Godzilla vs. Kong

by Greg Keyes

  Ren followed Simmons and Hayworth, the security chief, to the helicopter. Ren caught Hayworth’s eye, then looked back at the approaching mist. He thought he could make out a shape there, the shape. And then, there he was.

  Jets screamed by, and explosions billowed against Gojira’s hide.

  Hello, brother, he thought. They don’t learn, do they? Those pitiful weapons can’t stop you. But I can. I will. Then he climbed in.

  Santa Rosa Island, Florida

  The rain was cold, so when Jenny made it back to shore, she took shelter under the eaves of one of the buildings. Godzilla was revealed by his glowing dorsal fins and by flashes of lightning that burned the sky white.

  And then—another kind of light, like fireworks, but all the same color.

  She blinked as her perspective shifted. Jet fighters, firing missiles at Godzilla. But why? Wasn’t he supposed to be humanity’s ally? What was going on?

  Even as she wondered that, Godzilla’s fins suddenly glowed with heat, and a bolt of blue energy erupted from his mouth, stabbing into Pensacola.

  Apex Facility, Pensacola

  “Okay,” Bernie said, as he ran through the corridors. He needed to find an elevator, and he figured there should be one around the turn ahead. “Okay … not okay.”

  Because the two armed guards watching the elevator ahead were staring at him.

  “You!” one of them said. “Where’s your clearance tag?”

  Bernie drew himself up. Showtime.

  “You know what?” he said. “The fact that you’re talking about clearance tags right now in a time of crisis is incredibly unprofessional. We should be talking about evacuation!”

  But the show closed as soon as it opened. The guards drew their Tasers.

  “Freeze!” one of them shouted.

  “Okay,” Bernie said, holding up his hands. “Okay.”

  It had been a nice try. Well, no, it hadn’t been, had it? Even that was wishful thinking. He had completely bungled this.

  Sorry, Sara, he thought.

  They were still pointing their Tasers at him. Were they going to use them anyway?

  Bernie heard a dull thud, and the building shook. The guards looked around warily, fingers still on the triggers of their weapons.

  Another much closer explosion shuddered the building. Bernie took a few shallow breaths. The guards were a little distracted. Maybe if he made a break for it—

  The wall exploded in a shower of sparks. The lights went out as Bernie was slammed into the floor.

  I’m dead, he thought. Then: Wait, am I? He wiggled his fingers. They seemed to be alive.

  The lights came back up, red. The room was completely trashed, rubble everywhere. The guards were out of it, and he—he wasn’t dead, but was he injured? He’d heard people in shock sometimes didn’t notice fatal wounds until they cashed out. He patted his hands over his body, scanned for wounds.

  He seemed to be all right.

  Gazing around, trying to understand his situation now, his attention was drawn to a gaping hole in the wall. Through the jagged concrete frame, he saw a round mass of circuitry suspended on scaffolding. Attached to it was a flip-out screen scrolling data, going so fast he only caught a little of it—running defensive gait analysis … updating predictive algorithm… And this all came with a soundtrack, too, an awful rhythmic pulsing. He stared, wondering what the thing could be, somehow knowing at the same time that whatever-it-was was why he was here.

  And it opened its eye and stared at him. His heart seemed to wiggle in his chest. It wasn’t an eye, but a mechanical aperture with something behind it, something glowing red…

  “What the hell is that?” he said.

  Then he became aware that the whole building was coming down around him. Time to get out.

  Skull Island

  Kong had been increasingly restless since he had speared the “sun” in the biodome enclosure, but he seemed especially agitated as the new day wore on. As Ilene feared, he had begun testing the other boundaries of his containment. When building the structure, where possible, they had hidden its limits behind natural features, so he wouldn’t be suspicious. He was familiar, after all, with cliffs and canyons as barriers or at least impediments to movement. But given the breadth of his reach, there were a few spots they’d had to hide with nothing more than dense vegetation or the illusion of sky, and he had zeroed in on one of those.

  But he didn’t start pounding at it as she feared he would. Instead, he tore out the tall bamboo and pressed himself against the unnatural barrier—more like he was listening for something than trying to get through. And he seemed—uncertain.

  And then, in the afternoon, he suddenly stood to his full height and began hooting, pounding his chest.

  A threat display. She hadn’t seen that since—well, not since Kong’s battle with the Titan Camazotz. What the hell was going on?

  Maybe Zo-Zla-halawa, Jia signed.

  Probably not, Ilene replied. But it might very well be something outside of the barrier, a surviving Skullcrawler, maybe. She should probably look into that.

  She and Jia went back to their little prefab cottage near the entrance of the dome. They had larger quarters in the facility, but crossing through the storm was a pain, and sometimes they spent a day or two on-site. And Jia was more comfortable here, in the little fragment of the world she had lived in for most of her life, near the Titan who had adopted her just as surely as Ilene had.

  She went to her workstation and began going through the perimeter camera footage and motion sensor data, but nothing bigger than a squirrel showed up.

  Then she noticed the alert on her phone. It was a silent one, so it probably wasn’t an emergency, but it was marked urgent.

