Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 103

by Robert Reed

  Frida undid Peachy’s leash and patted her head. “She’s already gone potty. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  After Frida had left, I surfed the TV stations, looking for evidence that anyone besides Frida knew about Mega Whatsis. I didn’t find any—now they were full of politicians arguing about whether or not any more money ought to be spent trying to kill Behemoth and the Cloud Squid. They couldn’t agree on that any more than they could agree on other stuff, so I drifted off to sleep again.

  Sometime later, I approached wakefulness like a swimmer floating toward a bright surface. I couldn’t quite open my eyes, but I felt one of the cats lying across my stomach. I petted it, enjoying the velvety feel of its fur and its plump, warm body. I heard purring, but didn’t feel it vibrating in the body I was stroking.

  And the fur felt too short. Way too short. Almost like you would expect the fur of a seal to be. I opened my eyes and saw the fat thing stretched across me. It tapered to a narrow tip that was lazily curling to and fro like a cat’s tail. It widened as it crossed my body and continued off the bed, onto the floor, and out the window, most of which was blocked by its bulk.

  It was a tentacle.

  Two things occurred to me then. The first was that you don’t expect a tentacle to be warm and fuzzy. The second was that the Cloud Squid was probably going to drag me through the window and eat me.

  I lay there frozen, waiting for the Squid to make her move. When she ate me, who would take care of Peachy? Who would take care of Sheba, and Buster, and Thugly, and Jingle Monster (four more pets than I had officially declared in my lease agreement)? Would she eat them too? Jingle was grooming the tentacle as if it were another cat. Peachy had rested her head on top of it, and she was snoring again.

  I’m not sure how long I lay there arguing with myself. But it was the Cloud Squid who resolved the situation. She used the tip of her tentacle like a hand and gently moved Peachy’s head onto the bed. Then she patted each of the cats and the dog, and slipped away out the window.

  I stayed frozen for a few more moments, but I couldn’t resist the urge to look out the window to see where she had gone. I poked my head into mild morning air and the clean smell of recent rain. I saw the tentacle slipping back over the top of the roof. But why was she on the roof?

  The water tank, I thought. She’s the one who put the rainwater in there . . .

  After all, she moved around in a rain cloud. Maybe the rainwater was a pleasant side effect to one of her visitations. Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel like I wanted to lie in bed anymore. And I was sick of trying to get information out of the stupid talking-heads TV. Instead, I headed for my computer.

  I logged onto Facebook. I wasn’t surprised to see that rumors about our creatures dominated the feed. What did surprise me was that there were still plenty of posts about politics, religion, status reports of how people’s diets were going, and pictures of funny cats. Once I got used to that, I composed my own status report and posted it.

  To everyone who lives outside the Danger Zone, I said. Please stop bombing us. Don’t send any more troops. And please don’t let them drop an atomic bomb. Stop attacking, period! You’re doing more damage than good.

  Once I had posted that, and tweeted an abbreviated version, I got an idea. I logged onto Google Blogger and created a blog called Postcards From Monster Island. It was just a template, but I thought maybe I could get Frida to send me some picture files. As I was plotting and scheming over all this, I realized something.

  I felt better. I could breathe. I wasn’t dizzy. My head didn’t hurt. I was snarf-free. And my stomach was no longer my mortal enemy.

  So I fed the beasties and took Peachy out for her business. Once we were outside, we even did a little walkies. But our world looked very different now.

  A sort of mountain range had grown between my street and Behemoth’s battle zone. It seemed to consist of a combination of ruined buildings and actual rock. Hardly anyone was on the street, which looked largely untouched by the destruction. The temperature was mild, flowers bloomed in pots and window boxes, cooking smells tempted my starved palate, and most of the odd little shops were open, though there could be very few customers these days. The air still had that freshly washed smell, and breezes blew along the new corridor that had been created by Behemoth’s Makeshift Mountains.

