Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization by Greg Cox Page A

had resumed? Joe didn’t believe it.
    What if it was already too late… again?
    He peered out the office door and made eye contact with Ford, who had just stuck his head out of his old bedroom. The two men looked at each other in confusion.
    “Did you…?” Ford asked.
    Joe shook his head. “No. I have no idea…”
    A quick inspection confirmed the truth. Everything electrical in the house had powered up, from the lights and TV to the lucky cat figurine bobbing its paw. The aroma of scented oil from a miniature waterfall drifted from the bathroom, competing with the stale atmosphere of the house. Ceiling fans began to spin, shedding years of accumulated cobwebs. A light bulb popped.
    The inane clamor from the TV grated on Joe’s nerves, making it hard to think. He moved to switch off the set, but had taken only a few steps when, without warning, the pictures on the wall started rattling. The ceramic cat vibrated off the bookcase and crashed to the floor, shattering into pieces. Just like Joe’s coffee cup at the plant fifteen years ago.
    For a heart-stopping moment, he thought the tremors had returned already, but then he recognized the thundering
whoomp-whoomp-whoomp
of a helicopter flying low over the house. The chopper’s passage shook the rafters and the two men as well. They stared up at the ceiling in surprise, then back at each other. Neither of them knew why a ‘copter would be buzzing a house in the middle of the Q-Zone. It made no sense. This entire area was supposed to be a no-fly zone.
    Then again, it was supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, too.
    Joe decided that he and Ford were pressing their luck by sticking around. After his previous arrest, his old address might be the first house the authorities would search. They needed to get back to the docks with their prizes. In theory, Koruki, the pilot of the skiff, would be waiting for his signal to pick them up. Joe had promised the second half of his payment on their safe return to Tokyo.
    But first: Joe took one last look around at the house where his family had once been so happy, where and Sandra had been together.
    He suspected he would never set foot in it again.
    * * *
    The fading daylight did not make the return trip through the deserted city any less eerie. Lights flickered in the lifeless storefronts, while snatches of muzak or TV broadcasts escaped open doors and windows. Neon signs cast long, colored shadows on the weed-infested sidewalks. A clock tower started counting off the minutes again, for the first time in who knew how long. Ford didn’t like it. He preferred his ghost towns to be a little less animated, especially when he didn’t have a clue as to what was turning the lights back on.
    I knew this was a bad idea
, he thought.
    Another helicopter buzzed by overhead, and the two men ducked beneath the tattered awning of a vacant sidewalk café to avoid being spotted. Ford tracked the chopper’s progress. It was flying northeast toward the horizon, where he now spotted what appeared to be a large metal structure in the distance. Glowing lights illuminated a towering assemblage of new scaffolding and facilities—right where the nuclear power plant used to be.
    He looked to his father in confusion. “Are they rebuilding the plant?”
    Joe stared at the distant complex intently, too transfixed by the sight to reply. You could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes as the former engineer tried to absorb this unexpected new development. And yet, Ford observed, his father didn’t appear to be
too
surprised to find something happening at the old site, just as he’d theorized earlier. For the first time in years, Ford actually felt like Joe Brody had a better grip on what was going than he did.
    How weird was that?
    He opened his mouth again, to ask his dad to explain, only to be interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an assault rifle being racked. Ford’s mouth went dry.
    The men turned around to find a pair of uniformed