“Does this cab have high beams?” I asked.
“No. You gotta be kidding me,” groaned a less-than-encouraging voice from the backseat.
But I was quite serious. Without another word, Phillipe adopted my plan and gunned the engine. The cab peeled out and we shot forward through the darkness. Twenty, forty, sixty miles per hour. We were driving blind on a collision course with the creature’s head. I don’t know how Phillipe avoided smashing into the walls. Maybe that’s another thing he learned at the secret agent academy. When he sensed that a head-on collision was imminent, he switched on the brights. I reached over and held down the horn.
Startled by the sudden noise and light, Gojira flinched. He pulled his head away from the tunnel just enough to allow us to blast like a cannonball out of the entrance. We flew, literally, over a ramp and bottomed out again in the dirt of the construction site, skidding sideways. This slowed our forward momentum to a tire-spinning crawl. Gojira spun around and his huge hands began feeling for us on the ground. We were sitting ducks, dead in the water. But the high beams must have blinded him momentarily. Otherwise he would have snatched us up and done whatever he was planning to do. The tires eventually found some traction and we got out onto the pavement once again.
“Which way?” our taxi driver demanded.
Audrey and Animal couldn’t agree. They shouted conflicting directions, then they shouted at each other, then again at Phillipe, arguing vehemently over the best way to reach our destination. I think all New Yorkers are like that. It was another testament to Phillipe’s skill not only that he was able to steer a course toward the bridge, but that he didn’t stop the car and order the two of them to get out. It was about midnight, and the city was so empty and still, it felt like we were racing through a graveyard. We had been moving south with no sign of our pursuer for a couple of minutes when Phillipe caught a glimpse of him.
“We’ve got company,” he announced stonily, eyes on the mirror.
Suddenly the arguing stopped and the cab was dead quiet again except for the whine of the overheated engine. We all whipped around and looked through the back window. Gojira was galloping up behind us, moving like no other animal I’d ever seen. He used his powerful back legs to kick himself forward in great kangaroolike thrusts, a couple of city blocks at a time, and landed on his forepaws, balancing himself in the air long enough for the hind legs to coil again for another leap. He’d given us a head start but was quickly closing the gap.
“Straight ahead, baby,” Animal yelled. “Faster.”
But Phillipe eased off the gas and turned onto a side street. In an exhibition of superior driving skill, he took us on an evasive, zigzagging route through the East Village, Little Italy, and Chinatown. He cut either right or left at every second intersection, leaving me feeling nauseous and totally turned around. I had no idea where we were when he doused the headlights and rolled up to a deserted intersection.
“City hall,” Animal said, leaning over the seat back. “Perfect. I thought you didn’t know where you were going.”
Phillipe shrugged. “Just lucky.”
None of us quite believed that. Then Audrey, after looking out each of the windows, uttered those famous last words: “I think we lost him!” The one surefire way to make Gojira appear out of nowhere was to say those words. We all panicked a little bit when she spoke them. Phillipe slapped himself in the forehead, Animal groaned, and I turned around and said, “Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really,” she said, scanning in all directions. “See for yourself.”
We looked around and saw that, for the time being, Audrey appeared to be right. He had followed us around that first right-hand turn but hadn’t been seen since. The coast looked clear, not a saurian in sight. We rolled down all the windows and listened for the sound of smashing buildings but couldn’t hear anything louder than the rain and the hissing of our leaking radiator.
Audrey pointed out a brightly lit road sign with a big arrow looming in the distance. “Brooklyn Bridge, thataway.” It was only then that I realized Phillipe had driven us exactly where we needed to be. The green illuminated sign was set on an elevated roadway, the bridge’s long entrance ramp. We edged out into the intersection, close to Pace University, and saw the first of the bridge’s twin Gothic towers rising into the sky. One thing was clear: As soon as we got onto the ramp, we’d be out in the open again, completely exposed. Making matters worse, the half-mile path had tall buildings on both sides. Even though they were set back from the road, we knew Gojira could be lurking behind any one of them, waiting to pounce on us when we drove by.
On the other hand, he might not be.
