Godzilla vs. Kong

by Greg Keyes

  * * *

  When Nathan came to, he was floating; water was gushing into the bridge, and everything was upside down. He heard muffled screaming and pounding from the elevator and saw Jia and Ilene were in it. They were above water, but like the bridge, the elevator was quickly filling. He couldn’t tell what Ilene was saying, but he followed her frantic gestures. Through the bridge window, he saw Kong, underwater, still bound and still flailing, continuing to pull the ship over.

  The ship should right itself, he thought, in a weird moment of clarity. But it can’t now with Kong pulling it down. He was floating, with his head pointed at what had once been the floor. He looked down, toward the former ceiling, the controls, and the lever that would release Kong’s manacles.

  He shucked off his down vest and struggled toward the controls, as spiderweb cracks formed in the glass. When that shattered, the bridge would finish filling in an implosion, and it would be too late to do anything.

  He steadied himself. You can do this.

  But he ran out of breath and came up short.

  Gasping, he dove again, swimming back down to the lever. Outside Kong had managed to rip off one of his manacles, but it was going to be too late if he didn’t …

  He felt his muscles hit their limit and knew he didn’t have it in him. His lungs ached, and he remembered his talk with Ayara, about how he and his brother used to see who could stay under longest.

  It had always been Dave who won. He was the failure, and always had been.

  But then he remembered something else.

  You can do it, little brother. Dave had said, as he breathed, preparing himself. Another ten seconds this time. Don’t worry about anybody else. This time you’ll do your best.

  Goddammit, Dave, he thought.

  And he squeezed everything he had left in him into reaching the lever. His finger touched it. Now it was in his grip, and he was still afraid of failing.

  But he pulled it anyway.

  Then the universe tossed him aside as Kong finally freed himself. Gravity reversed again as the huge vessel righted itself and water began to drain away; as if in a nightmare, he saw the colossal forms of Godzilla and Kong grappling beneath the surface. As the reptile snapped at Kong’s face, the ape managed to kick Godzilla down into the depths, reaching for the ship.

  Nathan felt the burn of saltwater in his throat and sinuses as Kong hauled himself out of the water and back onto the now righted, if listing ship. The Titan was gasping, too. But his eyes were tracking Godzilla, whose fins could be seen moving in a wide circle around the fleet. Kong pulled himself up to his full height. He reached up and broke the metal band around his neck, and roared, beating his chest.

  Behind him, the elevator door opened, pouring out Ilene and Jia. The Admiral and bridge crew were recovering, but the controls were all dead.

  Oh, Nathan thought as Kong continued to follow Godzilla’s path. Kong isn’t going to wait for Godzilla to come back for him, is he?

  No, he thought, as the gigantic ape took a very short run across the deck and leapt. He bounced off a frigate as if it were a stepping-stone in a creek and landed squarely on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The whole ship lurched but Kong steadied himself, roaring a challenge at the other Titan swimming toward him. He grabbed one of the jets from the carrier deck and flung it at the oncoming Titan; Nathan saw the pilot eject an instant before the craft slammed into Godzilla’s back.

  It didn’t slow the monster down. Tail pumping furiously, he broke from the water and slapped down on the deck, destroying several planes as he pulled his entire weight from the sea and gathered his hind legs beneath him.

  But by that time Kong was ready. He threw a punch that would have made any street-brawler proud, connecting with Godzilla’s snout and knocking him back on his taloned heels—but not far enough. Godzilla recovered and returned with an open-clawed slap that overbalanced Kong, tumbling him back. Godzilla stooped over him, but then a fusillade of missiles blasted into his back, stunning him for the few seconds it took for Kong to come up swinging, this time punching Godzilla over the side of the carrier. The reptilian Titan vanished beneath the waves.

  For a moment, nothing happened; Kong stared down at the sea, his huge brows knit in concentration, searching for his vanished foe. Then he suddenly leapt aside as a blue bolt of energy shot up from below, blasting through the ship and narrowly missing the huge ape. Cut in half, the carrier began to sink, as Kong plunged into the water after Godzilla.

