Godzilla vs. Kong

by Greg Keyes

  But twenty minutes later, with the track still showing no evidence of veering toward any known Titan locations, he took the time to fire off a communiqué to command and control.

  “Be advised,” it said. “In my opinion, Godzilla tracking suggests behavior not in keeping with past patterns. Could indicate unpredictable outcomes. Godzilla may be off the reservation.”

  Skull Island

  Ilene looked up as Jia padded almost silently into the room, wearing her moon-and-star pajamas and carrying her little Kong doll. She wore her red shawl like a cape.

  You’re supposed to be in bed, Ilene signed.

  I couldn’t sleep, the girl replied. Are you still mad at me?

  I wasn’t mad at you. I was worried.

  Jia tilted her head; her posture broadcast skepticism. Fine. I was a little mad at you. Ilene admitted. But mostly worried.

  Kong would never hurt me, Jia replied. He and I are all that are left. All of the others are gone. He saved me.

  I know that, Ilene said. I don’t think he would hurt you on purpose. But he is so big, and he doesn’t always pay attention, especially when he’s angry. Haven’t you ever stepped on a bug by accident?

  I watch out for bugs, Jia signed. A lot of them can hurt you if you step on them, or if they bite you. If you step on a Blackstick bug, your whole foot can rot off.

  Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, Ilene said.

  Okay. What are you doing? What are these pictures?

  Ilene followed the girl’s gaze to her desk, where she had two screens full of images and two dozen hard-copy prints overlapping one another on the desk.

  Jia pointed at one of the images, a photograph of an “X-Ray”-style painting, an ancient trend in which people and animals were depicted with their bones and organs—and sometimes unborn offspring—showing through their skin. In prehistoric times, the style had spread to every inhabited continent and a number of islands. No one was sure why. The image in question looked something like a stylized man, but he also had a tail and an elongated face.

  What do you think this is? she asked Jia.

  Jia looked at it a little more closely. Not an Iwi drawing, she signed.

  No, Ilene agreed. This is from another people, far away.

  You tell me, then, Jia said.

  A lot of people think it’s what’s called a… She paused. There was no sign for it. So she spelled it out phonetically. Chimera. That’s when you combine different kinds of animal together, or people and animals. Some very smart people think this is a bear or lion and human chimera. A god of some kind.

  Jia scrunched her brows. Then why does it have a star inside of it? She pointed to a mark that resembled an asterisk, right along the backbone of the depiction. And why these sticks on its back?

  A costume maybe? Ilene signed.

  No, Jia said. I think it’s a bad lizard. He swallowed a star.

  Bad Lizard?

  Jia seemed to struggle. She closed her eyes, and then she, too, spelled something out phonetically.

  Zo-zla-halawa.

  Ilene blinked, wondering if she had seen that right, or if Jia had gotten it correct. The girl was, after all, deaf, and seemed to have been born that way. But she had a knack for connecting phonetic signs to spoken language, probably from lip-reading. It was often surprising how much of the spoken Iwi language she remembered, and how quickly she had come to understand English.

  The first two syllables didn’t mean anything to Ilene. But hala meant “enemy,” and wa was an intensifier—meaning something like “great,” or “superlative”—and also a verb conjugation that signified “eternal time” or maybe “forever.” Great eternal enemy? The Iwi called Skullcrawlers Halakrah: “persistent enemy.”

  Zo-zla? she repeated, to be sure.

  But Jia just shrugged. I may have the word wrong, she admitted. Long ago story when I was little.

  “How much do you remember?”

  Zo-zla-halawa, he lived in the Long Ago Below, like Kong, like us. He ate a star there and it made him evil. He could throw rays of the star out of his mouth and burn things. So it was decided he could not live in the Long Ago Below.

  Iwi and Kong made bonds of friendship. Become one people to fight Zo-zla-halawa. They fought for a long time, trying to make him leave. Something went wrong, I think? Someone broke a taboo, maybe. Anyway, Kong and Iwi traveled together in darkness until we reached the light of this place. We left all of the bad people behind, and the Zo-Zla-halawa, with his stomach star, too. There was peace for a while, but then some monsters followed us. The Skullcrawlers and some others. Kong’s parents fought them. So did Kong.

