Godzilla vs. Kong

by Greg Keyes

  Just wait, Simmons, you jackass, he thought. I’m gonna nail you. You think you’re immune, but nobody is immune to the truth.

  For an instant, he was afraid he’d said it out loud, but, if he had, none of the other employees starting their days around him seemed to have heard him.

  He clipped on his badge and fanny pack.

  Just be cool, he thought. Just act like you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t ask questions, and especially not these people. It’s why Apex likes them.

  Yeah. Of course, it was also why they got rid of anyone who was on to them. By whatever means necessary.

  * * *

  Horace pulled up the shipping manifest and the routing map. The logistics of this shipment were complicated, and this was going to take the better part of an hour to work out, but that was what he liked about the job. He got to work puzzles all night, and he got paid for it. He excelled at his work, and because he was so good at it, people generally left him alone, and they let him work the night shift, which was very quiet and exactly how he liked things.

  Studying the manifest, he reached for the apple he’d brought to snack on.

  “No!” someone said behind him, causing him to jump a little. “It’s incredibly unhealthy!”

  Horace looked at the doorway of his Plexiglas cubicle and saw a stout African American fellow in coveralls and a tool belt staring at him as if he wasn’t even aware he was interrupting something. What was his name? Ernie? Bobby? No, Bernie, one of the guys from engineering.

  “All those GMOs?” Bernie went on, obliviously. “Growing a second head could be useful, you’ll have to let me know. Myself? I can barely handle the one head I got.”

  “Bernie,” Horace said, trying to smile politely, “you’re not supposed to be in here.” There, he thought, turning back to his screen. He figured that was the end of it.

  It wasn’t.

  “You ever wonder about what we’re doing here?” the guy blathered on. “What we’re really doing here? From what I hear they’ve inlaid nano-circuitry in a field of turnips in Idaho.”

  Why one earth would anyone just walk up and start babbling like this? What was wrong with this guy? Horace was starting to feel crowded, with Bernie blocking the door like that. Not threatened, exactly, but extremely uncomfortable.

  “Why are you here?” he asked. “This isn’t engineering.”

  “Because, you know, they’re rendering these new specs which is going to take over…” Bernie paused and looked at his watch. “Oh, this is stuck in calendar mode,” he said. Then, before Horace could even flinch, Bernie reached out and grabbed his arm, twisting it so he could see his watch.

  “Over an hour,” Bernie continued. “Maybe even more. So my foreman told me to take a walk, make some new friends.”

  Oh, crap, Horace thought, as Bernie got even deeper into his already highly compromised personal space.

  “Now that we’re friends,” Bernie pushed on, “I can share something with you, right? Okay, cool, you’re going to love this because when I found out, it blew my mind.”

  Horace had been wondering if the nightmare could get any worse, and it immediately did. Bernie emptied his fanny pack onto Horace’s desk.

  “Oh,” Bernie said. “Um, can you hold onto these things? They’re very important to me. This is hand sanitizer I made from my own garden, it’s really amazing. A compass because I get lost around here, it’s a big place. Do you have any oils on your hands? This is a battery I made that is very sensitive to that. Ah!”

  He picked up a tiny circuit board. “See this? Check this out.”

  Horace looked at it.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “You see that?”

  “I do.”

  “That right there is radio mesh networking with a voice-record sub-processor … guess from what, c’mon.”

  “I don’t care,” Horace said.

  “A toaster!” Bernie said, with a weird air of triumph. “Look at this thing. You know my Sara, she said this is how it begins. Robot uprising, right here.”

  That was it. There was no way he could be near Bernie for another second. Horace got out of his seat. He felt like he had termites all over him.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  “Oh,” Bernie said. “Is it one or two? Because if it’s two it’s probably from those apples. Hey, you want to use some of the hand sanitizer that I made? Okay, I’ll just … stay here.”

  Bernie’s voice faded with distance as Horace fled the scene.

  Santa Rosa Island, Florida

  Jenny Tuazan swam in darkness, enjoying the gentle pressure of the water enveloping her. Other nights she might have walked a few hundred feet south and enjoyed the surf rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico to break on the thirty-mile-long spine of Santa Rosa Island. Those nights she would ride the waves, sometimes fight them, like some ancient goddess of the sea. So she had pretended when she was a girl, and secretly did so even now as she approached thirty. When she was a child, her family had come here often to camp and swim and beachcomb. It was less than a hundred miles from where she had grown up in Louisiana, but it had always seemed so different, so exotic to her. So far from the family business, which also involved the sea, but there it was all work, long hours on the boats and then mornings pulling the heads off shrimp. This place, with its white beaches, restaurants, hotels, and National Park had been all about fun, relaxation, family time.

  When she grew up and became a park ranger, she had managed to get a job here, on the westernmost end of the island. After nine, the general public was locked out, but she had the run of the place and full communion with the beach and the bay and the memories they contained for her.

  Tonight she wanted solitude and quiet, so she swam on the bay side of the island, across from which the city of Pensacola glittered like so many strings of Christmas lights.

