Steve raced after the airborne abortion and pounced on it where it came to rest, snatched a nosy news chopper out of the sky by its tail and smashed the monster with it until the whirling rotors broke off and the fuselage exploded like a cheap guitar on its sorry excuse for a head.
As Kungmin Horangi crumpled and lay prone against the toppled tower of the Old Post Office, great slits gasped all down its neck and flanks and gave forth a faint but growing feedback hiss. Steve cowered behind the rubble of the IRS, because in stark disregard for every known principle of physics or biology, these monsters almost always had some sort of energy weapon.
An eerie keening sound escaped from the speaker-slits, and Steve went dead-stick, oblivious to Corben’s spastic gyrations in the cockpit. Steve’s nervous network broadcast only static, while sensations like fluttering moths in his stomach—feelings!—swamped the mainframe. Out of the unlovely orifices of this monstrous abomination, in the thick of a titanic battle, came the celestial sound of a chorus of children.
They sang in Korean, but the longing, loving voices sailed their message straight through the benighted preverbal backwaters of Corben’s brain. These children, reared on Spartan rations and Stalinist dogma, sang of their dream of a world where everyone shared their talent and wealth and loved one another as a family should. They offered this awful, awesome monstrosity, from which the recording of their song spewed like the tune of an ice cream truck, as a gift, and the harbinger of a new golden age of humankind.
In their thousands, the surviving protesters poked up out of the rubble like shoots of grass and took up the alien chorus.
Steve grabbed up tanks and cars and fistfuls of shrieking protesters and threw them at the crumpled form, rushed up behind it and planted a kick in its flanks. The monster was lofted high over the capitol again, flipping end over end as the gang back at Mission Control went wild in his headset, cheers and screams about evacuating the President—
Steve fell on the monster again, plunged his taloned saurian claws into its cratered, rubbery hide above its cartilaginous ribs. Venomous spines pricked him all over, skin going numb and swelling purple-black blisters the size of snow tires. Thrashing tentacles flayed the scales off his back and pumped a potpourri of neurotoxins into his flesh, but he blanked it out as he squeezed something deep inside Kungmin Horangi that pumped like a heart until he popped it, then slashed the muscles behind its right foreleg.
The monster sagged under Steve, who wrenched the useless limb out of its socket like a drumstick and rammed it into the frantically gnawing mandibles. The tentacles swallowed up his arm and stripped it to the bone again, but the echinoderm mouth ruthlessly chewed up its own severed forelimb, and rivers of sweet-and-sour ichor showered the White House lawn as the colossal combatants grappled, the syrupy song of the children skipping but still burbling out of its speaker-gills.
“So you taste good, huh?” Steve roared. “You like to eat yourself, you Commie motherfucker?”
Kungmin Horangi went limp in his arms, then swelled up like an emergency airbag. Steve struggled to get free, but his destroyed arm was still trapped in the barbed gullet of the monster. A blast of hot air and briny broth escaped, and Steve’s nostrils caught it and told Wes that its aroma was not at all unpleasant.
Kungmin Horangi exploded.
Steve’s arm ripped free amid a torrent of soft tissue, mountains of stomachs and intestines and glands the size of school buses lay out on the lawn and festooned the south portico of the White House, and still it kept coming, an endless, gory horn of plenty.
And Corben had to admit that he had never smelled anything so sweet in all his life.
It took a Herculean effort of pure will, but he pulled back on Steve to retreat from the situation. The Red Korean kaiju limped away, deathly slow, towards the Potomac. It had to be stopped; Steve had to get back to the hangar, he was bleeding, dying—
But the controls wouldn’t respond. Corben felt himself go into a kind of paralysis, as Steve moved of his own volition back to the steaming pile of innards and, with his intact hand, began to shovel them into his gaping mouth.
“Steve, for God’s sake, it’s Communism! Stop eating it!”
Corben yanked on the manual overrides and punched the emergency sleep sequence, but to no avail. Steve went on gobbling up the monster’s digestive tract, which it had expelled after the fashion of its secondary parent species, the resourceful sea cucumber.
