All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  The foam burst and parted as something kicked completely out of the water before him, broad flukes dancing on air, arced high overhead and bent backwards as only an invertebrate can, and sliced deep beneath the sudsy surface without leaving a ripple.

  Ramdu whooped, looked around desperately beneath his frantically kicking fins.

  Down there.

  Behind swirls of industrial effluvia and rust-red sand, the lost city of Venice rotted, down there. Creatures born of twisted genes and sadistic fate lured men to their dooms, down there. And he still wanted to go.

  A wave towered over him, yellow foam cascading down its rising face and inside it, climbing above him, he thought he saw her. He dove for the bottom, flailing against the inexorable pull of the wave, too lost in panic to look for her above him. It came as quite a surprise to feel powerful arms encircle him and drag him down among the sunken ruins.

  Swarms of translucent ghost fish darted past his face. His pressure gauge roared in his agonized ears as it equalized again and again. The green sea deepened to a drab fecal brown pall broken by fluted columns of decaying skyscrapers. He struggled in vain to turn and face her. The sandy submarine street quivered and dissolved into flocks of panicked stingrays as he touched down on the old boardwalk.

  Ramdu’s head swam and bile flooded his throat, but he choked it back and tried yogic meditation techniques to center himself. He looked around, but saw no sign of her. He shivered and wrestled down panic. The musk was bogus, a stupid rabbit’s foot he’d clutched at to fulfill an impossibly perverse fantasy. He’d delivered himself to their dinner table. The waves barreled overhead, at least twenty feet up, and he knew there was no hope of escape, best to pool his fleeting strength for self-defense. He reached for his knife—

  And she was there, coiling round him like a whirlpool, and he spun so fast trying to see her, that he made himself dizzy again.

  The vids, all of them, must’ve been fakes. They flattered and anthropomorphized Sea Monkeys, but at the same time, obtusely failed to capture the unworldly beauty of the real thing. She was far less human, and far more attractive to Ramdu, than he’d been led to expect.

  The gene therapy had applied human beach-bunny traits to the mega-krill, triggering an unprecedented mutation, but it hadn’t made them into lovely half-human mermaids. Nonetheless, there was something about the form of this anomalous hybrid of man-mangled genomes that assured Ramdu that some ingenious and loving maker (perhaps a specialist in sex toys, like himself) had outdone himself in shaping her. A lobster-daughter of Kali, beautiful and terrible, she stoked his ancestral mingling of sex and death, ecstasy and annihilation.

  She had a head and a neck and tapered forelimbs that ended in something like hands without thumbs, and lesser forelimbs, scythes and sickles, folded into her voluptuous thorax. There were breasts in spectacular silicon profusion, and too many to count, though they were only a milkless mating display.

  She even had hair—a waving mane of silver-blond dreadlock-antennae––and eyes––a pair of quizzical black bubbles on graceful stalks, and more sprayed like freckles across the chitinous planes of her face. She had a mouth, rosy babydoll lips ringed and transfixed with dainty mandibular scissors. She had plush, translucent skin that glowed rose-gold over an iridescent petroleum-rainbow exoskeleton like burnished quartz, sunglow trapped like embers in stained glass, glistening contours like a lady bodybuilder’s muscles, but weightless, like the hollow-boned body of a bird.

  Her hindquarters had most successfully resisted humanizing, an armored tail with razor-finned flukes in place of proper beach-bunny legs, but Ramdu found himself keenly aroused by their absence. Humanoid torso fused with crustacean abdomen in a deep cleft fore and aft, housing cloacal openings and a lascivious vent shielded by countless, busily paddling, lesser legs, yet unmistakable to such a trainspotter of female pudenda as he. She was complete enough for his purposes, but it remained to be seen what she would do with him.

  He knew his lust now, too late, for what it was. He wanted death, in as sexy a package as possible. He couldn’t afford a whore classy enough not to grimace as he disrobed. Even dogs averted their incurious eyes as they licked peanut butter off him.

  Cramped into such an unlovable shell, no mere human nature could rise above bitter selfishness, and Ramdu had cultivated almost as few friendships as he had conquests. His search for a sexual experience unlike any other had become the flame that lured him to destruction. Small wonder, then, that on the moment of his fulfillment, he was unable to stir an erection.

  She circled him faster, drew nearer, and he stopped trying to see her. Was he to be offered to the males, or devoured here, on the spot, or was there something worse in store for him?

  His air was running low, the red flashes in his mask counting seconds. Any action was better than none. He whipped out the serrated fish-knife and lashed at her, hoping only to drive her back, but this seemed to be what she was waiting for.