  * * *

  Free of the elevator, Ilene came alongside Nathan in time to see Kong dive.

  Kong had never been shy of the rivers and lakes of Skull Island. He bathed in them, hunted in them, especially for mire squids and the enormous amounts of protein they contained.

  But while he liked to look out over the ocean, especially in the rare days when the storm parted, he had always avoided getting into it, probably because he didn’t like the idea of water deeper than he was tall. Whether he knew that from experimentation when he was younger, of from instinct, she did not know. Did Kong know how to swim? She couldn’t remember if other apes swam or not. It seemed unlikely. But then again, Kong was not like other apes.

  Whatever the case, Godzilla spent most of his time in the water.

  “Kong could hold his own on solid ground,” she told Nathan. “But this isn’t his terrain. He needs our help.”

  But once again, Nathan was frozen with indecision, as if his effort in freeing Kong had drained him of all initiative.

  “We’re running out of time, Doctor!” the Admiral said. The emergency power kicked in, and suddenly the controls and monitors of the bridge were alive again.

  “Depth charges,” Ilene said. “Depth charges. Maybe we can confuse Godzilla.”

  Lacking any input from Nathan, Wilcox seized on her suggestion.

  “All ships, set submersibles for cyclical expansion. Multiple sources. Multiple sources!”

  * * *

  The enemy pulled Kong down.

  Kong had sensed him before, many times. Sometimes it had been like an itch, but deep inside where he could not reach to scratch it. He had never seen him until now, yet there were no surprises when he did; like when he saw the bones of his parents, he knew what they were, although he did not really remember them. The shape of the enemy was like nothing he had ever seen, much less fought; but just the scent of the creature made him angry, and everything about it fit into a hollow spot inside of him, as if something had been taken out long ago and left empty until now.

  He would have let it be. He had no interest in it; it did not threaten his island and those he protected. Why should he care about it or what it did?

  But it had come for him, come when he was helpless. And for that, he wanted to break it, tear off its limbs, suck the meat from its bones.

  But it was bigger, stronger than anything he had ever known. It made him feel things he did not understand and did not want to understand.

  He had known the instant he was in the water that he’d made a mistake. He had fought things like this, the giant scaly predators that lurked in the waters of his island, that pulled smaller beasts beneath the surface and kept them there until they died. The largest of them had tried to kill him, but he always managed to plant his feet on the bottom of the river and snap them in half.

  There was no bottom to this water, and the only thing to plant himself on was the enemy. While the water was also Kong’s adversary, the enemy was friends with it. Rather than trying to go back up, where he could breath, the enemy only wanted to go down, deeper, where Kong could not.

  If Kong let that happen, he knew the darkness in the middle of him, the ache for air, would eventually spread out into his arms and legs and the place where light came into his head. And then the enemy would triumph.

  He had to break away, find his way back up to the air.

  But as he thought this, the enemy only dragged him deeper with sweeps of its powerful tail. Parts of the metal things the
small ones made went drifting by him. The things that floated on water, the flying-dead things like leafwings but faster. All falling in this pool that had no bottom. Like him.

  Then the water slapped him, his ears rang from a sound like the booming the sky made, but closer to the booming made by the small ones with their flying-dead things. It hurt, but the enemy jerked in his grip. More booms came, and for the barest instant, the enemy lost his grip. Another sound happened just behind the enemy’s head. Kong tore his arms loose and swung.

  The water made his arm too slow, but his clenched fingers still connected. It was like punching a mountain, but even a mountain could give way if you hit it hard enough.

  He pulled his legs up, put both of them against the enemy’s chest, and pushed, even as everything seemed to be getting darker, like when the brighter circle light went into the water and the clouds blotted out the little dim ones. The middle of him hurt more than ever, aching for air. He pushed harder, broke free, but then the huge tail hit him, and all of the air came out of him in huge silver bubbles, and water rushed in to take its place.

