All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  Enjoy yourself while you can, idiot, Dr. Otaku sneered. I wrung every molecule of endorphins out of your pitiful peasant brain so you wouldn’t go into shock during your dramatic metamorphosis. When you crash, you’re going to feel like an Anne Sexton poem about menstrual cramps—

  “Why do you think I’m eating this fucking brain?”

  I thought you were trying to make yourself sick. Cyborg brains are totally unstable. Invertebrate cyber-hybrids kick off prions like waste heat, and eating the brains of your own clone... fucking Americans.

  “Change me into something else… fly us out of here…”

  Too late. Bovine spongiform encephalitis has most likely set in. That’s your strategy? Ask the tiny man who lives in your gut for a miracle? We deserve to die.

  It was too late, anyway. The moon and stars were blocked out by something that completely covered the open pit of the arena like the lid of a cookie jar.

  Helicopters and drones were swatted out of the sky by huge arcs of blue lightning. Corben leapt into the emperor’s box to escape the barrage of falling wreckage. The survivors in the audience bowed down like Old Testament suckers before a golden calf. Corben alone stood up to the flying saucer that hovered overhead, and only because a bolt of lightning fried him where he stood. The joints of his keratin-based armor had melted and fused.

  With an epileptic fanfare of flashing lights, the flying saucer touched down and disgorged a pair of humanoid space travelers in blindingly bright silver spacesuits and mirrored helmets. Even in post-apocalyptic Vegas, every head in the arena bowed in fear, every mutant freak seriously vowed to mend their ways, if only they didn’t die, right now.

  As they approached, the spacemen took out pistols and pointed them at him. Corben cracked his armor and screamed as all the hair on his legs and crotch was ripped out at the same time.

  One of the spacemen stepped back and put his gun to his mate’s brainstem and shot him twice at an upward angle. The unlucky spaceman collapsed to his knees with the bullets ricocheting round and round inside his awesome bulletproof helmet.

  Corben tried to pop his absurdly long claws again, but he needed to eat a lot of hair to make it happen again. Unarmed, he faced down the spaceman’s pistol, but the alien unscrewed its helmet and a tumble of scarlet hair spilled out.

  “Everywhere I don’t want to be,” Corben groaned, “there you are.”

  “I don’t know why they brought you in at all,” she retorted, stepping back into the saucer’s airlock recess and raising her gun to beckon him inside. “I need no partner. But if you don’t want to get killed, put on suit.” She kicked the dead spaceman next to her. She didn’t explain how she got on the flying saucer, and he didn’t ask. She knew a lot more than him, and they were not on the same side.

  But he couldn’t stop trying to impress her. “Whoever they are, they’ve got Las Vegas eating out of their little green hands. The Mega-Snake is programmed to rape the other cities and make them seed the country with bastardized Vegas franchises. And I think they know… they think I know where Otaku is.”

  He expected the Slavic vixen to whiten with surprise, but she cocked a sturdy hip to throw the airlock switch and laughed. “Oh, you foolish fool! How do you think you were so easily captured? Your ridiculous nemesis has been broadcasting from inside you, offering final solution to mega-kaiju problem to highest bidder. We couldn’t find him for longest time, because he planted false relays everywhere, and you were hiding on his island with your… offspring. No one believed you succeeded in killing him, but no one suspected depth of collusion, either.”

  All during this barbed tirade, Corben tried to unscrew the alien corpse’s helmet from the suit’s seamless collar. The helmet was all visor and perfectly reflective, but he could just glimpse some kind of four-eyed freak inside, with a catfish mouth fringed with tentacles.

  Svetlana gave a provocative grunt of disgust as she stooped to take the helmet off. The scent of her sweat, spicy and rank from zero-g still vodka and NATO rations, inspired a crippling rush of blood to his crotch. Trying to change the subject as he turned to undress—which entailed prying melted hair off his skin—he demanded to know how she got on the flying saucer. “As long as we’re laying our wild suspicions to rest.”