  It turned out to be a Monarch general mailing for her clearance level, and urgent didn’t begin to cover it. She threw it to her larger screen and watched in horror as the footage displayed Godzilla crashing into a coastal community. Where was this?

  The answer was Pensacola, and the footage was in real time. It was dark, night-time in the States.

  Moments after she started watching, Godzilla stopped his advance into the city and returned to the sea. The cause of his retreat was as much a mystery as his attack. But that was for someone else to work out; she had a puzzle of her own to worry at.

  Kong. He must have somehow sensed Godzilla was active again. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  But how? Pensacola was half a world away. And why was Godzilla attacking there? The lead report was by Mark Russell, maybe the greatest surviving expert on the Titan, but he didn’t seem to have discerned any motive behind the attack.

  Whatever the reason, Godzilla was back from his vacation. And if the past was a prologue that meant he was likely to start seeking out threats to his alpha status.

  The only Titan that currently fit that description was Kong.

  A quick check on Godzilla’s trajectory showed he had made a swing by Skull Island earlier and given it a pass. That was a relief, because it meant that the island was still somehow protecting Kong from Godzilla’s attentions. But it made her wonder…

  Further inspection confirmed her suspicions. Kong had hurled his spear at the “sun” during Godzilla’s nearest approach to the island. It might be a coincidence, but Kong had spent a long time in the biodome without losing control. Maybe the fact that Godzilla was out there, on the prowl, had triggered his fight-or-flight instinct. Well, except Kong did not have the “flight” component of that. Or maybe it wasn’t that extreme; maybe he had the vague sensation that there was something dangerous out there, beyond his island.

  One thing she did know. If Monarch tried to move Kong off of the island, Godzilla would know instantly. And given what she suspected about the relationship between the two Titans, that would not have a happy ending for anyone…

  Tallahassee Magnet High School, Pensacola

  Normally, Madison wouldn’t have been bothered very much by the intentionally audible snickers from Lar
a and Alicia as she walked by them. She’d stood toe-to-toe with a three-headed dragon, after all, so what were a couple of mean girls compared to that? Of course, if she was honest with herself, she knew those two things didn’t go together. Yes, Titans were objectively more frightening than teenaged girls; Ghidorah had terrified her nearly beyond reason. She had dealt with that because she had been on a mission, and because there had been no option. Coping with kids her own age—that was an option. She had been homeschooled for years, and her memories of elementary school hadn’t prepared her for high school. She had assumed making friends would be easy. But if you were even slightly weird here, it was a problem, and she was more than slightly weird. But that was okay. On most days, anyway.

  But today was different. She’d spent the night in a Monarch bunker with her aunt, watching her phone obsessively, viewing videos of Godzilla’s attack, reliving her oh-so-fond memories of being holed up in a similar bunker outside of Boston, wondering whether or not her mother’s associates would slit her throat while she slept.

  Back then, at least, she had been able to act. She had stolen the ORCA and used it to disrupt Ghidorah’s rampage of terror.

  Today, with Godzilla’s attack over and the Titan already far out to sea, she had something far worse to deal with.

  School.

  She wandered through the halls, only half paying attention, watching the tiny screen of her phone, trying to find something, anything that could explain Godzilla’s behavior. But if it was there, she was missing it.

  It had been her own mother who unleashed the Titans on the world. She had believed that doing so was the only way to correct the damage human beings had done and were continuing to do to the environment. And for a while, Madison had been right there with her. She knew it was hard to understand, and she had had difficulty explaining it later, even to her dad. But a huge part of it had been that Mom trusted her with all of her secrets, including her mad plan to use the Titans to save the world. With all of Monarch’s data at their fingertips, it had been easy to see the problem—the vanishing rainforests, the mortally wounded Great Barrier Reef, the steady rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the melting polar ice. Not to mention the extinctions of plant and animal life, all on track to match even the worst extinction events the planet had ever known. But while most of those prior extinctions had happened over periods of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, the Anthropocene extinctions were occurring at a much faster pace of a few hundred years. And this wasn’t privileged knowledge—everyone knew it. The big oil companies knew it. Big Tech knew it. Politicians knew it.

  And they did nothing. Would do nothing until it was far too late.

  And then her mother had noticed something. In the places devastated by the MUTOs and Godzilla, life was on the mend. Deserts were blooming, ecosystems recovering. Titans were hard on human beings, but they were good for the planet. So Madison had believed that her mother was doing a good thing. That they were doing a good thing. She understood that some people might die. A few. But the way her mom put it, more people would be saved. And the death of her brother, Andrew, would not have been in vain.

  It all made sense right up until the moment that Mom’s co-conspirator, Jonah, started murdering people right and left. People Madison knew. And it kept getting worse; Mom had planned to let only a few Titans loose, but in freeing Ghidorah first, she’d made a terrible mistake. She hadn’t known that Ghidorah could awaken the rest, release all of the Titans at once—and control them. The result had been a bloodbath.

  And still her mother had tried to justify it. And rationalize nearly killing Madison’s father. That’s when Madison had realized she couldn’t be complicit any longer; she had to act against her mother, against Jonah. And finally her mother had come around, sacrificing her very life to try to atone for her mistakes.

