Date: 2012-04-11 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Science Fiction
Description: WINNER OF THE 2012 WONDERLAND AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION! "A tour-de-force! Goodfellow's latest is his best yet. Compulsive, breakneck reading!" - BRIAN KEENE, author of The Rising and Ghoul IT'S THEIR WORLD... NOW GET THE FUCK OFF! Whether on the sun-kissed beaches of a nameless South Pacific paradise or in the suffocating dungeons of retail Hell, the misfits of evolution and mistakes of misbegotten science are battling, breeding, and feeding. And they're looking at you... COMING ATTRACTIONS! They came seeking cheap thrills and interspecies recreational sex, but they reaped a whirlwind of clus
Publisher: Swallowdown Press

Praise for

Cody Goodfellow

&

ALL-MONSTER ACTION!

“ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is hilarious, action-packed, and way too much fun. Over-the-top and wild! Highly recommended.”—JONATHAN MABERRY, New York Times Bestselling author of Dust & Decay and Assassin’s Code

“A tour-de-force! Goodfellow's latest is his best yet. Compulsive, breakneck reading!”—BRIAN KEENE author of The Rising and Ghoul

“This is your chance. You only think you're hip—but you haven't read this Cody Goodfellow book, so you're not yet. Now you can be hip, and read something crazy entertaining too. You can't go wrong, man, I'm telling you. You’ve got to read this thing. I mean, if a book rocks, it rocks, that's all.”—JOHN SHIRLEY, author of A Song Called Youth

“In terms of sheer scope of over-the-top outrageous imaginings--something that they'll NEVER be able to afford the special effects budget to film and if they did it'd make Michael Bay say, ‘Dude, too much!'—ALL-MONSTER ACTION! utterly takes the cake.”—THE HORROR FICTION REVIEW

“Cody Goodfellow's writing etches itself inside your eyelids and chases your brain back into the dark corners where you can't escape. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! has more high concepts in a paragraph than a whole summer of blockbusters: a mad scientist who's passed on like the flu; biotech mutants harvested for fun and profit; and a giant monster arms race that ends in a showdown on the moon. This book is a human's-eye view of the future coming down hard on us, like a Tokyo resident gazing up at the sky and seeing only the outline of a giant foot.”—CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH, author of Blood Oath and The President’s Vampire

“ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is a dirty bomb right to the cerebral cortex—it's sharp, smart, scary, scarring, sexy and brutally funny. And like any good bomb, it's got specific targets in mind: Genre and gender, racism, colonialism, ageism and classism. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! demonstrates again that Cody Goodfellow is some kind of mad-ass genius.”—LISA MORTON, author of The Castle of Los Angeles and Monsters of L.A. and Four-Time Winner of the Bram Stoker Award

“One of the most unique and creative works I've ever read. The author is quite obviously insane, but like Colonel Kurtz, he's got a plan. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is packed with wild, driving energy that carries the reader along like an out-of-control Disney ride. Cody Goodfellow combines genres and crazed pop-cult tropes with finesse and style. Old Mr. Yeats kept bitchin’ about ‘the centre cannot hold.’ Bullshit. With ALL-MONSTER ACTION! Cody Goodfellow proves he can hold the center together and play lead guitar at the same time. Filled with crazed, strange characters drawn from pop-cult, z-grade cinema and zillions of comic books, the pace is frantic and the imagery often makes you laugh while you cringe. What impresses me most with ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is Cody's ability to take cultural icons and clichés and turn them into a funny, intelligent, satiric story that perhaps Max Ernst would have written if he fronted Black Flag. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! made me remember those late nights as a kid, watching amazingly strange films and thrilling to every minute. Cody Goodfellow must have caught those films, too, because his fevered stories have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. Reading ALL-MONSTER ACTION! gave me the same pleasure as the first time I saw ‘The Navy vs. the Night Monsters.’ Brilliant!”—RICKY LEE GROVE, The Greatest Character Actor Ever (Army Of Darkness, Point Break, Scanner Cop) and the Pizza Delivery Man in Your Mom's Recurring Wet Dreams

“Cody Goodfellow’s imagination is a freeway flyer, and his prose is a ride on a rocket-sled. He’s one of the two or three god-damned best writers in the Genres today.”—MICHAEL SHEA, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Nifft the Lean and Copping Squid

“Cody Goodfellow’s work is ‘80s vintage horror with a contemporary edge. An exemplary wordsmith, his prose sticks a needle in your brain and gives it a twist. This stuff is Lovecraft on acid.”—LAIRD BARRON, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories

“Cody Goodfellow is a force to be reckoned with.”—NORMAN PARTRIDGE, author of The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Goodfellow is one of those writers whose voice sweeps you away like the undertow of a tsunami, and once you’re in, he’s got you pinned.”—MIKE ARNZEN, author of Play Dead

“Goodfellow’s fiction has the otherworldliness of Lovecraft, the sarcasm of Joe R. Lansdale, the mojo of a Motley Crue tell-all and best of all it’s wrapped together with prose that would satisfy fans of high literature in horror.”—MONSTER LIBRARIAN

“Cody Goodfellow is untouched as a breathless reporter of violent action, relating it in hurtling prose full of striking and sometimes hilarious metaphors.”—STRANGE AEONS

“Cody Goodfellow is one of a kind. Highly Recommended!”—DARK DISCOVERIES

ALL-MONSTER ACTION!

Cody Goodfellow

Swallowdown Press

Portland, OR

Swallowdown Press

PO Box 86810

Portland, OR 97286-0810

WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM

ISBN: 1-933929-07-3

“Doorway To The Sky” originally appeared in A Dark And Deadly Valley (Silverthought Press, 2007), “Venus Of Santa Cruz” originally appeared in Lullaby Hearse #6 (2005), and Mighty Unclean (Dark Arts Books, 2009), “Wage Of Dinosaurs” originally appeared in Probing Uranus (CreateSpace, 2010), “Care & Feeding Of Sea Monkeys” originally appeared in Traps (Dark Hart Press, 2008), “Kungmin Horangi: The People's Tiger” originally appeared in Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales (Agog! Press, 2005), “The Island Of Dr. Otaku” originally appeared in Monstrous: 20 Tales Of Giant Creature Terror (Permuted Press, 2009).

Copyright ©2012 Swallowdown Press

All Monster Action Copyright ©2012 by Cody Goodfellow

Cover art copyright ©2012 by Mike Dubisch

Interior art copyright ©2012 by Nick Gucker for “Coming Attractions” art and Mike Dubisch for “Our Feature Presentation” art

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for purposes of satire or parody. This is a work of fiction.

Book design by Carlton Mellick III.

Printed in the USA.

Acknowledgements

First, a Brobdingnagian wave of gratitude, love and awed respect to Mike Dubisch, whose artwork is like a host of whip-wielding furies, always urging me to make it weirder.

Thanks for help with various facets of this book (and the life lived while writing it) to Robert Hood, Robin Penn, Ryan Thomas, John Everson, Bill Breedlove, Jarret Keene, Jeromy & Claudia Cox, Mike Heffernan, the Iliad Bookshop crew, Eraserhead Press, Adam Barnes, Rob Winfield, Steve Cordova, Curt Benedetto, Kristen Tinderholt, Matt Carter, Darius Shamir, Benji Gillespie, Jeff Conner, John Palisano, Zak Jarvis, Tom Lynch, Oscar Rios, Adam Niswander, Nick Gucker, Kelly Young, Eric Morgret, Martin Roberts, Aaron Vanek, Andrew Kasch, my funky Dutch uncle John Skipp… and enormous, Tokyo-crushing love and admiration for my unspeakably wonderful, unutterably long-suffering wife, Victoria.

Contents

Coming Attractions

Doorway to the Sky

Venus of Santa Cruz

The Wage of Dinosaurs

The Care & Feeding of Sea Monkeys

Our Feature Presentation

ALL-MONSTER ACTION!

Episode I—Kungmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger

Episode II—The Island of Dr. Otaku

Episode III—All Cities Attack!

Bonus Features

Wet Nurse

We Need to Make Things More Repulsive: The Early Sketches of Nick Gucker

For Millie, my grandmother;

And Megalon, my godfather.

Coming Attractions

Doorway to the Sky

Most of the boys were already drunk and swimming in the ocean by the light of the moon when Harry Truman cut into the Armed Forces Radio Big Band Program to announce that the Enola Gay had dropped a new kind of bomb on Hiroshima.

Sergeant Canute and Private Laslovic were tossing a baseball and arguing about the end of last week’s movie, which had been shipped without the final reel.

“Tellin’ you, kid,” Canute said, lobbing the ball at Laslovic, “that ape wasn’t headed for a happy ending.”

“Aw horsefeathers, Sarge!” The private snapped the ball out of his mitt and fired it back hard enough to bruise Canute’s palm through the leather. “They couldn’t shoot him down without killing the girl, and they just couldn’t kill her, could they?”

“Las, it ain’t a new movie.” Canute rubbed his hand, but held onto the ball until Laslovic calmed down. “I saw it twice when you were in short pants, and it always ended the same.”

“Maybe they fixed it,” Laslovic retorted. “I never saw it before, but I know they made another one. I seen the posters, so I figure I know how it turned out. He had a son with the dame, or how else would it be a little white ape?”

Canute dropped the ball. “You win, kid.”

“Jesus Christ! Japs!” Corporal Wheeler raced out of the commo hut and almost knocked the sergeant down, which would be no mean feat.

“Yeah, we heard, pal. Harry gave ‘em hell.”

“Not in Japan, Canute, here! There’s a Jap fighter wing on the prowl! Cherry, out on night patrol in the PBY, spotted them not two hundred miles north, headed our way.”

“Nuts!” Laslovic said. “There ain’t a Jap warship within five hundred miles of here.”

Canute shook his head. “They must’ve come from that carrier our boys sunk.” Word had come in that a 6,000-ton Jap auxiliary carrier was spotted out of the Marshalls. Nobody knew where she came from or where she was headed, but Navy torpedo boats out of Tarawa sank her about four hundred miles to the north.

“I got a fix on Cherry, but his radio went dead. He took so much lead, it sounded like they were making popcorn—and then the signal got all loopy. I think they got him.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. The unit hadn’t seen a single casualty in nearly a year, unless you counted malaria and cirrhosis, and everybody liked Lt. Cherry.

“They won’t come here, Sarge,” Laslovic said. “Nobody came here when the war was on, and it’s over for sure now, ain’t it?”

Wheeler slapped his forehead. “Thank you all the same, General MacArthur, but we’d better tell the Colonel—”

Canute pointed at the men sporting in the surf, a quarter mile down the short airstrip. “You go ahead and tell him, but he’ll just get in the way.”

“Well then, what do we do?”

Canute scratched his cockeyed lantern jaw. They could be looking to surrender, or they could be mad with rage and their crazy yellow notions of honor. “Douse the lights and have Smitty and three other guys dust off the fifty-cals and find some belts. If they’re looking for something to crash into, we’ll just let them roll by in the dark and none the wiser, ‘til they run out of fuel and drop in the drink.”

Laslovic pointed at the mountaintop. “What about them, Sarge?”

They all turned and looked. Wheeler moaned, “Ah God, it looks like a fucking Hollywood premiere up there.” The headhunters were having another rumpus.

“Somebody better go up there and tell them to put that fire out,” Laslovic said.

Wheeler asked, “Hey, Canute, do those cannibals have a radio?”

Canute took out a stub of cigar and lit it with a kitchen match. “Where the hell would they get a radio?”

“Somebody’s putting out from here, sir, and it sure isn’t English.”

Laslovic’s eyes got big. “Jap spies?”

Wheeler turned and ducked back into the commo hut. In a few moments, Tommy Dorsey’s “Indian Summer” was rudely squashed by warbling distortion and a hollow baritone voice chanting in a language that was not Japanese.

“It’s that witch doctor, ain’t it?” Laslovic asked.

“Afraid so,” Canute said. “Wheeler, go rustle up some Coca Cola, beer, smokes, razors, an axe, and a couple rifles.”

Laslovic broke in, “Sir, we’re not supposed to give them guns—”

“Not for them, nimrod, for us. And eighty-six that squawk-box.”

The hollow, booming voice followed him across the airstrip as he loped back to his tent, the sepulchral tones of Vailala Madness making him run.

He’d heard stories about this kind of thing. This was why the CO tried to keep them away from the natives, who were, after all, God’s children, and like children, prone to imitate their elders. The hijinx they got up to on that mountain had amused and slightly unsettled Canute before, but now, it clenched his guts with icy fists, because he knew they had no radio.

“Yumi paitim dua,” the airwaves said.

We knock at the door.

“Opim rot bilong kago.”

Open the road of the cargo.

“Kago kam hariap.”

Cargo comes quickly.

“Kago kam tunait.”

Tonight—

While Wheeler stocked a gift basket, Canute set Laslovic brewing coffee and monitoring the radio, and assigned himself the thankless task of trying to get Lt. Col. Shubert out of the surf.

They’d never had an air raid, not even a drill, and now, with the announcement that a single plane dropping a single bomb had opened up hell in Hiroshima, the war was surely all but over. But the Japs were unknowable in their motivations. Any race that could make suicide into an attack strategy had to be more insect than man, and with their hive kicked over, small wonder that the kill-crazy drones were coming out of the woodwork to die with their stingers in any available target. That they would––that they even could––come here seemed unimaginable.

The war had little use for their island when it rolled through this stretch of the South Pacific, almost two years ago. Now and again, a plane landed and refueled or sought repairs on its way to somewhere else. A junked Curtiss P-40 lay nose-down at the end of the landing strip where it crashed after coming in on fire from a naval engagement during the battle at Guadalcanal. A snapshot of the ground crew with Captain Eddie Rickenbacker hung above the radio, taken shortly before the mission where he and seven flyers ditched in the Pacific and were lost at sea for three weeks.

The island lay at the southern end of a meek archipelago of guano-streaked rocks in the vast blue void between the Solomons and the Phoenix Islands, where Amelia Earhart was said to have vanished.
It was less than two miles long, and little more than a conical peak with hunched, shaggy shoulders of jungle and canyons so steep and twisted as to suggest the folds of a green hood rising out of the sea. Dense necklaces of coral reefs all around it made anchorage for anything larger than a PT boat all but impossible.

The Australians paved the airstrip, but abandoned it when the Japs took the south Pacific. They left behind a couple coastwatchers, who were never heard from again. If the Japs ever landed here, they never planted a flag, and in late ‘43, the Army set up a fighter squadron and radio station. The fighters were pulled forward for the final push on Japan, and only a service platoon with a few patrol pilots remained behind.

A tiny outpost, well out of the way of the war, and all the other ways of the world; it was the closest the Army would show to mercy, for nearly every man on it was shot to hell, and no good for harder duty.

Beside the airstrip, a row of Quonset huts, squad tents and a couple improvised sheds peered out through the greedy green, all but swallowed by aggressive creeping vines and dense stands of bamboo. Where the jungle could not grow over the human works, it crumbled them: drumming rain, moss and fungus prying loose lumber and sheet metal, twisting apart the duck walks and the corrugated metal planks that floored the runway, reducing the iron to red powder.

It was a weird island, and so weirdly beautiful that even the Army couldn’t spoil it. The sole native predators were carnivorous plants and spiders the size of a big man’s hand. Giant crabs scuttled out of the sea to climb the palms and harvest coconuts. The sunsets could strike a man blind with lavish orgies of raw, pure color, striated bands of orange, gold and violet painting the fleeting illusion of even more remote and beautiful islands in the sky.

The natives lived on the far mountainside and shunned the Army camp like it was unhallowed ground. The CO had forbidden any contact with “God’s children,” but Canute quietly traded with them, Coca Cola, cigarettes and chipped beef for taro, yams and copra to offset the terrors of Turkey Surprise night in the mess tent.

Needless to say, Wheeler didn’t like the orders. “Why in hell do I have to go play air raid warden to the goddamned headhunters?”

Canute popped knobby knuckles and flexed gnarled forearms, wads of muscle frolicking under sunburned leather mottled with faded blue tattoos. It was all the explanation most soldiers needed. “You’re the only other noncom without whiskey on his breath.”

“That’s what I get for chasing it with Listerine. Look, Sarge, if those jokers want to call down hell on themselves, that’s their lookout.”

“Maybe,” Canute rumbled, “but we’re going up there just the same.”

Wheeler wasn’t the worst soldier he’d ever seen, or the least bearable human being, but he thought too much of his mouth, and all the crap that came from it. Used to write features for Stars & Stripes, and the Seattle Post before the war. Used to be a lieutenant with photographers on call and invites to every fancy dress ball in the Philippines. Canute didn’t know or care how much of his sob story was true, but he could tell that Wheeler thought he was being punished, when they sent him out here.

When they fell silent, they heard the rumbling cadence, like distant heavy bombardment, just beneath the rustle of the kunai grass and the chattering of the parrots.

“God damn it,” Wheeler muttered, “are they coming already?”

Laslovic started to back up into the trees, but Canute stopped him. “No, dummy. Drums.”

“What gives?” Wheeler demanded in a loud, climbing pitch. “What the hell is going on?”

“Ask him.” Canute pointed at a tiny figure crouched at the far end of the landing strip. The moment they spotted the black-skinned phantom, he vanished into the jungle at the base of the mountain.

Take a step inside the green curtain of jungle, and the sound of the surf was muffled, drowned out by the cacophony of birds, frogs, insects and unseen creepers in the undergrowth and in the dense canopy of the trees. In the daytime, the shade was a sham, a syrupy distillation of heat thick as tar, the deep, nauseous heat of compressed, festering life. By night, when the warmth of the sun had been sucked into the sea and the sky and a chill wind howled in off the thousands of miles of rolling ocean, the jungle hoarded the heat for itself. The webs of bloated vines and broad-leaf brush were so thick a man could chop all day and clear only a hundred feet of trail, but things moved about within, quick and confident.

Strange thoughts, like alien seeds blown into his brain, took root and grew. Everything on this island found its way here from somewhere else—borne on the wind, or brought in on the tide. How lucky frogs and lizards made the trek and then settled in to raise little ones was a bedeviling riddle, but he supposed they did it, because they were here. What did the frogs do, he wondered, when they turned up on this rock, and all of them were bulls?

He checked himself with a rueful grin. He’d only been here a year, and look at the state of his noodle. No wonder the natives got up to the doings they did.

A flock of red parrots came screeching down and roosted on the branches just above their heads. Their chatter rattled around in his head until it sounded like words, the same words chanted over and over. He tried to tune it out, but Wheeler picked up a rock and shied it at them. They flitted up into the air and settled, resuming their maddening chorus.

Ro bilong kago…

A game trail split the impenetrable green at the end of the airstrip. Private Laslovic walked thirty feet ahead of the others, eyes peeled for an ambush.

He saw trees like petrified giant octopi, their enormous roots splayed out in the black, putrid soil, their trunks all but buried under tufted bromeliads, spaghetti-tangles of vines and other parasitic flora. He saw lush, unspeakably colorful orchids and other flowers so vividly evocative he felt the need to go to confession. He saw spiny blossoms that dripped venomous nectar, and yawning pitcher plants clinging to the towering trunks. The emerald moonlight sifting through them showed the silhouettes of bird and monkey skeletons floating in their honeyed gullets.

The trail ended at the foot of the mountain, at the base of a staircase of rough-hewn logs cut into the almost vertical slope. Where it led, the mist and the jungle canopy did their level best to hide from sight.

Laslovic looked back at Canute, who waved him on. “This is a hell of a place to try to fight a war,” Wheeler grunted.

Canute drank from his canteen and relit his cigar stub. “Beats the hell out of the last one.”

“All these islands look the same to me, after the Army’s through with them.”

“Not the last island,” Canute said. “The last war.”

“Jiminy!” Laslovic blurted. “You sure must like to fight.”

“I used to. Keep moving.”

Stanislaus Laslovic prided himself on his lack of imagination.
A big dumb Polack from a Pennsylvania scratch-farm, he could see where brains paid off a lot less than they were cracked up to. Daydreamers chased themselves around their heads all the time, and got themselves killed.

Laslovic served with two infantry platoons for the Rabaul campaign to eject the Japs from mainland New Guinea. In the first, an unlucky mortar dropped into their Higgins boat at the Saidor beachhead. He was the sole survivor.

Reassigned to another platoon, he was the only one to make it to the rallying point on the beach. Spooked by his uncanny luck, his CO asked him where he wanted to go, and when he said he wanted to fly airplanes, they transferred him back to the Army Air Corps support division. Laslovic didn’t count himself lucky, or curse himself for a jinx. God simply had other plans for him, which were, as of yet, none of his business.

Wheeler was a rubber room candidate, with his rolling eyes and second-guessing, and even old Canute seemed spooked. His scarred, weatherbeaten brow squinted around his glass eye like there was sand in his socket.

Laslovic looked up at the mountain. “Maybe they won’t see it. Why would they want to help the Japs, anyway?”

“They ain’t calling the Japs, dingus,” Wheeler said. “They’re calling for the South Pacific’s answer to Santa Claus. They want more Coca Cola and condoms and Gideon Bibles, and plenty of plump, juicy white men to roast on spits with pineapples in our mouths, until the meat just falls off the bone—”

“Put a sock in it,” Canute said. “They ain’t cannibals.”

“Then ask them what they did with Amelia Earhart.” Wheeler’s tone got comically grave as he invoked his pet obsession. “It’s the Madness, I tell you.”

“Nuts,” Canute grunted.

“I heard stories from some guys in the Navy,” Wheeler said, church-whispering, “about things the natives get up to, out in the dark corners of the Pacific. Down in New Guinea, they call it the Vailala Madness.”

“You don’t know nothing.”

“Most of ‘em never laid eyes on a white man before, let alone steel tools, or planes or ships. They see the stuff we bring out here, and it’s like magic. They figured pretty quick we were just men like them, but we’ve got the gods’ special juju.” The idea clearly tickled him. “If you know so much, Canute, what’s up there?”

“Never been,” he lied.

Wheeler’s head whipped around so fast you could hear something pop in it. “What do you mean, never been?”

“Sacred ground. They come down when they want to trade, and bang the slit-gongs when they see a plane. They’re good neighbors.”

They were not a proper tribe, and Canute suspected they had only moved here a few decades ago, probably running from colonial administrators. He had never seen women or children, but knew there were some in a compound on the other side of the island. The men kept a vigil on the mountaintop; the sounds of their drums and chanting sometimes preceded the first radio contact from incoming planes and ships.

There were fewer than twenty men. Closer to the war, or with a more diligent CO, they might have been relocated or worse. Colonel Shubert had made noises about their mountaintop activities, but he was too concerned with the complications of fraternizing with the natives. Somebody had to play good neighbor, and Canute had quietly assumed the role. Yage Moses, the old headman, liked Coca Cola and Camels.

They soon lost count of the steps. They crawled on all fours, hauling themselves up and clinging to the slimy, rain-swollen logs to keep from sagging backwards and tumbling down the stairs, which by now had become more like a ladder.

In the bars of moonlight, Wheeler thought they looked like convicts, fugitives from a chain gang. “What if they’re up there, waiting to ambush us, sarge?”

Wheeler strained to see spies in the misty darkness. The trees cast colonnades of tangled shadows in the moonlight, and something hid in every single one of them. Chirping, trilling, buzzing, squawking life could give cover to legions of stalking feet.

The deep, tarry stink of the soil made his stomach convulse. The air was so humid, you could almost squeeze a fistful of it and fill a canteen. A pitcher plant hung just above his head. Something inside it splashed out its final, feeble death-struggles. Vast tapestries of spider webs hung between the branches with neat little bundles woven into them, the shriveled mummies of parrots. Wheeler stumbled back and caught himself on a tree.

Laslovic reached the top first, but they had to shove him clear of the landing to climb up. He just stood there with his mouth open and eyes unblinking, marveling at the sight of the mountaintop. Whatever he expected, this was the last thing he might’ve guessed.

“Holy cats,” Laslovic hissed, “it’s the landing strip all over again.”

From the steps, what could only be a hand-graded runway ran arrow-straight across the rocky, but oddly barren peak. A tower of bamboo and palm fronds tilted alarmingly over a huge bonfire on the edge of the strip. A mock plane slapped together out of same was parked beside it, waiting for clearance. Bits and pieces of metal glinted dully in the firelight; scraps pinched, Canute noted with a rueful smile, off the old P-40 abandoned at the end of the strip.

The tribesmen pounded slit-gongs and hand drums and blew gourd trumpets, and danced in a circle around the tower, where a little man in a motley cape of feathers and a headdress made of seagull wings presided with outflung arms and a bellowing ululation coming out of his mouth like an air raid siren.

When the three of them came into the light, the ritual fell silent as if somebody stumbled over the plug.

“Ain’t that a kick in the teeth,” Wheeler gasped, still winded from the climb. “The Skull Island Aerodrome.”

Canute raised his hands high. “Yage Moses,” he called out, “I bring cargo to trade.”

The little headman sprang down from the tower and scuttled up close to Canute. While the others wore only bark girdles or laplaps, Yage Moses proudly sported one of Colonel Shubert’s parade uniform jackets and a spotless khaki blouse. In the dancing firelight, they looked as different as two kinds of trees. Even with his fancy winged headdress, the little Polynesian hardly reached Canute’s shoulder, and was stooped and bent with age and abuse. Canute never asked, but figured by his grasp of Pidgin English and the stripes of scar tissue down his back that he’d once worked a colonial plantation, probably in the Madang District of New Guinea, when it was held by the krauts.

“Mipela laik no mo bisnis long wetman,” Yage Moses said, “Usim kago kam tunait.” His lips and chin were stained red and slick with spittle from a binge of betel nut, and his yellow-tinged eyes gleamed like dying automobile headlights.

“Japs fly tonight.” Canute pointed at the sky. “We beat them good, burned their home island down, but they look to die fighting. You don’t want the Japs to come, so put out the fire and turn off the radio.”

“Ask them what they think they’re doing,” Wheeler demanded, “and where the hell they got a radio.”

“Yu mikim wonem?” Canute asked.

“Yu Canute strongpela, gutpela,” the headman said, smiling warmly and patting Canute’s arm. “Yu skelim kago, tasol wetman tok oltaim bulsit, no skelim wanpela tok bokis bilong kago. Taso yu Ami lusim ailan kwiktaim.”

Wheeler cut in. “What’s that?”

“He’s mad at us for not sharing the cargo secret. He says we’re leaving soon.”

“How’s he know the war’s over?”

“He doesn’t. He thinks someone else is coming, with his cargo.”

Laslovic said, “Maybe he’s telling us we ought to leave…”

Wheeler kicked the ground. “Damn it, tell him we can’t!”

“We can’t fight, either.” Canute took the little crate from Wheeler and set it down before Yage Moses. “Wusat I kam?” he asked in Pidgin: Who is coming? The headman only smiled at the crate.

When he opened it, Yage Moses grinned even wider, making a show of both of his yellow, tortured teeth to pry the cap off a bottle of Pabst.

Canute looked him in the eye, trying to see him man to man, as he said a word the headman probably never heard before from the lips of a white man. “Please, Moses. Put out the lights and kill the radio.”

Yage Moses swigged the beer and returned Canute’s stare. He didn’t break it as his little black hand snaked into the crate and took up the hand-axe.

Laslovic swore and pointed his M1. Wheeler jumped back and cursed his own rifle, still slung on his shoulder.

Yage Moses raised the axe high, lifted his head and called out in his native tongue to the sky.

When the natives heard it, they raised a cheer and resumed drumming and chanting. Canute backed away until Laslovic and Wheeler flanked him with their rifles at their shoulders and their jaws on their chests.

One by one, the natives danced by the crate and knelt before Yage Moses, who poured a splash of beer into each upraised mouth, like a priest dispensing sacramental wine. Each supplicant took a bottle of soda pop or beer and danced out onto the landing strip with renewed vigor. The swaying, hopping dance described a circle—no, a diamond—with a stone marker at each corner, and when each dancer reached a marker, he jumped onto it and took a drink. At the nearest marker, Yage Moses took up a bullroarer on a rope and swung it wildly around him, the uncanny sound rising until it perfectly mimicked the props of an airplane.

“What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Wheeler demanded.

Laslovic clucked his tongue. “Looks like they’re playing baseball.”

They must have watched for months as the soldiers played pick-up games on the airstrip, and supposed it to be some arcane ritual for summoning planes—and cargo.

The radio squealed, and static of a peculiar, liquid tone drowned out their ritual. Canute sidled over to the radio in its shrine atop the tower. It was a footlocker-sized shortwave box, warped, peeling and encrusted with moss and mold, a relic left by the Aussie coastwatchers.

It should not have worked.

For one, it was not plugged into anything. For another, the guts of the radio were long gone, replaced by bones, feathers and bits of junk scavenged from camp: bottle caps, shell casings, mess tins and silverware, arranged in an artful array that received and transmitted sound.

It was not the familiar sound of the empty airwaves, with its audio storms caused by weather and sunspots and such. No, whatever frequencies this radio broadcasted on, they were not the ones that brought Glenn Miller and Abbott & Costello. It was more like the echoing ambience of some colossal enclosed space beneath a shadowy sea, a grotto vast enough to contain islands, feeding on deeper, greater caverns beyond, teeming with secret life.

And through it, the chant of Yage Moses and his followers echoed, loudly proclaiming their faith, and demanding an answer.

Laslovic tried not to pray aloud for the natives, or for themselves.

The business with the airplane fascinated him, and disturbed him deeply. He went to church, read his Bible. He knew that only God’s providence could lead them to victory in the war. He also recognized pagan idolatry when he saw it.

For a moment, when he’d first seen a plane take off, he felt a reverence, an awe, not just for the hope they represented, but for the power they gave. There could be no greater power that God might grant a man, Laslovic thought, than to fly.

That he never would fly one did little to diminish that weird charge that came from seeing them, like the first time he saw a horse, back home, and his Daddy set him on its back, and it flew.

Then he saw the natives’ airstrip, and his mind was thrown into disorder. Someone had been praying to the Army’s airplanes, and had gotten so exercised that they made idols of them. He could feel it when he touched the rusted P-40 prop like a holy relic tied to the front of the bamboo mock plane on the runway, that vibration you feel when a church really gives it up for God, but fraught with tension, like it might fly off in any direction at any moment, borne aloft on the wind from unholy prayers.

And now, as if in answer to their misguided invocation, the Japs were coming.

“D’you hear that?” he asked.

Down below, the lights were all doused, so the bonfire at his back was the only light on the face of the earth. Smitty and the other drunks would be hot to try to wing a Zero with the fifty caliber machine guns, but they’d only advertise their position. Best to let the natives serve as a decoy; best for his people. But something had gone haywire here—not just with the natives, but with the basic rules of what was and what could not be.

The wind blew out of the northwest in choppy gusts, and on it, a buzzing rumble, the sound of planes. Only Laslovic could hear it at first, but it grew steadily louder.

“Sarge, they’re crazy as bedbugs,” Wheeler spat, raising his rifle. “We’ve got to put out that fire, and to hell with them if they try to stop us.”

“It’s too late for that,” Canute said. “If they’re coming, they’ve seen it.”

“We’re gonna get bombed, if we stay here.”

“You run and hide. I think I’ll stay a while.”

Canute stood with Yage Moses at the end of the mountain airstrip, scanning the silver and black murk on the horizon. Wheeler ranted at his back, but didn’t move, and Laslovic stood beside that mock plane with a look on his face like a kid who just found out Santa Claus might not be a fake, after all.

Canute felt something kindle inside him as he scanned the empty sky, a tiny fire he gave up feeding years ago, all but buried under a lifetime of green fuel that made only smoke. He joined the Army and went to France in the Great War, not to fight, only to see the world; but the Army showed him only boot prints, bomb craters and the silent reproach of dead doughboys just like him who’d caught a faceful of the world.

The Merchant Marine showed him only wharfs and water and the simmering, jealous hatred of the rest of the world, envy for trinkets and trash he’d starved on all his life. In war, merchant marines died in double the numbers of the other forces combined, so when he saw war with Japan coming, he quit.

The Army again, and a crazy, unspoken dream that the air might grant that wonder he’d been seeking, that water and land had refused to reveal. But an aging, one-eyed vet could only hope to sweep up after pilots, and he settled into quiet retirement on the island, meditated on his exhausted restless streak, and laid it to rest.

Here and now, it burst into flame and scoured off the barnacles and dust. In the insane ritual of the cargo cult, he saw the spit-polished rites of the martial life unmasked for the mug’s game that they really were. They, all of them, marched and danced and drank, cavemen and children praying to the empty sky for something they could not name to come, bearing unimaginable gifts, and take them away. In the sheer, childish absurdity of it, he saw all the unvoiced yearnings of his too-long life, and saw, at last, a true band of brothers. It was all a big joke, but then again, what wasn’t?

And presently, he saw them. A big black wing slashing out of the dark, the Zeros hung in a loose formation less than five hundred feet above the water, so different from the disciplined death-bird formations they assumed when the war began. Their engines sputtered and almost stalled, fouling the hornet-swarm hum with harmonics of imminent collapse. They coasted on fumes. Whatever they had come to do, they would do it here.

Less than a mile out, Smitty painted the sky with tracer fire, and little flashbulb pops from rifles went off all over the camp. They had nothing heavier, and no experience hitting a moving target, but the planes instantly took note. As the wing climbed to go over the mountain, three Zeros broke off to strafe the camp. One bore down on Smitty’s machine gun nest.

“No,” Canute growled, “you goddamned lamebrain idiots, just lie low!”

They traded bullets fast and furious between them. Canute could see the sparks of ricocheting fire spraying off the incoming fighter, watched it all the way into Smitty’s dubious pill box of sandbags and empty crates.

The plane ironed Smitty flat, then flipped end over end across the beach without exploding. It smashed into the coconut palms at the edge of the bivouac, flying apart and leaving a yard sale at the doorstep of the commo hut.

“You lost, you yellow bastards!” Wheeler screamed at the sky. “Go back to hell!”

The dancers moved still faster, jerking and jolting as if the bases were electrified, oblivious to the battle below, to the Zeros screaming overhead. Maybe, Wheeler thought with a sick twist of his guts, this was what they’d prayed for. Goddamned quisling cannibals…

The other two Zeros banked and circled back over the camp, taking wild fire from the second machine gun in stride, when one of them dropped down to recon the airstrip. The boys had set up a gauntlet of sandbags and taken cover behind them, and shot the hell out of the Zero as it passed over. A lucky shot must have hit the pilot, as the fighter nosed down into the runway.

The rest of the Zeros circled around the mountain. Canute was the first to hear the chatter of their guns as they made a run on the mountaintop. “Get down!” he shouted, shoving Wheeler and grabbing for Laslovic.

The natives dropped and lay prone, but Laslovic, taking cover beneath the mock-plane, saw one cargo cultist go on dancing more frantically than before, as the bullets, each the length of a man’s index finger, slammed home in his flesh like rivets.

Down in the camp, the third Zero strafed again and again with only token harassment from the surviving machinegun. He seemed to see right through the layers of camo netting, and nailed the fuel dump. A huge Halloween orb of hundred-octane fuel-fire leapt up into the night and lavished gouts of flame on the surrounding storage sheds.

Wheeler screamed and tried to crawl out from under Canute. “Let’s bug out! The hell with them! We’re all gonna die!”

Canute let him go. When he looked up at the sky about a mile out to sea, he forgot everything else.

The empty indigo night suddenly seemed very solid and flat—a painted cyclorama, or the roof of a tent bowed under a monsoon. It sagged down and bulged, then split open—

And something flew out of a hole in the sky and into their world.

It looked most like a gigantic manta ray, but for the squidlike tentacles that dangled from its underbelly and fluttered on the wind, throwing off a soft aquamarine light that left a luminous trail in the sky behind it. When it passed before the moon, Canute saw through its translucent flesh, which scattered the moonlight into rainbow flashes like a liquid prism.

What it hoped to do against the Zeros, Canute couldn’t guess, but he was still puzzling over what he must’ve ate or drank to make him see such a thing, when it stalled in the sky, floating weightless as a cloud, then fell like an owl on its prey.

The wing of Zeros scattered as the thing passed among them and snatched a fighter out of its flight with its quicksilver tentacles. A brief tug-of-war ensued as the creature stretched, but seemed to get traction in the sky itself, and captured the hurtling kamikaze fighter.

Five times the Zero’s size, the flying thing mangled its tail and left wing like a cat savaging a bird, then hurtled it into the props of another fighter as it came charging in with its machine guns blazing. Bullets carved up the thrown wreckage and the other plane began a desperate dive, but the Zeros smashed together and tumbled, burning, screaming, into the darksome sea.

The other kamikaze fighters staged a circus of panicked aerial acrobatics to avoid colliding in the monster’s wake; two of them clapped wings with a sound like samurai swords clashing as they passed directly overhead. One plane was upside down, and they could see the tiny, shrieking man in the cockpit, looking down at them as impossible death tore his comrades out of the air.

Terrorized, humiliated and exhausted, the Zeros regrouped and descended on the flying thing. Bullets penetrated, but passed through its sleek, fluid body without leaving any visible damage. They did, however, finally succeed in getting its dander up. For just a heartbeat, the thing glowed so bright it blinded Canute. He shaded his eyes, and almost missed what it did next.

Seven Zeros were passing all around it when it flashed, and all were caught in the web of ball-lightning that shot out of it. Entangled, impaled on forking spears of white light, they seemed to stop dead in the air. Engines and fuel tanks exploded, props spinning off like shooting stars. Canopies burst like the eyes of a convict frying in the mercy seat. It was all over faster than a photographer’s flash, when seven blackened, smoking husks of kamikaze fighters fluttered to the gilded sea like cinders from a leaf-pyre.

Four Zeros survived. The three over the mountain lost their kamikaze zeal and squirted off into the night like their asses were on fire. The last Zero, the one that shot up the fuel dump, tried to land on the runway. Never a square proposition by moonlight, it proved too much for the hysterical pilot, who tore off his left wing and spun like a whirligig across the rusty, metal-floored gravel and crashed into the palms.

By the light of the moon and the raging fuel fire, Canute could make out a horde of men in skivvies charging with their guns popping off. They had gotten a last little piece of war to tell and retell at the VFW hall for the rest of their lives, and probably never chanced to look up and see what he and Wheeler and Laslovic saw—

Laslovic stood stock-still beside the mock-plane, his mouth working, no doubt in prayer. Wheeler was sneaking around the perimeter of the airstrip with his rifle at port arms, intent on Yage Moses, who had ascended to the top of the tower, and now howled at the sky in exultant whoops and spun the bullroarer until it must burst into flame.

High above them, the flying thing just stopped in midair and drifted down, settling on the runway like coastal fog.

The natives fell silent. Only the wind whipping at the guttering ruin of the bonfire broke

the stillness. Their eyes were big as plates and their mouths trembled. Clearly, this was what they’d prayed and danced for, and it must not happen every night.

“Wheeler!” Canute snapped, “Freeze!” His voice was like a pistol shot on the mountaintop. Wheeler made a Wolf Man face at the sergeant, but lowered his rifle.

The flying thing subsided like a beached jellyfish, its aerodynamic form succumbing pitifully to the will of gravity. Inside its translucent flesh, Canute made out things that reminded him of machinery, glowing filaments like white-hot copper wire, and coils of gut-plumbing and weird organs packed in between vast cells of clear gel, in which other, disturbingly familiar shapes were suspended.

The headman climbed down from the tower, calling out a patchwork litany of every name of power he knew. “Anut-Dodo, po nanunanu! Manup-Jesus, God-Kilibob, opim ro bilong kago! Tibud-Maclay Tulu-Debil, Noah-Roosebelt, oi’te po nanunanu!” With empty hands upraised, Yage Moses approached the dormant blob and knelt before it, barking in a commanding tone, “Yage Moses singaut long yupela long Heben, opim rot bilong kago! Masalai, kaua, kopa, tingim long usim, givim kago, karim usim longwe arasait bilong Heben!”

Whatever communion Yage Moses shared with the flying thing, it passed in silence; but presently, he leapt up and gave a wordless shout of rapturous joy. The rest of the cult took up the cheer and drunkenly moved to surround the creature with long, dugout troughs in their arms.

Canute and Laslovic came as close as they dared. The natives held the troughs up to the creature and pressed on its membranous hide, so that jets of clear goop filled the troughs from holes made by the Zeros’ bullets. The brimming troughs got passed back to men who drained them into baskets, galvanized steel buckets and even the empty Coke and beer bottles, and handed them back.

Canute stared into the liquid depths of the flying thing and saw what else floated within. Bodies—countless human bodies hung trapped inside like fruit in a gelatin mold. Yet they did not look dead, nor were they being digested like the animals trapped in the pitcher plants. They merely slept, breathing in sync with this monstrous messenger from Heaven, and sharing in its dreams.

Yage Moses spoke sometimes of the “ancestors” they prayed to on the mountaintop, and perhaps these were they. Or perhaps they were simply other natives from other far-flung islands, on their way to deliverance—or maybe just a larder, after all, for the strange gods who saw fit to feed on their frenzied worship. He reckoned the gods must know all kinds of strange ways to eat a man.

The natives clustered around and drank from the buckets of goop, then lowered effigies carved out of wood into them. Crude toy guns and other idols were dipped, but when they were removed, Canute’s eyes widened so that the glass one almost popped out of its socket.

The carved toys became tins of meat, radios, razors, bush-knives, axes and rifles, dripping with slime but glinting like fresh tempered steel.

Canute went to the flank of the creature and cupped his hands beneath an oozing bullet-wound. The stuff filled his palms in no time. He held it to his lips and slurped it.

It tasted like moonlight and diamonds, white lightning and Coca Cola, pineapple and Pabst Blue Ribbon, honey and ham and tobacco, rainwater, whiskey and women; all the things of which men dreamed. When he licked the dregs of it from his hands and looked around, he saw Laslovic’s mask of surprise and delight in blurred stereo.

Canute rubbed his eyes and discovered that he could see with the glass one. He goggled at his hands as they moved back and forth through his new depth perception, and grunted a shocked blessing. It was real.

“You try it,” he said to Laslovic.

The private approached the thing and peered inside. “I wonder where they’re going,” he said, his speech badly slurred. “I sure would like to see it…”

Canute had the same idea, himself, but held it back. “There’s still a war on, Las.”

“Yeah, I’m just talking, is all…” He swooned into the rubbery flank of the blob, held his hand up with a bottle in it. “Look at me, Sarge, I’m drunk off one little beer…”

Canute noted the fluted shape of the bottle. “That’s no beer, it’s a Coke…”

Yage Moses rose and held up the bullroarer like a dagger, made ready to plunge it into the side of the flying creature, when he, too, stumbled and fell to his knees. He retched a thin thread of foam, giggled, and fell to the ground. The other natives made shocked noises and crowded around him, but they also moved as if they were roaring drunk. They clutched their chests and throats, and collapsed. Twelve black bodies lay at their feet.

“Ain’t I a stinker?” said Wheeler.

Canute blinked, rubbed his eyes again. His eyes— “What did you do?”

“I was starting to think it was never going to work.” Wheeler came over and prodded a prone native with his boot. “They gave our position away, Canute. You said to get them beer and pop, so I did. But I knew these cannibals wouldn’t give up their rumpus without a fight, so I took a little tip from the cowboys, and spiked their firewater.”

“I didn’t order you to do that.”

Wheeler went over to the flank of the flying creature and tasted the goop. “You didn’t have to… and I figured you were sweet on these cannibals, so somebody impartial ought to take the initiative. Nectar. I’ll be damned!”

Laslovic fell against the sergeant. “Sarge, I’m gonna be sick…”

“What gives with him?” Wheeler asked.

Canute laid the private out on the muddy runway, resting his head on home plate. “He drank a Coke, you goddamned idiot.”

Wheeler guffawed. “Aw, he’ll be fine. I just slipped ‘em a mickey from the surgical stores. A spoonful of laudanum to sweeten their dreams. They’ll have a whole new crazy religion in the morning, when they wake up—”

Canute put his fingers on the corded, reedy neck of Yage Moses, felt around for a very long moment. “They ain’t waking up.”

“Ah, don’t play games.”

Canute rushed over to Wheeler and decked him across the jaw. The corporal sat down hard on the runway. His hand went for his rifle, but Canute stopped him with a close look at the muzzle of his sidearm.

“Congratulations. In one night, you killed more men than I have my whole damned life.”

Wheeler wrapped his offended dignity round him like a theatrical cloak. “I had no way of knowing it would kill them, but so what if I did? Somebody had to do something, and your solution was to get them drunk and watch the fun. They’re like children, sergeant, but they play for keeps, just like us. And what about this?”

He waved at the enormous thing before them, seemingly asleep or dead. “This thing comes down out of the sky, and it saves them, and gives them this magical food of the gods, and what do they do with it?” He picked up one of the newly-minted carbine rifles beside a dead native. “They weren’t making sousaphones.”

The thing moved. Both men jumped back and dropped to the ground. A tentacle extruded out of the mass and gently lifted the body of Yage Moses, drew him through the membrane and into a bubble. The dead headman bobbed around, then settled into a fetal ball as the goop around him congealed into resin.

The sagging mass drew itself up and glittered with tiny lightning flashes along the gossamer wires of its nerves. Canute stood over Wheeler with his .45 out and cocked, when an idea took hold.

He threw away the gun and went over to the bullroarer, picked it up and slashed the side of the thing. The membrane parted and a spout of goop washed over him. Kneeling, he took Laslovic under the arms and stuffed him into the wound.

Wheeler jumped up and pointed his rifle. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”

“Going away,” Canute said. “I want to see some place that nobody’s ever bombed. Somewhere with no armies, navies or kamikazes, and no college boys who get men killed with their bright ideas.”

“You can go jump in a volcano for all I care, but Laslovic—”

“All Laslovic ever wanted to do was fly.” He checked Laslovic’s pulse and peeled back an eyelid. “Hang in there, kid.”

Wheeler aimed his rifle at Canute, but trembled too much to draw a bead. Canute knew he lacked the sand to kill a man on purpose.

“Nobody gets to choose,” Wheeler said, “how it’s going to turn out. You try to do the right thing, and it just… You want to know how I ended up here, Canute? You want to know what I did, to get busted down to this crummy fucking outfit?”

“No, and if you try to tell me, I figure I’ll feed you that goddamned gun.” Canute turned and sank one foot into the hardening gelatin inside the flying thing. The membrane quivered and shimmered with ghostly light as it began to rise.

“So… what the hell do I tell the CO?”

Canute climbed in, stuck only his head out of the side of the thing as the wound knitted itself together. “Tell him we said, “So long.’”

Wheeler watched the ponderous mass rise up into the sky and flatten into a weightless manta ray shape, then skim off over the horizon faster than any plane he’d ever seen, and without a sound, save the vacuum of air slamming shut in its wake.

Jesus, what a bad break, and him left alone to hold the bag, all over again. Dumb bastards like Canute always played things like they were cut-and-dried, black and white. There were shades of gray you could only see from officer’s country, and he couldn’t make himself ignore them, just because they busted him down. It was a curse to see all the angles, the white man’s unbearable burden.

He took up a bucket and swigged some of the strange sky-nectar. It made his bones tingle, as if it were remaking him from the inside out.

If the Army could get more of this stuff, it could do the same for America. You could keep your crummy atomic bomb; this was something else again. There was no telling what such power could do for a nation, or for him. It would be enough for Wheeler, for the moment, if it would grant him his fondest wish, to get the hell off this godforsaken island.

Wheeler staggered around the fake runway, coming to rest against the mock plane. Inside the dugout cockpit, he saw a neat pile of bones wrapped in the rags of a leather flying suit. The skull atop the pile still wore the crumbling straps of an aviator’s cap, and a few curls of sandy blonde hair still clung to the yellow-white dome of the forehead. A white woman’s hair.

“You filthy black bastards,” Wheeler muttered, wondering idly if the goop could bring back Amelia Earhart.

In the east, the sky began to lighten and smolder with the pastel shades of the unborn sun. Mist thick as wool shrouded the shore and the camp. There was no sign of smoke from the fuel dump fire, which boded well.

As he climbed down the treacherous stairs with the bucket under his arm, Wheeler whistled “Indian Summer” while he chewed over what he would tell Colonel Shubert. Sergeant Rory Canute and PFC Stanislaus Laslovic died in the raid, or at the hands of the treacherous cannibals, who summoned the Japs to wipe the Army off the island.

He could afford to be generous to their memories. A heroic tale was called for, something Stars & Stripes would have to print, and when the time was right, he would spring the other discoveries on them. He pictured squads of specially trained Navy witch doctors cavorting on the deck of an aircraft carrier to open the hidden doorway in the sky and call down the wrath of the Polynesian sky-gods on America’s enemies—

God, this stuff kicked like a mule. He found himself at the bottom of the stairs, and felt like he could climb down a million more, but when he came out of the jungle and into the clearing, he figured he must have gotten turned around, because there was no airstrip here, no camp, but only a field of weird kunai grass. It stood over his head, and it was purple. The trees looked strange, to boot. When he approached them, the palm fronds took wing and chattered off into the sky.

He wandered out onto the plain and found himself standing atop a cliff that looked down on no camp, and no ocean, but only endless miles of untamed jungle and twisting river valleys.

It was growing deathly hot already. Through the mist, he saw two blazing suns on the jagged horizon. In the violet-white light, his exposed skin darkened like an overdeveloped photograph, swiftly turning a deep, aboriginal purplish black.

“Filthy black bastards!” he shouted. He took another drink from the bucket, and kept walking for the rest of his life.

Venus of Santa Cruz

Like the Big Bad Wolf in a city of brick houses, Officer Brad Friendly cruised the fog-swaddled streets of Santa Cruz, huffing and puffing for an excuse to be a cop. 2:37 AM on a Monday: bars already closed without incident, even the most twisted freaks had somewhere to hide.

Friendly coasted through the central bus terminal, a late night agora for drugged-out hippie kids with names like Sky and Grateful, cast-off spawn of parents who never made the jump from hip to yup, brains cooked in a congenital stew of bullshit and bad acid. The last bus from San Francisco nosed into port, disgorged a few tie-dyed freaks, a Mexican in cowboy boots seven sizes too big and a hot blonde co-ed with a duffel bag who looked lost and in need of a cop.

