I was running as fast as I could but lagged behind the others. Now, I’ve always thought of myself as a decent athlete and fairly fleet of foot. But it was painfully obvious to me that no matter how hard I ran, I simply couldn’t keep pace with middle-aged Phillipe, Animal, who was weighed down with a camera, or Audrey, who wasn’t even wearing running shoes. But as I fought to stay ahead of the growling animals, there was no room in my brain for embarrassment. A single, screaming idea dominated my thinking: get away. I was running on pure survival instinct. I don’t even remember seeing the bank of coin-operated candy dispensers along the wall. I just remember reaching out with both hands and desperately trying to throw some obstacle into their path. When the machines tipped over and hit the floor, all the glass shattered and thousands upon thousands of jawbreakers and gumballs spread out across the hard floor. When the baby Gojiras stepped on them, their feet went out from under them. Their limbs sprawled out in awkward directions and they hit the floor hard. Watching them try to get up again was like seeing an old Keystone Kops movie.
It bought a little time. And we needed every second, because we knew that somewhere in the sky over Manhattan, jets were approaching. Jets with enough firepower aboard them to vaporize half the city. We didn’t want to be inside the building when they arrived.
When they got to the top of the escalator, Phillipe, Audrey, and Animal didn’t head down the stairs. They pulled up short and peered over the edge, obviously surprised by something on the floor below. As I caught up with them the Garden’s aging but still magnificent main lobby, all chrome and polished marble, opened up around me. It was a beautiful space, with bronze sculptures and colorful murals and three enormous art-deco chandeliers. But the most beautiful sight of all was the set of exit doors at the far end of the lobby.
Of course, it wasn’t the beauty of the lobby that caused us to stop running. It was the sheer number of baby Gojiras crowded onto the floor below. There must have been four hundred of them, wall-to-wall lizards. Some of them were tearing into a Taco Bell stand, but most of them were milling around like spectators at some sold-out sporting event. None of them noticed us at first. But they smelled us almost immediately. The ones closest to us twitched their nostrils, then searched with their eyes until they found us. Within two seconds every lizard in the lobby had stopped what it was doing and whipped around to look at us. And everything became deathly quiet. The two species stood and stared at each other. I felt as though I were in a Hitchcock movie right before all hell breaks loose.
“How much time do we have left?” Audrey whispered.
I checked my watch. “Less than thirty seconds.” The hunting party was coming up behind us after finally crossing the great gumball barrier. They came marching carefully toward us, afraid we might have other tricks. We all stared across the room at the exit doors. They were so close—only fifty yards from the bottom of the escalator—and yet so very far away. To reach them, we would have to wade into the lake of lizards. It would be like someone with a nosebleed trying to swim past a school of piranha.
“Twenty seconds,” I reminded everyone.
Leave it to a Frenchman to feel arrogantly confident in the face of overwhelming odds. Phillipe glanced over his shoulder at us and asked, in that matter-of-fact, secret-service way of his, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
He started down the escalator as casually as if he were trotting off to visit the men’s room. And because we didn’t know what else to do, we followed him. Halfway down the steps he raised both his machine guns and fired a short burst of ammunition toward the ceiling. As you can imagine, he was an expert marksman. The bullets sliced through the cables supporting the closest of the huge chandeliers. In a blur of crystal and iron, the lighting fixture plummeted earthward and shattered on the floor with a violent crash.
Almost as quickly as the shards of glass exploded outward, the startled lizards darted to the sides of the room, giving the chandelier a wide berth. It was all the opening we needed. We raced away from the bottom step and out into the lobby, moving in a line. Somehow I once again ended up at the rear.
The animals quickly recovered from their initial fright, and when they saw us running they instinctively pursued us. They rushed toward us in a ferocious shoulder-to-shoulder wave. The sound of claws was everywhere, and through the seat of my pants I felt their teeth snapping closer and closer.
