The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  He soon found out. The head peeled open and splayed out like a banana, a thrashing mane of fanged tentacles around a gaping maw filled with busy mandibles. Its eyes, he saw, were everywhere, on the tentacles and all over its body, so that even as it recovered from the impact, it lashed out at a tank parked behind it and stomped its turret in, kicking it through the lobby window of a Japanese bank. Then it charged.

  Steve snatched up the nearest solid object—a tour bus containing BC/DC, Canada’s foremost AC/DC cover band—and hurled it at the oncoming monster. Kungmin Horangi changed course, talons digging into the solid masonry façade of the old US Mint, and vaulted off it. Steve barely dodged, then reached out and gripped one of its tentacles as it passed, making ready to whip it around and smash it into the street.

  But the plan fell apart before the pain even reached the dazed synapses of Steve’s pilot. The thorny tentacle razored through Steve’s gloves, into the muscle between the bones of his fingers and out the other side, as the monster tore past him and took his hand with it, ripping off the flesh like a glove.

  Steve stared at his naked bones and let out a yelp of confusion. The spotters screamed in his ears, but he heard only the sound of his own building agony as it roared out of him and shattered the last intact windows on the avenue.

  The Red Korean kaiju skidded to a halt a block away. The street buckled under it, brown sewage percolating up out of smashed pipes around its massive paws. The monstrous hybrid relaxed, as though Steve were already dead and it could destroy the city at its leisure. It shot one paw out at the walls of a glass skyscraper and smashed something inside—a cat stalking a mouse through a dollhouse. Steve recognized the building: the Transamerica Pyramid, always a favorite with disaster movies.

  Blood loss and encroaching shock made red warning lights blink all around the periphery of his vision, but Steve focused only on the enemy. “Weapons hot,” he growled, raising his intact arm to point at the thing now engaged in smashing open the Pyramid’s neighbors like an anteater ravaging termite mounds. “Fox one, fox two,” he said, and Hellfire missiles arced out of the gauntlet on his forearm.

  Where they hit, the sun seemed to peek out of a hole in the night, and then the whole avenue was awash in fire that reduced the air itself to ash.

  “Fox three, four . . . ” Steve emptied the remainder of his arsenal into the flaming mound, but he knew that no matter how hot he burned it, no matter how many pieces he blew it into, it would come back, and keep coming, and coming—

  And now, the news: In the wake of the disastrous San Francisco attack, the true extent of the damage inflicted upon the city is only now coming to light. While the kaiju invader Kungmin Horangi broke down the physical security systems of an undisclosed number of bank headquarters in the city’s financial district, an army of hackers descended on the unprotected servers and deleted whole banks of financial records, credit reports and loan documents. An emergency meeting of the FDIC and SEC this morning was closed to the public, but critics predict that at least four major banks will be forced to freeze all holdings and declare bankruptcy, until such time as the records can be retrieved. While his press secretary delivered the painful news that the federal budget is already too tight to allow for more emergency aid, the president made this brief statement, while enjoying a round of golf with friends and campaign boosters at Cocoa Beach:“We are at war, and the enemy is within our borders, as well as all around us. People will have to make sacrifices. Real Americans won’t have to be told twice.”

  The president’s golf game was cut short by the approaching Hurricane Manuel, but he still got to fire the inaugural round at Florida’s first indoor duck hunting arena. The president and his party bagged fourteen mallards, and poked fun at his troubles by naming one of the two ducks he shot in a cage match “Kungmin,” and the other, “Kim”—

  It had not been Kim Jong-Il’s intention to initiate a sneak attack on the United States. The last thing he wanted was for posterity to associate North Korea with the conniving cowardice of the Nipponese devils at Pearl Harbor. If only the American president had taken his repeated warnings seriously . . .

