At the end of the spongy, corrugated urethral tunnel, Corben hopped the railing and got up a ladder to the waste disposal control room before any of the hooded goons or white-robed Klansmen spotted him. The air was stifling, hot and rancid with corn liquor vapors and—his nose wrinkled in disgust and confusion—curry?
The whole city rolled and rocked with an unsteady, drunken gallop as it moved. He didn’t know how anyone could live inside something that moved that much, and figured they must not have many nice things.
He tossed the Cyclops at the valves over the railing and watched him sink without a ripple into the city’s sewage storage ponds.
Look alive, honky, a sneer in his hindbrain burned out his self-confidence like a migraine. They put you on a loser.
He had to find an access hatch to the spider-mandrill’s ass-brain. Staggering down a catwalk, Corben looked around and saw furry gray bodies everywhere. Streaming down the pipes, they moved faster than nerve impulses, though they had the bulk of St. Bernards, chittering a maddening, sped-up crooning harmony that even Wes Corben could not claim ignorance of.
The Mumbai Cadaver Rats were an international pop sensation right before the Teratopolis Singularity, a falsetto Bollywood novelty boy-band that chewed up the charts before gossip rags discovered they really were giant rats, endowed with human sentience and lovable singing voices from a steady diet of human corpses.
As Corben regained his senses, he realized these probably weren’t the real Mumbai Cadaver Rats, since there were dozens of them. And they weren’t infesting the city. They ran it.
“Your complete satisfaction is important to us, my main man,” chattered the rats. “Please indicate whether you would prefer to be eaten pre- or post-mortem.”
Corben skewered a few giant rats with his pen-laser, but they drew together into a snarling wall that cut off any escape.
“We’re currently experiencing a high volume of unexpected bullshit,” said another rat. “Your death is very important to us. Please hold.” All of the rats had wires snaking out of their notched and gnarled ears, and some had miniature satellite dishes in place of eyes. But all of them had long, yellow teeth. In unison, they went rigid and their tails intertwined, and those with eyes glared up at the ceiling and through it, as if at a glorious hologram spooling in their skulls.
Corben started to step over their tails to sneak away, when he saw it, too.
The city of Mobile sat and pulled its dork in happy stupefaction, slack simian jaw resting on its pot belly, watching the hypnotic light show of the Vegas Mega-Snake as it circled around him and rose up as if to kiss the charmed mandrill’s unlovely lips.
The air around Mobile went blue with small-arms fire, bazookas and howitzers, every trailer-dwelling citizen of the white monkey-city fighting the enemy for the right to continue idly scratching its inflamed ass. The Mega-Snake swayed hypnotically before the spider-mandrill while it fired off a barrage of harpoons and grappling hooks and jerked the hapless hillbilly city face-down in the river.
Evacuate the groin, gaijin! Otaku howled into his central nervous system, jerking on his pelvic pain receptors like a senile country lord on a butler’s bell rope. Collision and cornholing are imminent!
“It’s the only way to infiltrate Las Vegas…” Corben started, but there was no point arguing with a Japanese android living in his bowels. Corben frantically clung to a rusty girder as the thrashing chaotic motion of the city soon fell into an all-too familiar pattern.
The dizzying shaft of the urethra shriveled and truncated, and the vast ceramic reactor tanks of the testes retracted into the superstructure high above Corben’s head, but he forged ahead in spite of his screaming instincts, even as the redneck spider-primate’s mega-penis began to glow and retract, violently turning itself inside out to accommodate the implacable intruder.
The sleek steel and black glass reptilian hemipenis impaled the spider-mandrill’s quasi-vaginal canal like a runaway bullet train, and almost instantly shattered and disgorged a cheesy fireworks display and a cloud of frothy white ejaculate that descended on him like a monsoon made of shaving cream. Corben strapped on his gas mask and dove into the foaming surge before it could sweep him away.
It was like swimming against a salmon run. The rats scrambled and flailed in the semen-flood, screeching like slot machines as squirming white Mega-Snake sperm burrowed into their ears and assholes. All around him, berserk biomechanical sperm ranging in size from catfish to dolphins rammed into him, mistaking him for a giant monster ovum.