Phillipe’s guns blazed again, and the second chandelier exploded in the center of the floor. Again the animals shied away from the noise and flying debris, but not nearly as far as the first time. I put my head down and ran for everything I was worth. After a third round of gun blasts, the last chandelier crashed not far from the exit doors.
Animal and Audrey reached the doors first and got them to open. When I barreled past Phillipe, he looked like John Wayne defending the sands of Iwo Jima. His feet spread wide, he had a machine gun blazing in each hand. While he held them back, I dashed outside, where it was still raining. When he followed me, we slammed the doors closed.
The doors had large glass panels set into them. Looking through them, we saw a stampede of linebacker-sized saurians heading our way. Their blood lust aroused, they were determined to hunt us down. All four of us wedged our bodies against the doors and somehow managed to withstand their initial shoulder-crunching onslaught. They surged against the doors, pushing with ever greater force. We grunted and shoved and used all our strength to keep the doors closed. My shoulder and face were pressed against the glass. Only millimeters away was the slobbering, frustration-crazed face of a baby Gojira. He tried repeatedly to throw his powerful jaws over my head and bite down, but he only succeeded in leaving deep scratch marks in the glass. I was thinking, We can do it, we can hold them inside until the bombers get here.
But, of course, we wanted to eat our cake and have it, too. We wanted to lock them inside and get the hell away from the building before it went up in smoke. Phillipe, resourceful to the end, tried to shove one of his guns between the door handles. But it wasn’t easy. The lizards began head-butting the inside of the doors, forcing them open a few inches at a time. Then the glass broke and the razor-toothed monster that I had been staring at poked its head outside. The jaws opened over Audrey’s head. She ducked at the last minute, just as Phillipe got the gun wedged into the slot. As we backed away, the gun barrel began to bend out of shape. The metal wasn’t strong enough to hold the rambunctious youngsters back for long, but we hoped it would be long enough.
We were all drenched in sweat and our legs felt like rubber. We’d used every ounce of our strength to fight our way out of the nest. I was sure I couldn’t run another step. I bent over and rested my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. The radio on Phillipe’s belt began functioning once we were out in the open again. We heard the military pilots speaking back and forth.
“Stallion fifteen, this is Fox six. We are targeted and locked.”
“Fire at will.”
“Roger that. Missiles are away.”
As soon as I heard those words I somehow found an extra reserve of energy I didn’t think I had. “Run!” I yelled, and broke into another breathless, all-out sprint. Although I started out in the lead, the others ran past me on both sides. We ran across some sort of patio, down a long flight of rain-slick stairs, past the entrance to Penn Station, and out across another open pavilion. We were almost to the street, a totally deserted stretch of Seventh Avenue, when the missiles flashed past overhead, streaking in the opposite direction. Audrey stumbled, and as I came up from behind I scooped her up. We were running hand in hand when we heard the missiles penetrate the roof of the world’s best-known sports arena. We were halfway across the boulevard when the building blew to smithereens behind us. The force of the blast hit us before the sound reached our ears. There was a blinding flare of light, and for a split second I thought, Hey, I’m finally running really fast. Then I realized my feet were no longer in contact with the ground. The blast had picked all of us u
p and was hurling us toward the next sidewalk.
Landing was painful.
Although I didn’t get a chance to see the explosion itself, I have since watched it on tape. Most everyone has seen the tape I’m referring to. It’s that black-and-white digital video image made by an F-18’s automated tracking system, which has been played several hundred times on television. It shows the three Tomahawk missiles entering through the roof of Madison Square Garden with “surgical precision” and the incredibly powerful explosion that ensued. A moment after the roof shattered upward, the walls of the round building blew outward in unison. The sheer power of the explosion made the sturdy old Garden look like nothing more than a wooden barrel filled with gunpowder. In less than two seconds the twelve-story landmark was obliterated, reduced to an open pit of smoldering ashes.