  Her fluked tail swept him off his fins and drummed the ground, sending them rocketing up into the surf. Her forelimbs clasped him close. Queasily, he felt her lesser legs eagerly probing the nether-reaches of his suit. Her glittering eyes darted out to the extent of their stalks, circling round him eagerly, as her killing limbs clasped him to her. She wanted him!

  With a gasp of relief, he felt the groin of his suit teased outwards, the thinner membrane down there relaying the tactile data from a simulated phallus of smart-neoprene via microfilament nerves patched into his own at the base of his spine. An Allied Teledildonics product, designed for cyberspace sexual encounters, toxic waste fetishists and war amputees.

  He was no idiot; risking life and limb to frolic with a man-eating mermaid was one thing, while actually sticking his own unit in it was quite another. At some level, he must’ve hoped to

  survive this, or at least to die a whole man. These thoughts and sensations raced through his brain faster than the quicksilver bullets of air venting from his suit when she tore it open.

  Ramdu held his last breath in, burning hands encircling his lungs and squeezing him flat. The toxic ocean rushed in and sensation was cold black agony except for where she touched him, round and round, and he was inside her, and it was all too much.

  He tried reciting computer code, batting averages, pi out to thirty integers, but it was going to happen, he was going to come and he was going to expel his air and breathe in water, and it was all worth it—

  Her lips touched his and pried open his jaws and the colors rushed in and she was so hot, her fire pouring into him cracking him open to melt and flow into and out of her into a time of no time, a world of her that he burned through and exploded and the explosion was death and all he’d missed in life, and then she convulsed against him and the water rushed by and they were breaking the surface, rising into the air.

  His last thought was that she’d taken him when the suit was destroyed and the musk was erased. She’d wanted him—

  The wind and the sun burned his eyes and he sagged against her, but she was unable to bear her own weight out of the water, what with the harpoon impaling her slender thorax.

  “Jeebus, get ‘em into the boat!”

  Ramdu looked around and realized they’d been netted. The sorting arm of a manned trawler held them high above the deck as two fishermen rudely gaffed their bodies to separate them.

  “Hey, dude, you sure were lucky—”

  “Naw, look at him, he’s a farkin’ perv! Cut him loose.”

  The net dropped them on the deck and hungrily dove back into the water. Ramdu tried to roll off his Sea Monkey, shocked by the harpoon barb jutting out of her abdomen and nestling under his armpit. But they were still joined even more intimately, down below. He tugged and kicked, but could not extract himself from her viselike vaginal grip.

  She jolted and whistled, embracing him tighter as the fishermen approached. “Jeebus, even now, he can’t stop. I can’t look… you kill ‘em.”

  Ramdu jerked back from
her, but they were fused. Her eyes wilted on their stalks. She subsided like a lobster in a boiling pot, alarm and trauma tinting her exoskeleton royal violet, her gills fluttering and turning blue, singed by the air.

  The horrified fisherman scooped Ramdu up by his arms and began to rip him away. Ramdu screamed, feeling skin and something fundamental tear loose in his groin.

  Then she split open. The mailed scales of her abdomen gave way with a sickly purr. Ramdu’s manhood came free amid a torrent of colorless organs like the float bladders of seaweed. A briny miasma of spicy mating musk splashed out of her, and made him hard to do it all over again.

  He tried to get free, but the air came alive around her, hot red dots swimming all over, and he was already fainting when they knocked him unconscious.

  Sick on the flight home, huddled in the toilet, replaying in his mind what the customs people did to the smuggler who tried to get on the flight with a fake leg filled with bootleg gene tweaks. The screen they took him behind was too thin to block out his screams, but they waved Ramdu through. In his panic, he’d tossed Mr. Harkin’s package. He couldn’t expect preferential treatment in Detroit, all he could expect was a thicker screen.

  He unzipped his pants in the toilet and looked at the mess, a biology lesson he wished he’d skipped. His groin was a mess of rotting Sea Monkey guts, a slimy clutch of blackening organs like a sack of rancid eyes. Short of surgery, there was no way to remove the gummy adhesive which grafted them to his unit. He crushed a sedative on his PDA and snorted it, let golden waves of apathy claim him.

  A stewardess knocked on the door, was he all right? The lock turned and he zipped up, everything was fine. Feeling much better, he went back to his seat and dropped off to sleep until he was carried off the plane by paramedics.

  He woke to the sunrise, and the sun was Harkin’s face, beaming down on him. He’d hoped for time to rehearse this part, but the boss gave him none.

  “Gul, you fucking wog genius, you!”

  He tried to move his head, but Harkin filled his sight from horizon to horizon. “What…?”

  Harkin retreated and rubbed the round hips of a buxom woman in a full veil and burkha. His hand slipped into the shapeless black drapery and squeezed something, gave a little moan, and returned to Ramdu’s bedside. “I want to apologize for my man in SoCal, he was an idiot, he’s finished. They caught two runners of his the same day, but… I didn’t know you had it in you, Gul.”

