All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  The other people in the module didn’t really look much less disheveled or insane than the man they’d kidnapped. But they shaved or plucked themselves until they looked like obsessive-compulsive saucer-people, malnourished and elongated from prolonged freefall, and most of them wore shaded goggles so they didn’t go blind from the constant bombardment of cosmic radiation.

  Many had been up here since shortly before Zaibatsu’s birthday, eleven months ago. The rest had come with various national and corporate space programs’ last-ditch efforts to get above the global mega-kaiju shitstorm. The space station’s original seven gerbil-cage research and habitat modules were buried in a Sargasso clusterfuck of shuttles, spy planes, antique lunar orbiters and garbage scows that constituted the closest thing NATO had to an air force.

  A big Froggy knob-polisher, Harbinger tore off his sky-blue beret and jabbed a bony finger in the face of the prisoner. “As a traitor to your country, you can still expect to be shot if you ever set foot in America, but this isn’t America’s problem alone, Commander Corben—”

  “By your kind,” Wes Corben replied, “I didn’t mean Americans. I meant humans.”

  Behind him, a boot lashed out and kicked Corben in the tailbone, sending him spinning into a bulkhead. The buxom Spetsnaz commando-cosmonaut who led the team that snatched Corben from his remote island hermitage now seemed equally intent on shoving him out the airlock. “He is useless at best,” sneered Svetlana Kurchenko, “and enemy agent at worst.”

  Harbinger reined her in. “Like it or no, Commander Corben, whatever you’ve done, you’re still human. You’re still less than an insect to them, just like us. And no matter where you go on Earth, you’ll soon share the same fate as the rest of us. The kaiju-cities have dropped the other shoe, so to speak.”

  Warping the holo-globe with a dataglove, the station’s media geek dilated the glittering mote that stood for Las Vegas and opened a satellite feed window. Everyone in the module let out a noise. Many of them prayed, mostly to God but some to the city on the screen.

  The Strip blazed like a neon supernova, both inspiring and mocking a world condemned to candlelight. But enhanced imagery revealed the larger outline of the city of Las Vegas.

  It was a grotesque union of rattlesnake and scorpion, eight miles long, with scores of skyscraper hotels jutting like mirrored spines from its undulating backbone. Its coiled tail slashed at the air around it with a jerky speed that made one forget the whiplashing limb was a two-mile stretch of Interstate 15. The glass and steel facades of its skyscraper hotels flashed frenzied forty-story images of prosperity and sex, like the mating call of a God-sized bug zapper.

  Even Wes Corben let out a gasp of awe. The Vegas Mega-Snake, or the Stinger, as the hillbilly Bedouins dug into its desert territory called it, was a familiar and almost beautiful sight, compared to the Detroit Lamprey, or the orgiastic swarm of auto-fellating monstrosities that was LA.

  But something was wrong with Vegas. Its flashy, neon-feathered reptilian head was gone. Now Vegas had the head of a hammerhead shark, a massive, swinging battering ram of bone and steel eight blocks wide, infested with swiveling compound eyes and laser turrets and suicidal rollercoaster tracks.

  The ragtag militia gathered before a walled village in the deformed Mega-Snake’s path only showed up as splinters of torchlight and small arms fire on the dead, darkened earth. Vegas didn’t slow down to engage, but dropped a torrent of napalm out of hatches in its segmented underbelly. In the midst of the smoldering crater, it also dropped something that made Corben’s throat close up.

  An ovoid object the size of a Texan megachurch plopped into the flaming ruins and drilled itself into the black earth. Then the Mega-Snake’s tail uncoiled and pointed straight up at the spy satellite. A pulse of light and two seconds later, the screen wiped to snow.

  “When did that happen?” Corben demanded. He bolted down a bulb of piping hot coffee, scalding himself.

  “Watch this, my friend, and tell me you still don’t care.”

  A new window popped up with a live feed from the station’s own telescope. Vegas scrambled across fallow wheat fields until it crossed into a trampled zone marred by enormous, still-glowing hoofprints.

