Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 103

by Robert Reed

  Postcards From Monster Island

  Emily Devenport

  Sometimes people ask me, “Why didn’t you run?”

  “Because I had the Martian Death Flu,” I tell them.

  They look at me funny because they’ve seen the footage of people clogging the roads, and the subways and trains, desperate to get out of town the day he waded ashore. I wasn’t in that crowd. I was flat on my back in my studio apartment, blitzed out of my mind with medicine. Two of my cats slept on top of me and my dog was snoring beside us when the whole building began to shake. Some of my books fell off their shelves, and I could hear the dishes clattering in their cupboards. I thought it was an earthquake. I considered dragging myself out of bed and crouching in a doorway.

  That impulse didn’t make it past the notion stage. I couldn’t even muster the ambition to be worried as more books tumbled off my shelves and the windows rattled. I only managed a little curiosity when I noticed that the shaking was a side effect of slow, ponderous BOOMs, spaced like colossal footsteps. If the Statue of Liberty took a walk through town, she might make noises like that.

  Wow, I thought. This is the weirdest fever dream I’ve ever had. And then I fell asleep again.

  All night long I felt the tremors and heard the sirens. Once I awoke to a sound like ten foghorns going off at once. The cry was challenging, yet—oddly lonesome. That was the only time during the night when I believed something might really be going on. I thought I should at least try to get up. And then I passed out.

  When the bombs started to drop, I pried my eyes open and squinted at the window. Morning light was trying to penetrate the dust and debris floating in the air. It wasn’t making much headway.

  Any normal person would have been thinking about evacuating the scene by that point. But the Martian Death Flu, though not actually from Mars, made me feel anything but normal. For one thing, when I sat up, the room started to spin. For another, my pets let me know in no uncertain terms that they were hungry. Plus my dog needed to potty.

  I had to answer my own call of nature first. Halfway to the bathroom, I decided I’d better crawl if I really wanted to get there. Afterward I took more medicine, my head pounding in tune with the bombs going off outside.

  The war sounded like it might be about a mile away. My apartment shook more than it had during the night, yet everything was still pretty much intact. My pets didn’t like the noise, but they seemed more worried about their stomachs, so I staggered out of the bathroom and fixed their bowls.

  I could barely hold myself upright long enough to do it. Once my dog had eaten, she reminded me that I needed to do something more challenging. I managed to get her collar attached and find the pooper-scooper. Then it was out into the cold, cruel world.

  We passed one of my neighbors in the hall: Mr. Abé. He operated an African-clothing shop on our street. As the BOOMs and RAT-TAT-TATs shook our building, I lurched back and forth across the hall, and Mr. Abé gracefully sidestepped me.

  “Sorry,” I rasped.

  “I hope you feel better soon, Miss Herrmann,” he said. “Terrible racket, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I managed, before Peachy almost pulled me off my feet. She had her priorities, and she would tolerate no delay.

  Under the circumstances it was crazy to get into the elevator, but I knew I wouldn’t make it down the stairs. I don’t remember how we got outside from there, but we ended up in the alley behind our building. Peachy did her business cautiously, but not as nervously as I expected she would. She stopped from time to time and perked her ears at the sounds of battle. She sniffed out her favorite spots, and I pooper-scooped. Then she pulled me back toward the alley door, and I took a moment to be grateful she wasn’t going to insist on walkies. The way I was feeling, it would have been more like draggies.

  Just before we got through the door, that foghorn cry sounded again. It was much louder without the walls of our well-constructed building to muffle it. Both Peachy and I were extremely impressed. Instead of loneliness, this time I heard a note of exasperation.

  Peachy trotted through the door and I stumbled after her. I don’t remember how I got rid of the poop I had scooped, but I can only hope I did the right thing with it. I made it back up to our floor and into our little apartment.

  I really wanted to fall into bed. I also wanted to throw up. But I made myself grab my phone, and I also snagged the remote. All four of the cats were on the bed by then, but they made room for me once they realized I was about to fall on them.

