Godzilla

by Stephen Molstad

  I was riding shotgun and he was driving. The five “soldiers” fit very comfortably into the back of the roomy vehicle, all of them masticating with gusto. I had to ask. “What’s with the chewing gum?”

  “It makes us look more American.”

  I turned and studied the squad of faux American GIs. They were really pounding the Wrigley’s, as the expression goes. To my mind, they all looked a few years too old and a few pounds too thin to pass for U.S. soldiers. It was going to be a tough sell, I decided, gum or not.

  I said to Roaché, “You’d better let me do all the talking.”

  He shrugged and we sped out of the warehouse.

  Every entrance to the city had been sealed off tight. The army had established fortified checkpoints at all the bridges and tunnels. Police barricades held back the crowds of irritated Manhattanites who were waiting to go home. An armada of Coast Guard ships made sure no one tried to float, row, or swim to the city. National Guardsmen patrolled the shores of the island and the shores opposite. There was absolutely no way to get in.

  Unless you were Animal. He drove to Lucy’s brother’s house and, after ten minutes of furious shouting, came outside grinning like a lunatic. “Everything’s under control,” he announced. “We’re in.”

  A few minutes later he and Audrey were rolling through a run-down section of Hoboken. The view of Manhattan was obscured by the continuous rain and the grimy industrial buildings. About two hundred yards before they encountered one of the army’s ubiquitous shoreline checkpoints, Animal killed the headlights and pulled the van onto an embankment.

  “This is it.”

  Audrey, realizing she was in the middle of nowhere, asked Animal how this could be it. But he was already at the back doors. He grabbed his gear bag and took off at a jog along a broken-down chain-link fence. He wasn’t going to wait. Audrey sucked in a deep breath and straightened her beret in the mirror. “Time for the big boys to go to work.” Then she jumped out into the elements and took off in pursuit of her cameraman.

  They slipped through a tear in the fence and hurried across a muddy field littered with weeds and discarded steel track. In the middle of the lot was a tall concrete building in the shape of a cube. A sign on the door gave the address as EXIT 2677 and the property owner as the PORT AUTHORITY. Animal dug a key out of his pocket and inserted it into the rusty door lock.

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s a way down to the tracks. A service entrance. Lucy’s brother works for the Port Authority.”

  “Animal! The army shut down all the train stations. They’re guarding the entrances.”

  “Exactly,” he grunted, having a little trouble with the key. “The entrance is way over there. They won’t be guarding the platforms.” After some coaxing, the key turned and clicked. They stepped inside and let the heavy door slam behind them.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Audrey said in the pitch-black.

  Animal switched on his flashlight, handed her one of her own, then started down a steep flight of narrow stairs that took them deep, deep underground. At the bottom of the stairs they found a rusty metal door. They pushed it open and found themselves in an equipment room. Another door at the far side of the room led them out onto the boarding platform.

  “See? I told you there wouldn’t be nobody down here,” Animal said, as if he’d been sure of it all along. He hopped down onto the tracks and took a long look into the mouth of the tunnel that would lead them below the Hudson River. “Looks good. We can follow this tunnel to the Twenty-third Street station.”

  “I thought you said this was going to be fun,” Audrey reminded him, lowering herself off the platform. “Aren’t there rats and things down here?”

  “At the moment I’m a little more worried about lizards. Big, ugly, nasty, large lizards.”

  • • •

  There was a long line of military traffic waiting to pass through the checkpoint at the Lincoln Tunnel. Instead of waving army personnel through, the guards were stopping every vehicle and talking to the drivers. It would have been a long wait if Roaché hadn’t pulled into the lanes of oncoming traffic and raced to the front of the line. He snaked expertly back into line only a few car lengths from the checkpoint. We pulled in behind a dump truck filled with fish, bait for the second trap. Several of the drivers waiting in the line honked their horns at us angrily.

  “I thought the plan was to blend in,” I reminded him, “not call any attention to ourselves.”

  “Americans hate to wait in line,” he told me. “I’m driving like an American.”