  I didn’t know you knew that story, Ilene said to the girl.

  I was very little, she said. I don’t remember very well. But they told it with hand-shape-shadows at night around the fire. It was scary, but funny sometimes. There were other stories, too, like the one about the Mother Long Legs that raced the Mountain Turtle.

  Ilene nodded. Jia’s account sounded like a children’s version of a story she had managed to get one of the elders to tell her years before. The version she had taken down had been much longer, much more complicated, and probably seventy percent of it had been an intricate Iwi genealogy which began in mythic time—in the “Long Ago Below”—but also involved incorporating later arrivals to the island into the Iwi people—that part of the epic was known as the Marrying of Strangers. The most prominent of these were a group of people led by a woman named Atenatua who arrived on the island around five or six centuries before; these people spoke a different language from the Iwi and had different customs, but by a series of marriages and rituals the Iwi and the newcomers eventually became one people, and Atenatua was an important ancestress, despite her overseas origins. Ilene’s guess, based on the few words of their language that survived, was that these late arrivals had been Polynesians, speaking a language similar to that of Easter Island. The atua in Atenatua was almost certainly the word for “god” or “spirit.” A fragment of this story had been recorded, in garbled form, by Aaron Brooks—but she had been the first to learn that the core of the Iwi claimed to have come together with the Kongs—there had originally been many of them—to the island from a lost paradise deep in the Earth.

  I heard that story, too, she signed to Jia. It reminded me that many people believe they emerged from beneath the Earth, in many places. And many believed they were leaving enemies behind them, under the ground. And, as with the Iwi, those bad creatures sometimes followed them to this world.

  It was true. The Navajo, for instance, the Hopi, the Choctaw.

  Jia was leafing through the other images, stopping on one.

  Zo-Zla-halawa, she signed again.

  “Yes,” Ilene said. This time the image was less ambiguous; drawn not by someone depicting a rumor of a creature but by someone who had almost certainly seen it. It was bipedal, like the first, but the tail was long, decidedly lizard-like, as was the snout; its arms were short and clawed, and it had fins on its back that at this point almost anyone in the world would recognize.

  This was carved on a wall in a city under the water, she told Jia. Some friends of mine saw this and took pictures. And see, with him? She pointed to the much smaller figures clustered around the lizard-like giant.

  People, Jia signed. Not Iwi.

  Ilene nodded. I think that long ago, the creatures you call Zo-Zla-halawa and the family of Kong fought a war. One of your elders said that, but there are stories from other places. Many people believe the gods fought a great war, long ago.

  They fight it still, Jia said. I remember that now. It is sad.

  Why?

  What are they fighting about? Jia asked. No one ever said.

  I don’t think anyone knows, Ilene replied.

  There is only one Kong now, Jia said. Must he go to war?

  Not if I have anything to say about it.

  Jia thought about that for a minute. The Zo-Zla-halawa. What do the Awati call them?

/>   Awati was the Iwi word for anyone that wasn’t Iwi. It meant “people from the sky,” and referred to the pilots who had crashed on Skull Island during World War II and the later, Monarch-sponsored expeditions that had arrived by helicopter.

  Godzilla, she signed. And then, aloud, putting Jia’s hand to her throat and exaggerating the movement of her lips. “Godzilla.”

  Godzilla, the girl signed. How many of them?

  I’m not sure, Ilene replied. But I think just one.

  Jia held her Kong doll a little tighter. I hope their war is over, then, she said.

  So do I.

  Because if it is not, Jia went on, I will have to fight with Kong and help him kill Godzilla.

  FIVE

  From the notes of Dr. Chen

  The ancient Maori believed there were ten worlds beneath the surface world. The lowest was the home of the goddess Miru and her hordes of reptile gods.