  She came up for air and felt the wind; in the distance thunder rumbled; a storm was rolling in. She smiled, thinking how her father would have made her get out of the water at the first sign of bad weather for fear she would be electrocuted by distant lightning. She figured she would take a few more moments here, then walk over to the Gulf side and watch the waves get wild. She was already wet, and she didn’t mind a little rain.

  Four fighter jets shrieked by overhead. Pilots from the Naval Air Station training, probably. It seemed like a weird night for it, with the storm rolling in, but maybe the pilots needed to be certified for rough weather, or something.

  She took a breath, and went back down, hands searching for the bottom.

  And heard something.

  There were plenty of things to hear in these waters, even at night. Shrimp boats going out, tourist ships cruising the harbor, comings and goings at the port. Tonight thunder, rolling along the surface of the bay, and the fading sound of the jets. And … helicopters? But this noise she heard now was none of that; it was something different. A sort of deep thrumming, like a heartbeat. She surfaced again and blinked water from her eyes and looked around but saw nothing unusual.

  But then the sound—more a vibration, really—changed. She was feeling it now from below her. She went a little shallower, and there it was; the submerged earth beneath her feet was pulsing, very slowly, boom … boom … boom…

  Maybe someone was using explosives to generate tremors and search for oil? But they weren’t supposed to be doing that, not in these waters.

  She turned back toward Pensacola, and when the earth shuddered again, she noticed waves spreading across the bay in the reflected light.

  “What the hell?” she muttered. Could it be an earthquake? She had never been in one, and down here she had never expected to be.

  Then the stars in her peripheral vision were blotted out. And the resulting darkness … moved.

  She stared off west and saw him then, rising from the sea with each step, a massive, unmistakable outline she had seen hundreds of times in stills and videos. And even so, he was so much b
igger than she had imagined.

  “Godzilla,” she breathed.

  And as if he’d heard her, the massive, craggy fins on his back flickered with blue light, and then began to glow. She watched in amazement as he moved through the entrance to the bay. Not an animal, not a monster even. A god of the sea, from before the times when any human eye had laid eyes on the world. She saw the jets coming back now, and helicopters drawing near, and wanted to laugh. What could they do to him? Piss him off, maybe. If even that.

  And then it occurred to her. Godzilla hadn’t been seen in years. If he was here, that might mean another Titan was too, like when he’d shown up in Savannah to drive Scylla away from the city.

  The prospect of a Titan fight was almost as exciting as it was terrifying.

  The water started to pull at her, like when one of the big container ships came in, creating an artificial tide dragging her into the bay.

  But this was stronger than that, much stronger, and already her feet were no longer touching the bottom. Gasping, she put everything she had into swimming toward shore, only to watch it recede. She felt panic well up.

  She tried to stay calm. Panic killed more swimmers than anything else.

  Jenny let go, floating on her back, and allowed the bay to pull her out. Godzilla was already mostly out of the water. Soon the pull would end and even reverse. Then she could easily swim back to the beach and watch whatever was going to happen from there.

  Mist rolled in, and then the rain, as if Godzilla was pulling them, too, in his wake.

  Apex Facility, Pensacola

  That should keep him away for a while, Bernie thought, as Horace’s footsteps receded. He slipped a thumb drive from his tool belt and into the CPU tower, began typing commands, and took a bite of Horace’s apple.

  In moments he had what he was looking for, or at least he thought so. It was a shipping manifest, something being sent to Hong Kong from here, the Pensacola facility, from sub-level 33.

  “What are they shipping to Hong Kong?” he wondered. “And what’s sub-level 33?”

  And also, how? He couldn’t find the name or ID code of a ship. Were they maybe sending it by plane? Whatever it was looked heavy for that, but maybe they were in a hurry. Either way, this facility wasn’t equipped for that kind of shipping. Maybe they were sub-contracting with someone else in the port. Or they might be using one of the big troop carriers at the Navy base; Apex and the government were tight, after all. The manifest had an entry for maglev data, which also did not make a damn bit of sense. Unless it was an acronym for something he wasn’t aware of, maglev usually referred to the magnetic levitation technology used in trains. Which they did not have here in Pensacola.

  “What’s this?” he muttered.

  There was a sort of schematic on the screen. It was circular and looked like a dynamo or a reactor chamber, but it wasn’t either. There wasn’t enough detail to figure out what it was.

  It was all very weird, but absolutely something he could investigate. He just had to find sub-level 33.

  Before he could follow up on that thought, the alarm went off.

  For a horrible second, he thought he had been caught, that there was a safeguard against copying files that he hadn’t known about. He lifted both hands in surrender before realized that it was the facility-wide alarm. If he’d been noticed, or if Horace had reported him, they would have probably sent security to quietly drag him off someplace, not alert everyone in the building. He lowered his arms sheepishly, pulled the USB key and hurried out.

  Everyone else was already obediently forming lines. Bernie merged into one, trying to look like he belonged in this part of the building.

  “Proceed toward the fallout shelter in a single-file line,” a security guard said.

