All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  The Merchant Marine showed him only wharfs and water and the simmering, jealous hatred of the rest of the world, envy for trinkets and trash he’d starved on all his life. In war, merchant marines died in double the numbers of the other forces combined, so when he saw war with Japan coming, he quit.

  The Army again, and a crazy, unspoken dream that the air might grant that wonder he’d been seeking, that water and land had refused to reveal. But an aging, one-eyed vet could only hope to sweep up after pilots, and he settled into quiet retirement on the island, meditated on his exhausted restless streak, and laid it to rest.

  Here and now, it burst into flame and scoured off the barnacles and dust. In the insane ritual of the cargo cult, he saw the spit-polished rites of the martial life unmasked for the mug’s game that they really were. They, all of them, marched and danced and drank, cavemen and children praying to the empty sky for something they could not name to come, bearing unimaginable gifts, and take them away. In the sheer, childish absurdity of it, he saw all the unvoiced yearnings of his too-long life, and saw, at last, a true band of brothers. It was all a big joke, but then again, what wasn’t?

  And presently, he saw them. A big black wing slashing out of the dark, the Zeros hung in a loose formation less than five hundred feet above the water, so different from the disciplined death-bird formations they assumed when the war began. Their engines sputtered and almost stalled, fouling the hornet-swarm hum with harmonics of imminent collapse. They coasted on fumes. Whatever they had come to do, they would do it here.

  Less than a mile out, Smitty painted the sky with tracer fire, and little flashbulb pops from rifles went off all over the camp. They had nothing heavier, and no experience hitting a moving target, but the planes instantly took note. As the wing climbed to go over the mountain, three Zeros broke off to strafe the camp. One bore down on Smitty’s machine gun nest.

  “No,” Canute growled, “you goddamned lamebrain idiots, just lie low!”

  They traded bullets fast and furious between them. Canute could see the sparks of ricocheting fire spraying off the incoming fighter, watched it all the way into Smitty’s dubious pill box of sandbags and empty crates.

  The plane ironed Smitty flat, then flipped end over end across the beach without exploding. It smashed into the coconut palms at the edge of the bivouac, flying apart and leaving a yard sale at the doorstep of the commo hut.

  “You lost, you yellow bastards!” Wheeler screamed at the sky. “Go back to hell!”

  The dancers moved still faster, jerking and jolting as if the bases were electrified, oblivious to the battle below, to the Zeros screaming overhead. Maybe, Wheeler thought with a sick twist of his guts, this was what they’d prayed for. Goddamned quisling cannibals…

  The other two Zeros banked and circled back over the camp, taking wild fire from the second machine gun in stride, when one of them dropped down to recon the airstrip. The boys had set up a gauntlet of sandbags and taken cover behind them, and shot the hell out of the Zero as it passed over. A lucky shot must have hit the pilot, as the fighter nosed down into the runway.

  The rest of the Zeros circled around the mountain. Canute was the first to hear the chatter of their guns as they made a run on the mountaintop. “Get down!” he shouted, shoving Wheeler and grabbing for Laslovic.

  The natives dropped and lay prone, but Laslovic, taking cover beneath the mock-plane, saw one cargo cultist go on dancing more frantically than before, as the bullets, each the length of a man’s index finger, slammed home in his flesh like rivets.

  Down in the camp, the third Zero strafed again and again with only token harassment from the surviving machinegun. He seemed to see right through the layers of camo netting, and nailed the fuel dump. A huge Halloween orb of hundred-octane fuel-fire leapt up into the night and lavished gouts of flame on the surrounding storage sheds.

  Wheeler screamed and tried to crawl out from under Canute. “Let’s bug out! The hell with them! We’re all gonna die!”

  Canute let him go. When he looked up at the sky about a mile out to sea, he forgot everything else.

  The empty indigo night suddenly seemed very solid and flat—a painted cyclorama, or the roof of a tent bowed under a monsoon. It sagged down and bulged, then split open—

  And something flew out of a hole in the sky and into their world.