  Call me weird, but I thought it was an improvement. The noise of traffic was gone too, though I would still hear Behemoth moving big things around, with thuds and groans as stuff fell into place. He didn’t trumpet any challenges, but grumbled to himself, as if thinking aloud. Peachy perked her ears, seeming to understand every word. She even replied a few times.

  Once she felt satisfied in every possible way, we came back inside and walked through the empty halls of our building. I wondered how many residents had evacuated. There weren’t that many of us in the first place, maybe around ten people. Our bottom floor had been converted into shops (or maybe the top floors had been converted into apartments, I wasn’t sure). We saw our super just once a month, though he did a good job with repairs. And he had put up bulletin boards next to the elevators, so I saw the note:

  MEETING AT HOUDINI’S, UNIT 3C, 1:00 P.M. PLEASE COME AND DISCUSS THE CREATURE SITUATION

  The numbering in our building was as eccentric as the residents, so Apartment 3C was on the 2nd floor. The door stood open—someone had stuck a sign on it with an arrow pointing inside.

  I pushed the door open further and saw Mr. Abé across the room. He waved from a wingback chair, where he nursed a cup of coffee. As I hesitated on the threshold, Houdini poked his tattooed head around the corner from his kitchen. “Come on in,” he said, with the voice of a carney barker.

  Houdini had a magician’s name, but his true passion was the classic sideshow. He honored that tradition with the tattoos that covered him from head to toe, and he split his time between his circus memorabilia shop and a variety of sword-swallowing, fire-eating, knife-juggling gigs. His apartment was dominated by his personal collection, but everything was lovingly displayed, not jumbled together.

  Over his couch hung a giant poster featuring all of the lions and tigers in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Beneath the leaping cats sat Beetle, whose specialty was mounting insects for collectors and museums, and his partner Poe, who did professional skeleton articulation. Both held plates with orange scones made by Oskar, who perched on one arm of the couch, sipping a cup of mint tea. Oscar owned a bakery, and seeing the scones reminded me that my stomach was back to normal.

  The gathering was completed by Frida, who fussed at the computer with her occasional boyfriend, Gee, who was a buyer for the Museum of Weird Stuff.

  “So . . . ” I took account of my neighbors. “We’re the ones who stayed. Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  Oskar sipped his tea. “Running seemed like a hysterical reaction,” he said. “Like lemmings jumping off a cliff.”

  “Yes,” agreed Mr. Abé. “I’ve lived through much worse conflicts. And I can tell you from personal experience that refugee camps are not necessarily better than war zones.”

  If you were wondering why two normal guys like Mr. Abé and Oskar would be friends with a tattooed knife juggler, a skull-faced artist, the Bug Guy, the Skeleton Guy, Mr. Weird Stuff, and Crazy Cat/Library Girl, I can only say that Mr. Abé’s remark about refugee camps might explain why he’s willing to look past the surface and put up with our eccentricities. And as for Oskar, baker par excellence, he’s a very nice fellow with a flaw that was well tolerated in Germany, but is decidedly odd in the U.S. Oskar looks like Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. He smiles like him, too.

  Houdini snagged a chair for me and for himself. “So here’s why I called the meeting.” His tone was so commanding, even Frida and Gee stopped surfing. “For all intents and purposes, we are now in the Danger Zone. We are stuck here, and we’re the ones getting hurt by the bombs and stuff. We have to start telling the outside wor
ld what we want.”

  “Won’t they just ignore us?” asked Beetle, around a bit of scone.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “We’re what passes for experts now.”

  Mr. Abé raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. How did we pull that off?”

  But Poe was nodding enthusiastically. “No, we are! I’ve been tweeting about it. I got the president’s office to talk to me—can you believe it?”

  “Good.” Houdini waved a hand at Poe as if he were one of his side show performers, and he wanted everyone to step right up. “Because the biggest problem we’ve got is not the creatures. It’s the idiots in Congress who want to drop an A-bomb on us. The only thing we’ve got going for us is that the president is commander in chief, and he thinks it won’t work.”