  She finally removed the helmet. “The aliens were not so difficult to infiltrate, once I learned they aren’t aliens.” Corben tried to feel surprise, but he couldn’t even muster sincerely bitter disappointment. The hideous monster image was some kind of hologram embedded in the visor. Underneath the helmet was an irrefutably terrestrial Caucasian male ex-Air Force pilot with twenty or more messy exit wounds in his face from the endlessly ricocheting bullet. His cranium leaked like a colander full of overcooked lasagna noodles, but together they upended the corpse and peeled off its silver pressure suit. “So, who are they working for?”

  “We have to find another saucer group and find out. All the surviving cities in the Southwestern United States are converging on Southern Nevada. We think they’re building another space ladder.”

  “We’ll be there to stop them, then. But these flying saucer things won’t do any good against a herd of cities…” He forgot what he was going to say next. He froze with his shirt over his head.

  Svetlana had stripped off her own spacesuit. Her buxom curves glistened with sweat and dried blood from the original occupant. She wore only a spacer’s leotard underneath, and it was way too small.

  She smirked slyly at him as she brushed away his last protective clumps of melted hair. “I need shower, and… I… noticed your distress, earlier. Perhaps now is time for obligatory intimate physical entanglement…”

  He tried to turn around, but she trapped him. Her hand went to her mouth, finally somewhat impressed. “You’ve been a very bad boy…”

  His penis was anything but erect; in fact, it’d retracted into his pelvis like a salted snail-eyestalk upon exposure. But he had three swollen testicles. The third one was a gigantic crablouse, bloated to the size of a prize tomato with his blood.

  “Help me…”

  She took her sweet time burning it off with a pocket acetylene torch. “You also have… tail…” He turned around, spinning a couple of times like a crazed dog.

  He did indeed have a slimy white tadpole tail dangling out of his asshole and hanging down almost to his knees. Svetlana grabbed it with a lusty giggle and yanked a wayward Mega-Snake sperm out of his anus.

  Svetlana lit a cigar and forced him to sit back and spread his legs. “You are first American I ever meet,” she purred, “who can how to give good foreplay.”

  Even now, there were times when Mariko forgot that she was a celestial dragon the size of a Concorde SST, when she was still the undersized, unpopular daughter of a disgraced coprophiliac politician.

  This was one of those times. She thrashed in the void, tumbling end over end in a storm of helplessly flapping wings. Clamping her eyes and her jaws shut against the surge of internal pressure that must be the lining of her lungs boiling, she bounced off something hard and lashed out with her tail, sending herself hurtling off in a new direction.

  Her grasp of physics was shaky at best—she was flunking science, and had been momentarily glad when she turned into a monster at school, because it got her out of a physics quiz—but she knew that humans didn’t just explode like balloons filled with jelly in a vacuum. It takes about a minute for your blood vessels to rupture as their contents boil and freeze at the same time, for eyes, ears, lungs and abdominal cavities to violently expel their gases and fluid contents, and for the brain to freeze in its bony fortress and finally, mercifully, surrender. Thank God, you could still learn some science from cartoons.

  It took a moment for her to realize she could open her eyes, which were shielded by bulletproof nictitating membranes. Her ears were likewise covered by thick tympanic scales. But when she looked around, she almost forgot she couldn’t breathe.

  She clung li
ke a bat to the girders of the roof of a spherical chamber the size of the Astrodome. There was a perceptible but very weak gravitational pull, leading her to suspect she was in outer space or some kind of giant vomit comet. Set into the glittering black walls all around her were big silver doors with numbers and bar codes on them. One of the doors sphinctered opened, revealing a weird oily silver mirror that rippled and spat out a flying saucer. More flying saucers were stuck to the walls everywhere, like hats on hooks. A big picture window was set into the far wall, and she could see a bunch of tiny little men working at consoles, like at NASA mission control. They were all jumping up and down and pointing at her and screaming at each other, apparently pissed that she wasn’t dead, yet.

