All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  The Mega-Snake paused to take stock of its situation and recharge its death ray hotels. Up in the top of the Stratosphere tower, Wes Corben suddenly felt like a fly on the hood ornament of a car charging off a cliff. He had known every kind of fear, shock, dread and mortal despair perceptible by the human brain, but something alarmingly new and ugly gnawed at his insides. It couldn’t be just nerves…

  “Otaku, what’s going on down there?”

  And he waited, but his stomach only growled.

  At the foot of Hoover Dam, the gate abruptly began to glow and shimmer like the surface of a pool of mercury. The river, instead of passively flowing through its mysterious rippling veil, lifted out of its bed and flew through the gate, along with everything else in the vicinity that weighed less than a walking city.

  With a thunderclap that shattered every window in every hotel in Las Vegas, Lake Mead vaporized into a pillar of superheated steam. Glowing cracks spread out from the volcano, racing through the brittle crust, which began to buckle and bubble like the surface of a pizza.

  “Don’t shit your pants,” Corben muttered.

  “Imbecile,” Svetlana said from behind him. “I would never—”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” he snapped, then turned around. “You’re alive, what a surprise…”

  She threw her arms out as if to embrace him. A pair of shuriken pierced his hands just as he drew his pistol. “It’s time to drop the other hat, yes?”

  I believe the expression, Madame, is, ‘the other shoe,’ said a voice inside Corben’s head. This came as grave of a shock as the pain of being stabbed in both hands, because it wasn’t the voice of Doctor Otaku. Corben really wanted to scream, but instead, he said, “Madame, we are ready to deliver the cargo,” in his own voice but with a thick Ukrainian accent.

  “Excellent, Igor,” Svetlana purred, looking into Corben’s eyes at someone else, someone very tiny who must’ve infiltrated his body when they had sex. This human venereal disease must’ve traveled up his urinary tract to his bloodstream and somehow tracked and bagged Dr. Otaku without his ever raising an alarm. Either they were really fucking good microscopic commandos, or Otaku hadn’t put up any resistance. “If you knew all along, why didn’t you just turn me over to them when you had me at the space station?”

  “They wanted proof,” Svetlana answered. “You showed them what they needed to know. But game is over. No one else has to die. Tell your monster to stand down.”

  Corben finally found a reason to smile. “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” he said.

  Driven by some indescribably huge wild hair up its ass, the Mega-Snake charged the horde of deranged giant monsters when the gate got fully charged and a howling wind ripped across the burning lakebed. It was the roar of a deep vacuum, the suction of the void ripping trucks and trailer parks and even a couple whole cities into the rippling mercury mouth.

  While the other monsters clung to the earth, the Mega-Snake blasted them with its hotel death rays and waded through lava towards the gate. The Stratosphere rocked and trembled on its flimsy 107-story stalk. Svetlana’s flying saucer was docked directly on top of the tower. She cast him a rueful smile and said, “Dosvedanya, Wesley.”

  He reached out to punch her, but instead, he bent at the waist and threw up into an air sickness bag she dutifully held out for him (I TOSSED MY MRS. FIELDS® COOKIES ON THE STRATOSPHERE! it said on the side). He couldn’t see anything unusual in the contents, aside from a tiny ivory Japanese pagoda that he didn’t remember swallowing, but he knew Otaku was gone.

  His prisoner, his nemesis, his ace in the hole. Without him, Corben was not even a pawn in this insane game, but he knew they would never just let him go home to his monster bastard offspring.

  Svetlana kicked his drooling chin, sending him flipping backwards across the lounge, and sprang onto a ladder that reeled her up into the belly of the flying saucer.

  Corben was free at last, free to sink to the floor and pray that the Stratosphere would get crushed before it went through the gate.

  The burning earth subsided beneath the Mega-Snake’s feet and dissolved into flecks and rafts of granite floating on a heaving sea of magma. The volcano erupted and blew half of the city-kaiju on it into the troposphere, while the other half sank, with much roaring and wailing and gnashing of terrible teeth, into the sea of lava.

