The living room was quiet now, far too quiet for a space that once echoed with the sound of tiny footsteps and bedtime laughter, with a voice calling out from the kitchen.
"Ford, dinner's ready," and the soft patter of life that made the house feel like a home.
But now, it was a tomb of memories; empty bottles standing like glass monuments on the counter, the couch sunken in from sleepless nights, and the photograph of a smiling Elle Brody, cracked across the middle from being dropped too many times, propped against the wall because he couldn't bring himself to fix it.
Ford Brody sat hunched on the floor, his back against the armrest, a bottle of something strong cradled loosely in one hand while the other hovered over a crumpled piece of paper; a termination letter from the military, signed with no ceremony and sealed with his disgrace.
They hadn't court-martialled him formally; there was no public shaming, no media coverage, just a quiet removal from duty, a final stamp marking him unfit, and then the silence.
It wasn't just the uniform they had taken from him. It was his identity. It was everything.
He had lost her; Elle, the woman who had stitched his chaotic world into something calm. And just days before that, he had lost his father; Joe, the man he'd spent most of his life dismissing as delusional, only to realise, too late, that he'd been right all along.
And now, with those two gravitational bodies gone from his universe, Ford found himself untethered, drifting in freefall.
The worst, however, had come in the form of two social workers knocking on his door, flanked by a police officer and holding a clipboard thick with paperwork.
They said they had tried to give him time. They said they understood grief.
But neighbours had called; said the boy had been left alone more than once. The stove had been left on. The door had been open one night. There had been crying. Ford had stood in the centre of the living room, eyes glassy, heart pounding with the realisation that the one thread he had left tethering him to a future, to her, to any reason to breathe; Sam, was about to be cut.
He signed the papers with hands that shook so violently he could barely hold the pen, his thumbprint smeared in ink and sweat, his eyes never leaving the thin manila folder that held the documents.
The woman had tried to comfort him, gently placing a hand on his shoulder as she took the papers away, but her words passed through him like smoke.
Sam didn't even cry when they took him away.
And now, Ford Brody was alone; not in the sense of empty rooms or vacant calls, but in the much deeper, suffocating sense of spiritual isolation.
He drank to remember. He drank to forget. He drank until he couldn't remember what he was trying to do in the first place.
Every clink of ice in the glass was another echo in the hall of his failure. And as the world above him carried on; rebuilding, theorizing, hunting monsters, Ford Brody simply faded into the background, a man without anchor, drifting in the wake of titans.
…
Elsewhere, far from broken men and bureaucratic signatures, a creature older than history was pushing through something far more ancient and unknowable.
Mark's tentacles folded tight around his form as he pierced the threshold of the endless storm, pushing against winds that felt alive with resistance, as though the very weather was a gatekeeper tasked with holding back the world from what lay within.
Lightning danced across the waves like spectral claws, thunder boomed like warnings from the gods, and the ocean below churned with a sentient fury. Yet nothing could deter him now.
With a final pulse of his muscular body, he surged forward and broke through the last curtain of rainfall, his massive form suddenly emerging into an eerie pocket of calm. The skies here were still grey, still turbulent above, but the air itself was thick and unnatural, charged with something electric and radioactive.
And then he saw it. An island. It was not marked on any map; not visible from satellites, and yet it stood there, towering out of the ocean with jagged cliffs and thick jungle veiled in steam.
Massive roots tangled down the cliff face, their branches splitting the wind like ancient tendrils of a god-forgotten forest. The air smelled of rot, blood, and ozone.
But it was not the island that stole his attention. It was what moved upon it.
Creatures.
Not ordinary ones. Not weak, genetic placeholders like the deer or the seal or the crab.
These were different. These were powerful, mutated, and saturated. He could feel it in the marrow of his instincts; the same way one predator can sense the presence of another.
And more importantly, he could taste it in the air, that sickly-sweet, radiation-rich aroma of unstable genetics. These were beings whose very existence could alter ecosystems.
Creatures whose genomes had twisted and evolved in isolation, nurtured by the radiation and storms like monstrous children of the Earth's secret heart.
His vision focused, his limbs tensed with anticipation, and his hunger sharpened like a blade honed for war. Here, at last, was the feast his body had yearned for.
This was not just another hunt. This was a buffet of evolution.