  Ramdu’s stomach bloated with gas. He swallowed his tongue and tried to find words. “What—how—what did I do?”

  “I won’t ask how you did it, Gul, but I can tell, it took guts. You really showed the kind of initiative we prize at Allied Teledildonics.”

  Ramdu only blinked, so Harkin pressed on. “The doctors pulled twenty four hundred off you, at least. That was pure genius, carrying them that way. You knew that to survive, they’d have to be fertilized—”

  “What? Fertilized?”

  “The caviar, you devil. Normally, nature doesn’t play that way, but the Sea Monkeys are recombinant social-climbers, and they like human sperm. The poor freaks knock up the whole clutch of eggs when they spawn, and then attach it to the male. They mutate pretty fast, but we can keep a lid on that, nobody wants the product demanding pay and vacation time, right?”

  Ramdu tried to picture the eggs he wore, to imagine her— “The product?”

  “Gul, Allied Teledildonics will boldly forge a new field and corner the market. That new field is xenomorphic love-pets, and you’ve put A.T. right out on the cutting edge.”

  Harkin snatched away the burkha from his playmate and waved his arms at her naked body. “Feast your eyes on this beauty!”

  She had a head and neck, and forelimbs that ended in something like hands, albeit with fingers fused into flippers. She had breasts and big black eyes and long black hair and a bifurcated tail, the flukes of which had been chopped off, the stumps grafted to prosthetic legs he recognized from the Thai slave girl-bot in the A.T. Spring catalog.

  Her long neck craned and she shambled to the bedside, her soft shell gleaming honeycomb-tesselated saffron gold. She was unbearably beautiful, like a picture of his mother.

  “This is one from the first batch, she’s been hatched less than a week, but adapting swimmingly, as you can see.”

  It made sense. Ramdu’s mother bragged that he could read as soon as he could see.

  “Now, we can stabilize the germline so it doesn’t start infringing on human status anytime soon, and clone off vat-grown sports for now, but next year, we’ll start tweaking the genome to bring it closer to a designer female form, planned obsolescence, are you with me?”

  Ramdu felt sick. They were monsters; manmade things, not people, not even animals. They were his children...

  “We don’t forget our friends at Allied Teledildonics, Gul. You’re going up, we’re all going up. Your sea monkeys are going to make a horny world very happy, and all of us very, very rich.”

  Ramdu gagged.

  Harkin fondled Ramdu’s daughter, nipped her unfeeling flesh and chuckled lustily. “And no one will ever be lonely, anymore.”

  Our Main Feature

  ALL-MONSTER ACTION!

  Episode I—Kungmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger

  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 got too close and was swamped, crashing into southbound traffic lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge. Army and Navy choppers buzzed like mayflies, dropping marker flares and spraying red fans of incendiary shells at the geyser as it entered the bay. 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, artillery crews and mobile missile batteries eagerly peered into the roiling silver mist for their first glimpse of the adversary they had been summoned to destroy. Behind them, legions of protestors 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 demoralized lines of riot control police. They had come to denounce the federal crackdown on labor unions, the withdrawal of government assistance and the twenty-eight percent unemployment rate, but the spectacle unfolding in the water could not be ignored.

  A missile battery atop the ferry terminal sparked to life with a salvo of lightning spears that turned the churning surface of the bay into a dome of white-hot steam. Waves of scalding seawater swamped the docks, and 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 protestors.

  Then something exploded out of the water, and for just a moment, the entire city fell completely silent as it struggled, with its childlike collective mind of a half million or so, to understand just what the hell it was looking at.

  At that moment, 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 airborne 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 at the panorama of the big board, the global map jigsawed together from the composite eyes of several hundred defense and private satellites, and the exploded diagram of the world’s media coverage. Almost all of the 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 most of the room had been mooning over when he came in: Commander Wesley Corben, the most visible officer in the Air Force’s Special Counteroperations Detachment, and the
pilot of America’s most closely guarded super-weapon. If he was on the scene, then the emergency was clearly worse than they feared. The media scrutiny was sure to be brutal.

  Commander Corben looked out a window at the runway lights of Alameda Naval Air Station, and a wing of F-18’s 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. “Both of us.”

  “Mr. President, if I may,” Gen. Skilling broke in, “Commander Corben hasn’t been fully briefed, but when he is, I think he’ll agree that the situation is under control, without deploying—extraordinary measures.”

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

  Corben told Skilling, “Bring me up to speed, 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 even to hear the name spoken, glared down the nearby technicians who perked up at the sound. “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 drunk in a toy store. Suddenly, incredibly, the eighty-foot flaming behemoth sprang into the air, clearing a row of warehouses, and vanished into the frothing Bay.

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