All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  And he had invested very heavily in the present dark age. It was past time to reap his due dividends.

  He must’ve been crazy to think he could come out ahead in an alliance with Dr. Otaku. The lunatic who hijacked his network had used its millions of couch commandos to power the first phenomenological kaiju manifestation, and subsequently infected central Tokyo with the virus that went on to wreck the world… and only cleared the field for Gary to emerge, once again, on top.

  He may have been a 400-pound albino with halitosis, but he had the world eating out of the palm of his hand, which happened to be the slobbering mouth of a pop-eyed Chihuahua. No journalist had ever tired of observing how unlikely and yet inevitable was his rise to become the thirteenth richest man in the world, or his string of inspired innovations, but the paradox made perfect sense, if one only knew how deeply Gary Spruance hated the world, and how passionately he committed himself to ruining everything for everybody. The only mystery, even to Gary himself, was why he’d been so richly rewarded for it.

  Gary made a modest fortune off some software patents he filed as an undergraduate, but he was still just a 400-pound albino with a harelip. Until that fateful day when he decided to go to Mexico for spring break with his dorm-mates, Gary was probably fated to be just another flabby cog in someone else’s machine. It was a stupid idea anyway, for an albino to go to the beaches of Acapulco, but he wanted to get laid, and he figured he had as good a chance as any of the other geeks he ran with.

  Unfortunately, they never reached the beach, but instead their rental RV was run off the road by a Rockstar Energy drink truck and flipped into a crevasse, where it hung suspended upside down for three days.

  Everyone in the van was killed instantly except Gary, who hung upside down in the passenger seat with seven broken ribs and a partially severed arm and the remains of his friends putrefying all around him and drawing clouds of biting black flies, and Creed’s My Own Prison album playing over and over on the CD. His arm was crushed and he was faint from blood loss, but he heard every word of Creed’s vapid yet heartfelt message. It became his whole world, his only refuge from hell on earth.

  Semantic satiation is what it’s called, when words, endlessly repeated, lose meaning. But when songs so loaded with heart-wrenching, butt-rocking sincerity become meaningless, the human heart becomes a dead mechanical thing, immune to all emotional appeals.

  The Baja doctor thought he was doing Gary a favor by grafting the Chihuahua onto him. “We were not able, sorry, to save your arm… but we were able to save your dog.”

  The head and forelegs of the oily rodent-dog twitched and licked him. He didn’t have the heart to tell the doctor he’d never seen the dog before.

  He used his fortune from the lawsuit against Rockstar to buy up FM radio stations, and by scaling their playlists back to a skeletonized death march of cookie-cutter hits that annoyed and alienated every economically desirable demographic group, he made them fail even harder. All the while, he invested all his time and energy into developing code for a national mega-broadband network and approached auto manufacturers with designs for wifi consoles to be installed in their new models.

  When the FCC finally rolled over and decided to convert most of the commercial FM bands into free Internet, Gary was waiting to accept a fat buyout of his obsolete licenses and reap the whirlwind of revenue from a fully mobile, wired nation. When two thousand motorists died while playing videogames and driving in the first year, the lawsuits and bad press barely even softened the hard-on the financial world had for Gary Spruance.

  With the avalanche of capital, he founded Hardsoft, a late-comer to the operating system game that pioneered spamware, a buggy OS that installed itself uninvited on every PC in the western hemisphere and held files hostage until its steep registration fee was paid. Hardsoft diversified into games and social networking stuff, but Gary’s passion was for environmental engineering. His miniaturized red-light enforcement camera systems and made them so cheap that they were installed at every intersection in forty-two states, and thanks to his overseas automated interpretation and processing centers, he received ten percent on every moving violation.

  Of all his inventions, he was proudest of the mod he devised for commercial air conditioning systems that periodically released just a whiff of raw sewage or gorilla musk into crowded common areas. It caused everyone who smelled it to be deeply repulsed by their neighbors, and thus to pay more for private and exclusive treatment, which was immensely popular with hotels and casinos. To subconsciously remind every individual in an upscale public space that he was surrounded by walking tubes of excrement somehow increased profits, while sending a message that no art could hope to articulate to a willing audience.