“Let’s not overestimate him. And remember, we have the element of surprise,” I lectured the other people in the cab. “After all, he doesn’t know where we’re going. By the time he sees or hears us, it’ll be too late. We’ll already be on the bridge.”
I convinced no one.
Nevertheless, Phillipe took off. He pulled onto the ramp, pointed the nose of the car down the center of the roadway, and smashed down on the accelerator. Gaining speed, we whizzed toward the bridge, alert for any sign of a lurking lizard. But it looked as if I had been right. Gojira didn’t spring out at us. As we sped toward the shoreline and left the buildings behind, the East River came into view. Suddenly we were confronted with a new problem: Gojira wasn’t chasing us. We were supposed to be luring him out into the open, but he was nowhere to be seen. Realizing this, Phillipe eased off the accelerator just a bit.
Nothing now stood between us and the bridge. We were fast approaching the huge sign we’d seen before and looking out the windows for any sign of him when the road in front of us cracked apart and lifted upward. The huge section of the ramp lifted into the air and broke apart. Gojira’s enormous head erupted from below, using the flat, bony part of his skull to crash through the pavement. Where there had been three lanes of asphalt, there was suddenly nothing but quivering snout and jagged yellow teeth. The beast unhinged his great jaws and waited for us to drive inside.
Everybody screamed.
If Phillipe’s reflexes hadn’t been as sharp as they were, we would have given a new meaning to the phrase “drive-thru food.” But he managed to lock up the brakes and whip us around into yet another perfect one-eighty. As we spun around to face the city the passenger-side door cracked hard against the concrete base of the road sign. We had come dangerously close this time. The rear end of the cab was only ten or twelve feet from the monster’s hideous mouth. His misshapen teeth glistened like blood-red razor wire in the glow of our brake lights. The second we were pointing downhill again, Phillipe pounded the gas pedal, and the tires spun and squealed. And squealed, and squealed. We weren’t moving. A cloud of choking smoke surrounded the rear of the vehicle: burning rubber. It took us a moment to realize he had taken a quick bite out of the ramp, chewing through the asphalt as if it were a slab of peanut brittle. His last bite punctured the taxi’s trunk, pinning us to the roadway.
Everybody screamed again.
My life flashed before my eyes—especially the hideous way it was going to end. I was certain we were going to be swallowed, taxicab and all, into the body of the infuriated, gargantuan dragon, just as Jonah had been swallowed into the belly of the whale—and, the mind being the mysterious thing that it is, it occurred to me that Jonah hadn’t had to deal with caustic reptilian digestive juices. The teeth lifted out of the trunk and the cab squirted free once more. Phillipe had never lifted his foot off the accelerator, so we whiplashed forward immediately. But we didn’t get very far. And my nightmare vision became a horrible reality. The roof of the creature’s mouth was suddenly above us and craggy yellow teeth bit down, lowering in front of us like the closing gates of hell.
“We’re in his mouth!” Animal started yelling. “We’re in his mouth!”
As I’m sure you can imagine, it was not only dark in there but appallingly malodorous. The mouth couldn’t close completely because he’d also bitt
en down on the metal road sign. But as the powerful jaw muscles flexed, all the light bulbs on the sign exploded and the metal began to bend. The roof of the taxicab began collapsing on top of us. One of the windows shattered, and everybody was screaming at once. But no one was louder than Animal, who shouted over the top of everything, “We’re in his mouth! We’re in his mouth!”
The cab started shaking from side to side in a violent manner. The road beneath the car was still anchored to the ramp, which temporarily prevented his tongue from shoveling us backward into the gaping red hole of his throat. It was wide open and waiting for us, guarded by a huge set of tonsils that swung back and forth like wet medicine balls. We got a lucky break when the sturdy road sign next to us refused to collapse any further. It stabbed into the roof of his mouth, preventing him from flattening the car any more. The violent shaking continued. Gojira, we realized, had literally bit off more than he could chew. As the concrete and asphalt fell away, we saw there were hundreds of steel reinforcing rods laced through the structure. The reason we were shaking was that Gojira was trying to tear the entire section of roadway out of the ground. This he could have accomplished easily, except that he seemed unwilling to open his mouth even for a second. Now that he had us, he knew better than to let us go.