Wishing he still had his rocket pack, Corben fired a grappling hook down the shattered shaft of the spider-mandrill’s new vaginal canal and abseiled down it to hook an air conditioning unit on the hooded cobra-head of the Mega-Snake’s spent hemipenis just as it shriveled back into the daylight. Corben was whipped up on his retractable cord to cling to the air conditioner’s leaky Freon coils until the telescoping organ had retreated into its hangar in the parking garage of Circus Circus.
Too exhausted to hold on any longer, Corben unhitched his harness and slipped off the steaming hemipenis to collapse gratefully on a clean, unyielding concrete floor.
Fatigue and horror and disbelief and despair flooded him and crushed each other out, leaving only a curious numbness that began to feel a lot like euphoria.
As awful, as unacceptable as the world had become, he belonged in it, for it was exactly as fucked up, as deformed and defiled and dead to its own redemption, as he was. How much worse would it feel, to see the world going on as normal, when his life was so thoroughly a toxic disaster?
Stiletto heels jabbed him in the ribs, sent cattle-prod shocks through him, rolling him into a fetal ball, surrounded. At least now he couldn’t smell their perfume, only a lingering ozone funk he somehow knew was the stench of his own scorched brain matter.
Just before he blacked out, he heard the last words any tourist in Vegas ever wants to hear, as he loses consciousness.
“Hi, honey,” they said in creepy, clockwork unison. “Wanna date?”
In all of human history, no babysitter had put up with more than Mariko did. She had to get away from the ungrateful brats after a week, so the next time a flying saucer came near the island, instead of shooting it down and feeding it to the monsters, she chased it.
To be sure, she did not just ditch her helpless charges. She dumped a couple tons of whale slurry in trails leading from every corner of the island to the nest. That would attract plenty of apex predators for them to snack on. If they were mature enough to try to nip her legs off when she brought them food, they could fend for themselves when the polar sharks and emulemurs and Komodo draguars came calling.
Of course, the saucer was long gone by the time she’d taken care of the nest, but she could still see the ionized psychic contrail it left behind as clear as chalk on asphalt. Their cloaking devices might hide them from radar and satellites, and they might be from another planet, but they were such galactic-class assholes that their negativity was a GPS route beacon pointing northeast across the Pacific. This was what intrigued her most—that they didn’t simply flit up into outer space, or wink out through a wormhole to their own time or dimension, or something.
In just the short time she’d been stuck on the island, the ocean had changed drastically. The ice floes were all but melted away, and the racing tides were dotted with boats and naval ships. Most were deserted derelicts, but she heard such piteous wailing from an ocean liner that she almost descended out of the clouds to rescue them, until she realized they were Australian.
She flew on under sun and moon, between a bloated ocean and a burning sky, stopping periodically to snatch a gray whale or a great white shark out of the trash-laced whitecaps and eat it on the wing. Occasionally, she saw floating mega-kaiju like awesome whale sharks gobbling up tons of floating plastic waste, while tiny tribes of Polynesian were-sharks sang hymns in their grass shacks on the coral reef atolls blossoming around the monsters’ dorsal fins.
As she
passed from the deep Pacific basin to the South American continental shelf, the pollution grew steadily worse, until she gagged on mustard yellow clouds that made her miss Easter Island and totally obscured the Peruvian coastline. While the northern hemisphere and the Far East had been most deeply affected by the mega-kaiju, the less densely urbanized African and South American regions had spawned fewer city-gods while still losing any vestiges of modern civilization. Left to revert to a long-forgotten natural state, the Amazon and the pampas and the Andes were enjoying a second age of dinosaurs. The once-fearsome gorilliguanas and Agent Orange-breathing dragon-moths deployed by the United States to fight the war on drugs had spread out and migrated and become the apex predators in a bizarre new ecology.
Riding the frigid jet stream over the teeth of the Cordillera, she finally lost the saucer’s trail, but only because it faded to background noise against a looming miasma of hideous psychic deformity. The air up here was, if anything, even dirtier than over the lowlands and the sea. It was as if a haunted slaughterhouse the size of Mount Fuji lurked somewhere in the noxious mists, burning the earth itself and spewing out selfish, disrespectful ghosts.