  It was hard for him to hide in the shadows, since he was a 400-pound albino with a dog for an arm, but he was committed to his privacy, and to a secret dream of making the whole world exactly like that overturned van full of agony and charnel stench and Creed. This, of course, was not a regular American dream like becoming an astronaut or getting knocked up by a famous professional golfer, but more of a psychotic fantasy born of horrible trauma to a degree that leaves only suicide, crimefighting or heinous evil as career choices. But with his wealth and status, Gary at last began to conceive, for the first time, of something worth having, and not just because he’d taken it away from someone else.

  Despite his unsavory countenance and antisocial demeanor, Gary found himself grudgingly admitted to circles of unimaginable privilege and power, and quickly found them to be drab farces run by inbred morons ripe for fleecing. Even as his embryonic dream began to ignite and burn up the last dregs of his humanity, Gary approached a select group of clients who could be trusted to keep a monumental secret, and who could afford to finance a bold, risky venture inconceivable to any world superpower.

  It was easier to sell to rich people than silver polish. If they could pretend to enjoy themselves in Palm Springs or Martha’s Vineyard, then they’d go to any length to get away from the riff-raff. What was the point in amassing an ungodly fortune by despoiling the earth and victimizing the working poor, if you still had to live amongst them? Kaiju attacks were already more common and costly on the west coast than earthquakes. By the time North Korea entered the arms race and totally fucked the status quo with Kungmin Horangi, Gary had already completed the first phase of operations, and safely settled one hundred families in airtight, luxuriant estates in lava tubes beneath the Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon’s equator. When the predictable power struggles reduced the original cabal of tycoons to a handful of braindead ciphers and their clueless heirs, Gary found himself the reigning ruler of the Moon, an undeclared sovereign nation with fifteen thousand support staff servicing twelve hundred of the luckiest, laziest most ruthlessly efficient machines for turning food into shit ever conceived by selective breeding.

  As of this year, the population had mushroomed to thirty thousand homeowners, with four times their number in indentured help; two spaceports with a hundred-strong saucer armada; a four-thousand square mile solar wind farm that produced enough energy to power North America; and nearly two thousand miles of pressurized underground habitats containing all of Earth’s most precious ecosystems, preserved in miniature. All these pearls he had laid out before his swinish clients, and more. The most incredible invention—the bilocational Gates which enabled instantaneous travel between Earth and Moon—had only excited the lunar gluttons’ lust for dumber diversions and shinier trophies.

  The blue-blooded rubes believed the big day was coming, in which the Big Gate would be opened, and the Moon would get a stable, breathable atmosphere, siphoned directly off the Earth. If the Gates functioned and the magnetic shield towers erected all over the moon did their job, the lunar forecast for tomorrow called for mild rain followed by delightful Indian summer conditions. Weather forecasts for Earth, with about a sixth of its atmosphere suddenly vanished, were not so good.

  Of course, none of that happy
horseshit was going to happen, because Gary Spruance, as always, had his own plan. His two competing dreams—what he wanted for himself and what the rest of the world deserved—had finally become one. And while the dream involved the untimely death of every man, woman and child—indeed, everything that lived on Earth—it was pretty much all about him.

  Like eight miles of radioactive roadkill, the exhausted Vegas Mega-Snake limped over the Nevada border. The sandstone mountains crumbled under its ponderous weight, under the stabbing onslaught of millions of laboring legs, many of which had broken or worn down to flailing stumps by the monster city’s breakneck race across America’s empty breadbasket.

  For three days, Vegas had run at nearly a hundred miles an hour, stopping only to do battle with the Siamese twin scorpion-weasel Dallas/Fort Worth. By the time it had passed the empty desert cradle of its birth, the Mega-Snake had begun to drag, to look like a dead thing on automated legs.

  Commander Wes Corben didn’t really believe that it obeyed the orders he punched into the jury-rigged laptop spiked into Vegas’s biomechanical nervous system. The monster city’s mad nomadic circuit around America had allowed it to rape a dozen lesser cities which would exhaust themselves to death hatching out little Mega-Snake franchises. The city seemed to be drawn by its own territorial imperative, to its home.