Smart lizard.
“We’re in his mouth! Oh, crap, we’re in his mouth!” Animal continued to shout. Finally Phillipe, who was trying to think of something to do, turned and yelled at him to shut up. But Animal couldn’t stop. “Whaddaya mean, shut up? We’re in his goddamn mouth!” The shaking continued, but instead of a side-to-side motion, we started rolling left and right. I crashed against Phillipe, then he tumbled against me. With patience and tenacity, Gojira was twisting the steel bars, weakening them further with every passing second.
“Gun it! Get us out of here!” Audrey screamed, freaking out.
“I’m trying!” Phillipe screamed back at her, his foot still jammed down on the gas pedal. It was sheer mayhem. With everyone sliding and crashing around the interior of the cab, it was impossible to think clearly. To brace myself, I wrapped one leg around the side of the seat, shoved the other against the dashboard, and used both arms to push against the ceiling. And then, as if matters weren’t already bad enough, one of the electrical cables to the road sign tore loose and began swinging wildly around the inside of his mouth. Each time it brushed the hood of the taxi a buzzing shower of sparks erupted in the darkness.
The reinforcing rods anchoring us to the rest of the ramp began to snap one by one. Gojira had pulled them taut, and they twanged like guitar strings when they broke. I realized we were only seconds away from a slide down the wet hole of his esophagus. As a last resort, I began climbing out the window. When Audrey saw what I was doing, she hollered at me.
“Don’t, Nick, it’s too dangerous!” (I’m still rolling my eyes about that one.)
I slithered into a sitting position with my elbows resting on the roof of the cab. My head banged against the rigid upper palate of Gojira’s mouth. The inside of his cheek, a slab of wet flesh as thick as a wall, spanked hard against my back. I felt his warm saliva leaching through my T-shirt. As I struggled to maintain my balance, the loose cable swiped right past my nose and struck the metal sign, sending sparks everywhere. I lunged across the top of the cab and somehow managed to grab hold of the insulated part of the wire. I immediately jabbed the exposed tip of it into the rubbery pink flesh where tooth met gum.
The electrical surge shot through the lizard’s body. Reflexively he jerked backward with enough force to snap all the remaining cables. As he threw his head to the side, we felt ourselves whip around 180 degrees at spine-snapping velocity. The huge mouth opened and was flooded with the lights coming off the bridge. Gojira had spun himself completely around and put his head close to the ground, trying to cough us up. The bridge was right in front of us. As soon as the wall of teeth lifted out of our way, the battered taxicab lurched forward with me still dangling halfway out of the window.
The thirty-foot section of pavement sat like a doctor’s tongue depressor inside the big reptile’s mouth and acted as a natural launch ramp. We shot out of Gojira’s mouth like a dented yellow missile. We flew, but not far. We were at least fifteen feet off the ground when we left the mouth. The cab plummeted downward and hit the ground so hard I was sure the chassis had broken in half—to say nothing of our spinal columns. When at last I picked myself off the floorboards and looked outside, Phillipe was racing us across the bridge, speeding toward the first tower.
“Oh, my God, he ate it! He ate the whole thing! I can’t believe this guy.”
I turned around to see what Animal was talking about. “What? He ate what?”
“The whole damn on-ramp. He just swallowed it! He ate the whole thing!” And then, as if the idea were occurring to him for the first time, he added, “We’re all gonna die.”
It may help if I describe the bridge for those who haven’t seen it. First, it’s a suspension bridge, rather like the Golden Gate Bridge. From end to end it is just over a mile long, but the part overhanging the river is only half of that. Twin gothic towers, built of brick, rise 276 feet out of the water. On the night in question, their peaked archways, lit from below, looked as though they had been designed by the same architect who built Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. The main suspension cables sagged in long graceful swoops between the towers and were connected to the roadway by means of many smaller cables—thousands of them—that crisscrossed to form giant, geometric spiderwebs. The whole structure was stout, spooky-looking, and built to withstand just about anything. Phillipe had us moving at well over a hundred miles per hour, so it didn’t take long to reach the first tower. I looked behind and noticed the absence of two-hundred-foot-tall lizards. He hadn’t followed us onto the bridge.
