The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  Ike redoubled his efforts to gut the dome, which disgorged armies of antique flatbed tanks with energy projector lamps. They hardly singed Ike’s feathers, but the static charge made all the cockpit monitors go to random satellite feeds of Brazilian children’s shows. Blind, Corben kept smashing, hoping to somehow pull the plug, sure nobody was listening as he screamed, “Stop talking about it, you’re making it happen . . . ”

  Mortified, Mariko rolled through the trendy streets of Harajuku, eating everything.

  Every door was closed to her. She even tried to squirm down the storm drains, but they had been sealed. Everything organic that she touched dissolved and added to her already unbearable mass. Even the disgusting germs on every surface gave up their secrets with a toxic whimper, as they became her.

  It was liberating to be free of fear of bacteria, but the shock of tasting everything she touched sent her into a panic, stampeding through the quarantine roadblocks and out into the city, seeking a huge bowl of tapioca to stand in until someone could administer an antidote that worked.

  Soldiers shot at her, and with a wave of her pseudopods, she crushed and slurped them into her abominable spreading belly like so much melted ice cream. Classmates shrieked and hurled burning textbooks at her, and she wept hydrochloric acid tears, reducing them to crumbling husks while an NHK camera drone peeped it all. Lashing out at the drones only attracted a dozen more and set fire to a KFC, and all its flaming patrons leapt into her foaming flanks to put the fire out.

  In her blood, the kaiju RNA-potentiator agent had triggered a chain-reaction throughout Mariko’s body, causing every cell to revert to totipotency, a science word that meant every one of them could easily go its own way with no regrets. Made up of a colony of anything-goes amoebas casually dedicated to the idea of Mariko, if not to the form or the other dull mortal stuff, the new, mutant Mariko had cast off the uncool gene therapy scheme behind the spiked Kungmin Horangi jerky, only to regress into a blob.

  When she broke out of the classroom, a team of mercs shot her with tranquilizer darts spiked with the antidote. But they didn’t reckon on Mariko’s spunk, or her morning diet of ginseng, black market estrogen, and Blue Otaku Ecstasy. The havoc these ingredients played in the total reshuffling of Mariko’s genetics and morphology had rendered her a seething, primordial pit of awful potential.

  She wept at the manga-scale irony. Once, she could not bring herself to eat anything but kaiju jerky, for fear of becoming a fat girl. Now she could eat everything, it seemed, but herself.

  Slithering down the alley, she met a ragpicker woman, ancient and seemingly held together by dust and cat hair. Alone, the charwoman stood in her path, bent under a knapsack bulging with recyclables, but singularly unimpressed.

  “Foolish girl, what are you making of yourself?”

  “I don’t know!” Mariko wailed, shocked at the clarity of her words, as well as the volume, which shattered windows and set off car alarms

  for eight blocks.

  “Foolish girl . . . become the champion Japan needs.”

  Mariko tried to thank the old woman, but ended up eating her.

  Perhaps it was the old woman’s words, or just her gamy old body digesting within Mariko’s formless new one, but a deep, cosmic serenity took hold of her, enfolding her like a cocoon, soothing her with dreams of a new shape.

  On the verge of what he earnestly thought was victory, Wes Corben was already reaching for the emergency booze locker when Ike suddenly seized up and defied orders.

  “Orders” are what they called them in the manuals, but as Ike’s pilot, Corben entered commands directly into the monster’s hacked brainstem. Most brain functions above the autonomic level were modeled by on-board computers, but the men who designed and modified Ike had learned from their costly previous model, Major Steve.

  Ike should have shut down the moment it refused an “order,” or gone to a fetal crouch until it was airlifted. There was no “Ike” to defy Corben’s “orders,” or so he thought, until he came within a hair’s breadth of crushing Dr. Otaku himself.

  Smashing away at the mad scientist’s lair like a rabid badger with its snout in a beehive, Ike burrowed deeper into the lab complex, flinging crushed concrete, satellite dishes, lab equipment, and flattened hordes of subhuman orderlies like so much beach sand. Corben dared to hope that he could finally exact revenge for all the awful twists Dr. Otaku had introduced into his life, when he lost control of Ike.

