The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  Through the ear canal, Jack heard the wup wup wup and the whistling of helicopters rising into the air, hauling the giant heavenward. There was green light everywhere, heating, massaging, and stretching his skin.

  Jack found that by touching the right nerve endings he could see with the dead giant’s eyes. What he saw was the rising sun.

  Morning had come.

  Kungmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger

  Cody Goodfellow

  The churning black surf of the Pacific Ocean spouted fifty feet into the air as something very large stirred in the depths at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay. A news helicopter that had ventured too close got swooped up and crashed into southbound traffic lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge. Army and navy choppers buzzed like mayflies over the geyser, dropping marker flares and spraying red fans of incendiary shells. Nothing seemed to slow the invader, which torpedoed in on a collision course with the Old Ferry Building at the head of Market Street.

  All along the waterfront, crews of artillery and mobile missile batteries eagerly peered into the roiling silver mist for their first glimpse of the adversary itself. Behind them, legions of protesters filled the streets from the woodland grounds of the old Presidio Army Base to the Embarcadero and the heart of the Financial District, tens of thousands of furious, banner-waving marchers pressing against the embattled lines of riot-control police. They had come to denounce the federal crackdown on the labor unions, the withdrawal of government assistance and the twenty-eight per cent unemployment rate—but the spectacle unfolding in the water could not be resisted.

  A missile battery atop the ferry terminal sparked to life with a salvo of lightning spears that turned the black surface of the bay into a dome of white-hot steam. Waves of scalding seawater swamped the docks, but then the bubbles subsided. The cheers of the soldiers spread up and down the waterfront, drowning out their CO’s irate barking and the chanting of the protesters.

  It was a brief victory; something exploded out of the water, and for just a moment, the entire city held its breath as it struggled, with its childlike collective mind of a half million or so, to understand just what it was looking at.

  Then, amidst the massed shrieking of the sudden inferno pouring down on the flaming invader and its own unearthly howls of tormented rage, hundreds among the crowd began to cheer for the monster.

  The command center of the Joint Forces Mobile Command fell silent as General Skilling entered with his retinue. “Get back to work!” he barked, and the airmen resumed running around as if the deck of the C-98 Supernaut cargo plane were covered in hot coals.

  Skilling cast a jaundiced eye over the panorama of the big board, the global map jigsawed together from the composite vision of several hundred defense and private satellites and the exploded diagram of the world’s media coverage. Most of two hundred screens played the images coming in from the flock of helicopters circling over San Francisco.

  When he absolutely had to, Skilling turned to the man nearly everyone in the room had been mooning over when he entered: Commander Wesley Corben, the most visible officer in the Air Force’s Special Counteroperations Detachment and the pilot of America’s most closely guarded weapon. If he was on the scene, then the emergency was clearly under control.

  Commander Corben ignored him, gazing out the window at the runway lights of Alameda Naval Air Station and a wing of F-18s scrambling off the flight line.

  “This is everything we feared, Commander,” said a voice from the speaker on the General’s desk. Though he had never heard it so raw with exhaustion and nerves, he recognized it well enough.

  “We’re up to the task, Mr. President,” the pilot said, glancing at Skilling. “Both of us.”

  “Mr. President, if I may,” General Skilling broke in, “Commander Corben hasn’t been fully briefed, but once he has been, I think he’ll agree that the situation is under control, without the need for . . . extraordinary measures.”

  “Have it your way, General, but you boys swore up and down you could stop it at sea.”

  “Bring me up to speed, General,” Corben said quietly, “and I’ll decide whether turning the army loose in the middle of San Francisco is a better idea than deploying Steve.”

  Skilling winced. He hated to hear the name spoken and glared down nearby technicians who had perked up at the word. “My opinion of your . . . weapons program is a matter of record—”

  “General! They’ve got a visual!”

  All eyes turned to the monitors, where a gargantuan tower of flames staggered across Market Street, kicking tanks and armored personnel carriers out of its path like a burning drunk in a toy store. Suddenly, incredibly, the sixty-foot flaming behemoth sprang high into the air, clearing a row of warehouses, and vanished into the frothing Bay.

