by Sean Wallace
They try everything. Cellular toxins. DNA replication inhibitors. Antisense nucleic acids and short inhibitory RNAs. Artillery. Great bolts of lightning. Nothing stops him; it only makes the monster angrier. They try mutagens, teratogens, carcinogens, neurotoxins, hemotoxins, genotoxins—they think that toxins in the environment created the monster, and maybe toxins can kill it. Maybe two wrongs can make a right. They don’t, apparently. I worry about the residues left in the ground after the monster’s moved on.
Some pranksters are trying to run up, as close to the monster as they can. From behind, so he can’t see them. Idiots. They’re still running through that haze of toxins, and they could still get smashed by a random swish of his giant tail. Or a missile that falls short of its mark. Despite the danger, these pranksters have spawned a host of copycats.
Now the monster’s going up and down the eastern seaboard. Janie talks about flying out there to help, but she doesn’t want to get stomped on. Who would? A team of guys from work drive across the country to do whatever they can. They figure that patent annuities can still get paid in their absence. I want to go, but I have to stay to help my mom. That’s my fight.
Our co-workers save the Liberty Bell, but nobody tries to save the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Boston’s gone, too. Part burnt up, the rest contaminated. My grandparents used to live there, in Arlington. My grandma would give me Coke and cake, a dangerous cocktail for a hyperactive child. I used to sneak into my grandpa’s basement to look at his calligraphy and the books he’d written in Chinese, which I couldn’t read. That old house is gone now.
The monster’s in Jersey City. Joke all you want about that state, but my God people are dying by the thousands.
Two hours after crawling out of the Hudson, the creature tilts his head, rivulets of water tumbling down his back, water falling between the rows of plates on his back. After two hours of walking among flames of his own making, the monster still carries, in the nooks and crannies of his skin, pools of sea water, bigger than bathtubs.
I wonder if he can carry tuna or salmon with him on his rampages, then gently deposit them back in the ocean when he’s done.
Maybe they can figure out a way to fill those water pockets with poison, so he can’t shake it off . . . but what do I know? I’m not a scientist.
Maybe those pools are the safest place to be, nestled in the hollows and pits in his own scaly skin where he can’t reach. I wonder what it would be like to be carried by the monster, swept away, giving myself over to destruction.
Over seven thousand have died in the last four months. The monster’s been ravaging the East Coast for so long that people here in California don’t talk about it much anymore. Raleigh was wiped out, but nobody at work even mentioned it. I heard about it on the radio, but I didn’t believe it until I read it on the internet. It’s not real until it’s virtual.
Stanford’s in the Sweet Sixteen this year and Janie’s all excited about that. She says I need at least a little fun in my life or I will go insane, and that won’t help anybody. If we don’t go on with the rest of our lives, she says, then the monsters win. I guess.
My mom’s taken a turn for the worse. She hardly eats or sleeps anymore. I bought her some fresh veggies, but a couple days went by and she hadn’t eaten them and they started to smell bad.
She still won’t let us move in with her, but she doesn’t mind when we sleep on her sofa. We Rug Doctored the whole house, but it still smells like smoke and we can’t get out the yellow tinting everything. I gave her a new cell phone, but she never answers it and forgets to recharge it. Since she spends a lot of time in bed, Janie got her some new pillows, since hers are decades old, but she never took them out of the plastic.
“Am I going to die now?”
“No, no, you’re not.”
“Do I have a pained look on my face?”
“No, you look fine.”
“Do you believe in miracles?”
“Yes.”
“Will you go and buy me cigarettes?”
“No.” But what does it really matter?
Between trying to save my mom and trying to save my job, I don’t have much time with Janie. Mostly we spend that time watching basketball. I never cared for it. It’s boring and stupid. Maybe people like watching tall muscular guys run back and forth and back and forth. Rhythmic like the tide. Maybe it’s soothing.
We watch the game together, but afterwards I can’t for the life of me tell you who won. Maybe it’s Stanford, because I remember Janie being all giddy. My world is happy when she smiles.
I am standing at my mom’s front door, and the wind brings horrid fumes. The air smells like burnt hair and pulverized concrete, and it sticks in my throat. Has the smoke and ash from the east coast actually circled the Earth to reach us here in California?
Or is it just the normal pollution we breathe every day without noticing?
I push in the door, calling out, “I bought you some flowers!” and thinking, we’re all going to die.
“Why did you do that?” she screams. “This won’t make it all better!”
“They’re yellow roses,” I say. “Your favorite.”
“You’re just doing this to trick me into thinking you care. I can see right through you. You don’t really care about me. Nobody does! All you care about is your stupid job. That’s more important to you than I am.”
“No, it’s not,” I say, pulling moldy shriveled stems from a vase and putting in the roses. “Do you want some water? It’ll help clear out your system.”
“You never tell me I’m pretty.” Her face is twisted, wrung like a sponge of its tears. “I wish I’d never had you. I should have stuck with cats instead.”
“Would you like me to make you a sandwich?” I ask. “There’s some fresh roast beef.”
