All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  It wasn’t working. His head was about to explode, and even escalating to racist and homophobic slurs probably wouldn’t relieve the pressure in time to save him.

  He dropped to his knees, skidding on the perfectly groomed 13th putting green. He was stomped on, crushed face-down in the grass by a massive, hovering golf cart. The roaring ground effects skirt flung cigarette butts and mini vodka bottles in his face. This, at least, he could take out. He rolled out of the golf cart’s footprint, grabbed a running board and hauled himself out from under. He raised his pistol, but his finger twitched on the trigger. Even a trained killer with deep paranoid psychoses is paralyzed for a moment, when they find a world-famous celebrity in their gunsights.

  “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Commander Corben!” The driver flashed a dazzling phalanx of perfectly capped ivory teeth at him, smiling right past the gun in his face. “God damn, we’re so sorry we didn’t greet you in the style befitting a true American hero, but we didn’t know you were coming until this morning! Grab a seat, have a drink, and let’s get you into a game!”

  Wayne Newton brought the hover-cart to a stop and Corben slipped into the passenger seat. A zombie caddy with a majestic pair of silicon DDD tits instead of a face poured him a mimosa. Very fine Freixenet brut mixed with Tang.

  Keeping the gun parked in Wayne Newton’s gut, Corben slurped the drink and demanded a refill from Titface, as he growled, “If I’m a hero, it’s because I killed anyone who ever crossed me or my country. You fuckers are at war with America.”

  Wayne Newton laughed. His skin was yellow and looked like embalmed turkey loaf. Corben could’ve sworn Newton was dead, but here, no possibility was too unsavory to consider. He could be a surgically altered imposter or a zombie or a wax dummy android from Madame Tussauds, or even the real Mr. Las Vegas, fresh from some kind of cut-rate rejuvenation treatment.

  “I was afraid you’d feel that way. But you’ve got to look at the small picture, here on the ground. From where we’re standing, we are America. We’re the only ones carrying on and trying to rebuild this great nation.”

  At the end of the course, the golf cart hopped an electrified fence and leap-frogged a couple taxis before settling to travel the spine of the Mega-Snake.

  “We’re not afraid of the visitors because we know a thing or two… I wish I could tell you, but we’re working on a little real estate deal…”

  Even at midnight in February somewhere north of Pittsburgh, it was still 108˚on the Vegas Strip. The double row of mirrored and tinted glass skyscraper hotels had been converted into solar collectors-cum-death-ray-projectors shedding searing heat-haze that warped and distorted the street. This was not a bug, Corben soon discovered, but a feature.

  “You’re lucky we found you when we did, Commander. A lifetime of commando training and deployment in urban war zones could not prepare you to survive even an hour on the Strip.”

  At first glance, the awakened Las Vegas had strived to maintain its native ecology, even to have devolved to its adorably sleazy pre-corporate ecosystem. Tourists still gawked at the volcano and the pirate-versus-stripper stunt shows, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Its metabolism was based upon hospitality and entertainment, and it fed quite well on gamblers, which allowed it to expend disgusting amounts of energy and wealth on garish displays. Once it went mobile, the city found it hard to attract tourists—though some high rollers did fly in and out of a short runway on Desert Inn Road. But the Mega-Snake had to keep the party going, and so it had taken to abducting any humans in its path with viable credit ratings, then it co-opted most of the service industry into zombies and installed cameras everywhere. Anything that tried to kill and eat anything else on the Strip was a subject of furious online betting. As an incentive to try to survive in this glamorous hellhole, the city secreted weapons, ammunition, cybernetic upgrades, cash and buffet tokens in unlikely places and inside the cavities of zombie hookers and other monsters it turned loose on the streets.

  As they passed the casinos, Corben immediately noticed what was wrong. The poker and roulette tables were all gone, and the flashy video slots had been shut down or converted into handjob kiosks. In their place stood ranks of clanky old mechanical one-armed bandits—hundreds in every casino, spilling out onto the half-melted sidewalks. Every slot machine was in use, and every dead-eyed gambler sitting at a machine fed it a coin and pulled the lever at the same moment. They sat on stools that were also toilets, and gulped pureed lobster from feeding tubes. Like one-armed galley slaves, they pushed the Mega-Snake across the wasteland with every pull and generated more kilowatts than Hoover Dam, for the colossal city-monster had learned to harness the power of uncertainty itself.