  “This is most unprecedented!” shouted Dr. Murai, the team’s resident kaijuologist. “I’ve never seen anything so large move so fast. Only Dr. Otaku could create such a weapon.”

  Commander Corben ran for the exit. Skilling did not try to stop him. “Well, Mr. President,” the general prompted, “I guess you know what this means.”

  “If that thing out there is the one they call Kungmin Horangi, then I guess it means we’re now at war with North Korea as well. Don’t these damn commies know when they’ve been licked? What the hell does that crazy name mean, anyhow?”

  Skilling bit his lip. Half the intelligence community was listening in. “Some shitwit at the Pentagon says it means ‘People’s Tiger.’ ”

  The president’s snorting, signal-distorting laugh turned heads throughout the command center. “A tiger? Is that what it’s supposed to be? Goddamn, those commies never get anything right.”

  Commander Corben sprinted across the runway to the enormous hangar where his team lounged, lobbing a football and watching the news. Without a word, they took their positions to prepare for the launch. Corben zipped into his flight-suit and stepped into the shadowy, cathedral-sized space. In the center, an enormous American flag hung from the domed rafters, screening off most of the hangar.

  Lieutenant Mullin walked alongside, briefing him on the pre-flight check. “The new armaments are loaded, the new Hellfires are quicker on lock-on, like you wanted, but the blowback is worse, so don’t go punching anyone with them. The armor’s been overhauled, again, but that fiberglass shit’s gotta go. It’s giving him a rash.”

  “What about the approach?”

  “They don’t want you to cross on foot. Reckon the Bay Bridge can’t take it.”

  “Did you show them our numbers?”

  “Sure, but the Richmond Bridge is already falling apart, and they don’t want to risk an accident. He’s gotta go over in the harness.”

  Corben cursed. “And the other . . . problem?”

  “Electrolytes are bumped up to optimum, but he’s still running like a faucet. The doc says he’ll adjust to the new diet, but they don’t want to run antibiotics on him so soon before—”

  “Another upgrade? He’s not a goddamned machine. He’s—”

  “I know, Wes, we feel the same way, but to them he’s a weapon. They don’t even call him a ‘he’ anymore. And you know what they keep saying—”

  “I know, I know. He volunteered for this. As if any of us knew what ‘this’ would be.”

  “Oh, and I tried to get her to leave before you deployed, but—”

  Corben stopped, fussing with the readouts on his helmet. “I’ll take care of it, Ben. She deserves better than to get thrown out by the guards.”

  Lieutenant Mullin patted him on the shoulder, checked the optic jacks running from Corben’s helmet to the CPU on the back of the suit, gave him a thumbs-up and went back to a safe distance.

  Corben slipped behind the flag and stopped, as he always did, to offer a prayer for himself, and for Steve. Then he opened his eyes and ascended the stairs parked beside Steve’s temple.

  Steve lay on his back in the hangar. All the computers and gantries and medical equipment had been cleared
out to give him room to get up.

  At the top of the stairs, Laura waited, just like always, beside the open hatch bored out of Steve’s right temple. The guards had orders to keep her out, but no one could look Steve’s widow in the eye and deny her.

  She lifted her black lace veil and poured those eyes all over him. “He’s afraid, Wes.”

  “He’s not afraid, Laura. He’s—” A machine, a weapon, a meat puppet . . . “He was never afraid of anything in his life.”

  Laura got closer, her perfume burning in his nose. “He loved his country, you know that. He loved you, Wes. He loved me—a little bit less maybe. He wasn’t afraid for himself, but now . . . ”

  “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s some mutt hunk of kaiju-shit from North Korea. It’s probably already dead; this is just a photo op.” He shook her off, but her real perfume—her sweat, her tears—made it hard to remember where he was.

  “It’s not the fighting.” Laura tried to catch his eyes. “He’s afraid of what he’s becoming. He knew that this mission . . . doing this made him a symbol, like the astronauts. They’re changing him again, aren’t they?”