  Corben knelt on the floor of the lounge and put his head to the tile. Let it end here, he thought. I can’t take any more. I’ll do anything to stop this.

  The Mega-Snake reared up and let the howling pyroclastic wind lift it like a great, greedy kite. Flying saucers circled it like angry gnats, zapping its windowless hotels and broiling a VIP cabana party at the Venetian. The Mega-Snake seemed like a city possessed as it charged over the lip of Hoover Dam and into the gate just as the mirror of mercury was shot through with black cracks. With its power supply consumed by a massive volcanic eruption which was even now rippling up the San Andreas Fault as a salvo of unprecedented super-quakes, the gate suddenly failed, cutting the Mega-Snake in two neatly at the intersection of South Las Vegas Boulevard and Dunes Road.

  If you’ve ever cut the head off an anaconda, it was like that, except this anaconda had storm drains for veins and hoboes for blood. Just before the gate itself sank into the pulsating lava sea, the flopping, headless hind end of the Vegas Mega-Snake offered fifty to one odds against its own survival.

  Of the other half of the Mega-Snake, no sign could be found, unless one happened to be looking for it on the moon with a high-powered telescope.

  “And way out there on your left, towards the North Pole is the central reactor, which is actually a natural cavity, created when we processed the Moon’s largest concentration of water ice.

  “This is so silly,” said the President of the Lunar Homeowners’ Association, “us trying to impress the greatest scientific mind in human history. But you gotta admit, it’s really something, eh?” Next to him in the monorail’s deluxe observation car, four of the ten richest men in the world all made affirmative noises.

  This sucks, Gary thought, as he lit his thirteenth Kool of the day. He didn’t smoke, but Señor Dinky did. If he didn’t get at least a drag off a menthol cig an hour, he started whining and trying to chew himself off Gary’s arm.

  Gary didn’t usually do the tours himself either, and it was extra awkward, giving a tour to his arch-enemy, now a microscopic android only recently recovered from a bag of vomit. He supposed he should lord it over the miniature fruitcake, but Otaku was the one gloating. His magnified hologram yawned elaborately throughout, asking just enough questions that Spruance was obliged to go into excruciating detail about their solid waste recycling processes and the extent of their nanotech program. Pacing around in a Petri dish under the stereoscopic microscope back in Gary’s ready room, he had the Emperor of Earth by the balls.

  “Most impressive, Gary. You have recovered with alacrity from the stinging coup which I scored upon your more naïve incarnation only a year ago…”

  See? Every chance he got, the microscopic prick did him like this. Like a bitch. Gary took out his joystick and hit a secondary combo sequence. The Luna HOA President and his sycophants all froze and nodded off on the monorail’s suede couches. “As you said, I’ve passed it behind me…”

  “You remember it perhaps even better than I, don’t you? How your online gaming network served as the quantum overseer in the unprecedented chain reaction that animated Tokyo? I would think it would still be painfully fresh in—”

  “Yes, but…” Señor Dinky coughed and inhaled his smoke, and started choking. While digging in the gagging dog’s throat for the lit cigarette, Gary decided to lay his cards on the table. “I have worked very hard to approach you about a job… a unique challenge I think you’ll appreciate.”

  For once, Otaku just nodded and impatiently waved his little rodent hands.

  “I’ve done everything to make this colony a viable permanent habitat and a lasting legacy, short of
impregnating every female…” Distracted, he stopped to make a brief note for himself. “Now, the little homeowners’ association out here is totally down with my plan to animate a bunch of asteroids we dragged out from deep Earth orbit to make myself a new mega-kaiju.”

  “I am not bored with your proposal yet. Continue.”

  “They’re only too happy to let me fuck off to deep space on the back of a cosmic killer whale. But so far, our attempts to, uh, duplicate, ah…”

  “Of course it didn’t work, you starfucking imbecile. You can’t just animate dead rock by wishing for it. To become more than an automaton, a mega-daikaiju has to have an infrastructure designed or grown to support an elaborate ecology.”