  When we pulled even with the barricade, a meaty midwestern MP with a clipboard leaned in the driver’s-side window and glanced around at the gum-chewing infantrymen. “Who you boys with?” he asked our driver.

  “Uh, we’re with the Three-two,” I piped up.

  “I didn’t ask you, soldier,” he snapped, scanning his clipboard.

  I had no idea whether there was any such thing as the Three-two. It was just the first thing that came to mind. I knew I’d better distract him from the list on his clipboard before he realized our unit didn’t exist. “Sergeant O’Neal just called down for us to join them, sir.” As soon as I mentioned O’Neal’s name, the MP’s ears perked up and he stared straight at me. I was sure I’d said something wrong. He looked at the gray in Roaché’s beard, sizing him up carefully before asking, “You got a problem talkin’?”

  I was certain that once Roaché spoke, the MP would hear his French accent and our cover would be blown. If Roaché was nervous, he didn’t show it. He gave the soldier a lazy, sideways glance and answered the question in a dead-on Southern drawl. “Why, no, sir. I’m just fine.”

  The beefy soldier was still skeptical, but there were a couple hundred vehicles stacked up behind us. He stepped back and waved us through. “All right, keep it moving.”

  “Thank you, thank you very much,” Roaché said, hamming it up.

  As soon as we pulled away, the grin I’d been suppressing broke through. Talk about staying cool under pressure! “Hey, that wasn’t too bad,” I told him. “Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

  “Elvis Presley movies,” he informed me. “He was the King!”

  After a very long walk, Animal found something on the ground that told him they had reached Manhattan. At a gore point, where the tracks split off in two directions, half a dozen lemon yellow disks lay scattered on the tracks, each one about ten inches tall. They looked like high-tech plastic mushrooms sprouting in the darkness of the dank passageway. “Aud, watch your step around here.” He used his flashlight to show her where the danger was.

  “What are those?”

  “Those would have to be land mines,” surmised Animal, who had never actually seen one before. “They must’ve booby-trapped it so our friend can’t use the tunnels. Don’t worry, they only bite if you step on them.” He hopped over the mines and pressed on. Audrey approached the explosive devices with all the confidence of a first-time tightrope walker. She gulped hard, stepped mincingly between the disks, then ran to catch up with Animal.

  As the Frenchmen and I drove through the eerie, ghost-town-like streets of Manhattan, we listened in on one of the army’s protected radio frequencies. O’Neal was supervising a second delivery of fish, this one even more massive than the first. A large meadow at the northern end of Central Park, between the reservoir and the Lasker Rink, was being flooded with spotlights and seafood. One of the interesting things we overheard was an angry exchange between the leaders of two heavy artillery units. They both wanted a place on the front line, the perimeter of the park. But the army had brought in so many troops—from as far away as the Carolinas—that there wasn’t room for all of them. Colonel Hicks had pulled out all the stops, determined not to suffer another humiliating embarrassment at the hands of a lizard. But we weren’t heading to the park.

  We turned south and headed downtown. It was dusk, the hour when the gray, rain-streaked day was fading to blac
k, rain-soaked night. As we passed block after block of empty shops and apartment buildings, I thought I could see candles flickering behind the curtains in some of the windows. Every now and again a vaguely human shape darted across the street far ahead of our headlights or disappeared into a darkened doorway as we approached. As we drove along we realized that a handful of people continued to elude the evacuation’s dragnet.

  When we rolled into Madison Square, we were surprised to find a large contingent of soldiers still guarding the rubble-strewn intersection. They had all the entrances to the Twenty-third Street station guarded. Obviously, we couldn’t risk a face-to-face encounter with them, so Roaché sped right past them, circling back only after we were well out of their sight. We would have to find another way down into the subway system.

  Within minutes we had slipped underground and were traveling through an undamaged tunnel, which was pitch-black except for our flashlights. The Frenchmen kept the pace somewhere between a fast march and a slow jog. Before long we came into the Twenty-third Street station—or what was left of it. At first I didn’t even recognize it because the place had been utterly torn apart and destroyed. We were standing at the bottom of a hundred-foot-deep pit of mangled concrete. The platform where I’d stood with Hicks and O’Neal the day before was gone. Evidently, Gojira had been back.