  The renegade monster didn’t run amok or switch sides to pull Corben out of its own skull. On all fours, Ike crawled away from the gutted lair and began to dig a hole in the middle of the minefield.

  The hole was wider than it was deep, and of no strategic value whatsoever that Corben could see. Yet Ike squatted over it in blithe innocence of the onslaught of bombs and lasers chopping away at its hunched shoulders.

  Corben tried to harangue Mission Control, tried to raise anyone, but the airwaves were a helter-skelter of random red noises and bleeding shortwave chatter.

  He watched the monitors in disbelief. Fuck the regs, he thought, and lit up a cigarette. He’d need at least that long to figure out what to do next, assuming he could do anything.

  Ike was engineered to have no secondary sexual characteristics, no hormone arousal receptors that might make the monster hard to control in the event of a “gay bomb,” or other sexual bioweapons.

  So, even if he couldn’t do anything about it, Corben still wanted very much to hear the guys at the lab explain how Ike could be laying eggs.

  Of the seven million Tokyo residents who watched the newborn, nameless monster materialize in their midst, no fewer than fourteen died of heart attacks or strokes, while another hundred and twelve leapt or fell to their deaths as it passed harmlessly through their apartment blocks. A perfect self-projecting hologram, a thirteen-story ghost; when it thrust its metamorphic forelimbs through towering skyscrapers and maser-tank battalions, its tiny human victims lay quivering yet unharmed in their own urine, quite convinced they’d been crushed.

  And there was no shortage of real destruction. The two Self Defense Force artillery units flanking Otaku’s monster in the business district of Akasaka Chuo never particularly cared for each other. Infiltrated and thoroughly compromised by rival mystic prosperity cults, and with no enemy to fight but endless kaiju invaders, the rival tankers could be accused of little more than excessive zeal and poor hearing when reports came in that their barrages were passing through the target and hitting each other, the US Embassy, and the nearby Imperial Palace, with devastating accuracy.

  “Shit,” Otaku hissed, cutting a botched line of code and pasting a revised binary phrase into the command line. “Forgot to carry the one . . . ”

  And the monster instantly became utterly, inescapably solid.

  The most coherent accounts of the monster’s appearance described it as some sort of chimerical centipede, with hundreds of armored, highly articulated limbs that wrought street-level holocausts wherever the creature went, like a Rose Parade of whirling combine threshers.

  Skyscrapers toppled against each other in its wake like felled stands of bamboo, their foundations whittled away as if by colossal Weed Eaters. The business end of the creature was a burly, almost humanoid thorax with a deadly array of wildly scything meat cleavers for arms. For a head, it had only a blunt, lobsterish battering ram festooned with hosts of compound camera eyes and a freaky crown of trembling downlink dishes, radomes, and antennae, like the collected receiving arrays of the NSA and KGB, stuffed into its face.

  The indestructible apparition seemed to frolic through Tokyo with the blind fury of a tsunami on two hundred dancing feet, but the civil defense authorities watching the city’s transit grid saw an insidious plan taking shape behind the chaos.

  As the monster rampaged through the city, it surgically cut off all bridges, subway routes, and highways along the Sumida River, severing central Tokyo from the eastern suburbs, and moving north, chopping down monorails alo
ng the narrow trash-chute of the Kanda River.

  Even as Otaku’s giant centipede raged through the city, it shrank, but not from the puny onslaught of the Self Defense and NATO forces. The behemoth was an Internet Worm made flesh, an apparition of pure data cast in a candy coating of wantonly destructive matter. And it was dismantling itself, shedding boxcar-sized segments of its serpentine body that disintegrated into streams of data radiation that made gross matter thrum like overclocked chipsets, and hordes of giant spiders that spread throughout the island it had created out of central Tokyo, repairing damage and weaving webs of carbon-steel around the leaning skyscrapers of Akasaka, knitting them together to reinforce them against an imminent quake not even the doom-obsessed engineers of the city could have predicted.

  Wracked with a pain like a thousand periods, Mariko cried out and shattered her cocoon.

  Sure, she should feel exultation and curiosity to discover what she had become, but mostly, she just felt shame. The whole day had been a surprise final exam in degradation.

