All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  Mariko flunked Western Conspiracies in grade school, but she doubted that the mile-tall golden behemoth was really the animated monastery of Shangri-La, the lair of the Illuminated Masters who secretly control the world. And yet the monster that trampled the Great Wall and left a Grand Canyon-sized swath of destruction en route to Beijing did indeed resemble a shaggy, fire-eyed, triple-tusked yeti made of living, molten gold, and the pagodas on its head and shoulders were teeming with hundreds of laughing, saffron-robed monks.

  How overwhelming is the sight of a city at night, the combined work and worth of millions of humans reborn as a neon beast-god sleeping uneasily in the miasmic cocoon of its own pollution?

  And how mind-boggling to witness titanic monsters striding through such cities, laying waste to all in their path, to forever bear the burden of sharing the world with titans?

  How much more insane, when the cities themselves awaken, arise and walk upon the land, suddenly elevated and animated into a colossal tortoise, or floating overhead like a swimmer of alien seas? To witness the passage of a living city, its rainbow-scaled electric exoskeleton mocking the perpetual blackouts below, the question becomes not how to defeat the monster cities, but how to prevent, postpone or control their worship as gods.

  Back on Otaku Island, one man had not given up the fight, though he was crippled, yet again, by the failure of his manned kaiju. He nervously thumbed the eject button, knowing that to do so would dump him on a hostile island rife with monsters, or out in a hostile sea rife with pissed-off corporate mercs whose checks probably just bounced.

  “Ike is, uh— Well, he’s not really a…”

  “I figured that out when he started laying eggs! But why is this happening, now…”

  “Well, it’s… more complicated than that… Wes, she wasn’t grown from scratch. You know that would’ve taken years. But they’re working wonders with gene therapy, now, just little bugs. Catch a flu, and you’re off to the races, you know?”

  “What is it? Tell me later! For now, just tell me how to shut it off—”

  “You need to know this now, Wes. She was a volunteer. Her lawyer vouched for her sanity. She was distraught, but she wanted to do something for her country—”

  Wes suddenly smelled shit. “No… no, she wouldn’t… and you couldn’t…”

  “She didn’t want Steve’s sacrifice to be in vain.”

  Ice filled his stomach. “She was fucking flipped out before her husband became America’s Other White Meat. You let her—”

  “She practically forced us. She demanded that we treat her right away, and that you be assigned to pilot her.”

  Corben looked around for a bag to throw up in.

  “Her mind was wiped, of course. She can’t possibly respond in any way. We gutted her forebrain to make room for the targeting opticals. Those eagle eyes really soak up a lot of neural bandwidth—”

  “Why are you telling me this, now, Control?”

  “Because we were in a hurry, and, um… well, the President wants you to know he’s counting on you to do the right and honorable thing…”

  “What is the right and honorable thing?”

  “The eggs are fertile, Wes. And we’re pretty damn certain that they’re yours.”

  As with every disturbing new trend in America, San Francisco was first.

  Mariko flew low over the city, weaving among the intertwined spines of the skyscrapers. The spiders had done their work more thoroughly than in Tokyo, and were only just retreating or withering into empty husks in the streets. In the Transamerica Pyramid alone, she saw thousands and thousands of faces, watching as blandly as if they were on an elevator, as the city of San Francisco awakened, and found its feet. The skyscrapers of the financial district quivered on the gnarled, colossal shell made of the rewired raw materials of the hills beneath their foundations, while a spade-shaped head the size of a stadium reared up out of the waterfront slime, blinked a million eyes, and bellowed a sonorous foghorn roar that shattered bay windows and knocked over bongs from Sausalito to Petaluma.

  Crawling clumsily into the sea on hundreds of battleship-sized paddle-limbs, the megalopolitan sea turtle was twelve miles long. Ahead of the leviathan, the earth subsided and crumbled, water, oil and gas lines erupting under its feet, sending it sliding into the sea.