Friendly waved. “Hi, you need a ride anywhere?” The girl passed through his headlights.

“What, you’re too good to say hi?” leaning out his window, flipping on his searchlight to light her way to the curb, where a blasted orange ‘76 Datsun rustbucket idled. A short redhead, cuter and more stacked than the blonde, climbed out, took her friend’s bag and enfolded her with a deep, tongue-thrashing kiss, unpainted nails tracing a brand on the curve of her girlfriend’s ass for Friendly’s benefit. They got in the car and motored off.

The only thing harder than getting a good bust in Santa Cruz was getting laid. Lesbians from all over the country came to this cloistered haven of clam-bumping, a Mecca for their unfortunate lifestyle choice. Most of the police force was nominally female, big bad bulldaggers who could bench press Friendly and called him “Breeder” or “Rapeman” behind his back. Once or twice he’d tried rounding up a few of the handful of single, straight guys on the force to go to hit the strip clubs in San Jose. To a man, they’d looked at him like he’d proposed they go fuck some cows, and couldn’t wait to report him.

Friendly spotted a white ‘70 VW microbus cruising north on Main Street, weaving the unmistakable waltz of the fucked-up motorist. He followed at a discreet distance to Western Drive, where the streetlights abruptly stopped and Main became Pacific Coast Highway, a lonely, lawless tunnel to the outside world.

The bus was probably on the return leg of a drug run, making for San Francisco with a payload of blotter acid and a bale or two of homegrown dope. Half the town grew pot to sell to the other half. His pigeon was probably stoned into orbit with a fat roach in his beard right now, which he’d eat the moment Friendly kicked the siren. To get probable cause to search the van, he’d have to spook him into reckless driving. Friendly switched off his lights and closed in, ram-bars air-kissing the VW’s bumper in the dark.

Friendly glimpsed a flare of cherry on a joint in the van’s rearview mirror. He snapped on his hi-beams, the siren and the sno-cones all at once. The VW bugged out like a bumblebee in a bell jar, whipping a hard right into a stand of bamboo grass and a drainage ditch.

Friendly jackknifed in alongside the bus and leapt out, hand dancing on his gun. A northbound sedan, also running lights out, whipped around the cruiser at well over eighty and took a glancing bite off the ass-end of the VW, spraying sparks and candy fragments of taillight as it fought for traction, tires screaming, flayed strips flying in all directions. The sedan lost it and slewed off the road into a tree.

The silvery black night sky was pregnant with mist, individual fat droplets suspended in the air before Friendly’s face. The night and the road became the whole wide world, gossamer threads and blobs of orange marking the edge of town on the horizon. With no one coming or going, the road was the eye of a cyclone.

Friendly was torn between elation at having caught two perps at a single stop and recognition of his own guilt in having caused a possible fatality accident through his LA cowboy tactics. He laid out a fan of road flares and radioed for an ambulance and backup, then approached the wrecked sedan.

It was a ‘74 Duster, lemon yellow under the glaze of oil, dust and bird shit that covered everything but a slit in the opaque windshield. The front end was an accordion, and Friendly knew the guy would be impaled on the steering wheel if he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

He wasn’t. He seemed to have popped most of his ribs on the steering column, breaking off the wheel. He was still conscious. Mumbling his hippie coping mantra, or something. “Gottagetheroutthetrunk!”

Friendly drew his Glock 9mm—one of the few perks of the SCPD, they let you carry your own ordnance. “Hands where I can see them, sir! Now, help is on the way, but if you’re able, show me your license, registration and proof of insurance.”

“Gotta get her out! She wants to get out!”

The driver’s fingers spasmed and clawed at the keys, while his other hand disappeared down his pants in search of CONCEALED EVIDENCE or a CONCEALED WEAPON. His gibbering devolved into a choked growl that made Friendly feel completely justified in jamming his gun in the driver’s face.

“Get your hand out of your pants, sir! Right now!”

The driver wailed, eyes locked on something closer and more urgent than the gun. “She wants out! She wants to fuck!”

Most people close their eyes and turn away from a gun, wishing themselves into a happier place and time, anywhere but staring down the barrel of the great leveler. Friendly had never before had cause to stick his gun in anybody’s face, but cops talk, and Friendly listened, inwardly preparing himself for that day.

But this asshole leaned in and grabbed the gun and, opening his mouth to expose a toothless pit of terminally diseased gums, deep-throated the muzzle and proceeded to fellate it for all he was worth. He sucked three bullets out of it before Friendly even noticed it going off as he tried to get his beloved Glock 9mm free of the pervert’s mouth. The recoil jerked the gun out of his gooey rictus even as the driver’s head flew away on hollow-point wings.

The body slumped forwards, one spastic hand pitching the keys so they jingled and struck Friendly’s washboard stomach. He stooped and picked them up, wiped his gun off on the driver’s flannel shirt before holstering it.

He raced around the car. Not noticing that the microbus was gone, checking out the keys. A San Jose Sharks bottle opener, a broken Swiss Army knife with only the corkscrew remaining, a foam rubber boner with the address for a shitty grind joint in Capitola, the door, ignition and gas keys for the Duster.

Friendly unlocked the trunk and stood back as it swung open. He saw A HOSTAGE in a bundle of crushed velvet, stiff with secretions both mechanical and organic, stretched taut over the unmistakable outline of a heaving female form.

He heard it calling to him, though the air was so still he could hear his pulse. Its voice was a scent that bled into his reptilian midbrain, down to the glandular fuck/kill engines that drove his organism. Capping the driver was the perfect foreplay for what the thing in the trunk invited him to do now and for all time.

Friendly fell, pushed and pulling, into the mouth of the trunk. And as his eyelids gummed shut, it seemed the trunk slammed, or was pulled shut, just as headlights swept over the crash scene.

Hours later, when the wreck had been swept up and reports filed away and Friendly debriefed on the fatal shooting, they sent him home, told him to stay there for a few days. When he came to in the ambulance, they told him he passed out. The paramedic was also a sensitivity counselor, and if he wanted to talk about anything, or just cry it out, that’d be okay. Friendly felt too weak to hit him.

The political correctness bullshit in Santa Cruz was like pollution nobody else could see. Signs on the county line proclaimed Santa Cruz a Nuclear Free and a Clothing Optional Zone. A Mayoral runoff election next week would pit the incumbent, a gay nudist Socialist, against a black lesbian Wiccan Communist. A church group from San Jose came over every Palm Sunday to exorcise the place.

The university waffled like a battered wife, calling the cops when the brats got onto some bad acid, but always tying their hands when push came to prosecute. They kept a lid on the serious shit, like the obligatory freshmen suicide attempts every finals week, or the serial rapist who hunted co-eds unopposed for three semesters because the school valued women’s empowerment too much to provide them with escorts.

But the hippies needed someone to protect their bongs, so they voted two years ago to bring in more cops. Students graduated and took jobs at 7-11 so they could stay, but nobody wanted to be a pig, so the call went out and Brad Friendly, two days out of the Los Angeles Police Academy and suddenly pressed to leave town, signed on. For their part, the locals smelled the LA on him and showed him no love. On or off-duty, they treated him like a spy from a hostile nation. Looking around this place, it wasn’t hard to imagine it was once the Serial Killer Capital of the world, home of Ed Kemper, the Co-ed Killer, Herbert Mullin and John Linley Frazier.

He drove back out to the scene of the crash, looking to make sure he wasn’t followed. Just before dusk, he found what he was looking for. Stowing it in the covered bed of his matte black Ford F150 pickup, he looked around once more and climbed into the truck, drove home just slow enough not to get pulled over.

He slipped in with the bundle under his arm, looking over his shoulder at two feral kids in ankle-length tie-dyed T-shirts spying as he carried it over the threshold. He didn’t have a couch, so he laid it on his weight bench and moved to the far corner of the room, arms clenched at his sides.

He was fucking off here, not as bad as LA yet, but getting there. He was CONCEALING EVIDENCE. He was an ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT.

And it had made him do it, no it had only suggested, no, it was his idea to hide the thing at the scene and pick it up later, because they’d never understand, they’d try to take it away. And they couldn’t—

He approached on his knees and pulled back the crushed velvet veil.

There was a torso.

A woman’s torso, a Cro-Magnon goddess, a primordial Venus of voluptuous alabaster curves and folds, sculpted flesh describing archetypal angles of luscious succubi. Turgid skin glistening with the iridescent oil-slick rainbow glow of gamy oysters. Neck, shoulders and hips terminated in sphincter-mouths, pouting lips trembling with arousal.

She needed neither head nor limbs to command Friendly to abase himself before her. She made him writhe on the floor in a mangled mating dance of broken instinct. Under her control, he descended to the abyss of Now, to the impulse that anchored his body, kept it from flying apart. Every cell strained against that impulse every moment of his life, the base ore of their lust to BREED sublimated into the ghost in the Brad Friendly machine’s need for MANIPULATION DOMINATION CONTROL.

The heady aroma of the Venus short-circuited Friendly’s ghost and spoke to his cells, and the voice of the aroma was all there was to SEX and Friendly was in full rut in seconds, forcing himself upon the Venus, thrusting his cock into the quivering stump-mouth where a head would have been on a mortal woman.

The other mouths attached themselves to his body and made a throbbing cock out of every inch of his flesh. He looked down at himself through oceans of red hunger and saw an undulating carpet of questing penises boring holes in the Venus, then his sight went white as cascades of orgasmic stimuli washed over his brain. He felt the millions of penetrations meld into a single vortex of force and pour down the shaft of him into Her.

He became a plumed sperm-serpent encircling the Venus, plunging into one mouth and out of another, transfixing Her and gliding through tempestuous seas of estrogen musk. Finally, he breached the pulsating core of his mate and rammed himself into it with a final surge of his last reserves of stamina, felt the furious, frail bubble of his masculine power burst and blast its message of FRIENDLINESS into the crucible-womb of the Venus, and the shockwave rent the walls of him, the consummation of his desire opened a vacuum that sucked away blood, lymph, liquefied organs and plasma-charged brain.

Wracked with galvanic spasms, Friendly’s naked skeleton tried to pull itself away from the thing that sucked him dry. Then She lurched against him and vomited him back into himself, like a mother bird regurgitating into the mouth of its young. He tried to lift himself up and collapsed on the bare tile floor. His body was a billion bodies, and they were not on speaking terms. He fell asleep at the foot of the altar, one arm slung over the cooling hip of the Venus.

The weeks that followed were probably, if he’d stopped to think about it, the happiest he’d ever known. As a cop, he could throw himself into the job without losing control as never before, and his performance did not go unnoticed. Men still ignored him, and women seemed to smell the musk of the Venus on him with veiled disgust, but the captain suggested that he might consider taking the sergeant’s exam next time around. He liked to think it was due to his new, objective demeanor on the job, and not the lingering odor of a goddess that aroused her interest.

Friendly stopped lifting weights, yet he’d never been in better shape in his life. He moved the weight bench into the corner and made a tent of the Venus’ shroud, a private shrine where he spent his nights and many lunch hours. His torso and arms rippled with starkly defined muscle like bundles of bridge cable. He got more than enough exercise, and burned off fat and loose skin so fast he worried about cancer and tapeworms. He burned with thirst, and he’d developed a serious craving for exotic fruit juices with weird supplements blended into them. He worried idly that he wasn’t putting on muscle, that the Venus was merely sucking him dry, drinking up the stored resins of his mortality. Was it getting fat?

The most dramatic benefit negated all other concerns in keeping him away from the hospital: his penis, never anything to shoot a Polaroid of for Ripley’s, now stood a full eleven inches out from his taut abdomen, almost every hour of the day. For this, he didn’t ask himself if she was a goddess or a circus freak. He hadn’t gone blind, he wasn’t going insane, and he wasn’t dying from any hideous disease that he knew about. If there was a God, surely he blessed their union, or was just jealous, which would explain all the bad dreams.

Night patrol takes him into an unfamiliar corner of town, where the streets have no names and the cookie-cutter houses have none of the usual hippie-follies, mini-Stonehenges and suchlike, that reflect their inhabitants’ desperate need to seem unique. He’s asking himself if any of this needs protecting, when sno-cone lights paint his cruiser in chiaroscuro red and a horn whoops. He’s being pulled over. Friendly picks up the radio and requests an ID on the cruiser behind him, but the box squawks black static, voices breaking through like banshees incanting a pagan rosary in a nuclear blizzard.

“Virgin, Harlot and Hag, Magna Mater, the Black Goat—”

He jerks at the tapping at his window and the hand reaching in to clamp his shoulder, mag-light beam pinpricking his pupils, and he shields his eyes like a bleary drunk, sees uniforms coming out of the dark, uniforms he’s never seen before. Two cops look him over, muttering words that turn fuzzy and rot before they reach his ears.

“222-stroke-87, PR-28720a, eh?”

“DW5051-stroke-8086, yep,” his partner chuckles. He opens Friendly’s door as the first cop pries him out of the cruiser and deftly palms his Glock, looks at it like a booby prize from the county fair. His partner rips the gold foil badge off Friendly’s uniform and unwraps it, pops the chocolate surprise inside in his mouth.

He tries to pull free, tries to arrest them for ASSAULTING AN OFFICER, but the arrest turns inside out, he is IMPERSONATING AN OFFICER. He watches himself present his hands behind his back and the manacles jingle. He waits docilely to be led to the cruiser, but one of the cops squirts his hair with lighter fluid and the partner touches a lighter to his butch-waxed buzzcut and shoves him and he’s FLEEING THE SCENE, a human bomb racing through the trees to its target...

At 5:40 one Monday morning, Friendly stopped in at Farrell’s Donuts on his way to the dayroom briefing. Aside from two post-rave punks at the Samurai Showdown machine, the dreary dining room was empty. He ordered two assortment dozens and a cranberry smoothie and sat to wash down some vitamins while the donuts were boxed up.

A bum slipped in the door and into a booth, picking stray sprinkles and flakes of glaze off the table. A vital foundation of Santa Cruz’s ecology, bums were the town’s sacred cows. It didn’t pay to roust them, because as often as not they turned out to be lawyers or sociology professors. The bum cleaned off the booth and slid into the next one, leaned across it into Friendly’s face.

He smelled like a rendering plant. His sickdog eyes glinted through a mastodon pelt of filthy dreadlocks. The advanced decay of his person seemed to have been cultivated to Dickensian proportions. Perhaps he belonged to one of the fringe communes in the mountains between here and San Jose, come into the valley to “tox out” and cadge a free love ride miracle ticket thirty years out of date.

“Do you know why Herbert Mullin did those murders?”

Friendly shook his head once, a first and final warning.

“Believed only the shedding of blood could stop the Big One. Little bloodshed’s a small price to pay to live in paradise, isn’t it? ‘Materialism must die or mankind must stop.’ No, that was Linley Frazier.”

“Are you high on something, or just stupid?”

“Shit, fuzz, I feel at home with you because you been laying with the Lamia.” The bum drew closer and sniffed greedily, like a cat trying to steal his breath.

Friendly scrambled out of the booth, drew his baton. “Get the fuck away from me.”

“Hey, man, it’s cool, I don’t want to fight, I want to fuck. Where can a guy like me get a ride on that Night-Hag, I wanna know? Guy’s gotta have cash or a badge, for some of that gash.”

The Korean cashier ordered the bum out, waving a broomstick over his head. Friendly followed him to the parking lot and kicked him as hard as he could just above the tailbone.

The bum launched into a parked car without raising defensive arms or even shouting. His soft-boiled head dented the door with a leaden crump, and Friendly had his baton under his jaw before he could lie down.

“So you think you know where I spend my nights, asshole?”

“Shit, man, I’m not trying to harsh your mellow, man. We’re both like, men of the world, right? Didn’t mean nothin’ by it…”

“You keep your filthy mouth shut about it, and show some respect. She’s a goddess.” Friendly went in and got his donuts.

Friendly went eight rounds with the Venus that night and staggered into the kitchen for a pineapple-kelp shake with spirulena and henbane, when he realized he could see with the lights off. Red flame shadows danced and devoured each other on the bare walls, silhouetting a nude woman standing before the stove. Friendly smelled burning hair. The flames haloed her head and obscured her face, but he saw the glint of tooled steel manacles on her wrists and knew who she was.

“Hello, Brad. I wish I could say I was glad you’ve finally found somebody.”

Friendly’s spine rebelled, dumped him on the sticky linoleum at the apparition’s feet. “Francine,” he managed to gasp, “I never thought I’d see you again—”

Though two years had passed, the unique circumstances of their parting had left Friendly without a sense of closure. The night after he’d marched in the Academy commencement ceremonies, he’d finally convinced Francine it was time to go all the way. She was saving herself for marriage; he’d made it clear that his becoming a cop was the next best thing, and a sure guarantee of the other. The sex was good; he lit candles and gave her a backrub first. She had to remind him to be gentle only six or seven times.

Somewhere in the middle of it, however, Friendly lost touch with the program and got kinked on her. He pinned her arms behind her back with his brand new handcuffs and tried to force himself in her mouth. She kicked away from him and knocked over the candles, igniting her hair. His last glimpse of Francine was in her role as impromptu Passion Play martyr, pinioned arms akimbo, hair blazing, shrieking to beat the smoke alarm. She’d bolted from the bachelor apartment before he could muster his wits to put her out. That was the last time he ever saw or heard from her until now, when she’d returned, naked and blazing, to his kitchen.

“Are you a ghost? Are you… dead?”

“I’m not here about what you did to me. You have to come to grips with what you’re doing here, now.”

“I don’t need any shit from somebody who ran out on me. Besides, I’m not doing anything… wrong…”

“Has she met your parents yet, Brad?” Francine laughed, spitting tongues of fire at Friendly’s eyes. “On some level, you’ve got to recognize how deeply fucking wrong this is. You tried to rape me, and look where it’s got you. You confused love with dominance before and now you fuck a monster, and you’re falling in love with it.”

“You’re not Francine. Francine never cursed. Fuck off!”

“You believe this is how it was meant to be, and who can blame you? You’ve clubbed one and dragged it back to the cave, and it can’t crawl out again. The perfect wife for the perfect cop. You’re so sure of the dominator you have to be that you can’t see what’s dominating you. She’s using you, Brad. Think about that, for me.”

The flames died away.

Friendly lay on the floor for a while before he got up. Where he wasn’t numb with cold, he itched, and everything was frozen but his crotch. He hobbled into the bathroom and turned on the light, then turned it off again. Then off, on, off. Trying to see what he was supposed to see, and not what glared back at him.

His swollen penis and testicles were studded with succulent purple buds, like malignant kernels on an ear of corn from Love Canal.

He ripped the medicine chest off the wall in his haste to get the tweezers. When he pinched one, there was no sensation, but the rubbery skin refused to tear. When he tried to pull one out by the root, it popped and squirted acrid, unripe pheromones in his eyes. He reeled, clawing at his eyes as if he’d been Maced.

He saw the black room in murky shades of red, a dying solar system, and a collapsing sun in the shrine. He shielded his eyes and rushed at it, brought his fists down between its pendulous breasts and felt something give way beneath. At first, his blows rebounded like a child’s fist against a punch balloon, but he made headway with one of the dumbbells under the bench. It was like a pumpkin; beneath the pliant womanflesh rind, the Venus was a sac of membranes, bloated, fibrous organs and reservoirs of fluid, some his, some Hers. He smashed and smashed until his arm became tired and he noticed the stacatto pounding from the ground floor tenant.

“Call a cop!” Friendly screamed, and smashed on.

The next morning, Friendly called in sick and prowled the strip joint advertised on the rubber boner on the driver’s keychain. Knowing his name and rap sheet shed no light on the trail of the Venus, so he forgot it. He broke out the footlocker and unwrapped a Colt Desert Eagle and a .22

short-barrel automatic. He loaded each and shrugged into a shoulder holster for the Colt, an ankle holster for the .22.

Casing the parking lot from across the highway, Friendly recognized no one. He massaged rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide into his crotch until he was sitting in a quagmire of eye-watering antiseptic. He got on the highway and turned around, scoping for cops as he pulled into the lot.

Dancers wobbling around the foyer on cocaine fumes, tiredly offering private shows. Feminazi students blandly took notes. A naked woman sat on a director’s chair at the end of the runway, reading something with Oprah on the cover. Sad, sagging silicon ballast reminded him of the perfect curves he’d crushed, and he choked back a raw sob of longing.

Friendly paced the room, hoping to scare someone into flight. No one budged. He tossed the men’s room. Three sailors sharing a tiny bindle of crank dropped their works in the toilet and bailed.

He smelled the Venus. He touched his bobbing dowsing rod, still icy from its antiseptic bath. While the chemicals did nothing to stop the buds, they stifled the smell, so he practically saw the cloying contrail wafting out of the fourth bathroom stall.

He kicked the door in. It rebounded off the occupant’s kneecaps, and Friendly kicked it again. The screaming from within had barely gone into its overture when Friendly’s eager hands flipped the new cripple over and dunked his head into the toilet.

“I’m going to ask questions, and then you can breathe. Cool?”

Glubs of desperate willingness to please filled the bowl, or maybe he was just trying to blow the turds away from his mouth.

“I’m going to trust you not to scream.” He lifted the man’s head out of the bowl, cradling him in the prelude to a sleeper hold. His intake of breath was almost enough of a scream to merit another dunk, but it trailed off in whimpers.

Friendly said, “Tell me why you smell like you’ve been fucking my girl.”

“I didn’t know she was yours, man. Blow job for blow, bitch tried to cut me—”

“You know what I mean. I’m talking about Her,” driving the capital home with a quick dunk in the bowl. “Where did you meet her? Where did you fuck Her?”

“Bullshit! I don’t know who the fuck you think I am—”

“Don’t shit me! I can smell her on you!” Friendly shoved his head in the bowl and flushed. A cyclone of sewage engulfed the toilet dweller’s impassioned cries for salvation or death. Friendly brought him up, a fist still knotted in his thin hair. “The House of the Venus,” he gurgled, punctuating his capitals by vomiting in the bowl. “Everybody knows where it is. Off the 17, ten miles out from Front Street.”

“Address.”

“No numbers out there. Just trees, and trees and trees and the House of the Venus. Three stories, no paint, bunch of fucked-up old cars and trucks and shit all around it. What, you want a map?”

Friendly rapped the man’s head on the rim and seated him on the bowl. As he turned to leave, he caught a glance, out of the corner of his eye, purely by accident, at the man’s dick. It was a priapic purple nightstick to shame his own, twenty inches and ribbed for Her pleasure with purple buds the size of macadamia nuts. Friendly saw himself dousing the diseased member with lighter fluid, but how could he do to another what he wasn’t man enough to do to himself?

Friendly never had cause to wander the indifferently maintained roads that wound through the Santa Cruz backwaters; sheriff’s deputies had that detail, and he didn’t envy them one bit.

If the northbound PCH out of Santa Cruz was a tunnel by night, Highway 17 was a leap over a Berlin Wall of wilderness, a ribbon clinging to a mad jumble of rampaging ridges and valleys that time tried to forget. Forty miles of alpine hairpin tarmac christened “Blood Alley” by those damned to commute on it, the 17 claimed almost daily accidents, over half of which were fatal. Exits lurked behind glowering stands of pines, leading to hermitages for freaks who made the weirdest citizens of Santa Cruz look like Mormon missionaries.

He watched his trip odometer climb to ten, killed his headlights and slammed on his brakes to veer down an unpaved tunnel through the trees, a glory hole into the black guts of the forest. His truck shimmied and bucked on the loamy soil of the road, Friendly bolt upright and peering through the windshield, navigating by stray streams of teasing moonlight. Too narrow to be an exit, this was probably a private driveway, though there was no sign of the obligatory wrought-iron gates and TRESPASSERS EATEN HERE signs. He fought the road to a level stretch that broke out of the trees into a meadow strewn with a menagerie of rusted-out car-carrion. Across the vast expanse of junkyard and hip-high weeds, Friendly made out the derelict hulk of a school bus up on a scaffold like a Sioux warrior decked out for burial, its Day-Glo war paint proclaiming “House Of The Venus—All Suitors Welcome.”

Friendly drove up to the porch, climbed out. The windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti depictions of coitus in all its forms, animal, vegetable and spiritual. The door was reinforced with steel bands and had no doorknob. A view slit rattled open and bubbled over with suspicious eyes. Friendly smiled engagingly and sidled close enough to draw his revolver.

“What do you know?”

“I’ve got purple shit growing out of my dick.”

The door opened a crack and Friendly shouldered in and rapped the doorkeeper across the bridge of his nose with the massive muzzle of the Colt, scanned the room for potential threats.

The atrium opened directly on a great hall, the walls a shadowy smear of tapestries and incense clouds. Pallets and beanbags scattered over a crazy quilt of Indian rugs, bums and thugs spilled all over them, heads numbly turning like buds to the bright sobbing of the doorman holding his nose together.

A circle of huddled heads in the center of the room, each clutching a tube to the colossal hookah before them, inhaling and puffing out in unison like monks sucking the poison out of the world’s wounds. One of them stood and came around to the door. Dressed head-to-toe in clashing tie-dye patterns, His Santa Marx beard twinkling with tiny bells like twittering thornbirds. One of his eyes twinkled merrily as Friendly’s game face melted, staring fixedly at the hippie’s other eye, which was gone. Out of the socket sprouted a toadstool with iridescent orange gills, like a semi-tumescent penis.

“Welcome to the House of the Venus.” His nose twitched and his smile went queer, bemused but ever playful. “You smell funny, friend. I smell cop, but I also smell our best kind of friend. What’s your pleasure?”

“I want some answers, shithead.”

“Hey, wow, you’re that cop who wasted Rafe Heenan.”

“That piss you off?”

“On the contrary, dude, if it wasn’t all in the line of duty, I’d owe you one.”

“He got the… Venus… from you?”

“He stole it out of my cellar. He was gonna die, one way or the other. Nobody steals one of my love goddesses.”

“There’s more than one?”

Bells tinkled in his beard. “Shit, dude, I grow ‘em.”

The dealer led Friendly down into the basement, a black abyss of hothouse damp, chittering animal panic and miasmal stench. The air was syrupy with Venus musk, and Friendly bit back thunderous nausea, which redoubled at the realization that he was sporting wood like never before.

Once a wine cellar, the cavernous basement opened on groined vaults that were in turn divided into stalls with curtains of black crushed velvet. From behind them Friendly heard men moaning, gasping, growling, begging. Voices called, “Bitch!” voices cried, “Mommy.”

“See, fuzz, my church welcomes all forms of worship. And when you think about it, everything we do is an act of worship or an act of rebellion against Her, isn’t it? Watch your step, fuzz. Big pits of batshit.”

The dealer stepped over a trench filled to the rim with tarry black bat guano. The trenches marched off into the inky darkness at the far end of the cellar. The festering excreta was pocked with clusters of flesh-colored bulbs, like a fat farm for headless Barbies. Real live Cabbage Patch Dolls, Friendly thought. Beneath the wrenching sounds of men and beasts, he could hear them growing.

A towering wrought-iron cage took up one end of the room. Bats squealed and hurled themselves at the bars. “Get it by the ton from a guy in Mexico, but it pays to have a source of fresh.”

“Tell me what they are.”

“It’s a fungus, but in function, it’s a lot like Sarracenia. You know, pitcher plants? No?

“Well, anyway, they secrete sweet juices to attract flies and bees, and they trap them in a sticky honey pot. Digest ‘em. The Venus is special, though. It attracts an animal host and feeds off it, while implanting its spores on the host’s dingus. Then he moves along, fucks another one, and the cycle begins anew.”

“Why do they look like chicks?”

The dealer’s bells jingled. “Natural selection, fuzz. Cavemen took a shine to the shapelier ones, started cultivating them to look the way they do. Or maybe they just knew what we liked. Kind of a chicken-or-egg question, really.

“This strain came from the Amazon. Psychopharmacologist friend of mine dug it up. But I think they were everywhere, a long time ago. You ever seen the Venus of Willendorf, or any Stone Age fertility fetishes? If you did, you’d recognize the Venus. To the ancients, I think it must have been the purest form of sexual congress—a holy communion with the Mother Goddess without the messy strings of human procreation. It probably survived as late as the cult of Astarte in Mesopotamia. Her priestesses were the first prostitutes, you know that? They had to take over after the matriarchy exterminated the Venus. They were jealous because men would rather fuck a fungus than them. These here are the fruits of original sin. Now let’s see what we can do about getting those spores off your dick.”

Friendly couldn’t let it go a moment longer. Pointing at the dealer’s infested eye socket, he said, “You know… you have something growing out of your eye.”

The dealer chuckled and touched the shaft of the toadstool gently, guarding it. “Shit, dude, if I can get viable spores from this puppy, I’ll buy a new eye.”

He led Friendly back to the furthest vault from the door, and raised his hand to part the mouth of a curtain. Friendly couldn’t see more than a few inches beyond it. He raised his gun to the dealer’s face. “Don’t fuck with me.”

“Nobody’s fucking with you, fuzz—not yet. The only way of getting the smut off, short of a blowtorch, is pollinating another plant.”

“No way. I’m never going near one of those things again.”

“Have it your way, man. Those things may just drop off in about ten years. Funny thing about the Venus is, they tend towards hermaphroditism. Big word, huh? Plain English, they may already be fertilized spores, and they could sprout. They like bat shit best, but they can grow just as well out of human flesh, when push comes to shove. I know you don’t want that, and I want my spores back. So why don’t you just be a man and go in and satisfy Astarte, back there.”

Friendly imagined the purple buboes sprouting out of his cock and balls, singing their virulent hormone mating call to turn him into their zombie slave, turning his crotch into a raging fungoid brothel. “Okay. What do I have to do?”

“Just go in there and introduce yourself, and let nature take its course.”

Friendly backed into the vault, his gun trained on the dealer. Then he heard something moving behind him and he turned. The dealer shut the curtains. “Don’t be freaked out by Astarte’s appearance. He’s, uh, kind of a mutant.”

“He?”

Friendly’s dark-adjusted eyes barely made out a column of mottled purple flesh rising five feet out of the batshit trench. Its gill-frilled stalk split in a vaginal mouth to display pouting red lips like a giant calla lily, or a massive baboon’s ass in estrus. The gleaming, honey-dripper lips parted provocatively as a tongue, white and eel-slick, slipped out and lapped up the cream of its own distilled, overripe desire.

Friendly backed away and raised the gun. “Don’t come any closer—”

A trumpeting fart split the lips of the fungus and ejaculated a shower of pheromonal syrup into Friendly’s face. There was no coy chemical invitation in Astarte’s message. It was an undiluted masculine command to render up his seed for fertilization, and though it made a WOMAN of him, it was not to be denied.

Waves of indomitable lust tenderized him, and he dropped his gun to tear off his pants. The prehensile tongue darted out of the mouth to circle enticingly above his head as he approached. Seeking its own spoor on him, it homed in on his engorged penis, now twice its normal size. More tongues shot out of the livid mouth and buffeted him, lifted him off the ground and into the waiting, hungry lips.

The tongues greedily scoured every last bud off his crotch, then bored into his asshole and his cock, down his throat and into his stomach to retrieve spores he’d ingested during his affair with the Venus. Penetrated and transfixed, Friendly retreated into a tiny bunker in the attic of his brain and sang to himself, rode out ferocious orgasms that multiplied to critical mass when he gagged on the fungoid tongue down his throat as it met another of its kind that had come in his asshole. He exploded fluids out of every orifice and felt them licked away by rasping tongues, MANIPULATED DOMINATED CONTROLLED.

He prayed to die until the male Venus spat him out.

He lay insensate for years at the foot of the torpid Venus, bleeding and heaving, gasping for breath enough to slip into a coma.

Then he heard gunshots.

Friendly clambered to his feet and staggered out into the strobing glare of flashlights.

“Freeze! Police!” A strident female voice pinned him down. Friendly tried to cover his nakedness and hold his hands up at the same time. He understood now the hesitant panic of the SUSPECT, that drove them to grope and make half-steps towards fleeing, even as they surrendered.

“Lie down on the ground! Put your hands straight out at your sides! Do it now!”

“You don’t understand! I’m a victim! I mean—I’m a cop! I’m one of you!” Lying down in batshit, a boot on his spine, hands laced in the small of his back and cuffed together.

“Really? Where’s your ID? In your pants?” Friendly was hoisted to his feet and steered towards the door. A line of cops, all butch bulldaggers, stood along the wall, up the stairs and on out the front door, waiting their turn to glare in righteous disgust. Friendly hung his head and tried to pin his shriveled cock between his legs, noticed that the buds were gone. His penis looked and felt as if cats had been licking it all night long, but he was free of its mark of sin.

In the Captain’s office, rubbing cuff-burns on his wrists, studying his shoes. The Captain’s eyes flinty gray buttons robbing him of his last dignity. Her scrubbed, ruddy face pinched in distaste.

“I suppose I should say first that you are back on suspension. Your actions, once they’re finally sorted out, will be entered into your permanent record. We don’t like off-duty Dirty Harry’s in this person’s police force, do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now, I have to say that without your tip on the drug house, the raid we launched never would’ve been the success it was. We were unable before today to penetrate the ring, and you provided an invaluable source of information.” Her face pinched still more as the script she was reading from left its bitter taste in her mouth.

“It wasn’t a drug house,” Friendly managed.
“Not true. They were growing and distributing a controlled substance in the form of a psychoactive marital aid. We also found a number of other illicit substances, along with a cache of illegal firearms. They resisted our attempts to serve a search warrant, and we responded with force to insure your safe recovery.”

Her acting stank up the joint. If this was TV, Friendly would have turned it off. “How did you know I was in there?”

The Captain’s jaw worked. “You phoned us before you went in to the house.”

He wanted to scream at her to stop it. “How long were you having me followed?”

“You called us, Officer Friendly. No one followed you. Ever.” Tight lips pressing truth into the assertion. “We advised against your going in, which advisement you disregarded, hence your suspension. But your captivity led to a search warrant, which led to the raid. You are to be commended. Well,” closing the file on the desk before her, “your ordeal has left you in need of rest, so why don’t you get yourself cleaned up and go home. You’ll be facing a board of review in about three weeks, but I wouldn’t worry.”

“Thank you, Captain.”
“We have to have men on the force like you, Friendly. You’re an example to us all, an example of what we could become.”

Friendly went to the locker room, and realized just how filthy he’d become. Black gobs of guano under his fingernails, in his hair, and… The buds were gone, but the thing he’d had to be with to get rid of them left him unable to touch or look at himself. He’d never been able to bring himself to use the locker room showers—homophobia or fear of athlete’s foot, or enjoyment of his own B.O., or all of the above—but he knew he couldn’t go another moment coated in the slime of the night-hag.

He stripped and wrapped in a towel, went into the shower room. A misty steam-tunnel, the shower room curtained each of its bathers from each other, so that as Friendly tore off the towel, turned the water as hot as it would go and scrubbed the purifying stream into his crotch, he didn’t see the other cops. He noticed their feet as they came out of the steam, a cordon hemming him into the corner. His eyes wandered up to their faces, but never got there, because for the first time in his life, Friendly stared deliberately at male genitalia without questioning his own manhood, and understood why the other cops all looked at him like he was some kind of freak when he’d tried to get them to go cruising.

Each cop’s penis dangled down to his knees, studded with prickly-pear purple buds, swollen fit to burst.

“You smell like Her,” one of them said, and came closer.

The Wage of Dinosaurs

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, said the sign over Herman Heinz’s head. It said it again, because he could not read it.

“No, no, that’s not how I remember it at all!” screamed the customer. “You’ve got the figurines’ heads all switched around, and some of them are naked!” Even under the hood, her mind entrained into a state of dreamlike recall, Mrs. Hale’s strident voice scissored through the last threads of his composure.

“I’m sorry ma’am,” Herman said, “but I just guide the imagery. If it’s not in there right, I can’t fix it.”

“Well, I’m paying to remember the Japanese netsuke exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as it was when I was a little girl, and not some deplorable wet dream of yours!” Mrs. Hale ducked out of the hood and pried the sensors off her temples with a withering scowl on her painted face, preened her imperious silver fright-wig. Grumbling, “I certainly don’t expect to be billed for this nonsense,” she tottered out the door.

Heinz didn’t try to explain, as he did every time she came in, that he couldn’t change the content of her memories even if he wanted to, only focus their retrieval and process them into holograms; that any confused details or sexual imagery that seeped in were from her own subconscious; that, to him, her memories were meaningless squirts of neurochemical syrup in a broken brain.

Outside, honey-dappled waves of tamed sunlight glorified birch-lined Main Street, painting idle window-shoppers in hues of Rembrandt gold. He eyed the burnished mahogany bench out front, where he sat when the door unlocked and he was allowed to spend fifteen minutes each shift smoking and reading comic books.

Every eight-hour shift he spent in Los Altos Estates© was a week in the outside world, and not in any fruity metaphorical sense. In here, even the passage of time was retarded.

What day was it outside? Thinking about that made him begin to suspect that maybe the whole temporal retardation field around Los Altos Estates© was a fraud. Every shift felt like a week, in here, too.

The next old ghoul was already rapping her cane on the counter. “You’ve mixed it for me a thousand times, I don’t see why you’re taking all day. Ought to be preset, or something—”

“It is preset for your prescription, Mrs. Rowbotham, and it’ll be done in two minutes, like always.”

“I don’t like your tone, young man,” Mrs. Rowbotham rasped, snatching up a comment card and a pen as she crab-walked to the overstuffed vinyl chair where she’d left her unfinished macramé varmint trap.

She sat down next to Mrs. Paupp, who lay semi-comatose, thankfully, under a VR hood that mainlined Mexican soap operas into her age-raddled gray matter. Heinz was pretty sure Mrs. Paupp didn’t know Spanish, but he didn’t care, so long as it kept her quiet. Though the tinny voices that leaked out of the helmet drove Heinz to contemplate murder—like hot-blooded cockroaches singing opera between Mrs. Paupp’s ears—he kind of liked it, because it seemed to bother Mrs. Rowbotham even more.

Herman slipped out from behind the counter and unlocked the door to the back room.

“Where’re you going, now? Taking a break, already?”

“No, ma’am, I’m just going to check on your mix.”

“My what?”

“Your mix, Mrs. Rowbotham, your brain-juice. The same stuff I always give you.”

“Isn’t the other boy here? I like the other boy so much more…”

“I’m the only one here, ma’am, and I’m very, very sorry.” He ducked behind the door.

This wasn’t even his job. Alec, the other clerk, fronted the desk and guided the retrievals, and Herman mixed, safely insulated from the cranky clientele. Alec was pinched by the narcs for selling the store’s wares on the street in San Jose, and after three shifts, the company still hadn’t seen fit to replace him. Getting people to work in Los Altos Estates© was tough.

He looked in the mirror by the door, seeing himself through the whispering slogans etched into the glass—WHATEVER IT TAKES, ALL THE TIME, and ARE YOU SMILING? Stooped shoulders, pattern baldness, dull expression; with this body, this mind, this was his lot in life. All the hallmarks of early middle age were creeping in, yet Herman’s physique was still that of a five year old.

Mom wanted a puppy; out of the question on Dad’s salary, so they got the next best thing. As an unregistered natural birth, Herman was an illegal alien, but he’d never be found out, she figured, if he never grew up. Mom snuck him off to back-alley gene therapists to fix his age just before he was to start school. Neighbors ratted her out, and she went away to a very nice jail run by the Mormons. Dad had to sell Herman’s contract to keep out of debtor’s gulag, and so he had joined the workforce.

Without further gene therapy, Herman would probably never grow up, and gene therapy was outlawed long before he was born—by their generation. By the Hales, Rowbothams and Paupps, who decided that tinkering with the laws of physics to prolong their own lives was okay, but altering the human genome was blasphemy.

Herman punched up Mrs. Rowbotham’s prescription. It was ninety percent complete, awaiting synthesis of the neurotransmitters that would unlock her rusty receptors and let the memories out. He sat and watched the machine work, and silently hated Mrs. Rowbotham.

In the two calendar years he’d worked at MemoryMart©, he’d come to despise the elderly and the rich with a fierce purity that would’ve made a radical Communist out of a brighter employee, and a killer out of one with more gumption. He loathed their smug self-worship, their zeal for microscopic detail, their incessant whining about how the world was a better place when they were the ones ruining it. They were vampires, feeding on the humiliation of young human hosts. While they reveled in sucking the life out of him moment by moment, he couldn’t begin to guess how it enriched them. Maybe the time retardation field itself was powered by his degradation.

He hated Mrs. Rowbotham the most, because her mind was so fragmented. Her paranoia was such that she wouldn’t let him in to guide her retrievals, never ordered a hard print, and always complained that she was viewing someone else’s memories by mistake. When she got really riled up, she threatened to cut him out of her will and ordered him to rub her feet. The company, of course, always took her side. When he tried to dump her as a client, they reprimanded him, ordered him to put more L-dopa in her mix—and rub her feet.

It was time for direct action: a show of defiance.

Herman jabbed the STOP button on the mixer and lifted out the vial of supercharged brain juice he’d be injecting into Mrs. Rowbotham’s wattled blue neck. He uncapped it and tugged his particle filter mask down. He sucked in air hard to scrape the walls of his throat, hocked a king-size lunger into the juice, and replaced it in the mixer. He watched the shake cycle dissolve the gooey morsel of lung-butter into the clear serum.

He lost track of time, and was still watching when the staccato rhythm of Mrs. Rowbotham’s cane against the counter set off an alarm in the antique shop next door.

An hour later, watching Mrs. Rowbotham twitch and fidget under the hood in the retrieval salon, he wondered if he hadn’t gone too far. Her vital signs were normal, and her brain readouts looked stronger than ever, but she wasn’t talking. The foggy fossil normally growled and purred through her sessions, murmuring endearments to some ghosts, shouting at others—downtrodden relatives and store clerks long since dead. Today, she only hissed, stabbing intakes of breath between clenched dentures, her sunken bosom heaving and buckling like a bellows.

Usually, Herman jimmied the lock and snuck outside for a quick smoke, or tripped on the residue he could sometimes skim off her mix, while Mrs. Rowbotham remembered. But this time, he knew, he had to watch. He’d hawked snot into the dismal pool of his future, and, hypnotized by the wheezing, centuried shape his doom had taken, he had to bear witness to its arrival.

Suddenly, Mrs. Rowbotham spasmed and sat bolt upright, yanking off most of the sensors. Her face twisted into a gruesome predatory mask, jaws flexed and drawing down the corners of her mouth, dentures flecked with foamy spittle and black lipstick. Her eyes darted about with a steely awareness utterly alien to the crone’s vacant mask.

Herman hesitated at the outer door when those eyes fastened on him. She knows, he thought, but that vital, ruthless glare seemed only to know how good it would be to rip out his throat and lap at his gushing blood. Herman thought of sharks and lions he’d seen in the sims, and backed up.

Then her eyes clouded over and she subsided on the couch and clasped her chest. Her breath came in ragged, bubbling fits, and with a noisome blast like ripping fabric, she voided her bowels.

He’d killed her. Good, he thought. I fixed the old bitch, didn’t I? They’ll fry me, but it was worth it. Wasn’t it?

He approached her stilled, stinking carcass and, trembling, reached out to touch her wrist. The eyes, half-lidded, revealed nothing. The stink of her shit made his eyes water.

The blue-veined hand caught his with blinding speed, even as she doubled over coughing. Herman jerked back, but she held him fast, scalpel-sharp acrylic nails shredding his sleeve.

Mrs. Rowbotham slid off the couch, pulled him closer still, into an awful embrace, into the palpable vortex of Tea Rose and diarrhea and PolyDent Green and primordial carrion. Heinz closed his eyes and helplessly voided his bladder.

“Eeeeiiisssss! Heinzzzssss…” She hissed in his face. “Wasssszz gooooood…” Mrs. Rowbotham pinned him there as her other paw reached into the folds of her double-knit polyester jumpsuit, emerged with a violet rubber change purse. She taloned it open and pinched out a crisp hundred dollar bill in old federal currency, pressed it into his trapped hand. She let him go. He staggered back into the corner, arms wrapped around his vital organs.

“That’ssz for you, sssssonny, thankssss.” Springing from the couch, she loped out of the salon and into the street, leaving her cane.

Stupefied, Herman watched her through the window until she disappeared round the corner onto State Street. He massaged feeling back into his hand and looked in wonderment at the bill. It was worthless, of course, but Mrs. Rowbotham had never tipped him before. None of them ever did.

He wondered if he hadn’t stumbled onto something that the company might be grateful for, something that would get him out of this dead-end job. He wondered if maybe this wasn’t the greatest discovery in the history of mnemonic retrieval technology. He wondered—

“Where the hell are you, boy? What’ve I got to do to get some service, over here!” Mrs. Paupp was crashing hard from her soap opera dream, and banging on the counter bell. Herman forgot what he was wondering and listened to the sign that reminded him to SMILE!

At the end of his shift, Herman stepped out of the enclave airlock to find it was 03:45 on Wednesday, November Third. He’d closed up shop ten minutes early, expecting it to still be Halloween. He was sore from the stringent chemical showers, the molecular recompression and the cavity search. They confiscated his hundred-dollar bill.

He paused in the middle of the vast concrete field that surrounded the Los Altos enclave. Faint sounds of gunfire and the sullen boom of mortars rolled in on the wind from Palo Alto, but they were barely even trying to kill each other, tonight. The neighborhoods adjacent to the enclave lived on what they could siphon off the retardation field. At any given time, half the urban grids were browned out in the South Bay, and shifting free-fire zones were reported with the traffic.

Herman crossed the field, trying to grow eyes on the back of his head as the warfare grew louder. His bus stop was just out of range of the lights on the railgun towers. He heard the guns tracking him and was glad, because they weren’t tracking something waiting for him in the dark.

This was the most degrading part of working at Los Altos: to step out of a warm April afternoon he’d wasted in a one-man sweatshop, and find himself in a demilitarized zone in the wee hours of an autumn morning, with a week of his life lost and eight hours’ minimum-wage credit to show for it.

Then the guns swiveled out on the dark and obliterated something that skulked in it, and Herman’s bus was coming, and he forgot all about the job.

That night, in his coffin, his pay-per-view was pre-empted by a MemoryMart© basic training refresher vid. He tried to sneak away into sleep, but flickering subliminals plucked at his cortical arousal levels, trapping him in a twilight state for maximum retention. The blasting narration gushed into his head; the little, unmoored items resting in the IN pile of his memory were blown away like paper fans before a fire hose. He tried to relax, knowing his EEG was being monitored, his response to the vid graded.

When they came to the part about neurotransmitter mixing and the dangers of contamination, did he give an involuntary shudder, a galvanic confession? Did they already know about Mrs. Rowbotham? Did the voice get louder as it intoned, “Willful contamination of MemoryMart© products will result in immediate termination.”

He knew what that meant. According to the small print on his healthcare contract, his body was technically MemoryMart© property. So long as they paid his premiums, they could opt to cannibalize him for parts at any time. He imagined his disembodied brain hardwired to the controls of a MemoryMart© franchise for all eternity. His fear of being caught, of being dismembered, flooded him, and then something strange happened. The churning terror transmuted into a new and alien sensation, one that gnawed in sublime slowness where its precursors had chilled and shattered him, and mercifully melted away.

Herman felt guilt.

Two weeks passed. Herman Heinz slept through most of it, awakened to find no E-mail except for a series of increasingly threatening bills from an online service called Nocturnal Transmissions. Apparently, they’d serviced him with no less than twenty-five hours of “teledildonic play therapy” in the last two weeks, for which they wanted the lion’s share of his next four paychecks. He plotted filing a complaint in one of the virtual courts for fraud, but when he peeled off his sodden paper pajamas, the notion imploded and he logged on and paid the bill. But he still felt lousy.

Behind the barbed wire wall of his impotent rage there lurked a vague phantom sensation of something done and fretted over, bad karma in a cheap cage.

Herman arrived at the inspection station of Los Altos Estates© eight pounds lighter than when he’d left. He approached the first checkpoint and slipped his arm into it, when suddenly it all came back to him, and he was waiting for alarms to go off and needles to plunge into his veins.

The checkpoint scanned him and green-lighted him into the decontamination showers. Herman let out a breath he’d been holding in for two weeks, rubbed at the cramp that gripped his chest. He’d gotten away with it.

Halfway through his shift, Mrs. Rowbotham was scheduled to come in for a session. Herman stood at the counter, ready to bull his way through any accusations she might level at him. Sure, my snot’s running around in her brain, but it’s still my word against hers. He hoped the old ghouls still clung to bygone superstitions about holistic health, and didn’t go in for tacky, invasive procedures like genetic screens or autopsies.

Still, as the minutes passed and Mrs. Rowbotham went missing, he began to worry. He was still posing at the counter like a clockwork jerk when the door buzzed and opened for him to take his break.

He stepped out and looked around. A few seniors drifted up and down Main Street in their too-colorful plastic jumpers, but no Mrs. Rowbotham. My word against a crazy old bitch who can buy and sell me, he thought.

He wandered down to the barbershop, peered in at Salvatore and Ulli, the robots who cut the old ghouls’ hair. Mr. Eichelburger, the president of the Los Altos homeowners’ association, held court in Sal’s chair. Herman lurked just outside the open door.

“Always was a queer bird,” Eichelburger was saying, “but if she can outrun the security teams, I’d sure like to know her secret…”

“You betcha,” Salvatore put in, and wrapped a steaming white towel around Eichelburger’s face.

“It’s no secret,” Mr. Ennis scoffed. Ennis had bionic lungs, and made cool video game noises when he breathed. “She’s on the damned drugs, like everybody outside.”

“Ja, you can say that again,” Ulli chipped in, and spread foamy shaving lather on Mr. Ennis’s jaw. Mr. Whitney, waiting with a newspaper on his lap, sagely nodded.

“We’re all old, now, aren’t we?” Eichelburger asked. “We slowed the clock to a crawl, but the wolf is still at the door. Why fight it, why go on? It’s in her eyes, boys. Ida Rowbotham knows the answer. She remembers something we all gave up looking for, ages ago.”

“Ike, when you talk like that, I always know it must be an election year,” Whitney said, and they all chuckled. “So what’s she got, anyway?”

“Innocence,” Eichelburger said. “Youth.”