  It looked most like a gigantic manta ray, but for the squidlike tentacles that dangled from its underbelly and fluttered on the wind, throwing off a soft aquamarine light that left a luminous trail in the sky behind it. When it passed before the moon, Canute saw through its translucent flesh, which scattered the moonlight into rainbow flashes like a liquid prism.

  What it hoped to do against the Zeros, Canute couldn’t guess, but he was still puzzling over what he must’ve ate or drank to make him see such a thing, when it stalled in the sky, floating weightless as a cloud, then fell like an owl on its prey.

  The wing of Zeros scattered as the thing passed among them and snatched a fighter out of its flight with its quicksilver tentacles. A brief tug-of-war ensued as the creature stretched, but seemed to get traction in the sky itself, and captured the hurtling kamikaze fighter.

  Five times the Zero’s size, the flying thing mangled its tail and left wing like a cat savaging a bird, then hurtled it into the props of another fighter as it came charging in with its machine guns blazing. Bullets carved up the thrown wreckage and the other plane began a desperate dive, but the Zeros smashed together and tumbled, burning, screaming, into the darksome sea.

  The other kamikaze fighters staged a circus of panicked aerial acrobatics to avoid colliding in the monster’s wake; two of them clapped wings with a sound like samurai swords clashing as they passed directly overhead. One plane was upside down, and they could see the tiny, shrieking man in the cockpit, looking down at them as impossible death tore his comrades out of the air.

  Terrorized, humiliated and exhausted, the Zeros regrouped and descended on the flying thing. Bullets penetrated, but passed through its sleek, fluid body without leaving any visible damage. They did, however, finally succeed in getting its dander up. For just a heartbeat, the thing glowed so bright it blinded Canute. He shaded his eyes, and almost missed what it did next.

  Seven Zeros were passing all around it when it flashed, and all were caught in the web of ball-lightning that shot out of it. Entangled, impaled on forking spears of white light, they seemed to stop dead in the air. Engines and fuel tanks exploded, props spinning off like shooting stars. Canopies burst like the eyes of a convict frying in the mercy seat. It was all over faster than a photographer’s flash, when seven blackened, smoking husks of kamikaze fighters fluttered to the gilded sea like cinders from a leaf-pyre.

  Four Zeros survived. The three over the mountain lost their kamikaze zeal and squirted off into the night like their asses were on fire. The last Zero, the one that shot up the fuel dump, tried to land on the runway. Never a square proposition by moonlight, it proved too much for the hysterical pilot, who tore off his left wing and spun like a whirligig across the rusty, metal-floored gravel and crashed into the palms.

  By the light of the moon and the raging fuel fire, Canute could make out a horde of men in skivvies charging with their guns popping off. They had gotten a last little piece of war to tell and retell at the VFW hall for the rest of their lives, and probably never chanced to look up and see what he and Wheeler and Laslovic saw—

  Laslovic stood stock-still beside the mock-plane, his mouth working, no doubt in prayer. Wheeler was sneaking around the perimeter of the airstrip with his rifle at port arms, intent on Yage Moses, who had ascended to the top of the tower, and now howled at the sky in exultant whoops and spun the bullroarer until it must burst into flame.

  High above them, the flying thing just stopped in midair and drifted down, settling on the runway like coastal fog.

  The natives fell silent. Only the wind whipping at the guttering ruin of the bonfire broke

  the stil
lness. Their eyes were big as plates and their mouths trembled. Clearly, this was what they’d prayed and danced for, and it must not happen every night.

  “Wheeler!” Canute snapped, “Freeze!” His voice was like a pistol shot on the mountaintop. Wheeler made a Wolf Man face at the sergeant, but lowered his rifle.

  The flying thing subsided like a beached jellyfish, its aerodynamic form succumbing pitifully to the will of gravity. Inside its translucent flesh, Canute made out things that reminded him of machinery, glowing filaments like white-hot copper wire, and coils of gut-plumbing and weird organs packed in between vast cells of clear gel, in which other, disturbingly familiar shapes were suspended.