  The waves off its flanks swamped the San Francisco Bay like a fat man’s bathtub, flooding Oakland and Berkeley. The leading towers on its shell drew near to smashing into the middle span of the Golden Gate Bridge, when swarms of spiders leapt out from the Pyramid to dismantle the bridge like Lego blocks. So many movies had dreamed of this moment, yet when it came, the fall of the bridge was a lame anticlimax; the spiders didn’t drop a screw as they took apart the span and the adjoining towers, and returned with the famous deep bronze hardware to their nests, as the Brobdingnagian city-turtle sailed majestically out onto the open sea.

  The awesome sight of the new Zaibatsu’s towers adrift on the Pacific, bejeweled in light and sheathed in a fiber-optic corona of glistering holograms, inspired new apocalyptic faiths in dozens of schizophrenics, which quickly became mainstream cults with hordes of celebrity adherents.

  Missile attacks were countermanded at the last instant, when the first electronic shockwave of the monster San Francisco’s awakening was unleashed; millions of cellphone calls, texts and mails from the human hostages inside its web of skyscrapers.

  They were not prisoners. They were not afraid. They were employees. And they were very busy, so please stop calling them at work…

  Deep within the Zaibatsu’s bowels, an arsenal of deadly weapons was churned out and deployed by the living city’s most fearsome weapon—its lawyers.

  Within minutes of the city’s awakening, the UN, the United States Supreme Court, the WTO, and every media organization in the world were bombarded with faxes outlining the unique legal status of the sovereign corporate entity formerly known as the city of San Francisco. All real property within city limits had been appropriated into the newly incorporated being; claimants were free to fight the grab in international court, but it would be days, if not weeks, before companies like Sony and Honda recovered from having their whole legal and bureaucratic systems, to say nothing for the Nikkei Stock Index itself, defect and sue them.

  The President sat on his hands until San Francisco was safely in international waters before he dared to fulfill the wildest dreams of his heartland constituency, and pushed the button. But by then, of course, it was much too late. SAC/NORAD’s mainframe computers disregarded the launch orders, locked down the command centers in the Pentagon and at Cheyenne Mountain, and filled them with nerve gas, all while blasting the Weathergirls’ “It’s Raining Men” in the President’s ear over the secure hot line.

  Mariko settled down in yet another empty crater, and pondered her impossible task.

  The Zaibatsus had wreaked uncounted damage on the world in a long weekend, and utterly destroyed its communications, commerce and economic systems.

  Far from stamping out these institutions, however, the Zaibatsus had claimed full ownership and control of their daughter corporations’ assets and legal status. In most developed nations, international corporations had lobbied for and received “personhood,” a status equal to any private citizen, albeit one with thousands of bodies, hundreds of houses, fleets of vehicles and armadas of lawyers to enforce patents, contracts and options.

  Building on this legal precedent, the Zaibatsus were working relentlessly to rebuild the economy in their own image. They found it very easy to do, because the remaining 99.9 percent of the real estate and population was still starving in darkness, and the monsters owned everything needed to rebuild.

  It could take forever to kick all their asses. Like, she’d be in her twenties—

  Somewhere, deep inside Mariko’s pearl-scaled, serpentine magnificence, her Hello Kitty satellite phone meowed.

  Her mercurial mind, still that of a bright, ADHD tweener several days off her meds, f
licked from deep despair to insolent pique.

  Her father was always bugging her, ever since Mom got incinerated at the catastrophic christening of Mecha-Ronin 1, and now that he’d lost his job, and she had become a mystical kaiju guardian of all the empty craters of earth’s dead cities, he seemed to want to try to be her Dad, again.

  He’d decided not to go back to Japan, and had taken a cushy gig golfing with the rich Americans in their walled enclaves back east. He’d pined for his beloved Shinjuku waterworks for all of a week, before he discovered New Jersey. He’d already bought a controlling interest in a sewage treatment plant in Newark for pocket Yen, but he still found time to meddle in her business.

  As she unfurled her wings and whipped tornados of debris with her takeoff, she saw clusters of survivors bearing flower garlands and food offerings to the mighty (too-late, too-small) celestial dragon.