  The gamblers played with twin tragedies gunning for their sorry asses. If they went broke, the city would devour them or ship them to the gladiator pits, but if they won a jackpot, they’d never live to claim it. So they hoped only to keep winning enough to keep playing…

  “I’ll admit, it might look a little weird from outside, but we’re just using our God-given gifts. We’re still just a poor ol’ show biz town, but we know how to make something out of nothing. Most of the cities out there are just wasting resources and getting in the way of rebuilding.”

  “So that’s why you’re raping and killing them all and seeding the Earth with giant monster larvae?”

  “Not larvae, son! Franchises! Listen, we have a chance to make this country right this time. The cities we competed against and defeated in fair trial by combat are going to make the next generation of livable American cities. Not big unstable nomadic monsters, but real, livable cities that will make products and services again. Comfortable, secure homes and wholesome entertainment for families, Commander. That’s our dastardly plan.”

  So the eggs were filled with freeze-dried suburbs. It was just stupid enough to be true. “You people didn’t think of this by yourselves, did you? Did the little green men promise you a controlling share in all the new cities? Make slaves out of the rest of America, maybe…?”

  Newton frowned, the tectonic plates of his dreamy face colliding so he looked like a sock puppet. “That hurts, Wes. Sure, we have some outside partners in this thing, but it’s not like we were the first to cut a deal, right? They want the same thing we want, actually.”

  The cart turned into a blind alley behind the Mirage. A wall dropped down and they took the ramp and shot up a narrow storm drain tunnel. They passed dozens of connecting tunnels from which bug-eyed morlocks hurled buckets of piss, to which Titface replied with a grenade launcher.

  Whatever Wayne Newton was, Corben tried his best to reason with it. “You can’t trust them, Mr. Newton. They’re using Las Vegas as a tool to turn America into a plantation. They’re doing it all over the world.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of inviting some folks to watch the show.”

  “Show? What the fuck are you taking me to a show for? They’re invaders from another goddamned planet! What common cause could you find with them against your own species? How can you be so blindly fucking arrogant, Wayne Newton?”

  Newton smiled his Welcome to Vegas smile again, and Corben knew that he wasn’t sitting beside a human being. “D’you know why our city is raping the shit out of every other city in this country? Some folks think it’s because of the tests, you know, the 126 atmospheric and 828 underground A-bomb tests—just the ones we know about—between 1951 and 1962. A lot of folks aren’t actually from here, but I am. Born and raised. I remember waking up to the sun rising in the north, and silver snow in September. This is my home, you understand? Nobody’s going to fuck with it.”

  “They’re aliens from outer space. They’re pillaging our goddamned planet, with your help.” Corben started to take out his phone to show pictures, but then they went into a rotating ultraviolet decontamination tunnel, and something zapped all his electronics.

  “We’re not worried, Wes. We’ve got something they want and need more than our a
ir or water or world monuments. We’ve got you!”

  No doubt he would’ve expanded upon this statement, but Corben was done enabling Newton’s infodump with his empty interrogative grunting. He took hold of the king of the lounge crooners’ chin and twisted and separated his spine against the golf cart’s memory foam headrest. It snapped more like PVC plumbing than honest bone, but at least he seemed dead.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Titface mumbled through his sideways mouth. “You’ve gone and made me fall in love with you, master.”

  The blind wall in front of the golf cart opened up and they rolled into a blitzkrieg of flashing lights and canned, refried applause.

  Naturally, it was a gladiator arena.

  From the tumbled columns and fake gold bas-relief everywhere, the vast, bowl-shaped crater had to be the ruins of Caesars Palace. The sloping floor was made of melted auditorium seats, and silhouettes of dumpy people pulling slot machine levers were burned into the walls. The new regime had remodeled it just enough to make it more dangerous than the pussy Roman version. A crowd of about a thousand tourist slaves was piled into stadium seating and screaming like their lives depended on it. Helicopters and drone cameras from the gambling syndicates made a thousand-eyed ceiling over the arena.