  For several moments I just lay there, the remote and phone still clutched in my hands, my stomach and my head competing for Most Amazingly Wretched Body Part. I waited until I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to throw up, and then I dialed the first of my three jobs.

  They were part-time jobs, the best I could find with my new bachelor’s degree in library science, and I juggled them to keep myself afloat. Only one of them paid for sick time, so I had planned to dose myself with the medicine and stagger in to work, regardless of how horrible I felt. That plan had wilted in the painful (and extremely filtered) light of day. I speed-dialed the morning job.

  An operator told me the number was no longer in service. I got the same message for the afternoon job. The number for the evening job didn’t even connect with a recording; it just made horrible noises.

  I gave up on the phone. “Guess what, gang,” I croaked. “I don’t have to go to work—ever again.”

  My building shook, the dishes rattled, and another book fell off the shelf. I should have been worried, possibly even depressed to lose my livelihood. Yet somehow I felt relieved. I knew it wasn’t a rational reaction, but I couldn’t help it.

  I pointed the remote at the TV and pushed the ON button.

  I didn’t have to surf for a news channel. The story was on all of them. I hadn’t seen that kind of coverage since 9/11 (though I was in the 4th grade at the time, and spent most of my time watching the Cartoon Channel, so maybe I wasn’t an authority on that). Talking heads babbled about the giant creature who had waded ashore, and the bombs that didn’t seem to do anything but annoy it, and the pollution and/or nuclear waste that had probably created it, and the wreckage that used to be our city, and the conference with the president that was supposed to happen any minute (but never did on that night)—and on the bottom of the screen scrolled the words: SCIENTISTS BAFFLED BY BEHEMOTH.

  It was hard to get a good look at him with all the smoke, fire, tracers, exploding debris, etc. But I could see bits and pieces. He was colossal (apparently they felt behemoth was easier to spell). He sometimes stood on two legs, sometimes on four, and I couldn’t help comparing him to a giant lemur—except that he had a thick tail that he used to bash things.

  Another not-so-lemur-ish characteristic was his hide. Instead of fur, he had these triangular, rocky scales that seemed impervious to everything they hurled at him. No missiles could penetrate that hide. And some of them were really big missiles.

  They did no damage to Behemoth. But they did plenty of damage to our city. Just when I thought they would wise up and stop with the bombs, a troops of marines jumped out of an airplane and parachuted onto him. They bounced off too. When they landed, the ones who didn’t get tangled in their parachutes launched grenades at him. He turned and walked away from them, toppling several buildings that had been damaged by the bombs.

  “This just in,” said the reporter, who sounded like he might OD on the excitement. “All troops are being withdrawn. Readings on the geiger counters are spiking. The creature seems to be generating dangerous levels of radiation.”

  That didn’t sound good. But no one had anything very smart to add, and amazingly, the behemoth story began to suffer from the same problem every other big news story seems to have: endless rehashing of theories and footage, without anything new or intelligent to offer.

  I passed out again while waiting for clarification on the radiation thing. It sounded pretty bad, and it also sounded like a good reason to
clear out, assuming I could find a way to wrangle four cats and a dog. And my dizzy, flu-bedeviled ass. To where, I couldn’t imagine. Because no shelter was going to take my pets; I had heard about what happened to the pets in New Orleans after that hurricane.

  Maybe the radiation wouldn’t reach my part of the city . . .

  A few hours later I woke to hear someone on the TV saying that Behemoth wasn’t radioactive all the time, just when a lot of missiles had been fired at him. Like maybe it was a defense mechanism or something. But then they started that old rehash again, and I stopped listening. The only thing that made my ears perk up was a rumor that another giant creature had been spotted over our city, this one in the clouds.

  Yes, that was the Cloud Squid. She showed up inside a thunder storm. The rain thrashed us so long, parts of the city flooded. It did clean most of the smoke and debris out of the air, though. You’ve got to look on the bright side.