I’d landed on my head. Even before I opened my eyes, I reached up and began examining my scalp ever so tenderly with my fingertips. Now I had a second lump to match the one Animal had given me earlier. It was painful, but I didn’t really mind. I was just delighted—and more than a little surprised—simply to be alive. The street around us was in bad shape: All the cars parked on the Garden side of Seventh Avenue were overturned or burning, or both. And the blast had blown out every window for blocks around. We were lying four abreast in the wet street. It was raining pretty hard.
I turned back and looked at the boiling mountain of flame coming from the hole in the ground that had, a moment before, been Gojira’s nest. As the remaining chunks of wall crumbled and collapsed, a gruesome noise filled the air—the painful screams of young lizards roasting alive. Their tortured cries echoed through the empty streets like the shrieking of all the souls in hell. Slowly the pitiful sound died away, and soon all was silent except for the crackle of the flames and the pattering of the rain.
I sat up rubbing my head and checked to see if Audrey was hurt. “Are you okay?” I asked her. She said she was fine, a little shaken up, maybe, but not injured. I noticed that she was staring at me with an expression I didn’t recognize. “Aud, you look a little funny. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“No, I’m fine,” she assured me. “It’s just that … somehow I never imagined your life was this exciting.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” I told her.
Then she took me completely by surprise. “Nick,” she said, “I’d like to find out.”
I did a quick double take. For a second I thought she might be saying that we should try getting together again. But that would have been too good to be true. Surely she meant something else, something more platonic. Or did she? She leaned in, bringing that angelic face of hers closer and closer to mine. When our eyes met, she was so close, it almost seemed as though we were going to kiss. And then … well, I could go on, but I doubt whether anyone is very interested in the love life of some boring worm guy. Let’s just say that Audrey and I spent a couple of minutes getting reacquainted.
With a great deal of moaning and groaning, Animal scraped himself off the pavement. Like the rest of us, he had bruises all over after a long tumble across the asphalt. But he forgot his own pain when he saw his video camera lying in the street. Like a mother concerned for her injured baby, he ran over and scooped the machine up in his arms. Part of the plastic housing had broken off, but the camera was still working. Greatly relieved, he turned to check on Phillipe. “Yo, Frenchie, comment allez-vous or whatever? You okay?”
“I could use a coffee,” he answered groggily. The wily undercover agent forced his battered body into a sitting position. He was several years older than the rest of us and it was beginning to show. A drip of blood rolled down the side of his face from a fresh abrasion above his left eye. “Good French coffee,” he specified.
“You got it, my treat,” Animal said, helping him to his feet. The radio on Phillipe’s belt continued to pick up the army’s “secure” communications. As we watched Madison Square Garden burn down to a huge glowing bowl in the earth, we kept one ear tuned to the radio. Amid the flurry of messages, we heard Hicks speaking from the command center to the pilots of the F-18s, congratulating them on the job they’d done. Then we heard O’Neal. He was headed into the city with a convoy of armored vehicles to “search for survivors.” It wasn’t clear if they meant surviving baby Gojiras or the four of us. In either case, we would soon have a ride back to New Jersey.
Ignoring the rain, I put my arm around Audrey and we walked a little closer to the fire. It resembled nothing so much as the red-orange caldera of an active volcano and was actually quite a beautiful sight. All in all, it was a happy ending. We had succeeded in destroying the nest, Audrey had filed a dynamite news report, Animal had shot several minutes of historic pictures, Phillipe had protected his country’s reputation—and best of all, I had my girl back after eight long, lonesome years.
Still, none of us felt like celebrating. The mangled corpses of baby Gojiras lay in the street, strewn around the gigantic fire pit. And Gojira himself was dead. We heard on the radio that they were dredging the river for his body.