  At first his plan was only a frustrated whim—to turn a kaiju loose on his decadent cousins to the south, and force the Americans to show their impotence, or their insanity . . . it mattered not, so long as something finally happened. A modest plan, but the Supreme Leader’s restless dreams of even a shabby reconstituted dinosaur were out of his poor nation’s reach. All this changed when he stole the inestimable Dr. Otaku and set him to work; the dream had become the creation of a symbol of North Korea’s adamantine resolve, an avatar of the People to shake the palaces of the world to dust. The notorious Nipponese kaijuologist only smiled and bowed and disappeared into his lab, saying, “I will hold a mirror up to your state, and give your reflection life.”

  The world laughed when it heard what North Korea was doing. With half of the capital in darkness, with disease and famine claiming nearly as many per annum as had the war that split their great nation in half, Kim was spending all their money on a desperate weapons project, using a kidnapped—and certifiably mad—scientist to make a monster.

  But Kim had never listened to the world. If his rule, by the same rigorous Stalinist doctrine he inherited from his omnipotent father, was painted as incompetent tyranny by the chattering swine of the outside world, he would not deign to explain himself. Though Dr. Otaku escaped to China only six months into the project—in a capsule within a giant earthworm of his own devising—the specimen in the brine tanks in his lab grew nevertheless, stunted and grotesque, yes, but it became more than he ever dared to imagine.

  Kim awakened to a revelation, and dreamed a new dream of eliminating hunger and teaching the world about the true benefits of communism, but the world would not stop laughing long enough to listen. They cackled at the destruction of Kungmin Horangi in San Francisco, but soon they would hear, and see, and taste—and they would know.

  In the heart of his palatial fortress at Pyongyang, Kim Jong-Il swilled Hennessy, raged at his PlayStation and waited for the world to apologize.

  General Skilling hated using the laser pointer, but he’d found it was the only way to keep the president’s attention. “As you know, sir, one year ago, North Korea was accused by the UN Security Council of running a biological weapons program. Nobody thought they’d ever pose a threat to anyone but themselves, but there was some speculation that China had financed them.

  “Kim Jong-Il refused to address the charges, but then Dr. Otaku disappeared—”

  “He wanted the head egghead for his monster factory.”

  “Correct, sir,” Admiral Beecher cut in. “Kim is a freak for the old kaiju flicks, and when the Japs cracked the recombinant kaiju genome, he shit himself with envy, and went on a shopping spree. He did the same thing to get some movies made, a few years back.”

  Skilling waggled the pointer in the president’s eyes. “Well, this morning, sir, we received this tape. It was postmarked two weeks ago, but it was sent parcel rate.”

  A screen lit up at the center of the big board. A plump face filled the screen, eyes flashing like Siamese fighting fish behind the convex lenses of monumental goo-goo goggles. Pulling out in spastic jerks, the camera framed Kim Jong-Il at a podium before a window overlooking the snowcapped mountains of the Amnok-Kang River Valley, near the Chinese border. Behind him, an elderly Japanese man in a spotless white lab coat smiled and nodded, his nimble fingers dancing as if they worked the strings of a marionette.

  “That’s Dr. Otaku. Kim’s people took him from his fortified lab on Mt Fuji.”

  For once, the president was all ears. “Was he brainwashed?”

  “You be the judge of who brainwashed whom.”

  The dictator appeared tired, but smiled benignly at the clockwork soldiers flanking him at the podium. Though heavily sweetened with digital studio effects, his voice was still the querulous falsetto of a cat trying to frighten a rival as he squawked through
the hostile English-language script. “To those who believe that communism is dead, Great Comrade Kim Jong-Il offers this lesson. Communism is sharing, no more and no less, from each according to his means, to each according to his needs. And so, people of the so-called Free World, we share the gift of the People’s Tiger with you.”

  The video cut out.

  The president pounded the table. “What I want to know is, why was this such a goddamned surprise? We knew he was cooking up something, we knew he had the know-how, and he warned us—”

  “He warned you, Mr. President, but—”

  “The man’s some kind of goddamned nut, with all the crazy crap that comes out of his mouth. ‘The People’s Tiger is coming?’ What were we supposed to make of that happy horseshit?”

  Admiral Beecher, reluctantly, stepped in. “It would appear, sir, that we did have some advance contact . . . ”

  The president smelled the fumble and pounced on it. “What? Who dropped the ball?”