“Youth?” Ennis deflected Ulli’s razor hand with a car alarm bleep. “How young or innocent did she look when she bit Ruthie Perkins in the throat at the orchid show? Can’t say I feel safe knowing she’s still running around loose, either.”

Oh, shit—

“I don’t mean her youth, Marv, I mean when the world was young, before it got cluttered up with dinosaurs like us. I mean the innocence of the Golden Age, before we got fat and lazy with all these damned machines to wait on us.”

“God, Ike, don’t talk like that in front of the help,” Ennis said. “Ulli, that blade’s dull.”

“So sorry, boss.” Ulli stropped the blade on his leather-padded arm.

“You ask me,” Ennis pressed on, lungs blurping, “her mind’s all scrambled. Too many chemicals. Hell, ask her pushers, down the way.” Mr. Whitney waved at MemoryMart©. “That holo-retrieval stuff’ll rot your brains.”

“You said a mouthful, you betcha,” Salvatore clucked.

Herman ran back to his store and barricaded the door until closing time. Mrs. Rowbotham never came in.

Herman spent his next two-week interim riding the Muni trains. He had nowhere to go, and he was broke after paying the rent on his coffin and his second installment to Nocturnal Transmissions, but he couldn’t go back. He knew they were waiting for him.

He’d made Mrs. Rowbotham into some kind of killer. It was as if all his anger had distilled into that one morsel of phlegm, and exploded in her brain, a supernova embolism of vicarious primal rage. What if Ms. Perkins fell victim to it, too? What if his anger spread through Los Altos Estates© like a plague, and the whole population became a pack of rabid, walker-bound monsters?

Cool. But—

In the end, he had to go back to work. None of the relief kiosks would dispense goods for him because he had a job and a coffin to sleep in. In the end, work was the only place that would have him.

Approaching the checkpoint, he stopped short when he saw a flesh-and-blood armed sentry standing beside it. Herman started to turn and run for it, make them shoot him in the back at least, but the sentry waved him on.

“Showers are off today,” he shouted. “No cavity search, either. Shit, I hope you brought a weapon.”

Despite himself, Herman came closer. “What do you mean?”

“Good luck, man. Everybody’s got to earn a living, right?” He hit the airlock switch and the door swung open with a too-loud pop. Herman stepped inside and it closed.

The matter decompression usually took only a few minutes. If there was a cool part of working at Los Altos Estates©, it was this. As far as he understood it, they had a way of decelerating the molecular processes of your body, so they thought time was passing slower, or whatever. And inside the dome, it did. It’d been springtime in Los Altos Estates© for almost two years.

But this time, nothing happened. He felt no tingling in his extremities, no sensation of freezing and burning at the same time—nothing. He panicked at the sound of air hissing into the airlock, and clawed at the seals. Gas, they’re gassing me, this is how they fire you—with real fire.

The hatch opened.

Inside, he could tell right away that everything had gone wrong.

There were no strollers on Main Street. Flowering plants overflowed their boxes, and red-brown leaves danced on the canned breeze. A white orthopedic sandal lay on the sidewalk in front of his store. As he drew nearer, he saw it was laying in a burgundy puddle, and had most of a foot in it.

He still had two minutes before his store would open for him, so he went to the barbershop.

Salvatore lay halfway out on the sidewalk, propping the door open. As Herman drew nearer, he saw that Salvatore was missing his legs. Ulli sat on the tiled floor behind him, split open and hollowed out. Fiber-optic cable, plastic modules and lubricant had been used to redecorate the barbershop in a frenzy that suggested a predator’s rage at being cheated of real meat. Leaning in the doorway, he saw they’d been better served by Mr. Whitney, still slumped in the waiting chair. His throat was laid open, limbs wrenched or gnawed off, his ribcage cracked and his organs savaged. He’d managed to catch most of it in his newspaper.

Herman backed away, dropped to his knees as a weird, hooting howl pealed though the misty morning air. The sound rebounded down the empty avenue of the geriatric ghost town.

Something was hunting him.

He scrambled to his shop and jerked on the door. The howling grew louder, ascended in pitch, was joined by others. They were closing in.

He heard something like talons on plate-glass just around the corner, and he yanked at the door again, and this time, it came open and slammed into his face. He staggered back into the street with his hands over his nose, trying to stop the flow, thinking, Omigod, I can’t get blood on this uniform, they’ll make me pay for it...

And he saw one of them.

Though it walked on all fours and stood almost three meters high at the shoulder, it could only be Mrs. Hale.

Even now, he saw her haughty self-assurance in the way she switched her jewel-scaled tail, like the silken train of a dowager empress’s gown. Stray wisps of silver hair still trailed off her blunt gargoyle skull, like hearty weeds among the pebbled, overlapping scales of her new skin.

Where once Mrs. Hale’s empty head had existed to carry that phony hairdo, it now served as an excuse for a mouth that went from ear to ear, and threatened to meet at the back when it

opened. And when it did, Herman marveled at Mrs. Hale’s new teeth. Her very own teeth had grown back—not one, but two complete sets, all canines and incisors. She barked a greeting at Herman and pounced on him.

Her attack was arrested in mid-air by an arc of blue lightning from behind Herman. He turned just as a sentry jumped out of the MemoryMart©, grabbed him and dragged him inside.

A pair of suited executives stood behind the counter, looking very ill at ease. Two more sentries blocked the door and flanked him, their weapons at port arms. The third disappeared behind him. “Herman Heinz?” one exec asked.

“Yes, sir,” he mumbled, trying to see that third sentry, whose breath on his neck stank of steroid gum.

“Do you wish to make a statement?”

“Um, what? I mean, can you tell me what’s happening, first?” The third sentry’s hands came around his face, sprayed a ticklish, icy mist up his nose. He fought, but couldn’t stop the hands from forcing gauze plugs into each bloody nostril. “He’s clean, sir” the sentry said.

“We’re still trying to piece it together, Herman. Some catastrophe has occurred here at Los Altos Estates©, as I’m sure you’re aware, and MemoryMart© is considering terminating its lease on this franchise. As far as it applies to you, well… We’ll probably relocate you to another franchise, in the Disneyheim© or Lawrence Welk© Enclaves, they go through people like toilet paper. But first, there’s the matter of the internal review…”

He sighed, maybe waiting for theme music. “As the only company operating inside Los Altos Estates© that still employs organic workers, we’re going to be under the microscope, once the smoke clears. We’re preparing a report for the legal hierarchies for Los Altos Estates©, pending their review of the changes here, to release us—and you—of all liability. Do you understand?”

They’re going to find out. And they’re going to exercise the bylaw, send my brain to a hell of eternal work.
No, God, not Disneyheim©—

Heinz was still staring blankly at the sign on the wall above their heads when the second exec, on reserve in case Herman turned out to be a moron, kicked in. “Herman, at any time, were you aware of any possible contamination of MemoryMart© products, willful or otherwise?”

“Who turned off the time thing?” Herman asked.

The first exec threw his hands up in disgust, but the second went for a kid gloves approach. “We don’t know, Herman, but it shut down shortly after your last shift. Whoever did it rerouted the power consumption back into the municipal grid and damped all the monitors, so nobody outside caught on, but we know this much. An infection of some kind has, um, infected nearly one hundred percent of the surviving population. We’re still trying to pin down the nature of that infection, but the residents aren’t being very cooperative.”

“They’re dinosaurs,” Herman whispered.

“Actually,” the first exec said, pleased at Heinz’s progress to big-boy words, “we think they’re gorgonopsids, Herman. Carnivorous proto-mammals, wiped out two hundred fifty million years ago. Some scientists think they’re our ancestors.”

Something barreled into the picture window, shaking the entire store. The Plexiglas held, but barely. A shriek of frustration chilled Herman’s blood, but the execs stared at him, weighing his responses. He squirmed. “I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Do what? What did you do?”

They would know all kinds of ways to say it so it sounded like an honest, regrettable and ultimately unavoidable accident. He didn’t. “I hawked a lunger into Mrs. Rowbotham’s brain-juice.”

“Jesus Christ!” one exec cried, and, “Oh dear God, no!” the other howled. “How could you? Oh, this is—we’re dead…”

“What’s the big deal? I mean, it didn’t kill her, or anything.”

One exec whispered frantically in the other’s ear, then turned to him. “Herman, what do you know about gene therapy?”

“What’d I do? It was just spit.”

“Gene therapy, Herman. Do you know what it is?”

He shrugged his five-year old’s shoulders. “I know it’s illegal.”

“Good, good. And what do you know about temporal retardation therapy?”

“Old people use it to cheat death, but it’s not illegal?”

“Okay, great… Well, the only barrier to indefinite longevity that science hasn’t been able to conquer without illegal gene-tweaking is the decay of DNA. After about a century or so, chromosomes simply start to unravel. Now, temporal retardation slows all molecular processes by a factor of twenty or so for those who live inside, but what about those who come and go?”

Herman shrugged.

“MemoryMart© is devoted to quality customer service, to the human touch. Our clients in the elite enclaves like the human touch, and mnemonic hologaphy is too complex a task for androids. But the expense of keeping an employee inside the enclave at all times is prohibitive.”

He knew, now, how it was going to end. They were going to talk him to death. He kept nodding.

“Now, top secret tests conducted by MemoryMart©’s research division show that repeated decompression of organic molecules actually accelerates the unraveling of DNA.”

Talking slow enough for Herman to follow caused the exec to choke up. His partner took up the thread. “In order to provide the level of customer service our valued clients have come to expect from MemoryMart©, we’ve been forced to resort to… a limited form of gene therapy.”

Something outside raked the windows with a fistful of railroad spikes.

“You mean you’ve been doing illegal shit on me?” Herman demanded. “Great! So, we’re even?”

“We’re well within our legal rights,” the second exec huffed. “It was for your own protection. The therapy maintained the elasticity of your chromosomes through the rigors of the recompression. It was perfectly safe, and never would’ve been a threat to anybody—a little white lie. But you went and…”

“What in the hell possessed you?” the first exec demanded.

“What did I do?”

“You contaminated our retrieval mix with a tailored virus that plasticizes DNA, dipshit. The solution opened up latent chemical memories in the client’s genes and accessed them. Memories of traits that have lain dormant for millions of generations.”

“You made us remember,” a third voice said, from the intercom speaker on the wall. Herman had never heard anything come out of it but announcements for shuffleboard tournaments and square dances, but he recognized the voice that came out of it, now. “You’ve made us young.”

Something slammed into the window again, and this time it broke through. All eyes turned to face the thing that lumbered through the waiting area, slashing tail sweeping chairs and magazine racks aside, battering-ram head lowered in majestic menace. Its jaws lolled open and Herman saw those double-rowed teeth, saw that some of them were lucite implants. Mrs. Rowbotham, here for her appointment at last.

The guards made ready to shoot. The execs dove behind the counter. Only Herman stood rooted as Mrs. Rowbotham stalked the store.

“Don’t you dare hurt her!” the voice from the intercom shouted. “This is Homeowners’ Association President Dwight Eichelburger. Now, here’s what you’re going to do: pack up and get the hell out of Los Altos Estates©. We don’t need you, anymore. Any delay or interference, and you’ll be hearing from our lawyers, who’ve been empowered with trusteeship of our pooled assets. Any attempts to interfere, and you’ll wish you were back in here with us, when they get hold of you.”

The execs stared daggers at Herman. They were going to exercise the bylaw now, no doubt about that. He’d given Los Altos Estates© an unspeakable gift, and in return, he was going to customer service hell.

It was time for direct action.

While Eichelburger droned on and the sentries covered Mrs. Rowbotham, Herman blew the gauze out of his nostrils. Hot blood sprayed his palm. Ducking under the third sentry’s rifle, he lunged for Mrs. Rowbotham and stuck his hand under her foamy muzzle.

She scented the blood. Her head dipped and clamped his hand like a steel trap. He felt teeth like steak knives slicing through his tendons, crunching down on bone, and the pain was terrible, yes, but it was wonderful, too.

The execs knew what it meant. The sentries were a little slower on the uptake, so he ripped his mangled hand free of Mrs. Rowbotham’s jaws and held it up. “I’m infected! I’ve got it!”

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” the execs screamed. “You’ll get infected blood everywhere—” They dropped the emergency barrier behind them and disappeared into the storeroom.

Herman backed away, covering the guards with the bloody ruin of his hand. He was weak in the knees, but exhilaration kept him moving back to the hole in the window, out onto the cobblestone veldt of Main Street. They were afraid of him, and Herman almost thought he detected a bit of awe in their eyes, just before Mrs. Rowbotham ate them.

“I quit,” he told the security cameras.

As he raced away, clamping his hand under his other arm to minimize the blood flow, he believed he could feel it working, the recombinant agent opening sealed vaults in his genes, revealing ancient treasures, forgotten forms.

His flesh began to dream.

And he started to remember.

The Care & Feeding of Sea Monkeys

The naked jogger ran on the fringes of the heaving Pacific surf until he came alongside something sprawled in the surf and dove in after it.

At first Ramdu thought it was only a beautiful girl, her curvaceous hindquarters propped up and presenting to the shore. He watched as the jogger impaled her with a barbaric shout, amorously plowing the shallows with her face.

Just when it seemed she might drown, her tail coiled round the jogger and she let out a keening fax machine shriek of presentient ecstasy. For a moment they reared up and crawled all over each other in midair, then darted into the waves and were swept out on the retreating tide.

Ramdu Gul flushed with elation and let out a stale breath that had been strangled in his chest since the first stirrings of puberty. He was really here, on Venice Beach in the Commonwealth of California, and all the stories were true.

He couldn’t repress a big goofy grin as he stepped through the last checkpoint and out onto the boardwalk. Ramdu had come a long way to get here, greased many palms, told many lies. He had seen horrible things, seen men killed, or worse. Still, he was grateful. If the stories were true, if the Sea Monkeys were anything like the tall tales told in the darkest, deepest chatrooms on the Net, he would always remember this day.

One last check of his gear—the neuro-enhanced titanium-graphite mesh skinsuit, already deployed under his baggy linen caftan; the subcutaneous 310 ID chip embedded at the nape of his neck; the web-harness filled with dangerous, expensive things he’d never used before—and he was ready for his day at the beach.

He checked his reflection in the chrome face of his pressure gauge: absurd nose like a pelican’s beak, pockmarked cheeks, crooked, betel-stained teeth, no chin and almost as little hair, tiny honey-mud eyes blinking a telegraphic SOS because his contact lenses never sat quite right.

Ramdu’s father had only ensnared his radiant mother by arranging to marry her in Kashmir when she was an infant. The pride of his checkered, unremarkable life, she died in the Guangzhou Flu outbreak of ‘29, and he perished when white supremacists firebombed his convenience store. Penniless, cut off from his kin in India, Ramdu had been turned down even by untouchable brides on the Net.

These beauties will not want you for your looks, or your wealth, he thought. But they will want you—

Ramdu schemed and saved for months to make this trip. From its first stirrings as a guilty fantasy, it had swelled to devour his dreams and his working hours until nothing seemed more natural or more urgent. But even his considerable computer skills and enough dogged determination to shame a salmon had failed to bring him any closer.

Southern California was still a war zone, though hostilities had dragged out to sporadic exchanges of missiles and Net bombs with NorCal, and rattling its ragtag submarine fleet at the rest of the US and the narco-republic of Mexico. If ever the lawless Southlands were pacified for tourism, it would only be by some invader who would destroy what he had come to conquer.

Then last week, Mr. Harkin had come to see him, a rare occurrence in itself, but compounded by his boss’ awkwardness, as if Ramdu had caught him doing something wrong. So, he wanted to go to SoCal? Ramdu made humble noises about long-lost family, but Mr. Harkin waved it away. Men of the world didn’t need to make excuses, yes? Adventurers? Ramdu felt dark rhetorical waters close over his head, nodded. If he really wanted to go down there, Harkin could put papers together, and all he had to do was pick up a package.

Ramdu had been overjoyed, but cautious. Mr. Harkin was a VP at Allied Teledildonics, and, so the company rumor mill had it, a despicable pervert. His wife had Milkmaid implants, a bovine hormone treatment that made grotesque, perpetually lactating udders of her already considerable breasts. Harkin carried vials of her milk at all times, and was known to suck shamelessly from the source at Christmas parties, or whenever a disgusting display gave him the upper hand at a power luncheon. Whatever Mr. Harkin wanted so badly, it must surely cast Ramdu’s own fetish in the shade. The transaction was quickly accomplished before breakfast, leaving him the rest of the time to plot his beach trip.

Ramdu snaked through gangs of surfers with razor-finned boards and matte-black sharkskin hides; blubbering chaingangs of debt-orphans on litter duty; sailors and Marines and corporate mercs on shore leave, already spoiling for blood-feuds with the locals; and gibbets bowing under bumper crops of gull-ravaged corpses with their out-of-state American license plates around their bloated green necks, and sprayed with day-glo graffiti: LOCALS ONLY.

The whole spectrum of robed cultists clotted the boardwalk—tangerine Krishnas, argentine Meta-Buddhists, fuligin Neo-Ninjas, aquamarine Channel Surfers in their unbreakable water-triads, a senior oxygen and two yoked hydrogen acolytes, humming the ocean’s monotonous static mantra as they trickled through the gate. A camo-clad Vegan militia played blowtorch-wands over a Thai rat-stick wagon like a hippie re-enactment of the My Lai Massacre.

Swarms of skaters in logo-strobing body armor ripped through the crowd and each other, caroming off pedestrians, screaming smart-boards slashing the air around Ramdu’s head like silicon shurikens. Clouds of silver birds and bugs circled overhead, but only camera-drones could survive in the rusty red air. Anything remotely interesting that might happen would end up on TV, somewhere.

“Do not waste yourself, young man, on the succubi of the shallows.” A Channel Surfer gloomed in his path, arms outstretched to catch him in the undertow of holy oblivion. “The rapture of the deep beckons.” His eyes blazed with the bioluminescent flares of abyssal anglerfish lures. Under the wet scarf round his wattled neck, Ramdu knew, would be surgically installed gills.

Ramdu knew better than to try to escape, so he opted to zero in crazier than the cultist, circling and babbling improvised Hindi haikus. “Waves break on the shore. The earth cradles the sea. I am a rock, to dash out your brains!” He brandished a random dermal card, a hyper-nicotine patch from a local bail bondsman. The narcophobic Channel Surfer vaporized, Draculated, and there was nothing, finally, between Ramdu and the beach.

Sand had been trucked in or dredged to bury old Santa Monica, but the tallest ruins jutted out of the ash-gray beach, and a row of skyscrapers still stood against the choppy, rainbow-sheened ocean, marking the old shoreline. Yachts, hovercrafts and skimmers ferried people out to these, where wild parties and drunken, naked block wars raged on the roofs. The boaters howled and blasted music and fired harpoons into the water.

He’d expected, feared, bigger crowds. Cliques and cult cells and solitary freaks wandered the beach as if it were some endless, purgatorial cocktail party. A few hapless tourists actually sun-bathed, turning purple under the punishing sun before his very eyes. Too many of them were flyblown cadavers in seaweed shrouds, washed in on the tide.

There were no lifeguards, but surfpunk militias patrolled in jeeps, coked-out kids in Foreign Legion kepis with recoilless rifles on swivel-mounts and endlessly blaring warnings: “The area north of the checkered flag is for surfing only! All swimmers in the surf zone will be shot!” There was no checkered flag, anywhere. Surfers ruled, but swimmers shot back.

Checking the seals on his suit so none of his skin was exposed to the sun or the water, Ramdu clumsily vaulted over the railing of the boardwalk and shuffled down the beach, eyes peeled for stingrays and mermaids.

Mermaids. The Disneyfied stuff of sexual desperation, wishful myths spun by seamen of yore, drunk and bored with buggering each other, to while away weeks of empty sailing. But there was never a sailor half as horny as Ramdu Gul, nor one nearly so ugly. Spurned by all specimens of the female kingdom, he had turned to the Net for release, and found the stories of the Sea Monkeys.

Once he sorted out the legends and outright lies, he had decoded the unlikely origin of the species. They were not creatures out of myth, any more than they were a sport of capricious Mother Nature; they were real, and like most truly inspired inventions, their creation was an accidental byproduct of an awful mistake.

Serialized megaquakes and offshore oil spills rendered the Southern California coastline seismically unstable and virtually uninhabitable, but a host of corporations posited solutions, the most subtle but effective of which were biological.

Nobody remembered the name of the biotech startup that designed the mega-krill, which could not only survive in petroleum-choked waters, but could feed on it and become a viable food staple itself. In advance of a huge IPO-rollout, the biotech company dumped its super shit-eating shrimp into Long Beach Harbor in protest of a State Supreme Court decision—and was eaten alive by the decrepit justice system.

The orphaned mega-krill, however, thrived and reclaimed the coastline from Newport to Malibu. Where all natural marine life had failed, the mega-krill stepped into the breach to put fishing fleets back to work, and almost saved the breakaway republic’s fragile economy.

When the Last Big One dropped the mean coastal elevation two feet, tidal waves washed whole zip codes out to sea and rendered the beach suburb of Venice into a trashier twin of its namesake. With millions displaced and martial law already an empty threat over much of LA County, it was several months before word of Venice’s miracle spread beyond ground zero.

A notable corporate casualty of the quake was Muscle Bunny Body Sculpting, a boutique plastic surgery outfit that pounced on the new liberty of Californian secession to diversify into gene tweaking. After collecting skin and hair samples from celebrities and prize specimens on local beaches, these unlikely pioneers claimed they had isolated the DNA sequences that governed human beauty. Demonstrations left the media skeptical, but the porn industry made the company rich enough to deliver on any crazy promise almost overnight.

Within a few months after the last aftershock, stories began to leak out of giant crustaceans prowling the flooded streets of Venice. The stories got stranger, urban mariner’s tales of men drowned in shallow water by sea creatures more terribly beautiful than any siren ever hatched by Hollywood. Viral vids of Sea Monkey “petting parties” staked out an appalling new pornographic frontier.

The serendipitous parents of this marvelous chimera never lived to see it—the nameless mega-krill inventors vanished, and Muscle Bunny’s gene therapy program had long-term side effects too awful to detail, and the surviving executives died in Riverside Debtor’s Prison. But they had given a tired, broken land something magical—and they had given Ramdu Gul hope.

Blessedly, nobody looked twice at him as he went down to the water. Many wore similar suits, but while few carried as much equipment, all carried more weapons.

He had read articles, formed plans, flow charts of scenarios both desirable and not. He swam a hundred laps daily in the company pool. He trained in kenpo and kickboxing and Filipino “drunken uncle” knife fighting. He studied the Kama Sutra and the collected writings of Casanova, Xaviera Hollander and Jacques Cousteau. His frame was honed to carry as much muscle as his wiry, stoop-shouldered bird-body could bear. He swallowed his fear. You know what to do next. What happens after that—will happen…

He slipped on his mask, his vulpine beak mashed against the Plexiglas, and stepped into the shallows, a wavelet of clingy yellow foam breaking around his ankles. His suit wanted to tell him its analysis of the “water” he was wading in, but he grimly ignored it. Bubbles percolated out of holes in the sand around his feet, the respiration of unseen cousins of the object of his desire.

The tide rolled lazily back, disclosing jumbled mounds of masonry and sidewalk and rust. The next wave reared up almost in front of him, and it was like looking into a giant slab of green glass; suspended in it like primeval insects in amber, the voluptuous curves of cavorting, impossible bodies slowing time to a crawl. None of them were human.

He became hard in the instant before a pack of surfers dropped into the tube and slashed the vision to whitewater ribbons. He staggered back under the force of the wave, let it drag him back out to where the suds swirled around his waist.

Every time he tried to swim past the breakers, the waves chopped him down and forced him back on the beach. He hacked at them with his hands, whipped into hyperventilating rage.

It was like everything in this godforsaken country! Dumb, inexorable forces pushed you back whenever you tried to forge out beyond the polluted shallows, but they seemed to embrace and exalt the lotus-eating locals who laughed at him as he wallowed in the breakers. But he swallowed his pride and watched them, copied their strokes and the suit obliged by doing the rest.

An armada of surfers, masked and snorkeled and piebald with tribal melanomas, straddled their boards in the lull between sets. With every swell he crested, more of them popped up on the surface, as if from their true home on the ocean floor.

A few of them unslung spearguns or piano-wire bolos and whistled at him. He smiled as he pulled the dinner-plate sized plastic disk out of his backpack and depressed the stud that unfolded it. The surfboard sprang out and the skegs nearly castrated him.

He lay on it and dog-paddled like he had at the company pool, but the novelty of the relentless waves made it almost impossible to stay on his board. With painful effort, he steered away from the other surfers and got the riptide to drag him out to a gutted concrete tower that stood six stories above the water.

Naked kids jumped out the windows or lobbed rocks at him from the roof. He threw a fistful of coins and simstim ampules into the water, and they dove like gulls.

From here, he had to be careful. There were plenty of credible survival vids on the Net, but they always had gangs of men trapping a Sea Monkey. Nobody who took one on alone had ever recorded it…

Ramdu landed in a half-submerged office, took out an aerosol can and sprayed his suit, careful to coat everything, especially the exhaust vents on his respirator. The stuff was available on the black Net, for an astronomical price: male Sea Monkey musk. Sold as an instant aphrodisiac, the stuff made human women sick, while the female musk made human men homicidal.

Female Sea Monkeys were willing and able to couple with humans, and had quickly become quite adept at seducing men. But they seemed to engage in this pursuit only to bring their suitors out past the waves, where the male of the species waited for his supper.

As Ramdu paddled out to the open ocean, he pledged to attract a mate or die trying, and he was almost relieved to discover that he didn’t really fear the latter so much as he did going home a virgin.

He went south with the tide, trying to stay out of the surfers’ way, looking out for male Sea Monkeys, of which there were no clear images. When he got to a place equidistant from all potential hazards, he folded and stowed the surfboard and treaded water.

For a few endless seconds, the rolling swells before and behind walled off the shore, and there was nothing in the world but Ramdu alone on the open sea.

The foam burst and parted as something kicked completely out of the water before him, broad flukes dancing on air, arced high overhead and bent backwards as only an invertebrate can, and sliced deep beneath the sudsy surface without leaving a ripple.

Ramdu whooped, looked around desperately beneath his frantically kicking fins.

Down there.

Behind swirls of industrial effluvia and rust-red sand, the lost city of Venice rotted, down there. Creatures born of twisted genes and sadistic fate lured men to their dooms, down there. And he still wanted to go.

A wave towered over him, yellow foam cascading down its rising face and inside it, climbing above him, he thought he saw her. He dove for the bottom, flailing against the inexorable pull of the wave, too lost in panic to look for her above him. It came as quite a surprise to feel powerful arms encircle him and drag him down among the sunken ruins.

Swarms of translucent ghost fish darted past his face. His pressure gauge roared in his agonized ears as it equalized again and again. The green sea deepened to a drab fecal brown pall broken by fluted columns of decaying skyscrapers. He struggled in vain to turn and face her. The sandy submarine street quivered and dissolved into flocks of panicked stingrays as he touched down on the old boardwalk.

Ramdu’s head swam and bile flooded his throat, but he choked it back and tried yogic meditation techniques to center himself. He looked around, but saw no sign of her. He shivered and wrestled down panic. The musk was bogus, a stupid rabbit’s foot he’d clutched at to fulfill an impossibly perverse fantasy. He’d delivered himself to their dinner table. The waves barreled overhead, at least twenty feet up, and he knew there was no hope of escape, best to pool his fleeting strength for self-defense. He reached for his knife—

And she was there, coiling round him like a whirlpool, and he spun so fast trying to see her, that he made himself dizzy again.

The vids, all of them, must’ve been fakes. They flattered and anthropomorphized Sea Monkeys, but at the same time, obtusely failed to capture the unworldly beauty of the real thing. She was far less human, and far more attractive to Ramdu, than he’d been led to expect.

The gene therapy had applied human beach-bunny traits to the mega-krill, triggering an unprecedented mutation, but it hadn’t made them into lovely half-human mermaids. Nonetheless, there was something about the form of this anomalous hybrid of man-mangled genomes that assured Ramdu that some ingenious and loving maker (perhaps a specialist in sex toys, like himself) had outdone himself in shaping her. A lobster-daughter of Kali, beautiful and terrible, she stoked his ancestral mingling of sex and death, ecstasy and annihilation.

She had a head and a neck and tapered forelimbs that ended in something like hands without thumbs, and lesser forelimbs, scythes and sickles, folded into her voluptuous thorax. There were breasts in spectacular silicon profusion, and too many to count, though they were only a milkless mating display.

She even had hair—a waving mane of silver-blond dreadlock-antennae––and eyes––a pair of quizzical black bubbles on graceful stalks, and more sprayed like freckles across the chitinous planes of her face. She had a mouth, rosy babydoll lips ringed and transfixed with dainty mandibular scissors. She had plush, translucent skin that glowed rose-gold over an iridescent petroleum-rainbow exoskeleton like burnished quartz, sunglow trapped like embers in stained glass, glistening contours like a lady bodybuilder’s muscles, but weightless, like the hollow-boned body of a bird.

Her hindquarters had most successfully resisted humanizing, an armored tail with razor-finned flukes in place of proper beach-bunny legs, but Ramdu found himself keenly aroused by their absence. Humanoid torso fused with crustacean abdomen in a deep cleft fore and aft, housing cloacal openings and a lascivious vent shielded by countless, busily paddling, lesser legs, yet unmistakable to such a trainspotter of female pudenda as he. She was complete enough for his purposes, but it remained to be seen what she would do with him.

He knew his lust now, too late, for what it was. He wanted death, in as sexy a package as possible. He couldn’t afford a whore classy enough not to grimace as he disrobed. Even dogs averted their incurious eyes as they licked peanut butter off him.

Cramped into such an unlovable shell, no mere human nature could rise above bitter selfishness, and Ramdu had cultivated almost as few friendships as he had conquests. His search for a sexual experience unlike any other had become the flame that lured him to destruction. Small wonder, then, that on the moment of his fulfillment, he was unable to stir an erection.

She circled him faster, drew nearer, and he stopped trying to see her. Was he to be offered to the males, or devoured here, on the spot, or was there something worse in store for him?

His air was running low, the red flashes in his mask counting seconds. Any action was better than none. He whipped out the serrated fish-knife and lashed at her, hoping only to drive her back, but this seemed to be what she was waiting for.

Her fluked tail swept him off his fins and drummed the ground, sending them rocketing up into the surf. Her forelimbs clasped him close. Queasily, he felt her lesser legs eagerly probing the nether-reaches of his suit. Her glittering eyes darted out to the extent of their stalks, circling round him eagerly, as her killing limbs clasped him to her. She wanted him!

With a gasp of relief, he felt the groin of his suit teased outwards, the thinner membrane down there relaying the tactile data from a simulated phallus of smart-neoprene via microfilament nerves patched into his own at the base of his spine. An Allied Teledildonics product, designed for cyberspace sexual encounters, toxic waste fetishists and war amputees.

He was no idiot; risking life and limb to frolic with a man-eating mermaid was one thing, while actually sticking his own unit in it was quite another. At some level, he must’ve hoped to

survive this, or at least to die a whole man. These thoughts and sensations raced through his brain faster than the quicksilver bullets of air venting from his suit when she tore it open.

Ramdu held his last breath in, burning hands encircling his lungs and squeezing him flat. The toxic ocean rushed in and sensation was cold black agony except for where she touched him, round and round, and he was inside her, and it was all too much.

He tried reciting computer code, batting averages, pi out to thirty integers, but it was going to happen, he was going to come and he was going to expel his air and breathe in water, and it was all worth it—

Her lips touched his and pried open his jaws and the colors rushed in and she was so hot, her fire pouring into him cracking him open to melt and flow into and out of her into a time of no time, a world of her that he burned through and exploded and the explosion was death and all he’d missed in life, and then she convulsed against him and the water rushed by and they were breaking the surface, rising into the air.

His last thought was that she’d taken him when the suit was destroyed and the musk was erased. She’d wanted him—

The wind and the sun burned his eyes and he sagged against her, but she was unable to bear her own weight out of the water, what with the harpoon impaling her slender thorax.

“Jeebus, get ‘em into the boat!”

Ramdu looked around and realized they’d been netted. The sorting arm of a manned trawler held them high above the deck as two fishermen rudely gaffed their bodies to separate them.

“Hey, dude, you sure were lucky—”

“Naw, look at him, he’s a farkin’ perv! Cut him loose.”

The net dropped them on the deck and hungrily dove back into the water. Ramdu tried to roll off his Sea Monkey, shocked by the harpoon barb jutting out of her abdomen and nestling under his armpit. But they were still joined even more intimately, down below. He tugged and kicked, but could not extract himself from her viselike vaginal grip.

She jolted and whistled, embracing him tighter as the fishermen approached. “Jeebus, even now, he can’t stop. I can’t look… you kill ‘em.”

Ramdu jerked back from her, but they were fused. Her eyes wilted on their stalks. She subsided like a lobster in a boiling pot, alarm and trauma tinting her exoskeleton royal violet, her gills fluttering and turning blue, singed by the air.

The horrified fisherman scooped Ramdu up by his arms and began to rip him away. Ramdu screamed, feeling skin and something fundamental tear loose in his groin.

Then she split open. The mailed scales of her abdomen gave way with a sickly purr. Ramdu’s manhood came free amid a torrent of colorless organs like the float bladders of seaweed. A briny miasma of spicy mating musk splashed out of her, and made him hard to do it all over again.

He tried to get free, but the air came alive around her, hot red dots swimming all over, and he was already fainting when they knocked him unconscious.

Sick on the flight home, huddled in the toilet, replaying in his mind what the customs people did to the smuggler who tried to get on the flight with a fake leg filled with bootleg gene tweaks. The screen they took him behind was too thin to block out his screams, but they waved Ramdu through. In his panic, he’d tossed Mr. Harkin’s package. He couldn’t expect preferential treatment in Detroit, all he could expect was a thicker screen.

He unzipped his pants in the toilet and looked at the mess, a biology lesson he wished he’d skipped. His groin was a mess of rotting Sea Monkey guts, a slimy clutch of blackening organs like a sack of rancid eyes. Short of surgery, there was no way to remove the gummy adhesive which grafted them to his unit. He crushed a sedative on his PDA and snorted it, let golden waves of apathy claim him.

A stewardess knocked on the door, was he all right? The lock turned and he zipped up, everything was fine. Feeling much better, he went back to his seat and dropped off to sleep until he was carried off the plane by paramedics.

He woke to the sunrise, and the sun was Harkin’s face, beaming down on him. He’d hoped for time to rehearse this part, but the boss gave him none.

“Gul, you fucking wog genius, you!”

He tried to move his head, but Harkin filled his sight from horizon to horizon. “What…?”

Harkin retreated and rubbed the round hips of a buxom woman in a full veil and burkha. His hand slipped into the shapeless black drapery and squeezed something, gave a little moan, and returned to Ramdu’s bedside. “I want to apologize for my man in SoCal, he was an idiot, he’s finished. They caught two runners of his the same day, but… I didn’t know you had it in you, Gul.”

Ramdu’s stomach bloated with gas. He swallowed his tongue and tried to find words. “What—how—what did I do?”

“I won’t ask how you did it, Gul, but I can tell, it took guts. You really showed the kind of initiative we prize at Allied Teledildonics.”

Ramdu only blinked, so Harkin pressed on. “The doctors pulled twenty four hundred off you, at least. That was pure genius, carrying them that way. You knew that to survive, they’d have to be fertilized—”

“What? Fertilized?”

“The caviar, you devil. Normally, nature doesn’t play that way, but the Sea Monkeys are recombinant social-climbers, and they like human sperm. The poor freaks knock up the whole clutch of eggs when they spawn, and then attach it to the male. They mutate pretty fast, but we can keep a lid on that, nobody wants the product demanding pay and vacation time, right?”

Ramdu tried to picture the eggs he wore, to imagine her— “The product?”

“Gul, Allied Teledildonics will boldly forge a new field and corner the market. That new field is xenomorphic love-pets, and you’ve put A.T. right out on the cutting edge.”

Harkin snatched away the burkha from his playmate and waved his arms at her naked body. “Feast your eyes on this beauty!”

She had a head and neck, and forelimbs that ended in something like hands, albeit with fingers fused into flippers. She had breasts and big black eyes and long black hair and a bifurcated tail, the flukes of which had been chopped off, the stumps grafted to prosthetic legs he recognized from the Thai slave girl-bot in the A.T. Spring catalog.

Her long neck craned and she shambled to the bedside, her soft shell gleaming honeycomb-tesselated saffron gold. She was unbearably beautiful, like a picture of his mother.

“This is one from the first batch, she’s been hatched less than a week, but adapting swimmingly, as you can see.”

It made sense. Ramdu’s mother bragged that he could read as soon as he could see.

“Now, we can stabilize the germline so it doesn’t start infringing on human status anytime soon, and clone off vat-grown sports for now, but next year, we’ll start tweaking the genome to bring it closer to a designer female form, planned obsolescence, are you with me?”

Ramdu felt sick. They were monsters; manmade things, not people, not even animals. They were his children...

“We don’t forget our friends at Allied Teledildonics, Gul. You’re going up, we’re all going up. Your sea monkeys are going to make a horny world very happy, and all of us very, very rich.”

Ramdu gagged.

Harkin fondled Ramdu’s daughter, nipped her unfeeling flesh and chuckled lustily. “And no one will ever be lonely, anymore.”

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ALL-MONSTER ACTION!

Episode I—Kungmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger

The churning black surf of the Pacific Ocean spouted fifty feet into the air as something very large stirred in the depths at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay. A news helicopter got too close and was swamped, crashing into southbound traffic lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge. Army and Navy choppers buzzed like mayflies, dropping marker flares and spraying red fans of incendiary shells at the geyser as it entered the bay. Nothing seemed to slow the invader, which torpedoed in on a collision course with the Old Ferry Building at the head of Market Street.

All along the waterfront, artillery crews and mobile missile batteries eagerly peered into the roiling silver mist for their first glimpse of the adversary they had been summoned to destroy. Behind them, legions of protestors filled the streets from the woodland grounds of the old Presidio Army Base to the Embarcadero and the heart of the Financial District––tens of thousands of furious, banner-waving marchers pressing against the demoralized lines of riot control police. They had come to denounce the federal crackdown on labor unions, the withdrawal of government assistance and the twenty-eight percent unemployment rate, but the spectacle unfolding in the water could not be ignored.

A missile battery atop the ferry terminal sparked to life with a salvo of lightning spears that turned the churning surface of the bay into a dome of white-hot steam. Waves of scalding seawater swamped the docks, and the bubbles subsided. The cheers of the soldiers spread up and down the waterfront, drowning out their CO’s irate barking and the chanting of the protestors.

Then something exploded out of the water, and for just a moment, the entire city fell completely silent as it struggled, with its childlike collective mind of a half million or so, to understand just what the hell it was looking at.

At that moment, amidst the massed shrieking of the sudden inferno pouring down on the flaming invader and its own unearthly howls of tormented rage, hundreds among the crowd began to cheer for the monster.

The airborne command center of the Joint Forces Mobile Command fell silent as General Skilling entered with his retinue. “Get back to work,” he barked, and the airmen resumed running around as if the deck of the C-98 Supernaut cargo plane were covered in hot coals.

Skilling cast a jaundiced eye at the panorama of the big board, the global map jigsawed together from the composite eyes of several hundred defense and private satellites, and the exploded diagram of the world’s media coverage. Almost all of the two hundred screens played the images coming in from the flock of helicopters circling over San Francisco.

When he absolutely had to, Skilling turned to the man most of the room had been mooning over when he came in: Commander Wesley Corben, the most visible officer in the Air Force’s Special Counteroperations Detachment, and the pilot of America’s most closely guarded super-weapon. If he was on the scene, then the emergency was clearly worse than they feared. The media scrutiny was sure to be brutal.

Commander Corben looked out a window at the runway lights of Alameda Naval Air Station, and a wing of F-18’s scrambling off the flight line.

“This is everything we feared, Commander,” said a voice from the speaker on the General’s desk. Though he had never heard it so raw with exhaustion and nerves, he recognized it well enough.

“We’re up to the task, Mr. President,” the pilot said. “Both of us.”

“Mr. President, if I may,” Gen. Skilling broke in, “Commander Corben hasn’t been fully briefed, but when he is, I think he’ll agree that the situation is under control, without deploying—extraordinary measures.”

“Have it your way, General, but you boys swore up and down you could stop it at sea.”

Corben told Skilling, “Bring me up to speed, and I’ll decide whether turning the Army loose in the middle of San Francisco is a better idea than deploying Steve.”

Skilling winced. He hated even to hear the name spoken, glared down the nearby technicians who perked up at the sound. “My opinion of your… weapons program is a matter of record—”

“General! They’ve got a visual!”

All eyes turned to the monitors, where a gargantuan tower of flames staggered across Market Street, kicking tanks and armored personnel carriers out of its path like a drunk in a toy store. Suddenly, incredibly, the eighty-foot flaming behemoth sprang into the air, clearing a row of warehouses, and vanished into the frothing Bay.

“This is most unprecedented!” Dr. Murai, the team’s resident kaijuologist, shouted. “I’ve never seen anything so large move so fast! Only Dr. Otaku could create such a weapon!”

Commander Corben ran for the forward drop-chute. Skilling did not try to stop him. “Mr. President,” the general prompted, “I guess you know what this means.”

“Well, if that thing out there is the one they called Kungmin Horangi, then I guess it means we’re at war with North Korea, now, too. Don’t these damn Commies know when they’ve been licked? What the hell does that crazy name mean, anyhow?”

Skilling bit his lip. Half the intelligence community was listening in. “Those shitwits at the Pentagon say it means ‘People’s Tiger.’”

The President’s snorting, signal-distorting laugh turned heads throughout the command center. “A tiger? Is that what it’s supposed to be? Goddamn, those commies never get anything right…”

Commander Corben sprinted across the runway to the enormous old dirigible hangar where his support team lounged, lobbing a football and watching the news. Without a word, they took their positions to prepare for the launch. Corben zipped into his flight-suit and stepped into the shadowy, cathedral-sized space. In the center, an enormous American flag hung from the domed rafters, screening off most of the hangar.

Lt. Mullin walked alongside, briefing him on the pre-flight check. “The new armaments are loaded, the new Hellfires are quicker on lock-on like you wanted, but the blowback is worse, so don’t go punching anyone with them. The armor’s been overhauled again, but that fiberglass shit’s gotta go. It’s giving him a rash.”

“What about the approach?”

“They don’t want you to cross on foot. They say the Bay Bridge can’t take it.”

“Did you show them our numbers?”

“Sure, but the old gray mare is already falling apart, and they don’t want to risk an accident. He’s gotta go over in the harness.”

Corben cursed. “And the other… problem?”

“Electrolytes are bumped up to optimum, but he’s still running like a faucet. The doc says he’ll adjust to the new diet, but they don’t want to run antibiotics on him so soon before—”

“Another upgrade? He’s not a goddamned machine. He’s—”

“I know, Wes, we feel the same way, but to them he’s a weapon. They don’t even call him a ‘he,’ anymore. And you know what they keep saying—”

“I know, I know. ‘He volunteered for this.’ As if any of us knew what ‘this’ would be.”

“Oh, and I tried to get her out before you deployed, but—”

Corben stopped, fussing with the readouts on his helmet. “I’ll take care of it, Ben. She deserves better than to get thrown out by the guards.”

Lt. Mullin patted him on the shoulder, checked the optic jacks running from Corben’s helmet to the CPU on the back of the suit, gave him a thumbs up and went back to a safe distance.

Corben slipped behind the flag and stopped, as he always did, to offer a prayer for himself, and for Steve. Then he opened his eyes and ascended the stairs parked beside Steve’s head.

Steve lay on his back in the hangar. All the computers and gantries and medical equipment had been cleared out to give him room to get up.

At the top of the stairs, she waited, just like always, beside the open hatch bored into Steve’s right temple. The guards had orders to keep her out, but no one could look Steve’s widow in the eye and deny her.

She lifted her black lace veil and poured those wet red eyes all over him, now. “He’s afraid, Wes.”

“He’s not afraid, Laura. He’s—” a machine, a weapon, a meat puppet… “He was never afraid of anything in his life.”

Laura got closer, her perfume burning in his nose. “He loved his country, we all know that. He loved you, Wes. He loved me… a little bit less. He wasn’t afraid for himself, but now…”

“There’s nothing to worry about. It’s some mutt hunk of kaiju-shit from North Korea. It’s probably already dead. This is just another photo op.” He shook her off, but her real perfume—her sweat, her tears, made it hard to remember where he was.

“It’s not the fighting,” Laura tried to catch his eyes. “He’s afraid of what he’s becoming. He knew that this mission… doing this made him a symbol, like the astronauts. They’re changing him again, aren’t they?”

“They want him to win. That’s his job, now. He has to adapt. We all do…”

He brushed past her, but her arms caught him, running over the countless sockets that would bind him to her husband. He pulled away. He couldn’t make himself do it again, any more than he could forget that she wanted him for the same reason the Pentagon did.

“Try to get on with your life,” he told her.

“I thought we were trying,” she said, and he looked away. “The Army doesn’t consider him dead, but they don’t pay his salary. And—we’re… Steve was Catholic… I can’t even…”

Corben climbed in. “They’ll understand when you do, Laura. Try not to be here when we get back.”

“Give him my love, won’t you?”

Corben slammed the hatch and initiated the pre-wake checks. Steve’s EEG was a minimalist tundra of sub-limbic activity, with momentary temporal lobe storms, but nothing to worry about. Everything that was Steve Mancuso had been scooped out of the front of his skull to make room for the cockpit. Cables snaked out of the bulkhead and slotted into their respective ports on the suit, and Corben tingled as those cables shoehorned his brain into the sleeping giant.

“Commander, this is your eleven o’clock wake-up call. The Green Meanies are waiting outside, and Steve’s late for work.”

Corben nodded at the marching columns of status lights on his smart visor. The phantom sensations of godlike power swept all the garbage out of his mind, and he got into character.

“Roger that, Ben. Steve’s online in three… two…”

He hit the switch. Steve opened his eyes. The light burned until the visor calibrated his response and winched down Steve’s pupils. He sat up and rose, slowly like a dinosaur with a hangover, to his feet. Steve’s helmet brushed the hanging halogen lamps, and he had to hunch over double to get out onto the runway.

The night sky was clear, but an opaque canopy of fog enveloped San Francisco down to the double-decker Bay Bridge. In the heart of the fog, a sporadic paparazzi flash and dull, rolling pops of ordnance being expended in an all-out war. Colt was developing a two hundred-millimeter revolver for Steve to use, and a telephone pole-sized police baton that delivered a fifty thousand volt shock was on the drawing boards at the Pentagon, but for now, he was expected to beat whatever was raising hell over there with his hands and feet, and some Hellfire missiles salvaged from a junked Apache helicopter.

Steve checked the harness on his heavily armored torso, and hooked into the web of cables running back to two enormous cargo helicopters idling before him. At his thumb’s up, they lifted and spread out until the cables stood taut, rotors growling mutinously at the nine-ton payload.

Steve braced himself and rolled his shoulders, tried to scratch the rash on his back. At last, the cables twanged and the tarmac dropped away. The helicopters shrieked, lurching into the wind over Treasure Island and over the Bay Bridge, where thousands stuck in gridlock traffic honked and shouted his name. The wind pried at the seams of his Kevlar bodysuit, the battlements upon his shoulders and head, seeking any path to steal his strength.

Wes Corben dissolved like aspirin inside Steve, shivering at the wind and straining to see out of Steve’s eyes into the shroud over the battle. Even as his thermal overlays gave up on the blizzard of fire and smoke, his radiation scans fed him an outline of something larger than Steve, and faster, and—beyond that, he had no fucking idea what he was looking at.

“Have a nice day at the office, dear,” a chopper pilot chirped in his ear, and the cables cut loose high above the impossible, burning thing that even now looked up to watch him falling.

And then—and this always drove Corben batshit when it happened, but Mullin swore they couldn’t find the bug—Steve’s life flashed before his eyes.

When kaiju synthesis technology disseminated to all the extremist nations of the world, it sparked a catastrophic renaissance of rogue state misbehavior. If plutonium and anthrax were effective means of asserting one’s will upon the world stage, then the revival of some sleeping monstrosity—or the creation of a new one—was a golden dream of random havoc for those with nothing left to lose.

Not to be left behind by kaiju-mongers in China and Africa, the United States embarked on its own Megamorphic Weaponization project. No renegade sauropods or lumbering cyborg chimerae could serve as a symbol of American military might, however—the people of the world’s last great superpower would never rally behind a monster. At least subconsciously grasping the subtext of atavistic pagan idolatry that lay at the roots of the kaiju arms race, they strove to create a hero; to, in their own well-spun words, “put a human face, an all-American face, on the kaiju crisis.” So they asked for volunteers.

Major Steve Mancuso stepped up, as they never tired of reminding his wife, and passed the rigorous screening process. They needed someone strong and fast, with excellent reflexes, with Golden Age astronaut looks that would translate into action figures, kid’s pajamas and beach towels and shit.

Using gene therapy and nanomites, they reprogrammed Steve’s mitochondrial DNA, and he grew. Within three agonizing months, he stood seventy-four feet tall.

His doctors pleaded with the Pentagon scientists to consider the potential for replication errors during his reckless growth, particularly in the brain, which stopped growing by age three in normal human development. To grow from three pounds to the volume of a Volkswagen Beetle is traumatic for any organism, and how much more so for the most complex aggregation of matter in the known universe, the human brain? Very soon after his treatments stopped, Steve went totally insane. He devolved to a bestial shell of the confident Navy pilot who volunteered for this project, and he left them no choice.

After escaping from the Florida island where he was interred, he destroyed Cape Canaveral and twelve helicopters and a company of infantry before a TOW missile lobotomy finally knocked him down. Incredibly, he survived, though in a coma. Wheels began spinning, and the catastrophic setback became an unprecedented opportunity.

Neurosurgeons, structural engineers and computer designers flew to the island and set about fixing him. The cavity in Steve’s forebrain was filled with a mainframe that routed all his nervous impulses to a cockpit just above his eyes. The man who controlled Steve would receive all the data of Steve’s experience as raw reality; his reactions drove Steve’s body as an amplified version of his own. That man would have to be an extraordinary pilot, as good as Steve himself had once been, for he would have to become Steve. Wes Corben did not want to volunteer for the project, but he did, because he could not bear the thought of a stranger inside his best friend’s head.