  “But what will he think when he finds out we’ve got three creatures now?” I worried.

  “There are more than three,” said Gee. “I think there may be as many as seven in our city alone. So far. Look at the pictures we took.”

  Frida tapped the screen to show us action shots. “They’re all doing stuff, but none of them are attacking people. See? There are people in all of these shots—some of them taking pics like we were doing, so it won’t be long until the outside world finds out.”

  “Ah, but what are the creatures doing, Miss Muerta? That’s what we need to prove.”

  Gee pushed a lock of his blue hair out of his face. “All we have is theories about most of them right now—except for Behemoth. Frida thinks he’s an artist.”

  That remark provoked a conspicuous silence. But Frida was undaunted. “You notice he’s been piling debris up? Well, he’s fusing it together in particular ways. Look . . . ” She found the video she wanted and hit play. We watched Behemoth shove debris into piles, then look at it critically. He rearranged things a bit, then pondered it again. When he felt satisfied, he stretched out on the pile and his underside began to glow.

  When he stepped away from it, the result was an oddly pleasing amalgam of cityscape and mountain range. I had never seen anything quite like it.

  “He’s an artist,” said Frida, with the reverence most people reserve for guys like Michelangelo.

  “And I think that’s why radiation levels keep spiking and then falling off. That’s how he’s melting stuff together.”

  “All well and good,” Oskar said. “But that will only make people angry when we tell them. They think Behemoth is a monster, like from the movies. They see that he’s giant, he waded ashore and destroyed the city. We know the military did most of that, but that will leave egg on the faces of the politicians and the generals. They will despise us if we point that out.”

  I heard him, but something that was unfolding on Frida’s screen snared my attention. “Hey—is that footage you guys took?”

  “No,” said Gee. “That’s from YouTube; someone took it with their cell phone the night Behemoth came ashore.”

  Behemoth was walking through the city, away from planes that shot missiles at him. An elevated train line stretched across his path; the train was stranded, and full of people. It looked like Behemoth was going to walk right into them, so people were screaming, trying to climb out windows. Then Behemoth paused, pivoted just as another missile was fired at him, and the bridge started to collapse.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you see that? Can you go back and play it again?”

  He replayed the segment, then froze it at the crucial moment.

  “Wow,” said Frida. “Did I just see that?”

  We watched the segment again.

  “We’ve got to blitz social media with this clip,” said Frida. “I’ve seen the early part of the footage, but they keep cutting out the end. A lot of people probably haven’t seen the whole thing!”

  “And there’s something else we have to do,” I said. “If we want to make them believe that we’re experts, and they should listen to us, we need to work on our bona fides.”

  “But how?” wondered Houdini.

  I pointed to the image on the screen. “We need to make contact with Behemoth.”

  Our trip into the Makeshift Mountains made me wonder if Behemoth and the other creatures were having some positive effect on us after all. It was a challenging climb (though a few parts of Behemoth’s construct still had functioning elevators), yet I was able to troop alongside the others, despite the fact that I had just been very sick. We let Frida and Gee lead the way, since they were the youngest, and since they had also made several forays into those mountains.

  For over two hours we wormed our way through mountain passages, walked single file along ridges, climbed in and out of shattered windows and across rooftops and balconies. We could hear Behemoth doing his work. We knew we were close.

  “My friends,” Oskar warned, “we hope Behemoth will not hurt us, but what if we’re wrong? What if all those bombs and grenades have taught him to hate us?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that, and by then I realized I wasn’t nearly as scared as I should have been. I just wanted to find Behemoth, I wasn’t even thinking about how we should contact him. But we had to do it if we wanted a future. We were bound together with him, for better or worse.

  We climbed several rows of steps, some from old structures and some newly formed, until we reached a lookout point. As we made our way around an outcrop on the pinnacle, we came face-to-face with Behemoth. He stood in the valley on the other side of the peak, not more than one hundred yards away from us—a distance he could have crossed in just a few steps. His head was almost level with us.