  The tiny spaceman still clutched in her talons could give no answers. In the rigors of traveling through the weird volcano-gate, she’d squashed his entire body into his helmet. She knew aliens in monster movies usually came disguised as humans, but in the final reel, they always turned out to be hideously deformed mutants or giant cockroaches. This poor bastard hadn’t turned into anything but jelly, so maybe it was true, and aliens didn’t exist. But Americans were the next worst thing, and if they were wrecking the earth in earnest now, they deserved a proper lesson in humility.

  Pushing herself off the dome, she flew towards the command center with her wings swept back against her long, undulating body. They tried to raise a blast wall, but she peeled it off and tapped on the glass, signing with perfect clarity for them to let air into the saucer hangar. Instead, they zapped her with microwaves until her scales started flaking off. Really annoyed now, she breathed fire on the window. Of course, the fire didn’t ignite in vacuum, but gouts of highly reactive bile coated the six-inch Plexiglas window and commenced eating through it.

  More flying saucers deployed and attacked her, and Mariko had a jolly time bouncing off the walls and flinging them into each other like pachinko balls. Their magnetic pulse weapons tickled and they couldn’t use death rays in the house, but when a couple of the suicidal idiots used the spinning edges of their saucers like circular saws, they actually hurt her.

  She smashed them and rampaged around some more, but no more saucers came out and eventually, her lungs started to burn, and she realized she was probably dying. She picked a big silver door at random and pried it open. Sweet air gushed over her snout for a moment before it depressurized, but a bunch of other stuff got sucked out into the hangar, too. Big geodesic bubbles with cows and pigs and other livestock bounced off her flanks as she crawled into the confining space of a smoothly bored lava tube. Flash-frozen cow carcasses drifted in the hangar in Mariko’s wake, but she made herself dig patiently at the roof of the tunnel until it collapsed behind her.

  When she came to another airlock door, she was gentler in prying it open, and the air that greeted her was warm and syrupy with the perfume of flowers, and it didn’t just rush out into space. At last she took in a deep breath and unfolded her wings. This cavern was as large as the hangar, but it contained greenhouses and an old-growth redwood forest that looked like something out of a fairytale. And high above, the roof of this enchanted cavern was of tinted glass that allowed the sun’s rays to pour down on a dazzling panorama of stolen nature. Mariko gasped as she looked around the cavern and realized that the blue moon partially obscuring the sun was the Earth. She was on the moon, but it looked a lot like Earth in a bottle.

  The tunnel became a vast segmented Plexiglas tube that stretched out across a crater at least twenty kilometers across. Peering out through the condensation-streaked walls, she could see a loose tangle of braided tubes filled with Amazonian rainforest, Siberian taiga, and Arctic ice floes teeming with polar bears and electric emperor penguins, together at last.

  Once she navigated a junction pod and figured out the directory, she went for a swim in a highly pressurized benthic tube and battled a giant squid, then emerged on a picture perfect shoreline with automated breakers garnishing a beach of tiny black pearls. Drunk with the bends and bloated with several tons of squid meat that had exploded inside her stomach, Mariko wanted only to sleep it off. Sunbathers panicked and fled or ignored her, and a couple Arabs commanded her to kneel so their children could ride on her back. She cremated them all and curled up to sleep in their embers.

  But sleep eluded her, even after she’d gotten up to crush the beach airlocks and fidgeted with an imaginary day planner. She didn’t like to admit it even to herself, but she was… kind of horny. She’d had a discreet device that she carried in her purse because all her friends did it to seem daring and impervious to boys. She’d actually tried it a couple times but never found it worth the lingering disgust. But her new body didn’t seem to have any such hang-ups, despite the fact that no males of her species seemed to exist. To be the only one of her kind didn’t bother her in the least, but to still have the plumbing and the desire for sex… it was just cruel.

  It may have been the moon, but this place was like any other five-star resort she’d ever stayed at with daddy. When she needed something, you didn’t even have to ask. Just wish for it, and there it was.

  “DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!” Sirens and an amplified, echoing masculine voice jolted her out of her torpor.