Steve hit the ground and sank up to his ankles on a grassy palisade overlooking the Bay. The street was seeded with burning cars and military debris, and a fusillade of tracers sprayed out of the nearest cross-street. Protestors swarmed the sidewalks around his feet, waving banners and throwing rocks and bottles as they sought shelter from the meta-Biblical conflict raging above their heads.

A chorus of spotters buzzed in his ears that the enemy was closing in on his position, but he just stood there. The thing had been right under him when he dropped. How did something so big move so fast?

The building in front of him, an eight-story office complex, sagged and spat glass as all its eastern-exposure windows shattered. Steve looked up at the titanic black shape perched on the roof just as it sprang at his face.

He tried to roll with the impact and throw the attacker over his head, but it slammed into his chest, crushing his lungs flat, and its talons got inside his arms and shredded his armor.

Pain whited out the scene. Corben almost blacked out before the dampers reduced Steve’s pain-incentive triggers and told him what was wrong. Steve was laid out on his back in the street, armor and bodysuit torn wide open, and the attacker straddled his chest like a dog burying a bone in his abdomen.

With a noisome trumpet blast that somehow cut through the din of war all around, Steve’s irritable, bacteria-infested bowel cramped up and sounded a chocolate war charge. The monster flinched and shrank away, as if offended by the outburst. Galvanized, Steve brought one leg up as hard as he could between its hind legs, hoping the kaiju specialists had striven for authenticity, and levered its mammoth bulk up and as far away as he could.

The creature flailed at the air, sailing over three waterfront blocks, smashing to earth on an unfortunate retro diner and plowing across the street into the deserted stalls of the farmer’s market in front of the Ferry Terminal. At last, Steve got a good look at it.

Even with its pelt burned off, Kungmin Horangi was clearly supposed to be a tiger, perhaps a new strain of the giant sabertooths the Chinese revived from fossils and turned loose in Tibet. But its hide was a sickening mass of polyps and blisters, with arrays of envenomed quills sprouting in radiating patterns down its spine from its head, or where it was supposed to have a head.

Nice try, North Korea.

Then it roared at him, and he understood that, blasphemy as it was, this was no mistake. It was the offspring of a fundamentally perverse union of land and sea fauna, but why? Why would anyone want to cross a tiger with a sea cucumber?

The head peeled open and splayed out like a banana, a thrashing mane of fanged tentacles around a gaping maw filled with busy mandibles. Its eyes, he saw, were everywhere, on the tentacles and all over its body like blood blisters. Even as it recovered from its impact, Kungmin Horangi lashed out at a tank parked behind it and stomped its turret in, kicked it through the lobby window of a Japanese bank. Then it charged.

Steve snatched up the nearest solid object—a tour bus chartered by BC/DC, Canada’s foremost AC/DC cover band—and hurled it at the oncoming monster. Kungmin Horangi changed course in midair, talons digging into the masonry façade of the old US Mint, vaulted off it as the bus smashed into the roof, silencing its vintage 8-track at the height of the final chorus of “Big Balls.” Steve barely dodged, reached out and gripped a tentacle as it hurtled by, and made ready to whip the monster around and smash it into the street.

The plan fell apart before the flaming messages of pain even reached the dazed synapses of Steve’s pilot. The thorny tentacle razored through Steve’s Kevlar mittens, into the muscle between the bones of his fingers, and out the other side as the monster tore past and took his hand with it, stripping off glove and flesh like cotton candy.

Steve stared at the naked bones of his hand and let out a yelp of confusion. The spotters screamed in his ears, but he heard only the sound of his own agony as it roared out of him and shattered the last intact windows on the avenue.

The Red Korean kaiju skidded to a halt a block away. The street buckled under it, brown sewage percolating up out of smashed pipes around its massive paws. The monstrous abortion relaxed, as if Steve was already dead and it could destroy the city at its leisure. It batted at the walls of a glass skyscraper and smashed something inside, a cat stalking a mouse through a dollhouse. Steve recognized the building, the Transamerica Pyramid, always a favorite with disaster movies.

Blood loss and encroaching shock made red warning lights blink all around the periphery of his vision, but Steve focused only on the enemy. “Weapons hot,” he growled, raising his intact arm to point at the thing now engaged in smashing open the Pyramid’s neighbors like an anteater ravaging termite mounds. “Fox one, fox two,” he said, and Hellfire missiles arced out of the gauntlet on his forearm.

Where they hit, the sun seemed to peek out of a hole in the night, and then the whole avenue was awash in fire that reduced the air itself to ash.

“Fox three, four…” Steve emptied his arsenal into the flaming mound, but he knew that no matter how hot he burned it, no matter how many pieces he blew it into, it would come back, and keep coming, and coming—

And now, the news:

“In the wake of the disastrous San Francisco attack, the true extent of the damage is only now coming to light. While the kaiju invader Kungmin Horangi broke down the physical security systems of an undisclosed number of bank headquarters in the city’s Financial District, an army of hackers descended on the unprotected servers and deleted millions of financial records, credit reports and loan documents. An emergency meeting of the FDIC and SEC this morning was closed to the public, but critics predict that at least five major banks will be forced to freeze all holdings and declare bankruptcy, until such time as the records can be retrieved. While his press secretary delivered the painful news that the federal budget is already too tight to allow for more emergency aid, the President made this brief statement, while enjoying a round of golf with friends and campaign boosters at Cocoa Beach.”

“We are at war, and the enemy is within our borders, as well as all around us. People will have to make sacrifices. Real Americans won’t have to be told twice.”

“The President’s golf game was cut short by the approaching Hurricane Manuel, but he still got to fire the inaugural round at Florida’s first indoor duck hunting arena. The President and his party bagged fourteen mallards, and poked fun at his troubles by naming one of the two ducks he shot in a cage match Kungmin, and the other, Kim—”

It was hardly Kim Jong Il’s intention to initiate a sneak attack on the United States. The last thing he wanted was for posterity to associate North Korea with the conniving cowardice of the Nipponese devils at Pearl Harbor. If only the American President had taken his repeated warnings seriously…

At first his plan was only a frustrated whim—to turn a kaiju loose on his decadent cousins to the south, and force the Americans to show their impotence, or their insanity–– it mattered not, so long as something finally happened. A modest plan, but the Supreme Leader’s restless dreams of even a shabby reconstituted dinosaur were out of his poor nation’s reach. All this changed when he chanced to kidnap the inestimable Dr. Otaku and set him to work; the dream had become a symbol of North Korea’s adamantine resolve, an avatar of the Proletariat to shake the palaces of the world to dust. The notorious Nipponese kaijuologist only smiled and bowed and disappeared into his lab, saying, “I will hold a mirror up to your state, and give your reflection life.”

The world laughed when it heard what North Korea was doing. With half of the capitol in darkness, with disease and famine claiming nearly as many per annum as had the war that split their great nation in half, Kim was spending all their money on a desperate weapons project, using a certifiably mad scientist to make a monster.

But Kim never listened to the world. If his rule was painted as incompetent tyranny by the chattering swine of the outside world, he would not deign to explain himself. Though Dr. Otaku escaped to China only six months into the project—in a capsule within a giant earthworm of his own devising—the specimen in the super-sized incubator in his lab grew––unruly and grotesque, yes, but it became more than he ever dared to imagine.

Kim awakened from a revelation, a new dream of eliminating hunger and showing the world the true benefits of communism, but the world would not stop laughing long enough to listen. They cackled at the destruction of Kungmin Horangi in San Francisco, but soon they would hear, and see, and taste—and they would know.

In the heart of his palatial fortress at Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il swilled Hennessy, raged at his defective Playstation and waited for the world to apologize.

General Skilling hated using the laser pointer, but he’d found it was the only way to keep the President’s attention. “As you know, sir, one year ago, North Korea was accused by the UN Security Council of running a biological weapons program. Nobody thought they’d ever pose a threat to anyone but themselves, but there was some speculation that China had financed them. Kim Jong Il refused to address the charges, but then Dr. Otaku disappeared…”

“He wanted the head egghead for his monster factory.”

“Correct, sir,” Admiral Beecher cut in. “Kim is a freak for the old kaiju flicks, and when the Japs cracked the recombinant kaiju genome, he shit himself with envy, and went on a shopping spree. He did the same thing to get some monster movies made, a few years back.”

Skilling waggled the pointer in the President’s eyes. “Well, this morning, sir, we received this tape. It was postmarked two weeks ago, but it was sent parcel rate.”

A screen lit up at the center of the big board. A plump face like a pickled fetal pig filled the screen, eyes flashing like Siamese fighting fish behind the convex lenses of monumental goo-goo goggles. Pulling out in spastic jerks, the camera framed Kim Jong Il at a podium before a window overlooking the snowcapped mountains of the Amnok-Kang river valley, near the Chinese border. Behind him, an elderly Japanese man in a spotless white lab coat smiled and nodded, his nimble fingers dancing as if they worked the strings of a marionette.

“That’s Dr. Otaku. Kim’s people took him from his fortified lab on Mt. Fuji.”

For once, the President was all ears. “Was he brainwashed?”

“You be the judge of who brainwashed whom.”

The dictator appeared tired, but smiled benignly at the clockwork soldiers flanking him at the podium. Though heavily sweetened with digital studio effects, his voice was still the querulous falsetto of a cat on Quaaludes as he limped through the difficult English-language script. “To those who believe that Communism is dead, Great Comrade Kim Jong Il offers this lesson. Communism is sharing, no more and no less, from each according to his means, to each according to his needs. And so, people of the so-called Free World, we share the gift of the People’s Tiger with you.”

The video cut out.

The President pounded the table. “What I want to know is, why was this such a goddamned surprise? We knew he was cooking up something, we knew he had the know-how, and he warned us—”

“He warned you several times, Mr. President, but—”

“The man’s some kind of goddamned nut, with all the crazy crap that comes out of his mouth. ‘The People’s Tiger?’ What were we supposed to make of that happy horseshit?”

Admiral Beecher, reluctantly, stepped in. “It would appear, sir, that we did have some advance contact…”

The President smelled the fumble and pounced on it. “What? Who dropped the ball?”

“Our nuclear submarine Typhon, on patrol in the Sea of Japan, pinged an unidentified object larger than itself a week ago. It emitted no hull or engine noise, so the captain assumed it was a hostile kaiju, and torpedoed it. The target was presumed destroyed.”

“Why the hell wasn’t I told?”

Beecher looked around for support, but they’d all been thrown under that bus too many times. “Well, it, um… It was in the daily briefings to the Joint Chiefs, but it looked like a non-starter. No action alerts, no response from your people—”

“Well, now we know different, don’t we?”

“Yes, sir, we’ve since collected waterborne tissue samples on the beaches near Aomori and Sapporo, but it was difficult to identify, because…”

“What? Out with it!”

An exasperated Beecher threw the laser pointer to General Skilling. “People have been eating it, Mr. President.”

That cracked the President up. “Lord, those Japs’ll eat anything, won’t they?”

“Sir, your morning briefing of yesterday details the same problem in San Francisco…”

“What? What page is that on?”

“Fourteen-A, sir, in the bright red box, next to the word search? Army recovery efforts were hampered by the protestors, some of whom appear to have been pinko filth columnists, and they led a salvage of the remains.”

“What do you mean, ‘salvage?’”

“The protests were about federal aid, sir, about food for the poor. The meat of the kaiju was roasted by Steve’s, ah, overzealous attack, and distributed over dozens of city blocks by the explosion. It’s resistant to decay and, by all accounts, the flesh of the monster is, ah…”

“Spit it out!”

“Well, it’s said to be delicious.”

In South Korea, the US Army maintained a high state of alert, awaiting an order they’d been hoping for across three generations, to finally shower North Korea with missiles. But due to the desperate peace brokered by South Korea’s president and China’s promise that any attack on her poor neighbor would draw a nuclear response, a shaky truce held. But at home, a new radical movement formed and, almost overnight, escalated into an all-out insurgency.

When the unwashed hippie hordes of the UC Berkeley student body staged a sit-in at which the meat of Kungmin Horangi was offered as a sacrament, the police cracked down, but nobody took it seriously. When the same thing happened at Stanford’s crypto-conservative Hoover Institute four days later, they started to worry. Police raids on Communist soup kitchens all over the Bay Area turned up a distribution network for the kaiju meat. Within a week, thirty-eight such establishments were shut down, and nearly three tons of the monster’s flesh was confiscated and removed to labs across the country for study. What they learned in the next twenty-four hours made them freeze or burn all samples and order a news blackout.

When left in a medium of seawater and any organic substrate including human solid waste, the flesh replicated itself. The proprietors of the soup kitchens, card-carrying Communists all, were interrogated, and extolled the virtues of the meat as an inexhaustible food staple, a gift from the peace-loving people of North Korea.

Their customers, however, were a different matter. The poor and hipsters alike, drawn to the necessity or novelty of free kaiju cuisine, reported that it had properties far beyond its flavor and astounding nutritional content. Eating the meat opened rusty floodgates in the American brain, boosting endorphins and serotonin output, creating a euphoric yet alert state which one imprisoned kaiju addict described as “like Christmas morning, where you love everyone and want to share everything.” This witness had particular clout, as he was a decorated artillery officer and survivor of the San Francisco attack, who snatched up and cooked a feast of kaiju meat for his Army buddies as a goof. “If this is what Communism was supposed to be about, then boy, have we ever been barking up the wrong tree,” he declared, just before he was taken out and shot.

The government’s aggressive publicity campaign to depict the meat as drugged, poisoned or radioactive seemed to fall on deaf ears. Spontaneous demonstrations blocked every law enforcement attempt to root out the trade in kaiju meat, and kitchens opened in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and Las Vegas—which suffered most grievously from the effect, as tourists discovered the futile stupidity of gambling and simply shared their money, and rogue hotels opened their doors to the homeless.

The government also tried to block the plague of websites devoted to kaiju cuisine and philosophy, most of which came not from North Korea, but from Japan, where the phenomenon had already saturated the once-healthily self-centered island nation via the meat that washed ashore at Sapporo. In retaliation, domestic and foreign hackers alike descended on the federal servers in earnest, so that the NCIC criminal database was wiped clean of all records, and the New York Stock Exchange seized up and began rattling off kaiju recipes.

The next month saw the Kungmin Horangi kitchens spread across the nation and out of the liberal underground, into the faltering middle-class mainstream. With more banks in default or freezing their accounts in the wake of the database collapse, unemployment swallowed up nearly half the adult population, and social agencies were swamped and sank without issuing a single check. Employees at fast food franchises were caught preparing kaiju meat for unsuspecting customers, and the suburban hinterlands began to simmer with political unrest and unconditional love. The news stopped showing the riots, as police clubs fell more and more on the heads of cornfed Republicans and even other cops who had succumbed to the un-American side-effects of the forbidden flesh.

No matter what draconian measures the government imposed—martial law and curfews imposed in the cities, roadblocks and roving gangs of National Guardsmen torching burger joints with flamethrowers everywhere else—the madness spread, and people pig-headedly, defiantly, continued to share.

Commander Wes Corben spent the next month running Steve through physical therapy in Florida, and so had little time to read the news. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor from his hospital bed, recovering from a concussion and the psychosomatic shock of losing Steve’s hand.

He pushed for a robotic prosthetic, but was outmaneuvered by the project scientists, who wanted to try out a sauropod regeneration virus they’d harvested from the remains of one of Mexico’s lesser-known kaiju plagues, the Iguanadonkey.

The treatment bore immediate fruit—within hours, Steve’s cauterized stump broke open with new buds of pink bone sheathed in noisily dividing cells, and before the week was out, a hand, of sorts, had grown to replace the one sheared off by the monster. That his skin broke out in shingles like the scales of a marine iguana only intrigued them, and when Steve began to grow a tail, they were ecstatic. They talked about pushing the envelope—Steve Mk.2, armies of dino-Steves stomping through Pyongyang, eating everything and vomiting Agent Orange on everyone in their path on the long road to Beijing.

The only battle he won was over Steve’s incontinence; they resumed antibiotics and stopped feeding him by stomach tubes, but Corben had to run Steve’s meal each day, herding the brain-dead behemoth through whole pods of steamed orca and hockey rink-sized portions of cornbread.

He came back to his off-base motel room to find Laura waiting for him. She still wore her widow’s weeds, but she shed them even as he worked the key in the door. Too tired from days on end inside a dead man’s head, too beaten down to argue, he let her in, and kept his mouth shut when she called him Steve. He told himself he was defending his friend’s memory by refusing to do it where she really wanted to, in the cramped confines of Steve’s cockpit.

Commander Corben lay in bed, wondering what day it was. The phone rang. Laura turned over, sighed in her sleep, whispered a sibilant name. He picked up the phone.

“Scramble, code red, Commander. Steve’s late for work.”

Wes slid off the bed and stepped into his crumpled pants. “Steve’s still in therapy from the changes, he’s not ready to walk around the block, yet—”

“Too damned bad, is what they say. We need him. Tiger-Cucumber’s back.”

“Near as we can tell, the bastards hoarded a ton of the meat and incubated it near Norfolk, right under our goddamned noses.” General Skilling struggled to catch his breath as he jogged alongside Commander Corben into the hangar at Bolling Air Force Base. As before, helicopters circled over the water outside, dogging something moving fast upstream to the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers, at the heart of Washington, DC.

Liliputian scientists and technicians crawled all over Steve, disconnecting catheters and hoses and running the final pre-wake check. Corben eyed Steve nervously, seeing the finished upgrades for the first time. Steve lay propped on his side to accommodate his new tail, as long as he was tall, spilling out onto the runway. His bone structure had begun to warp, muscles to sculpt themselves into a very different kind of body. An ugly brainwave soured Corben’s alert frame of mind: a drawing-board sketch of King Kong versus Godzilla in a genetic blender, with Steve’s apple-pie freckled, Tom Sawyer face slapped onto the hideous final product.

“How do you know there’s only one?” Corben asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Those asses in Congress have finally seen the light, and they’ve voted the funding to expand the program. We won’t make the same mistakes, again.”

Looking over the chainmail mesh of serrated scales spilling down Steve’s oddly hunched back, Corben could only mumble, “Who wouldn’t volunteer for this?”

Skilling saluted him and nudged him up the stairs. At least Laura wasn’t here. She was still asleep in the motel room, and he knew what she was dreaming.

Corben climbed into Steve’s head and fired it up without running through the checks. Steve lumbered to his feet, trampling a lot of million-dollar equipment and more than a few fleeing technicians. Though heavier than ever, he felt even more powerful, his center of gravity lower and wider thanks to the balancing tail, which slashed the runway clear with a will of its own, and drove Steve in a bounding, simian gait that was barely under Corben’s control.

There had been much wrangling, at the start of the program, over where to locate the pilot. Some had demanded that Steve be run by remote, but security concerns and human practicality had won out. Steve was a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth, and muscle memory and superb reflexes made his head the safest place to be when he ran amok.

Though much of the data Steve’s nerves poured into his brain was utterly alien, Corben became Steve like never before as he loped across the paved expanse of the airbase, skirting the waiting helicopters and running down to the river, where he could already see the churning waters parting as his adversary burst from the gray Potomac and waded into our nation’s capitol on the opposite bank.

Steve hit the water and kicked across in twenty strokes, his tail propelling him like a cruise missile to the shore of East Potomac Park. In the silvery light of the overcast morning, the obscene profile of the enemy loomed over the Capitol Mall—Kungmin Horangi, reborn.

Steve took note of how it moved among the white sepulchral houses of government. In its wake, only selected targets were destroyed: the Mint, the Federal Trade Commission, and the fortress of the Internal Revenue Service were flattened, while the monster leapt high over the Smithsonian castle and gamboled across the open greensward, cutting a wide berth around the bureaucratic temples and museums, in open contempt for the helicopters raining depleted uranium shells down on it.

Steve came lumbering out onto the Mall, and saw that the green was packed with protesters. Hundreds of thousands of men and women of every class and persuasion shouted and sang and cheered the kaiju invader. It traipsed over their heads like their collective dream of a champion made flesh, somehow never stepping on a single tiny body.

The damage to its fiery, jet-striped pelt was hardly negligible—gigantic gobbets of flesh sprayed and spattered the Mall like so much gory piñata filling, and teeming hordes of protesters overran the barricades to carry them off or devour them on the spot.

Steve locked on the monster, leading it so he aimed at a projected ghost of its probable path, and launched a volley of missiles. Bigger than ever, easily a hundred feet long, the monster launched itself into the air and the missiles strafed the Smithsonian and made a blazing pyre of the US Forest Service.

“Power down your missiles, Wes! Repeat, power down, you’re blowing up government property!”

“Do you want to win, or not?” Corben barked, and rushed the monster.

Protesters milled around his feet as he strode through their midst, spearing his ankles and feet and tail with the shafts of their picket signs. Screaming, “Whose side are you on?” Steve stomped them until the lawn was a swamp of liquefied sedition, and raked the Mall with his tail until the fortress of the Department Of Justice and the marble walls of the National Archive wept blood and human shrapnel.

Kungmin Horangi met his charge by rearing up on its hind legs, head yawning open and fang-studded tentacles questing for his face. Steve slipped under the wriggling worms and drove his fists into its blubbery chest. His tail darted behind and swiped the monster’s legs out from under it. Dragging it off-balance just as Steve once had his opponents in judo tournaments, he heaved the writhing bulk over his hip, sent it hurtling across Constitution Avenue.

Steve raced after the airborne abortion and pounced on it where it came to rest, snatched a nosy news chopper out of the sky by its tail and smashed the monster with it until the whirling rotors broke off and the fuselage exploded like a cheap guitar on its sorry excuse for a head.

As Kungmin Horangi crumpled and lay prone against the toppled tower of the Old Post Office, great slits gasped all down its neck and flanks and gave forth a faint but growing feedback hiss. Steve cowered behind the rubble of the IRS, because in stark disregard for every known principle of physics or biology, these monsters almost always had some sort of energy weapon.

An eerie keening sound escaped from the speaker-slits, and Steve went dead-stick, oblivious to Corben’s spastic gyrations in the cockpit. Steve’s nervous network broadcast only static, while sensations like fluttering moths in his stomach—feelings!—swamped the mainframe. Out of the unlovely orifices of this monstrous abomination, in the thick of a titanic battle, came the celestial sound of a chorus of children.

They sang in Korean, but the longing, loving voices sailed their message straight through the benighted preverbal backwaters of Corben’s brain. These children, reared on Spartan rations and Stalinist dogma, sang of their dream of a world where everyone shared their talent and wealth and loved one another as a family should. They offered this awful, awesome monstrosity, from which the recording of their song spewed like the tune of an ice cream truck, as a gift, and the harbinger of a new golden age of humankind.

In their thousands, the surviving protesters poked up out of the rubble like shoots of grass and took up the alien chorus.

Steve grabbed up tanks and cars and fistfuls of shrieking protesters and threw them at the crumpled form, rushed up behind it and planted a kick in its flanks. The monster was lofted high over the capitol again, flipping end over end as the gang back at Mission Control went wild in his headset, cheers and screams about evacuating the President—

Steve fell on the monster again, plunged his taloned saurian claws into its cratered, rubbery hide above its cartilaginous ribs. Venomous spines pricked him all over, skin going numb and swelling purple-black blisters the size of snow tires. Thrashing tentacles flayed the scales off his back and pumped a potpourri of neurotoxins into his flesh, but he blanked it out as he squeezed something deep inside Kungmin Horangi that pumped like a heart until he popped it, then slashed the muscles behind its right foreleg.

The monster sagged under Steve, who wrenched the useless limb out of its socket like a drumstick and rammed it into the frantically gnawing mandibles. The tentacles swallowed up his arm and stripped it to the bone again, but the echinoderm mouth ruthlessly chewed up its own severed forelimb, and rivers of sweet-and-sour ichor showered the White House lawn as the colossal combatants grappled, the syrupy song of the children skipping but still burbling out of its speaker-gills.

“So you taste good, huh?” Steve roared. “You like to eat yourself, you Commie motherfucker?”

Kungmin Horangi went limp in his arms, then swelled up like an emergency airbag. Steve struggled to get free, but his destroyed arm was still trapped in the barbed gullet of the monster. A blast of hot air and briny broth escaped, and Steve’s nostrils caught it and told Wes that its aroma was not at all unpleasant.

Kungmin Horangi exploded.

Steve’s arm ripped free amid a torrent of soft tissue, mountains of stomachs and intestines and glands the size of school buses lay out on the lawn and festooned the south portico of the White House, and still it kept coming, an endless, gory horn of plenty.

And Corben had to admit that he had never smelled anything so sweet in all his life.

It took a Herculean effort of pure will, but he pulled back on Steve to retreat from the situation. The Red Korean kaiju limped away, deathly slow, towards the Potomac. It had to be stopped; Steve had to get back to the hangar, he was bleeding, dying—

But the controls wouldn’t respond. Corben felt himself go into a kind of paralysis, as Steve moved of his own volition back to the steaming pile of innards and, with his intact hand, began to shovel them into his gaping mouth.

“Steve, for God’s sake, it’s Communism! Stop eating it!”

Corben yanked on the manual overrides and punched the emergency sleep sequence, but to no avail. Steve went on gobbling up the monster’s digestive tract, which it had expelled after the fashion of its secondary parent species, the resourceful sea cucumber.

And even as he fought to pull Steve back, the cables running into his suit fed him the taste and the texture, the gelatinous, spicy, tangy succulence of it, not unlike kimchi with pickled octopus, but tempered by the pleasantly gamy murk of tiger meat, and the briny, womb-like glow of collective well-being, of universal rightness, of belonging to a harmonious whole, that began to spread out from his stomach.

Corben coded the self-destruct sequence, ripped the leads out of his suit and undogged the hatch, all the while telling himself he was not hungry, he was not going to eat it—

“You’re an American hero, Steve,” Corben begged, “you’re like a god to them. Why can’t you stop?”

A familiar voice pounded on his eardrums, and shocked Corben so that he threw himself head-first out of the cockpit, and though Steve was hunkered down on his knees over the diminishing pile of guts, he still fell thirty feet to the immaculately manicured White House lawn, the echo of that voice still ringing in his ears.

“Why can’t you stop fucking my wife, Wes?”

Corben’s arm folded under him and fractured on impact and he hit his head so hard he saw stars, but he rolled to sit up at the sound of a helicopter touching down in front of the west portico.

High above him, the explosive charges embedded beneath the cockpit detonated, blowing the domed roof off Steve’s skull in a furious monsoon of bone shards and hunks of flaming brain. Steve’s hand stalled at his mouth, a colossal rope of kaiju intestine slithering free and draping itself across his lap.

A platoon of dour Secret Service agents in black suits hustled out the West Wing exit and crossed the lawn with guns drawn, but halfway to the chopper, their ranks broke and a shorter man in shirtsleeves came running up to Corben.

“Do I smell barbecue?” shouted the President.

“No, Mr. President, it’ll brainwash you!” Corben went for his sidearm, oblivious to Secret Service agents painting laser dots on him and running to shield the President.

“Naw, I’m not touching that disgusting foreign Commie crap, but it does give me an idea.” The President engaged that matinee-idol squint that somehow projected frontier grit and cowboy resolve on TV, that somewhat alarming facial tic which had carried him in the southern states. “If that sea cucumber shit makes people turn pinko, then we just need an antidote, right? Fight fire with fire.”

Picking his way across the debris-strewn lawn, the President stood in the shadow of Steve––still kneeling upright, though his convertible head belched smoke like an uneasy volcano. “Yes sir, a taste of true-blue courage, of independence and strength and faith, to remind them what it means to be Americans.”

The leader of the free world knelt and scooped up a fillet of Steve’s brain, still sizzling in its own juices. “Smells like veal from my Daddy’s ranch,” he said, and took a bite.

“Please, Mr. President, don’t— He wouldn’t…” Corben crawled up to the President, but a Secret Service agent stepped on his neck and pried his pistol from his hand.

“Nonsense, boy, he knew what the duty was, when he signed up for it. Any red-blooded American with half the heart he had would jump at the chance. And, Jesus, take a look at him! Whatever it is, it sure ain’t cannibalism…”

The President bethought himself a moment, then flagged down his chief of staff. “Now, get my Interfaith Council on the horn, and have them stand by for something big. And get me every cloning specialist you can, and some lab space, and some vats, and you know we’re gonna need a helluva grill…”

Episode II—The Island of Dr. Otaku

“Meh,” said the Prime Minister of Japan to the UN General Assembly, and dreamed of brown seas.

What, honestly, did they expect him to say, on this terrible anniversary of the Daikaiju Age? What consolation could the first victim of a rapist offer to the next? What wisdom, to a world where everyone raped everyone?

He blinked at a flash in the micro teleprompters embedded in his contact lenses, before he remembered to close his eyes to see the unfiltered feed. A little extra sexy edge the gaijin would have to pay retail for, ten years down the line, ha ha, what an empty game.

The speech—expensive and individually wrapped origami phrases, focus-group tested pro-corporate shit—did not come.

Instead, his contacts, along with the monitors behind the podium and every console in the General Assembly Hall, flash-cut to a scene that made most of the sullen ambassadors instantly sit up at attention.

A nanny-cam view of row upon row of Japanese schoolgirls. The Prime Minister’s bafflement turned to heart-stopping rage as the camera zoomed in on one specific girl in the class, fidgeting and twitching in her seat. Despite the uniforms and the poor resolution, he recognized his daughter at once, and knew the media would be only seconds behind him.

“Good morning, Mr. Prime Minister-san,” a sunny, smug voice chuckled in his hearing aid. A Caucasian, upper-class Australian voice. “Only you can hear me, of course, but everyone can see what we’re going to discuss. If you’re a reasonable man, there’s no reason you can’t spin this to your advantage, eh?”

The Prime Minister gave no answer but chopped, choked breathing, like a constipated swimmer entering a frozen stream.

On every screen, his daughter arched provocatively back in her seat, kicking out in grand mal seizures. The razor-pleats of her blue wool skirt hitched up to reveal the doubled outrage of melon-hued cotton panties emblazoned with a cuddly cartoon image of Kungmin Horangi, the infamous People’s Tiger.

The General Assembly hall erupted into chaos, and the Prime Minister found his mic had been cut. His pleas for the scandalized diplomats of the United Nations to stop ogling his daughter went unheeded.

The Aussie voice in his ear resumed its syrupy purr. “I assume we may speak freely, so I’ll get down to it. Your daughter has been a bad girl, eh? She and her friends are all hooked on People’s Tiger jerky, did you know that? Well, we spiked her supply a bit, old son. Without the antidote, she’ll transform into a full-fledged tiger-sea cucumber in about twelve hours, if the shock doesn’t kill her. But chin up, mate. None of that has to happen.”

All at once, the Prime Minister knew who was ranting at him. The third son of the sole owner and CEO of the world’s largest media conglomerate. A rude, shrewd little shit who pissed on proper protocol in a desperate attempt to get noticed.

And, with a tremor of deeper, creeping dread, he also realized what this must be about.

“Of course, you’ll appreciate our admittedly uncharacteristic restraint, at this point. We could have piped in some spectacular immersive VR stuff we got off your last Shinjuku toilet-trip. But the Old Guard thought it was best to take the high road.”

The Prime Minister deliriously lost control of his bowels. The hermetically-sealed astronaut diapers under his impeccable Brooks Brothers suit contained the deluge, but cradled it deliciously close to his chafed, shameful buttocks. Of all the vices it took to maintain his flagging faith in democracy, his coprophilia, indulged in biweekly baths in untreated Tokyo sewage, was the most humiliating.

Would that he had the grace or guts to use this stage to end it all…

On the monitors, the classroom desk-grid dissolved in a panic of flying preteen bodies. Someone must have armed the posh private school’s emergency protocols, because the girls were locked in the room with his poor Mariko, who had not begun to change physically, but was her unmistakably shy, insecure self in no other respect. Flipping desks and gnashing foaming jaws like she meant to bite her classmates, she herded them toward the windows. Screaming girls broke their nails on the latches, but safety precautions rendered them impossible for students to open, let alone climb out, especially during midterms.

“What,” grunted the Prime Minister, “do you want?”

“What do I want? What does the whole world want? The answer to the question that has you here, soiling your three-million yen monkey-suit in front of the General Assembly… but instead of sticking to the script, you’re going to tell them the truth.”

“I do not know—”

“Of course you do, mate. You’ve been supplying and sheltering him since he defected from North Korea. Everybody knows it, and everybody knows he’s up to something big… something apocalyptic.

“All you have to do to save your daughter—and whatever slivers of face you still have with the folks at home—is speak into the microphone, and tell the whole world where it can find the infamous Dr. Otaku.”

The location of Dr. Otaku’s latest laboratory fortress was indeed a closely guarded secret from the world at large, but hardly a mystery to the world’s great powers, who were discovering that knowing something, and doing anything with that knowledge, were often worlds apart.

While the uncharted island of Dr. Otaku lay well within the Antarctic Circle, the ocean boiled.

Submarine vents in the ocean floor radiating out for miles from the tiny volcanic island gushed molten magma into the shallow Weddell Sea, fueling a violent transmutation that shrouded the region in perpetual columns of superheated steam, so that no detail of it was visible from the open sea or the air, let alone from orbit.

The aggressively secretive climate also did nothing for the island’s defenses. No alarms sounded when the scalding waves parted to eject a titanic kaiju invader and fling its nuclear submarine-sized bulk onto the jagged tusks of volcanic stone that fringed the island’s shore.

Two hundred feet of laser-guided mayhem from its screeching eagle beak to the Teflon tip of its parboiled tail, and the ex-Navy pilot cooped up in the cockpit hacked into its spinal cord was light years past pissed.

Commander Wes Corben had paid dearly to find this place, in every coin men and devils accepted, for the island was guarded by forces more sinister than fog, more sophisticated than any cloaking device or satellite baffler: the boundless power of international corporations to cover their fuck-ups.

A few years before, the volatile Antarctic coastal shelf was hopelessly fractured by overeager oil companies desperate to get out of the oil business. The geothermal instability accelerated the thawing of the region several hundredfold, until New Zealand-bound ocean liners took to skimming their wakes to harvest bobbing flocks of boiled penguins as a novelty entrée.

The oil companies used the same proactive strategy they brought to alternative energy research to hide the catastrophe, flooding every media outlet and science journal with doctored snapshots and cartoons featuring happy surfing penguins, many of whom were, thanks to digital sorcery, also avidly drinking Diet Dr. Pepper. But they also bombarded the government with phony satellite imagery and doctored climate research, and stymied muckraking environmental watchdog groups with rosy propaganda campaigns and unmanned kamikaze submarine wolf packs.

As a result, Dr. Otaku had selected the most dangerous and secret place in the world to set up his laboratory… at least since the last one.

The island’s rocky shore lurched up drunkenly out of the boiling foam to join battle with the cyclone-riddled sky as a phalanx of near vertical cliffs of black lava rock. A maze of narrow, twisting canyons cut into the towering volcano were choked with a riotous jungle of colossal mutant fungi, like pulpy tenement towers. The fleshy gills underneath the mushroom domes powdered the giant monster’s white-feathered head with psychoactive spores as it stealthily crept through the labyrinth, sneezing and mildly hallucinating.

Cmdr. Corben could not hope to have arrived undetected. The churning ocean was full of sea mines, drone subs and marker buoys with depth charge launchers, and half the shrieking seabirds that hovered and pecked at the trampled fungi in his path seemed to have compound dragonfly eyes and cellular antennae for ears.

It didn’t matter if Dr. Otaku knew he was coming. The world’s foremost freelance kaiju-engineer was more devious than Dr. No and Fu Manchu in a three-legged race, but Wes Corben had come from the edge of the grave for revenge, and an angry, wounded and divided nation had hurled him into the mad scientist’s clutches solely to take it.

After his last piloting gig ended so spectacularly on the White House Lawn (Code Name: CUCUMBER BBQ: ABOVE TOP SECRET), Corben retired to spend more time with his family of single malt scotches. Still weeks away from hitting rock bottom, but the government had been willing to forgive and forget, just to get him back.

They promised him that they had modified the organic components, replacing unreliable neural processes with solid-state fiber optics driven by a nuclear power plant, and installing a host of no-nonsense ordnance. They reinvented the pilot interface, and totally retooled the manual override and emergency recovery protocols.

And they made a whole new monster for him to drive.

Named for the visionary worrywart who coined the term “military industrial complex,” IKE (International Kaiju Enforcer) stood only a little taller than Corben’s last ride, but the absurdly musclebound torso and rangy arms were pure Malaysian highland orangutan—albeit with rail gun cannons embedded in the outsized forearms—while the silicon-scaled hide, the shrimpy, talon-crazed hind legs, lashing, razor-edged tail and lethally septic saliva came from the hotwired genome of a Komodo dragon.

A potent and adroitly engineered kaiju-hybrid, ideal for amphibious ops, but the pork-barrel dipshit who chaired Senate Intel rebuked the “diabolical” design until he could insure it had a uniquely American stamp on it.

Which was why Ike had the head of a bald eagle.

The smaller brainpan forced them to relocate the cockpit between the shoulder blades, but it was much better protected than Steve’s head.

Ike’s scrappy, undersized saurian hindquarters had to scramble to keep up with his top-heavy forelimbs, but the monster hustled across the battlefield with a stampeding gait that looked awesome on TV with the accompanying stadium butt-rock theme music the Pentagon had commissioned for all his media packages.

“A tragicomic triumph over every sound principle of genetic engineering,” said Scientific American, “and a perfect totem spirit for America’s moribund status as a world power,” added the Washington Post. “The most idiotic abomination to shamble out of the Beltway groupthink cuddle-puddle since the New Deal,” jeered the Wall Street Journal. (The President took umbrage at the harsh reception of his “personal brainchild,” and invited the seditious press corps to review Camp X-Ray Delta in the DMZ bayous of the former state of Louisiana, but the damage was done. Ike’s reality shows, cartoons and merchandise tanked.)

At least, Commander Wes Corben told himself, they hadn’t succeeded in putting wings on him. When the people who turned cloned tissue from his friend Steve Mancuso into a mystery meat served in every cafeteria in America sat down to make a monster, you had to expect some unpleasant surprises.

It seemed like he had arrived just ahead of the rush. Out on the ocean, he heard but couldn’t see a massive naval battle––men, machines and monster pointlessly blowing each other up in the fog. Approaching the island’s central volcanic peak, Corben was almost disappointed at the lackadaisical resistance he had encountered. The mushroom-jungle was teeming with Otaku’s recent experiments in mini-kaiju, anklebiter chimeras bred for tyrants as crowd control in Indonesia and Africa. Iguanadonkeys nipped at Ike’s flanks with their toxic jaws and hurled inflammable feces at him, but Ike smashed them to jelly with his mighty fists. Scampering emulemurs proved harder to target, but their kicking spurs proved only a minor annoyance, gouging shallow, bloodless divots out of Ike’s carbon-steel endodermis before he mowed them down with his rail guns.

Ike scaled a thousand-foot waterfall and bounded across an open plateau with a heliport and observation bunkers arranged around rows of open missile silos.

The ground shook, and a gargantuan shadow rose up out of the murky mists to blot out the milky light of the sun.

Ike thumped his chest and let out a shriek like a thousand eagles in a document shredder. Corben charged up the rail guns and kicked in Ike’s adreno-blowers, thrilled to finally face a foe worthy of his undiluted wrath.

At first, it seemed as if a mountain of mushrooms shambled out to attack him, but the leviathan laboring underneath the shaggy carpet of parasitic fungi shook itself free and honked a defiant roar from its gaping maw and slime-choked blowhole.

Corben felt pity seep like lactic acid into his reflexes, slowing, but not stilling his hand, as he spurred Ike to engage his miserable enemy.

The assholes called it Ishmael.

Bred by Dr. Otaku for an overfunded Greenpeace in a fit of grandiose pique in the late 90’s, the walking mega-cetacean wiped out the Japanese whaling fleet in a month—but not before the fickle eco-activists had a change of heart, and stopped the cash transfer to Otaku’s account.

Ishmael had been missing and presumed dead for nearly a decade, but now, it thundered across the helipad like something out of the Golden Age of Greece, when the earth was raped by the sky, and gave birth to monsters.

Despite his political repulsion for everything Ishmael stood for, Corben had to marvel at the workmanship. A gigantic orca on functional sauropod legs, Ishmael could have been a real threat, if it had arms. The monster’s useless flukes had been ripped off, burned or shot away dozens of times, but Otaku had finally overcome the fatal design flaw. You could hate the game, but never the player. And yet, Corben discovered new depths of loathing for the mind that could replace the hapless tyranno-orca’s flapping flippers with gigantic, chrome-plated chainsaws.

The huge, ungainly lumberjack blades struck sparks off each other as they roared to rusty life, but Ishmael struggled to keep up, big black eyes bugging out in bloodshot shock at what it had become, wheezing and flinging great streamers of slime-mold from its infested blowhole. A blood-flecked yellow beard of the disgusting stuff hung from the whaler-killing killer whale’s sick, toothless maw like a hillbilly patriarch’s beard.

Ike ducked under the slashing blades and pivoted, clipping one rampaging chainsaw forelimb by its tender, infected organic stump, and bent it to sever its mate at the base as neatly as such a monumentally ghastly operation could be executed.

Ishmael fell with a shockwave that lofted Otaku Island spores to Manitoba, asthmatically bleating its melancholy love for its cruel, careless creator until Ike, wielding Ishmael’s own chainsaw-limb, cored the miserable monster’s speech center, signaling lunch.

With all the waste disposal paperwork the eco-activists and Right to Lifers had foisted on the mad scientists’ guild, it was almost easier to clean house by provoking an international incident every so often, Dr. Otaku observed.

Ishmael and his ilk were bittersweet reminders of a simpler era, but all Dr. Otaku saw were their defects.

He never wanted to make weapons. He wanted to create life, which no one could corrupt, tame or control. Which forced him to come around to the unseemly business of the hour.

“Greetings, friends, allies and interested parties. You have been briefed on the rules. Shall we start the bidding?”

Otaku waved to cut the feed and sank into a chair to sip a restorative tonic of Tang and vat-grown human cerebrospinal fluid. Though it was like a cannon in his pygmy hands, he never put down the vintage WW2 Mauser which, the eBay seller promised him, was the gun Goebbels used on himself and his wife in Hitler’s bunker.

His unpaid summer interns, the Seppuku Clan, had the auction well in hand. The federation of bosozoku hackers had come to Otaku’s attention when they took over Mega-Ronin 1, Tokyo’s old-school corporate defender mecha, and orchestrated the monster robot’s spectacular hara-kiri in Tokyo Bay. The rusting remains of the beloved robot, still hunkered over the haft of its vibra-katana, had become Japan’s Statue Of Liberty, a moving symbol of its enduring love affair with heroic self-defeat.

With their bleach-blonde mohawks and pompadours, their huge blue cybernetic anime eyes and biker gear made of cured Yakuza hitmen hides, the Seppuku Clan were laughably campy henchmen, but he couldn’t argue with the results as they expertly filtered the flurry of wire transfers, Trojan horses and data packets, both overt and covert, pounding the firewalls of Otaku’s network like piranha sperm trying to fertilize an egg. Every corporate bidder worth entertaining had tried to spike the experiment with its own software, hardware specs and genetic codes. Most of them had also sent armadas of mercs and Somali pirates, drone blastboats and mecha-kaiju swarms to shell the island and shoot expensive lasers at each other.

Bioweapon bombs hit like smoke tracers and sprayed viral mists that made the mushroom forests sprout wings, tails and udders. Each was trying to outbid its rivals with one hand, while gaming the birth of Otaku’s last monster with their own protocols, and sabotage the process in case anyone but them succeeded… exactly as he knew they would.

The reason the concerted intelligence forces of the free world could not shut down Dr. Otaku’s control network was very simple. It was everywhere, and nowhere, at once.

The moment the auction cycle reached critical mass, the system appeared to crash, and Dr. Otaku ceased transmitting from his island stronghold. The auction had only been a ruse, anyway. Otaku had no intention of selling his masterpiece, but he had used the mountains of credit put on the block in millions of micro-transactions to finance the real project, and to focus the world’s attention on this project, and thus, bring it to life.

The virtual womb in which his masterpiece gestated was buried in the Seppuku Clan’s server on the Hardsoft Gaming Network, where the unborn monster would awaken in millions of households, cafes, arcades and pachinko parlors around the world, to take control of its new body.

While Interpol, NSA and a hundred corporate and government agencies in the United States and Europe frantically scoured the globe and the Net for his latest dastardly creation, at any given moment an average of 1.2 million subscribers wasted their lives online via the Hardsoft Gaming Network, which was unofficially Seppuku Clan’s bandwidth-hogging bitch. While upwardly mobile parents tried to avert or manage or just profit off the impending kaiju holocaust, none noticed how their tween and teenaged kids stayed locked in their rooms and immersed in a marathon cooperative tournament, even after some of them started to die.

Today, the current peak audience of four million distributed across five continents worked like virtual slaves racing to build a pyramid, but also served as the surrogate nervous network of a new artificial intelligence cloud, training it to work in concert as parts of a single, unborn beast, straining to break out of its egg.

The game demanded their total concentration, as terabyte parcels of data comprising Dr. Otaku’s ultimate monster were uploaded onto the net, and downloaded to a battery of masers and nanotech fabricators set up atop the NHK parking garage in the geographic center of Tokyo.

With the conclusion of the game, half a million elite survivors emerged victorious from the final level and were whisked into the synthesis of a new order of kaiju.

The inferior three and a half million gamers simultaneously choked to death on their own vomit, but moments later, their bank and credit accounts were drained and maxed out, and flurries of spam blasted out of their respective mail accounts (W3 G0T PWNED BY ZAIBATSU!!! UR NXT, NOOBZ!!!!), proving that there was life after death, if only in the belly of an unborn god.

At the top of the highest peak on Otaku Island, the bleeding and battle-scarred Ike reared up on its hind legs and roared defiance at the last circle of security around Otaku’s lair.

The lab itself was no paltry matter, a six-story geodesic dome surrounded by minefields and automated machine-gun towers, but the staging area for Otaku’s final project was as absurdly oversized as a workbench would need to be, for the construction of giant monsters.

A paved, silicon-lined bowl the size of the Arecibo deep space radio telescope filled the yawning chasm where the mouth of the volcano once yawned. The vast expanse was traversed by a network of cables from which gondolas dangled over the great work. Swarms of hovering drones monitored or controlled the process, which, despite the teams of uniformed lackeys racing around in golf carts, the squads of ninjas drilling on platforms, and the flocks of white-coated nerds hassling with banks of expensive technology under the eye of tattooed Jap biker terrorists… had amounted to nothing much, that he could tell.

The bowl was empty.

Corben didn’t take too long to puzzle it out. If you drove a giant monster around the world and smashed into nefarious assholes’ hideouts for a living, then sooner or later, you might just stumble in a bit before the eleventh hour, and you’d only have to kick over a bunch of charts and nifty conceptual sketches.

He ordered Ike to take apart the lair. Shrugging off the depleted-uranium rounds the machine guns pumped into it like so many fleabites, Ike picked up tanks and tossed them into the minefields, loping across the field towards the lab dome when the debris stopped bouncing.

No more giant monsters dropped out of the sky or crawled out of cracks in the earth. No satellite death weapons or clouds of mustard gas to thwart his claws when he set Ike to pounding on the steel and Plexiglas wall of the dome. It yielded instantly, spilling him into the flimsy interior of his archenemy’s lair, which looked like a gigantic Benihana steakhouse.

“Corben, what’s the status of the operation?”

“There is no operation! There’s nothing going on, here. I think the old geek just wanted the attention—”

Corben lost his train of thought as he saw something on the aft monitors. Disengaging Ike from the dome, Corben brought the vista of the huge, empty bowl up on his main monitor.

It was still empty, but suddenly, and vitally, full of… bullshit?

The concave surface of the bowl lit up and danced with weird circuit-frying waves like St. Elmo’s fire, summoning and containing arcane energies that warped the air. There were no hoses or artificial womb machinery, or the small factory needed to assemble even modest combat mecha.

All in a flash, Wes Corben understood.

The project was all but complete.

The bowl was, as he originally pegged it, a satellite dish. It collected all the world’s communications, filtering them to focus on the events that had the world’s undivided attention: the battle here, and all the endless, airtime-eating, empty expert speculation about whatever the hell Dr. Otaku might be up to.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, concerned parents, politicians, pundits, noted futurists and even a few actual scientists, speculating, debating and spitballing, molding the clay of inexplicable events into instant mythology. And all this bullshit, as well as the corporate gamesmanship to try to control the process, had created a tremendous sink of energy and wealth and consciousness, out of thin air. And somehow, Otaku’s ingenious lackeys had figured out a way to harness all that hot air and bullshit, to coalesce it into a power source, and more—

Because the raw uncertainty, the yawning mass hysterical terror of the unknown that the bullshit sought to overcome, was the root chord that drove that awesome symphony, and dictated the form that the chaotic energy began to take.

The bowl was much more than a satellite dish. It was more like a laser, collecting all the world’s fear and misinformation, transmitting it anywhere in the world, and transmuting it into flesh.

Corben had to hand it to the old devil. In a world so eaten up with the fear of the lights going off, Dr. Otaku had harnessed the earth’s only inexhaustible power source, and turned it loose to make his monster for him.

Ike redoubled his efforts to gut the dome, which disgorged armies of antique flatbed tanks with energy projector lamps. They hardly singed Ike’s feathers, but the static charge made all the cockpit monitors go to random satellite feeds of Brazilian children’s shows. Blind, Corben kept smashing, hoping to somehow pull the plug, sure nobody was listening as he screamed, “Stop talking about it, you’re making it happen…”

Mortified, Mariko rolled through the trendy streets of Harajuku, eating everything.

Every door was closed to her. She even tried to squirm down the storm drains, but they had been sealed. Everything organic that she touched dissolved and added to her already unbearable mass. Even the disgusting germs on every surface gave up their secrets with a toxic whimper, as they became her.