  “Our nuclear submarine Akron, on patrol in the Sea of Japan, pinged an unidentified object larger than itself a week ago. It emitted no hull or engine noise, so the captain assumed it was a hostile kaiju, and torpedoed it. The target was presumed destroyed.”

  “Why the hell wasn’t I told?”

  Beecher looked around for support, but they’d all been thrown under that bus too many times. “Well, it, um . . . it was in the daily briefings to the Joint Chiefs, but it looked like a non-starter. No action alerts, no response from your people—”

  “Well, now we know different, don’t we?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve since collected waterborne tissue samples on the beaches near Aomori and Sapporo, but it’s difficult to account for all of the mass because . . . ”

  “Because what? Out with it!”

  Beecher spent, General Skilling took back the laser pointer. “People have been eating it, Mr. President.”

  That cracked the president up. “Lord, those Japs’ll eat anything, won’t they?”

  “Sir, your morning briefing of yesterday details the same problem in San Francisco—”

  “What? What page is that on?”

  “Fourteen-A, sir, in the bright red box? Army recovery efforts were hampered by the protesters, some of whom appear to have been pinko fifth columnists, and they led a salvage of the remains.”

  “What do you mean, ‘salvage?’ ”

  “The protests were about federal aid, sir, about food for the poor. The meat of the kaiju was roasted by Steve’s, ah, overzealous attack, and distributed over dozens of city blocks by the explosion. It is resistant to decay and, by all accounts, the flesh of the monster is, ah . . . ”

  “Spit it out!”

  “Well, it’s said to be delicious.”

  In South Korea, the US Army maintained a high state of alert, awaiting an order to begin the mad minute they’d been trained for—showering North Korea with missiles. But due to the desperate peace brokered by South Korea’s president, and China’s promise that any attack on her poor neighbor would draw a nuclear response, a shaky truce held. But at home, a new radical movement formed and, almost overnight, escalated into an all-out insurgency.

  When the unwashed hippie hordes of the UC Berkeley student body staged a sit-in at which the meat of Kungmin Horangi was offered as a sacrament, the police cracked down, but nobody took it seriously. When the same thing happened at Stanford’s crypto-conservative Hoover Institute four days later, they started to worry. Police raids on communist soup kitchens all over the Bay Area turned up a distribution network for the kaiju meat. Within a week, thirty-eight such establishments were shut down, and nearly three tons of the monster’s flesh was confiscated and removed to labs across the country for study. What they learned in the next twenty-four hours made them freeze or burn all samples and order a news blackout.

  When left in a medium of seawater and organic nutrients, the flesh replicated itself and grew. The proprietors of the soup kitchens—card-carrying communists all—were interrogated and extolled the virtues of the meat as an inexhaustible food staple, a gift from the peace-loving people of North Korea.

  Their customers, however, were a different matter. The poor and hipsters alike, drawn to the necessity or novelty of free kaiju cuisine, reported that it had properties far beyond its flavor and astounding nutritional content. Eating the meat opened gates in the brain, boosting endorphins and serotonin output, creating a euphoric yet alert state which one imprisoned kaiju chef described as “like Christmas morning, where you love everyone and want to share everything.” This witness had particular clout, as he was a decorated artillery officer and survivor of the San Francisco attack, who snatched up and cooked a feast of kaiju meat for his army buddies as a goof. “If this is what communism was supposed to be about, then have we ever been barking up the wrong tree!” he declared, even as he was taken out and shot.

  The government’s aggressive publicity campaign to depict the meat as drugged, poisoned or radioactive seemed to fall on deaf ears. Spontaneous demonstrations of thousands blocked every law enforcement attempt to root out the trade in kaiju meat, and kitchens opened in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Las Vegas—the latter of which suffered most grievously from the effect, as tourists discovered the futile stupidity of gambling and simply shared their money, and hotels opened their doors to the homeless.