  The bowls were full of Colonel Steve’s Freedom Meat. The vat-grown clone-flesh of the dead American kaiju was marketed to instill rugged American patriotism into the basic brain functions and even DNA, but she could not look at the gibbering, three-toed mutants bowing to worship her (morbidly obese, clad only in shredded American flags, covered in tumors gnarled with fetal GI Joe faces barking malignant orders) without wondering about the side effects.

  Merciful to a fault, Mariko circled back and roasted the crypto-fascist freaks with her napalm breath, and found their flash-blackened flesh far tastier than the tainted crap they tried to feed her.

  Mariko climbed into the jet stream and broke the sound barrier so she wouldn’t have to listen to the meowing phone in her gut.

  Once, Wes Corben flew planes. He was good at it, but not as good as his friend, Steve, who volunteered for a top secret project that left him a seventy-foot vegetable. They trained Corben to “pilot” Steve, and together, they made the world safe for democracy. Until a conniving Nipponese cocksucker unleashed a diabolical Communist monster that perverted everything it touched, including his beloved friend, the most expensive fighting vehicle in Pentagon spending history.

  But Steve was only flesh and blood. And so was his wife, and Steve’s wife was hard to refuse—

  Steve’s last words stung him, all over again. “Why can’t you stop fucking my wife, Wes?”

  Corben stroked the polished bone bulkhead of the cockpit. “I wish you would have told me, Laura.”

  With that, he holstered his own pistol and picked up Otaku’s Mauser. If it looked like he was killed in the line of duty, he wouldn’t forfeit his insurance.

  Holding Otaku’s tiny hands in his own around the trigger. Corben put the barrel to his temple. Maybe this was a mistake. This gun didn’t weigh half as much as it should, and the bullet in his back hurt less than a mosquito bite.

  Aw, why should everything be painful? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  He put it in his mouth and pulled it again.

  Both times, the gun went off with a deafening report, but he felt little more than a burning in his mouth, as if he’d swallowed bees. It wasn’t even a fucking prop gun, like the kind stupid action stars were always offing themselves with.

  Suspicious, he broke out the magazine and popped the bullets.

  They were transparent cylinders of a wax-silicon gelatin that vaporized when the gun was fired. A tiny microdot-sized dart in the bullet was the only active projectile. Corben had swallowed two of them, and had one in his back.

  Then he looked at one under a microscope.

  The darts were coated with a syrupy solution seeded with microscopic frogmen, sea monkeys with spear-guns, nets and prop-driven gadgets to tow them around inside Corben’s bloodstream.

  Horrified, Corben turned up the magnification.

  The nano-divers were all identical: the same tiger-stripe wetsuits, telescoping goggles and long, flowing white hair, but they seemed to be at odds about who was in charge. As he watched, the nano-frogmen attacked each other as viciously as wolverine sperm in a fertile uterus, severing each other’s air hoses and puncturing tanks so the tiny bodies piled up before his very eyes.

  “That’s what happens when you look at them under a hot lamp, you idiot!”

  “Oh God, what now?” Instantly, Corben deduced who and where and the speaker was, and reflexively attacked the enemy.

  He punched himself in the head.

  If you’ve ever tried and failed to shoot yourself while trapped inside the monstrous head of your ex-girlfriend/best friend’s widow, you know how hard it can be to think clearly under such circumstances, and are free to judge.

  “My nano-frogmen have installed my wetware mainframe in your brainstem. Did you think I would foolishly attack you alone, hoping to be killed? When have the proud Nipponese people ever thrown their lives away in suicidal futility? Ha, that’s a rhetorical, Yankee devil! In any case—”

  “Shut up. I’m still going to kill myself.”

  “Fine, fine, let me help you. Just do nothing… act naturally for about another… what, thirty seconds?” The miniaturized Otaku bickered with his clones in the sub-basement of Corben’s brain, all of which Corben was as unable to understand as he was unable to tune it out.