  “I learn from my mistakes, Otaku. I will, in fact, simply wish for it. But that is only the beginning. I want you to turn the moon into a starfaring biomechanical organism.”

  “The whole moon?”

  “The whole motherfucking moon, yes.”

  “So sorry, vainglorious moron. It’s dead rock.”

  “It’s an egg with a yolk of cities, infrastructure, communications systems and biomass. I have the resources to infuse it with everything else it needs, and the nanotech to convert it to fit these specifications.” He waved at the hologram of the Moon, which must look to the microscopic Otaku like the eye of God. At a touch of Gary’s hand, the Moon cracked like an egg and morphed into something new that made even Otaku rub his eyes and stop pushing his shit in. “Yes, but where is the difficult part?”

  “The creature that hatches… it will be me.”

  “You want your DNA spliced into it? No offense, but I fail to see what beneficial traits you could offer…”

  “No, not my DNA. Me. I want to be the Moon.”

  “Ah, wonderful,” Otaku sneered. “Up to now, this has been very boring for me. This, at least, is amusing. What can you offer me?”

  Deep in thought, Gary stroked his chin with Señor Dinky’s tongue. “Indeed, I could offer you a new, life-sized body, but I imagine you could’ve done that for yourself. I could offer you control over the kaiju cities and their franchises.”

  Micro-Otaku spat on the floor. “I could’ve taken them over, but that was never my goal.”

  “No, you don’t seek power or wealth, do you? Or even knowledge, except for the means to create more chaos. I must admit, you’re the only person whose motivations are completely opaque to me.”

  “Feh! Everything you ever created only made the world into a smaller, more controlled and predictable opportunity to smell each other’s bodily effluvia. I have always striven to make the world larger, more mysterious and dangerous, to give mankind the world it deserved, and nature the weapons she required, to defend herself.”

  “Well, think of how much more you could achieve, if all your enemies were zapped from orbit? I could do it for you.”

  Otaku fidgeted nervously. “One is measured by the caliber of one’s enemies. One only grows when one breaks from containment.”

  Gary hit another combo sequence and the four rich men dropped to the deck of the monorail car, robotically crawled into a daisy chain and commenced fellating each other. “I can give you this kind of power over everyone on Earth.”

  “I am deeply embarrassed for you,” Otaku said, but he didn’t look it. Something at the edge of the hologram’s ranging field pressed against the glass slide that micro-Otaku stood upon. Some kind of water bear, badly mutated into a baggy blob studded with whirling protein drills. It was drilling through the glass, and Otaku actually looked frightened. Priceless!

  Lazily, Gary ordered his lab robot to turn the dial on the microscope until the lens crunched into the slide. Otaku leapt away from a volley of glass spears and cracks like icy crevasses running underfoot. “A great challenge is its own reward,” Otaku yelped.

  “Excellent. How soon can you start?”

  “I am already finished, you childish ogre. The process requires an expert observer to parse the quantum uncertainty factor, which invariably turns the unobserved reaction into gray goo. I am the only qualified observer. And a nano-catalyst, which I have synthesized in abundance in preparation for just such a task as you have placed before me. Regrettably, I don’t have it on my most humble person…”

  Gary felt a long curly hair of suspicion tickle his puckered place. If Otaku was bluffing, it might be better to just crush him now, and dig at his leisure through the mountains of booby-trapped super-science debris and freakish specimens they’d recovered from his damnable monster island. “Where is this substance you require? If it’s back on your island—”

  “Oh no, it’s not there. I’ve learned to work on a much greater economy of scale. Bigger is no longer better. I have only to fetch the product from my old lab…”

  Corben fully expected his blood to freeze and boil at the same time, for his intestines to burst like water balloons and for his crystallized shit flying everywhere to be the last thing he saw before his eyes were sucked out of his head like deviled eggs. Instead, he awoke to find it was raining on Las Vegas Boulevard, the north half of which now resided on the sunken lava plains of the Sea of Tranquility.