  The headman climbed down from the tower, calling out a patchwork litany of every name of power he knew. “Anut-Dodo, po nanunanu! Manup-Jesus, God-Kilibob, opim ro bilong kago! Tibud-Maclay Tulu-Debil, Noah-Roosebelt, oi’te po nanunanu!” With empty hands upraised, Yage Moses approached the dormant blob and knelt before it, barking in a commanding tone, “Yage Moses singaut long yupela long Heben, opim rot bilong kago! Masalai, kaua, kopa, tingim long usim, givim kago, karim usim longwe arasait bilong Heben!”

  Whatever communion Yage Moses shared with the flying thing, it passed in silence; but presently, he leapt up and gave a wordless shout of rapturous joy. The rest of the cult took up the cheer and drunkenly moved to surround the creature with long, dugout troughs in their arms.

  Canute and Laslovic came as close as they dared. The natives held the troughs up to the creature and pressed on its membranous hide, so that jets of clear goop filled the troughs from holes made by the Zeros’ bullets. The brimming troughs got passed back to men who drained them into baskets, galvanized steel buckets and even the empty Coke and beer bottles, and handed them back.

  Canute stared into the liquid depths of the flying thing and saw what else floated within. Bodies—countless human bodies hung trapped inside like fruit in a gelatin mold. Yet they did not look dead, nor were they being digested like the animals trapped in the pitcher plants. They merely slept, breathing in sync with this monstrous messenger from Heaven, and sharing in its dreams.

  Yage Moses spoke sometimes of the “ancestors” they prayed to on the mountaintop, and perhaps these were they. Or perhaps they were simply other natives from other far-flung islands, on their way to deliverance—or maybe just a larder, after all, for the strange gods who saw fit to feed on their frenzied worship. He reckoned the gods must know all kinds of strange ways to eat a man.

  The natives clustered around and drank from the buckets of goop, then lowered effigies carved out of wood into them. Crude toy guns and other idols were dipped, but when they were removed, Canute’s eyes widened so that the glass one almost popped out of its socket.

  The carved toys became tins of meat, radios, razors, bush-knives, axes and rifles, dripping with slime but glinting like fresh tempered steel.

  Canute went to the flank of the creature and cupped his hands beneath an oozing bullet-wound. The stuff filled his palms in no time. He held it to his lips and slurped it.

  It tasted like moonlight and diamonds, white lightning and Coca Cola, pineapple and Pabst Blue Ribbon, honey and ham and tobacco, rainwater, whiskey and women; all the things of which men dreamed. When he licked the dregs of it from his hands and looked around, he saw Laslovic’s mask of surprise and delight in blurred stereo.

  Canute rubbed his eyes and discovered that he could see with the glass one. He goggled at his hands as they moved back and forth through his new depth perception, and grunted a shocked blessing. It was real.

  “You try it,” he said to Laslovic.

  The private approached the thing and peered inside. “I wonder where they’re going,” he said, his speech badly slurred. “I sure would like to see it…”

  Canute had the same idea, himself, but held it back. “There’s still a war on, Las.”

  “Yeah, I’m just talking, is all…” He swooned into the rubbery flank of the blob, held his hand up with a bottle in it. “Look at me, Sarge, I’m drunk off one little beer…”

  Canute noted the fluted shape of the bottle. “That’s no beer, it’s a Coke…”

  Yage Moses rose and held up the bullroarer like a dagger, made ready to plunge it into the side of the flying creature, when he, too, stumbled and fell to his knees. He retched a thin thread of foam, giggled, and fell to the ground. The other natives made shocked noises and crowded around him, but they also moved as if they were roaring drunk. They clutched their chests and throats, and collapsed. Twelve black bodies lay at their feet.

  “Ain’t I a stinker?” said Wheeler.

  Canute blinked, rubbed his eyes again. His eyes— “What did you do?”

  “I was starting to think it was never going to work.” Wheeler came over and prodded a prone native with his boot. “They gave our position away, Canute. You said to get them beer and pop, so I did. But I knew these cannibals wouldn’t give up their rumpus without a fight, so I took a little tip from the cowboys, and spiked their firewater.”

  “I didn’t order you to do that.”

  Wheeler went over to the flank of the flying creature and tasted the goop. “You didn’t have to… and I figured you were sweet on these cannibals, so somebody impartial ought to take the initiative. Nectar. I’ll be damned!”