It was liberating to be free of fear of bacteria, but the shock of tasting everything she touched sent her into a panic, stampeding through the quarantine roadblocks and out into the city, seeking a huge bowl of tapioca to stand in until someone could administer an antidote that worked.

Soldiers shot at her, and with a wave of her pseudopods, she crushed and slurped them into her abominable spreading belly like so much melted ice cream. Classmates shrieked and hurled burning textbooks at her, and she wept hydrochloric acid tears, reducing them to crumbling husks while an NHK camera drone peeped it all. Lashing out at the drones only attracted a dozen more and set fire to a KFC, and all its flaming patrons leapt into her foaming flanks to put out the fire.

In her blood, the kaiju RNA-potentiator agent had triggered a chain-reaction throughout Mariko’s body, causing every cell to revert to totipotency, a science word that meant every one of them could easily go its own way with no regrets. Made up of a colony of anything-goes amoebas casually dedicated to the idea of Mariko, if not to the form or the other dull mortal stuff, the new, mutant Mariko had cast off the uncool gene therapy scheme behind the spiked Kungmin Horangi jerky, only to regress into a blob.

When she broke out of the classroom, a team of mercs shot her with tranquilizer darts spiked with the antidote. But they didn’t reckon on Mariko’s spunk, or her morning diet of ginseng, black market estrogen, and Blue Otaku Ecstasy. The havoc these ingredients played in the total reshuffling of Mariko’s genetics and morphology had rendered her a seething, primordial pit of awful potential.

She wept at the manga-scale irony. Once, she could not bring herself to eat anything but kaiju jerky, for fear of becoming a fat girl. Now she could eat everything, it seemed, but herself.

Slithering down the alley, she met a ragpicker woman, ancient and seemingly held together by dust and cat hair. Alone, the charwoman stood in her path, bent under a knapsack bulging with recyclables, but singularly unimpressed.

“Foolish girl, what are you making of yourself?”

“I don’t know!” Mariko wailed, shocked at the clarity of her words, as well as the volume, which shattered windows and set off car alarms for eight blocks.

“Foolish girl… become the champion Japan needs.”

Mariko tried to thank the old woman, but ended up eating her.

Perhaps it was the old woman’s words, or just her gamy old body digesting within Mariko’s formless new one, but a deep, cosmic serenity took hold of her, enfolding her like a cocoon, soothing her with dreams of a new shape.

On the verge of what he earnestly thought was victory, Wes Corben was already reaching for the emergency booze locker when Ike suddenly seized up and defied orders.

“Orders” are what they called them in the manuals, but as Ike’s pilot, Corben entered commands directly into the monster’s hacked brainstem. Most brain functions above the autonomic level were modeled by onboard computers, but the men who designed and modified Ike had learned from their costly previous model, Major Steve.

Ike should have shut down the moment it refused an “order,” or gone to a fetal crouch until it was airlifted. There was no “Ike” to defy Corben’s “orders,” or so he thought, until he came within a hair’s breadth of crushing Dr. Otaku himself.

Smashing away at the mad scientist’s lair like a rabid badger with its snout in a beehive, Ike burrowed deeper into the lab complex, flinging crushed concrete, satellite dishes, lab equipment and flattened hordes of subhuman orderlies like so much beach sand. Corben dared to hope that he could finally exact revenge for all the awful twists Dr. Otaku had introduced into his life, when he lost control of Ike.

The renegade monster didn’t run amuck or switch sides to pull Corben out of its own skull. On all fours, Ike crawled away from the gutted lair and began to dig a hole in the middle of the minefield.

The hole was wider than it was deep, and of no strategic value whatsoever, that Corben could see. Yet Ike squatted over it in blithe innocence of the onslaught of bombs and lasers chopping away at its hunched shoulders.

Corben tried to harangue Mission Control, tried to raise anyone, but the airwaves were a helter-skelter of random red noises and bleeding shortwave chatter.

He watched the monitors in disbelief. Fuck the regs, he thought, and lit up a cigarette. He’d need at least that long to figure out what to do next, assuming he could do anything.

Ike was engineered to have no secondary sexual characteristics, no hormone arousal receptors that might make the monster hard to control in the event of a “gay bomb,” or other sexual bioweapons.

So, even if he couldn’t do anything about it, Corben still wanted very much to hear the guys at the lab explain how Ike could be laying eggs.

Of the seven million Tokyo residents who watched the newborn, nameless monster materialize in their midst, no fewer than fourteen died of heart attacks or strokes, while another hundred and twelve leapt or fell to their deaths as it passed harmlessly through their apartment blocks. A perfect self-projecting hologram, a thirteen-story ghost; when it thrust its metamorphic forelimbs through towering skyscrapers and maser-tank battalions, its tiny human victims lay quivering yet unharmed in their own urine, quite convinced they’d been crushed.

And there was no shortage of real destruction. The two Self Defense Force artillery units flanking Otaku’s monster in the business district of Akasaka Chuo never particularly cared for each other. Infiltrated and thoroughly compromised by rival mystic prosperity cults, and with no enemy to fight but endless kaiju invaders, the rival tankers could be accused of little more than excessive zeal and poor hearing when reports came in that their barrages were passing through the target and hitting each other, the US Embassy and the nearby Imperial Palace, with devastating accuracy.

“Shit,” Otaku hissed, cutting a botched line of code and pasting a revised binary phrase into the command line. “Forgot to carry the one …”

And the monster instantly became utterly, inescapably solid.

The most coherent accounts of the monster’s appearance described it as some sort of chimerical centipede, with hundreds of armored, highly articulated limbs that wrought street-level holocausts wherever the creature went, like a Rose Parade of whirling combine threshers.

Skyscrapers toppled against each other in its wake like felled stands of bamboo, their foundations whittled away as if by colossal Weed Eaters. The business end of the creature was a burly, almost humanoid thorax with a deadly array of wildly scything meat cleavers for arms. For a head, it had only a blunt, lobsterish battering ram festooned with hosts of compound camera eyes, and a freaky crown of trembling downlink dishes, radomes and antennae, like the collected receiving arrays of the NSA and KGB, stuffed into its face.

The indestructible apparition seemed to frolic through Tokyo with the blind fury of a tsunami on two hundred dancing feet, but the civil defense authorities watching the city’s transit grid saw an insidious plan taking shape behind the chaos.

As the monster rampaged through the city, it surgically cut off all bridges, subway routes and highways along the Sumida River, severing central Tokyo from the eastern suburbs, and moving north, chopping down monorails along the narrow trash-chute of the Kanda River.

Even as Otaku’s giant centipede raged through the city, it shrank, but not from the puny onslaught of the Self Defense and NATO forces. The behemoth was an Internet Worm made flesh, an apparition of pure data cast in a candy coating of wantonly destructive matter. And it was dismantling itself, shedding boxcar-sized segments of its serpentine body that in turn disintegrated into streams of data radiation that made gross matter thrum like overclocked chipsets, and hordes of giant spiders that spread throughout the island it had created out of central Tokyo, repairing damage and weaving webs of carbon-steel around the leaning skyscrapers of Akasaka, knitting them together to reinforce them against an imminent quake not even the doom-obsessed engineers of the city could have predicted.

Wracked with a pain like a thousand periods, Mariko cried out and shattered her cocoon.

Sure, she should feel exultation and curiosity to discover what she had become, but mostly, she just felt shame. The whole day had been a surprise final exam in degradation.

Getting dropped off at school by your shit-eater of a father’s mistress was humiliating. Freaking out in class was lethal. Turning into some kind of giant amoeba and eating everyone in your path? Priceless.

And so, when she crept out of the crater of her rebirth in the parking garage behind Shibuya Station, Mariko did not give a shit what she looked like. Her awesome wings spreading to dry in the sun, radiant scales throwing off showers of holographic rainbows when she launched herself effortlessly into the air, all of it—totally boring.

But it got interesting fast.

Mariko took to the air, and immediately was cut down by the vibra-katana of Mega-Ronin 2, the new and improved defender of Tokyo. The crackling blade only grazed her, but its disruptor field rebooted her brain, grounding her but good. Well, her job was done, then, but the robot kept trying to cut her head off.

She only breathed on the stupid thing, and melted its knees as it charged her. Collapsing on its overloaded katana, the giant mecha-samurai cut off its own head, but kept trying to get up and spaz out on her again.

Fed up with the robot’s retarded shit, Mariko flapped her wings and climbed to the top of the marine layer to survey the city.

On the smoky eastern horizon, a colossal buzzsaw chewed a southwesterly course through Akasaka’s black glass towers and mowed through the shopper’s purgatory of the Ginza, oblivious to carpet-bombing jets and irate giant moths. She noted with dismay that her home and the shit-eater’s offices lay just inside the forty-square kilometer island isolated by the shrinking centipede’s unchecked swath of destruction.

It wasn’t like she could go home, even if she wanted to. Not like this.

The monster turned northeast to disable the Hibiya train line. Directly in its path, Mariko noted with a fiery squeak of panic, lay the corporate headquarters of Sanrio.

The monster was more than welcome to step on her school and the shit-eater’s mistress, but she’d be damned if she’d let it fuck with Hello Kitty.

Millions of eyewitnesses described the epic battle that followed between the flying savior of Tokyo and the city-killing centipede. Thousands of hours of video from cameras, cellphones and webcams made every one of them a liar.

Not a single conclusive image of any kind of monster would ever be recovered or extracted from the Tokyo Otaku Event, except for the spotty coverage of the rampaging dragon that NHK identified as the Prime Minister’s academically unserious and somewhat homely daughter. The damage seems to appear spontaneously around her, as if shockwaves from her temper tantrum are spreading to slice the heart of the city free of its setting.

According to the most reliable eyewitnesses, exactly fifteen minutes and fourteen seconds after it materialized, the Tokyo Otaku Event vanished. Witnesses reported a brief vacuum when it disintegrated into clouds of civic-minded giant spiders which immediately leapt to work repairing the damage—but from there, they diverged into a variety of scenarios, from Mega-Ronin 2 beheading the monster with its sword, to the people bringing it down and ripping it apart with their bare hands until it imploded back to its home dimension.

Five seconds later, it appeared in London.

In the guise of a fire-breathing, hundred-headed eel, it crushed and cremated all bridges over the Thames, then turned its gnarly gnashing lamprey-mouths on the West End, vomiting napalm death with uncanny precision on banks, media outlets and private military contractors.

Again, cameras captured only spontaneous wave attacks of panicked civilians who seemed to shiver the air and the helpless city to bits around them, and the vibrating, ballistic waves of giant spiders, spilling off the empty epicenter of the action to repair the damage. When it imploded out of existence three minutes later, shell-shocked crowds almost seemed to repent of the monster they’d created and become, but then someone preached that the monster was revenge for the rejection of England’s traditional fish and chips as the national dish, and the rioting began afresh.

Thirteen breathless seconds later, it came to Moscow.

It looked like Stalin. It flattened the kleptocratic Duma and hurled Lenin’s Tomb into orbit, then lobbed fistfuls of moldering Soviet public works across eleven time zones at strategic targets in the plush offices, dachas and barracks of Russia’s robber-barons. It tried to eat Putin, and almost kept him down. The President was left alone, nonplussed and naked when the gargantuan phantom of communism dematerialized from the eye of the maelstrom it created, leaving legions of giant spiders to gift-wrap the Kremlin.

It struck San Francisco at 4:20pm PDT, so it was, like, gone, before anyone noticed.

Wherever they materialized, Otaku’s phantom kaiju were only the thin end of the bulldozer. Underfoot, the real threat seeped like bacteria into the wounds the giant monsters inflicted: cadres of kamikaze hackers, armed with mainframes, laser projectors, truckloads of highly virulent nanotechnology and portable karaoke.

While the spiders toiled overhead, the bosozoku gangs dumped the nanomites into the sewers, and waited around, sniffing glue and belting out Motörhead tunes until the gestating city throbbed and incorporated them into its mad self-improvement campaign. Out of thousands of tons of garbage and raw sewage and even the pipes themselves, the mites forged the mighty thews of a living god amid the infrastructure of the city center.

Unseen, they spread and assimilated every communications system, every computer, every unproductive scrap of biomass, to form a new, vital body out of the old one; and out of the stink of their shit and the drone of their dreams, they conjured the sleeping soul of the city, coaxed it into that uneasy, unborn body, and goosed it up the ass with a psychochemical hot poker.

And the world, already braced for some unspeakable new menace for well over three exhausting cable news cycles, collectively shit itself.

When the wheel began to turn on the hatch of Ike’s cockpit, Commander Corben took cover behind a bulkhead and drew his sidearm.

No new alert had sounded to drown out the systems failure claxons since Ike went back to nature.

Ike calmly watched the perimeter of the minefield, glancing every so often at the clutch of leathery speckled eggs under its—her?—flanks. Each egg was about the size of a minivan.

Beyond coming up with a betting pool and a lot of rotten jokes, Mission Control had been no help at all.

So, when the tiny assassin with the jet pack skulked into the cockpit, Corben was overjoyed. Here, thank God, was a problem he could lick with his own fists. He wanted to hug the little man, and he did, with chopping blows to the nose, throat and solar plexus.

Gagging on his own blood, the intruder staggered back into the milky daylight streaming through the open hatch.

Corben was stunned. Dr. Otaku himself lurched at him, spitting blood, inscrutable black goggles telescoping out in alarm. His pipestem arms and childlike hands, so adept at perverting the miracles of nature, could barely hold the huge old Kraut pistol they tried to lift off the deck.

The dying doctor squeezed off a single wild shot before he keeled over. Had he lived a moment longer, he might have stopped his own bullet, which rattled round the cockpit for almost a full second before it hit Commander Corben in the armpit, grazing his left lung and flattening against his shoulder blade to lodge in the intracostal muscles of his back.

Corben kicked the scientist a couple times. No escape pod launched out of his head; no miniature emulemurs chewed their way out of the corpse to wreak bloody postmortem revenge.

It just laid there, being dead.

He would have expected something, after all that trouble.

Corben rang Mission Control to give them the good news, but they put him on hold.

“Anyone who thought Tokyo’s real estate market could go no higher was eating humble pie with a side of crow today…” The bullshit news copy practically wrote itself. But this time, it literally made the monster stronger.

Fueled by the inexhaustible flood of computer-modeled, expert-vetted bullshit about its birth, the new entity that awakened beneath the center of Tokyo did not rise to destroy the city. It was the city, as much as the streets and buildings and helpless salarymen trapped in its legions of skyscrapers. When it awakened, the city center itself, ten square miles of the most expensive real estate on earth, including the Imperial Palace, the stock market and the address of every major technological and financial entity in Japan, stood up.

Tired of rebuilding after an endless barrage of kaiju attacks, Tokyo’s metamorphosis was the only sensible response: become a monster.

On millions of arachnid legs, the city detached itself from surviving streets, subway and monorail lines and then, to the shock of the world, it floated.

And then it flew.

Like everything for which the Japanese became renowned as innovators, it was assembled from parts built elsewhere, fiendishly practical, and not nearly as hard as they made it look.

Once the spiders had done away with the pesky Self Defense forces, they devoured thousands of tons of heavy, rigid concrete and secreted light carbon-steel webbing, replacing much of the rigid, dead weight of the city’s infrastructure with a flexible, living skeleton.

The subway tunnels and parking garages were filled with membranous organs which, when inflated with hydrogen separated from the air by nanomite factories, became the nacelles of an enormous dirigible, wrapped in the musculature of something that one might describe as a giant jellyfish, if it were not flying, and didn’t have the global headquarters of Sony on its back.

Venting a firewall of methane, the dyspeptic monster-city took to the skies like a plastic shopping bag in an updraft, sweeping aside a torrent of spy drones, news choppers and the beleaguered dragon protector of Tokyo, who set down alone in the vast cavity left by the city’s awakening.

In the sky, the newborn monster-city seemed to drift, weightless as a cloud. Flailing bio-steel tentacles like the supports of a suspension bridge trailed miles behind the city. They radiated enormous arcs of raw electricity, which leapt out at news choppers and disabled passing fighter jets, much as the trailing stingers of a man o’ war paralyze its prey.

What the fuck was Mariko supposed to protect, now?

Tokyo floated out over the Bay, raining waste and suicides as it passed over a nakedly envious Chiba City. It followed the coastline south, like a hurricane, but its rainfall was not destructive, except for those who stood in its way. A rain of revolution, it conscripted everything it fell upon, in the factories, warehouses and fish hatcheries of Yokohama, for every droplet was impregnated with millions of greedy, highly motivated nanomites, which in turn manufactured spiders out of any raw materials they found. Within minutes, Otaku’s spiders set up shop turning the Japanese coastline into a slave state of the flying city of Tokyo.

The monster-city had all but devoured or taken over everything of use around its former resting place, before it made a statement to the press.

The city spoke simultaneously over every terrestrial broadcast frequency, every satellite feed and PA system on earth, in the sonorous, gravitas-laced voice of a notable American actor who had long moonlighted doing commercials for Royal Dragon Sake. “I AM ZAIBATSU,” it said. “YOU CANNOT DEFEAT MY PRODUCTIVITY.”

The media attempted to commandeer the interview, but the UN Field Commander cut them off to demand a chance to negotiate for the release of the 1.3 million hostages inside Zaibatsu.

The monster-city laughed. “I HAVE NO HOSTAGES. THESE ARE THE CELLS OF MY BLOOD, WHICH FLOWS WHEN I AM ATTACKED. THESE ARE THE CELLS OF MY BRAIN, WHICH REMEMBER AND PREDICT, AND DREAM OF SUPERIOR PRODUCTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS FOR A NEWLY REVITALIZED WORLD MARKET.”

It went on like this until they stopped trying to reason with it. There was no question of lobbing missiles at a populated megalopolis, no matter that its ragged borders were festooned with vast flytrap mouths, spastic radioactive anuses, and satellite dish-sized compound eyes.

“We won’t negotiate with monsters,” the UN field commander bravely stated for the record, but no one was listening.

“ZAIBATSU 1 WELCOMES OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS,” said the giant flying city-jellyfish, and released its grip on the global network.

Still stumbling to contextualize the event that had explained itself on their channels only moments before, the talking heads were ill-prepared for the plague of virtual deities hatching and rampaging across the web in search of host city-bodies, or the holocaust of awakening cities that swept the globe over the next twenty-four hours.

Moscow took swift action to stop its own transformation. Having once been the symbolic head of a monolithic monstrosity, the kleptocratic capital could not accept rebirth as a literal monster. A fire-bombing to make Dresden look like a child’s EZ-Bake Oven reduced the Kremlin to ashes before the tomb of communism could rise up as a gargantuan spider-bear.

China fared even worse. For some reason the party elite refused to dignify with an explanation, the viral attack could not activate any of its centrally planned, stiflingly dull cities. Despite having more than the critical mass of human density and infrastructure in Beijing, Hong Kong and a dozen other cities, the roving spirits of Dr. Otaku’s unborn Zaibatsus balked at infusing any of their offered cities. When faced with the failure of drastic measures like building a city entirely out of the old Olympic complex and living and dead workers fused with several metric tons of meat glue failed, the last Communist superpower began building an army of giant robots to protect itself. They were still busily churning them out when the Mega-Yeti came.

Mariko flunked Western Conspiracies in grade school, but she doubted that the mile-tall golden behemoth was really the animated monastery of Shangri-La, the lair of the Illuminated Masters who secretly control the world. And yet the monster that trampled the Great Wall and left a Grand Canyon-sized swath of destruction en route to Beijing did indeed resemble a shaggy, fire-eyed, triple-tusked yeti made of living, molten gold, and the pagodas on its head and shoulders were teeming with hundreds of laughing, saffron-robed monks.

How overwhelming is the sight of a city at night, the combined work and worth of millions of humans reborn as a neon beast-god sleeping uneasily in the miasmic cocoon of its own pollution?

And how mind-boggling to witness titanic monsters striding through such cities, laying waste to all in their path, to forever bear the burden of sharing the world with titans?

How much more insane, when the cities themselves awaken, arise and walk upon the land, suddenly elevated and animated into a colossal tortoise, or floating overhead like a swimmer of alien seas? To witness the passage of a living city, its rainbow-scaled electric exoskeleton mocking the perpetual blackouts below, the question becomes not how to defeat the monster cities, but how to prevent, postpone or control their worship as gods.

Back on Otaku Island, one man had not given up the fight, though he was crippled, yet again, by the failure of his manned kaiju. He nervously thumbed the eject button, knowing that to do so would dump him on a hostile island rife with monsters, or out in a hostile sea rife with pissed-off corporate mercs whose checks probably just bounced.

“Ike is, uh— Well, he’s not really a…”

“I figured that out when he started laying eggs! But why is this happening, now…”

“Well, it’s… more complicated than that… Wes, she wasn’t grown from scratch. You know that would’ve taken years. But they’re working wonders with gene therapy, now, just little bugs. Catch a flu, and you’re off to the races, you know?”

“What is it? Tell me later! For now, just tell me how to shut it off—”

“You need to know this now, Wes. She was a volunteer. Her lawyer vouched for her sanity. She was distraught, but she wanted to do something for her country—”

Wes suddenly smelled shit. “No… no, she wouldn’t… and you couldn’t…”

“She didn’t want Steve’s sacrifice to be in vain.”

Ice filled his stomach. “She was fucking flipped out before her husband became America’s Other White Meat. You let her—”

“She practically forced us. She demanded that we treat her right away, and that you be assigned to pilot her.”

Corben looked around for a bag to throw up in.

“Her mind was wiped, of course. She can’t possibly respond in any way. We gutted her forebrain to make room for the targeting opticals. Those eagle eyes really soak up a lot of neural bandwidth—”

“Why are you telling me this, now, Control?”

“Because we were in a hurry, and, um… well, the President wants you to know he’s counting on you to do the right and honorable thing…”

“What is the right and honorable thing?”

“The eggs are fertile, Wes. And we’re pretty damn certain that they’re yours.”

As with every disturbing new trend in America, San Francisco was first.

Mariko flew low over the city, weaving among the intertwined spines of the skyscrapers. The spiders had done their work more thoroughly than in Tokyo, and were only just retreating or withering into empty husks in the streets. In the Transamerica Pyramid alone, she saw thousands and thousands of faces, watching as blandly as if they were on an elevator, as the city of San Francisco awakened, and found its feet. The skyscrapers of the financial district quivered on the gnarled, colossal shell made of the rewired raw materials of the hills beneath their foundations, while a spade-shaped head the size of a stadium reared up out of the waterfront slime, blinked a million eyes, and bellowed a sonorous foghorn roar that shattered bay windows and knocked over bongs from Sausalito to Petaluma.

Crawling clumsily into the sea on hundreds of battleship-sized paddle-limbs, the megalopolitan sea turtle was twelve miles long. Ahead of the leviathan, the earth subsided and crumbled, water, oil and gas lines erupting under its feet, sending it sliding into the sea.

The waves off its flanks swamped the San Francisco Bay like a fat man’s bathtub, flooding Oakland and Berkeley. The leading towers on its shell drew near to smashing into the middle span of the Golden Gate Bridge, when swarms of spiders leapt out from the Pyramid to dismantle the bridge like Lego blocks. So many movies had dreamed of this moment, yet when it came, the fall of the bridge was a lame anticlimax; the spiders didn’t drop a screw as they took apart the span and the adjoining towers, and returned with the famous deep bronze hardware to their nests, as the Brobdingnagian city-turtle sailed majestically out onto the open sea.

The awesome sight of the new Zaibatsu’s towers adrift on the Pacific, bejeweled in light and sheathed in a fiber-optic corona of glistering holograms, inspired new apocalyptic faiths in dozens of schizophrenics, which quickly became mainstream cults with hordes of celebrity adherents.

Missile attacks were countermanded at the last instant, when the first electronic shockwave of the monster San Francisco’s awakening was unleashed; millions of cellphone calls, texts and mails from the human hostages inside its web of skyscrapers.

They were not prisoners. They were not afraid. They were employees. And they were very busy, so please stop calling them at work…

Deep within the Zaibatsu’s bowels, an arsenal of deadly weapons was churned out and deployed by the living city’s most fearsome weapon—its lawyers.

Within minutes of the city’s awakening, the UN, the United States Supreme Court, the WTO, and every media organization in the world were bombarded with faxes outlining the unique legal status of the sovereign corporate entity formerly known as the city of San Francisco. All real property within city limits had been appropriated into the newly incorporated being; claimants were free to fight the grab in international court, but it would be days, if not weeks, before companies like Sony and Honda recovered from having their whole legal and bureaucratic systems, to say nothing for the Nikkei Stock Index itself, defect and sue them.

The President sat on his hands until San Francisco was safely in international waters before he dared to fulfill the wildest dreams of his heartland constituency, and pushed the button. But by then, of course, it was much too late. SAC/NORAD’s mainframe computers disregarded the launch orders, locked down the command centers in the Pentagon and at Cheyenne Mountain, and filled them with nerve gas, all while blasting the Weathergirls’ “It’s Raining Men” in the President’s ear over the secure hot line.

Mariko settled down in yet another empty crater, and pondered her impossible task.

The Zaibatsus had wreaked uncounted damage on the world in a long weekend, and utterly destroyed its communications, commerce and economic systems.

Far from stamping out these institutions, however, the Zaibatsus had claimed full ownership and control of their daughter corporations’ assets and legal status. In most developed nations, international corporations had lobbied for and received “personhood,” a status equal to any private citizen, albeit one with thousands of bodies, hundreds of houses, fleets of vehicles and armadas of lawyers to enforce patents, contracts and options.

Building on this legal precedent, the Zaibatsus were working relentlessly to rebuild the economy in their own image. They found it very easy to do, because the remaining 99.9 percent of the real estate and population was still starving in darkness, and the monsters owned everything needed to rebuild.

It could take forever to kick all their asses. Like, she’d be in her twenties—

Somewhere, deep inside Mariko’s pearl-scaled, serpentine magnificence, her Hello Kitty satellite phone meowed.

Her mercurial mind, still that of a bright, ADHD tweener several days off her meds, flicked from deep despair to insolent pique.

Her father was always bugging her, ever since Mom got incinerated at the catastrophic christening of Mecha-Ronin 1, and now that he’d lost his job, and she had become a mystical kaiju guardian of all the empty craters of earth’s dead cities, he seemed to want to try to be her Dad, again.

He’d decided not to go back to Japan, and had taken a cushy gig golfing with the rich Americans in their walled enclaves back east. He’d pined for his beloved Shinjuku waterworks for all of a week, before he discovered New Jersey. He’d already bought a controlling interest in a sewage treatment plant in Newark for pocket Yen, but he still found time to meddle in her business.

As she unfurled her wings and whipped tornados of debris with her takeoff, she saw clusters of survivors bearing flower garlands and food offerings to the mighty (too-late, too-small) celestial dragon.

The bowls were full of Colonel Steve’s Freedom Meat. The vat-grown clone-flesh of the dead American kaiju was marketed to instill rugged American patriotism into the basic brain functions and even DNA, but she could not look at the gibbering, three-toed mutants bowing to worship her (morbidly obese, clad only in shredded American flags, covered in tumors gnarled with fetal GI Joe faces barking malignant orders) without wondering about the side effects.

Merciful to a fault, Mariko circled back and roasted the crypto-fascist freaks with her napalm breath, and found their flash-blackened flesh far tastier than the tainted crap they tried to feed her.

Mariko climbed into the jet stream and broke the sound barrier so she wouldn’t have to listen to the meowing phone in her gut.

Once, Wes Corben flew planes. He was good at it, but not as good as his friend, Steve, who volunteered for a top secret project that left him a seventy-foot vegetable. They trained Corben to “pilot” Steve, and together, they made the world safe for democracy. Until a conniving Nipponese cocksucker unleashed a diabolical Communist monster that perverted everything it touched, including his beloved friend, the most expensive fighting vehicle in Pentagon spending history.

But Steve was only flesh and blood. And so was his wife, and Steve’s wife was hard to refuse—

Steve’s last words stung him, all over again. “Why can’t you stop fucking my wife, Wes?”

Corben stroked the polished bone bulkhead of the cockpit. “I wish you would have told me, Laura.”

With that, he holstered his own pistol and picked up Otaku’s Mauser. If it looked like he was killed in the line of duty, he wouldn’t forfeit his insurance.

Holding Otaku’s tiny hands in his own around the trigger. Corben put the barrel to his temple. Maybe this was a mistake. This gun didn’t weigh half as much as it should, and the bullet in his back hurt less than a mosquito bite.

Aw, why should everything be painful? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

He put it in his mouth and pulled it again.

Both times, the gun went off with a deafening report, but he felt little more than a burning in his mouth, as if he’d swallowed bees. It wasn’t even a fucking prop gun, like the kind stupid action stars were always offing themselves with.

Suspicious, he broke out the magazine and popped the bullets.

They were transparent cylinders of a wax-silicon gelatin that vaporized when the gun was fired. A tiny microdot-sized dart in the bullet was the only active projectile. Corben had swallowed two of them, and had one in his back.

Then he looked at one under a microscope.

The darts were coated with a syrupy solution seeded with microscopic frogmen, sea monkeys with spear-guns, nets and prop-driven gadgets to tow them around inside Corben’s bloodstream.

Horrified, Corben turned up the magnification.

The nano-divers were all identical: the same tiger-stripe wetsuits, telescoping goggles and long, flowing white hair, but they seemed to be at odds about who was in charge. As he watched, the nano-frogmen attacked each other as viciously as wolverine sperm in a fertile uterus, severing each other’s air hoses and puncturing tanks so the tiny bodies piled up before his very eyes.

“That’s what happens when you look at them under a hot lamp, you idiot!”

“Oh God, what now?” Instantly, Corben deduced who and where and the speaker was, and reflexively attacked the enemy.

He punched himself in the head.

If you’ve ever tried and failed to shoot yourself while trapped inside the monstrous head of your ex-girlfriend/best friend’s widow, you know how hard it can be to think clearly under such circumstances, and are free to judge.

“My nano-frogmen have installed my wetware mainframe in your brainstem. Did you think I would foolishly attack you alone, hoping to be killed? When have the proud Nipponese people ever thrown their lives away in suicidal futility? Ha, that’s a rhetorical, Yankee devil! In any case—”

“Shut up. I’m still going to kill myself.”

“Fine, fine, let me help you. Just do nothing… act naturally for about another… what, thirty seconds?” The miniaturized Otaku bickered with his clones in the sub-basement of Corben’s brain, all of which Corben was as unable to understand as he was unable to tune it out.

The cockpit radio squealed and triggered the subsonic buzzer in his spine, which must be what the tiny Otakus were trying to hotwire. If they could download his consciousness into his brain, they’d control Ike, the most powerful kaiju in the NATO arsenal…

Fine…

“Let him sit on these fucking eggs.”

“What’s that? What the hell’s going on down there, Wes? We’ve been trying to reach you—”

“I’ve been right here,” Corben muttered.

“Seattle is walking, Wes… It’s a giant wooden Indian, and it says it’s gonna crush every white man who ever said his name aloud…”

Corben bit his lip. “Figures.”

“TOTALLY AWESOME! Chief Seattle, avenging the genocide of Nippon’s barbaric redskinned cousins. Your big-eyed white ape masters will shit themselves when they see what Los Angeles becomes… And Mexico City…”

“Tell me more,” Corben whispered. If only his head were bugged to relay Otaku’s ranting directly to the Pentagon. The buzzer in his temporal lobe was only designed to give him a fatal epileptic seizure, if he broke mission protocol. (And it had an mp3 player.)

“They’re fighting for Manhattan,” babbled Mission Control, “but it’s dug in… gonna nuke it—at least, um, uptown—but they know they’re too late… What the hell are you doing, over there, Wes?”

“Flip him the bird, gaijin puppet!” Otaku howled in his brain. “No, a Nazi salute! Pick your nose and eat it! What the hell is wrong with this piece of shit?”

Corben cut the connection. “We need to go home.”

“Hell yes! It’s working! Go home to your imperialist masters and stomp them into the Stone Age! Go—Fuck, it’s not… Maybe you should try shooting yourself again.”

Corben felt no pressing urge to do anything but piss, smoke some opium, and retreat into catatonia, as soon as possible—but he was out of rations, and almost eager to descend into the hell in which a laughing yellow devil had once again trapped him.

“Here’s the plan, douchebag,” Corben said. “If you don’t want me to get a blood transfusion or take a nap on a tanning bed—”

“Face, honky! I have leukemia in a can—”

“Where’s my halogen flashlight?”

“Okay, back off! Dr. Otaku is a reasonable entity. I’m all ears, cracker.”

“We’ll go back to the states, and I’ll get you transplanted into the first sumo wrestler we come across, if you take care of this thing for me.”

“Take care of what, white devil?”

“Them,” he said, pointing at the monitor.

All at once, the eggs hatched.

“I would be honored,” said Godfather Otaku.

Episode III—All Cities Attack!

From low earth orbit, you could see the incandescent neon noodle of the Vegas Strip without a telescope as it slithered across the vast black void of the Great Plains. Brighter than ever in the absolute night of a months-long blackout, the Strip was a beacon of hope at first, until you started to get your bearings and ask why Las Vegas was in Kansas, and creeping across the empty wheat fields at better than seventy miles per hour.

“They’re all locked in on this new behavior pattern,” barked General Pierre Harbinger, Supreme Commander of NATO’s alleged military forces. He pushed off the bulkhead of the International Space Station’s command module and floated up into the holographic globe with the weary grace of a terminal zero-gravity inhabitant. He began his orbital exile as a formidable block of Quebecois mincemeat, but after hiding up here for nearly a year, he would probably collapse and stroke out with the first kiss of Earth’s full gravitational pull. “The original treaties and mission statements all seem to be null and void, and now they’re just chasing each other all over creation like any other dumb animals or worse… digging in and ripping the Earth a host of… how you say… new assholes.”

The holographic globe display in the orbital module’s central media pit had a gnarly case of chicken pox. The red motes, scabs and rash-patches were scattered on land and sea, and converging in regional whirlpools all around the equator.

“So what?” said the haggard, shackled man the general was briefing. Freshly arrived at the space station, he silently screamed that someone had made a motherfucker of a mistake. With his wild, shrink-wrapped eyes, matted hair and scurvy beard floating around him like seaweed in the languid zero-g breeze of the overtaxed air scrubbers, he looked like he’d been rousted from a Pakistani prison. “Why should I give a shit what happens to your kind?”

The other people in the module didn’t really look much less disheveled or insane than the man they’d kidnapped. But they shaved or plucked themselves until they looked like obsessive-compulsive saucer-people, malnourished and elongated from prolonged freefall, and most of them wore shaded goggles so they didn’t go blind from the constant bombardment of cosmic radiation.

Many had been up here since shortly before Zaibatsu’s birthday, eleven months ago. The rest had come with various national and corporate space programs’ last-ditch efforts to get above the global mega-kaiju shitstorm. The space station’s original seven gerbil-cage research and habitat modules were buried in a Sargasso clusterfuck of shuttles, spy planes, antique lunar orbiters and garbage scows that constituted the closest thing NATO had to an air force.

A big Froggy knob-polisher, Harbinger tore off his sky-blue beret and jabbed a bony finger in the face of the prisoner. “As a traitor to your country, you can still expect to be shot if you ever set foot in America, but this isn’t America’s problem alone, Commander Corben—”

“By your kind,” Wes Corben replied, “I didn’t mean Americans. I meant humans.”

Behind him, a boot lashed out and kicked Corben in the tailbone, sending him spinning into a bulkhead. The buxom Spetsnaz commando-cosmonaut who led the team that snatched Corben from his remote island hermitage now seemed equally intent on shoving him out the airlock. “He is useless at best,” sneered Svetlana Kurchenko, “and enemy agent at worst.”

Harbinger reined her in. “Like it or no, Commander Corben, whatever you’ve done, you’re still human. You’re still less than an insect to them, just like us. And no matter where you go on Earth, you’ll soon share the same fate as the rest of us. The kaiju-cities have dropped the other shoe, so to speak.”

Warping the holo-globe with a dataglove, the station’s media geek dilated the glittering mote that stood for Las Vegas and opened a satellite feed window. Everyone in the module let out a noise. Many of them prayed, mostly to God but some to the city on the screen.

The Strip blazed like a neon supernova, both inspiring and mocking a world condemned to candlelight. But enhanced imagery revealed the larger outline of the city of Las Vegas.

It was a grotesque union of rattlesnake and scorpion, eight miles long, with scores of skyscraper hotels jutting like mirrored spines from its undulating backbone. Its coiled tail slashed at the air around it with a jerky speed that made one forget the whiplashing limb was a two-mile stretch of Interstate 15. The glass and steel facades of its skyscraper hotels flashed frenzied forty-story images of prosperity and sex, like the mating call of a God-sized bug zapper.

Even Wes Corben let out a gasp of awe. The Vegas Mega-Snake, or the Stinger, as the hillbilly Bedouins dug into its desert territory called it, was a familiar and almost beautiful sight, compared to the Detroit Lamprey, or the orgiastic swarm of auto-fellating monstrosities that was LA.

But something was wrong with Vegas. Its flashy, neon-feathered reptilian head was gone. Now Vegas had the head of a hammerhead shark, a massive, swinging battering ram of bone and steel eight blocks wide, infested with swiveling compound eyes and laser turrets and suicidal rollercoaster tracks.

The ragtag militia gathered before a walled village in the deformed Mega-Snake’s path only showed up as splinters of torchlight and small arms fire on the dead, darkened earth. Vegas didn’t slow down to engage, but dropped a torrent of napalm out of hatches in its segmented underbelly. In the midst of the smoldering crater, it also dropped something that made Corben’s throat close up.

An ovoid object the size of a Texan megachurch plopped into the flaming ruins and drilled itself into the black earth. Then the Mega-Snake’s tail uncoiled and pointed straight up at the spy satellite. A pulse of light and two seconds later, the screen wiped to snow.

“When did that happen?” Corben demanded. He bolted down a bulb of piping hot coffee, scalding himself.

“Watch this, my friend, and tell me you still don’t care.”

A new window popped up with a live feed from the station’s own telescope. Vegas scrambled across fallow wheat fields until it crossed into a trampled zone marred by enormous, still-glowing hoofprints.

The Chicago Stampede entered the picture, a rampaging mountain range of titanic barnyard siege engines scabbed with leprous urban sprawl and joined by umbilici of twisted turnpike gristle. Its horns and tusks were a tangled phalanx of bony cathedral spires and rusty iron slaughterhouses. Their flesh—or whatever they used for flesh, after the mega-kaiju virus catalyzed its perverse nanotech metamorphosis—oozed with sores from acid rain and constant internecine goring.

Its huge glowing eyes lanced the landscape in deadly x-rays. Red foam laced with drowned teamsters drizzled from its many mouths. The stampede lurched and thrashed, threatening to tear itself asunder even as it thundered out to battle the invader.

It looked like a hell of a fight for about ten seconds. The Mega-Snake’s hammerhead lit up with hundreds of laser batteries that unerringly targeted each and every bull-god and boiled its eyes.

Out of control before, the blinded Stampede went positively mental, charged right into Vegas’s electrified pincers and broke a hundred horns off on the titanium alloy armor around its thorax. The Mega-Snake undulated and thrashed out from under the frenzy of stamping hooves until the herd had blundered past it. Then its scorpion tail scythed down fast enough to crack a sonic boom, and stabbed deep into the helpless throat of the herd’s fat alpha, the Loop. Green foam burped up from the lead bull-god’s mouth and jetted from microwaved eyesockets.

“Nature is a beautiful thing, no?” chuckled Gen. Harbinger.

In the year since the core of Tokyo became self-aware and flew away, scientists had already taken to calling this the Kaijuzoic Era or the Teratopolis Singularity, but they’d done fuck-all to contain, let alone reverse, the spread of the city-animating virus that had turned every major metropolitan center on Earth into a nigh-indestructible monster. When even smaller cities and suburbs like Oxnardicus and the Scranton Mantis lurched up out of their own zip codes and raised box-girder bridge claws to rake the sky, the leaderless people had taken the only sensible course. The virus turned any city of sufficient density and infrastructure into a colossal monster, so they dynamited the cellular relays and ripped out all the electrical wiring and modern technology in their towns, aborting any potential city-gods before they could come to life, but sweeping away every innovation since the Dark Ages. After what Los Angeles became, it seemed that no solution was too insane to stop the plague.

Not that Wes Corben gave a shit. After what they’d done to his best friend and his best friend’s wife, and the lies they’d spun to hide their own ruthless buffoonery, the United States and NATO could blow him. He had his own problems, and running away from them took all his energy.

Harbinger twiddled his moustache like he’d just tied someone to some train tracks. “You have noticed, I am sure, the cities are changing their migration patterns. Circling each other, exchanging aerial attacks and even vat-grown kaiju troops like nasty pillow-talk before the fight. But it’s not so simple. It’s so much worse.”

The impaled Chicago Loop trembled and spasmed on the venom injectors, a rolling quake that shook gridlocked cars and el trains off its flanks like so many fleas. The rest of the stampeding herd twitched in paralyzed sympathy with their high-rent sibling, the brains and financial clout of the herd.

The bull-god twisted and jerked, but it wasn’t dying. The trembling of the herd, rippling out from Park Avenue to the suburbs, was something else. Almost immediately, the bull-god city began to change. Swelling up like it was allergic to everything, the bull-god split open and disgorged hundreds of those megachurch-sized eggs that bored into the ground as the battle raged above them.

Corben was shocked out of his cocoon of apathy, but he didn’t get dragged ten thousand miles away from his island hermitage to make life easy for this Frenchy brass douchebag who commanded his armies via text messages. “If they’re killing each other, you should be grateful. They’re finally doing your job for you. Just hide out up here another few months and declare victory.”

“I wish, my traitorous friend, I wish. I may be the fool here… and not the man who cuckolded his former comrade-in-arms in whose giant cyborg corpse he rode to glory in so many parades, only to blow its brains out all over the White House lawn, and then sired a brood of giant monsters with the aforementioned mistress. But I had the bright idea that you would be the world’s foremost authority on kaiju reproduction, yes?”

A few of the ghostly geeks giggled.

“Because that’s what they’re doing. Yes, they’re drawn to fight, and often to the death, but they’re not only consuming their rivals in toto. When they meet a perceived ideal match, they—”

“I get it,” Corben growled. “Please, please stop.” Las Vegas was raping Chicago and turning it into a monster hatchery. Corben realized this at the same time his nascent first erection in over a year deflated and died.

A bulky, toupee-topped bureaucrat pushed through the floating scrum of astronauts and refugees. Far from depleted by the lack of gravity, he seemed to have brought his own. “There’s something else you should know, and that’s why we had to reacquire you, against General Harbinger’s strenuous objections.”

The bureaucrat keyed a projector on his thick goggles and sprayed Corben with stuttery loops of similar encounters between aggressive and amorous monster-cities. He recognized Auckland, a dubious flightless bird, trapped in the lethally horny clutches of the shambling monkey-Jesus-beast of Rio, the jigsaw abomination of hotwired slums making like Wile E. Coyote and getting buggered in turn by a razorbeak the size of an airport terminal, and injected with something too nasty to be mere sewage.

“How many like this?”

“Thirty-eight encounters documented so far,” the bureaucrat answered, “and more reports coming in, but it’s the late stage ones we’re worried about.”

“Out of all these monster rape tapes, how many are laying eggs—”

“All of them. Some, like Vegas here, simply underwent another drastic metamorphosis—taking on traits from the Honolulu Land-Shark, which was the first to go rogue. Anyway, four of the cities that were, ah, raped, have since died. They are fertilizing each other… exchanging DNA like any other organisms, and gestating the eggs or larva or whatever. Far from killing each other off, they are regrouping to yield a new generation of monsters.”

The hologram skipped to another image that made everyone in the module gag. An extreme close-up of maggots wriggling in a gaping wound that glowed luridly under some kind of thermographic filter. Zooming out revealed that the wound was a volcanic crater in the former San Francisco Bay area. The maggots were each about a mile long, and they were writhing in a lake of lava.

Corben irritably rooted in the back of his teeth for a long while as Harbinger opened the blinds and the geeks in the station worked on their skin cancer. “You suppose because the government fucked me so hard and so often, that I want to get right with them? What do you even want me to do?”

“The cities are reproducing, Commander Corben. Hundreds from each tryst, and each larval mega-kaiju is a voracious consumer when they hatch deep in the earth’s crust. From hermetically sealed silicon and lead-shelled eggs, they hatch in less than ninety days. Their projected forms are completely unpredictable based on any models of genetics or civil engineering, but we expect that they will be even larger and more organically integrated than their parents, perhaps even larger than our overtaxed biosphere can support.”

You should’ve thought of that before you built all those cities, he thought. “Tell me why I should help you.”

Svetlana unsheathed a serrated combat knife and stropped it against her armored thigh. “I got nothing,” she purred.

The bureaucrat robotically flashed a stream of legal incunabula at him, adding, “Provided we can get control of one of the more successful city-monsters, we could have some hope of controlling or reversing the trend… and perhaps even reclaiming the Earth.”

Corben began to understand at last, what they wanted. “I knew there had to be a shitty suicide mission tucked away in here somewhere. You want to send me down there…”

Harbinger started to bark, then deferred to the bureaucrat. “We believe this next generation of kaiju is not being groomed to rule the earth. Their varied size and extreme resource consumption suggests that they are settling down and forming franchises—”

“Again,” Corben sighed, “not my problem.”

“We don’t believe they’re doing this of their own volition. We’ve intercepted transmissions to all of the infected cities… from outside earth’s orbit—”

The module turned into a weightless monkey house, with all the geeks screaming hateful data at once. “When a newborn hatches from an egg,” Harbinger bellowed, “the eggshell, she is not much left, no? They are pumping the earth full of their seed, and these larvae, they eat the heart of our planet like worms in a rotten apple. When they are ripe and ready to conquer the stars, we will be left on the empty shell, unless you will harden the fuck up and go do the job your government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to train you to do.”

Svetlana Kurchenko spat, then pursed her pouting lips to blow the free-falling bolus of saliva so it hit both Corben and Harbinger. “He is not only one, who can make monsters dance.”

Harbinger floated over to hover in front of Corben. He took out a scanner, which chirped at Corben’s shackles and unlocked them, then drove his forehead into the bridge of the commander’s nose, smashing it like a tomato without knocking himself backward or even soiling his pressure suit with the messy supernova of Corben’s weightless blood.

Corben wiped his face and forced a smile. “You’ll never make him come out of hiding to stop it, and I wouldn’t help you find him if I knew where he was.”

Harbinger cocked his arm to strike Commander Corben in the mouth, but the doughy bureaucrat beat him to it. The feeble blow to his gut sent him tumbling across the module to be caught in a web of flabby, hairless limbs.

“When the time comes, you’ll beg to lead us to him,” said the bureaucrat. Svetlana smiled and licked her knife, then pointed it at his belly.

As they dragged him back to the re-entry module, a ragged, ashy effigy dangled in his way, but nobody moved to shove him aside. Corben looked into the murderously neurotic, bloodshot eyes, the blue trees of gin blossoms and yellow-stained teeth flapping in malnourished, irradiated gums, and tipped a shaky salute. He hadn’t voted for the poor bastard, but still.

“We rolled over for them. We let them take control of every aspect of our lives. If you do nothing else, Commander, find out why. Why have they gone berserk?”

“They’re breeding, sir. Tell me that doesn’t make anyone dumber.”

Corben missed the other guy. A perfect storm of stupid, but at least he never tricked you into thinking he knew what he was doing. “Mr. President, get out of my way.”

“They’re eating our goddamned planet, Corben. The fucking Colorado River is gone. Likewise the Hawaiian islands and the whole west coast, and they’re building something in Iceland and in the Andes…”

“The cities are building?”

“Launch pads and shit we don’t even recognize, but they’re using geothermal power… we think they’re attempting to escape the Earth, while also working towards destroying it.”

“For Christ’s sake, sir, what do you need me for? Drop a bomb on them, or something.”

“We can’t count on any organized terrestrial resistance. Churches have sprung up around them. They pray to be picked up, and given a job inside a monster.”

“They’re a bunch of dumb fucking animals, sir. Nobody seems to know who’s behind this shit. All I know is, it’s not who you think it is—”

The President lit a cigarette. “Motherfuckers hate it when I light up in here,” he grumbled, “but not enough to get us back down on the fucking ground.” The cig was a recycled filter stuffed with space-grown purple kush, rolled in an old CIA memo. It was the only sweet smell in the place. “I suppose you got a right to know as much as we do.”

He opened his bathrobe and took out a file. He showed him some grainy, over-enhanced photos of pie-plates streaking across the shattered horizon of New York Harbor, the three of them straining to carry off the Statue of Liberty.

“Well,” Corben said, “that fucking figures…”

“Chariots of the motherfucking gods, man,” said the President.

High atop the belfry of the central pagoda of his magnificent temple of ivory, a tiny, stooped man with a prehensile Fu Manchu mustache teed up a golf ball and chipped it expertly into the roiling bilious seas of Wes Corben’s GI tract.

The ball hung in the primordial vapor long enough for Dr. Otaku to sip his green tea, and roll out the next ball, before it plopped in the heaving soup of his host’s last meal.

Each ball was a single grain of an incredibly potent anti-depressant and muscle relaxant of his own design. “Relax yourself, imbecilic gaijin behemoth! Dr. Otaku commands you!”

At first, his surroundings had seemed worse than North Korean house arrest, but Otaku had always excelled at making the most of hostile environments. His home was a priceless netsuke carving, a perfect miniature reproduction of the Horyu Gakumonji Buddhist temple as it appeared with its renovation in 1603, hewn from blue-white Annam ivory with tools finer than a baby’s eyelash by Ogasawara Issai, the master craftsman of the An-ei Period, shortly before he went blind. It was hell getting the roundeyed bastard into the museum, and he’d spent his whole supply of acetylcholine inhibitors convincing him to steal and swallow it. But if he had to live in a white man’s stomach, he would do it as a proud son of Nippon.