At last, the mountain range fell away, and she dropped down to swoop over a wide, low valley that caused her to scream in terror and anguish.
The valley was a graveyard of cities, but more tragic than the mountains of abandoned husks was what they had become, in death.
Very little remained of their old forms, aside from odd jutting steel bones or faded fiberglass carapaces, the wreckage of a funfair, touched once by nano-magic and set adrift. Caracas, Montevideo, Manaus, said the graffiti inscribed by giants everywhere around the carcasses, which had died giving birth to towers. Some were vast launch gantries, blackened and wilted from hurling projectiles into space. But many of them had fused in death to form a single, conical tower like an artificial volcano.
Something must have infected them and brought them up here, only to wither and die in some kind of insane project so steeped in failure, it could only be American in design. But why would the flying saucers need to resort to such monstrous and wasteful means, to pillage the Earth? And why this spent, trashy hellhole planet, out of all the universe?
Circling the ominous charnel-mound of dead cities, glowing with friction-fire rolling off her golden scales, she found herself engaged in an uncomfortably grownup dialogue about her role in the grand scheme of things.
Was she the defender of humanity? Hardly. She was never a fan of the species as a whole when she was one. She was only a little more fond of the Earth itself. Though she’d long since shed her urban schoolgirl phobias of dirt, germs and genocide, Mariko had hardly become a Buddhist. And as for the helpless and innocent, she had yet to find any living thing that met her criteria. Indeed, it was becoming harder by the hour to even think as she’d been taught in school. To use linear logic and words was like pulling a tapestry through a keyhole thread by thread, leaving a mess of threads that she couldn’t begin to weave into anything like what they were. Perhaps she would have less trouble adjusting, if she’d been transformed into a dragon after completing puberty.
Just then, she saw a trio of flying saucers skipping like river rocks off the troposphere, and she turned to attack them. These squirrelly hubcaps eluded her energy blasts, but even when she hit them, they reflected her blasts back at her off pearlescent bubble shields as they dove headlong for the Earth.
Ratcheting her piercing scream up to a supersonic buzzsaw, she deflected their puny missile salvos with less effort than it took to try to catch them. She intercepted them at the gaping peak of the hollow mound and caught one in her claws, cracking it like an oyster. Its wingmates pounded her with microwaves, making her forget what she was doing, and she fell out of the sky.
The tiny spacemen in the flying saucer she clutched tried to eject, but she peeled them out of their escape pod like foil-wrapped candies, oddly intent even as she plummeted into the hollow mountain of dead cities. There was nothing to see down there. The pit within had no bottom.
Mariko shook the tiny, shrieking dolls in her talons, banged them into each other. “Why are you messing up the Earth?” she shrieked.
Finally, one of them stopped screaming and crying long enough to answer her. “We’re Americans, bitch. It’s what we do.”
The other two flying saucers raced ahead of her and the blackness became whiteness, as oppressive and as uninformative as the darkness. Only then did Mariko remember that she was falling.
It felt like slamming into concrete. It atomized her, and yet she lived, fell through it and into a black velvet apocalypse. The ultraviolet light scorched her so all she saw was a void, but it was teeming with bodiless entities that fumbled at her as she plummeted past like a gutshot duck.
Passing through the other side felt even worse, like being electrocuted. She was grateful to emerge and come to rest on solid ground with no more force than if she’d fallen out of bed.
With a single mighty thrash of her wings, she wrenched herself out of freefall, but there was no up or down. When she tried to turn over to find the mouth of the volcano, she saw a tiny black mote like a negative star, dwindling so fast she realized that it was much too far away for her to still be on Earth.
When the light went away, she suddenly felt like she was falling again, but like falling off a bicycle, not like terminal velocity into the center of the earth. And she was flying but it suddenly wasn’t working, and her brain flooded with pictures but no words. She instantly knew what was wrong, but was blessedly unable to rationally confront the reality of how truly fucked she was.
Her wings were flailing for the same reason her lungs weren’t working and her brain itself was beginning to substitute big black balloons for any kind of coherent thought. She was swimming in a vacuum.