  The bright side was pretty easy for me to see. Because thanks to Behemoth, I wouldn’t have to drag my half-dead carcass out of bed and go to work anytime soon. Sadly, it was that simple. I wondered if I might qualify for some kind of hazard pay, or even radiation disability. When I passed out again, I dreamed I was taking selfies of my new, glow-in-the-dark face, and I kept having to do it over because I couldn’t quite seem to capture the pretty colors of my triangular scales.

  When I woke up, my neighbor Frida stood looking down at me. “Bernadette—are you still alive?” she wondered.

  This was an ironic question, considering that Frida, who actually did look like Frida Khalo when she wasn’t in Santa Muerta drag, had painted her face to look like a flowery Dia de los Muertos skull. The effect was quite gorgeous, but it looked as if Death herself had paid me a visit. Death carrying a container of chicken soup. Accompanied by a pet ferret on a leash.

  “Maybe,” I croaked. I sounded even worse than the last time I had tried to communicate, but I felt better. Not great, but there was a definite improvement; my head wasn’t spinning and my stomach had settled. The chicken soup smelled good.

  “Can you sit up?” asked Frida. “I’ll fix you a bowl of this soup and then take Peachy for her walk.”

  “You really are a saint, Miss Muerta.” I pushed myself into a sitting position and watched her putter in the kitchen. Frankenferret sat on the foot of the bed, ignoring and being ignored by the cats while she socialized with Peachy, her best walkies buddy. Frida took Peachy out every day while I was at work, and in return she had a key to my place and unlimited borrowing privileges to my extensive library.

  Frida is an artist who specializes in skeleton/calavera images, though her repertoire is much broader, including murals for businesses and private homes and illustrations for children’s books. She is a successful artist, which in this day and age means that she barely makes a living and has to rent a studio in our odd little building. But she is living La Vida Loca, and her soup is good. She dished up a bowl and put it on a tray, then waited with her hands on her hips until she was sure I could get it down and keep it there.

  “I investigated the water tank on our roof,” she informed me. “I worried there might be gunk in there because of all the smoke and debris from the explosions. You know what I found?”

  I swallowed a spoonful of soup and guessed, “Gunk?”

  “Nope. Pure rainwater. The cleanest water I’ve ever seen. I have a theory about why, but I’m going to do some investigation when I take these rascals on their walk.”

  “Okay.”

  Frida herded Peachy and Frankenferret out the door and I reached for the remote. No bombs were going off, so I thought I’d better turn on the TV and find out where things stood.

  Once again, the Creature Crisis dominated all stations, but now it was the Cloud Squid they couldn’t get enough of. I watched some very entertaining footage of her evading air force jets and attack helicopters. Every time they fired something at her she darted away, leading them on quite a merry chase. What was not so entertaining was the destruction they caused when their missiles hit what was left of the city. So they weren’t making any more headway against the Cloud Squid than they had against Behemoth. And I learned something else from the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen:

  DANGER ZONE HAS BEEN CLOSED . . . NO ONE ALLOWED IN OR OUT DUE TO RADIATION THREAT . . .

  Closed. Yet I still had electricity, cable, water—all the important stuff. This would make life easier, as long as it lasted. Now that the Danger Zone was closed, I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to, so that simplified things. But if they were isolating us, did that mean they might drop a bomb on us? I mean a really big bomb? As in nuclear? Since we were already kind of radioactive sometimes?

  I tried to reassure myself that they would have the common sense to realize the radiation from nuclear bombs would travel, along with dust and debris that would cause a nuclear winter. I tried and tried. And tried.

  I gave that up and surfed the channels on the TV, until I found a story that was unfolding in real time. The Cloud Squid and Behemoth had discovered each other.

  “It looks as though we’re about to see a battle royale between those two monsters.” The reporter was trying to sound worried, but instead he sounded like this would be the coolest thing ever.