My emotions were mixed when I learned that it was all over. On the one hand, I was glad the animals were dead. It meant the millions of people who lived in Manhattan could come home and not worry about being eaten alive (not by reptiles, anyhow). But at the same time I was sorry this new and spectacular species had been sent into extinction only a few days after it was first discovered. If only there had been more time, we might have been able to capture one of the infants alive and raise it in captivity. It’s well known that Komodo dragons, fierce predators in the wild, are quite docile in captivity. One of Gojira’s children would have made quite an attraction at the Bronx Zoo’s petting zoo!
Phillipe came up and asked if he could speak to me in private. As Audrey went to check on Animal, the man with the salt-and-pepper beard scanned the streets in both directions, knowing the U.S. Army was going to arrive any moment. “Nick, I have to go.”
It didn’t surprise me. Even though he had saved New York City from total destruction, he would be in a world of trouble if anyone found out. He had hidden himself from the camera while we were in the broadcast booth, and there was no other physical evidence linking him to the action. If he slipped away before the army arrived, no one would ever have to know the heroic role he had played. He was, after all, a foreign agent conducting a secret war on U.S. soil—not the kind of thing France would want published in the newspapers. I knew it wouldn’t do any good trying to talk him out of it, so I shook his hand and told him to stay in touch.
Then he walked over to have a word with Animal, probably about the videotape in his camera. There were plenty of shots of Phillipe leading the escape from the nest. I knew Animal wasn’t going to hand over that tape without an argument, so I watched with interest to see what would happen. But before the subject ever came up, we felt the ground begin to shake.
Then we heard that famous wailing cry, something between a lion’s roar and the shriek of a prehistoric eagle. We knew in a heartbeat that Gojira was still alive. But the sound was muffled and seemed to come from far away. It echoed in all directions around the deserted city. Only when the ground began to shake more violently did we realize that he was below us, using the subway system again to move underground.
We turned toward the smoking lava pit that had been Madison Square Garden and saw something begin to stir the pot of glowing embers. Chunks of burning debris were thrown high in the air as a huge shape thrashed around in the crater. Then a huge gray head with piercing amber eyes burst out of the smoldering wreckage.
A moment before, I’d been inwardly mourning his demise. But when I saw him rise through the ashes like a mythological phoenix, I groaned out loud. It had already been a long night, and it looked like it was going to get a lot longer.
In one fluid motion, he climbed up out of Penn Station and into the burning Garden, then lifted his torso and long neck several stories into the air. Great cascades of blood poured down his flanks and drip
ped into the pavement as he lumbered up onto the street and towered over us. The navy’s torpedoes had sheared away large patches of his scaly armor, and he stood above us partially denuded, war-torn. He bent down and nuzzled gently at something on the ground in one place after another, becoming more agitated all the while. We realized what he was doing: inspecting the burned and battered bodies of his children, looking desperately for one of them to show a sign of life. But they were all as dead as could be. When Gojira understood this, he arched his back, threw his neck back, and howled into the sky. This time the scream was different. It sounded like a cry of suffering.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. He was screaming out in pain over the bodies of his dead children. The sound cut through me like a cold blade and resonated in some primordial part of my nervous system. For the first time I thought I saw an expression cross the huge saurian’s face—the nostrils flared, the nictitating membranes closed over the eyes, and the lower jaw quivered. It was impossible not to feel a pang of sympathy for this poor grieving father. And my heart would have gone out to him except for one thing: He was going to kill us.
The titanic lizard wheeled its great head in our direction and glared down at us with those burning honey-colored eyes. All the pain on his face gathered itself into a fireball of hatred. The eyes stretched wide open, the tail began to lash back and forth, and its mouth gaped to reveal the ragged teeth set in his glistening pink gums.
“He looks angry,” I hypothesized.
“Thanks, Einstein. Couldn’t’ve figured that out by myself,” Animal shot back.
We were in a vulnerable, exposed position facing a wrathful and highly lethal enemy. Naturally, in such a situation, we turned to Phillipe for leadership. “What do we do now?”
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