  * * *

  The ocean’s surface boiled from underwater explosions, and then an immense column of water geysered up. Ilene braced herself for what would come next, but it was … calm. The water went still.

  That was bad. Godzilla was completely at home in the depths. If only he came up, it probably meant he had prevailed. If neither came up, it probably meant the same thing. The only way this turned out well was if…

  Her thoughts were interrupted when Kong’s hand shot out of the water and slammed onto the deck. Slowly, painfully, the Titan pulled himself onto the ship, coughing up tons of water and marine life. Then he collapsed, exhausted.

  Relief flooded through her. He had survived. But had he won? She doubted it. If Godzilla came back for another try, it would all be over. Kong looked as if he could scarcely raise a fist.

  * * *

  Nathan could not focus. He was supposed to be in charge, why? Because he had such a great track record? All he wanted was out.

  On one hand, he was aware that he was consumed with panic, and on the other hand, the nature of panic was that it would not let you think.

  In the distance, Godzilla’s fins were briefly visible through the flame and smoke of the ruined fleet.

  “He’s circling back,” he said.

  “This won’t end until one of them submits,” Ilene said.

  I know that! He screamed in his mind. Don’t you think I know that?

  As long as the threat remained…

  Wait. The threat. He remembered something, something Mark Russell had told him once over a beer in a hotel in Denver. About Godzilla, and Castle Bravo…

  “Shut it down,” he told Admiral Wilcox. “All of it. Guns. Engines. Shut it down. Now!”

  “If we do that, we’re dead,” Wilcox retorted.

  “No,” Nathan said. “We’re playing dead.”

  For a heartbeat or two, no one answered. But Ilene got it.

  “Make him think he’s won,” she said.

  The Admiral looked at Nathan, and his face changed. Nathan wasn’t quite sure how to read it, because he hadn’t seen the expression from him before. But it looked like … approval.

  “Cut all engines,” the Admiral commanded. “Cut all power. Cease fire. No radio. Kill anything that makes noise.” He glanced out to sea. “This had better work.”

  Everything went quiet, so quiet it was surreal. Nathan hadn’t realized just how much ambient noise there was even without the explosions until it was gone.

  Come on, he thought. It had to look real enough; most of the ships really were gone. Smoke and fumes obscured vision; the water was full of their wreckage, of burning fuel and flotsam. And … bodies. Nathan had no sense of the casualty count yet. He prayed that it was small.

  For a stretch of time, nothing happened. Then, in the distance, the water rippled as Godzilla’s head rose from it, just a little, like an alligator having a surreptitious look around.

  Kong was still laid out on the main deck, exhausted, one eye wearily tracking for danger, his chest rising and falling slightly but the rest of him as still as a corpse.

  Please let this work, Nathan silently pleaded. No more fighting, no more death. He had promised Ilene Kong would be okay. He had promised Jia.

  Served him right for promising things not in his power to deliver. If Godzilla didn’t fall for this, everything was lost.

  The reptilian head glided through the water, rotating here and there, surveying the wreckage, the flames, the silent remains of the armada.

  Then Godzilla abruptly rose out of the water, slamming his tail into the waves and screeching a long nightmarish howl of victory, before plunging once more into the depths.

  At first, Nathan feared it was just another ruse, that the Titan would surface again, right beneath their feet and savage what little was left of their expedition. But after several very long minutes, it seemed the ruse had worked.

  Jia went to the window; Nathan saw Kong had lifted his head and was staring at her. The girl signed something. Then Kong slumped to the deck. His eyes closed, but he could still see the Titan’s chest moving.