  Our flashlights revealed that the station was much deeper and complex than I’d thought. Train tunnels moved off in different directions at different distances below the ground. It reminded me that Manhattan not only reaches to impossible heights with its skyscrapers, but also goes down to surprising depths with its network of tunnels. After some scouting around, I came across a pile of fish. I recognized it as the same pile O’Neal’s soldiers had found the day before. Judging from the odors permeating the passageway, the finny carcasses weren’t getting any fresher. I discussed this discovery with Roaché and we decided to begin our search for the nest with this tunnel. We set out through the lizard-enlarged train tube, moving more slowly now because our path was littered with a thousand dangers: boulder-sized clods of earth, pools of sewer water, bent train rails, and live electrical wires.

  Suddenly all the air pressure in the tunnel changed, and a background noise, a humming sound that had been vibrating the walls, cut off. It left us with the feeling of being marooned in a vacuum of silence.

  “They’ve switched off the ventilation system,” I whispered. “They’re calling him to dinner.”

  Roaché looked at me with those world-weary eyes and cracked a bad joke. “Let’s hope we are not the hors d’oeuvres.”

  The seven of us pushed nervously onward, keeping to the center of the tunnel for the most part, pausing occasionally to decide the best way around a barrier of debris. Then we heard a noise that froze us in place. It was a muffled screeching sound that came out of the darkness and vibrated the walls around us. It seemed to come out of the earth itself. We realized it must be Gojira’s voice in an adjoining tunnel. Before we could discuss our next move, the ground began to tremble. The shaking quickly intensified, and years of accumulated dust spilled onto us from the pipes and beams above. Sections of the walls buckled and began to collapse. The overhead pipes clanked against one another, and the animal’s roaring got louder.

  Suddenly something was in the tunnel with us. We trained our flashlights on the source of the sound and saw Gojira’s giant claws breaking out a new entrance. In an energetic fury the six-foot-long talons scraped away earth, concrete, and steel. After only a few seconds the opening was large enough for him to squeeze into the tunnel. He did, and came barreling toward us like a runaway subway train.

  A large drainage pipe intersected the subway tunnel near our position. It was tall enough to accommodate a man standing upright. We hurried over to the mouth of it, but I lingered in the tunnel, mesmerized by the giant lizard’s agility. I felt a hand grab me by the collar and yank me out of harm’s way. One of the Frenchmen pulled me into the pipe a moment before the animal blasted past us, the sides of his body scraping hard against the tunnel walls.

  Audrey and Animal were only a hundred yards away. They’d watched us from above as we entered the Twenty-third Street station, ducking out of the way when our flashlights moved close. After we moved off down the tunnel, they decided to climb down to our level and follow us. The way down was through a subway car that had been parked at the top level. Now it was dangling over the side, a natural bridge to the bottom of the hollowed-out station. No sooner had they made the nerve-wracking trip to the bottom and stepped out of the car than they found five hundred tons of lizard rushing toward them.

  “Animal, let’s get out of here!” Audrey screamed. But the fearless newsman ignored the advancing earthquake and stood in the middle of the tracks, camera rolling. Finally Audrey began pulling him out of the path of danger.

  “All right, all right already!” He lowered the camera from his eye just as the creature became visible in the distance, filling the tunnel like a flash flood of flesh and teeth. At the last possible moment they jumped back into a broken-down subway car. With a metal-shredding jolt, Gojira grazed the car as he hurtled past them. Through the rattling, broken windows, they got the same close-up view of the lizard’s brawny, scale-covered flanks I’d seen only a moment before.

  “Shoot! Shoot it!” Audrey yelled. Animal, whose jaw had fallen wide open, recovered in time to capture some close-up images of the hind legs and tail moving by. Once the creature moved away down the tunnel, the two of them broke into sighs of relief and nervous laughter, tickled that they were still alive.