  It didn’t look much like the Moon. The craters had been bulldozed and sculpted into the foundations for an epic low-gravity tournament golfing complex and a huge luxury housing development with models available to see now! The landscape looked like God’s own miniature golf course, with the Statue Of Liberty, the Hollywood sign, the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower artfully deployed as hazards. Beyond the dome, the hostile emptiness of the void beckoned, promising eternal peace.

  He found the Stratosphere’s elevators shut off and the stairs locked. The VIP’s and street freaks who’d tried to mutiny had apparently found something better to do. Even at one-sixth gravity, he could probably still kill himself if he jumped.

  Yes, that was the thing to do. He’d failed utterly in everything he’d attempted, except those nefarious purposes for which others had used him. He had abandoned or destroyed everyone and everything that had ever cared for him.

  He found a fire ax and chopped out a window. The air was crisp and new-car fresh. High overhead, he could see some kind of static energy dome holding the air in. Apparently, someone had filtered out the deadly gases from the volcano, which would’ve been just what these assholes deserved.

  He leapt out and drifted like a dandelion seed on the wafting air-conditioned breeze. On the Strip, refugees and tourists and mutant prostitutes were coming out to bask in the rain. They probably thought they’d been delivered to the promised land. At the sight of his swan dive, they broke into a ragged cheer. In their world, end credits were rolling over an Aerosmith cover of “Danke Schoen.”

  He spread out his arms to embrace Las Vegas Boulevard, when something violently interrupted his fall.

  Ascending just as fast as he’d fallen and dangling by his collar from the mouth of a gigantic pearl-scaled Oriental dragon, Corben tried to shrug out of his clothes. Cursing in Japanese, the dragon shook him like a field mouse until he was too dazed to try to escape.

  The dragon flew the length of the hemi-Strip and passed over another golf course before it reached the burned out gate that the Mega-Snake had passed through. Blackened and half-melted and being taken down by roadies in faded Metallica shirts, it offered no return home, as if there was anything to go home to.

  “Go ahead and eat me,” he moaned.

  “You think I’m new? Never eat anything that wants you to eat it, that’s like basic Pokemon.”

  “Are you rescuing me so I can save somebody or stop something?”

  “Hell should I know? I’m a puppet.”

  “Kill me. For your sake and everyone’s… just let me fall.”

  The dragon circled around a monorail platform, but after the first few circuits, he realized she was dawdling, clutching Corben like a doll in her forelegs. He noticed that each of her talons had a different color nail polish on it. “Monorail’s broken again. So… why are you so much wantin
g on getting eaten?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She perched on top of the gateway and held him up to her mouth as if she had changed her mind about granting his wish.

  “I’ve been used,” he said, “and every time I set out to save the world or at least keep it from getting worse, I end up being a prime instrument of its ruination.”

  “Oh relax, it is not so bad… The Moon is really nice, now, at least…”

  “Sure, they ripped off all the best parts of Earth… It’ll get ruined, too. I had the Devil inside me, but this evil Ukrainian bitch tricked me and let him out, and now he’s loose. I don’t know why I trusted her…”

  “Did she act like she hated your guts at first, but then she abruptly melted after fate thrust you together and proved your heroic mettle?”

  Far below, a giant armadillo left a piss-trail across the golf course as it waddled just ahead of a gang of swells in fox hunting gear, armed with laser-lances and riding Otaku’s patented emulemurs. Where did this dragon get all this comic book psychology shit? “Kinda…”

  “Well, that’s why, dummy. That always works. If they’re nice to you at first, then you know they’re a traitor, but your traitor was sneaky.” The talons on his shoulder gave him a gentle squeeze and a shake. “Was the sex good, at least?”

  “Of course, she was a tiger… Well, she was real aggressive, and you had to pull her hair and choke her and stuff, or she couldn’t get off, and she’d say things that just… How old are you? I shouldn’t be—”

  “You shouldn’t give up, just because you’ve been tested. Only then do we find out what we’re really made of.”