  —TU-TE-WANA’ from TU-PARI gat KAWEAU, TUA-TARA,

  PA-PA, MOKO-MOKO, lords of lizards and of reptiles;

  O’er them MOKO-HIKU-WARU rules as deity and guardian,

  Rules in peace!—a god of evil, he in darkness dwells with MIRU,

  In the eighth gloom dwells with MIRU, goddess of three nether regions;

  Dwells in evil thoughts with MIRU…

  TU-TE-WANA’ from MAI-RANGI gat the many gods of reptiles

  That in darkness sit with Miru…

  …Conflict endless, rends the dwellers in thy waters; Unremittingly thou warrest on the creatures made by TANE’,

  Slayest trees, and birds, and insects, preyest on thy forest brother:

  Internecine warfare shatters sons of thee on earth, in ocean!

  Excerpts from Maori Life in Ao-Tea,

  Johannes Carl Anderson, 1907

  Monarch Office, Pensacola

  Mark spent the next eight hours reviewing Godzilla’s last known activities, all of which had happened years before. He had told Chloe that he thought Godzilla was mopping up the competition during that period, but maybe he’d been wrong about that. People tended to anthropomorphize animals and their actions, and it was possible that he and the rest of Monarch had fallen into that trap.

  Mark had been there in Boston, after Godzilla—with the help of Mothra and the united military of the human race—had defeated Ghidorah.

  There were still a lot of questions about that fight. The Titans seemed to be hierarchical in nature; they had a pecking order, and whichever one was strongest, whichever one came out on top, seemed to control the rest. Godzilla and the three-headed Gidorah had been battling for that top spot until the government made a bad call, overruling objections from Serizawa and other Monarch scientists. They had experimented with a weapon known as the Oxygen Destroyer, trying to wipe out Godzilla and Ghidorah with a single missile.

  The missile had nearly killed Godzilla, and in fact at first they thought it had—but it hadn’t had any noticeable effect on Ghidorah, and Ghidorah had then proceeded to take command of more than a dozen Titans, many still in containment. The results were devastating, and it soon became clear that nothing in the human arsenal could stop Ghidorah, who seemed intent on stripping the world back down to its bedrock bones. Subsequent studies of Ghidorah’s DNA had suggested that the three-headed dragon was so genetically different from the other Titans—and life on Earth in general—that it might not even be a native of the planet. Mark doubted that; it seemed extreme to invoke an extraterrestrial origin when there was so much they still didn’t know about the evolution of any of the Titans. But for whatever reason, Ghidorah was different. While many of the Titans—Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Behemoth—seemed to be dedicated to preserving some sort of global balance—part of a failsafe system to keep the environment from going too far off of the rails—Ghidorah was certainly not that. If it had been able to continue on its rampage, projections suggested that the only thing left alive on the planet at this point would be Ghidorah and certain bacteria.

  But it had not succeeded; Godzilla had ended it, and soon after, more than half a dozen Titans, summoned by Ghidorah to kill Godzilla, had instead literally bowed down to him.

  But that complete obeisance was short-lived; a few of the Titans had clearly had their fingers crossed behind their backs while they were bowing. Scylla, that truly weird chimera of arthropod and cephalopod, had attacked the coast of Georgia, apparently in an attempt to feed on an A-bomb that had been lost at sea there for decades. Godzilla had kicked Scylla so badly it had fled all the way down to an island near the tip of South America, where it had hibernated in a freezing lake. Behemoth, who had broken out of the containment center near Rio de Janeiro, had settled peacefully down in the Amazon, where its presence was clearly a healing influence on the human-ravaged rainforests there. When Behemoth was attacked by Amhuluk—another Titan that refused its Godzilla-mandated bedtime—the big lizard showed up and weighed in on that too, tipping the confrontation in favor of Behemoth. Then he had gone into the deep sea, reappearing to deal with a rogue human operation in the Sea of Okhotsk and freeing the octopus-like Titan Na Kika to return to her rest at the bottom of the sea.

  And then, someplace in the South Pacific, Godzilla had vanished.

  It was not the first time. It was well established by that point that Godzilla and other Titans could use parts of Hollow Earth to take short-cuts in their journeys. But this time Godzilla stayed away, out of sight, as he had been in the decades, and perhaps centuries, leading up to his appearance in 2014, when he had come from some deep hiding place to destroy the insectile MUTOs in their rampage from Japan to San Francisco. After that emergence, Monarch had been able to keep tabs on Godzilla, tracing a fairly stable pattern of patrol through the vast currents of the world’s oceans. He had briefly emerged to battle yet another MUTO, a fight Emma had been involved in, but other than that he had remained quiet, but visible, at least to Monarch.