  “I guess we go this way,” I said, pulling my T-shirt up to cover my nose and mouth against the thick fog of dust hanging in the air. The creature was already long gone, probably drawn northward by the scent of the fish in Central Park. I don’t know why, but I had a hunch we should follow him. One of the men suggested we head in the opposite direction, reasoning that the beast might have come from the nest after smelling the food.

  Roaché turned to me. “What do you think?”

  “This tunnel is the first place we found any evidence of him. I think this is where we should begin our search.”

  That was good enough for him. He pointed north, and that’s the way we went. In a minute or two we were back in the Twenty-third Street station, marching past the subway car dangling from one of the upper levels. We hurried along, unaware that we had company.

  We wandered through various damaged tunnels, keeping alert for signs of a nest. Moving in a generally northward direction, we passed several ruined subway stations. Eventually, we came into another ruined station. Like the last one, it was several stories deep and looked as though it had been intentionally hollowed out. All the layers of steel and concrete had been smashed down into a carpet of powdery rubble. The destruction was so complete, we all knew the creature had spend a good deal of time in this place.

  Jean-Marc spotted something high on the wall. We all pointed our flashlights up to a damaged mosaic and saw that the blue and yellow tiles spelled out ENN STATI.

  “This is Penn Station,” I said, “or at least it was.” It had been one of the largest and busiest train depots in the entire world, but now it was a huge hole in the ground, clawed and stomped to oblivion. High above, at street level, an immense black hole had been torn in the ceiling. There was just enough light coming through the hole to reveal that there was a huge, cavernous space above us. We thought we were looking up into some sort of cave. Sparking electrical wires provided tantalizing glimpses of an enormous blocky shape resting inside the cavern.

  “What is up there?” Roaché asked.

  We pointed our flashlights up at the blocky shape, illuminating a sign that read MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. Then I realized that we were looking at the Jumbotron scoreboard that once hung at the center of the building. It had torn loose from its suspension cables and crashed to the floor of the arena near the immense hole. I asked myself: If the scoreboard couldn’t break through the floor, what did? A
s we peered into Madison Square Garden from below, I knew there was a good chance we had discovered the nest. I gulped and turned to the other men. “I guess we should go up there and have a look.”

  Roaché had already started climbing.

  FIVE

  Meanwhile, in Central Park, the U.S. military was preparing for a showdown of epic proportions with New York City’s latest and least desirable immigrant. A new and larger pyramid of fish had been stacked in a soggy meadow near the Lasker Rink, far from the nearest building. It sat out in the open, sparkling brightly under the intense glare of a dozen searchlights, and seemed to be unguarded. It would be a powerful temptation to an ichthyophagous lizard with a family to feed.

  But hidden among the trees lining the edges of the park and lurking in the shadows of the nearest buildings were twenty thousand heavily armed soldiers. All nonessential lights had been doused so as not to distract the lizard from the small mountain of fish. With ears and eyes peeled, the army waited anxiously for the confrontation to begin.

  High atop a skyscraper, at the south end of the park, one of the perimeter lookouts heard a suspicious rustling noise. He splashed through the rain over to the retaining wall and leaned over it to take a look down Seventh Avenue. A giant, shadowy figure was creeping toward him, advancing one building at a time.

  As the soldier peered down, he saw the hunched-forward brute, as heavy as a freight train, stealing cat-quietly up the street. The rustling noise he heard was the reptile’s winglike armored plates grazing against the twentieth story of the buildings it passed. He dug for the radio under his rain poncho and reported the sighting.

  “Command center, we have visual on the target. He’s headed north toward sector five.”

  Surrounded by phones, video monitors, and assistants, Colonel Hicks stood at the situation table in the command center, watching a computerized schematic of Manhattan. As Gojira approached the edge of Central Park he was picked up by the tracking devices and came to life on Hicks’s computer screen as a blinking red light. “Affirmative,” Hicks replied to the lookout. “I have him on radar now, heading into sector five. Stand ready, O’Neal.”