  Getting dropped off at school by your shit-eater father’s mistress was humiliating. Freaking out in class was lethal. Turning into some kind of giant amoeba and eating everyone in your path? Priceless.

  And so, when she crept out of the crater of her rebirth in the parking garage behind Shibuya Station, Mariko did not give a shit what she looked like. Her awesome wings spreading to dry in the sun, radiant scales throwing off showers of holographic rainbows when she launched herself effortlessly into the air, all of it—totally boring.

  But it got interesting fast.

  Mariko took to the air, and immediately was cut down by the vibra-katana of Mega-Ronin 2, the new and improved defender of Tokyo. The crackling blade only grazed her, but its disruptor field rebooted her brain, grounding her but good. Well, her job was done, then, but the robot kept trying to cut her head off.

  She only breathed on the stupid thing, and melted its knees as it charged her. Collapsing on its overloaded katana, the giant mecha-samurai cut its own head off, but kept trying to get up and spaz out on her again.

  Fed up with the robot’s retarded shit, Mariko flapped her wings and climbed to the top of the marine layer to survey the city.

  On the smoky eastern horizon, a colossal buzzsaw chewed a southwesterly course through Akasaka’s black glass towers and mowing through the shopper’s purgatory of the Ginza, oblivious to carpet-bombing jets and irate giant moths. She noted with dismay that her home and the shit-eater’s offices lay just inside the forty-square kilometer island isolated by the shrinking centipede’s unchecked swath of destruction.

  It wasn’t like she could go home, even if she wanted to. Not like this.

  The monster turned northeast to disable the Hibiya train line. Directly in its path, Mariko noted with a fiery squeak of panic, lay the corporate headquarters of Sanrio.

  The monster was more than welcome to step on her school and the shit-eater’s mistress, but she’d be damned if she’d let it fuck with Hello Kitty.

  Millions of eyewitnesses described the epic battle that followed between the flying savior of Tokyo and the city-killing centipede. Thousands of hours of video from cameras, cellphones, and webcams made every one of them a liar.

  Not a single conclusive image of any kind of monster would ever be recovered or extracted from the Tokyo Otaku Event, except for spotty coverage of the rampaging dragon that NHK identified as the prime minister’s academically unserious and somewhat homely daughter. The damage seems to appear spontaneously around her, as if shockwaves from her temper tantrum are spreading to slice the heart of the city free of its setting.

  According to the most reliable eyewitnesses, exactly fifteen minutes and fourteen seconds after it materialized, the Tokyo Otaku Event vanished. Witnesses reported a brief vacuum when it disintegrated into clouds of civic-minded giant spiders which immediately leapt to work repairing the damage—but from there, they diverged into a variety of scenarios, from Mega-Ronin 2 beheading the monster with its sword, to the people bringing it down and ripping it apart with their bare hands until it imploded back to its home dimension.

  Five seconds later, it appeared in London.

  In the guise of a fire-breathing, hundred-headed eel, it crushed and cremated all bridges over the Thames, then turned its gnarly gnashing lamprey-mouths on the West End, vomiting napalm death with uncanny precision on banks, media outlets, and private military contractors.

  Again, cameras captured only spontaneous wave attacks of panicked civilians who seemed to shiver the air and the helpless city to bits around them, and the vibrating, ballistic waves of giant spiders, spilling off the empty epicenter of the action to repair the damage. When it imploded out of existence three minutes later, shell-shocked crowds almost seemed to repent of the monster they’d created and become, but then someone preached that the monster was revenge for the rejection of England’s traditional fish and chips as the national dish, and the rioting began afresh.

  Thirteen breathless seconds later, it came to Moscow.

  It looked like Stalin. It flattened the kleptocratic Duma and hurled Lenin’s Tomb into orbit, then lobbed fistfuls of moldering Soviet public works across eleven time zones at strategic targets in the plush offices, dachas, and barracks of Russia’s robber-barons. It tried to eat Putin, and almost kept him down. The president was left alone, nonplussed and naked, when the gargantuan phantom of communism dematerialized from the eye of the maelstrom it created, leaving legions of giant spiders to gift-wrap the Kremlin.