  Fallout shelter? What was this? If the place was on fire, or if there had been a chemical spill, they should be headed outside, right? There had been a storm coming in, but could it really be that bad?

  Or maybe it was something else. Maybe Apex wanted all of its employees locked underground, where they could easily be scanned, searched, questioned, exposed to certain chemical agents…

  The woman in front of him glanced back. Maybe she saw he was nervous. She had a friendly, round face and bangs.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said.

  “You know,” he replied, “back in the day they used to use cyanide capsules instead of fallout shelters, keep the secrets in. But that’s neither here nor there so don’t listen to … me.”

  Her brow creased, and she acted like she was about to say something. Instead she turned back around.

  Again, he thought. No one was listening to him. They were all intent on getting to the shelter, away from whatever threat the alarm portended. No one was paying attention to anything. There would never be a better time than now to figure out what Apex had hidden away on sub-level 33. And to escape whatever diabolical fate awaited those who stayed in the line.

  He watched a few guards and guys in white lab coats run through sliding doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”

  “That way,” he said to himself.

  As the line turned a corner, Bernie slipped out of it and through the sliding doors.

  SEVEN

  Loyal listeners, I’m gonna start with another history lesson. This one’s about pirates. Yeah, the real thing, not what you see in the movies. Most of ’em started out as privateers. What does that mean? It means they worked for the government. Unofficially. Off the books. So English privateers robbed French and Spanish ships, but never English ones. And the privateers from France and Spain, same rules. And everybody was sort of okay with it, for a while. Then comes along the first multi-national corporations, like the East India company, and they say, this piracy thing is bad for business. And yeah, they’re Freemasons, they operate across national lines, we’ve talked about that before. The point is, it’s not the kings and queens and parliaments that have the real power anymore. It’s the corporations. And all of a sudden, English privateers are being hung by the English government—that they worked for. In a couple of decades, the pirates are all gone. Because this Company wanted it that way. They want trade to be free, predictable, and profitable. That’s what they still want, these corporations. You think they have an allegiance to any country? Think again. They want their stuff to ship on time and get where it’s going. And you know what can throw one hell of a monkey wrench in that? Titans. You can’t bribe a Titan, you can’t lobby a Titan. Like the Tea dudes, Apex can control governments. If Walter Simmons can figure out a way to control Titans, he will. And take it from me, he is trying. But if he can’t, then he will absolutely do everything in his power to snuff them.

  Mad Truth, Titan Truth Podcast #115

  Apex Facility, Pensacola

  Ren Serizawa watched the storm as it crossed into the bay. The wind was already here, buffeting the rooftop and the helicopter warming up for flight, at times trying to steal off the titanium case he carried from his grip.

  A storm at night could be a wonderful thing to see. It could bring with it many surprises. Of course, in this case, there would be no surprise. He knew what was coming. Monarch had ordered the evacuation a few minutes ago, but Apex had known a half-hour before that, because they still cultivated sources inside Monarch. Simmons had been worried about this eventuality; Ren had thought him paranoid. But Simmons had not gotten where he was by being stupid.

  After three years, Godzilla was back. Coming here. It was not—could not be—coincidence. It was inevitable that he and the Titan would meet. His father had seen to that.

  You are out there, aren’t you? he thought. And you, Father? Are you with him?

  Ren did not believe in ghosts, not literally. But he did believe that people left things behind them when they were gone. Memory. Consequences.

  And what could be more consequential than a son? A literal, biological legacy?

  He knew it was a tired story, the father who never had time for his son. There h
ad been songs written about it. He was not one to bring it up in conversation, or cry about it to a lover when he felt weak. He would not be a stereotype to be pitied and inevitably mocked. He had managed to keep his resentment even from his mother.

  He supposed that was because he had always imagined they would reconcile, he and his father. That the old man would have a moment of satori, that the fish scales would fall from his eyes, and he would understand what he had been neglecting in the pursuit of his obsession. In pursuit of Gojira.

  Of course, his grandfather Eiji had set the pattern. A sailor in World War II, he had lied to his son Ishiro for thirty-five years, claiming to work for a cargo company when in fact he had been drawn into working for Monarch. Eiji had come clean to his son, before he died in 1981, and they had had at least a little time to reconcile, for father to pass the torch to son.

  But he would never get any such catharsis. His father had all but ignored him in life, but Ren had worshipped Ishiro, nonetheless. He had studied hard, learned to build and create in hopes that his father would someday understand him—or at least take note of him. It was on Gojira that Ren focused his anger. Gojira had felt almost like a big brother to him—the older brother his father truly loved and doted on. And in the end, his father had died for Gojira—a monster who had killed thousands—rather than come home alive to his only son.

  His father had made his choice. Ren had made his. What father worshipped, the son would revile. What the father saved, the son would destroy.

  That was how it was. That course was now set. His father had chosen to side with monster. Ren chose humanity.

  “It’s time! We need to evacuate now!” Simmons shouted to be heard, approaching from the facility below.