  The Chicago Stampede entered the picture, a rampaging mountain range of titanic barnyard siege engines scabbed with leprous urban sprawl and joined by umbilici of twisted turnpike gristle. Its horns and tusks were a tangled phalanx of bony cathedral spires and rusty iron slaughterhouses. Their flesh—or whatever they used for flesh, after the mega-kaiju virus catalyzed its perverse nanotech metamorphosis—oozed with sores from acid rain and constant internecine goring.

  Its huge glowing eyes lanced the landscape in deadly x-rays. Red foam laced with drowned teamsters drizzled from its many mouths. The stampede lurched and thrashed, threatening to tear itself asunder even as it thundered out to battle the invader.

  It looked like a hell of a fight for about ten seconds. The Mega-Snake’s hammerhead lit up with hundreds of laser batteries that unerringly targeted each and every bull-god and boiled its eyes.

  Out of control before, the blinded Stampede went positively mental, charged right into Vegas’s electrified pincers and broke a hundred horns off on the titanium alloy armor around its thorax. The Mega-Snake undulated and thrashed out from under the frenzy of stamping hooves until the herd had blundered past it. Then its scorpion tail scythed down fast enough to crack a sonic boom, and stabbed deep into the helpless throat of the herd’s fat alpha, the Loop. Green foam burped up from the lead bull-god’s mouth and jetted from microwaved eyesockets.

  “Nature is a beautiful thing, no?” chuckled Gen. Harbinger.

  In the year since the core of Tokyo became self-aware and flew away, scientists had already taken to calling this the Kaijuzoic Era or the Teratopolis Singularity, but they’d done fuck-all to contain, let alone reverse, the spread of the city-animating virus that had turned every major metropolitan center on Earth into a nigh-indestructible monster. When even smaller cities and suburbs like Oxnardicus and the Scranton Mantis lurched up out of their own zip codes and raised box-girder bridge claws to rake the sky, the leaderless people had taken the only sensible course. The virus turned any city of sufficient density and infrastructure into a colossal monster, so they dynamited the cellular relays and ripped out all the electrical wiring and modern technology in their towns, aborting any potential city-gods before they could come to life, but sweeping away every innovation since the Dark Ages. After what Los Angeles became, it seemed that no solution was too insane to stop the plague.

  Not that Wes Corben gave a shit. After what they’d done to his best friend and his best friend’s wife, and the lies they’d spun to hide their own ruthless buffoonery, the United States and NATO could blow him. He had his own problems, and running away from them took all his energy.

  Harbinger twiddled his moustache like he’d just tied someone to some train tracks. “You have noticed, I am sure, the cities are changing their migration patterns. Circling each other, exchanging aerial attacks and even vat-grown kaiju troops like nasty pillow-talk before the fight. But it’s not so simple. It’s so much worse.”

  The impaled Chicago Loop trembled and spasmed on the venom injectors, a rolling quake that shook gridlocked cars and el trains off its flanks like so many fleas. The rest of the stampeding herd twitched in paralyzed sympathy with their high-rent sibling, the brains and financial clout of the herd.

  The bull-god twisted and jerked, but it wasn’t dying. The trembling of the herd, rippling out from Park Avenue to the suburbs, was something else. Almost immediately, the bull-god city began to change. Swelling up like it was allergic to everything, the bull-god split open and disgorged hundreds of those megachurch-sized eggs that bored into the ground as the battle raged above them.

  Corben was shocked out of his cocoon of apathy, but he didn’t get dragged ten thousand miles away from his island hermitage to make life easy for this Frenchy brass douchebag who commanded his a
rmies via text messages. “If they’re killing each other, you should be grateful. They’re finally doing your job for you. Just hide out up here another few months and declare victory.”

  “I wish, my traitorous friend, I wish. I may be the fool here… and not the man who cuckolded his former comrade-in-arms in whose giant cyborg corpse he rode to glory in so many parades, only to blow its brains out all over the White House lawn, and then sired a brood of giant monsters with the aforementioned mistress. But I had the bright idea that you would be the world’s foremost authority on kaiju reproduction, yes?”

  A few of the ghostly geeks giggled.