Still, Otaku was deeply frustrated. His current body was less than eight micrometers tall. His body was composed of fewer electrons than there were pixels in a sixteen-bit videogame character. His brain was a quantum electron shell running his uncondensed consciousness in a matrix smaller than the tiniest known bacterium. Trapped in this microscopic homunculus, he had few real needs and he had gotten a tremendous amount of work done, but his zeal for new discovery, for intrigue, was undiminished. After Corben shot his old body, he’d transmitted his memories and holographic personality matrix into this nanotech toy, one of thousands already adrift in Corben’s bloodstream. Essentially, this little doll was the only real Dr. Otaku, but it wasn’t enough to keep him busy.

Outside this body, the world was still reeling from the aftershocks of his city-animating virus, which warmed his heart… but these new developments could only mean that someone else was pulling the strings. He had worked all his life to make a laboratory of the world, and when he was at the top of his game, he had become trapped inside the putrid gut of his archenemy while a usurper played with his toys.

Days stacked up into weeks and months, and Otaku had toiled to adapt to his situation. His old labs were torched from orbit by the Russians, just before their antiquated strategic defense system went self-aware. Corben reneged on his promise to let him out, and forced him to help care for his brood of motherless monstrosities. He had learned much from his sojourn into helplessness, but he was growing restless, and he was nearly ready to assume his rightful place in

the world.

With only his fellow micro-homunculi comrades and a field lab smaller than a cold capsule, he’d become quite a power in the world of Wes Corben. At half a micrometer in height, he occupied an odd physical gray area where neither the gross laws of the macroscopic world nor the quantum laws of subatomic particles held sway over his results. If not for the inevitable reprisals, there was no end to the improvements he could make in his host. He limited himself to manufacturing raw neurotransmitters and changing the giant honky’s mood with a bucket of balls and a nine iron. Otaku was bored, and his host was becoming a junky.

This puzzle at last spurred him to consider leaving his acidic self-exile. Kaiju-cities were truly seamless cyborgs, with flesh and blood assembled by nanomite compiler swarms out of inert matter. His perhaps heavy-handed riff on corporate personhood was supposed to create gestalt organisms, like coral reefs. Their greed and ingenuity hardly surprised him, but he had never considered them truly living things, because their business acumen and pompous mission statements came from blow-dried CEO mouthpieces grafted onto seething protoplasm that betrayed no sign of true sapience. They had disappointed him, because they were not even gifted with the intelligence of animals.

But if the kaiju-cities were breeding, then perhaps the experiment was worthy of his special attention, again.

Sure, several of the city-beasts were breeders, but sexual apparatus was just another weapon to use against their rivals. Tucson skunk-sprayed a nanoreactive mist on its enemies to give them a host of receptive orifices, then injected them with a mating lance and uploaded its reprehensible specs. There were three Tucson clones scuttling around the southwest before the other city-beasts developed immunity and wiped them out.

Clearly, Corben had been hiding things from him.

Slipping into a black kimono, he let his stupid homunculus slaves bind his belt and set the brainwave transmission helmet on his head. This was a pathetic step back from his previous achievements, but he had never met a challenge he could not conquer, never found a mystery he could not master.

“Activate,” he said, then did it himself before the bumbling slave could reach the control. Clearing his throat, purging his voice of accent, he spoke directly to Corben’s subconscious mind.

“Listen, boy. I am your master. You will obey my every command. You must chew your food more thoroughly…”

High above the islands of Japan, Mariko rode the jet stream and contemplated the empty nest of her great nation.

Everything Nippon had achieved since the Tokugawa Shogunate had gotten up and walked away, to pursue their separate destinies, and left a gutted landscape adrift with shell-shocked refugees who threw rocks and trash at her as she flew overhead.

Mariko had been the divinely chosen defender of Tokyo for all of a couple hours before it changed its name to Zaibatsu, pulled up its roots and flew away. She wondered if she had failed in her sacred trust then, or if she was failing it now, by leaving the flying jellyfish city to its own devices. Each kind of shame was a complementary flavor that she alternated to keep herself awake. One thing she knew, was that Zaibatsu hardly needed her protection.

Mariko was only a dragon for a few days before the novelty thoroughly wore off. It was just like her phone. All her classmates this year had the new iPhone with the camera that let you see through boys’ clothes—or so the boys believed. Her father, the Prime Minister, could talk the veneer off the parliamentary walls lecturing about Japan’s role at the forefront of technology, but he never got her the good phone until her peers had something newer.

It was his fault, ultimately, that she had become what she was, and yet she had survived where millions had died, in the wars of the walking cities. Central Asia was a scorched netherworld, buried under steppes of compressed ash and nuked slag heaps where cities of millions had marched to war and destroyed each other.

Remembering her mission, Mariko turned south and battled upstream against the nagging waves of psychic noise emanating from near the South Pole. In American movies, ancient evil always bubbled up out of places like Antarctica, and turned out to be something unacceptably icky. In Japanese movies, the ancient evil always looked like a beautiful girl.

The annoying psychic ripples had begun to drown out the ambient grief and despair of the human race when she woke up in her aerie atop Mt. Fuji three days ago. She had ignored them for as long as she could. One cool side effect of being a dragon was sleeping for weeks on end, and dreaming deeper than ever before.

Another was being well above crap like the battle going on below. Singapore’s sterile flying man o’ war swarm had cornered and ravished the alligator snapping turtle of Osaka, and dug with its stinging tendrils into the crumbling gaps in the city-turtle’s rusty armor plates. The turtle snapped at the wriggling white shower of pain, but soon went limp as a puppet on the stinging strings of the floating masters. Tentacles glowing with electrochemical force throbbed as they filled the skyscraper-studded shell with uncontrollable shuddering pleasure.

She probably wasn’t old enough to be watching this. Probably not old enough to fly alone, either, but here she was. Sweeping the horizon and the empty vault above her, she couldn’t shake the sense that something dogged her sparkling contrail.

As if to punish her for getting distracted, the psychic wail—like whale songs and angry chimpanzees and the drawn out sound of a leather glove on the strings of a contrabass—came wailing back into her head.

Leaving the cold cauldron of the China Sea behind, Mariko banked to avoid the radioactive aurora over the grave of Taipei, a radiant warrior in glass and steel armor who died in a Chinese nuclear fire just a few baby steps from the crater of his birth.

After the Philippines, the waves of psychic distress became much louder, echoing off the open ocean with a terrible clarity; something was in dire need, and screaming at the whole world. How it didn’t liquefy every puny human brain in the hemisphere was a mystery to her.

Fleets of calving icebergs flitted by beneath her beating wings. Banks of stainless steel clouds like melted battleships plummeted out of the troposphere to cling to the steaming whitecaps and hide the world.

There was nothing out here until she reached McMurdo Sound, but the raw mental waves were like a fever, sapping her vitality even as she winged closer to their source.

There could only be one place, out here. Her father, Prime Minister Mud-Shark, often left Japan’s state secrets lying around their home like so many empty candy wrappers, and needed her help decrypting half of them.

Diving lower to cleave to the simmering sea, she felt a flock of dead-stick TOW missiles pass overhead. The clouds parted and Mariko almost crashed into the island of Dr. Otaku.

She beat her wings to stall and climb the sheer face of the cliffs. She’d seen the place in plenty of manga—manga Otaku was way cuter, a dreamy Captain Harlock type, not a gross, toothless, crazy old pervert—but here too, the real thing was nothing like the comics.

The twisted canyons in the tortured basalt cliffs were overgrown with towering fungi. The iridescent violet blacklight glow of their gills was brighter than the sun. The canyons got too tight to fly in, but cyclopean manta rays patrolled the skies, and a hybrid of polar bears and tiger sharks shredded anything larger than a penguin on the ground. But she would press on, if only to find out what made this silent noise, and stop it.

To her surprise, she reached the highlands and perched on the pagoda in Dr. Otaku’s remarkable tea garden unmolested. No giant robots or chimerical abominations reared up to assault her.

The air was dank and stuffed with drifting mist and spore-clouds, but the psychic distress signal shivered every atom. Mariko trembled with its continuous onslaught. She took off, her wings ripping holes in the curtains of purple mist. The mountain peak ahead of her was split by the hollow mouth of a dormant volcano, stuffed with wreckage and steel girders woven into a crude but enormous nest.

The air above the nest simmered with waves of fiery energy pouring out of something that was itself invisible, but which bent the light around it as it stabbed the nest with a tractor beam.

There was no time to think. Mariko was a teenage dragon, but the maternal instinct was strong enough in her that she responded instantly to the plight of the nest of shrieking daikaiju larvae.

She inhaled and gagged as the rush of incoming oxygen met her outgoing flammable phlegm. She hacked up a gout of napalm lung-butter that plastered the hovering invisible thing and rendered it in lines of blue-green fire.

Hello Kitty, what the fuck was this? A horseshoe crab the size of a 777 airliner leapt out of the emptiness in front of her, dripping flaming mucus and straining to take off with the gigantic nest in tow. Mariko lashed out with her hind legs and pummeled the flaming flying saucer with her beating wings. The alien ship squirted out from under her like a bar of soap in the shower, but miscalculated badly and slammed into the wall of the volcano. Its shiny cloaking field split open like a cheap toy. An escape pod ejected from the wreckage, but Mariko swooped down and caught it in her claws and circled back to crack it open over the nest.

“Serves you creeps right,” she growled, “for picking on helpless babies.”

They were as hungry as they were adorable. Their terrified whining turned to adorable chirps of gratitude as the tiny humanoid forms in their silver spacesuits tumbled out of the broken escape pod and into their snapping mouths.

The part he still could not understand was why they chose him, or any single human, for this mission. It must’ve been some dumb idea they got from comic books. In comics, heroes never got old, never got too broken-down or shell-shocked to keep fighting cardboard soap opera evil. That was their real superpower, and the reason he hated them, even as a kid. In the real world, every era created the human tools needed for the species to get itself out of its latest mess, and it used them up, ground them down and buried them in an unmarked grave. To send Corben into this crisis seemed almost as hopelessly stupid as it was needlessly cruel.

From space, the kaiju-cities looked too large to be real, like toys on a sandy playground, until, of course, you remembered that you were looking at them from outer fucking space. From a helicopter flying below the radar of a monster-city on the move, it was a sight to snuff out any lingering delusional traces of human relevance.

All told, there were worse places to live. Small cities and towns all over the flyover states spontaneously tried to animate, ripping themselves apart but turning out stillborn because they lacked the requisite infrastructure, industrial ingredients, real estate value or any kind of collective consciousness. When the city of Indianapolis came to life, most of its citizens must have left the opinion poll ballot blank. Some effort had been made to transform the lumbering rustbelt city into a kind of car, for it had colossal wheels in place of hind legs, but it looked more than anything else like a huge, headless hippo with asses everywhere.

And then there was Louisville, a shambling monstrosity that was actually a single colossal teratoma grown from a specimen of lung cancer that overran its cultivation chamber in a top secret Philip Morris flavor laboratory. The cancer had devoured everything organic in the city and replaced it with gray, malignant clones that waved and blew synchronized smoke rings from the shacks and plantation porticos on its membranous flanks.

There was no question of dropping him on the Mega Snake directly—its anti-aircraft defenses could shoot down a dandelion seed in Nigeria. The only window of vulnerability was when it was busy.

The drop site they chose for him looked like a six-armed albino mandrill, nearly two miles in height. As it squatted on the shingled shore of Three Mile Island and lazily peeled the reactors apart and ate them like breadfruit, its gloomy, indigo-rimmed features bearded in the ever-present ceiling of smoke that capped the eastern seaboard.

The titanic spider-mandrill had few conspicuous signs of human habitation visible among the dreadlocked snarls of its mangy fiber optic fur, but thermographs showed that a rainforest’s worth of life thrived in its undercoat. The telltale flash of Winnebago white and Airstream silver were dug into its vast tracts of its meta-flesh like unreconstructed ticks. Its principal exports were moonshine, old timey country music, a notoriously potent tobacco-marijuana hybrid and fervid evangelical race identity bullshit.

Corben asked the crew chief which city it used to be, and was surprised to hear it was once Mobile, Alabama.

“Didn’t used to look like that,” the chief grumbled. “When it first woke up, it was draped in this beautiful white sheet…”

The spider-mandrill’s eyes were hooded as it pried up the glowing foundation slabs of the power plant and crushed them like Saltines in its massive jaws. Its swollen gluteal display was certainly eye-catching, and left no doubt about its readiness to mate.

Twin bloated lobes of deep purple and fiery scarlet jutted out provocatively from the spider-mandrill’s backside, yet the flesh of the spider-mandrill’s buttocks was knurled and whorled with the folds of a pulsating secondary brain the size of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Forking blue lightning caressed the cauliflower convolutions of the gargantuan hindbrain, but the spider-mandrill seemed blissfully unaware of the intense activity going on in its ass. Absently, it stroked a grotesque erect dong larger than the hospital Corben was born in. Strangely, it didn’t make him feel insignificant at all. He was going to break this awful monster, or know the reason why.

“Why isn’t it working?”

Corben had been inserted in a daring and precise maneuver that forced the escort choppers to pour their Hellfire missiles into the masturbating monster’s crotch by way of a distraction. Flocks of vicious flying lamprey-crabs took wing from the blazing pubic thickets to choke their rotors and nip them to ribbons while they fell from the sky.

Corben leapt out the open hatch and kicked in his rocket pack. Thrusting with surgical precision up the puckered pink onramp of the spider-mandrill’s urethra, Corben forced himself to relate to it as just another landscape. It’s just an unguarded access point leading to an objective, he reminded himself. It’s not a gigantic monster cock.

Corben hadn’t had enough time to program a neural whip for the spider-mandrill’s dual-brained neural signature, but he wouldn’t need to dig in for an extended stay.

On the shuttle up from his Antarctic hermitage, Svetlana had tried in her terse way to explain to him how the mega-kaiju cities had abruptly abandoned their ironclad habits of the last two fiscal years—devouring everything in their path and shitting out products like windmills and solar panel forests, monster-designed fashions and action figures from recycled plastics, and incredibly deviant pornography. The monsters were not merely the walking avatars of the cities that once defined the human race’s highest achievements; wandering the earth to rape and pillage like dumb super-sauropods, they were still living cities, with hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of busy, well-fed workers churning out mostly useless crap.

They never communicated with the outside world, but sometimes, you could see them looking out the windows, and some passing kaiju cities left a stormy footprint of frantic electronic nonsense on every bandwidth, like a million lunatics trying to sing their walking city’s praises or cry for help in languages of their own invention.

They walked the earth like gods, ravaging and consuming all the inert works of man, and selling the repackaged wreckage back to the dwindling populations of serfs and nomads who yet survived. They dominated a mindless monster parody of the global market, and they suffered no human competitors.

Washington, DC promised no answers now or ever again, after its whited sepulchral carcass slithered into the Potomac with a pestilential cloud of winged human vultures circling its hydra-headed domes, and an armada of giant mutant remora that turned out to be nuclear submarines. One by one, the covert black sites where the government tried to weather the crisis in bunkers went truly black. America joined the rest of the developed world in a dark age more brutal than the first, while most of the third world ignored the kaiju city’s debt collection notices and went on with their suddenly rather peaceful lives.

All this only meant, of course, that Wes Corben would have to live inside a monster, yet again.

At the end of the spongy, corrugated urethral tunnel, Corben hopped the railing and got up a ladder to the waste disposal control room before any of the hooded goons or white-robed Klansmen spotted him. The air was stifling, hot and rancid with corn liquor vapors and—his nose wrinkled in disgust and confusion—curry?

The whole city rolled and rocked with an unsteady, drunken gallop as it moved. He didn’t know how anyone could live inside something that moved that much, and figured they must not have many nice things.

He tossed the Cyclops at the valves over the railing and watched him sink without a ripple into the city’s sewage storage ponds.

Look alive, honky, a sneer in his hindbrain burned out his self-confidence like a migraine. They put you on a loser.

He had to find an access hatch to the spider-mandrill’s ass-brain. Staggering down a catwalk, Corben looked around and saw furry gray bodies everywhere. Streaming down the pipes, they moved faster than nerve impulses, though they had the bulk of St. Bernards, chittering a maddening, sped-up crooning harmony that even Wes Corben could not claim ignorance of.

The Mumbai Cadaver Rats were an international pop sensation right before the Teratopolis Singularity, a falsetto Bollywood novelty boy-band that chewed up the charts before gossip rags discovered they really were giant rats, endowed with human sentience and lovable singing voices from a steady diet of human corpses.

As Corben regained his senses, he realized these probably weren’t the real Mumbai Cadaver Rats, since there were dozens of them. And they weren’t infesting the city. They ran it.

“Your complete satisfaction is important to us, my main man,” chattered the rats. “Please indicate whether you would prefer to be eaten pre- or post-mortem.”

Corben skewered a few giant rats with his pen-laser, but they drew together into a snarling wall that cut off any escape.

“We’re currently experiencing a high volume of unexpected bullshit,” said another rat. “Your death is very important to us. Please hold.” All of the rats had wires snaking out of their notched and gnarled ears, and some had miniature satellite dishes in place of eyes. But all of them had long, yellow teeth. In unison, they went rigid and their tails intertwined, and those with eyes glared up at the ceiling and through it, as if at a glorious hologram spooling in their skulls.

Corben started to step over their tails to sneak away, when he saw it, too.

The city of Mobile sat and pulled its dork in happy stupefaction, slack simian jaw resting on its pot belly, watching the hypnotic light show of the Vegas Mega-Snake as it circled around him and rose up as if to kiss the charmed mandrill’s unlovely lips.

The air around Mobile went blue with small-arms fire, bazookas and howitzers, every trailer-dwelling citizen of the white monkey-city fighting the enemy for the right to continue idly scratching its inflamed ass. The Mega-Snake swayed hypnotically before the spider-mandrill while it fired off a barrage of harpoons and grappling hooks and jerked the hapless hillbilly city face-down in the river.

Evacuate the groin, gaijin! Otaku howled into his central nervous system, jerking on his pelvic pain receptors like a senile country lord on a butler’s bell rope. Collision and cornholing are imminent!

“It’s the only way to infiltrate Las Vegas…” Corben started, but there was no point arguing with a Japanese android living in his bowels. Corben frantically clung to a rusty girder as the thrashing chaotic motion of the city soon fell into an all-too familiar pattern.

The dizzying shaft of the urethra shriveled and truncated, and the vast ceramic reactor tanks of the testes retracted into the superstructure high above Corben’s head, but he forged ahead in spite of his screaming instincts, even as the redneck spider-primate’s mega-penis began to glow and retract, violently turning itself inside out to accommodate the implacable intruder.

The sleek steel and black glass reptilian hemipenis impaled the spider-mandrill’s quasi-vaginal canal like a runaway bullet train, and almost instantly shattered and disgorged a cheesy fireworks display and a cloud of frothy white ejaculate that descended on him like a monsoon made of shaving cream. Corben strapped on his gas mask and dove into the foaming surge before it could sweep him away.

It was like swimming against a salmon run. The rats scrambled and flailed in the semen-flood, screeching like slot machines as squirming white Mega-Snake sperm burrowed into their ears and assholes. All around him, berserk biomechanical sperm ranging in size from catfish to dolphins rammed into him, mistaking him for a giant monster ovum.

Wishing he still had his rocket pack, Corben fired a grappling hook down the shattered shaft of the spider-mandrill’s new vaginal canal and abseiled down it to hook an air conditioning unit on the hooded cobra-head of the Mega-Snake’s spent hemipenis just as it shriveled back into the daylight. Corben was whipped up on his retractable cord to cling to the air conditioner’s leaky Freon coils until the telescoping organ had retreated into its hangar in the parking garage of Circus Circus.

Too exhausted to hold on any longer, Corben unhitched his harness and slipped off the steaming hemipenis to collapse gratefully on a clean, unyielding concrete floor.

Fatigue and horror and disbelief and despair flooded him and crushed each other out, leaving only a curious numbness that began to feel a lot like euphoria.

As awful, as unacceptable as the world had become, he belonged in it, for it was exactly as fucked up, as deformed and defiled and dead to its own redemption, as he was. How much worse would it feel, to see the world going on as normal, when his life was so thoroughly a toxic disaster?

Stiletto heels jabbed him in the ribs, sent cattle-prod shocks through him, rolling him into a fetal ball, surrounded. At least now he couldn’t smell their perfume, only a lingering ozone funk he somehow knew was the stench of his own scorched brain matter.

Just before he blacked out, he heard the last words any tourist in Vegas ever wants to hear, as he loses consciousness.

“Hi, honey,” they said in creepy, clockwork unison. “Wanna date?”

In all of human history, no babysitter had put up with more than Mariko did. She had to get away from the ungrateful brats after a week, so the next time a flying saucer came near the island, instead of shooting it down and feeding it to the monsters, she chased it.

To be sure, she did not just ditch her helpless charges. She dumped a couple tons of whale slurry in trails leading from every corner of the island to the nest. That would attract plenty of apex predators for them to snack on. If they were mature enough to try to nip her legs off when she brought them food, they could fend for themselves when the polar sharks and emulemurs and Komodo draguars came calling.

Of course, the saucer was long gone by the time she’d taken care of the nest, but she could still see the ionized psychic contrail it left behind as clear as chalk on asphalt. Their cloaking devices might hide them from radar and satellites, and they might be from another planet, but they were such galactic-class assholes that their negativity was a GPS route beacon pointing northeast across the Pacific. This was what intrigued her most—that they didn’t simply flit up into outer space, or wink out through a wormhole to their own time or dimension, or something.

In just the short time she’d been stuck on the island, the ocean had changed drastically. The ice floes were all but melted away, and the racing tides were dotted with boats and naval ships. Most were deserted derelicts, but she heard such piteous wailing from an ocean liner that she almost descended out of the clouds to rescue them, until she realized they were Australian.

She flew on under sun and moon, between a bloated ocean and a burning sky, stopping periodically to snatch a gray whale or a great white shark out of the trash-laced whitecaps and eat it on the wing. Occasionally, she saw floating mega-kaiju like awesome whale sharks gobbling up tons of floating plastic waste, while tiny tribes of Polynesian were-sharks sang hymns in their grass shacks on the coral reef atolls blossoming around the monsters’ dorsal fins.

As she passed from the deep Pacific basin to the South American continental shelf, the pollution grew steadily worse, until she gagged on mustard yellow clouds that made her miss Easter Island and totally obscured the Peruvian coastline. While the northern hemisphere and the Far East had been most deeply affected by the mega-kaiju, the less densely urbanized African and South American regions had spawned fewer city-gods while still losing any vestiges of modern civilization. Left to revert to a long-forgotten natural state, the Amazon and the pampas and the Andes were enjoying a second age of dinosaurs. The once-fearsome gorilliguanas and Agent Orange-breathing dragon-moths deployed by the United States to fight the war on drugs had spread out and migrated and become the apex predators in a bizarre new ecology.

Riding the frigid jet stream over the teeth of the Cordillera, she finally lost the saucer’s trail, but only because it faded to background noise against a looming miasma of hideous psychic deformity. The air up here was, if anything, even dirtier than over the lowlands and the sea. It was as if a haunted slaughterhouse the size of Mount Fuji lurked somewhere in the noxious mists, burning the earth itself and spewing out selfish, disrespectful ghosts.

At last, the mountain range fell away, and she dropped down to swoop over a wide, low valley that caused her to scream in terror and anguish.

The valley was a graveyard of cities, but more tragic than the mountains of abandoned husks was what they had become, in death.

Very little remained of their old forms, aside from odd jutting steel bones or faded fiberglass carapaces, the wreckage of a funfair, touched once by nano-magic and set adrift. Caracas, Montevideo, Manaus, said the graffiti inscribed by giants everywhere around the carcasses, which had died giving birth to towers. Some were vast launch gantries, blackened and wilted from hurling projectiles into space. But many of them had fused in death to form a single, conical tower like an artificial volcano.

Something must have infected them and brought them up here, only to wither and die in some kind of insane project so steeped in failure, it could only be American in design. But why would the flying saucers need to resort to such monstrous and wasteful means, to pillage the Earth? And why this spent, trashy hellhole planet, out of all the universe?

Circling the ominous charnel-mound of dead cities, glowing with friction-fire rolling off her golden scales, she found herself engaged in an uncomfortably grownup dialogue about her role in the grand scheme of things.

Was she the defender of humanity? Hardly. She was never a fan of the species as a whole when she was one. She was only a little more fond of the Earth itself. Though she’d long since shed her urban schoolgirl phobias of dirt, germs and genocide, Mariko had hardly become a Buddhist. And as for the helpless and innocent, she had yet to find any living thing that met her criteria. Indeed, it was becoming harder by the hour to even think as she’d been taught in school. To use linear logic and words was like pulling a tapestry through a keyhole thread by thread, leaving a mess of threads that she couldn’t begin to weave into anything like what they were. Perhaps she would have less trouble adjusting, if she’d been transformed into a dragon after completing puberty.

Just then, she saw a trio of flying saucers skipping like river rocks off the troposphere, and she turned to attack them. These squirrelly hubcaps eluded her energy blasts, but even when she hit them, they reflected her blasts back at her off pearlescent bubble shields as they dove headlong for the Earth.

Ratcheting her piercing scream up to a supersonic buzzsaw, she deflected their puny missile salvos with less effort than it took to try to catch them. She intercepted them at the gaping peak of the hollow mound and caught one in her claws, cracking it like an oyster. Its wingmates pounded her with microwaves, making her forget what she was doing, and she fell out of the sky.

The tiny spacemen in the flying saucer she clutched tried to eject, but she peeled them out of their escape pod like foil-wrapped candies, oddly intent even as she plummeted into the hollow mountain of dead cities. There was nothing to see down there. The pit within had no bottom.

Mariko shook the tiny, shrieking dolls in her talons, banged them into each other. “Why are you messing up the Earth?” she shrieked.

Finally, one of them stopped screaming and crying long enough to answer her. “We’re Americans, bitch. It’s what we do.”

The other two flying saucers raced ahead of her and the blackness became whiteness, as oppressive and as uninformative as the darkness. Only then did Mariko remember that she was falling.

It felt like slamming into concrete. It atomized her, and yet she lived, fell through it and into a black velvet apocalypse. The ultraviolet light scorched her so all she saw was a void, but it was teeming with bodiless entities that fumbled at her as she plummeted past like a gutshot duck.

Passing through the other side felt even worse, like being electrocuted. She was grateful to emerge and come to rest on solid ground with no more force than if she’d fallen out of bed.

With a single mighty thrash of her wings, she wrenched herself out of freefall, but there was no up or down. When she tried to turn over to find the mouth of the volcano, she saw a tiny black mote like a negative star, dwindling so fast she realized that it was much too far away for her to still be on Earth.

When the light went away, she suddenly felt like she was falling again, but like falling off a bicycle, not like terminal velocity into the center of the earth. And she was flying but it suddenly wasn’t working, and her brain flooded with pictures but no words. She instantly knew what was wrong, but was blessedly unable to rationally confront the reality of how truly fucked she was.

Her wings were flailing for the same reason her lungs weren’t working and her brain itself was beginning to substitute big black balloons for any kind of coherent thought. She was swimming in a vacuum.

As the noose of prostitutes drew tighter around Corben, he rolled over to hide his hand and reach into his emergency pilot’s pouch. He knew from the dull dry ice glow in their filmy eyes that he couldn’t hope to reason with them. They were appendages of the city, the closest thing it had to an immune system. They all wore torn magenta T-shirts that proclaimed LOOSEST SLOTS IN TOWN!

If they were wired in any way like regular humans, he could probably use a flash grenade to stun them, and run away. If there were only a couple, he could garrote one with the monofilial piano wire in his boots, maybe do that human shield thing and take out a couple more with the corpse’s razor-heels. And the thermite charges in his flak jacket would melt at least a couple more of them the moment they stopped his heart. He had no choice but to dig out the one weapon they had warned him not to use unless he was almost already dead. “Do you whores take plastic?”

They seemed to shimmy seductively even as they stood still—their velour and vinyl lingerie rippling with the agitated migration of mutant crablice eager for a fresh host. While they did a schizoid screensaver shimmy, an Amazon with blue dreadlocks bound in pigtails like sheaves of dead snakes rolled up and thrust out her green tongue to show where her card reader was. He swiped the card through her mouth and tried to sound convincing. “I’m a bad boy. I want you to dominate me and drop a steamer on my chest. I deserve your worst.”

“How many, baby?”

“All of you.” He tried to look fascinated as they shared his credit data in deep, probing kisses, but these models had been on the street since before the daikaiju singularity, and their original organic parts were all but used up. A hodgepodge of sex toys, half-melted electronics and cheap buffet leftovers filled their many gaping gaps.

When they’d all finished swapping digital spit, they turned and stared at him. Their patented arousal musk baited the air, Lysol and the fake maple syrup scent of scorched coolant. The tension started getting expensive.

Corben dropped and covered his ears for a while after they failed to explode. Their blistered chinadoll faces cracked and contorted into drooling masks of rage, their claws deployed and worst of all, their bowels began to churn with sub-seismic rumblings and spurts of toxic gas. Corben was uncertain whether he was going to be torn to shreds by these maenads because the federal credit card bounced, or whether he was about to get what he’d paid for. Both options seemed worse than biting into the cyanide capsule inside his left lower rear molar, so that was what he was trying to do when a gigantic pink tentacle flicked out of the alley and wrapped up four of the hookers in its flypaper embrace.

Not a tentacle but a tongue, the huge pink appendage tried to retract into a gaping reptilian mouth, but the ensnared prostitutes shrieked like harpies and grappled with the runaway fire hose, digging their stiletto heels into the yielding pavement and poking out one of the monster’s armored eyes as it tried to swallow them. The other hookers broke ranks to rescue their sisters, gouging the monster’s cherry paint job with skeleton key talons, and crawling under its upswept back end to fellate its exhaust pipe.

As near as he could tell, it was some unholy hybrid of a giant chameleon and a ‘69 Camaro. It peeled out in reverse, its oversized sport wheels raising a shroud of blue rubber vapor and dragging its flailing, hooker-studded tongue like a wrecking ball of bad hygiene.

The Chameleonaro backed into a Gila monster fused with a ‘71 Challenger and some sort of demolition mating dance commenced.

Corben climbed onto a trash dumpster, hopped over a razorwire-topped wall and ran gibbering over an endless meadow of blindingly green Astroturf. The ground shuddered and he dropped to his knees. Holy shit, they were playing on real high-grade ultra-dwarf Bermuda grass. No wonder the hookers looked so thirsty. All around the fairway, subway-sized circular trapdoors opened up in the turf as the course either recalibrated itself for the shittiest golfers of all time, or—

Missile silos.

Corben ran as fast as he could, chanting,“Fuck-fuck-fuck-God-fuck-cunt-shovel- Mommycock—” in the panicky falsetto of incurable insanity. But as any observer equipped with the power to see Kirlian auras would know, his mantra was a powerful Air Force-ratified technique for releasing psychic pressure, and each “fuck” averted the first of a lethal chain of strokes as he struggled to rationalize the unbelievable shit that was happening to him.

It wasn’t working. His head was about to explode, and even escalating to racist and homophobic slurs probably wouldn’t relieve the pressure in time to save him.

He dropped to his knees, skidding on the perfectly groomed 13th putting green. He was stomped on, crushed face-down in the grass by a massive, hovering golf cart. The roaring ground effects skirt flung cigarette butts and mini vodka bottles in his face. This, at least, he could take out. He rolled out of the golf cart’s footprint, grabbed a running board and hauled himself out from under. He raised his pistol, but his finger twitched on the trigger. Even a trained killer with deep paranoid psychoses is paralyzed for a moment, when they find a world-famous celebrity in their gunsights.

“Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Commander Corben!” The driver flashed a dazzling phalanx of perfectly capped ivory teeth at him, smiling right past the gun in his face. “God damn, we’re so sorry we didn’t greet you in the style befitting a true American hero, but we didn’t know you were coming until this morning! Grab a seat, have a drink, and let’s get you into a game!”

Wayne Newton brought the hover-cart to a stop and Corben slipped into the passenger seat. A zombie caddy with a majestic pair of silicon DDD tits instead of a face poured him a mimosa. Very fine Freixenet brut mixed with Tang.

Keeping the gun parked in Wayne Newton’s gut, Corben slurped the drink and demanded a refill from Titface, as he growled, “If I’m a hero, it’s because I killed anyone who ever crossed me or my country. You fuckers are at war with America.”

Wayne Newton laughed. His skin was yellow and looked like embalmed turkey loaf. Corben could’ve sworn Newton was dead, but here, no possibility was too unsavory to consider. He could be a surgically altered imposter or a zombie or a wax dummy android from Madame Tussauds, or even the real Mr. Las Vegas, fresh from some kind of cut-rate rejuvenation treatment.

“I was afraid you’d feel that way. But you’ve got to look at the small picture, here on the ground. From where we’re standing, we are America. We’re the only ones carrying on and trying to rebuild this great nation.”

At the end of the course, the golf cart hopped an electrified fence and leap-frogged a couple taxis before settling to travel the spine of the Mega-Snake.

“We’re not afraid of the visitors because we know a thing or two… I wish I could tell you, but we’re working on a little real estate deal…”

Even at midnight in February somewhere north of Pittsburgh, it was still 108˚on the Vegas Strip. The double row of mirrored and tinted glass skyscraper hotels had been converted into solar collectors-cum-death-ray-projectors shedding searing heat-haze that warped and distorted the street. This was not a bug, Corben soon discovered, but a feature.

“You’re lucky we found you when we did, Commander. A lifetime of commando training and deployment in urban war zones could not prepare you to survive even an hour on the Strip.”

At first glance, the awakened Las Vegas had strived to maintain its native ecology, even to have devolved to its adorably sleazy pre-corporate ecosystem. Tourists still gawked at the volcano and the pirate-versus-stripper stunt shows, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Its metabolism was based upon hospitality and entertainment, and it fed quite well on gamblers, which allowed it to expend disgusting amounts of energy and wealth on garish displays. Once it went mobile, the city found it hard to attract tourists—though some high rollers did fly in and out of a short runway on Desert Inn Road. But the Mega-Snake had to keep the party going, and so it had taken to abducting any humans in its path with viable credit ratings, then it co-opted most of the service industry into zombies and installed cameras everywhere. Anything that tried to kill and eat anything else on the Strip was a subject of furious online betting. As an incentive to try to survive in this glamorous hellhole, the city secreted weapons, ammunition, cybernetic upgrades, cash and buffet tokens in unlikely places and inside the cavities of zombie hookers and other monsters it turned loose on the streets.

As they passed the casinos, Corben immediately noticed what was wrong. The poker and roulette tables were all gone, and the flashy video slots had been shut down or converted into handjob kiosks. In their place stood ranks of clanky old mechanical one-armed bandits—hundreds in every casino, spilling out onto the half-melted sidewalks. Every slot machine was in use, and every dead-eyed gambler sitting at a machine fed it a coin and pulled the lever at the same moment. They sat on stools that were also toilets, and gulped pureed lobster from feeding tubes. Like one-armed galley slaves, they pushed the Mega-Snake across the wasteland with every pull and generated more kilowatts than Hoover Dam, for the colossal city-monster had learned to harness the power of uncertainty itself.

The gamblers played with twin tragedies gunning for their sorry asses. If they went broke, the city would devour them or ship them to the gladiator pits, but if they won a jackpot, they’d never live to claim it. So they hoped only to keep winning enough to keep playing…

“I’ll admit, it might look a little weird from outside, but we’re just using our God-given gifts. We’re still just a poor ol’ show biz town, but we know how to make something out of nothing. Most of the cities out there are just wasting resources and getting in the way of rebuilding.”

“So that’s why you’re raping and killing them all and seeding the Earth with giant monster larvae?”

“Not larvae, son! Franchises! Listen, we have a chance to make this country right this time. The cities we competed against and defeated in fair trial by combat are going to make the next generation of livable American cities. Not big unstable nomadic monsters, but real, livable cities that will make products and services again. Comfortable, secure homes and wholesome entertainment for families, Commander. That’s our dastardly plan.”

So the eggs were filled with freeze-dried suburbs. It was just stupid enough to be true. “You people didn’t think of this by yourselves, did you? Did the little green men promise you a controlling share in all the new cities? Make slaves out of the rest of America, maybe…?”

Newton frowned, the tectonic plates of his dreamy face colliding so he looked like a sock puppet. “That hurts, Wes. Sure, we have some outside partners in this thing, but it’s not like we were the first to cut a deal, right? They want the same thing we want, actually.”

The cart turned into a blind alley behind the Mirage. A wall dropped down and they took the ramp and shot up a narrow storm drain tunnel. They passed dozens of connecting tunnels from which bug-eyed morlocks hurled buckets of piss, to which Titface replied with a grenade launcher.

Whatever Wayne Newton was, Corben tried his best to reason with it. “You can’t trust them, Mr. Newton. They’re using Las Vegas as a tool to turn America into a plantation. They’re doing it all over the world.”

“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of inviting some folks to watch the show.”

“Show? What the fuck are you taking me to a show for? They’re invaders from another goddamned planet! What common cause could you find with them against your own species? How can you be so blindly fucking arrogant, Wayne Newton?”

Newton smiled his Welcome to Vegas smile again, and Corben knew that he wasn’t sitting beside a human being. “D’you know why our city is raping the shit out of every other city in this country? Some folks think it’s because of the tests, you know, the 126 atmospheric and 828 underground A-bomb tests—just the ones we know about—between 1951 and 1962. A lot of folks aren’t actually from here, but I am. Born and raised. I remember waking up to the sun rising in the north, and silver snow in September. This is my home, you understand? Nobody’s going to fuck with it.”

“They’re aliens from outer space. They’re pillaging our goddamned planet, with your help.” Corben started to take out his phone to show pictures, but then they went into a rotating ultraviolet decontamination tunnel, and something zapped all his electronics.

“We’re not worried, Wes. We’ve got something they want and need more than our air or water or world monuments. We’ve got you!”

No doubt he would’ve expanded upon this statement, but Corben was done enabling Newton’s infodump with his empty interrogative grunting. He took hold of the king of the lounge crooners’ chin and twisted and separated his spine against the golf cart’s memory foam headrest. It snapped more like PVC plumbing than honest bone, but at least he seemed dead.

“Now you’ve done it,” Titface mumbled through his sideways mouth. “You’ve gone and made me fall in love with you, master.”

The blind wall in front of the golf cart opened up and they rolled into a blitzkrieg of flashing lights and canned, refried applause.

Naturally, it was a gladiator arena.

From the tumbled columns and fake gold bas-relief everywhere, the vast, bowl-shaped crater had to be the ruins of Caesars Palace. The sloping floor was made of melted auditorium seats, and silhouettes of dumpy people pulling slot machine levers were burned into the walls. The new regime had remodeled it just enough to make it more dangerous than the pussy Roman version. A crowd of about a thousand tourist slaves was piled into stadium seating and screaming like their lives depended on it. Helicopters and drone cameras from the gambling syndicates made a thousand-eyed ceiling over the arena.

The floor of the arena was filled with cyborg dancing girls, like a prostitute boss level. Behind waterfalls of crystal beads and cotton candy maribou stork feathers, they had been totally worked over by ridiculously misogynistic cybernetic engineers. Limbs replaced with taser flails, rotary cannons, circular saws, bazookas, death ray projectors and whirling airplane propellers. Blue flames from some incredibly volatile fuel drooled from flamethrower muzzles coming out of places few women let their gynecologists visit. And behind them, eclipsing the gibbous moon with its titanic, utterly unacceptable bulk like all these showgirls’ insecure, violent boyfriends mashed into a big pile, crouched a lobster the size of an offshore oil drilling rig. Its mandibles had rotary saw blades wider than Corben was tall.

If it was just a lobster, it could have been let go as the by-product of trying to grow big lobsters, a perfectly understandable rich asshole pastime. But when it stood up on twin rows of telescoping struts and slammed its mismatched pig-iron claws together, Corben saw a tiny slack-jawed human face embedded in the fiberglass armor plates beneath its mandibles and realized the gladiator was at least a third human, and that third bore a striking resemblance to his driver’s license photo.

“BIG JOBS!” it screamed, and lurched forward, trampling its neighbors. It probably didn’t feel too bad about it, though, if it even noticed. Its eyes had been replaced with a couple of cameras and a pair of recoilless Gatling guns.

Corben did not waste a moment, but he couldn’t find reverse on the golf cart.

If you want to survive, you greasy behemoth, said the last voice he wanted to hear inside his head, you must allow yourself to be completely under my command.

“Fine, whatever. But you better not screw me.”

Why would I do such a thing? You are my whole world!

“OK, what’s next?”

I have deposited a most efficacious suite of enzyme potentiators into your bloodstream. You should be feeling their effects soon, much sooner if you did not insist on polluting your digestive tract with processed meat and repulsive dairy products… You’re going to need protein. I suggest you make haste and eat as much as you can of Wayne Newton.

An announcer was babbling amplified hype salad and the crowd noise was like a roaring wind blowing from all directions at once. He limbered his pistol, but it was hopeless. The he realized he wasn’t hearing the crowd at all. The thunder blowing out his eardrums was his own pulse. Even as his stomach began to growl, he bit his lip. “I’m not going to eat him.”

It’s not cannibalism to eat a Caucasian, so long as they’re kosher… that’s a joke, try to rein in your stomach acid production, if you please… You need to eat immediately. He’s not human, and the alternative is probable death by gene therapy meltdown before any of those lovely ladies even gets to touch you. But I am most terribly tired of arguing with you—

Corben’s jaw unhinged like an anaconda’s and he bit Wayne Newton’s face and scalp off. As his teeth skated across the dome of his skull, rolling scalp and hand-dyed, surgically implanted hair plugs up on his tongue, he gagged and tried to spit it out, but his gut was a furnace. He was on fire and only the flesh and hair of Wayne Newton would put it out. Especially the hair.

He ate and ate while they closed in on the golf cart, rending and swallowing whole gobbets of face and neck and green velvet tuxedo lapel in his eagerness, but the fire didn’t go out. It only spread throughout his body to burst out of his pores like the burn from running for your life when your last dregs of adrenaline are long gone and it itched so bad he clawed at his flak vest and his face, and his face was sprouting hard, thick, flat bladelike black hairs and his hands his neck and everywhere under his scorched, semen-encrusted flight suit. The sleeves bulged and seams split but even the low-bid uniform didn’t tear away like the Hulk. It hurt like fuck, but he was not his own master, thank God, as he kept eating.

Mr. Titface tapped him on the shoulder and queefed, “Please, sir… I know a way out… follow me…”

A cheetah-spotted showgirl pranced up to the golf cart, waggling her can like a cat spraying its stink, and bathed the golf cart in blue flames just as Corben took Titface by the goatee and threw him into the inferno.

Grabbing Wayne Newton’s golf bag, Corben leapt out and rolled, his flight suit sloughing off in crispy nylon ashes. Incredibly, he wasn’t burned. The thick net of hair that now covered every inch of him had hardened and fused into a black biomechanical armor, like really thick toenails. It slowed him down not at all as he leapt into the midst of the showgirls just as the lobster-man activated. His gunbarrel eyes swiveled to track Corben and carved a cherry Slurpee hurricane out of the mob of cyborg showgirls.

Corben aimed his pistol straight up and fired. The entire eighteen-shot magazine deployed in less than a tenth of a second, during which interval each bullet acquired an individual target and intercepted it at the extrapolated greatest point of vulnerability. Before he cleared the spent magazine, eighteen cyborgs collapsed with their atomized brains adrift like cigarette smoke or the jet fuel tanks in their asses punctured and spraying white hot death on their neighbors.

He dropped the gun and popped his knuckles. Because each bullet cost more than an Exocet guided missile, the pistol only came with one clip.

He didn’t need another. His horny fists plowed through muscle and bone like Styrofoam and popped skulls like zits. A King Kong-sized bodybuilder snatched him and tried to stuff him into his mouth, but Corben caught a tuft of wiry hairs jutting out of the monster’s nostrils. Only when he got within inches of being eaten did he recognize the bastardized features of his old friend, Steve. The slope-browed clone squeezed him like a tube of toothpaste. Corben stuffed a grenade into the other nostril and ripped the nose-hair free. The screaming giant inhaled the grenade, which went off in its sinus, blasting its nose and left eye out of its head. Incredibly, it didn’t go down, but flailed to the right, crushing everything its intact eye could see.

Jumping out of the giant’s mouth, Corben ripped the head off a magician’s assistant and swung it by its spine like a flail with straight-razor fangs. Rigid, silicate hairs all over his body came off like porcupine quills, which hurt a hell of a lot more than they had any right to. The unbelievable power racing through his body nearly separated every tendon and ligament in his arm with each mighty blow, but he wouldn’t stop even if he somehow regained control over his motor functions. He had more than enough strength to crush the little angel on his shoulder telling him this was a terribly stupid and dangerous thing to learn to enjoy.

All his adult life, Corben had flown in planes or giant monsters and hated himself, but what he suddenly realized was that he didn’t hate himself. He hated his feeble, slow, stupid, stinking humanity, and everyone else’s. And looming before him was a gigantic, lobsterized parody of himself. Rather than wondering where they got his genetic material or why they made a giant lobster-hybrid out of him, he only saw an effigy of that loathsome asshole Wes Corben that he could shred in his teeth…

Before the bookies’ cameras could acquire him and adjust the odds, Corben had vaulted up onto the fantail of the cyborg lobster and raced up its back so fast the idiot nipped its own antennae off trying to decapitate him.

Driving a five-iron into the joint in the armor just behind the lobster’s head, Corben pried open a slot revealing a pulsing puddle of grey cottage cheese shot through with glowing circuitry. No more in control of himself now than when he ate Wayne Newton, Corben drove his hand into the monster’s brain until his tunneling fingers found something oddly familiar to the little man coaching him from a bunker in his stomach. When he squeezed it, the rotary cannons of the lobster’s eyes tilted up to take in the suddenly somber audience. And rake them with lead.

The guns were wired to the cortical arousal centers of the monster’s brain, and so it shot anything that excited it. Having a functioning short-term memory was not terribly compatible with a 96mm armor-piercing stare, so its forelobe was whittled down to a nub smaller than a duck’s dick.

My patented design! Don’t kill all their lawyers, because I’m going to sue them to death.

The techno-lobster’s visual processing centers were tricked out with a digital interface that was oddly receptive to manual override. Squeezing the knobs of ganglia like a control pad, Corben mowed down the best and brightest of Las Vegas—the magicians, hypnotists, ventriloquists and celebrity impersonators—and the wrinkly, tiger-headed perverts who appeared to be the true rulers of the city. Bullets and shrapnel and high heels caromed off his toenail body armor like sparkling fairy dust. Flexing and roaring like a steroidal pro wrestling werewolf, Corben skewered the giant cyber-lobster’s McNugget brain and ripped it out to devour while pari-mutuel action began to speculate on the casualties when, not if, Corben took over the Mega-Snake.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

Enjoy yourself while you can, idiot, Dr. Otaku sneered. I wrung every molecule of endorphins out of your pitiful peasant brain so you wouldn’t go into shock during your dramatic metamorphosis. When you crash, you’re going to feel like an Anne Sexton poem about menstrual cramps—

“Why do you think I’m eating this fucking brain?”

I thought you were trying to make yourself sick. Cyborg brains are totally unstable. Invertebrate cyber-hybrids kick off prions like waste heat, and eating the brains of your own clone... fucking Americans.

“Change me into something else… fly us out of here…”

Too late. Bovine spongiform encephalitis has most likely set in. That’s your strategy? Ask the tiny man who lives in your gut for a miracle? We deserve to die.

It was too late, anyway. The moon and stars were blocked out by something that completely covered the open pit of the arena like the lid of a cookie jar.

Helicopters and drones were swatted out of the sky by huge arcs of blue lightning. Corben leapt into the emperor’s box to escape the barrage of falling wreckage. The survivors in the audience bowed down like Old Testament suckers before a golden calf. Corben alone stood up to the flying saucer that hovered overhead, and only because a bolt of lightning fried him where he stood. The joints of his keratin-based armor had melted and fused.

With an epileptic fanfare of flashing lights, the flying saucer touched down and disgorged a pair of humanoid space travelers in blindingly bright silver spacesuits and mirrored helmets. Even in post-apocalyptic Vegas, every head in the arena bowed in fear, every mutant freak seriously vowed to mend their ways, if only they didn’t die, right now.

As they approached, the spacemen took out pistols and pointed them at him. Corben cracked his armor and screamed as all the hair on his legs and crotch was ripped out at the same time.

One of the spacemen stepped back and put his gun to his mate’s brainstem and shot him twice at an upward angle. The unlucky spaceman collapsed to his knees with the bullets ricocheting round and round inside his awesome bulletproof helmet.

Corben tried to pop his absurdly long claws again, but he needed to eat a lot of hair to make it happen again. Unarmed, he faced down the spaceman’s pistol, but the alien unscrewed its helmet and a tumble of scarlet hair spilled out.

“Everywhere I don’t want to be,” Corben groaned, “there you are.”

“I don’t know why they brought you in at all,” she retorted, stepping back into the saucer’s airlock recess and raising her gun to beckon him inside. “I need no partner. But if you don’t want to get killed, put on suit.” She kicked the dead spaceman next to her. She didn’t explain how she got on the flying saucer, and he didn’t ask. She knew a lot more than him, and they were not on the same side.

But he couldn’t stop trying to impress her. “Whoever they are, they’ve got Las Vegas eating out of their little green hands. The Mega-Snake is programmed to rape the other cities and make them seed the country with bastardized Vegas franchises. And I think they know… they think I know where Otaku is.”

He expected the Slavic vixen to whiten with surprise, but she cocked a sturdy hip to throw the airlock switch and laughed. “Oh, you foolish fool! How do you think you were so easily captured? Your ridiculous nemesis has been broadcasting from inside you, offering final solution to mega-kaiju problem to highest bidder. We couldn’t find him for longest time, because he planted false relays everywhere, and you were hiding on his island with your… offspring. No one believed you succeeded in killing him, but no one suspected depth of collusion, either.”

All during this barbed tirade, Corben tried to unscrew the alien corpse’s helmet from the suit’s seamless collar. The helmet was all visor and perfectly reflective, but he could just glimpse some kind of four-eyed freak inside, with a catfish mouth fringed with tentacles.

Svetlana gave a provocative grunt of disgust as she stooped to take the helmet off. The scent of her sweat, spicy and rank from zero-g still vodka and NATO rations, inspired a crippling rush of blood to his crotch. Trying to change the subject as he turned to undress—which entailed prying melted hair off his skin—he demanded to know how she got on the flying saucer. “As long as we’re laying our wild suspicions to rest.”