“Why do you bother coming here?” She pounds on the coffee table and a pile of magazines slide onto the floor. “You don’t love me! You’ve never loved me! You’re just pretending, trying to trick me! Get out! Get out! Go to your stupid job that you love more than me. No, I don’t want any water. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. What are you going to do about it?”
I sit down next to her and brush the back of her hand with my fingertips.
“Don’t you dare touch me!” She pushes me away. “Why did you bring me flowers? They’ll be dead in a couple days. But I’ll be dead before they will. Why do you bring me flowers that will die in a couple days?”
I don’t know why I exhaust myself driving one and a half hours to come here. Why I come here to listen to her cough for hours on end, first thing in the morning, late into the night. If I didn’t come here, I wouldn’t have to put up with her abuse. This is far worse than any nicotine-withdrawal tirade. Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished.
Janie asks why I put up with Mom’s abuse. I’m hoping that eventually I’ll do the right thing, or say the right thing, so she’ll finally say “Thank you.” I don’t need fanfare, trumpets. All I really want is a small act of appreciation, some tiny, tiny acknowledgment that I’ve done someone right once in my life.
I need to stop thinking about myself.
She is dying. My mother is dying. There is no more denying it. And this lashing out is the first of the final death rattles.
“Honey, quick! Turn on the TV!” Janie’s voice calls over the cell phone.
“I’m at work,” I say. “I have a meeting in twenty, uh, fifteen minutes.”
“Oh,” she says, “I thought you were at your mom’s . . . . okay, then, click on Yahoo news!”
Through my glass door, I hear a cheer erupt down the hall.
“Here we see the science vessel Iverson Lord,” the reporter on my monitor says, “hauling up what appears to be a piece of the monster, possibly part of a scale.” Out of the choppy, greenish water, a shipboard crane is lifting a black mass the size of a Volkswagen. “Yes, that looks to me like one of the monster’s scales. And look! Another scale, bobbing in the water. Physical e
vidence, I think, that the monster’s been hit. But we have yet to confirm that it is dead.”
The crewmen on the ship are high-fiving each other through their white environmental suits.
How ironic that, on the day the monster dies, I hadn’t been thinking of it all day. Probably just staring into space.
“They nuked it!” Janie screams. “Fox News is declaring it dead! They had to wait until it was done with Atlanta and had moved back to sea. But it looks like they finally got it!”
Nukes? Was that necessary? Nobody else seems to be worried, but do we want to start down that path?
“Honey? Honey? Are you still there?” Janie asks.
“Yeah . . . ”
I hear a rapping on the office door next to mine, followed by a brief, muffled conversation coming through the wall.
Misty, the excitable admin across the hall, knocks twice on my door, then opens it and pokes her head in.
“Did you hear?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Why so glum? We’re breaking out champagne in the big conference room!”
“What about the meeting?”
“Oh, heck, I’m sure that’s canceled.”
Her head disappears and I hear her rap on the next office.
“I’ll call your mom to let her know,” Janie says.
“Okay.”
I put my head on my desk.
I’m glad innocent people won’t die anymore, but I can’t bring myself to celebrate. I didn’t fight, didn’t shoot any missiles or throw a Molotov cocktail between the monster’s toes. I am as responsible for the monster’s defeat as I am for Stanford’s victories. Which is to say, not at all. The war is over, and I missed it.
Then I think; if the monster and my mom’s cancer spring from the same well of evil, then caring for my mom was my part in the war against the monster. Maybe. Or am I just rationalizing my cowardice?
My phone rings again.
“Your mom didn’t answer!” Janie says.
“What?” I ask. “You tried her cell?”
“Of course I did,” Janie says. “No answer there, either.” She never leaves her house anymore, unless we take her.
“Maybe she’s in the yard, smoking,” I suggest.
“She can hear the phone from the yard.”
“Holding the cell with my shoulder, I try calling Mom on my office line. No answer.
“Okay, I’m coming to get you,” I say.
“All right,” Janie says. “I’ll call the police over there first.”
When we are still a few miles from Mom’s house, my cell rings. It’s the cops. They say that they’d found her sitting upright, in a chair next to the phone. It was ringing when they arrived. Her head was lolled to the side, but she was still breathing, still alive.
Once we get to the hospital, they make us sit in the waiting room. For hours. The TV is showing celebrations all around the world. Some people are looting, rioting. Others are firing guns into the air. I wonder how many will die when the bullets land. The monster is gone, but the death toll keeps rising.
The doctor finally comes in, with an undecipherable expression.
“Well . . . how is she?” Janie asks.
“We checked the levels of cancer proteins in her blood, did some preliminary scans, and I think we got it. It could come back, but, for now, we can’t detect anything trace of it.”
“You’re kidding!” Janie says. But the doctor doesn’t look happy.
“We’ve had to excise a lot of tissue over the last few months,” the doctor says. “There were also some adverse effects from the chemotherapy, permanent unfortunately, related to some of her other organs. Her stomach lining, her brain, her liver . . . ”
“Her brain?” I ask.