“Whoa, slow down a little bit. He’s not back there.”
Phillipe did more than slow down. He coasted to a complete stop and parked. We were just beyond the first tower. After studying the situation in his rearview mirror, he switched on his emergency blinkers to make sure we were easy to see. In the backseat Animal was still shaking his head and muttering, “He ate the damn on-ramp.”
“He’s still back there,” eagle-eyed Audrey reported.
“I see him.” Staring into his side mirror, Phillipe was as calm as a gunslinger. He reached into the pocket of his camo jacket, pulled out an unfiltered Gauloise, and lit it. He noticed the dirty look I was giving him and blew his smoke out the window.
I wagged a finger at him. “Those things are gonna kill you,” I said.
He didn’t smile.
Gojira was hunched over in the shadows, partially out in the open now, staring at us from near the foot of the bridge. He was only a few hundred feet from where he had first stepped out of the river and entered Manhattan less than forty-eight hours earlier, near Pier 17 and the Fulton Fish Market. Streetlamps cast a pallid glow across his left flank, and we could see his rib cage heave each time he took a breath. We waited tensely for him to make a move, and finally he did. With all the stealth of a hunting jaguar, he began slinking forward into the light. But something caught his attention and stopped him. A moment later our less-perceptive ears picked up the sound that had spooked him. Over the sound of the rain, we heard an angry rumble growing in the sky. The F-18s were back. They roared past, high above and hidden in the rain clouds.
“He knows it’s a trap,” I said. “He’s not going to chase us out here.”
“He has to!” Audrey declared as the sound of the jets began to recede. “We’ve got to get him out in the open.”
“I am sure he will come.” Phillipe flicked his ashes out the window. “We killed his babies.” And almost as soon as these words had left his mouth, they came true. With the F-18s temporarily out of range, Gojira’s desire for revenge overcame his instinct for self-preservation. I realize it’s a strange thing to say about a reptile, but I suspect he was calculating he would be able to kill us
before the planes returned. He erupted out of his hiding place and, with a shrill war cry, charged out onto the bridge.
Phillipe hit the gas and we peeled out again. Before we could get up to speed, the roadway beneath us began to jump and sway and twist—all at the same time. Gojira’s great weight, over five hundred tons by most estimates, shook the bridge as though it were made out of paper and string. The shaking was even worse inside the moving taxicab. We advanced in bullfrog fashion: flying through the air one second and bottoming out hard the next. It was like driving during a massive earthquake, and we were moving far, far too slowly. Out the rear window I watched Gojira run down the bridge on his hind legs, quickly closing in on us. We had moved barely a hundred yards before he was approaching the first tower.
The main suspension cables were about eighty-five feet apart, barely enough room for the furious giant to slip between them. But the inner cables, the thinner strands that formed the spiderwebs, were only about thirty feet apart. As he thundered toward the tower, he lowered his head as if he would use it as a battering ram. There is no doubt in my mind that he could have broken through the massive brick tower. But the suspension cables slowed him down before he had the chance to try. Individually they were not strong enough to stop his progress—he barged through the first ten or twelve of them effortlessly. But the closer he came to the tower, the more of them he had to penetrate. They slowed and then stopped his progress. Biting and kicking, he raged against the insignificant little barriers, slashing at them with his fore claws until one of his arms became tangled up to the shoulder. For a moment he stopped moving and appeared to consider the predicament he was in. He cocked his head slightly to one side as a dog might do, staring down at the puzzle of wires.
With Gojira occupied, the swaying of the bridge eased up. We took advantage of the moment to shoot forward, getting most of the way to the second tower. The sight of us escaping brought his blood back to the boiling point. He screamed again and used his massive strength to shrug free of the wires, snapping them with a series of sharp cracks. For a moment he glanced behind him. Either he’d heard something back there or he was considering retreat. But the sight of us escaping proved too much. He coiled his hind legs, pounced astonishingly high into the air, and landed atop the tower itself! Even after all I had seen him do, this leap was utterly astonishing. With the languid, heavy grace of a big cat, he used his claws to climb over the top and leap down on the other side.
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