  “They want him to win. That’s his job, now. He has to adapt. We all do . . . ”

  He brushed past her, but her arms caught him, running over the countless sockets that would bind him to her husband. He pulled away. He couldn’t make himself do it again, any more than he could forget that she wanted him for the same reason the Pentagon did.

  “Try to get on with your life,” he told her.

  “I thought we were trying,” she said, and he looked away. “The army doesn’t consider him dead, but they don’t pay his salary. And—we’re . . . Steve was Catholic . . . I can’t even . . . ”

  Corben climbed in. “They’ll understand when you do, Laura. Try not to be here when we get back.”

  “Give him my love, won’t you?”

  Corben slammed the hatch and initiated the pre-wake checks. Steve’s EEG was a minimalist tundra of limbic activity with momentary temporal lobe storms, but nothing to worry about. Everything that was Steve had been scooped out of the front of his skull to make room for the cockpit. Cables snaked from the bulkhead and slotted into their respective ports on the suit. Corben tingled as those cables shoehorned his brain into the sleeping giant.

  “Commander, this is your eleven o’clock wake-up call. The Green Meanies are waiting outside, and Steve’s late for work.”

  Corben nodded at the marching columns of status lights on his smart visor. The phantom sensations of godlike power swept all the garbage out of his mind as he got into character.

  “Roger that, Ben. Steve’s on-line in three . . . two . . . ”

  He hit the switch.

  Steve opened his eyes. Light burned until the visor calibrated his response and winched down his pupils. He rose to his feet, slowly, like a coma patient. His helmet brushed the hanging halogen lamps, forcing him to hunch over double to step out onto the runway.

  The night sky was clear above, but an opaque canopy of fog enveloped San Francisco down to the double-decker Bay Bridge. From the heart of the fog came a constant flash and dull, rolling pops of ordnance being expended in an all-out war. Colt was developing a 90mm revolver for Steve to use, and a telephone pole-sized police baton that delivered a fifty-thousand-volt shock was on the drawing boards at the Pentagon, but for now, he was expected to beat whatever was raising hell over there with his hands and feet and some Hellfire missiles salvaged from a junked Apache helicopter.

  Steve checked the harness on his heavily armored torso, and hooked into the web of cables running back to two enormous cargo helicopters idling before him. At his thumbs-up, they lifted and spread out until the cables stood taut, rotors growling in mutiny at the nine-ton payload.

  He braced himself and rolled his shoulders, tried to scratch the rash on his back. At last, the cables twanged and the tarmac dropped away. Aloft, the helicopters double-timed, lurching into the wind over Treasure Island and along the Bay Bridge, where hundreds stuck in traffic honked and shouted his name. The wind pried at the seams of his Kevlar bodysuit, the battlements upon his shoulders and head, seeking any path to steal his strength.

  Wes Corben dissolved like aspirin inside Steve, shivering at the wind and straining to see out of Steve’s eyes into the shroud over the battle. Even as his thermal overlays gave up on the blizzard of fire and smoke, his radiation scans fed him an outline of something larger than Steve, and faster, and—beyond that, he had no fucking idea what he was looking at.

  “Have a nice day at the office, dear,” a chopper pilot chirped in his ear, and the cables cut loose high above the impossible burning thing that even now looked up to watch him falling.

  And then—and this always drove Corben batshit when it happened, but Mullin swore they couldn’t find the bug—Steve’s life flashed before his eyes.

  When kaiju synthesis technology disseminated to all the extremist nations of the world, it sparked a renaissance of rogue state misbehavior. If plutonium and anthrax were effective means of asserting one’s will upon the world stage, then the revival of some sleeping monstrosity—or the creation of a new one—was a golden dream of random havoc.

  Not to be left behind by kaiju-mongers in China and Africa, the United States embarked on its own Megamorphic Weaponization project. No renegade sauropods or lumbering cybernetic chimerae could serve as a symbol of American military might, however, the people of the world’s last great superpower would never rally behind a monster. At least subconsciously grasping the return of pagan idolatry that lay at the roots of the kaiju arms race, they strove to create a hero. To, in their own well-spun words, “put a human face, an all-American face, on the kaiju crisis.” So they asked for volunteers.