“Yeah,” the doctor says. “She doesn’t seem to have any cranial nerve reflexes, or brain electrical activity. None at all, really. Some damage to normal tissue is an unfortunate but not uncommon side effect of whole-body irradiation. But her heart’s as strong as an ox. Should keep beating for a good long time.”
On the TV the president’s spokesman is gloating that the Administration has saved Texas, as yet untouched by either the monster or the weapons used against it. Meanwhile, most of Georgia and Florida, including Disneyworld and Universal Studios, will remain uninhabitable indefinitely.
The war is over. Did we win?
Minutes later, we are taken to see Mom. The nurse leads us in and then immediately walks out. My mom wears an oxygen mask and foam dribbles from her mouth. Why hadn’t anyone cleaned her up? I wave my hand in front of her face. No response. I move the mask and wipe her mouth. Still no response.
I can’t see her like this, not ever again.
I pull from my pants a crushed, sweat-stained box of Marlboro Reds. One end I have pounded against my palm, compacting them just as she liked. On the inside of the flip top I’d drawn a dozen hearts. I’d drawn on the flip tops before, elephants because she liked elephants. The lines were sometimes jiggly, because it was hard to reach in there, but she would tear off the tops and save them. I push the pack into her useless hand and close the fingers over it. Her fingers are still fat, though most of the rest of her is devastated and shriveled. As I cover her hand with a blanket so the nurse won’t see the cigarettes, Janie shoots me a disapproving look, but doesn’t say anything. Mom lies there, not moving, just a smudge, only a shadow of her remaining.
A flash of anger passes through me. She will never say thank you. I am disappointed in myself for wanting so much, but her abusive words will hurt for a very long time.
Still . . . If I had my life to live over, would I do it again? Without a doubt.
I kiss her on the forehead and whisper, “I love you, Mom. Goodbye.”
Then I turn to Janie and say, “Let’s go.”
“Are you sure?” she asks.
I have reached my limit. I have nothing left to give.
As we drive away, a special report comes on the radio that explosions are breaking out in coastal cities all around the world. Giant monsters are everywhere, huge jellyfish and octopi. Some kind of animal I’d never of, called a pangolin, which is apparently a spiny anteater that looks like a giant pinecone. The monsters are everywhere. Belgium, France, Malaysia. What then, will we have to nuke those places, too?
Janie turns off the radio.
Now I am crying again.
“Janie, we need to go back for Mom—” I start to say, when sour air drifts through the vents. I cough once, twice. As I go into spasms, Janie pulls the car over.
I can’t stop coughing, a shattering, deep cough that shakes the bone girders in my flesh and strips my throat.
“No,” Janie says. “Not for her.”
I sink into my seat, finally suppressing the hacking. My hands are speckled in blood.
“No, Bobby,” she says. “We need to go back for you.”
I nod.
Before she makes an illegal U-turn, Janie unhooks her seatbelt and slides it away. She lunges over the gearshift and grabs me tight, cradling me in her arms as I had cradled my mother.
When Janie puts the car back into Drive, I slide forward, the seatbelt over my tummy. Like I did when Mom gave me rides. For the first time in months I can relax. It’s my turn now. I turn to Janie and say, “You’re welcome.”
“What?”
“Nothing, never mind,” I say with a tearful smile, as she drives me through the night.
Seven Dates That Were Ruined by Giant Monsters or Why I Really Need to Get Out of This City
Adam Ford
1. Katie Chambers—Saturday 27th July, 1988
I was fifteen years old, standing outside the cinema, waiting for Katie Chambers to show up. I’d just been dropped off by my parents and was nervously watching the family car drive away after managing somehow to fend off an uninvited PDA from my mother. I knew that I’d cop it when I got home that night with the “What’s the matter, are you too much of an adult for me to kiss you goodbye anymore?” rou
tine, but I didn’t care. For the week that had passed since I had got the guts up to ask Katie Chambers—Katie Chambers, mind you—to the Saturday Matinee at the Odeon, I had been coasting on pure adrenaline and nothing, absolutely nothing, could touch me, except maybe the nagging fear that Katie wasn’t going to show. The fear grew exponentially with each minute that passed, each nervous glance at my watch, but she finally turned up, only three and three-quarter minutes later than we’d arranged. There she was, stepping out of the passenger seat of a parental-looking station wagon that had pulled up across the road. Things were starting to look okay. The adrenaline was back and I had a great opening conversational gambit along the lines of parents, what the hell are they good for, hey?
All of a sudden it got dark, like a cloud was passing across the sun. I looked up and Gigantadon was swooping down out of the sky and everyone was screaming and running inside the theatre except for me. I just stood there and watched as two hundred tonnes of giant radioactive pterodactyl reached out one claw and picked up Katie’s parents’ station wagon and flew off. Katie started running down the middle of the road screaming, Give me back my mum, my mum, give her back! I waited for another half an hour for her to come back, but by then the previews were definitely over and the movie had started for sure. I could hear helicopters in the distance, and guns, and that weird high-pitched screaming sound Gigantadon’s sonic-wing-attack makes, so I walked to the phone booth on the corner and called Mum and asked her to come pick me up.