  It struck San Francisco at 4:20 PM PDT, so it was, like, gone, before anyone noticed.

  Wherever they materialized, Otaku’s phantom kaiju were only the thin end of the bulldozer. Underfoot, the real threat seeped like bacteria into the wounds the giant monsters inflicted: cadres of kamikaze hackers, armed with mainframes, laser projectors, truckloads of highly virulent nanotechnology and portable karaoke.

  While the spiders toiled overhead, the bosozoku gangs dumped the nanomites into the sewers, and waited around, sniffing glue and belting out Motörhead tunes until the gestating city throbbed and incorporated them into its mad self-improvement campaign. Out of thousands of tons of garbage and raw sewage and even the pipes themselves, the mites forged the mighty thews of a living god amid the infrastructure of the city center.

  Unseen, they spread and assimilated every communications system, every computer, every unproductive scrap of biomass, to form a new vital body out of the old one; and out of the stink of their shit and the drone of their dreams, they conjured the sleeping soul of the city, coaxed it into that uneasy, unborn body, and goosed it up the ass with a psychochemical hot poker.

  And the world, already braced for some unspeakable new menace for well over three exhausting cable news cycles, collectively shit itself.

  When the wheel began to turn on the hatch of Ike’s cockpit, Commander Corben took cover behind a bulkhead and drew his sidearm.

  No new alert had sounded to drown out the systems failure klaxons since Ike went back to nature.

  Ike calmly watched the perimeter of the minefield, glancing every so often at the clutch of leathery speckled eggs under its—her?—flanks. Each egg was about the size of a minivan.

  Beyond coming up with a betting pool and a lot of rotten jokes, Mission Control had been no help at all.

  So, when the tiny assassin with the jet pack skulked into the cockpit, Corben was overjoyed. Here, thank God, was a problem he could lick with his own fists. He wanted to hug the little man, and he did, with chopping blows to the nose, throat, and solar plexus.

  Gagging on his own blood, the intruder staggered back into the milky daylight streaming through the open hatch.

  Corben was stunned. Dr. Otaku himself lurched at him, spitting blood, inscrutable black goggles telescoping out in alarm. His pipestem arms and childlike hands, so adept at perverting the miracles of nature, could barely hold the huge old Kraut pistol they tried to lift off the deck.

  The dying doctor s
queezed off a single wild shot before he keeled over. Had he lived a moment longer, he might have stopped his own bullet, which rattled around the cockpit for almost a full second before it hit Commander Corben in the armpit, grazing his left lung and flattening against his shoulder blade to lodge in the intercostal muscles of his back.

  Corben kicked the scientist a couple times. No escape pod launched out of his head; no miniature emulemurs chewed their way out of the corpse to wreak bloody postmortem revenge. It just lay there, being dead.

  He would have expected something, after all that trouble.

  Corben rang Mission Control to give them the good news, but they put him on hold.

  “Anyone who thought Tokyo’s real estate market could go no higher was eating humble pie with a side of crow today . . . ” The bullshit news copy practically wrote itself. But this time, it literally made the monster stronger.

  Fueled by the inexhaustible flood of computer-modeled, expert-vetted bullshit about its birth, the new entity that awakened beneath the center of Tokyo did not rise to destroy the city. It was the city, as much as the streets and buildings and helpless salarymen trapped in its legions of skyscrapers. When it awakened, the city center itself, ten square miles of the most expensive real estate on Earth, including the Imperial Palace, the stock market, and the address of every major technological and financial entity in Japan, stood up.

  Tired of rebuilding after an endless barrage of kaiju attacks, Tokyo’s metamorphosis was the only sensible response: become a monster.

  On millions of arachnid legs, the city detached itself from surviving streets, subway, and monorail lines and then, to the shock of the world, it floated.

  And then it flew.

  Like everything for which the Japanese became renowned as innovators, it was assembled from parts built elsewhere, fiendishly practical, and not nearly as hard as they made it look.

  Once the spiders had done away with the pesky Self Defense forces, they devoured thousands of tons of heavy, rigid concrete and secreted light carbon-steel webbing, replacing much of the rigid, dead weight of the city’s infrastructure with a flexible, living skeleton.