As the noose of prostitutes drew tighter around Corben, he rolled over to hide his hand and reach into his emergency pilot’s pouch. He knew from the dull dry ice glow in their filmy eyes that he couldn’t hope to reason with them. They were appendages of the city, the closest thing it had to an immune system. They all wore torn magenta T-shirts that proclaimed LOOSEST SLOTS IN TOWN!
If they were wired in any way like regular humans, he could probably use a flash grenade to stun them, and run away. If there were only a couple, he could garrote one with the monofilial piano wire in his boots, maybe do that human shield thing and take out a couple more with the corpse’s razor-heels. And the thermite charges in his flak jacket would melt at least a couple more of them the moment they stopped his heart. He had no choice but to dig out the one weapon they had warned him not to use unless he was almost already dead. “Do you whores take plastic?”
They seemed to shimmy seductively even as they stood still—their velour and vinyl lingerie rippling with the agitated migration of mutant crablice eager for a fresh host. While they did a schizoid screensaver shimmy, an Amazon with blue dreadlocks bound in pigtails like sheaves of dead snakes rolled up and thrust out her green tongue to show where her card reader was. He swiped the card through her mouth and tried to sound convincing. “I’m a bad boy. I want you to dominate me and drop a steamer on my chest. I deserve your worst.”
“How many, baby?”
“All of you.” He tried to look fascinated as they shared his credit data in deep, probing kisses, but these models had been on the street since before the daikaiju singularity, and their original organic parts were all but used up. A hodgepodge of sex toys, half-melted electronics and cheap buffet leftovers filled their many gaping gaps.
When they’d all finished swapping digital spit, they turned and stared at him. Their patented arousal musk baited the air, Lysol and the fake maple syrup scent of scorched coolant. The tension started getting expensive.
Corben dropped and covered his ears for a while after they failed to explode. Their blistered chinadoll faces cracked and contorted into drooling masks of rage, their claws deployed and worst of all, their bowels began to churn with su
b-seismic rumblings and spurts of toxic gas. Corben was uncertain whether he was going to be torn to shreds by these maenads because the federal credit card bounced, or whether he was about to get what he’d paid for. Both options seemed worse than biting into the cyanide capsule inside his left lower rear molar, so that was what he was trying to do when a gigantic pink tentacle flicked out of the alley and wrapped up four of the hookers in its flypaper embrace.
Not a tentacle but a tongue, the huge pink appendage tried to retract into a gaping reptilian mouth, but the ensnared prostitutes shrieked like harpies and grappled with the runaway fire hose, digging their stiletto heels into the yielding pavement and poking out one of the monster’s armored eyes as it tried to swallow them. The other hookers broke ranks to rescue their sisters, gouging the monster’s cherry paint job with skeleton key talons, and crawling under its upswept back end to fellate its exhaust pipe.
As near as he could tell, it was some unholy hybrid of a giant chameleon and a ‘69 Camaro. It peeled out in reverse, its oversized sport wheels raising a shroud of blue rubber vapor and dragging its flailing, hooker-studded tongue like a wrecking ball of bad hygiene.
The Chameleonaro backed into a Gila monster fused with a ‘71 Challenger and some sort of demolition mating dance commenced.
Corben climbed onto a trash dumpster, hopped over a razorwire-topped wall and ran gibbering over an endless meadow of blindingly green Astroturf. The ground shuddered and he dropped to his knees. Holy shit, they were playing on real high-grade ultra-dwarf Bermuda grass. No wonder the hookers looked so thirsty. All around the fairway, subway-sized circular trapdoors opened up in the turf as the course either recalibrated itself for the shittiest golfers of all time, or—
Missile silos.
Corben ran as fast as he could, chanting,“Fuck-fuck-fuck-God-fuck-cunt-shovel- Mommycock—” in the panicky falsetto of incurable insanity. But as any observer equipped with the power to see Kirlian auras would know, his mantra was a powerful Air Force-ratified technique for releasing psychic pressure, and each “fuck” averted the first of a lethal chain of strokes as he struggled to rationalize the unbelievable shit that was happening to him.
All-Monster Action! Page 18