  “Because that’s what they’re doing. Yes, they’re drawn to fight, and often to the death, but they’re not only consuming their rivals in toto. When they meet a perceived ideal match, they—”

  “I get it,” Corben growled. “Please, please stop.” Las Vegas was raping Chicago and turning it into a monster hatchery. Corben realized this at the same time his nascent first erection in over a year deflated and died.

  A bulky, toupee-topped bureaucrat pushed through the floating scrum of astronauts and refugees. Far from depleted by the lack of gravity, he seemed to have brought his own. “There’s something else you should know, and that’s why we had to reacquire you, against General Harbinger’s strenuous objections.”

  The bureaucrat keyed a projector on his thick goggles and sprayed Corben with stuttery loops of similar encounters between aggressive and amorous monster-cities. He recognized Auckland, a dubious flightless bird, trapped in the lethally horny clutches of the shambling monkey-Jesus-beast of Rio, the jigsaw abomination of hotwired slums making like Wile E. Coyote and getting buggered in turn by a razorbeak the size of an airport terminal, and injected with something too nasty to be mere sewage.

  “How many like this?”

  “Thirty-eight encounters documented so far,” the bureaucrat answered, “and more reports coming in, but it’s the late stage ones we’re worried about.”

  “Out of all these monster rape tapes, how many are laying eggs—”

  “All of them. Some, like Vegas here, simply underwent another drastic metamorphosis—taking on traits from the Honolulu Land-Shark, which was the first to go rogue. Anyway, four of the cities that were, ah, raped, have since died. They are fertilizing each other… exchanging DNA like any other organisms, and gestating the eggs or larva or whatever. Far from killing each other off, they are regrouping to yield a new generation of monsters.”

  The hologram skipped to another image that made everyone in the module gag. An extreme close-up of maggots wriggling in a gaping wound that glowed luridly under some kind of thermographic filter. Zooming out revealed that the wound was a volcanic crater in the former San Francisco Bay area. The maggots were each about a mile long, and they were writhing in a lake of lava.

  Corben irritably rooted in the back of his teeth for a long while as Harbinger opened the blinds and the geeks in the station worked on their skin cancer. “You suppose because the government fucked me so hard and so often, that I want to get right with them? What do you even want me to do?”

  “The cities are reproducing, Commander Corben. Hundreds from each tryst, and each larval mega-kaiju is a voracious consumer when they hatch deep in the earth’s crust. From hermetically sealed silicon and lead-shelled eggs, they hatch in less than ninety days. Their projected forms are completely unpredictable based on any models of genetics or civil engineering, but we expect that they will be even larger and more organically integrated than their parents, perhaps even larger than our overtaxed biosphere can support.”

  You should’ve thought of that before you built all those cities, he thought. “Tell me why I should help you.”

  Svetlana unsheathed a serrated combat knife and stropped it against her armored thigh. “I got nothing,” she purred.

  The bureaucrat robotically flashed a stream of legal incunabula at him, adding, “Provided we can get control of one of the more successful city-monsters, we could have some hope of controlling or reversing the trend… and perhaps even reclaiming the Earth.”

  Corben began to understand at last, what they wanted. “I knew there had to be a shitty suicide mission tucked away in here somewhere. You want to send me down there…”

  Harbinger started to bark, then deferred to the bureaucrat. “We believe this next generation of kaiju is not being groomed to rule the earth. Their varied size and extreme resource consumption suggests that they are settling down and forming franchises—”

  “Again,” Corben sighed, “not my problem.”

  “We don’t believe they’re doing this of their own volition. We’ve intercepted transmissions to all of the infected cities… from outside earth’s orbit—”

  The module turned into a weightless monkey house, with all the geeks screaming hateful data at once. “When a newborn hatches from an egg,” Harbinger bellowed, “the eggshell, she is not much left, no? They are pumping the earth full of their seed, and these larvae, they eat the heart of our planet like worms in a rotten apple. When they are ripe and ready to conquer the stars, we will be left on the empty shell, unless you will harden the fuck up and go do the job your government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to train you to do.”

  Svetlana Kurchenko spat, then pursed her pouting lips to blow the free-falling bolus of saliva so it hit both Corben and Harbinger. “He is not only one, who can make monsters dance.”