  Major Steve Arness had done so, as they never tired of reminding his wife, and had passed the rigorous screening process. They needed someone strong and fast, with excellent reflexes, with Golden Age astronaut looks that would translate into action figures, kid’s pajamas and beach towels and shit. Steve was perfect.

  Using gene therapy and nanomites, they reprogrammed Steve’s mitochondrial DNA, and he grew. Within six months, he stood sixty-four feet tall.

  His doctors pleaded with the Pentagon scientists to consider the potential for replication errors during this reckless growth, particularly in the brain, which stopped growing by age three in normal human development. To grow from three pounds to the volume of a V-8 engine block is traumatic enough for any organism, but how much more so for the most complex aggregation of matter in the known universe, the human brain? Very soon after his treatments stopped, Steve went totally insane. He devolved to a bestial shell of the confident test pilot who had volunteered for this project—and left them no choice.

  After escaping from the Florida island where he was interred, he destroyed Cape Canaveral and twelve helicopters and a company of infantry before a TOW missile lobotomy felled him. Incredibly, he survived, though in a coma. Wheels began spinning, and the catastrophic setback became an unprecedented opportunity.

  Neurosurgeons, structural engineers and computer designers flew to the island, and set about fixing him. The cavity in Steve’s forebrain was filled with a mainframe that routed all his nervous impulses to a cockpit just above Steve’s eyes. The man who controlled Steve would receive all the data of Steve’s experience as raw reality; his reactions drove Steve’s body as an amplified version of his own. That man would have to be an extraordinary pilot, as good as Steve himself had once been, for he would have to become Steve. Wes Corben had not wanted to volunteer for the project, but he did, because he could not bear the thought of a stranger inside his best friend’s head.

  Steve hit the ground and sank up to his ankles on a grassy palisade overlooking the Bay. The street was seeded with burning cars and military debris, and a fusillade of tracers sprayed out of the nearest cross-street. Protesters swarmed the sidewalks around his feet, waving banners and throwing rocks and bottles as they sought
shelter from the meta-Biblical conflict raging above their heads.

  A chorus of spotters buzzed in his ears that the enemy was closing in on his position, but he just stood there. The thing had been right under him when he dropped. How did something so big move so fast?

  The building in front of him, an eight-story office complex, sagged and spat glass as all its eastern-exposure windows shattered. Steve looked up at the titanic black shape perched on the roof just as it sprang at his face.

  He tried to roll with the impact and throw the attacker over his head, ut it slammed into his chest, crushing his lungs flat. Its talons got inside his arms and shredded his armor.

  Pain whited out the scene. Corben almost succumbed before the dampers reduced Steve’s pain-incentive triggers and told him what was wrong. Steve was laid out on his back in the street, armor and bodysuit torn wide open, the attacker straddling his chest like a dog about to bury a bone in his abdomen.

  With a noisome trumpet blast that somehow cut through the din of war all around, Steve’s irritable, bacteria-infested bowel cramped up and sounded a war charge. The monster flinched and shrank away, as if offended by the outburst. Galvanized, Steve brought one leg up as hard as he could between its hind legs, hoping the kaiju specialists had striven for authenticity, and levered its mammoth bulk up and as far away as he could.

  The creature flailed at the air, sailing over three waterfront blocks, smashing to earth on an unfortunate retro diner and plowing across the street into the deserted stalls of the farmer’s market in front of the Ferry Terminal. At last, Steve got a good look at it.

  Even with its pelt burned off, Kungmin Horangi was clearly supposed to be a tiger, perhaps a new strain of the giant sabertooths the Chinese had revived from fossils and turned loose in Tibet. But its hide was a sickening mass of polyps and blisters, with arrays of envenomed quills sprouting in radiating patterns down its spine from its head, or where there was supposed to be a head. Nice try, North Korea.

  Then it roared at him, and he understood that, blasphemy though it was, this was no mistake. It was the offspring of a fundamentally perverse union of land and sea fauna. But why? Why would anyone cross a tiger with a sea cucumber?