And even as he fought to pull Steve back, the cables running into his suit fed him the taste and the texture, the gelatinous, spicy, tangy succulence of it, not unlike kimchi with pickled octopus, but tempered by the pleasantly gamy murk of tiger meat, and the briny, womb-like glow of collective well-being, of universal rightness, of belonging to a harmonious whole, that began to spread out from his stomach.
Corben coded the self-destruct sequence, ripped the leads out of his suit and undogged the hatch, all the while telling himself he was not hungry, he was not going to eat it—
“You’re an American hero, Steve,” Corben begged, “you’re like a god to them. Why can’t you stop?”
A familiar voice pounded on his eardrums, and shocked Corben so that he threw himself head-first out of the cockpit, and though Steve was hunkered down on his knees over the diminishing pile of guts, he still fell thirty feet to the immaculately manicured White House lawn, the echo of that voice still ringing in his ears.
“Why can’t you stop fucking my wife, Wes?”
Corben’s arm folded under him and fractured on impact and he hit his head so hard he saw stars, but he rolled to sit up at the sound of a helicopter touching down in front of the west portico.
High above him, the explosive charges embedded beneath the cockpit detonated, blowing the domed roof off Steve’s skull in a furious monsoon of bone shards and hunks of flaming brain. Steve’s hand stalled at his mouth, a colossal rope of kaiju intestine slithering free and draping itself across his lap.
A platoon of dour Secret Service agents in black suits hustled out the West Wing exit and crossed the lawn with guns drawn, but halfway to the chopper, their ranks broke and a shorter man in shirtsleeves came running up to Corben.
“Do I smell barbecue?” shouted the President.
“No, Mr. President, it’ll brainwash you!” Corben went for his sidearm, oblivious to Secret Service agents painting laser dots on him and running to shield the President.
“Naw, I’m not touching that disgusting foreign Commie crap, but it does give me an idea.” The President engaged that matinee-idol squint that somehow projected frontier grit and cowboy resolve on TV, that somewhat alarming facial tic which had carried him in the southern states. “If that sea cucumber shit makes people turn pinko, then we just need an antidote, right? Fight fire with fire.”
Picking his way across the debris-strewn lawn, the President stood in the shadow of Steve––still kneeling upright, though his convertible head belched smoke like an uneasy volcano. “Yes sir, a taste of true-blue courage, of independence and strength and faith, to remind them what it means to be Americans.”
The leader of the free world knelt and scooped up a fillet of Steve’s brain, still sizzling in its own juices. “Smells like veal from my Daddy’s ranch,” he said, and took a bite.
“Please, Mr. President, don’t— He wouldn’t…” Corben crawled up to the President, but a Secret Service agent stepped on his neck and pried his pistol from his hand.
“Nonsense, boy, he knew what the duty was, when he signed up for it. Any red-blooded American with half the heart he had would jump at the chance. And, Jesus, take a look at him! Whatever it is, it sure ain’t cannibalism…”
The President bethought himself a moment, then flagged down his chief of staff. “Now, get my Interfaith Council on the horn, and have them stand by for something big. And get me every cloning specialist you can, and some lab space, and some vats, and you know we’re gonna need a helluva grill…”
Episode II—The Island of Dr. Otaku
“Meh,” said the Prime Minister of Japan to the UN General Assembly, and dreamed of brown seas.
What, honestly, did they expect him to say, on this terrible anniversary of the Daikaiju Age? What consolation could the first victim of a rapist offer to the next? What wisdom, to a world where everyone raped everyone?
He blinked at a flash in the micro teleprompters embedded in his contact lenses, before he remembered to close his eyes to see the unfiltered feed. A little extra sexy edge the gaijin would have to pay retail for, ten years down the line, ha ha, what an empty game.
The speech—expensive and individually wrapped origami phrases, focus-group tested pro-corporate shit—did not come.
Instead, his contacts, along with the monitors behind the podium and every console in the General Assembly Hall, flash-cut to a scene that made most of the sullen ambassadors instantly sit up at attention.