She finally removed the helmet. “The aliens were not so difficult to infiltrate, once I learned they aren’t aliens.” Corben tried to feel surprise, but he couldn’t even muster sincerely bitter disappointment. The hideous monster image was some kind of hologram embedded in the visor. Underneath the helmet was an irrefutably terrestrial Caucasian male ex-Air Force pilot with twenty or more messy exit wounds in his face from the endlessly ricocheting bullet. His cranium leaked like a colander full of overcooked lasagna noodles, but together they upended the corpse and peeled off its silver pressure suit. “So, who are they working for?”

“We have to find another saucer group and find out. All the surviving cities in the Southwestern United States are converging on Southern Nevada. We think they’re building another space ladder.”

“We’ll be there to stop them, then. But these flying saucer things won’t do any good against a herd of cities…” He forgot what he was going to say next. He froze with his shirt over his head.

Svetlana had stripped off her own spacesuit. Her buxom curves glistened with sweat and dried blood from the original occupant. She wore only a spacer’s leotard underneath, and it was way too small.

She smirked slyly at him as she brushed away his last protective clumps of melted hair. “I need shower, and… I… noticed your distress, earlier. Perhaps now is time for obligatory intimate physical entanglement…”

He tried to turn around, but she trapped him. Her hand went to her mouth, finally somewhat impressed. “You’ve been a very bad boy…”

His penis was anything but erect; in fact, it’d retracted into his pelvis like a salted snail-eyestalk upon exposure. But he had three swollen testicles. The third one was a gigantic crablouse, bloated to the size of a prize tomato with his blood.

“Help me…”

She took her sweet time burning it off with a pocket acetylene torch. “You also have… tail…” He turned around, spinning a couple of times like a crazed dog.

He did indeed have a slimy white tadpole tail dangling out of his asshole and hanging down almost to his knees. Svetlana grabbed it with a lusty giggle and yanked a wayward Mega-Snake sperm out of his anus.

Svetlana lit a cigar and forced him to sit back and spread his legs. “You are first American I ever meet,” she purred, “who can how to give good foreplay.”

Even now, there were times when Mariko forgot that she was a celestial dragon the size of a Concorde SST, when she was still the undersized, unpopular daughter of a disgraced coprophiliac politician.

This was one of those times. She thrashed in the void, tumbling end over end in a storm of helplessly flapping wings. Clamping her eyes and her jaws shut against the surge of internal pressure that must be the lining of her lungs boiling, she bounced off something hard and lashed out with her tail, sending herself hurtling off in a new direction.

Her grasp of physics was shaky at best—she was flunking science, and had been momentarily glad when she turned into a monster at school, because it got her out of a physics quiz—but she knew that humans didn’t just explode like balloons filled with jelly in a vacuum. It takes about a minute for your blood vessels to rupture as their contents boil and freeze at the same time, for eyes, ears, lungs and abdominal cavities to violently expel their gases and fluid contents, and for the brain to freeze in its bony fortress and finally, mercifully, surrender. Thank God, you could still learn some science from cartoons.

It took a moment for her to realize she could open her eyes, which were shielded by bulletproof nictitating membranes. Her ears were likewise covered by thick tympanic scales. But when she looked around, she almost forgot she couldn’t breathe.

She clung like a bat to the girders of the roof of a spherical chamber the size of the Astrodome. There was a perceptible but very weak gravitational pull, leading her to suspect she was in outer space or some kind of giant vomit comet. Set into the glittering black walls all around her were big silver doors with numbers and bar codes on them. One of the doors sphinctered opened, revealing a weird oily silver mirror that rippled and spat out a flying saucer. More flying saucers were stuck to the walls everywhere, like hats on hooks. A big picture window was set into the far wall, and she could see a bunch of tiny little men working at consoles, like at NASA mission control. They were all jumping up and down and pointing at her and screaming at each other, apparently pissed that she wasn’t dead, yet.

The tiny spaceman still clutched in her talons could give no answers. In the rigors of traveling through the weird volcano-gate, she’d squashed his entire body into his helmet. She knew aliens in monster movies usually came disguised as humans, but in the final reel, they always turned out to be hideously deformed mutants or giant cockroaches. This poor bastard hadn’t turned into anything but jelly, so maybe it was true, and aliens didn’t exist. But Americans were the next worst thing, and if they were wrecking the earth in earnest now, they deserved a proper lesson in humility.

Pushing herself off the dome, she flew towards the command center with her wings swept back against her long, undulating body. They tried to raise a blast wall, but she peeled it off and tapped on the glass, signing with perfect clarity for them to let air into the saucer hangar. Instead, they zapped her with microwaves until her scales started flaking off. Really annoyed now, she breathed fire on the window. Of course, the fire didn’t ignite in vacuum, but gouts of highly reactive bile coated the six-inch Plexiglas window and commenced eating through it.

More flying saucers deployed and attacked her, and Mariko had a jolly time bouncing off the walls and flinging them into each other like pachinko balls. Their magnetic pulse weapons tickled and they couldn’t use death rays in the house, but when a couple of the suicidal idiots used the spinning edges of their saucers like circular saws, they actually hurt her.

She smashed them and rampaged around some more, but no more saucers came out and eventually, her lungs started to burn, and she realized she was probably dying. She picked a big silver door at random and pried it open. Sweet air gushed over her snout for a moment before it depressurized, but a bunch of other stuff got sucked out into the hangar, too. Big geodesic bubbles with cows and pigs and other livestock bounced off her flanks as she crawled into the confining space of a smoothly bored lava tube. Flash-frozen cow carcasses drifted in the hangar in Mariko’s wake, but she made herself dig patiently at the roof of the tunnel until it collapsed behind her.

When she came to another airlock door, she was gentler in prying it open, and the air that greeted her was warm and syrupy with the perfume of flowers, and it didn’t just rush out into space. At last she took in a deep breath and unfolded her wings. This cavern was as large as the hangar, but it contained greenhouses and an old-growth redwood forest that looked like something out of a fairytale. And high above, the roof of this enchanted cavern was of tinted glass that allowed the sun’s rays to pour down on a dazzling panorama of stolen nature. Mariko gasped as she looked around the cavern and realized that the blue moon partially obscuring the sun was the Earth. She was on the moon, but it looked a lot like Earth in a bottle.

The tunnel became a vast segmented Plexiglas tube that stretched out across a crater at least twenty kilometers across. Peering out through the condensation-streaked walls, she could see a loose tangle of braided tubes filled with Amazonian rainforest, Siberian taiga, and Arctic ice floes teeming with polar bears and electric emperor penguins, together at last.

Once she navigated a junction pod and figured out the directory, she went for a swim in a highly pressurized benthic tube and battled a giant squid, then emerged on a picture perfect shoreline with automated breakers garnishing a beach of tiny black pearls. Drunk with the bends and bloated with several tons of squid meat that had exploded inside her stomach, Mariko wanted only to sleep it off. Sunbathers panicked and fled or ignored her, and a couple Arabs commanded her to kneel so their children could ride on her back. She cremated them all and curled up to sleep in their embers.

But sleep eluded her, even after she’d gotten up to crush the beach airlocks and fidgeted with an imaginary day planner. She didn’t like to admit it even to herself, but she was… kind of horny. She’d had a discreet device that she carried in her purse because all her friends did it to seem daring and impervious to boys. She’d actually tried it a couple times but never found it worth the lingering disgust. But her new body didn’t seem to have any such hang-ups, despite the fact that no males of her species seemed to exist. To be the only one of her kind didn’t bother her in the least, but to still have the plumbing and the desire for sex… it was just cruel.

It may have been the moon, but this place was like any other five-star resort she’d ever stayed at with daddy. When she needed something, you didn’t even have to ask. Just wish for it, and there it was.

“DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!” Sirens and an amplified, echoing masculine voice jolted her out of her torpor.

No invitation to surrender, no attempt to divine whether she was sentient at all—not that it mattered to this clown. A peacekeeping robot—no, a Yankee jarhead in a cybernetic combat suit—braced himself in the sand and opened up with twin rail guns. Hundreds of white-hot riboflavin rounds skipped off her scales to do interesting things to the ocean, but they hurt like mild period cramps. The walking one-man tank bristled with harmful armaments like a sea urchin, but she was particularly fond of urchin meat.

Struck by a wicked inspiration, she seized the mini-tank and, after burning off its weapons and sealing the cockpit, she commenced to pleasure herself with it.

The tank was mostly disabled, but the human pilot’s frantic attempts to destroy her or to eject from the doomed rig made it vibrate with the spasmodic throbbing of solid objects forced to inhabit the same space in a buggy videogame. She stroked her maddeningly sensitive underbelly with the shivering machine and gingerly teased the scaly folds of her special place.

“EJECT! EJECT!” the pilot screamed, like a little boy, impatient to finish, but Mariko took her time, manipulating the slippery gadget with three of her hind legs and winding her coils around herself again and again until her entire body was clenched like a fist around her smoldering sex.

So embarrassing. Compared to the rest of her, it was smaller than ever and tucked away under her tail where only a champion herpetologist or an as-yet unincarnated male celestial dragon could find it, and yet her nether parts had become engorged and emitted a distressing smell and light and… music. Even with the golden wings of her labia inflamed and blocking the canal, the entry itself was the size of the compartment the tailgear retracts into on an airliner. A small man could hide in it for several hours, and would probably die unnoticed. But if she was aroused, like now…

When she finally gave in and plunged the tank inside her, the pilot was in an ecstasy of outrage, and his frenzied struggles set off a cluster-bomb of multiple orgasms. She ripped him out at the last moment, wary of letting the jarhead die inside her, but her coital writhing had collapsed the hull of the tank, and the poor Yankee had drowned in her excitement juices.

Mariko pitched the wrecked vibrator into the sea and curled up again, content and ready to sleep, but now she was surrounded by robots and hover-tanks and laser-cannons and at the center a storklike robot that stood as tall as she, and had an ion cannon for a head that looked like it might actually be able to hurt her in some almost permanent capacity.

“We all have needs,” said the giant robot in passable Japanese, which opened up to reveal a tiny fat albino man in a silver chainmail muumuu who cradled a hideous, drooling teacup Chihuahua in one arm… no, for the love of Heaven, somehow, the diseased little dog was his arm.

“I, too, have needs. If you can only find it in your heart, Miss Mariko, to remain here and continue to enjoy yourself as my guest, I am confident that we’ll all of us get what we really want. Now I ask you, is that something a villain would say?”

Something smelled funny, literally. A burned rubber smell reached her nostrils at the same time she realized that smoke was coming out of her tear ducts. Something inside her skull was burning. “And what if I choose not to?”

“Oh, I hope you won’t be difficult. Because then…” the fat man picked up a joystick and pressed a flurry of buttons, “I will have to act like a villain.”

The audacity of the repulsive little Caucasoid moved her to her feet, but a thundering migraine crushed her to the luxuriant black sand and rolled her up in a quivering ball.

“Now behave,” said the Man in the Moon, “or I’ll make you masturbate again.”

Gary Spruance had been waiting a long time for this day. It was probably a little early to announce himself Emperor of Earth, but he’d been dithering around all morning on Photoshop and his 3D printer workstation, making himself a wicked crown. Unforeseen and unprofitable shit like this Jap dragon was a headache, but par for the course when you dreamed as big as Gary Spruance, President and CEO of Hardsoft.

Few who were aware of Gary Spruance in his early years would’ve pegged him to some day rule the world from a secret city on the Moon, but many fawning media profiles hyped him in exactly that kind of language, long before the new dark age of mega-monsters. Having forced an unstable, user-hostile operating system into every personal computer in America, and turned a moronic, aggravating gaming network into the most effective method of keeping superfluous male youth off the streets since trench warfare, Gary had ably demonstrated his talent for bending reality to his will.

And he had invested very heavily in the present dark age. It was past time to reap his due dividends.

He must’ve been crazy to think he could come out ahead in an alliance with Dr. Otaku. The lunatic who hijacked his network had used its millions of couch commandos to power the first phenomenological kaiju manifestation, and subsequently infected central Tokyo with the virus that went on to wreck the world… and only cleared the field for Gary to emerge, once again, on top.

He may have been a 400-pound albino with halitosis, but he had the world eating out of the palm of his hand, which happened to be the slobbering mouth of a pop-eyed Chihuahua. No journalist had ever tired of observing how unlikely and yet inevitable was his rise to become the thirteenth richest man in the world, or his string of inspired innovations, but the paradox made perfect sense, if one only knew how deeply Gary Spruance hated the world, and how passionately he committed himself to ruining everything for everybody. The only mystery, even to Gary himself, was why he’d been so richly rewarded for it.

Gary made a modest fortune off some software patents he filed as an undergraduate, but he was still just a 400-pound albino with a harelip. Until that fateful day when he decided to go to Mexico for spring break with his dorm-mates, Gary was probably fated to be just another flabby cog in someone else’s machine. It was a stupid idea anyway, for an albino to go to the beaches of Acapulco, but he wanted to get laid, and he figured he had as good a chance as any of the other geeks he ran with.

Unfortunately, they never reached the beach, but instead their rental RV was run off the road by a Rockstar Energy drink truck and flipped into a crevasse, where it hung suspended upside down for three days.

Everyone in the van was killed instantly except Gary, who hung upside down in the passenger seat with seven broken ribs and a partially severed arm and the remains of his friends putrefying all around him and drawing clouds of biting black flies, and Creed’s My Own Prison album playing over and over on the CD. His arm was crushed and he was faint from blood loss, but he heard every word of Creed’s vapid yet heartfelt message. It became his whole world, his only refuge from hell on earth.

Semantic satiation is what it’s called, when words, endlessly repeated, lose meaning. But when songs so loaded with heart-wrenching, butt-rocking sincerity become meaningless, the human heart becomes a dead mechanical thing, immune to all emotional appeals.

The Baja doctor thought he was doing Gary a favor by grafting the Chihuahua onto him. “We were not able, sorry, to save your arm… but we were able to save your dog.”

The head and forelegs of the oily rodent-dog twitched and licked him. He didn’t have the heart to tell the doctor he’d never seen the dog before.

He used his fortune from the lawsuit against Rockstar to buy up FM radio stations, and by scaling their playlists back to a skeletonized death march of cookie-cutter hits that annoyed and alienated every economically desirable demographic group, he made them fail even harder. All the while, he invested all his time and energy into developing code for a national mega-broadband network and approached auto manufacturers with designs for wifi consoles to be installed in their new models.

When the FCC finally rolled over and decided to convert most of the commercial FM bands into free Internet, Gary was waiting to accept a fat buyout of his obsolete licenses and reap the whirlwind of revenue from a fully mobile, wired nation. When two thousand motorists died while playing videogames and driving in the first year, the lawsuits and bad press barely even softened the hard-on the financial world had for Gary Spruance.

With the avalanche of capital, he founded Hardsoft, a late-comer to the operating system game that pioneered spamware, a buggy OS that installed itself uninvited on every PC in the western hemisphere and held files hostage until its steep registration fee was paid. Hardsoft diversified into games and social networking stuff, but Gary’s passion was for environmental engineering. His miniaturized red-light enforcement camera systems and made them so cheap that they were installed at every intersection in forty-two states, and thanks to his overseas automated interpretation and processing centers, he received ten percent on every moving violation.

Of all his inventions, he was proudest of the mod he devised for commercial air conditioning systems that periodically released just a whiff of raw sewage or gorilla musk into crowded common areas. It caused everyone who smelled it to be deeply repulsed by their neighbors, and thus to pay more for private and exclusive treatment, which was immensely popular with hotels and casinos. To subconsciously remind every individual in an upscale public space that he was surrounded by walking tubes of excrement somehow increased profits, while sending a message that no art could hope to articulate to a willing audience.

It was hard for him to hide in the shadows, since he was a 400-pound albino with a dog for an arm, but he was committed to his privacy, and to a secret dream of making the whole world exactly like that overturned van full of agony and charnel stench and Creed. This, of course, was not a regular American dream like becoming an astronaut or getting knocked up by a famous professional golfer, but more of a psychotic fantasy born of horrible trauma to a degree that leaves only suicide, crimefighting or heinous evil as career choices. But with his wealth and status, Gary at last began to conceive, for the first time, of something worth having, and not just because he’d taken it away from someone else.

Despite his unsavory countenance and antisocial demeanor, Gary found himself grudgingly admitted to circles of unimaginable privilege and power, and quickly found them to be drab farces run by inbred morons ripe for fleecing. Even as his embryonic dream began to ignite and burn up the last dregs of his humanity, Gary approached a select group of clients who could be trusted to keep a monumental secret, and who could afford to finance a bold, risky venture inconceivable to any world superpower.

It was easier to sell to rich people than silver polish. If they could pretend to enjoy themselves in Palm Springs or Martha’s Vineyard, then they’d go to any length to get away from the riff-raff. What was the point in amassing an ungodly fortune by despoiling the earth and victimizing the working poor, if you still had to live amongst them? Kaiju attacks were already more common and costly on the west coast than earthquakes. By the time North Korea entered the arms race and totally fucked the status quo with Kungmin Horangi, Gary had already completed the first phase of operations, and safely settled one hundred families in airtight, luxuriant estates in lava tubes beneath the Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon’s equator. When the predictable power struggles reduced the original cabal of tycoons to a handful of braindead ciphers and their clueless heirs, Gary found himself the reigning ruler of the Moon, an undeclared sovereign nation with fifteen thousand support staff servicing twelve hundred of the luckiest, laziest most ruthlessly efficient machines for turning food into shit ever conceived by selective breeding.

As of this year, the population had mushroomed to thirty thousand homeowners, with four times their number in indentured help; two spaceports with a hundred-strong saucer armada; a four-thousand square mile solar wind farm that produced enough energy to power North America; and nearly two thousand miles of pressurized underground habitats containing all of Earth’s most precious ecosystems, preserved in miniature. All these pearls he had laid out before his swinish clients, and more. The most incredible invention—the bilocational Gates which enabled instantaneous travel between Earth and Moon—had only excited the lunar gluttons’ lust for dumber diversions and shinier trophies.

The blue-blooded rubes believed the big day was coming, in which the Big Gate would be opened, and the Moon would get a stable, breathable atmosphere, siphoned directly off the Earth. If the Gates functioned and the magnetic shield towers erected all over the moon did their job, the lunar forecast for tomorrow called for mild rain followed by delightful Indian summer conditions. Weather forecasts for Earth, with about a sixth of its atmosphere suddenly vanished, were not so good.

Of course, none of that happy horseshit was going to happen, because Gary Spruance, as always, had his own plan. His two competing dreams—what he wanted for himself and what the rest of the world deserved—had finally become one. And while the dream involved the untimely death of every man, woman and child—indeed, everything that lived on Earth—it was pretty much all about him.

Like eight miles of radioactive roadkill, the exhausted Vegas Mega-Snake limped over the Nevada border. The sandstone mountains crumbled under its ponderous weight, under the stabbing onslaught of millions of laboring legs, many of which had broken or worn down to flailing stumps by the monster city’s breakneck race across America’s empty breadbasket.

For three days, Vegas had run at nearly a hundred miles an hour, stopping only to do battle with the Siamese twin scorpion-weasel Dallas/Fort Worth. By the time it had passed the empty desert cradle of its birth, the Mega-Snake had begun to drag, to look like a dead thing on automated legs.

Commander Wes Corben didn’t really believe that it obeyed the orders he punched into the jury-rigged laptop spiked into Vegas’s biomechanical nervous system. The monster city’s mad nomadic circuit around America had allowed it to rape a dozen lesser cities which would exhaust themselves to death hatching out little Mega-Snake franchises. The city seemed to be drawn by its own territorial imperative, to its home.

From the observation lounge at the top of the Stratosphere casino hotel, the mountains seemed to be covered in black ash. As they grew closer and passed underneath the Mega-Snake’s steel-scaled underbelly, the ash-heaps resolved into leaping fleas. Hill people, dispossessed and cut adrift in a monster-ridden wilderness, reverted to Stone Age savagery in less than a year. They had quickly turned to weird cargo cult rituals which preached that life aboard the lumbering kaiju-cities was Heaven.

“Slow down, please,” Corben murmured into the Mega-Snake’s ear. “Let them come aboard.” The city gave no reply, but he felt a gradual shift in the thrumming tempo of its gait, and saw swarms of refugees yanked up by grappling hooks, saw the monumental legs shaggy with climbing bodies. He wondered if they would be so eager to hitch a ride if they knew where the city was going, and what it was about to do.

“Is taking too long,” Svetlana’s withering voice boomed in his earbuds. “We should take battle to Moon-traitors. Look at screen, you fool!” The tight-beam transmission from the saucer she flew included a panoramic panning shot of the enemies amassing in their path. It was like somebody took the statistics of the least livable cities in America and used them as the roster for a giant monster football team.

“At least you could have picked city that flies.” Svetlana said, a moment before she got shot down.

“Svetlana!” He couldn’t see her on the radar, because she was in a fucking flying saucer. Ever since their too-brief intimate encounter, it burned like a motherfucker whenever he took a piss, but at least, thanks to her, he could feel something besides dread and remorse.

And she was right, damn it. He was only one man in an eight mile-long monster city-snake. It was time to call God and ask for some air support.

The number for the International Space Station rang about forty times before somebody picked up. In the background, he could hear laughing, crying and vomiting.

“I’d like to speak to the president or the NATO commander…”

“Fuck off, they’re busy. Cheers, mate, it’s all over…”

“Don’t hang up! Look, the aliens are not aliens, but ultra-elitist Randian douchebags who set up a breakaway state on the moon. They’re stripping the Earth of its vital natural and cultural resources to turn the Moon into a resort. They have moved a couple dozen mega-kaiju cities to southern Nevada to build what we think will be a huge teleportation gate to siphon air and water to terraform the Moon. The power expenditure alone for such a huge undertaking will likely cause the terminal earthquake we’ve always feared would sink the California coast…”

Corben trailed off when he realized nobody at the other end was listening. He heard someone talking about him with someone who wept and giggled at the same time. “Yeah, he just keeps on talking, innit? Sod off, it’s all over. The saucer-geezers are pouring the tea. Prepare your anus, mate.”

Ignoring Corben’s shouted questions, the limey at the other end shot him a feed of a massive armada of asteroids circling the moon like a halo of cookie crumbs. “Those rocks popped up out of fucking nowhere just yesterday. Nobody’s taking credit, but that kind of power don’t just come from thrift and honest hard work, donnit?”

The sight knocked the wind out of him, but it hardly surprised him. Once they’d finished plundering the Earth to turn the Moon into a low-gravity country club, they’d do well to bomb their homeworld’s last traces of infrastructure to insure that it’d be decades or centuries before anyone ever came after them. “I really need to talk to the President…”

“You know what the Frenchies put in the walls of their module for the ISS, mate? Enough fucking gear and booze to kill us all dead twenty times, that’s what. They figured it’d be hell to watch the world get knocked to shit and be stuck up here, right? So we got a lovely bunch of poofy wine and pure China white. The Main Man, he’s like a fucking surgeon. Never seen a cooler head in a crisis, yeh? Ask you, real cool-like, ‘one way or round trip,’ and he never misses the vein, he don’t. I’m holding out for when they drop the rocks on yer arses before I snuff it, but rest assured, we will be commemorating yer extinction with the mother of all knees-ups…” The line went dead.

The Mega-Snake came sidewinding over the hills overlooking Lake Mead and paused to survey a scene that would’ve turned Dante into an atheist.

The lake was swollen and brown and boiling, the bed and shoreline jigsawed with cracks that oozed magma and noxious gases. Without Vegas as a tourist draw, the desert oasis of Boulder City had become a bandit paradise, but now it hosted no fewer than twenty-two walking metropolises, which had come to enjoy the last stop for water and Nevada’s newest tourist attraction, a brand new active volcano.

It rose up out of the center of the lake like a fourth-grader’s science project. The slopes of the young volcano were covered with the interlocked bodies of dead or dying cities, which seemed to have joined together to form some kind of geothermal power plant which spewed cables thick as city buses that converged on a gigantic but otherwise unimpressive mega-kaiju-sized soccer goal, set up atop Hoover Dam. Beyond the dam, the Colorado River was a dusty furrow in the earth.

The soccer goal was a gate to the Moon. Some miraculous new form of instantaneous travel from planet to planet, and they used it to pretend to be Martians and loot their own home, and destroy it in the process. He had to admit, the plan was as ingenious as it was short-sighted and inhuman. Were the selfish assholes really that brilliant all along, and just waiting for us to become too dumb to stop them?

Long before it reached the shore, the Mega-Snake came under attack. The flaming Phoenix ptero-toad circled overhead and dropped fiery guano on them amid a hailstorm of flying saucers. The Yuma Giladillo hawked gobs of acidic venom from its eyes, and the two-headed serpent-tortoise of Calexico-Mexicali catapulted day-laborers skyward in all directions with the quiet confidence that the surviving workers would someday subtly undermine its rivals’ economies.

A dozen more kaiju cities waded out across the lake, hurling catcalls and making vulgar thrusting motions to suggest that their ill intent did not stop at a stiff beating.

Without being ordered, the Mega-Snake turned south along the boiling shore, snatching up houseboats and Airstream trailers and eating them on the run. A squadron of flying saucers strafed the Strip, blasting pirate ships and waterslide parks and the Lil’ Daredevil Chapel, home of the 500-foot Leap of Xtreme Faith. The great mirrored glass skyscrapers of thirty-six mighty 3,000-room hotel towers glowed and threw off a shitstorm of microwave radiation and static electricity that sterilized everyone in Nevada who hadn’t already had a vasectomy. Flying saucers got toasted and magnetically bonded to each other in midair. Betting action adjusted to three to one against the Mega-Snake.

A lumbering armored tarantula-hammerhead shark stilted over to intercept Las Vegas. Horribly disfigured by some losing encounters with several uglier cities, yet it was still recognizably the Land-Shark, the kaiju rape-plague’s Patient Zero. Its hundreds of teeth were carved into gigantic, razor-headed tiki idols. Written in green fire across acres of its tattered, dangling tongue: ALOHA HONOLULU!

Acidic foam jetted from its gnashing jaws, splashed off the Mega-Snake’s forward shields and ate through the Circus Circus Adventuredome like salmonella through a sushi buffet. A spray of goo from the passing shark’s fat abdomen hardened into a net of silicon webbing that ensnared the Mega-Snake’s neon-lit head and slammed it into the dirt. Honolulu proceeded to plow a trench in the earth with the floundering Mega-Snake.

“Do something!” a seasick high-roller screamed at Corben. “People are spilling their drinks!”

Moving so swiftly that all its swimming pools were emptied and flatscreen TV’s and Magic Fingers beds spilled out of its towers, the Mega-Snake reared and wrenched its own deformed shark-head off. From out of the gushing stump, a sleek new viper’s head emerged and fixed the Land-Shark with laser-beam eyes like huge tumbling dice. Then it opened its mouth and spat three hundred ballistic missile fangs filled with depleted uranium warheads and several thousand gallons of lethal neurotoxin into the arachno-shark’s open mouth. The colossal spider-shark had no proper brain to liquefy, but the missiles aerosolized it from the neck up.

The Mega-Snake advanced through the sizzling remains of the Hawaiian sharkrantula, but more city-monsters thundered into the breach—a Brobdingnagian horned toad that squirted inflammable blood from its tear ducts and was covered in billboards with aborted fetuses that said CHOOSE LIFE; a hundred-headed barnacle-goose thing from Canada; an orangutan with electrified octopi for arms and a missile the size of the Chrysler Building for a head.

The Mega-Snake paused to take stock of its situation and recharge its death ray hotels. Up in the top of the Stratosphere tower, Wes Corben suddenly felt like a fly on the hood ornament of a car charging off a cliff. He had known every kind of fear, shock, dread and mortal despair perceptible by the human brain, but something alarmingly new and ugly gnawed at his insides. It couldn’t be just nerves…

“Otaku, what’s going on down there?”

And he waited, but his stomach only growled.

At the foot of Hoover Dam, the gate abruptly began to glow and shimmer like the surface of a pool of mercury. The river, instead of passively flowing through its mysterious rippling veil, lifted out of its bed and flew through the gate, along with everything else in the vicinity that weighed less than a walking city.

With a thunderclap that shattered every window in every hotel in Las Vegas, Lake Mead vaporized into a pillar of superheated steam. Glowing cracks spread out from the volcano, racing through the brittle crust, which began to buckle and bubble like the surface of a pizza.

“Don’t shit your pants,” Corben muttered.

“Imbecile,” Svetlana said from behind him. “I would never—”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” he snapped, then turned around. “You’re alive, what a surprise…”

She threw her arms out as if to embrace him. A pair of shuriken pierced his hands just as he drew his pistol. “It’s time to drop the other hat, yes?”

I believe the expression, Madame, is, ‘the other shoe,’ said a voice inside Corben’s head. This came as grave of a shock as the pain of being stabbed in both hands, because it wasn’t the voice of Doctor Otaku. Corben really wanted to scream, but instead, he said, “Madame, we are ready to deliver the cargo,” in his own voice but with a thick Ukrainian accent.

“Excellent, Igor,” Svetlana purred, looking into Corben’s eyes at someone else, someone very tiny who must’ve infiltrated his body when they had sex. This human venereal disease must’ve traveled up his urinary tract to his bloodstream and somehow tracked and bagged Dr. Otaku without his ever raising an alarm. Either they were really fucking good microscopic commandos, or Otaku hadn’t put up any resistance. “If you knew all along, why didn’t you just turn me over to them when you had me at the space station?”

“They wanted proof,” Svetlana answered. “You showed them what they needed to know. But game is over. No one else has to die. Tell your monster to stand down.”

Corben finally found a reason to smile. “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” he said.

Driven by some indescribably huge wild hair up its ass, the Mega-Snake charged the horde of deranged giant monsters when the gate got fully charged and a howling wind ripped across the burning lakebed. It was the roar of a deep vacuum, the suction of the void ripping trucks and trailer parks and even a couple whole cities into the rippling mercury mouth.

While the other monsters clung to the earth, the Mega-Snake blasted them with its hotel death rays and waded through lava towards the gate. The Stratosphere rocked and trembled on its flimsy 107-story stalk. Svetlana’s flying saucer was docked directly on top of the tower. She cast him a rueful smile and said, “Dosvedanya, Wesley.”

He reached out to punch her, but instead, he bent at the waist and threw up into an air sickness bag she dutifully held out for him (I TOSSED MY MRS. FIELDS® COOKIES ON THE STRATOSPHERE! it said on the side). He couldn’t see anything unusual in the contents, aside from a tiny ivory Japanese pagoda that he didn’t remember swallowing, but he knew Otaku was gone.

His prisoner, his nemesis, his ace in the hole. Without him, Corben was not even a pawn in this insane game, but he knew they would never just let him go home to his monster bastard offspring.

Svetlana kicked his drooling chin, sending him flipping backwards across the lounge, and sprang onto a ladder that reeled her up into the belly of the flying saucer.

Corben was free at last, free to sink to the floor and pray that the Stratosphere would get crushed before it went through the gate.

The burning earth subsided beneath the Mega-Snake’s feet and dissolved into flecks and rafts of granite floating on a heaving sea of magma. The volcano erupted and blew half of the city-kaiju on it into the troposphere, while the other half sank, with much roaring and wailing and gnashing of terrible teeth, into the sea of lava.

Corben knelt on the floor of the lounge and put his head to the tile. Let it end here, he thought. I can’t take any more. I’ll do anything to stop this.

The Mega-Snake reared up and let the howling pyroclastic wind lift it like a great, greedy kite. Flying saucers circled it like angry gnats, zapping its windowless hotels and broiling a VIP cabana party at the Venetian. The Mega-Snake seemed like a city possessed as it charged over the lip of Hoover Dam and into the gate just as the mirror of mercury was shot through with black cracks. With its power supply consumed by a massive volcanic eruption which was even now rippling up the San Andreas Fault as a salvo of unprecedented super-quakes, the gate suddenly failed, cutting the Mega-Snake in two neatly at the intersection of South Las Vegas Boulevard and Dunes Road.

If you’ve ever cut the head off an anaconda, it was like that, except this anaconda had storm drains for veins and hoboes for blood. Just before the gate itself sank into the pulsating lava sea, the flopping, headless hind end of the Vegas Mega-Snake offered fifty to one odds against its own survival.

Of the other half of the Mega-Snake, no sign could be found, unless one happened to be looking for it on the moon with a high-powered telescope.

“And way out there on your left, towards the North Pole is the central reactor, which is actually a natural cavity, created when we processed the Moon’s largest concentration of water ice.

“This is so silly,” said the President of the Lunar Homeowners’ Association, “us trying to impress the greatest scientific mind in human history. But you gotta admit, it’s really something, eh?” Next to him in the monorail’s deluxe observation car, four of the ten richest men in the world all made affirmative noises.

This sucks, Gary thought, as he lit his thirteenth Kool of the day. He didn’t smoke, but Señor Dinky did. If he didn’t get at least a drag off a menthol cig an hour, he started whining and trying to chew himself off Gary’s arm.

Gary didn’t usually do the tours himself either, and it was extra awkward, giving a tour to his arch-enemy, now a microscopic android only recently recovered from a bag of vomit. He supposed he should lord it over the miniature fruitcake, but Otaku was the one gloating. His magnified hologram yawned elaborately throughout, asking just enough questions that Spruance was obliged to go into excruciating detail about their solid waste recycling processes and the extent of their nanotech program. Pacing around in a Petri dish under the stereoscopic microscope back in Gary’s ready room, he had the Emperor of Earth by the balls.

“Most impressive, Gary. You have recovered with alacrity from the stinging coup which I scored upon your more naïve incarnation only a year ago…”

See? Every chance he got, the microscopic prick did him like this. Like a bitch. Gary took out his joystick and hit a secondary combo sequence. The Luna HOA President and his sycophants all froze and nodded off on the monorail’s suede couches. “As you said, I’ve passed it behind me…”

“You remember it perhaps even better than I, don’t you? How your online gaming network served as the quantum overseer in the unprecedented chain reaction that animated Tokyo? I would think it would still be painfully fresh in—”

“Yes, but…” Señor Dinky coughed and inhaled his smoke, and started choking. While digging in the gagging dog’s throat for the lit cigarette, Gary decided to lay his cards on the table. “I have worked very hard to approach you about a job… a unique challenge I think you’ll appreciate.”

For once, Otaku just nodded and impatiently waved his little rodent hands.

“I’ve done everything to make this colony a viable permanent habitat and a lasting legacy, short of impregnating every female…” Distracted, he stopped to make a brief note for himself. “Now, the little homeowners’ association out here is totally down with my plan to animate a bunch of asteroids we dragged out from deep Earth orbit to make myself a new mega-kaiju.”

“I am not bored with your proposal yet. Continue.”

“They’re only too happy to let me fuck off to deep space on the back of a cosmic killer whale. But so far, our attempts to, uh, duplicate, ah…”

“Of course it didn’t work, you starfucking imbecile. You can’t just animate dead rock by wishing for it. To become more than an automaton, a mega-daikaiju has to have an infrastructure designed or grown to support an elaborate ecology.”

“I learn from my mistakes, Otaku. I will, in fact, simply wish for it. But that is only the beginning. I want you to turn the moon into a starfaring biomechanical organism.”

“The whole moon?”

“The whole motherfucking moon, yes.”

“So sorry, vainglorious moron. It’s dead rock.”

“It’s an egg with a yolk of cities, infrastructure, communications systems and biomass. I have the resources to infuse it with everything else it needs, and the nanotech to convert it to fit these specifications.” He waved at the hologram of the Moon, which must look to the microscopic Otaku like the eye of God. At a touch of Gary’s hand, the Moon cracked like an egg and morphed into something new that made even Otaku rub his eyes and stop pushing his shit in. “Yes, but where is the difficult part?”

“The creature that hatches… it will be me.”

“You want your DNA spliced into it? No offense, but I fail to see what beneficial traits you could offer…”

“No, not my DNA. Me. I want to be the Moon.”

“Ah, wonderful,” Otaku sneered. “Up to now, this has been very boring for me. This, at least, is amusing. What can you offer me?”

Deep in thought, Gary stroked his chin with Señor Dinky’s tongue. “Indeed, I could offer you a new, life-sized body, but I imagine you could’ve done that for yourself. I could offer you control over the kaiju cities and their franchises.”

Micro-Otaku spat on the floor. “I could’ve taken them over, but that was never my goal.”

“No, you don’t seek power or wealth, do you? Or even knowledge, except for the means to create more chaos. I must admit, you’re the only person whose motivations are completely opaque to me.”

“Feh! Everything you ever created only made the world into a smaller, more controlled and predictable opportunity to smell each other’s bodily effluvia. I have always striven to make the world larger, more mysterious and dangerous, to give mankind the world it deserved, and nature the weapons she required, to defend herself.”

“Well, think of how much more you could achieve, if all your enemies were zapped from orbit? I could do it for you.”

Otaku fidgeted nervously. “One is measured by the caliber of one’s enemies. One only grows when one breaks from containment.”

Gary hit another combo sequence and the four rich men dropped to the deck of the monorail car, robotically crawled into a daisy chain and commenced fellating each other. “I can give you this kind of power over everyone on Earth.”

“I am deeply embarrassed for you,” Otaku said, but he didn’t look it. Something at the edge of the hologram’s ranging field pressed against the glass slide that micro-Otaku stood upon. Some kind of water bear, badly mutated into a baggy blob studded with whirling protein drills. It was drilling through the glass, and Otaku actually looked frightened. Priceless!

Lazily, Gary ordered his lab robot to turn the dial on the microscope until the lens crunched into the slide. Otaku leapt away from a volley of glass spears and cracks like icy crevasses running underfoot. “A great challenge is its own reward,” Otaku yelped.

“Excellent. How soon can you start?”

“I am already finished, you childish ogre. The process requires an expert observer to parse the quantum uncertainty factor, which invariably turns the unobserved reaction into gray goo. I am the only qualified observer. And a nano-catalyst, which I have synthesized in abundance in preparation for just such a task as you have placed before me. Regrettably, I don’t have it on my most humble person…”

Gary felt a long curly hair of suspicion tickle his puckered place. If Otaku was bluffing, it might be better to just crush him now, and dig at his leisure through the mountains of booby-trapped super-science debris and freakish specimens they’d recovered from his damnable monster island. “Where is this substance you require? If it’s back on your island—”

“Oh no, it’s not there. I’ve learned to work on a much greater economy of scale. Bigger is no longer better. I have only to fetch the product from my old lab…”

Corben fully expected his blood to freeze and boil at the same time, for his intestines to burst like water balloons and for his crystallized shit flying everywhere to be the last thing he saw before his eyes were sucked out of his head like deviled eggs. Instead, he awoke to find it was raining on Las Vegas Boulevard, the north half of which now resided on the sunken lava plains of the Sea of Tranquility.

It didn’t look much like the Moon. The craters had been bulldozed and sculpted into the foundations for an epic low-gravity tournament golfing complex and a huge luxury housing development with models available to see now! The landscape looked like God’s own miniature golf course, with the Statue Of Liberty, the Hollywood sign, the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower artfully deployed as hazards. Beyond the dome, the hostile emptiness of the void beckoned, promising eternal peace.

He found the Stratosphere’s elevators shut off and the stairs locked. The VIP’s and street freaks who’d tried to mutiny had apparently found something better to do. Even at one-sixth gravity, he could probably still kill himself if he jumped.

Yes, that was the thing to do. He’d failed utterly in everything he’d attempted, except those nefarious purposes for which others had used him. He had abandoned or destroyed everyone and everything that had ever cared for him.

He found a fire ax and chopped out a window. The air was crisp and new-car fresh. High overhead, he could see some kind of static energy dome holding the air in. Apparently, someone had filtered out the deadly gases from the volcano, which would’ve been just what these assholes deserved.

He leapt out and drifted like a dandelion seed on the wafting air-conditioned breeze. On the Strip, refugees and tourists and mutant prostitutes were coming out to bask in the rain. They probably thought they’d been delivered to the promised land. At the sight of his swan dive, they broke into a ragged cheer. In their world, end credits were rolling over an Aerosmith cover of “Danke Schoen.”

He spread out his arms to embrace Las Vegas Boulevard, when something violently interrupted his fall.

Ascending just as fast as he’d fallen and dangling by his collar from the mouth of a gigantic pearl-scaled Oriental dragon, Corben tried to shrug out of his clothes. Cursing in Japanese, the dragon shook him like a field mouse until he was too dazed to try to escape.

The dragon flew the length of the hemi-Strip and passed over another golf course before it reached the burned out gate that the Mega-Snake had passed through. Blackened and half-melted and being taken down by roadies in faded Metallica shirts, it offered no return home, as if there was anything to go home to.

“Go ahead and eat me,” he moaned.

“You think I’m new? Never eat anything that wants you to eat it, that’s like basic Pokemon.”

“Are you rescuing me so I can save somebody or stop something?”

“Hell should I know? I’m a puppet.”

“Kill me. For your sake and everyone’s… just let me fall.”

The dragon circled around a monorail platform, but after the first few circuits, he realized she was dawdling, clutching Corben like a doll in her forelegs. He noticed that each of her talons had a different color nail polish on it. “Monorail’s broken again. So… why are you so much wanting on getting eaten?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She perched on top of the gateway and held him up to her mouth as if she had changed her mind about granting his wish.

“I’ve been used,” he said, “and every time I set out to save the world or at least keep it from getting worse, I end up being a prime instrument of its ruination.”

“Oh relax, it is not so bad… The Moon is really nice, now, at least…”

“Sure, they ripped off all the best parts of Earth… It’ll get ruined, too. I had the Devil inside me, but this evil Ukrainian bitch tricked me and let him out, and now he’s loose. I don’t know why I trusted her…”

“Did she act like she hated your guts at first, but then she abruptly melted after fate thrust you together and proved your heroic mettle?”

Far below, a giant armadillo left a piss-trail across the golf course as it waddled just ahead of a gang of swells in fox hunting gear, armed with laser-lances and riding Otaku’s patented emulemurs. Where did this dragon get all this comic book psychology shit? “Kinda…”

“Well, that’s why, dummy. That always works. If they’re nice to you at first, then you know they’re a traitor, but your traitor was sneaky.” The talons on his shoulder gave him a gentle squeeze and a shake. “Was the sex good, at least?”

“Of course, she was a tiger… Well, she was real aggressive, and you had to pull her hair and choke her and stuff, or she couldn’t get off, and she’d say things that just… How old are you? I shouldn’t be—”

“You shouldn’t give up, just because you’ve been tested. Only then do we find out what we’re really made of.”

Corben shook his head, wiped his nose. He really didn’t want to cry in front of this dragon. “It’s not that simple! I’m a war hero, I’ve proved my loyalty and my ability a thousand times, but it’s never enough, and the people in charge are insane bastards just looking to make a profit off the mess before it all burns up. And I’m not… I’m not such a good person.”

Now the dragon’s attention was really piqued. “What did you do?”

“I left… a litter of… puppies.”

“That’s terrible!”Her superheated gust of outraged breath raised welts on his face.

“It wasn’t my fault! I got abducted by NATO, and I… I just couldn’t take care of them anymore… They were orphans… and, uh, I took them to this trainer who said he could raise them to behave, but they’re still wild animals, and I couldn’t face living with them. So I ran away, but now I see I was wrong to try to tame them. They’re right to be wild animals, now. It’s not a human-sized world, and if I have to live, I don’t want to be a human in it, anymore. I want to be—”

The dragon’s eyes had clouded over. He thought maybe he’d bored her to sleep, but suddenly, a huge pearl dropped from one of the dragon’s great black eyes. Wiping away tears that were worth more than diamonds, she said, “That’s so sad… I want to eat you for being such a coward, but I can’t… because I’m no better than you! I found this nest of larval monsters on this island in the Antarctic sea… I fed them for a while, but they were vicious little shits, so I left them alone. I could hear them from halfway around the world, calling for their Daddy… and I can almost still hear them now…”

Now, Corben felt his eyes welling up with tears. He and the dragon hugged each other. “They’ll be alright,” the dragon purred, “My monsters and your puppies. Knowing what you want is the only kind of intelligence that matters.”

“I’ve been a fool. I should try to get back to my… puppies…”

Suddenly, the dragon went rigid and wadded him up like a dead spider in a Kleenex, then plunged down the monorail tunnel. “So sorry, Commander Corben,” she said in an unaccented monotone, “but you have something that belongs to me inside you, and I will stop at nothing to get it out.”

The voice that came out of the dragon’s mouth was a scratchy transmission, but Corben recognized it immediately. The world believed that it had suffered its last Internet worm at the hands of the Hardsoft CEO who unwittingly helped Dr. Otaku infect the world’s cities with the mega-kaiju virus, but Corben had known someone like Spruance must be at the apex of this operation, from the moment he learned there were no aliens. Only corporate software engineers could make such a promising prospect into such a shitty reality.

If nothing went wrong today, history would remember it as the greatest day in the history of science.

“Before the advent of civilization, Man, in his ignorance, filled his world with monsters. Cast adrift in a world he could not understand, let alone control, he worshipped the Sun and the Moon. Now, thanks to the excesses of science, he has begun to do so again… but the Moon, at least, will answer his prayers.”

Gary Spruance delivered his sermon to the people of the moon (and anyone on Earth with a really badass satellite dish) from the launch bay of the lunar shuttle Hegemony, which floated over KVK-788m6, a near-Earth asteroid that was about the size of the city of Indianapolis, which floated in the leeward shadow of the moon, and thus was easily visible to amateur astronomers on Earth.

Hegemony floated belly-up over the asteroid with its launch bay doors open and pointing what looked like a gigantic X-ray machine at the rock. Four flying saucers floated in a ring around the shuttle, but they had precious little to worry about. Earth’s defenses were utterly devastated, and the International Space Station had not issued even a token automated response to the Moon’s ultimatum. PEOPLE OF EARTH—ORDER IS BACK IN STYLE. FOOD, SHELTER AND FABULOUS PRIZES FOR THOSE WILLING TO WORK. TERROR AND DEATH FOR FREELOADERS.

As soon as the traumatized atmosphere stopped rearranging the landscape down there, the Moon’s movers and shakers would begin establishing plantations, gulags and other reform programs to remake the Earth into something the lunar elite would be able to someday return to. At least, that was the Moon’s plan, but you can’t get cows to walk into a slaughterhouse if you show them a flank steak.

“We’re all just as excited for you,” said the President of the Moon, LLC, “as we are grateful for all your hard work to establish our humble home among the stars.” He and the rest of the lunar HOA watched from the floor of the Tranquility Stock Exchange. The relief in his voice, in his sweaty twitching smile, was like a fart in a car. Though they had no idea what he was planning, they were pretty sure they’d almost seen the last of Gary Spruance. Their biggest fear now was that the confetti and disco ball would drop too early.

“Mr. President, peoples of the Earth and the Moon… get ready to meet your new god.” Gary threw the mic to the deck, which rebounded in zero-G and hit him in the crotch a moment before the cameras cut out.

“Make it happen,” Gary growled.

Commander Wes Corben could barely follow what was going on. He barely cared. Cruel, cliché-ridden fate had teased out his last working nerve and extinguished a cigar on it. That he still had some vital part to play in this cosmically retarded farce only convinced him that it was doomed to fail, whatever it was. With his arms zip-tied behind him and the treacherous Oriental dragon coiled around him like a circle of death, he was forced to chug bottle after bottle of hefty barium solution, or something like it. It was blueberry flavored.

Dr. Otaku floated within reach, life-sized and smirking at him with special contempt. Corben lashed out to kick him in the nuts. His boot passed through the holographic ghost and he kicked himself in the chin, chipping his teeth.

“Resolved as always,” Otaku grinned, “to use violence against others as a mask for self-destruction. American to the end.”

“Is this the end?” Corben asked. “I don’t think I’m that lucky.”

Gary stalked over to the specimen jar which contained micro-Otaku, gnashing serrated mantis-arms like gigantic pruning shears. “I’m not paying anybody here by the hour! Get on with it!”

Smiling and bowing, Otaku spoke extra slowly, as if to a signing chimp or an American. “I will explain in great detail, so there will be no unexpected eventualities.”

The first stage would entail the potentiation of the asteroid—it would be bombarded with the beam of a 23-terawatt gallium arsenide laser that would convert the carbon molecules in the rock into complex and very aggressive nano-compilers. The gigantic millipede that had invaded and infected Tokyo had been a Trojan horse stuffed with nano-compilers, animated and controlled by the combined attention of half a million Hardsoft Network gamers. Because this new daikaiju would be an apotheosis of one human mind, it would be charged and then imprinted with the human pilot in the second stage, which would, if all went well, result in a miracle to beggar all the cat and pony parlor tricks in the Old Testament.

“Stage Three,” Otaku continued after killing the live video feed, “will deliver the charged asteroid into the receptor in the Copernicus Crater. When the bird reaches its nest, then we will finally see something exciting.”

Looking down on the Moon, even on the big monitors, made Corben queasy. The imaging somehow penetrated the dead lunar shell with something much gnarlier than X-rays to reveal the whole staggering extent of the lunar colony, but also extensive veins of exotic metals and organic materials. The opaque shape nested within the dead gray lunar regolith was a fetus the size of Texas. A blinking red dot over its blank, shapeless head, beneath Copernicus, seemed to suggest that the god-sized embryo was a Hindu, or perhaps it was just the target zone for where they intended to drop the animated asteroid in order to bring the moon-god to life.

Corben finished his second liter of blueberry death. A third slid into its place.

Somewhere behind him, staring icy daggers at his head, he knew he’d find Svetlana Kurchenko.

Strapped into a bionic spacesuit with a crazy array of pincers and long mantis-like scissor-arms, Gary Spruance looked like the spoiled fat kid intent on ruining his own birthday. Corben began to hope that maybe the whole thing would blow up in his face, that maybe Otaku hadn’t sold out the human race, yet again. “What the hell are we waiting for?”

“The final ingredient,” Otaku snarled, “cannot be rushed.”

“I need to piss,” Corben mumbled.

“The final ingredient!” Otaku crowed. “Someone get the receptacle.”