  Laslovic fell against the sergeant. “Sarge, I’m gonna be sick…”

  “What gives with him?” Wheeler asked.

  Canute laid the private out on the muddy runway, resting his head on home plate. “He drank a Coke, you goddamned idiot.”

  Wheeler guffawed. “Aw, he’ll be fine. I just slipped ‘em a mickey from the surgical stores. A spoonful of laudanum to sweeten their dreams. They’ll have a whole new crazy religion in the morning, when they wake up—”

  Canute put his fingers on the corded, reedy neck of Yage Moses, felt around for a very long moment. “They ain’t waking up.”

  “Ah, don’t play games.”

  Canute rushed over to Wheeler and decked him across the jaw. The corporal sat down hard on the runway. His hand went for his rifle, but Canute stopped him with a close look at the muzzle of his sidearm.

  “Congratulations. In one night, you killed more men than I have my whole damned life.”

  Wheeler wrapped his offended dignity round him like a theatrical cloak. “I had no way of knowing it would kill them, but so what if I did? Somebody had to do something, and your solution was to get them drunk and watch the fun. They’re like children, sergeant, but they play for keeps, just like us. And what about this?”

  He waved at the enormous thing before them, seemingly asleep or dead. “This thing comes down out of the sky, and it saves them, and gives them this magical food of the gods, and what do they do with it?” He picked up one of the newly-minted carbine rifles beside a dead native. “They weren’t making sousaphones.”

  The thing moved. Both men jumped back and dropped to the ground. A tentacle extruded out of the mass and gently lifted the body of Yage Moses, drew him through the membrane and into a bubble. The dead headman bobbed around, then settled into a fetal ball as the goop around him congealed into resin.

  The sagging mass drew itself up and glittered with tiny lightning flashes along the gossamer wires of its nerves. Canute stood over Wheeler with his .45 out and cocked, when an idea took hold.

  He threw away the gun and went over to the bullroarer, picked it up and slashed the side of the thing. The membrane parted and a spout of goop washed over him. Kneeling, he took Laslovic under the arms and stuffed him into the wound.

  Wheeler jumped up and pointed his rifle. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”

  “Going away,” Canute said. “I want to see some place that nobody’s ever bombed. Somewhere with no armies, navies or kamikazes, and no college boys who get men killed with their bright ideas.”

  “You can go jump in a volcano for all I care, but Laslovic—”

  “All Laslovic ever wanted to do was fly.
” He checked Laslovic’s pulse and peeled back an eyelid. “Hang in there, kid.”

  Wheeler aimed his rifle at Canute, but trembled too much to draw a bead. Canute knew he lacked the sand to kill a man on purpose.

  “Nobody gets to choose,” Wheeler said, “how it’s going to turn out. You try to do the right thing, and it just… You want to know how I ended up here, Canute? You want to know what I did, to get busted down to this crummy fucking outfit?”

  “No, and if you try to tell me, I figure I’ll feed you that goddamned gun.” Canute turned and sank one foot into the hardening gelatin inside the flying thing. The membrane quivered and shimmered with ghostly light as it began to rise.

  “So… what the hell do I tell the CO?”

  Canute climbed in, stuck only his head out of the side of the thing as the wound knitted itself together. “Tell him we said, “So long.’”

  Wheeler watched the ponderous mass rise up into the sky and flatten into a weightless manta ray shape, then skim off over the horizon faster than any plane he’d ever seen, and without a sound, save the vacuum of air slamming shut in its wake.

  Jesus, what a bad break, and him left alone to hold the bag, all over again. Dumb bastards like Canute always played things like they were cut-and-dried, black and white. There were shades of gray you could only see from officer’s country, and he couldn’t make himself ignore them, just because they busted him down. It was a curse to see all the angles, the white man’s unbearable burden.

  He took up a bucket and swigged some of the strange sky-nectar. It made his bones tingle, as if it were remaking him from the inside out.

  If the Army could get more of this stuff, it could do the same for America. You could keep your crummy atomic bomb; this was something else again. There was no telling what such power could do for a nation, or for him. It would be enough for Wheeler, for the moment, if it would grant him his fondest wish, to get the hell off this godforsaken island.