  Harbinger floated over to hover in front of Corben. He took out a scanner, which chirped at Corben’s shackles and unlocked them, then drove his forehead into the bridge of the commander’s nose, smashing it like a tomato without knocking himself backward or even soiling his pressure suit with the messy supernova of Corben’s weightless blood.

  Corben wiped his face and forced a smile. “You’ll never make him come out of hiding to stop it, and I wouldn’t help you find him if I knew where he was.”

  Harbinger cocked his arm to strike Commander Corben in the mouth, but the doughy bureaucrat beat him to it. The feeble blow to his gut sent him tumbling across the module to be caught in a web of flabby, hairless limbs.

  “When the time comes, you’ll beg to lead us to him,” said the bureaucrat. Svetlana smiled and licked her knife, then pointed it at his belly.

  As they dragged him back to the re-entry module, a ragged, ashy effigy dangled in his way, but nobody moved to shove him aside. Corben looked into the murderously neurotic, bloodshot eyes, the blue trees of gin blossoms and yellow-stained teeth flapping in malnourished, irradiated gums, and tipped a shaky salute. He hadn’t voted for the poor bastard, but still.

  “We rolled over for them. We let them take control of every aspect of our lives. If you do nothing else, Commander, find out why. Why have they gone berserk?”

  “They’re breeding, sir. Tell me that doesn’t make anyone dumber.”

  Corben missed the other guy. A perfect storm of stupid, but at least he never tricked you into thinking he knew what he was doing. “Mr. President, get out of my way.”

  “They’re eating our goddamned planet, Corben. The fucking Colorado River is gone. Likewise the Hawaiian islands and the whole west coast, and they’re building something in Iceland and in the Andes…”

  “The cities are building?”

  “Launch pads and shit we don’t even recognize, but they’re using geothermal power… we think they’re attempting to escape the Earth, while also working towards destroying it.”

  “For Christ’s sake, sir, what do you need me for? Drop a bomb on them, or something.”

  “We can’t count on any organized terrestrial resistance. Churches have sprung up around them. They pray to be picked up, and given a job inside a monster.”

  “They’re a bunch of dumb fucking animals, sir. Nobody seems to know who’s behind this shit. All I know is, it’s not who you think it is—”

  The President lit a cigarette. “Motherfuckers hate it when I light up in here,” he grumbled, “but not enough to
get us back down on the fucking ground.” The cig was a recycled filter stuffed with space-grown purple kush, rolled in an old CIA memo. It was the only sweet smell in the place. “I suppose you got a right to know as much as we do.”

  He opened his bathrobe and took out a file. He showed him some grainy, over-enhanced photos of pie-plates streaking across the shattered horizon of New York Harbor, the three of them straining to carry off the Statue of Liberty.

  “Well,” Corben said, “that fucking figures…”

  “Chariots of the motherfucking gods, man,” said the President.

  High atop the belfry of the central pagoda of his magnificent temple of ivory, a tiny, stooped man with a prehensile Fu Manchu mustache teed up a golf ball and chipped it expertly into the roiling bilious seas of Wes Corben’s GI tract.

  The ball hung in the primordial vapor long enough for Dr. Otaku to sip his green tea, and roll out the next ball, before it plopped in the heaving soup of his host’s last meal.

  Each ball was a single grain of an incredibly potent anti-depressant and muscle relaxant of his own design. “Relax yourself, imbecilic gaijin behemoth! Dr. Otaku commands you!”

  At first, his surroundings had seemed worse than North Korean house arrest, but Otaku had always excelled at making the most of hostile environments. His home was a priceless netsuke carving, a perfect miniature reproduction of the Horyu Gakumonji Buddhist temple as it appeared with its renovation in 1603, hewn from blue-white Annam ivory with tools finer than a baby’s eyelash by Ogasawara Issai, the master craftsman of the An-ei Period, shortly before he went blind. It was hell getting the roundeyed bastard into the museum, and he’d spent his whole supply of acetylcholine inhibitors convincing him to steal and swallow it. But if he had to live in a white man’s stomach, he would do it as a proud son of Nippon.