  The floor of the arena was filled with cyborg dancing girls, like a prostitute boss level. Behind waterfalls of crystal beads and cotton candy maribou stork feathers, they had been totally worked over by ridiculously misogynistic cybernetic engineers. Limbs replaced with taser flails, rotary cannons, circular saws, bazookas, death ray projectors and whirling airplane propellers. Blue flames from some incredibly volatile fuel drooled from flamethrower muzzles coming out of places few women let their gynecologists visit. And behind them, eclipsing the gibbous moon with its titanic, utterly unacceptable bulk like all these showgirls’ insecure, violent boyfriends mashed into a big pile, crouched a lobster the size of an offshore oil drilling rig. Its mandibles had rotary saw blades wider than Corben was tall.

  If it was just a lobster, it could have been let go as the by-product of trying to grow big lobsters, a perfectly understandable rich asshole pastime. But when it stood up on twin rows of telescoping struts and slammed its mismatched pig-iron claws together, Corben saw a tiny slack-jawed human face embedded in the fiberglass armor plates beneath its mandibles and realized the gladiator was at least a third human, and that third bore a striking resemblance to his driver’s license photo.

  “BIG JOBS!” it screamed, and lurched forward, trampling its neighbors. It probably didn’t feel too bad about it, though, if it even noticed. Its eyes had been replaced with a couple of cameras and a pair of recoilless Gatling guns.

  Corben did not waste a moment, but he couldn’t find reverse on the golf cart.

  If you want to survive, you greasy behemoth, said the last voice he wanted to hear inside his head, you must allow yourself to be completely under my command.

  “Fine, whatever. But you better not screw me.”

  Why would I do such a thing? You are my whole world!

  “OK, what’s next?”

  I have deposited a most efficacious suite of enzyme potentiators into your bloodstream. You should be feeling their effects soon, much sooner if you did not insist on polluting your digestive tract with processed meat and repulsive dairy products… You’re going to need protein. I suggest you make haste and eat as much as you can of Wayne Newton.

  An announcer was babbling amplified hype salad and the crowd noise was like a roaring wind blowing from all directions at once. He limbered his pistol, but it was hopeless. The he realized he wasn’t hearing the crowd at all. The thunder blowing out his eardrums was his own pulse. Even as his stomach began to growl, he bit his lip. “I’m not going to eat him.”

  It’s not cannibalism to eat a Caucasian, so long as they’re kosher… that’s a joke, try to rein in your stomach acid production, if you please… You need to eat immediately. He’s not human, and the alternative is probable death by gene therapy meltdown before any of those lovely ladies even gets to touch you. But I am most terribly tired of arguing with you—

  Corben’s jaw unhinged like an anaconda’s and he bit Wayne Newton’s face and scalp off. As his teeth skated across the dome of his skull, rolling scalp and hand-dyed, surgically implanted hair plugs up on his tongue, he gagged and tried to spit it out, but his gut was a furnace. He was on fire and only the flesh and hair of Wayne Newton would put it out. Especially the hair.

  He ate and ate while they closed in on the golf cart, rending and swallowing whole gobbets of face and neck and green velvet tuxedo lapel in his eagerness, but the fire didn’t go out. It only spread throughout his body to burst out of his pores like the burn from running for your life when your last dregs of adrenaline are long gone and it itched so bad he clawed at his flak vest and his face, and his face was sprouting hard, thick, flat bladelike black hairs and his hands his neck and everywhere under his scorched, semen-encrusted flight suit. The sleeves bulged and seams split but even the low-bid uniform didn’t tear away like the Hulk. It hurt like fuck, but he was not his own master, thank God, as he kept eating.

  Mr. Titface tapped him on the shoulder and queefed, “Please, sir… I know a way out… follow me…”

  A cheetah-spotted showgirl pranced up to the golf cart, waggling her can like a cat spraying its stink, and bathed the golf cart in blue flames just as Corben took Titface by the goatee and threw him into the inferno.