  The Cloud Squid eased herself into the airspace over Behemoth, moving almost shyly. She hovered over him, her limbs opening like the petals of a flower. He gazed up, his mouth open, revealing rows of teeth that looked like stalactites (and stalagmites).

  Damn, I thought. I didn’t want to see them fight. They were both beautiful in their odd ways. But then something amazing happened.

  The Cloud Squid began to flash with color. I remembered the idea of bioluminescence: cephalopods communicating with each other using light and color. It was a glorious sight. Behemoth seemed to think so too, from the way he gazed at her.

  And then another amazing thing happened. Behemoth’s hide began to flash with color too. And why would the giant lemur with the rocky skin have bioluminescence? Beats me (though he did come out of the sea).

  They flashed colors at each other for maybe twenty minutes. Reporters chattered, baffled by the scene, yet feeling compelled to make inane comments anyway. They were still hoping for a fight, but that wasn’t going to happen. The two creatures stopped flashing colors, and then the Cloud Squid drifted away with her rainstorm. Behemoth sat in the rubble he had been collecting and gazed at the news cameras, and if to say, What do you think of that?

  Reporters dutifully started their rehash cycle. After another half hour of that, I turned off the set. I was about to drift off to sleep again when Frida came in with Peachy and Frankenferret.

  “Our branch of the subway line is intact,” said Frida. “And as far as I can tell, so are the cables that provide our internet and electricity. If you were willing to walk, you could get from here to the edge of the Danger Zone, but you’d have to cross some flooded parts up to your chest, maybe even up to your neck.”

  “Are you planning to leave?” I asked.

  She looked surprised. “No way. They’d have to drag me out of here.”

  I felt happy to hear that. I doubted anyone else would bring me chicken soup. “So—did you see anyone down there?”

  “Nope. Something better.” She pulled her iPad out of her backpack and called up a picture file. “I found another creature.”

  The picture she showed me was murky. There was very little light in the tunnel, and the water level was high enough to hide a lot of stuff. But right in the middle of it all, a face grinned at me. “It looks like a friendly dog,” I said. “A giant—happy—water dog.”

  “He acts like one, too,” said Frida, calling up more pictures. “You can’t see from these pics, but he’s about the size of a school bus. It’s hard to tell how many legs he has, because the number seems to change—see?” She selected a picture where he seemed to have five limbs, and then another where he might have only three, though in both of them
he seemed to have a vaguely tail-shaped appendage. “I call him Mega Whatsis. Sometimes he seems to be solid, but other times he’s kind of gelatinous. Here’s a short video I took on my iPad.”

  My stomach stirred uneasily at the thought of looking at something that was sometimes kind of gelatinous, but when I watched Mega Whatsis in the video, I saw a creature who moved confidently, even joyously, both in and out of the water. “Cool!”

  “He’s smart,” said Frida. “Watch this next part.”

  Frida’s hand appeared in the bottom edge of the picture. She held a cookie out to Mega Whatsis. His colossal head filled the frame until all I could see was a giant nostril sniffing the cookie. He delicately maneuvered the cookie into his mouth, using his rubbery lips, then pulled back for a moment and contemplated the taste, his happy face shifting into thoughtful lines. After another minute, he produced the cookie intact and nudged it back into Frida’s hand.

  “It was dry,” said Frida. “No creature slobber on it.”

  “Wow. Peachy couldn’t do that.”

  Frida pulled up some more pictures on the laptop. “I expected the water down there to be full of waste and toxins. But it was more like natural creek water.”

  I remembered what she had said about our water tank. “You think Mega Whatsis cleaned our water? Is that what you went down to investigate?”

  She nodded. “But I don’t think it was him. He likes to stay underground. And his water has mud and silt in it.” She closed the picture files and put her pad back into its case. “I’m not telling anyone about this. If those jerks go down there to shoot bombs at Mega Whatsis, they’ll cut off our supply route. And he’s a big sweetheart, there’s no reason to hurt him.”

  I decided to keep the radiation argument to myself for the time being. After all, I didn’t have a geiger counter.