  No invitation to surrender, no attempt to divine whether she was sentient at all—not that it mattered to this clown. A peacekeeping robot—no, a Yankee jarhead in a cybernetic combat suit—braced himself in the sand and opened up with twin rail guns. Hundreds of white-hot riboflavin rounds skipped off her scales to do interesting things to the ocean, but they hurt like mild period cramps. The walking one-man tank bristled with harmful armaments like a sea urchin, but she was particularly fond of urchin meat.

  Struck by a wicked inspiration, she seized the mini-tank and, after burning off its weapons and sealing the cockpit, she commenced to pleasure herself with it.

  The tank was mostly disabled, but the human pilot’s frantic attempts to destroy her or to eject from the doomed rig made it vibrate with the spasmodic throbbing of solid objects forced to inhabit the same space in a buggy videogame. She stroked her maddeningly sensitive underbelly with the shivering machine and gingerly teased the scaly folds of her special place.

  “EJECT! EJECT!” the pilot screamed, like a little boy, impatient to finish, but Mariko took her time, manipulating the slippery gadget with three of her hind legs and winding her coils around herself again and again until her entire body was clenched like a fist around her smoldering sex.

  So embarrassing. Compared to the rest of her, it was smaller than ever and tucked away under her tail where only a champion herpetologist or an as-yet unincarnated male celestial dragon could find it, and yet her nether parts had become engorged and emitted a distressing smell and light and… music. Even with the golden wings of her labia inflamed and blocking the canal, the entry itself was the size of the compartment the tailgear retracts into on an airliner. A small man could hide in it for several hours, and would probably die unnoticed. But if she was aroused, like now…

  When she finally gave in and plunged the tank inside her, the pilot was in an ecstasy of outrage, and his frenzied struggles set off a cluster-bomb of multiple orgasms. She ripped him out at the last moment, wary of letting the jarhead die inside her, but her coital writhing had collapsed the hull of the tank, and the poor Yankee had drowned in her excitement juices.

  Mariko pitched the wrecked vibrator into the sea and curled up again, content and ready to sleep, but now she was surrounded by robots and hover-tanks and laser-cannons and at the center a storklike robot that stood as tall as she, and had an ion cannon for a head that looked like it might actually be able to hurt her in some almost permanent capacity.

  “We all have needs,” said the giant robot in passable Japanese, which opened up to reveal a tiny fat albino man in a silver chainmail muumuu who cradled a hideous, drooling teacup Chihuahua in one arm… no, for the love of Heaven, somehow, the diseased little dog was his arm.

  “I, too, have needs. If you c
an only find it in your heart, Miss Mariko, to remain here and continue to enjoy yourself as my guest, I am confident that we’ll all of us get what we really want. Now I ask you, is that something a villain would say?”

  Something smelled funny, literally. A burned rubber smell reached her nostrils at the same time she realized that smoke was coming out of her tear ducts. Something inside her skull was burning. “And what if I choose not to?”

  “Oh, I hope you won’t be difficult. Because then…” the fat man picked up a joystick and pressed a flurry of buttons, “I will have to act like a villain.”

  The audacity of the repulsive little Caucasoid moved her to her feet, but a thundering migraine crushed her to the luxuriant black sand and rolled her up in a quivering ball.

  “Now behave,” said the Man in the Moon, “or I’ll make you masturbate again.”

  Gary Spruance had been waiting a long time for this day. It was probably a little early to announce himself Emperor of Earth, but he’d been dithering around all morning on Photoshop and his 3D printer workstation, making himself a wicked crown. Unforeseen and unprofitable shit like this Jap dragon was a headache, but par for the course when you dreamed as big as Gary Spruance, President and CEO of Hardsoft.

  Few who were aware of Gary Spruance in his early years would’ve pegged him to some day rule the world from a secret city on the Moon, but many fawning media profiles hyped him in exactly that kind of language, long before the new dark age of mega-monsters. Having forced an unstable, user-hostile operating system into every personal computer in America, and turned a moronic, aggravating gaming network into the most effective method of keeping superfluous male youth off the streets since trench warfare, Gary had ably demonstrated his talent for bending reality to his will.