  Grabbing Wayne Newton’s golf bag, Corben leapt out and rolled, his flight suit sloughing off in crispy nylon ashes. Incredibly, he wasn’t burned. The thick net of hair that now covered every inch of him had hardened and fused into a black biomechanical armor, like really thick toenails. It slowed him down not at all as he leapt into the midst of the showgirls just as the lobster-man activated. His gunbarrel eyes swiveled to track Corben and carved a cherry Slurpee hurricane out of the mob of cyborg showgirls.

  Corben aimed his pistol straight up and fired. The entire eighteen-shot magazine deployed in less than a tenth of a second, during which interval each bullet acquired an individual target and intercepted it at the extrapolated greatest point of vulnerability. Before he cleared the spent magazine, eighteen cyborgs collapsed with their atomized brains adrift like cigarette smoke or the jet fuel tanks in their asses punctured and spraying white hot death on their neighbors.

  He dropped the gun and popped his knuckles. Because each bullet cost more than an Exocet guided missile, the pistol only came with one clip.

  He didn’t need another. His horny fists plowed through muscle and bone like Styrofoam and popped skulls like zits. A King Kong-sized bodybuilder snatched him and tried to stuff him into his mouth, but Corben caught a tuft of wiry hairs jutting out of the monster’s nostrils. Only when he got within inches of being eaten did he recognize the bastardized features of his old friend, Steve. The slope-browed clone squeezed him like a tube of toothpaste. Corben stuffed a grenade into the other nostril and ripped the nose-hair free. The screaming giant inhaled the grenade, which went off in its sinus, blasting its nose and left eye out of its head. Incredibly, it didn’t go down, but flailed to the right, crushing everything its intact eye could see.

  Jumping out of the giant’s mouth, Corben ripped the head off a magician’s assistant and swung it by its spine like a flail with straight-razor fangs. Rigid, silicate hairs all over his body came off like porcupine quills, which hurt a hell of a lot more than they had any right to. The unbelievable power racing through his body nearly separated every tendon and ligament in his arm with each mighty blow, but he wouldn’t stop even if he somehow regained control over his motor functions. He had more than enough strength to crush the little angel on his shoulder telling him this was a terribly stupid and dangerous thing to learn to enjoy.

  All his adult life, Corben had flown in planes or giant monsters and hated himself, but what he suddenly realized was that he didn’t hate himself. He hated his feeble, slow, stupid, stinking huma
nity, and everyone else’s. And looming before him was a gigantic, lobsterized parody of himself. Rather than wondering where they got his genetic material or why they made a giant lobster-hybrid out of him, he only saw an effigy of that loathsome asshole Wes Corben that he could shred in his teeth…

  Before the bookies’ cameras could acquire him and adjust the odds, Corben had vaulted up onto the fantail of the cyborg lobster and raced up its back so fast the idiot nipped its own antennae off trying to decapitate him.

  Driving a five-iron into the joint in the armor just behind the lobster’s head, Corben pried open a slot revealing a pulsing puddle of grey cottage cheese shot through with glowing circuitry. No more in control of himself now than when he ate Wayne Newton, Corben drove his hand into the monster’s brain until his tunneling fingers found something oddly familiar to the little man coaching him from a bunker in his stomach. When he squeezed it, the rotary cannons of the lobster’s eyes tilted up to take in the suddenly somber audience. And rake them with lead.

  The guns were wired to the cortical arousal centers of the monster’s brain, and so it shot anything that excited it. Having a functioning short-term memory was not terribly compatible with a 96mm armor-piercing stare, so its forelobe was whittled down to a nub smaller than a duck’s dick.

  My patented design! Don’t kill all their lawyers, because I’m going to sue them to death.

  The techno-lobster’s visual processing centers were tricked out with a digital interface that was oddly receptive to manual override. Squeezing the knobs of ganglia like a control pad, Corben mowed down the best and brightest of Las Vegas—the magicians, hypnotists, ventriloquists and celebrity impersonators—and the wrinkly, tiger-headed perverts who appeared to be the true rulers of the city. Bullets and shrapnel and high heels caromed off his toenail body armor like sparkling fairy dust. Flexing and roaring like a steroidal pro wrestling werewolf, Corben skewered the giant cyber-lobster’s McNugget brain and ripped it out to devour while pari-mutuel action began to speculate on the casualties when, not if, Corben took over the Mega-Snake.