brown Toyota Corolla with a very bad paint job. The semi’s bumper caught the Toyota on the right corner and drove the vehicle headlong into a yellow cab. Jill whooped in triumph as Tina changed gears, getting the rig up to twenty miles an hour; they smashed a Dodge Ram broadside, flipping it over and out of the way like a kid’s Tonka toy. Tina kept blowing the horn and pushing more vehicles out of the way.

Aaron heard the air horn and looked down. “What the hell are they doing?”

Just finished inserting the last of the blasting caps and inspecting the wiring, Fleer looked down to see a yellow Dodge Ram pick-up flipped effortlessly onto its side by the big truck. “Enjoying themselves immensely, I’d say. I think we’re ready.”

“Really?” Aaron looked up, saw the bat-lion had also heard the blatting horn. It banked away from the building and momentarily hung motionless on an updraft. It seemed to be wondering what to do. In their present predicament, any distraction away from their perch of stainless steel one hundred feet above the ground was welcome. But he worried about Jill. Especially now, as he realized that she was not in the cab but clinging to a ladder on the front of the tanker.

“I’m setting this for thirty seconds,” Fleer announced.

“Thirty seconds can be a lifetime ... go ahead.” On the street, Tina had steered the tractor-trailer in the direction of a thirty-story office building. Jill no longer clung to the ladder but was making her way cautiously down the spine of the tank, walking in a hands-down, crouched position. Something looking suspiciously like sticks of dynamite were clutched in her right hand. She stopped halfway down the tank’s length at a hatch-cover, began fumbling at the mechanism holding it closed. Three hundred feet above her head, the Gryphon decided she looked too good a morsel to pass up and plunged into a dive.

“Oh, no,” Aaron groaned. He shouted, “Jill, look out!” at the top of his lungs, but over the sound of the truck’s diesel engine and the intervening distance, she didn’t hear him. All he could do was watch as the bat-lion dropped for the kill. Her only chance...

... was in getting this damned hatch-cover open in time. She looked up, saw that the front of the truck was no more than a dozen yards from the edge of the intersection, clutched the flares between her knees and hauled on the hatch-cover release were both hands. It suddenly let go and back she went onto her butt. The flares, luckily, came down between her legs and she snatched them up. Ripping off the covers, she struck the top of each flare on the striker pad on the end of one of the covers, looked up and...

“Oh, my God!” The Gryphon was plummeting toward her at fantastic speed, no more than a second or two away. She tossed the crackling flares down the hatch, spun about, and let herself slide down the side of the tank on her stomach. Still ten feet in the air, she began to free-fall and crashed down on the roof of a Plymouth Horizon that the tractor had pushed aside. She bounced hard, tumbled down the incline of the windshield, rolled down the short, sloped hood and landed on her side on the street. Only the three inches of concrete dust saved her from serious injury. In an instant she was on her feet, racing down the side of the van toward the rear, a field mouse scampering from a plunging hawk. Only the hawk wasn’t after her.

Tina was running in the opposite direction, north, toward the building opposite the truck’s target. She was the bat-lion’s intended prey.

“Tina!”

Tina reacted to the scream by flinging herself sideways beneath a dump truck parked at the corner. The Gryphon slammed into the truck body, rocking it on its undercarriage, almost tipping it over. Jill watched Tina scrambling around underneath, trying to find cover. “Stay where you are!” she yelled.

Tina shrieked for help, and then jumped as the tractor-trailer smashed headlong into the front of the tall building, covered her head for the expected explosion ... but no explosion came. The truck continued through the building’s lobby, not stopping until it impacted against something immovable, probably the elevator cores, Jill thought. The whole rig shuddered, and the tank, white smoke pouring from the open hatch-cover at the top, jack-knifed from forward momentum.

Why hadn’t it exploded?

Jill thought for sure the flares would ignite the fuel inside. Was the truck carrying some innocuous cargo, like milk? She didn’t have time to worry about it. Jumping up and down and waving her arms, she tried to get the Gryphon’s attention.

“Hey! You! Over here! Hey, you big dumb monster!”

“Mom, no!” Tina had crawled directly beneath the truck’s diesel engine and was waving frantically for her mother to stop her gyrations. But the ruse had worked. The Gryphon was looking at Jill quizzically, as though unsure of her sanity. Perhaps Tina wondered too. “Run, Mom! Run!”

Jill thought that a good idea as well. She spun and dashed toward the nearest store. She prayed the door was open, realized immediately there were no storefronts left in any of the buildings, and leapt through the one closest. She lost her footing on the scattered glass and skidded across the littered floor on her back. Again, misfortune saved her life. The Gryphon’s huge paw swept the air directly above her head, one of the long deadly talons catching the front of her shirt and ripping it open. She screamed, then scrambled behind a desk and through a door on her hands and knees into another room. The Gryphon roared and pawed after her again, demolishing the entire wall with one powerful swipe. She covered her head against the rain of debris.

Kawoomph!

The entire building shook. The fuel tanker--or some other flammable source--had ignited. Jill saw the reflection of flames in the remains of the shattered storefront. She scrambled to her feet as the Gryphon pulled back and shot a look back up the street. As it did, Jill saw her daughter running down the opposite sidewalk just as fast as her legs would propel her. Every footfall resulted in an explosion of dust, slowing her down. Then she was gone from sight--and so was the Gryphon; it had taken off again.