  THIRTEEN

  “So, loyal listeners—class—I’m going to give you an assignment. Dr. Strangelove. It is a movie. And yeah, it’s in black-and-white—get over it. Get a little culture. You need to see it. Not because it’s funny—oh, it’s really funny. But because it’s the blueprint. It’s got the stuff in it. The whole truth about the military–industrial complex, the government, everything. And they got away with it because they were playin’ it for laughs. Laugh all you want, but pay attention. Tap water, the privileged conspiracy for the ‘select persons’ to survive a nuclear war, the power elite—all there. Watch it. Take notes. Then we’ll circle around back to this.”

  Mad Truth, Titan Truth Podcast #98

  Tasman Sea

  Ilene watched Jia sign to Kong.

  Thank you, friend, was how she would translate in English. But the Iwi concept of “friend” was deeper in every way than its English counterpart. Kong seemed to acknowledge that before he passed out.

  She regarded the devastation around them. Godzilla had wrecked their seemingly indomitable fleet in minutes.

  Wilcox was in conference with his aides. When he was done, he approached them.

  “This vessel is no longer seaworthy,” he told them. “We might limp a little closer, but we’ll never make it to Outpost 32.”

  “Can we use another ship?” Nathan asked.

  The Admiral shook his head. “Anything we might have had capable of handling Kong is at the bottom of the sea or on its way there. We might make the Antarctic coast, but not all the way around to the outpost. We would founder somewhere east of there. Or we could try to make it to Australia or South Africa. Either way, I don’t like our odds. I’m looking for a supertanker or something that might be able to meet us at sea, but so far everything is too far away. We’re really in the middle of nowhere here.”

  “As soon as we move,” Ilene said, “he’ll be back. So how are we going to get the rest of the way?”

  But Nathan had an idea.

  “How is Kong with heights?” he asked.

  * * *

  “You’re absolutely certain we need him? The monkey?” Maia Simmons asked. She crossed her arms and looked at Kong. “The HEAVs will make it to Hollow Earth, I promise you.”

  “Sure,” Nathan said. “But once we get there, then what? Your father’s satellite imaging shows there is a power source down there. But to use it, we have to locate it.”

  “How hard can that be?”

  Nathan put up his hands as if holding a globe.

  “If I’m right,” he said, “Hollow Earth is huge, a whole world unto itself. Think about it—if the Titans came from there—”

  “Then it’s big, yes,” Simmons said. “I get that. But if we can literally see this power source from orbit, we should be able to
triangulate it once we’re down there.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. “Eventually. But there is a lot going on between here and there—there’s the membrane, polarity reversal, all kinds of weird magnetic phenomena. Imagine we are going into a huge mansion, and we want to find an electrical socket to plug something into. There are wires everywhere; if we have the right equipment, we can even trace the electrical wires in the wall. But there are lots of wires, right? And in this whole three-story mansion, there’s only one socket, and we don’t know where that is.”

  “And the monkey does?” Simmons said, gesturing toward the Titan with one hand. “I thought he’d never been down there.”

  “Genetic memory,” Nathan said. “I think he has a map of this place built into him, whether he knows it or not. Look—when loggerhead sea turtles are born on a beach in Florida, they take an eight-thousand-mile trip around the Atlantic basin. With no one to guide them, right? The mothers lay the eggs and leave. But these little turtles, they know where to go, and they steer using variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, until they—the females, anyway—end up back up on the same beach where they hatched to lay their eggs. This isn’t learned behavior. It’s hardwired. Having the biological equipment to sense the magnetic fields isn’t enough: they have to know when to turn. Where their mothers turned, and their mothers, on back for thousands, maybe millions of years. Like recognizing a landmark you’ve never actually seen before—”

  “Okay,” Simmons said, pushing one palm toward him. “You don’t have to beat it to death. I get it. You think Kong is tuned to this energy the way sea turtles are to magnetic fields. And even if it’s been a few generations since his kind came up here, he should still be able to recognize these ‘landmarks.’”

  “Yes,” Nathan said. “That’s it exactly. I discussed this with your father. I thought he might have mentioned it.”

  She raised her eyebrows.