  From the observation lounge at the top of the Stratosphere casino hotel, the mountains seemed to be covered in black ash. As they grew closer and passed underneath the Mega-Snake’s steel-scaled underbelly, the ash-heaps resolved into leaping fleas. Hill people, dispossessed and cut adrift in a monster-ridden wilderness, reverted to Stone Age savagery in less than a year. They had quickly turned to weird cargo cult rituals which preached that life aboard the lumbering kaiju-cities was Heaven.

  “Slow down, please,” Corben murmured into the Mega-Snake’s ear. “Let them come aboard.” The city gave no reply, but he felt a gradual shift in the thrumming tempo of its gait, and saw swarms of refugees yanked up by grappling hooks, saw the monumental legs shaggy with climbing bodies. He wondered if they would be so eager to hitch a ride if they knew where the city was going, and what it was about to do.

  “Is taking too long,” Svetlana’s withering voice boomed in his earbuds. “We should take battle to Moon-traitors. Look at screen, you fool!” The tight-beam transmission from the saucer she flew included a panoramic panning shot of the enemies amassing in their path. It was like somebody took the statistics of the least livable cities in America and used them as the roster for a giant monster football team.

  “At least you could have picked city that flies.” Svetlana said, a moment before she got shot down.

  “Svetlana!” He couldn’t see her on the radar, because she was in a fucking flying saucer. Ever since their too-brief intimate encounter, it burned like a motherfucker whenever he took a piss, but at least, thanks to her, he could feel something besides dread and remorse.

  And she was right, damn it. He was only one man in an eight mile-long monster city-snake. It was time to call God and ask for some air support.

  The number for the International Space Station rang about forty times before somebody picked up. In the background, he could hear laughing, crying and vomiting.

  “I’d like to speak to the president or the NATO commander…”

  “Fuck off, they’re busy. Cheers, mate, it’s all over…”

  “Don’t hang up! Look, the aliens are not aliens, but ultra-elitist Randian douchebags who set up a breakaway state on the moon. They’re stripping the Earth of its vital natural and cultural resources to turn the Moon into a resort. They have moved a couple dozen mega-kaiju cities to southern Nevada to build what we think will be a huge teleportation gate to siphon air and water to terraform the Moon. The power expenditure alone for such a huge undertaking will likely cause the terminal earthquake we’ve always feared would sink the California coast…”

  Corben trailed off when he realized nobody at the other end was listening. He heard someone talking about him with someone who wept and giggled at the same time. “Yeah, he just keeps on talking, innit? Sod off, it’s all over. The saucer-geezers are pouring the tea. Prepare your anus, mate.”

  Ignoring Corben’s shouted questions, the limey at the other end shot him a feed of a massive armada of asteroids circling the moon like a halo of cookie crumbs. “Those rocks popped up out of fucking nowhere just yesterday. Nobody’s taking credit, but that kind of power don’t just come from thrift and honest hard work, donnit?”

  The sight knocked the wind out of him, but it hardly surprised him. Once they’d finished plundering the Earth to turn the Moon into a low-gravity country club, they’d do well to bomb their homeworld’s last traces of infrastructure to insure that it’d be decades or centuries before anyone ever came after them. “I really need to talk to the President…”

  “You know what the Frenchies put in the walls of their module for the ISS, mate? Enough fucking gear and booze to kill us all dead twenty times, that’s what. They figured it’d be hell to watch the world get knocked to shit and be stuck up here, right? So we got a lovely bunch of poofy wine and pure China white. The Main Man, he’s like a fucking surgeon. Never seen a cooler head in a crisis, yeh? Ask you, real cool-like, ‘one way or round trip,’ and he never misses the vein, he don’t. I’m holding out for when they drop the rocks on yer arses before I snuff it, but rest assured, we will be commemorating yer extinction with the mother of all knees-ups…” The line went dead.

  The Mega-Snake came sidewinding over the hills overlooking Lake Mead and paused to survey a scene that would’ve turned Dante into an atheist.