  The government tried, as well, to block the plague of websites devoted to kaiju cuisine and philosophy, most of which came not from North Korea, but from Japan, where the phenomenon had already saturated the community via the meat that washed ashore at Sapporo. In retaliation, domestic and foreign hackers alike descended on the federal servers in earnest, so that the NCIC criminal database was wiped clean of all records, and the New York Stock Exchange seized up and began rattling off kaiju recipes.

  The next month saw the kaiju kitchens spread across the nation and out of the liberal underground, into the faltering middle-class mainstream. With more banks in default or freezing their accounts in the wake of the database collapse, unemployment climbed to nearly half the population, and social agencies were swamped and sank without issuing a single check. Employees at fast-food franchises were caught preparing kaiju meat for unsuspecting customers, and the suburban hinterlands began to simmer with political unrest and unconditional love. The news stopped showing the riots, as police clubs fell more and more on the heads of corn-fed Republicans and even other cops who had succumbed to the forbidden flesh.

  No matter what draconian measures the government imposed—martial law and curfews in the cities, roadblocks and roving gangs of National Guardsmen torching burger joints with flamethrowers everywhere else—the madness spread, and people pig-headedly, defiantly, continued to share.

  Commander Wes Corben spent the next month running Steve through physical therapy in Florida, and so had little time to read the news. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor from his hospital bed, recovering from a concussion and the psychosomatic shock of losing Steve’s hand.

  He pushed for a robotic prosthetic, but was outmaneuvered by the project scientists, who wanted to try out a sauropod regeneration virus they’d harvested from the remains of one of Japan’s lesser-known kaiju plagues.

  The treatment bore immediate fruit; within hours, Steve’s cauterized stump sprouted with new buds of bone sheathed in noisily dividing cells, and before the week was out, a hand, of sorts, had grown to replace the one sheared off by the monster. That his skin broke out in shingles like the scales of a dinosaur only intrigued them more, and when Steve began to grow a tail, they were ecstatic. They talked about pushing the envelope—Steve Mk2, armies of dino-Steves stomping through Pyongyang, eating everything and everyone in their path on the long road to Beijing—

  The only battle Corben won was over Steve’s incontinence; they resumed antibiotics and stopped feeding him by stomach tubes. But Corben had to run Steve’s meal each day, herding the brain-dead behemoth through whole pods of steamed orca and hockey-rin
k-sized portions of cornbread.

  He came back to his motel room off-base to find Laura waiting for him. She still wore her widow’s weeds, but she shed them soon enough even as he worked the key in the door. Too tired from days on end inside a dead man’s head, too beaten down to argue, he let her in, and kept his mouth shut when she called him Steve. He told himself he was defending his friend’s memory by refusing to do it where she really wanted to, in the cramped confines of Steve’s cockpit.

  Afterwards, he lay in bed, wondering what day it was. The phone rang. Laura turned over, sighed in her sleep, whispered a sibilant name. He picked up the phone.

  “Scramble, code red, Commander. Steve’s late for work.”

  Corben slid off the bed and stepped into his crumpled pants. “Steve’s still in therapy from the changes. He’s not ready to walk around the block yet—”

  “Too damned bad is what they say. We need him. Tiger-Cucumber’s back.”

  “As near as we can tell, the bastards hoarded a ton of the meat, and incubated it near Norfolk, right under our goddamned noses.” General Skilling caught his breath as he paced alongside Commander Corben in the hangar at Bolling Air Force Base. As before, helicopters circled over the water outside, dogging something moving fast upstream to the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers, at the heart of Washington, DC.

  Lilliputian scientists and technicians crawled all over Steve, disconnecting catheters and hoses and running the final pre-wake check. Corben eyed Steve nervously, seeing the changes in full bloom for the first time. Steve lay propped on his side to accommodate his new tail, as long as he was tall, spilling out onto the runway. His bone structure had begun to warp, muscles to sculpt themselves into a very different kind of body. An ugly brainwave soured Corben’s alert frame of mind: a drawing-board sketch of King Kong versus Godzilla in a genetic blender, with Steve’s apple-pie freckled, Tom-Sawyer face slapped onto the hideous final product.