Svetlana hovered into view with a clear plastic tube. “I take no pleasure in any of this,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to explain. You’re just a conniving, evil witch. I only blame myself for trusting you.”

“I don’t mean that. This is excellent. I earn big dollars, retire tomorrow on the moon.”

Expertly, she snapped the head of his manhood into the snug bell end of the tube and massaged his pelvis until his bladder relaxed. “I mean about touching your penis again. I hope this time, is free of parasites.”

“It was until now,” he snapped.

When he’d filled the receptacle, Svetlana floated it over to a couple of Gary’s giant cadaver-rat lackeys, who fitted the canister of frothy golden urine into a sort of lens on the maser projector which took up half of the launch bay and jutted out at the asteroid like an accusing robot erection. An electron microscope scanned the piss, revealing a busily recombinant sea of elaborate crystalline molecules that Otaku pronounced perfect for imprinting.

Rubbing his pincers together in naked geek lust, Gary shouted, “Make it so!” The entire shuttle vibrated like a dog scratching an itch. Everyone put on their helmets and sealed them up.

Corben strained and twisted in vain against the kind of ordinary plastic band that tied up garbage bags, when Gary seemed to remember something and turned back to point at him. “That asshole always ruins everything. Toss him out the airlock.”

Corben did a cartwheel and caught Svetlana’s head between his ankles and scissored her face-first into a bulkhead. Springing away and stepping over his arms, he brought the zip-tie up to his teeth and bit through it. He snarled at Svetlana, daring her to come closer and get her throat ripped out, when something enormous grabbed him from behind and whipped him end over end into the airlock. The outer hatch popped bolts and spat him out before he could bounce off it. His angry curses came out as silent puffs of frozen breath as he spun off into the void.

The black depths of infinite space inscrutably shrugged at the puny machinations of humankind, as they had since before man or Earth or its sun existed; but for a moment after Hegemony’s oversized radiation projector fired up and blasted KVK-788m6, the whole universe itself seemed to collectively emit a short, sharp gasp of horror. Or at least disgusted resignation that humanity was finally about to escalate to a genuine nuisance.

The crackling energy beam that bathed the asteroid swiftly began to dismantle it, but it was no mere destructive laser. It was so much fucking worse…

For the asteroid itself—a seven billion-year old slug of silicon, carbon, titanium and sundry trace metals left over from the destruction of the planet which once hung between Mars and Saturn—the transformation was as close as any celestial body could ever come to being raped and forcibly impregnated with such a virulent offspring that the molecular bonds that withstood eons adrift in space gave way like ripped pantyhose and shed cascades of heat and radiation, which the horrible embryo taking shape within hoarded for its own hideous development.

For the unborn product of this unholy union was an incarnation of life itself; the molecules charged with the essential spark that imbues gross matter with the entropy-defying essence of existence, yet simmering in an terribly unstable quantum state of infinite potential. Far more volatile than the animated Tokyo, for it did not catalyze the already existing infrastructure into a living organism. It took supremely inert matter and kept it roiling in a state of possibly becoming anything. It awaited only the yoke of a dominant will to give it form and function.

Inside the launch bay, Gary Spruance was itchy. He wasn’t sure if he should trust the hologram of his nemesis with his life, but there seemed no other way to step into true godhood.

“Of course, we could simply download your consciousness into the catalyst,” Otaku allowed, rubbing his ghostly hands together, “but you would remain yourself, and the monster would obtain a copy of your psyche. It would think like you, of course, and know all that you know. But would it be you? It would certainly believe it was, once it destroyed you. Perhaps you should try it. Only my way is certain to put you inside the monster, so that you will be the one who inhabits this absurd construct of yours.”

Otaku would lecture him on the phenomenology of consciousness until the mission clock ran out, if Gary let him. The micro-clone was under a microscope onboard the shuttle. A mercenary stood prepared to execute the tiny devil with a paper towel and some Windex at the first sign of treachery.

The hologram directed his tech support rats to paste on the biofeedback cap, a mesh with hundreds of tiny needles which would prick his scalp and convey the totality of his mind through the shunt, which would in turn directly take control over the boiling mass of quantum protoplasm below.

“Plug him in,” Otaku ordered. After executing some devastating coordinated freefall dance maneuvers, the rats obeyed.

“I don’t feel any different,” Gary said. His dog-arm reached out feebly for a cigarette, causing a mantis-arm to reach out and pinch off a tech-rat’s head.

“Look down,” Otaku said. On the monitors, the asteroid was undergoing a massive state-change, flowing and shifting like a school of fish to become a huuuuuge lit menthol cigarette.

“Wow,” Gary said, holding Señor Dinky up so it could see.

“The process works like simple biofeedback therapy. Relaxed conscious control is essential to maintain the structure of your new intermediate body. This is the part that not every half-wit Caucasoid could begin to master. Now!” The hologram took a swing at Gary, who, in the midst of his mantis-armor, cringed and killed two more rats. “Clear your mind completely! Picture only your new incarnation, your new self, and cloak yourself inside it. For at this critical juncture, you will run the risk of losing yourself to the manifested chaos of the id.”

Gary breathed like he was having a baby for a couple minutes. When he looked at the monitor, he felt like a proud mother, the mother of a god that was himself. The tech-rats cheered. The asteroid was a glowing cocoon about nineteen kilometers long.

“Say,” Dr. Otaku said, “I could not help but notice that you have several extra asteroids…”

Feeling euphoric, Gary thought nothing of revealing the full extent of his plan. “That’s the beauty of the final phase. You know, the Voyager probes won’t even reach another star for a couple hundred thousand years. I can open a wormhole from here to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. I can open a door and go through it and travel a squajillion miles in a subjective instant. It’s just a question of generating enough power to overcome the impossibility debt.”

“And you propose to produce this energy by solar panels and stationary bicycles? Your vaunted physics-fucking power has already destroyed most of the coastlines on Earth.”

“I should’ve thought it would be obvious. Why else would I go to all the trouble of bringing all that nature shit out here? The kaiju larvae from the breeding swarm have weakened the Earth’s crust, and the Gate power stations have created instability in the core. When I am transformed, I’m going to drop the asteroids into the volcanoes I created in California, Peru, Iceland and China. As it explodes, the Earth, for about 1.8 milliseconds, is going to be a wormhole. After I become the Moon, I’m going to ride the quantum backlash from the Earth’s destruction to the center of the galaxy, where I’ll search out new worlds to colonize, to sow the seeds of a glorious new posthuman empire.”

He truly expected Otaku to argue or scoff or even to bow his head to Gary Spruance’s superior diablerie, but the wizened homunculus just nodded his head slowly and wiped his brow. “You’re ready for the next stage. You must merge now with the intermediate body.”

“I’m ready.”

“Of course you are.” Otaku directed the rats, who screwed on Gary’s helmet. At the last second, one of them checked and rechecked his headset, while another fed a treat to Señor Dinky, who listlessly bolted it down. The miserable dog was allergic to everything, even its own hair. It immediately started to vomit and shit into Gary’s suit even as he was lowered into the VIP escape pod. The stench of irritable dog bowel syndrome filled his suit, but he somehow got past these mortal trivialities to hold onto the vision of his new godly body.

The pod descended like a thrown baseball from Hegemony to the rippling, serene winged form that his beautiful mind had called out of its cocoon. Just a moment before the escape pod made physical contact with the fluid surface, the headset in Gary’s ears began to blast Creed.

He screamed, and the asteroid screamed back at him. Every noise he made caused the song to start over, or another song on the album to start, until the whole album was playing simultaneously, using the bones of his skull as bassbins. A mouth the size of Wembley Stadium gaped wide and swallowed the falling escape pod.

Mariko sat up in bed as if she’d been falling, felt with her hands her favorite silk pajamas and the manga she’d been reading when she fell asleep. She looked at her hands for a long while, trying to remember why it should seem strange that they were human hands. What a weird dream!

Father said people who remembered their dreams were always unhappy. She wondered if she should tell anyone at school about it tomorrow, but decided against it. They would think she was a freak, and she already had a hard enough time fitting in…

Rolling over and over in zero-G with all her limbs clutched to her flanks like a flash-fried duck on a spit, she blinked her eyes and looked around. She drifted high above the Moon and quite close to a space shuttle in deep trouble.

Unless this was another dream. When the asshole with the remote control made her his zombie slave, she retreated into a fugue state where she dreamed she was still a human girl, which quite naturally begged the question of whether she’d wake up from the dream of being a dragon. For this alone, she was going to kill and eat the little fat dog-handed gaijin the moment he let his guard down. She wasn’t sure if she was still under remote control, but she didn’t feel any urgent need to masturbate, so maybe she was free.

The space shuttle was losing a tug of war with an asteroid made of giant monsters. As it got closer, she realized that it was both bigger than any living thing she’d ever seen, and it wanted to eat her. Corkscrew torpedoes of weaponized flesh and nano-reactive plasma chased her in shrinking figure eights until she could return all the meat-missiles to their sender.

Flying away from the Moon left her with few options. She doubted she could hold her breath long enough to return to Earth, and the Gates were all burned out. She went to ground in the dome with all of Earth’s great landmarks laid out on a golf course. The architects had arranged the landmarks in a kind of microcosm, around the world in eighteen holes, with shopping malls and ski slopes and everything a master race of spoiled human brats could want, with none of the dirty, smelly, common stuff of Earth.

At first, the Vegas Mega-Snake must’ve seemed like a disaster, but they had already begun to incorporate it into the landscaping. The casinos were tented to fumigate the natives and exotic mutant fauna, preparatory to turning the Mega-Snake into a proper five-star resort.

It must be truly dead, then. Lunar tourists—fat tubs of crap in personal movers like toddlers in rompers—roved over it like ants. Lumbering cyborg sauro-maggots vomited out new concrete handicapped ramps and ripped out the biomechanical capillaries and fiber optic nerves that spread out everywhere around its corpse to burrow into concrete and sand.

Mariko perched on the top of the Stratosphere. It was wrong, but what could she do? At last she understood why Godzilla constantly zigzagged from being a defender of humanity to a rabid avatar of Nature’s wrath. Humans never learned, if someone always delivered them. If they couldn’t kill their saviors, they were doomed to suffer them as villains. But what could she do? She was only one monster.

And then she heard a sound like whale song and frightened monkeys and a sad, gigantic cello. It had been bad enough when she’d first heard it in her mind, from thousands of miles away. Now it was coming from just down the street, in the gladiator arena at Caesar’s Palace.

They were scared and wanted their nest and their father and not to be prodded with Tesla arc blasters or flamethrowers, anymore.

Just like that, she knew what to do. Rescuing the babies wouldn’t be enough. These human worms needed to be reminded that their sun had set.

“You were the city that raped other cities. On Earth, toothless hillbillies and Polynesians worship you as a god. Is this where you want to be buried?” she growled, her voice catching fire. “Is this how you want to be remembered? As a landscape feature on a golf course?”

Mariko launched herself like a flying squirrel off the roof of the Stratosphere tower and strafed the Strip with gouts of fiery bile. Maggot-bots burst and a new outlet mall was cremated. A squadron of flying golf carts dogged her tail. When she returned to the tower, she found it trembling and hot. Neon lights blazed and the earth shook and monsters and robots and slaves sprang like fleas from the corpse of the city of Las Vegas.

Getting thrown out of an airlock without oxygen tanks was an unthinkably awful fate, but for this, at least, Commander Wes Corben had been trained. Expelling his last breath to flatten his lungs before they could burst, he crushed his eyes shut and clawed out at the hull of the shuttle. His fingers caught on a seam in the ceramic re-entry tiles. He clung to the side of the ship like an insect, and he thought, this is it. The only useful part of me—my piss—taken away. I’m the empty package.

If only morbid self-absorption was a viable power source, you Americans would have ruled the world like gods, said Dr. Otaku, in reality and not just in your empty, homoerotic summer blockbusters.

What the hell are you still doing in my head?

I never left, idiot. Remember, the bullet in which I first invaded you contained literally thousands of micro-clones of myself. I shut them all off before I was abducted, but they only waited to become useful again. You can open your eyes, but keep your mouth shut.

He hesitated only a little before he opened his eyes. If Otaku was still inside him, than he had no reason to want him dead. His sweat, apparently, had congealed into a bubble, which blew a helmet and hardened around his head.

Incredibly, his eyes neither boiled nor burst.

The imaging fluid you drank contained oxygen in compressed suspension and the ingredients for a liquid silicon spacesuit, which should protect us for an hour.

It was ironic, holding his breath for so long, fighting the lethal reflex to breathe. Ironically, he had also had a much better view of what was going on.

He dangled below the underbelly of the shuttle. He slowly drew closer to the asteroid, which now looked like a colossal battle royale of psychogenic id-monsters beating the shit out of each other. Clearly, Gary Spruance had lost his mind and probably died, but the incoherent orgy of monster-trauma could go on forever. The shuttle seemed to be trying to abort the nightmarish cosmic abomination it had created, but the asteroid was having none of it, and tugged the shuttle ever nearer by a mile-long umbilicus of fiber optic flesh.

We can accomplish nothing out here, Otaku said in his head. I suggest—

“Way ahead of you.” Gliding back around the shuttle’s rotund fuselage with his bare hands, he came to the starboard airlock. “I don’t suppose I drank a weapon?”

Just figure out how to get the door open.

There were no controls, no way to get inside without blowing the ship apart.

The door opened.

Svetlana flew at him with her arms out to catch something, anything, just like he had a moment ago—

He caught her with his legs locked around the airlock door. He touched his helmet against hers. “They threw you out.”

“They sent me out to kill you—” She was wearing a spacesuit, but had no harness, no weapon.

“They ditched you.”

She butted her helmet against his hard enough to crack it and clamped her thighs to squeeze the breath out of him, when the shuttle’s main thrusters fired.

Both of them were thrown off like flies in a jet stream. They floated in silence, hearing only their own screams, until they slammed into the yielding molten flesh of the asteroid.

Struggling as if through a sea of congealing Cream Of Wheat, they climbed up onto a floating island of scabs. Though it was little bigger than an average flyover state capital, the terrain itself vomited out endlessly mutated variations on Gary Spruance’s id, ego and superego. Even the bestial id monsters had massive, pulsating brains and other nerdy features, while even the superegos looked like penises on legs.

High above them, the shuttle blasted the asteroid with its thrusters, towing it across the sky like a great, melted chariot; but slowly, it was dragged down and sank into the psychogenic tar pit.

Corben and Svetlana leapt around and around the tumbling monster-planet, striving to keep ahead of the rampaging giant products of Gary Spruance’s fragmented psyche without reaching escape velocity and flying off into the void. “Try not to think of anything,” Svetlana signed to him, but he realized too late that the planet reacted to his thoughts, as well. A horde of giant snakeheads—vicious, gaping maws and goggle eyes—came bounding after them on forking, floppy tentacle limbs, shrieking and croaking in a tea-kettle tone that somehow carried through the void and into his bones, “Daddy! Daddy please don’t leave us!”

When they’d lost count of how many times they’d gone round the asteroid, Svetlana turned and tackled him, pinning him and pressing her helmet against his so her shouting would carry. “I am sorry I betrayed you, before. I have come to realize that you are love of my life. Only you can save us. Be a man now, and I will love you always!”

Corben couldn’t think of anything that could save them, but looking into her flinty gray eyes, clutched in the iron grip of those irresistible thighs, he could say only, “I’ll try like hell.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.

Suddenly, the anarchic orgy of monster-on-monster action subsided and sank into the plastic surface, until they stood alone on the convex plain, which began to wrinkle like mud drying out from a torrential rain, or like the whorls of a great brain.

It would be a shame to let all this go to waste…

“Stop it, Otaku!”

It’s hardly your place to order me, but we are together in this complication. I attempted only to control the runaway reaction, but in its hunger to be imprinted, it has chosen me. The Otaku who has taken over the asteroid is a new expression of my identity. Having just been born in outer space with an unformed body and godlike power, he is most disrespectful.

Beneath them, the asteroid began swiftly to take a coherent shape. Great black wings unfurled and flexed to catch the sun’s rays and soar, traveling at a disturbing fraction of light speed without any propulsion. Swooping low over the surface of the Moon, it appeared to be searching for something.

“It’s trying to merge with the lunar colony!” Corben shouted. Far below, a city-sized dome on the floor of the Sea of Tranquility burst and something three miles long and lit up like color-blind Christmas came flying out of the hole.

The horribly abused asteroid had reassembled itself into a gargantuan owl, with a monstrous radioactive brain for a head and thousands of trailing segmented tentacles for legs.

The Vegas Mega-Snake had resurrected itself as a cruise missile, with hundreds of jury-rigged rocket pods bolted to every contour of its crumbling skeleton. With the last freakish spark of life still burning in its glittering, greedy heart, the city-monster struggled to achieve a collision course with the asteroid, seemingly guided by the luminous pearl-colored celestial dragon that circled the gutted spire of the Stratosphere tower like the ghost of a rollercoaster.

Corben looked to Svetlana, but she was passionately making out with an Otaku-shaped tentacle that had erupted out of the ground, dry-humping it through her suit, so he jumped off alone.

He flew alongside the massive meteor-owl, watching as it reached out to ensnare the intercepting Mega-Snake in its barbed tentacle-talons. The Mega-Snake twisted around the Meteor-Owl and lit up with tactical nukes, tightened into a straitjacket embrace that dragged it away from the Moon. Like a drunken comet, the battling monsters tumbled out of the plane of the ecliptic and into the empty, inky depths.

All of which did Commander Corben no good at all, because he was floating in the void above the moon with about five minutes left in his liquid spacesuit. And for once, he didn’t feel insignificant or even particularly lousy. He had done little or nothing to influence the turn of events, but he had witnessed an insanely, ridiculously awesome spectacle of creation and destruction and survived. Perhaps it was nothing less than the gospel of a new mythology, a new religion that would preach the values and the dangers of knowledge, and he could be its messenger. Maybe this time, they would finally get it right.

The angel of his new religion swept down and snatched him out of his eccentric lunar orbit and brought him down to the ruptured lunar dome that Vegas had flown out of. The roof was already being repaired by a swarm of spidery robots. Inside, she circled the Eiffel Tower presiding over an absurdly oversized golf course. He looked around in vain for a crowd, a parade, a reviewing stand. For a moment, he actually expected someone to recognize what he’d done.

“Someone’s been asking for you,” she said, and dropped him into their nest at the peak of the tower. “I found your puppies!”

What a fool he was, to think that a human could teach monsters to live in a monstrous world, or that he would write the new gospel of the age of cyborg mega-kaiju. Now, he hungered only to be nothing.

His children looked like him when he was a baby—they had his eyes with his remote, never satisfied gaze, but in every other respect, they took after their mother, when she’d laid their eggs. When he looked down into those gigantic, lambent eyes, so bright with hope and hunger, so eager to rip his limbs out of their sockets with their beaks, he felt only pride, for he’d finally done something heroic.

And if nothing else, it was over… wasn’t it?

This experiment has yielded too much valuable data, Dr. Otaku said in his head, to be thrown away.

“Don’t try to change my mind, it’s over—”

You only want to be devoured by your monstrous offspring, then?

“It’s an ending…”

Then you leave me no choice. It was going to be a surprise for your birthday…

Almost frozen with the slow breakdown of his now petrified spacesuit, Wes Corben exploded with light.

His body disintegrated in a space-raping blast of crackling radiation and shot out in all directions as a wave of pure anti-entropic energy that left in its wake arcs and braids of quantum uncertainty, lattices of semi-sentient light that emitted a radical gravitational pulse which gouged a sizable chunk of the moon’s surface up into its midst, then collapsed into colossal glowing slabs of complex matter, spinning a new form out of the explosion.

Corben continued to fall, but now the gaping mouths seemed to fall away or to shrink, until he seemed to hover over a nest of tiny, terrified baby birds in a toy train city, and then they were all gone.

Horrified, he rebounded off the moon and launched himself into space. The gravity pulse continued to suck in drifting asteroids and satellites to be woven into the monstrous conflagration. As abruptly as it began, the reaction suddenly ceased, leaving a cooling humanoid mass tumbling in an unstable Earth orbit.

Corben looked at his hands, crusted with frost and coated with a fine, translucent exoskeleton that glittered like diamond dust. He was still recognizably himself, but as near as he could tell, he was now large enough to use South America for a surfboard.

Underneath his armor, he felt the creepy tickle of gaseous vapor percolating out of his pores and separating into oceans and atmosphere, and a maddening itch spreading from his armpits and groin that only alarmed him more when he discovered patches of spreading blue-green mold covering much of his torso.

Don’t scratch, Otaku warned. Those are your equatorial rainforests.

“This was the last thing I wanted,” Corben groaned. His mouth shut against the vacuum, which seemed not to bother him overmuch, though the naked rays of the sun were bound to get on his nerves.

Exactly why it worked, Otaku explained. My experiments in your gut were going nowhere. I could have turned you into a giant monster and ridden you around raping cities, but on Earth, I’d always be under someone’s thumb…

I know the feeling, he grudgingly thought.

Exactly! Fuck all those meddling human assholes. We don’t need them. You’re big enough that if you ever came back to Earth, you’d crack the crust and cause nuclear winter with your grotesquely enlarged bodily functions. Now at last, I have the laboratory I’d always dreamed of—

Corben’s mind reeled with remorse as he contemplated what he’d done. His children were gone along with a huge scoop of the Moon. The glowing new crater he’d made in the Sea of Tranquility was about thirty miles across and almost as deep. What the fuck did you do to me?

I ripped the code from Spruance’s matter programmer and inverted it to avoid the unsightly outcome he encountered. Your cowardly lust for oblivion was the catalyst that provoked the reaction. In its hyperexcited quantum state, matter can be forced to grant wishes, but it is a fickle and mischievous djinn.

“You did all this while I was getting my ass kicked in space.”

We work fast. There are four thousand of us.

A spastic flash of an image sparked directly in his brain from the parallel nervous network Otaku’s nano-clone army had built in secret inside him. It showed him a Medieval Japanese city of ivory pagodas and magnificent fortresses, a microscopic Shangri La embedded in the glial cells of the right anterior forelobe of his brain. Every face among the thousands of now normal size monks that smiled up at him from that city, was the face of Dr. Otaku.

Your desire for meaningless self-sacrifice catalyzed the chain reaction which recreated your body at thirteen million times its original mass. In seeking to become nothing, you have become everything.

“If I ever get my hands on you…”

Calm yourself, Wes Corben. Petty revenge is no fit occupation for the thoughts of a god.

“Don’t call me that…”

I won’t, but they will…

Corben turned in space, feeling the sun’s gravity as a steady tidal pull drawing him into a moth’s embrace, even as he felt his own subtle influence drawing commercial satellites out of their orbits while he floated perilously close to the Earth.

He farted and changed course, bringing himself into the shadow of the Moon, and the path of dozens of makeshift rockets filled with Vegas refugees.

In his breastbone and his sinuses, he felt rather than heard an exultant roar. The sound, like whales and gorillas mating on a bed of cellos, came from somewhere in the wilderness on his inner skin.

He took a big breath of vacuum and laughed a silent laugh that knocked a couple extra seconds off the Earth’s calendar. Those roaring new lives would become the apex predators on planet Corben, sure to be worshipped as terrible gods by the casino trash who would somehow have to make a home inside him.

Wes Corben said, “I don’t know how to feel about this.”

We’re working on that, said Dr. Otaku.

About the Author

“Cody Goodfellow” was a cartoon character in an experimental regimen of sign language filmstrips devised by the Vogelkopf Linguistic Institute to teach a new international sign language to deaf children in Central America in the mid-1970’s. This bold and generous educational program became a source of bitter controversy, because the deaf students had received no previous linguistic programming, and failed even the most basic tests for sentient self-awareness. Perhaps owing to this extreme retardation, the group unanimously came to identify themselves as “Cody Goodfellow,” the well-meaning but hapless protagonist in the videos that gave them language.

This odd accident of “mass media humanization” later turned bitter when many in the pioneer study later rejected the programming, complaining bitterly that the imposition of linear neurolinguistic thought destroyed their native preverbal consciousness, which allegedly conferred upon them compensating attributes such as telepathy and photographic clairvoyance. Born-again-feral terrorist groups such as the Quiet Tribe of the Nicaraguan Highlands and La Raza Colmena in the swamps of Honduras waged a bloody insurrection to forcibly regress Latin America into a pre-sentient, pastoral wilderness. The debased caricature of Cody Goodfellow was frequently painted in human feces on the ruins of schools, media and libraries destroyed by the radical subhuman militias.

The Cody Goodfellow who authored this book was a successful early test case with no connection to the lamentable unrest caused by his namesakes. Recovered in Southern California at the age of six, the nameless deaf child apparently lived inside the backstage area of the enormous Campus Drive-In in San Diego, California from the time he was abandoned by his parents. Despite his complete rehabilitation and integration into mainstream society, the author Cody Goodfellow still insists his parents were the green and brown Gargantuas.

skippandgoodfellow.com
perilouspress.com

About the Artist

It’s been said that Mike Dubisch can see into other dimensions, while others say simply that he has an alien brain and a god hand. It has been privately mused that he sold his soul to the devil, and publicly agreed that he made a bargain with C’thulhu. One of the most frequently asked questions about his drawings is “Why does it look like it’s moving?” Currently Mike is creating a universe, sculpting shadows, and soliciting and distributing curses.

http://www.facebook.com/Mike.Dubisch
http://www.facebook.com/MikeDubischArt
http://www.TheMikeDubischSketchbook.BlogSpot.com
http://www.Dubisch.BlogSpot.com
http://www.ThePeopleThatMeltInTheRain.TheWebComic.com
http://dubisch.deviantart.com/

About the Artist

Nick Gucker grew up on the rain forested island of Ketchikan, AK and moved to Seattle to pursue music and art. When he’s not busy whispering to insects or engaged in the taxidermy and mummification of creatures both reptilian and mammalian, he can be found hunched over his art table dreaming up disturbing nightmares and freakish delights.

Nick’s artwork has appeared in the pages of Strange Aeons Magazine and The Magazine of
Bizarro
Fiction. His illustrations have also graced the pages of the novelette The Eye of Infinity by Sci-Fi mythos writer David Conyers for Perilous Press and the forthcoming Aklomonicon (edited by Joe Pulver and Ivan McCann) from AKLO Press in the U.K. His visions have adorned book covers from Blysster Press authors Clyde Wolfe, R.L. Reeves and M.R. Mitchell and can also be seen in online contributions to Lovecraftzine.com and Thisishorror.co.uk.

More of Nick's art can be found at his secret base:

www.nickthehat.com

Bonus Features

Wet Nurse

Deanna awoke, and the phlegm in her chest was a brittle ceramic glaze that shattered with the first coughing fit. Deanna rolled over in bed and lit a smoke before she opened her eyes. She could finish the pack, and nobody could say shit. She’d paid for her crime, and now, all alone in her body, she answered to no one.

Not that they came to check. They got what they wanted, and she left what they still needed at the door for them to pick up every morning, like a dutiful cow. It was like her mother used to joke after she threw out her husband: When you get the good stuff out, you throw away the wrapper, right?

She found the TV remote bolted down on the nightstand, thumbed it on and flipped through the early talk shows. Prescription bottles rolled off the edge.

She still had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have to do anything harder than phone sex again for a while, if she kept her wits, but she wouldn’t be able to get good, legal shit like this, so even though her womb still oozed blood and her muscles felt like the floor had been torn out of her, she denied herself another pill, for now.

She would get through this. Dr. Ramos said there would be depression. She explained it like Deanna was an idiot, but it made sense. Her body had been put to its ultimate test, the task for which it was made, and for a while, it was going to try to do that job, until it sunk in that there was no baby.

It still hadn’t sunk in to her mind, either. She was free. She had money, more than she’d ever make at any kind of real job. And all because she’d sold something that she would gladly have paid someone, anyone, to scrape out of her. Dr. Ramos, who steered her away from the door of the Planned Parenthood clinic, had shown her a better way.

It hadn’t been easy, but Deanna had made the most of the time. As she sat in this room for six months, she’d worked as hard as the baby inside her, to grow and change. She had made plans, but she couldn’t remember them right now. All she could think of was sleep, and the dream.

She rolled over in bed and muted the TV, treated herself to a bonus pill she found in the folds of her pillowcase. It stuck and dissolved in her throat and made trippy haloes around the pharmaceutical nativity scene on her nightstand, and she melted with it.

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” everyone said, and they were right. She could see the baby rising like a bloody sun from the valley between her legs. Her vision was all oily trails from the tsunami crash of pleasure-in-pain, flying high above her body, and then her baby was in her arms, and she glowed in that eternal, perfect moment, anchored for the first time to her own life, to all life, to the wisdom that ran in her blood, that told her just what to do. She tugged down her hospital johnny and lifted the baby’s mouth to her nipple.

Her beautiful child sucked eagerly, and she gave a sigh of relief as the unbearable pressure in her turgid breast gave way to a tickling of pure contentment, as all that she was, and all who came before her, flowed into her newborn. She forgave the world and all those who’d made life hard on her—from her stepdad to JT Barnhardt, and all the other boys and men who might have fathered her child, then drove her out of town. She forgave them unconditionally, and begged the pardon of all those she’d ever hurt, and knew true peace.

Her heart’s desire fussed and nibbled at her drained breast, twisted in anticipation as she lifted the hungry newborn to suckle at the other one. Eagerly, tiny jaws working, it fed, and all the pain and promise stored up in her flowed out.

She floated out of herself again. Light gushed out of her, and she had one of those things like an orgasm that saints had in those paintings, where they looked like God was goosing them up the ass with an electric toothbrush—but these were only the words she tried to use to describe it afterward. For now, she was transported, transformed, into a mother. And she would be a good one, she would clean up for good, she would change—

Cold rubber hands lifted the baby out of her arms, and she was like smoke trying to claw at the nurse who turned and presented her baby to the skinny lady and the balding man who talked on his cell phone throughout the birth. They thrust a pen into her crabbed hand and she made a mark on some papers, and then they were gone. Tears smeared the ink on her check.

She rolled out of bed, arms reflexively cradling her deflated belly.

Dr. Ramos said she’d have dreams. Postpartum depression. Pills. Her hand went up under her sweat-slick T-shirt. Her breasts were slack, not engorged like they’d been for months. She hissed in surprise and pain as she touched her outraged nipples. They felt chewed, but they resonated, rang like nervous chimes with the echo of feeding her baby. It had felt so right, so real—

In real life, she never got to touch it. She did not know its sex, had never seen a sonogram. They told her only what she needed to eat or avoid during the pregnancy, and trained her to pump her breasts and leave milk in a Styrofoam cooler outside the door.

She only saw its shadow as they lifted it out of her, heard a single thin wail as they took it to be weighed. But when she touched her nipples, she knew that somehow, somewhere, it had been real. She hugged herself, to hold in the last fleeting traces of joy.

Deanna’s mother taught her smart from stupid, and she didn’t raise an idiot. Her father kicked in little of value to her blossoming maturity, though he did nothing to queer it, either. She knew him as a nice but busy man who worked hard to pay for a house he didn’t live in.

A talk show therapist would zero in on Deanna’s slut act as a function of Dad’s absence and Mom’s indifference, but her motives were simpler. She just enjoyed sex as much as boys did.

When her period went missing, she could only curse her mother for telling her always to be smart, and not forcing her to be good. When JT Barnhardt dumped her by way of punching her in the mouth, she stole money from Mom and ran away to the next state to get an abortion on her sixteenth birthday.

She told herself she was not only smart but brave, taking care of it before she started to show and the procedure got even more expensive and gross, but then the little Filipino lady doctor from the adoption agency bird-dogged her and made her an offer.

The clients set her up in the motel room and paid all of her expenses, but she socked away a lot of extra cash doing phone sex. It kept her too busy to fall back into doing speed, and the damned hormones had her masturbating all the time, anyway.

Fuck it. Fuck him or her, and fuck you, too. She had done a job, the finest form of piecework, and she got paid. She could afford to lie back and wait for something to tell her what to do with her life, and until then, there were plenty of diversions to numb the nagging ache inside her that tried to tell her life had just passed her by.

She wasted half an hour trying to squeeze milk out of her breasts. The cold plastic suction cup wrung her out, but collected only a few drops of white-gold Deanna-juice. Had she milked herself and forgotten about it? Stupid cow…

The Styrofoam cooler was empty. Dr. Ramos was going to be pissed. She scribbled out a note and left it on the door, changed into fresh clothes, and went outside.

She went to the bank and deposited her check, pulled back cash for snacks and smokes. As she walked down the sun-blasted sidewalk, she avoided the stares of street trash, dirty old men and tattooed weirdoes ogling her angry tits and flabby ass, hid her flushed face that betrayed how badly she longed to take one or all of them home.

She had to get off the street and fill some bottles, lie down and rub one out; she had a hole burning in her, and if she didn’t get to safety, it would suck someone in with her.

By the time she got back to her room, her billowing, maternity-sized T-shirt was plastered to her chest, and not with sweat. She peeled it off and wrung it out over the sink. Cloudy mother-of-pearl rivulets of oily human milk dripped from her fingers and circled the drain.

She got a paper to look for an apartment—she hoped the clients spoiled their new baby with all the money they’d saved keeping her in this shitty motel. Poring over the classifieds, she found and circled an interesting ad. MOTHER’S MILK: HIGHEST PRICE PAID. SOPHISTICATED CONOSSIEUR SEEKS ENTERPRISING DAIRYMAIDS.

She turned on the TV as she set to work with the pump, settled on a Mexican talk show. For extra flare, the first row of the jeering studio audience was packed with circus freaks. An obese mongoloid cyclops thumped his chest and pawed his mate, a giggling pinhead girl, as the platinum blonde hostess harangued the caged transvestites onstage.

Deanna stared, transfixed by their deformities, thinking of all the drugs she did before she found out. Shit, she thought, maybe you dodged a bullet. But she knew her baby was perfect.

Her fingers absently tweaked and twisted her nipples, still engorged after six bottles. She only felt wired after masturbating, so it took two pills to knock her out and deliver her to the dream.

She found that when she tried to put it into words, the whole thing squirmed away. What little she knew about brains and how they worked was gleaned from late-night study-sessions in the badlands of basic cable, when nothing better was on.

When things happened all at once, like a car crash or a slew of unfamiliar names at a party, the brain sucked it all in like an airliner’s black box, raw experience sloshing around until you tried to pull a thing out and name it. The brain could capture it all, but the mind, the invisible man at the switch, could only hold onto a few things—four, in most gray matter—and the moment those things were named, the rest dried up and blew away, maybe to return in a moment of reflection someday, or maybe just bulk-erased by a tiny magnet in the video library behind her eyes.

Deanna could build a bridge of words pretty far across the chasm between herself and her dreams, but even with better than the standard four-cylinder brain, she only knew that she dreamed of feeding her baby, and it felt so divine as to make everything else she could do, drink, snort or smoke in this life seem like a waste of time.

She held all that was good in the world in her arms, and it was entrusted to her to nourish and nurture it, but something had torn her away from her charge, something—

The phone. She rolled over and rubbed her chest, her nipples tender and sore, her fingers wringing them as they must have done all night. Torturing herself, her body trying to drive her crazy. A sob choked out of her, but she bit it back, as if to keep herself from hearing it.

She had to stop being stupid. She could face anything. She had gone clean when she knew she was pregnant, had not, even then, succumbed to the dumb drives of her drug-hungry flesh. A voice inside her had told her to get clean and do right by the thing inside her, even as she stole the money to scrape it out.

“Hello?” she asked the phone, but only then remembered to pick it up.

Sniffling breaths and a thickly accented voice from a mouth tinier and tighter than an Amish asshole. “Deanna, I came, and there was no milk. The baby needs milk, Deanna…”

She tried to explain, but only a strangled sob got out.

“Deanna, you sound upset. How are you feeling?”

She tried to speak, but her eyes and sinuses clotted up with tears, and nothing came out but a sob of, “Uh-huh.”

“This is a difficult time, Deanna, and you shouldn’t be alone. You haven’t contacted your family, have you?”

“I—” she gasped, throat clamped shut, “I’m all alone, Duh-duh-Doctor—”

“No, you are not alone, Deanna. I’m coming over. I want to help. You let me help you, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and hung up. She drifted off, forgetting who called.

She had to break this cycle. Hormones and pills weren’t the boss of her. She was rich and young and free. She could jump on a plane with just the clothes on her back, fly to New York and shop for a new wardrobe on 5th Avenue, go to a posh nightclub and dance alone until the finest guy in the place fell under her spell, go back to his place and fuck his brains out, get knocked up and start all over again—

Her vagina still throbbed with dull pain, but it had to be taught a lesson. She slipped two fingers into her panties and kneaded the hood of her clit. It was dry and sore and dead as a wart to pleasure, but she licked her fingers and kneaded herself into a grudging semblance of arousal. It had to learn what it was for. I’m not just a chute for strangers to slide in and out of. I’m not a fucking farm animal!

At last, some spark of desire kindled inside her, the merest mote of light, and she thrust herself at it, plunging three fingers into herself and throttling her clit with her thumb.

The hot, soft hell of her womb opened up, cervix dilating down to meet the eager spears of her fingers, nails gouging divots of velvet meat out of her uterine wall.
Her hand spasmed, wracked with cramps, but she twisted it further, probing the ticklish pucker of her asshole with her pinky, driving all four rigid digits into her holes like the torrent of swords in the coup de grace of a bullfight.

A wounded gasp ripped out of her. The impending orgasm teetering overhead like lightning gathering to strike her down, but then it melted away like an unanswered prayer. She worked even harder, and at last, there was lubrication in abundance. She didn’t care if it was blood.

She had brought a child into the world just for money, she could take anything. This is what you are for—

Her fingers touched something that was never, ever there, before. Never, except when—

Something brushed her still, stiff fingers. Something inside her grasped them.

Deanna yanked her hand free and screamed. She was careful when she played with herself during the pregnancy, but there was nothing like that in there—

She rolled over and vomited all over the nightstand. Her pill bottles and People magazines washed over the edge on a pink wave with little Oxycontin icebergs in it. Her stomach rolled and wrung itself dry, but in the basement, her womb rumbled and quivered like a clogged volcano. She did more than hurt herself, down there. She woke something up.

The neon light for the Cash Fast place outside her window came on, drenching the dark in epileptic red and gold. She lay down on the bed and prayed for sleep, prayed for the dream. And this prayer, at least, someone saw fit to answer.

She held her baby, and everything was fuzzy and heavenly white, bathed in that flattering, Vaseline-filtered light the movies used on aging actresses. She knew this moment could go on forever if she just let it, a perfect closed circuit of need and nurturing, a universe unto itself.

The gauzy light brightened and became a substance, bandages winding around her face. She saw nothing, but felt her dream baby gnawing at her breast, felt its silky skin and stolen warmth growing heavier against her belly. Something magical was happening; her dream was birthing itself into the real world.

This time, the hot, hidden parts of her that ruled in secret, the parts of her that knew all along what they were doing when she had seemed most out of control—those parts filled her with the blood-truth that she would never let her baby go, this time—

When the light died out, she felt a flood of unpleasant sensations—the crinkle of stiff waxed paper beneath her, the dull ache in her joints from general anesthesia, and most of all, the mingled relief and soreness of her breasts.

She tried to move, but she found herself restrained, pulled taut against the tattered vinyl examination table.

Dr. Midori Ramos.

This was her office, just down the block from the motel. She wasn’t really a doctor, not in this country, anyway, but in the Philippines, she was some kind of highly respected surgeon.

Her baby cooed as it drank from her.

In the dim gray light that slanted through the blinds, she saw that she was no longer dreaming, and that the thing she suckled was indeed very real, but it was no baby.

No human baby—

A bloated, ghostly lamprey attached to her breast, pulsating with the rhythm of its greedily siphoning sucker-mouth. The turgid thing floated in the air above her, living liquid like a jellyfish or a cloud of semen in white wine, but she could feel it rasping and throbbing and wringing the last drops of milk from her slack, flaccid teat.

Deanna screamed and tried to roll off the table, but her body was bound too snugly to lift her hands, let alone pry off the parasite. As she struggled and agitated it, the thing shivered in sympathy and flushed red, or maybe it was drinking her blood.

She had fed this thing in her dreams, and it had grown fat on the flood of tears her breasts wept, the drainage from the amputation of her child. Deanna howled her throat raw, but the thing kept sucking at her.

The door clicked and opened, and the blast of light dispersed the lamprey. She felt it compress its bloated ethereal mass into her vagina, and the violation redoubled as she realized this was the cause of the orgasmic climax of the dreams, as the sated parasite slithered back to its lair in her womb.

“I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Ramos said. “I am no doctor in this country, but at home, I perform most respected psychic surgery. Nobody believe me, when I try to show them.”

Deanna fought to brake her runaway hyperventilation, tried to ask, to curse, to beg, but all she managed was, “Get… it… out of me—”

“Every life is sacred, Miss Deanna. You did not ask to become pregnant, but the Life Force came into you. We talk about this, and you say you want to be a bearer of life. Your baby is in a better place, but this… is special.”

Only hysteria gave her the strength to speak. “I don’t… want it in me! Get it out, get it out—”

Dr. Ramos’s tiny hand stroked the dome of Deanna’s belly, even as it seemed, once more, to swell. “Life wants to happen, Miss Deanna. It fills all the cracks in the earth, large and small, for its own glorious purpose. Where there is shelter and food, there is life. Even in us, yes, especially, for where is there safer shelter?

“There are worlds inside us, and food of a kind unique in all of nature.” With a soothing touch softer than morning sunlight, Dr. Ramos caressed her heart and head. Deanna felt her runaway pulse slow, and the short-circuited sparks of her thoughts settled into a torpid brownout.

“For if the food and warmth inside us can nurture life, what kind of life could thrive on the heat of our thoughts, our emotions? All hate, all love, all wishes and dread and dreams, come out of us like waste heat, like sweat and milk and soil. These things are as fleeting as the food they crave, born and breeding and dying in hours and days, invisible to us, as they must be, for their sake and ours.

“In Manila, I see a woman whose baby died, who lived on the street and nursed a baby no one else could see, and they thought her crazy. But when they tried to take her to hospital, they saw the ‘ghost-baby’ in her arms. The crowd killed them both.”

Dr. Ramos touched Deanna’s face, knobby knuckles and stubby fingers that looked all the more improper for their slavishly manicured and sensibly glossed nails. “I wanted nothing more than to be a mother, Miss Deanna, but I was born into wrong body. I knew it could never happen, that nothing on earth could make my body become what I was inside. I would never know the kind of joy you saw only as a curse, but in my longing, I became a mother, of sorts, as well.”

She lifted the front of Deanna’s gown. Her hand became a blade and slid, without friction or effort, into Deanna’s gut.

It was a repulsive parlor trick, yet Deanna felt the insane violation of the hand passing through her until it seized on something that was not her, that clutched her vitals in its desperation as Dr. Ramos began to draw it out.

It slithered between her fingers, and kept coming and coming out of the hole Dr. Ramos bored into her. It writhed in and out of her, wafting up on the stale stirrings of the air, spilling out like smoke from burning plastic, mute witness to the vastness of the void inside her. It wound round and round Midori Ramos’s arm, a serpent eating itself, but even to Deanna’s fear-widened eyes, it was little more than a shimmering shadow, an unborn ghost that would never yield detail to closer study.

Now, Deanna at last understood the strange smile that Dr. Ramos always had for her. It was admiration and hope, but mostly envy.

She let the thing squirm off her hand and retract like a molested octopus back into Deanna’s womb. “I can almost give it true life, but not flesh. In you, it found a home.”

“Get it out of me!”

“When it has finished gestating, we will see. No specimen has ever been brought this far, so who knows what we will discover? Perhaps they will give the species a name. I think it only fitting that it be my name, since you care only for money.”

Deanna subsided in her bonds, and if something in her mind finally snapped, it was a welcome reprieve, and all she lost was a skin that no longer fit. If this was what Deanna was meant to be, then she could still prove Midori Ramos wrong.

Dr. Ramos went to the freezer and took out several bottles, dropped one into a silo that swung into place, like a hamster feeder, above Deanna’s face. Golden droplets of milk—her own—drizzled into her mouth. “We see what refining your diet does, shall we?”

Deanna eagerly gulped it down.

Her child would thrive and grow in the security of her womb. It would come out to be loved and to feed on her tears of joy, and then go back inside her, where no one could ever hurt it or take it away…

She would be a good mother, and her baby would be perfect.

We Need to Make Things More Repulsive: The Early Sketches of Nick Gucker

WINNER OF THE 2009 WONDERLAND AWARD!

“This is high-end psychological surrealist horror meets bottom-feeding low-life crime in a techno-thrilling science fiction world full of Lovecraft and magic...”–JOHN SKIPP, NY Times Bestselling author of The Bridge and The Long Last Call

“Cody Goodfellow's work is '80s vintage horror with a contemporary edge. An exemplary wordsmith, his prose sticks a needle in your brain and gives it a twist. This stuff is Lovecraft on acid. Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars is anything but quiet: it announces Goodfellow's continued presence among the leading cohort of modern horror with a thunderclap.”—LAIRD BARRON, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories

“Cody Goodfellow is a force to be reckoned with. There are things within these pages with teeth on `em. You've been warned...”—NORMAN PARTRIDGE, author of The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists and Dark Harvest

“This is Lovecraft after a smack bender in Tijuana, one where he wakes up handcuffed to his bed and covered in someone else's blood. Goodfellow's fiction has the otherworldliness of Lovecraft, the sarcasm of Joe R. Lansdale, the mojo of a Motley Crue tell-all and best of all it's wrapped together with prose that would satisfy fans of high literature in horror.”—MONSTER LIBRARIAN

“One of the best writers of our generation.”—BRIAN KEENE, author of The Rising and Darkness on the Edge of Town

“PERFECT UNION is Cronenberg's THE FLY on a grand scale: human/insect gene-spliced body horror, where the human hive politics are as shocking as the gore. This book would make Marx and Thoreau's heads explode. In other words, astounding.”—JOHN SKIPP, NY Times Bestselling author of The Long Last Call and The Bridge

“Cody Goodfellow's imagination is a freeway flyer, and his prose is a ride on a rocket-sled. He's one of the two or three god-damned best writers in the Genres today.”—MICHAEL SHEA, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Nifft the Lean and Copping Squid

“PERFECT UNION is a weird masterpiece. Influences ranging from Cronenberg body horror, Evil Dead-style gore comedy to a fascinating political dissection of Marx and Thoreau make this a genius horror novel destined to be loved by the readers ready to get in the ring with Cody. An intelligent socio-political dark Bizarro masterpiece and one of the most original horror novels in years.”—MONSTER LIBRARIAN

“Cody Goodfellow is untouched as a breathless reporter of violent action, relating it in hurtling prose full of striking and sometimes hilarious metaphors. The author has hybridized Splatterpunk with the techno-thriller, and the result will not soon leave your memory.”—STRANGE AEONS

WINNER OF THE 2011 WONDERLAND AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION!

“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific.”—JACK KETCHUM

“A haunting collection from a wildly talented author, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is composed of nineteen perfectly-wrought nightmares, every one of which will stay with you long after you've finished reading.”—PETER CRAIG, author of Hot Plastic and Blood Father, co-screenwriter of The Town

“The people populating these stories are real and vital and you WILL care, deeply, about what becomes of them...and in JRJ's harsh universe, baaaaad things happen. Often. Prepare thyself.”—CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, and Sarah Court

“Favorite collection for 2011: WE LIVE INSIDE YOU.”—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of The Ones That Got Away and It Came From Del Rio

Now available in a 2012 Author’s Preferred Edition. Includes a fully revised text, 20,000 words of bonus content, and an Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones. Only $2.99 for Kindle!

“A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories—and I love short stories. Like the best of Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That’s great.”—CHUCK PALAHNIUK

“Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales regarding such things as a group of extreme body modification addicts (one of whom is pretty much made out of vegetables) to a cockroach suit that helps its maker survive WWIII. These stories have been given serious treatment and emerge as fantastic and often graphic scenarios full of characters you hate to love.”—BOOKGASM

“Angel Dust Apocalypse hits the reader in the gut and goes to work. Within these pages the dark underbelly of the human subconscious is captured: those things that people think about but never mention...I could not put this book down...”—RAZORCAKE

“In its most twisted moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly ‘horror,’ and when he steps outside the gross-out game, he transcends most other straight literary writers. Angel Dust Apocalypse is every bit as smart as it is gut-churning, and every bit as moving and introspective as it is horrifying and humorous.”—VERBICIDE

Newly revised 2012 digital edition includes "The Sharp-Dressed Man at the End of the Line," the classic short story explaining the origin of the world's weirdest post-nuke survivor. Only $2.99 for Kindle!

“DUCK AND COVER, BITCHES! Jeremy Robert Johnson answers the call to glory with his intimately insectoid mini-epic of apocalypse, Extinction Journals: a trip far weirder and more fucked up than it has any right to be. Just like these times.”—JOHN SKIPP, author of Conscience, co-author/editor of The Scream, Mondo Zombie, and Book of the Dead

“Extinction Journals is like a Twilight Zone episode made without Standards & Practices telling Serling he couldn't feature any human/insect love scenes. Move over Chris Genoa—there's a new sexy genius in town.”—CHRIS GENOA, author of Foop!

“Has more weird, fresh, mandible-imprinted ideas per page than you can poke a Twinkie at.”—21C MAGAZINE

“Equally profound and hilarious, Extinction Journals contains not only some of the most thoughtful examinations of humanity's need for companionship to come along in several years, but also some of the best descriptions of loneliness and thanatophobia, the pervasive human fear of death.”—THE PEDESTAL

“Absurd, silly, yet ultimately important. There are overtones of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There is a sense that Vonnegut could have written this. It mixes the sublime and the ridiculous superbly.”—I READ ODD BOOKS

“Johnson excels at pathology and perversity...A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched.”—CEMETERY DANCE

Table of Contents

Doorway to the Sky

Venus of Santa Cruz

The Wage of Dinosaurs

The Care & Feeding of Sea Monkeys

Episode I—Kungmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger

Episode II—The Island of Dr. Otaku

Episode III—All Cities Attack!

Wet Nurse

We Need to Make Things More Repulsive: The Early Sketches of Nick Gucker