A nanny-cam view of row upon row of Japanese schoolgirls. The Prime Minister’s bafflement turned to heart-stopping rage as the camera zoomed in on one specific girl in the class, fidgeting and twitching in her seat. Despite the uniforms and the poor resolution, he recognized his daughter at once, and knew the media would be only seconds behind him.
“Good morning, Mr. Prime Minister-san,” a sunny, smug voice chuckled in his hearing aid. A Caucasian, upper-class Australian voice. “Only you can hear me, of course, but everyone can see what we’re going to discuss. If you’re a reasonable man, there’s no reason you can’t spin this to your advantage, eh?”
The Prime Minister gave no answer but chopped, choked breathing, like a constipated swimmer entering a frozen stream.
On every screen, his daughter arched provocatively back in her seat, kicking out in grand mal seizures. The razor-pleats of her blue wool skirt hitched up to reveal the doubled outrage of melon-hued cotton panties emblazoned with a cuddly cartoon image of Kungmin Horangi, the infamous People’s Tiger.
The General Assembly hall erupted into chaos, and the Prime Minister found his mic had been cut. His pleas for the scandalized diplomats of the United Nations to stop ogling his daughter went unheeded.
The Aussie voice in his ear resumed its syrupy purr. “I assume we may speak freely, so I’ll get down to it. Your daughter has been a bad girl, eh? She and her friends are all hooked on People’s Tiger jerky, did you know that? Well, we spiked her supply a bit, old son. Without the antidote, she’ll transform into a full-fledged tiger-sea cucumber in about twelve hours, if the shock doesn’t kill her. But chin up, mate. None of that has to happen.”
All at once, the Prime Minister knew who was ranting at him. The third son of the sole owner and CEO of the world’s largest media conglomerate. A rude, shrewd little shit who pissed on proper protocol in a desperate attempt to get noticed.
And, with a tremor of deeper, creeping dread, he also realized what this must be about.
“Of course, you’ll appreciate our admittedly uncharacteristic restraint, at this point. We could have piped in some spectacular immersive VR stuff we got off your last Shinjuku toilet-trip. But the Old Guard thought it was best to take the high road.”
The Prime Minister deliriously lost control of his bowels. The hermetically-sealed astronaut diapers under his impeccable Brooks Brothers suit contained the deluge, but cradled it deliciously close to his chafed, shameful buttocks. Of all the vices it took to maintain his flagging faith in democracy, his coprophilia, indulged in biweekly baths in untreated Tokyo sewage, was the most humiliating.
Would that he had the grace or guts to use this stage to end it all…
On the monitors, the classroom desk-grid dissolved in a panic of flying preteen bodies. Someone must have armed the posh private school’s emergency protocols, because the girls were locked in the room with his poor Mariko, who had not begun to change physically, but was her unmistakably shy, insecure self in no other respect. Flipping desks and gnashing foaming jaws like she meant to bite her classmates, she herded them toward the windows. Screaming girls broke their nails on the latches, but safety precautions rendered them impossible for students to open, let alone climb out, especially during midterms.
“What,” grunted the Prime Minister, “do you want?”
“What do I want? What does the whole world want? The answer to the question that has you here, soiling your three-million yen monkey-suit in front of the General Assembly… but instead of sticking to the script, you’re going to tell them the truth.”
“I do not know—”
“Of course you do, mate. You’ve been supplying and sheltering him since he defected from North Korea. Everybody knows it, and everybody knows he’s up to something big… something apocalyptic.
“All you have to do to save your daughter—and whatever slivers of face you still have with the folks at home—is speak into the microphone, and tell the whole world where it can find the infamous Dr. Otaku.”
The location of Dr. Otaku’s latest laboratory fortress was indeed a closely guarded secret from the world at large, but hardly a mystery to the world’s great powers, who were discovering that knowing something, and doing anything with that knowledge, were often worlds apart.
While the uncharted island of Dr. Otaku lay well within the Antarctic Circle, the ocean boiled.
Submarine vents in the ocean floor radiating out for miles from the tiny volcanic island gushed molten magma into the shallow Weddell Sea, fueling a violent transmutation that shrouded the region in perpetual columns of superheated steam, so that no detail of it was visible from the open sea or the air, let alone from orbit.