  The cockpit radio squealed and triggered the subsonic buzzer in his spine, which must be what the tiny Otakus were trying to hotwire. If they could download his consciousness into his brain, they’d control Ike, the most powerful kaiju in the NATO arsenal…

  Fine…

  “Let him sit on these fucking eggs.”

  “What’s that? What the hell’s going on down there, Wes? We’ve been trying to reach you—”

  “I’ve been right here,” Corben muttered.

  “Seattle is walking, Wes… It’s a giant wooden Indian, and it says it’s gonna crush every white man who ever said his name aloud…”

  Corben bit his lip. “Figures.”

  “TOTALLY AWESOME! Chief Seattle, avenging the genocide of Nippon’s barbaric redskinned cousins. Your big-eyed white ape masters will shit themselves when they see what Los Angeles becomes… And Mexico City…”

  “Tell me more,” Corben whispered. If only his head were bugged to relay Otaku’s ranting directly to the Pentagon. The buzzer in his temporal lobe was only designed to give him a fatal epileptic seizure, if he broke mission protocol. (And it had an mp3 player.)

  “They’re fighting for Manhattan,” babbled Mission Control, “but it’s dug in… gonna nuke it—at least, um, uptown—but they know they’re too late… What the hell are you doing, over there, Wes?”

  “Flip him the bird, gaijin puppet!” Otaku howled in his brain. “No, a Nazi salute! Pick your nose and eat it! What the hell is wrong with this piece of shit?”

  Corben cut the connection. “We need to go home.”

  “Hell yes! It’s working! Go home to your imperialist masters and stomp them into the Stone Age! Go—Fuck, it’s not… Maybe you should try shooting yourself again.”

  Corben felt no pressing urge to do anything but piss, smoke some opium, and retreat into catatonia, as soon as possible—but he was out of rations, and almost eager to descend into the hell in which a laughing yellow devil had once again trapped him.

  “Here’s the plan, douchebag,” Corben said. “If you don’t want me to get a blood transfusion or take a nap on a tanning bed—”

  “Face, honky! I have leukemia in a can—”

  “Where’s my halogen flashlight?”

  “Okay, back off! Dr. Otaku is a reasonable entity. I’m all ears, cracker.”

  “We’ll go back to the states, and I’ll get you transplanted into the first sumo wrestler we come across, if you take care of this thing for me.”

  “Take care of what, white devil?”

  “Them,” he said, pointing at the monitor.

  All at once, the eggs hatched.

  “I would be honored,” said Godfather Otaku.

  Episode III—All Cities Attack!

  From low earth orbit, you could see the incandescent neon n
oodle of the Vegas Strip without a telescope as it slithered across the vast black void of the Great Plains. Brighter than ever in the absolute night of a months-long blackout, the Strip was a beacon of hope at first, until you started to get your bearings and ask why Las Vegas was in Kansas, and creeping across the empty wheat fields at better than seventy miles per hour.

  “They’re all locked in on this new behavior pattern,” barked General Pierre Harbinger, Supreme Commander of NATO’s alleged military forces. He pushed off the bulkhead of the International Space Station’s command module and floated up into the holographic globe with the weary grace of a terminal zero-gravity inhabitant. He began his orbital exile as a formidable block of Quebecois mincemeat, but after hiding up here for nearly a year, he would probably collapse and stroke out with the first kiss of Earth’s full gravitational pull. “The original treaties and mission statements all seem to be null and void, and now they’re just chasing each other all over creation like any other dumb animals or worse… digging in and ripping the Earth a host of… how you say… new assholes.”

  The holographic globe display in the orbital module’s central media pit had a gnarly case of chicken pox. The red motes, scabs and rash-patches were scattered on land and sea, and converging in regional whirlpools all around the equator.

  “So what?” said the haggard, shackled man the general was briefing. Freshly arrived at the space station, he silently screamed that someone had made a motherfucker of a mistake. With his wild, shrink-wrapped eyes, matted hair and scurvy beard floating around him like seaweed in the languid zero-g breeze of the overtaxed air scrubbers, he looked like he’d been rousted from a Pakistani prison. “Why should I give a shit what happens to your kind?”