  Those great, golden eyes rolled in our direction and focused on us.

  “Oops,” I said.

  Yet I didn’t turn to run back down the path. None of us did. And it wasn’t just because we couldn’t have gotten away. Those eyes saw us, and we stared back at them, but it wasn’t an exchange between predator and prey. We, the Oddballs of the City, recognized Behemoth, the Oddball of the World.

  We had seen it in that footage when he bumped into the elevated train. The cars began to topple from the track. Behemoth reached out and grabbed the train as it was going down. Once he had it settled more or less on terra firma, he shielded the people from the missiles until they could get out and flee the scene. One guy with a cell phone had caught that moment, and no one said anything about it. But we saw it. And now we were looking him right in his gigantic eyes.

  Behemoth opened his mouth and emitted that cry we had heard so often in the last few days. There was no mistaking what he meant by it. I think he tempered it for us, it was gentler. It was still full of loneliness. But a new note had entered that symphony. To me, it sounded like hope.

  “What should we do?” wondered Frida.

  Without discussing it, we all waved at Behemoth. His ears perked. His pupils expanded, as if he were drinking in the sight. He sighed, and settled down to contemplate us further.

  We sat down and ate the lunch Oskar and Houdini had packed for us, where Behemoth could see us. When we had finished, Oskar said, “I can sit with him for a few hours. You guys go home and rest up.”

  “I’ll spell you after that,” offered Frida.

  And so it went. For the next few days, one of us was always where Behemoth could see us. Once we had established that habit with him, more of the creatures began to come into the open. We waved at them. Cloud Squid waved back with all her tentacles. Mega Whatsis grinned and wagged his vaguely tail-shaped appendage.

  But that’s not all we were doing. We started blitzing social media with our posts and pictures.

  “Stop attacking!” we pleaded. “We’ve reached an accord with the creatures. We can manage them.”

  When outraged people demanded to know just where they were going to rebuild the centers of commerce and culture that had once dominated our city, we pointed out that it would be a hundred times more expensive to rebuild that stuff than it would be to build new centers of commerce somewhere else. In response, we got a lot of flack from trolls. “Do the math!”
we pleaded.

  Just when we thought no one was listening, the trolling stopped. And the talking heads on TV stopped speculating whether more marines were going to jump out of planes so they could bounce off Behemoth’s teflon hide. Instead, the government started to drop emergency supplies for us along the Neutral Zone. And that’s when I got an email from the president.

  We’ll make sure you have electricity and water, he promised. We’ll keep the food and medicine coming, too. Your debts have been settled, and you won’t be paying rent anymore. In return, all that we ask is that you keep managing the creatures. Keep them peaceful. Can you do that?

  Yes, I replied, though I felt a little guilty about claiming credit for what seemed more like good luck.

  On the other hand, it might be something more than that. It might be the fact that even when the city seemed to be coming down around us, we didn’t want to leave. The more people outside lost hope, the more we gained it. They wanted to throw bombs at Behemoth, we wanted to sit down and have lunch with him. That counted for something.

  So—you remember that footage of all the people pouring out of the city the day Behemoth came ashore? Now a lot of people want to come back. Not to live—to see the creatures. So we started Danger Zone Tours. We take selected visitors to multiple stops, including the shops of Mr. Abé, Houdini, and Gee, to Oskar’s bakery and Frida’s gallery, Beetle’s exhibit and Poe’s museum, and to lots of other odd places that have sprung up. We’ve all got some extra cash on the side now.

  We take them to see the creatures, too. Ten of them have come out into the open, so far. Mega Whatsis is the usual favorite (though he still doesn’t like cookies).

  The last stop on the tour is a spot where people can see Behemoth. When he looks our way, we all wave. People love that. It’s the kind of reverence you would expect to see for whales breaking the surface next to a Greenpeace boat. When our visitors leave us, they talk about how glad they are the creatures showed up to teach us the error of our ways, that we were poisoning our world.