The aggressively secretive climate also did nothing for the island’s defenses. No alarms sounded when the scalding waves parted to eject a titanic kaiju invader and fling its nuclear submarine-sized bulk onto the jagged tusks of volcanic stone that fringed the island’s shore.
Two hundred feet of laser-guided mayhem from its screeching eagle beak to the Teflon tip of its parboiled tail, and the ex-Navy pilot cooped up in the cockpit hacked into its spinal cord was light years past pissed.
Commander Wes Corben had paid dearly to find this place, in every coin men and devils accepted, for the island was guarded by forces more sinister than fog, more sophisticated than any cloaking device or satellite baffler: the boundless power of international corporations to cover their fuck-ups.
A few years before, the volatile Antarctic coastal shelf was hopelessly fractured by overeager oil companies desperate to get out of the oil business. The geothermal instability accelerated the thawing of the region several hundredfold, until New Zealand-bound ocean liners took to skimming their wakes to harvest bobbing flocks of boiled penguins as a novelty entrée.
The oil companies used the same proactive strategy they brought to alternative energy research to hide the catastrophe, flooding every media outlet and science journal with doctored snapshots and cartoons featuring happy surfing penguins, many of whom were, thanks to digital sorcery, also avidly drinking Diet Dr. Pepper. But they also bombarded the government with phony satellite imagery and doctored climate research, and stymied muckraking environmental watchdog groups with rosy propaganda campaigns and unmanned kamikaze submarine wolf packs.
As a result, Dr. Otaku had selected the most dangerous and secret place in the world to set up his laboratory… at least since the last one.
The island’s rocky shore lurched up drunkenly out of the boiling foam to join battle with the cyclone-riddled sky as a phalanx of near vertical cliffs of black lava rock. A maze of narrow, twisting canyons cut into the towering volcano were choked with a riotous jungle of colossal mutant fungi, like pulpy tenement towers. The fleshy gills underneath the mushroom domes powdered the giant monster’s white-feathered head with psychoactive spores as it stealthily crept through the labyrinth, sneezing and mildly hallucinating.
Cmdr. Corben could not hope to have arrived undetected. The churning ocean was full of sea mines, drone subs and marker buoys with depth charge launchers, and half the shrieking seabirds that hovered and
pecked at the trampled fungi in his path seemed to have compound dragonfly eyes and cellular antennae for ears.
It didn’t matter if Dr. Otaku knew he was coming. The world’s foremost freelance kaiju-engineer was more devious than Dr. No and Fu Manchu in a three-legged race, but Wes Corben had come from the edge of the grave for revenge, and an angry, wounded and divided nation had hurled him into the mad scientist’s clutches solely to take it.
After his last piloting gig ended so spectacularly on the White House Lawn (Code Name: CUCUMBER BBQ: ABOVE TOP SECRET), Corben retired to spend more time with his family of single malt scotches. Still weeks away from hitting rock bottom, but the government had been willing to forgive and forget, just to get him back.
They promised him that they had modified the organic components, replacing unreliable neural processes with solid-state fiber optics driven by a nuclear power plant, and installing a host of no-nonsense ordnance. They reinvented the pilot interface, and totally retooled the manual override and emergency recovery protocols.
And they made a whole new monster for him to drive.
Named for the visionary worrywart who coined the term “military industrial complex,” IKE (International Kaiju Enforcer) stood only a little taller than Corben’s last ride, but the absurdly musclebound torso and rangy arms were pure Malaysian highland orangutan—albeit with rail gun cannons embedded in the outsized forearms—while the silicon-scaled hide, the shrimpy, talon-crazed hind legs, lashing, razor-edged tail and lethally septic saliva came from the hotwired genome of a Komodo dragon.
A potent and adroitly engineered kaiju-hybrid, ideal for amphibious ops, but the pork-barrel dipshit who chaired Senate Intel rebuked the “diabolical” design until he could insure it had a uniquely American stamp on it.
Which was why Ike had the head of a bald eagle.
The smaller brainpan forced them to relocate the cockpit between the shoulder blades, but it was much better protected than Steve’s head.
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