  The lake was swollen and brown and boiling, the bed and shoreline jigsawed with cracks that oozed magma and noxious gases. Without Vegas as a tourist draw, the desert oasis of Boulder City had become a bandit paradise, but now it hosted no fewer than twenty-two walking metropolises, which had come to enjoy the last stop for water and Nevada’s newest tourist attraction, a brand new active volcano.

  It rose up out of the center of the lake like a fourth-grader’s science project. The slopes of the young volcano were covered with the interlocked bodies of dead or dying cities, which seemed to have joined together to form some kind of geothermal power plant which spewed cables thick as city buses that converged on a gigantic but otherwise unimpressive mega-kaiju-sized soccer goal, set up atop Hoover Dam. Beyond the dam, the Colorado River was a dusty furrow in the earth.

  The soccer goal was a gate to the Moon. Some miraculous new form of instantaneous travel from planet to planet, and they used it to pretend to be Martians and loot their own home, and destroy it in the process. He had to admit, the plan was as ingenious as it was short-sighted and inhuman. Were the selfish assholes really that brilliant all along, and just waiting for us to become too dumb to stop them?

  Long before it reached the shore, the Mega-Snake came under attack. The flaming Phoenix ptero-toad circled overhead and dropped fiery guano on them amid a hailstorm of flying saucers. The Yuma Giladillo hawked gobs of acidic venom from its eyes, and the two-headed serpent-tortoise of Calexico-Mexicali catapulted day-laborers skyward in all directions with the quiet confidence that the surviving workers would someday subtly undermine its rivals’ economies.

  A dozen more kaiju cities waded out across the lake, hurling catcalls and making vulgar thrusting motions to suggest that their ill intent did not stop at a stiff beating.

  Without being ordered, the Mega-Snake turned south along the boiling shore, snatching up houseboats and Airstream trailers and eating them on the run. A squadron of flying saucers strafed the Strip, blasting pirate ships and waterslide parks and the Lil’ Daredevil Chapel, home of the 500-foot Leap of Xtreme Faith. The great mirrored glass skyscrapers of thirty-six mighty 3,000-room hotel towers glowed and threw off a shitstorm of microwave radiation and static electricity that sterilized everyone in Nevada who hadn’t already had a vasectomy. Flying saucers got toasted and magnetically bonded to each other in
midair. Betting action adjusted to three to one against the Mega-Snake.

  A lumbering armored tarantula-hammerhead shark stilted over to intercept Las Vegas. Horribly disfigured by some losing encounters with several uglier cities, yet it was still recognizably the Land-Shark, the kaiju rape-plague’s Patient Zero. Its hundreds of teeth were carved into gigantic, razor-headed tiki idols. Written in green fire across acres of its tattered, dangling tongue: ALOHA HONOLULU!

  Acidic foam jetted from its gnashing jaws, splashed off the Mega-Snake’s forward shields and ate through the Circus Circus Adventuredome like salmonella through a sushi buffet. A spray of goo from the passing shark’s fat abdomen hardened into a net of silicon webbing that ensnared the Mega-Snake’s neon-lit head and slammed it into the dirt. Honolulu proceeded to plow a trench in the earth with the floundering Mega-Snake.

  “Do something!” a seasick high-roller screamed at Corben. “People are spilling their drinks!”

  Moving so swiftly that all its swimming pools were emptied and flatscreen TV’s and Magic Fingers beds spilled out of its towers, the Mega-Snake reared and wrenched its own deformed shark-head off. From out of the gushing stump, a sleek new viper’s head emerged and fixed the Land-Shark with laser-beam eyes like huge tumbling dice. Then it opened its mouth and spat three hundred ballistic missile fangs filled with depleted uranium warheads and several thousand gallons of lethal neurotoxin into the arachno-shark’s open mouth. The colossal spider-shark had no proper brain to liquefy, but the missiles aerosolized it from the neck up.

  The Mega-Snake advanced through the sizzling remains of the Hawaiian sharkrantula, but more city-monsters thundered into the breach—a Brobdingnagian horned toad that squirted inflammable blood from its tear ducts and was covered in billboards with aborted fetuses that said CHOOSE LIFE; a hundred-headed barnacle-goose thing from Canada; an orangutan with electrified octopi for arms and a missile the size of the Chrysler Building for a head.