All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  The world laughed when it heard what North Korea was doing. With half of the capitol 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 certifiably mad scientist to make a monster.

  But Kim never listened to the world. If his rule 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 super-sized incubator in his lab grew––unruly and grotesque, yes, but it became more than he ever dared to imagine.

  Kim awakened from a revelation, a new dream of eliminating hunger and showing the world 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 defective 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 monster 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 like a pickled fetal pig 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 on Quaaludes as he limped through the difficult 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 several times, 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?’ 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 Typhon, 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 was difficult to identify, because…”

  “What? Out with it!”

  An exasperated Beecher threw the laser pointer to General Skilling. “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, next to the word search? Army recovery efforts were hampered by the protestors, some of whom appear to have been pinko filth 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’s 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 they’d been hoping for across three generations, to finally shower 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 any organic substrate including human solid waste, the flesh replicated itself. 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 rusty floodgates in the American brain, boosting endorphins and serotonin output, creating a euphoric yet alert state which one imprisoned kaiju addict 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 boy, have we ever been barking up the wrong tree,” he declared, just before he was taken out and shot.

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

  The government also tried 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 once-healthily self-centered island nation 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 Kungmin Horangi 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 swallowed up nearly half the adult 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 cornfed Republicans and even other cops who had succumbed to the un-American side-effects of the forbidden flesh.

  No matter what draconian measures the government imposed—martial law and curfews imposed 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 Mexico’s lesser-known kaiju plagues, the Iguanadonkey.

  The treatment bore immediate fruit—within hours, Steve’s cauterized stump broke open with new buds of pink 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 marine iguana only intrigued them, and when Steve began to grow a tail, they were ecstatic. They talked about pushing the envelope—Steve Mk.2, armies of dino-Steves stomping through Pyongyang, eating everything and vomiting Agent Orange on everyone in their path on the long road to Beijing.

  The only battle he 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 rink-sized portions of cornbread.

  He came back to his off-base motel room to find Laura waiting for him. She still wore her widow’s weeds, but she shed them 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.

  Commander Corben 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.”

  Wes 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.”

  “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 struggled to catch his breath as he jogged alongside Commander Corben into 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.

  Liliputian scientists and technicians crawled all over Steve, disconnecting catheters and hoses and running the final pre-wake check. Corben eyed Steve nervously, seeing the finished upgrades 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.

  “How do you know there’s only one?” Corben asked.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Those asses in Congress have finally seen the light, and they’ve voted the funding to expand the program. We won’t make the same mistakes, again.”

  Looking over the chainmail mesh of serrated scales spilling down Steve’s oddly hunched back, Corben could only mumble, “Who wouldn’t volunteer for this?”

  Skilling saluted him and nudged him up the stairs. At least Laura wasn’t here. She was still asleep in the motel room, and he knew what she was dreaming.

  Corben climbed into Steve’s head and fired it up without running through the checks. Steve lumbered to his feet, trampling a lot of million-dollar equipment and more than a few fleeing technicians. Though heavier than ever, he felt even more powerful, his center of gravity lower and wider thanks to the balancing tail, which slashed the runway clear with a will of its own, and drove Steve in a bounding, simian gait that was barely under Corben’s control.

  There had been much wrangling, at the start of the program, over where to locate the pilot. Some had demanded that Steve be run by remote, but security concerns and human practicality had won out. Steve was a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth, and muscle memory and superb reflexes made his head the safest place to be when he ran amok.

  Though much of the data Steve’s nerves poured into his brain was utterly alien, Corben became Steve like never before as he loped across the paved expanse of the airbase, skirting the waiting helicopters and running down to the river, where he could already see the churning waters parting as his adversary burst from the gray Potomac and waded into our nation’s capitol on the opposite bank.

  Steve hit the water and kicked across in twenty strokes, his tail propelling him like a cruise missile to the shore of East Potomac Park. In the silvery light of the overcast morning, the obscene profile of the enemy loomed over the Capitol Mall—Kungmin Horangi, reborn.

  Steve took note of how it moved among the white sepulchral houses of government. In its wake, only selected targets were destroyed: the Mint, the Federal Trade Commission, and the fortress of the Internal Revenue Service were flattened, while the monster leapt high over the Smithsonian castle and gamboled across the open greensward, cutting a wide berth around the bureaucratic temples and museums, in open contempt for the helicopters raining depleted uranium shells down on it.

  Steve came lumbering out onto the Mall, and saw that the green was packed with protesters. Hundreds of thousands of men and women of every class and persuasion shouted and sang and cheered the kaiju invader. It traipsed over their heads like their collective dream of a champion made flesh, somehow never stepping on a single tiny body.

  The damage to its fiery, jet-striped pelt was hardly negligible—gigantic gobbets of flesh sprayed and spattered the Mall like so much gory
piñata filling, and teeming hordes of protesters overran the barricades to carry them off or devour them on the spot.

  Steve locked on the monster, leading it so he aimed at a projected ghost of its probable path, and launched a volley of missiles. Bigger than ever, easily a hundred feet long, the monster launched itself into the air and the missiles strafed the Smithsonian and made a blazing pyre of the US Forest Service.

  “Power down your missiles, Wes! Repeat, power down, you’re blowing up government property!”

  “Do you want to win, or not?” Corben barked, and rushed the monster.

  Protesters milled around his feet as he strode through their midst, spearing his ankles and feet and tail with the shafts of their picket signs. Screaming, “Whose side are you on?” Steve stomped them until the lawn was a swamp of liquefied sedition, and raked the Mall with his tail until the fortress of the Department Of Justice and the marble walls of the National Archive wept blood and human shrapnel.

  Kungmin Horangi met his charge by rearing up on its hind legs, head yawning open and fang-studded tentacles questing for his face. Steve slipped under the wriggling worms and drove his fists into its blubbery chest. His tail darted behind and swiped the monster’s legs out from under it. Dragging it off-balance just as Steve once had his opponents in judo tournaments, he heaved the writhing bulk over his hip, sent it hurtling across Constitution Avenue.