  But these last few years, nothing. Houston Brooks and Nathan Lind conjectured that Godzilla had returned to the deeps of Hollow Earth. It seemed to Mark as plausible an explanation as any, and as far as he was concerned, good riddance. Godzilla might have proven he was nominally an ally of humanity, but whatever his motivations, the collateral damage of any Titan contest was devastating. He no longer believed that the only good Titan was a dead Titan, but he certainly believed in letting sleeping Titans lie.

  And now Godzilla was awake. That could not be good.

  He spent most of the day confirming the status of the other Titans. A few, like Godzilla, had gone somewhere off the map, but most of them were right where they were supposed to be, according to Monarch surveillance. He could not rule out the possibility that one or more of the Titan locations had been compromised by terrorists, and that the surveillance data was misleading, but everyone he shouted out to came back with the right answers.

  So he did the only other thing he could do—continued tracking the one Titan that was out there and on the go.

  But off the coast of French Guiana, about seventy klicks east of the Îles du Salut, Godzilla vanished without a trace. The bioacoustic and radiation signatures just vanished, and the underwater drones tracking him at a distance also lost contact.

  By that time, Chloe had come back in for the night watch. He thought she looked tired and disheveled; she had put her hair up in a band. He hadn’t seen her wear it like that before. He felt for her. He remembered his first experience with a Titan.

  “That’s past the mouth of the Amazon,” she noted. “So he’s not likely checking in on Behemoth. Do you think he’s headed for Isla de Mara?”

  “Nobody home there,” Mark said. “Unless Rodan laid eggs or something. Nothing left of the outpost. But there are still people in the area, so put it on the map. But at this point he could literally be going anywhere. I’m putting out an all-points bulletin, and then I’m going home. Call me if anything comes up, and I mean anything.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chloe said.

  * * *

  The
night passed peacefully, with no sign of the Titan. When he returned to work, Kennan was on duty. He was a tall, serious fellow around thirty who retained only a whisper of his native Jamaican accent.

  By noon Mark was starting to believe he was being overly paranoid. The big fellah had come out of hibernation or whatever to stretch his legs a little, check on some old pals, and maybe now he was all tucked in again for another three years. Or ten. Or a thousand. He had almost turned his mind back to other projects when Kennan said something under his breath.

  “What was that?” Mark asked.

  “Look,” Kennan said. He was pointing to a video playing on his screen. It looked like it had been shot with a phone from a small watercraft of some kind. It showed an expanse of blue sea, and in the distance, what looked like a stony ridge rising from the water. Except that the ridge was moving, leaving a wake—and although shot from a considerable distance, there was hardly any doubt that the “ridge” was Godzilla’s dorsal fins.

  “When was this?” he demanded.

  “It was posted about twenty minutes ago,” Kennan said.

  “Where?”

  “It was taken from a yacht, the Ima Outahere,” Kennan said.

  “Cute,” Mark said. “Where is she?”

  “En route from Galveston to Veracruz,” he said.

  “The Sigsbee Deep,” Mark said. “Deepest part of the Gulf.” That was spitting distance from Isla de Mara, so it looked like Chloe had been right.

  “Headed west?” he said, to confirm the suspicion.

  “The Ima reported him headed northeast,” Kennan said.

  “Northeast? Bring up a chart.”

  Kennan complied.

  “If that’s true,” Mark said, studying the map, “He’s not going to Isla de Mara. If he is topside, we should be able to reestablish a fix. Set bioacoustics and radiation signature scans from the Deep to DeSoto Canyon and everything in between. Find him.”

  “On it,” Kennan said.

  * * *

  It was six-thirty in the evening when they picked up the trail again; by then Godzilla was less than a hundred miles from the northern rim of the Gulf. Mark upgraded his message to command and control. By seven, they finally scrambled some jets from the nearby Naval Air Station and diverted nearby coastguard ships to have a closer look. Alarmed, Mark called command and control and was referred to a fellow named Clermont.