  And after that, the world had actually gotten better. People were rebuilding, in most cases smarter and better than before. In Boston, Godzilla had shown that he was an ally of the human race. Afterward he was seen a few more times, herding recalcitrant Titans away from human populations, returning them to places of rest. And for three years, there had been peace, and healing.

  But now Godzilla was back, and he had broken that peace, attacking Pensacola in the night.

  Why? she wondered, as she stared at cable news on the TV the teacher was playing in her next class.

  “A world at peace, shattered a mere twelve hours ago when the massive Titan, once thought a hero of humanity, made landfall in Pensacola, doing significant damage to the Southeastern headquarters of Apex cybernetics. CEO Walter Simmons had this to say.”

  The scene cut to Simmons, walking through the wreckage of the Apex facility.

  “This time is about working together,” the CEO said. “To ensure a safer world. From this day forward, I will stop at nothing to destroy Godzilla.”

  The other kids in the class were whispering, glancing back at her. Some uneasily, some with suspicion, some outright hostile. The Godzilla girl. The weird girl who had been homeschooled by the woman who tried to destroy the world. Who hung out with monsters and never did anything fashionable with her hair.

  More stares. Whispers getting louder, meaner. She frowned, staring straight ahead. She wanted to bolt, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. Or get in trouble with the principal again.

  She looked down, and noticed a note folded on her desk. She picked it up and slipped it in her pocket.

  The day was a loss, in more ways than one. When the bell rang she launched out of her chair. Only then did she unfold the note and read it.

  It was from Josh, of course.

  You okay? It read. And he had hand-drawn a concerned-face emoji.

  She smiled and put it in her pocket. Then she got out her phone and pulled up Mad Truth’s podcast as she made her way out of the building.

  “Oh loyal listeners I was there! Oh, man, I was there! Godzilla’s Apex attack, I saw it go down! You don’t think it’s a coincidence that he reappears, and just so happens to curb-stomp that specific facility? Ha! No such thing as coincidence.”

  No, there isn’t, Madison thought. If Godzilla attacked Apex, he had a good reason. And Dad would know that, too.

  Monarch relief camp, Pensacola

  Running on caffeine and adrenaline, Mark had once again concluded that he would rather be wrong about these things than right. Wrong meant people left him alone, he could do his job, go home and listen to Madison complain about how boring her homework was, get a good night’s sleep.

  Right meant everyone wanted a piece of him: everyone in the office, the volunteers with the relief effort, the press, the Monarch director. He felt like a creature with a hundred limbs and only one head to control them all.

  And once the press realized who he was, it was all coming back. All of the stuff about Emma and her associate Jonah, the ecoterrorist who was, by the way, still at large, somewhere out there. Was he responsible for this? Was there another ORCA? Were the events of three years ago about to repeat themselves? Was it true Ghidorah had reappeared at the North Pole?

  He didn’t blame them. They had every right to be frightened, to demand answers from the organization that claimed to oversee the monsters lurking in the shadows, that claimed to have all of the answers.

  And maybe someone at Monarch did have those answers, although given his conversations with his higher-ups he had his doubts. But he did not have many answers at all. Godzilla showed up. Godzilla broke things, mostly belonging to Apex, Godzilla left.

  “Is it possible Godzilla is being controlled by ecoterrorists?” one reporter asked him.

  “I…” Mark began. “Seriously? That’s what you’re asking me?”

  “Dr. Russell,” another interrupted, “given his attraction to human-caused environmental change, is it possible Godzilla hates artificial beaches?”

  Mark looked at that reporter for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said. “Does anyone have q
uestions about the relief effort? No? Good.” He turned and ducked back into his command tent.

  “Somebody at Monarch command wants to talk to you,” Chloe said. “He said you aren’t answering your phone.”

  “Enjoying the day shift?” he asked.

  “Not so much.”

  “Me either,” he sighed. “I’ll talk to whoever it is.”

  He pulled out his phone and returned the missed call.

  “Sorry, Clermont,” he said. “I’ve been a little busy with … things here. It’s sort of a madhouse.”

  “I’m sure,” a strange voice said. “But this isn’t Clermont. This is Director Guillerman.”

  “Oh,” Mark said. “Director. Nice to talk to you.”

  “To you as well. Let me come to the point. I need you here, Dr. Russell.”

  “Here?” Mark said.

  “In command and control. Castle Bravo. You’re the only one who called this right. I need you.”

  “That’s—ah—flattering,” Mark said. “But I have obligations here. I can’t just drop everything.”

  “We can staff up Pensacola,” Guillerman said. “But we need you.”

  “You did fine without me for years.”

  “Well, that was before Godzilla decided to wipe out random cities for no obvious reason,” the director said. “You predicted that.”

  “I didn’t,” Mark said. “I only said his pattern had changed. I didn’t know what it meant. I still don’t.”

  “And we need you to figure that out. Here.”

  “Okay,” Mark said. “I understand. But until the new staff arrives, I need to be here. And I’ve also got to make arrangements for my daughter. So if we can just hold off—”

  “Understood,” Guillerman said. “You don’t have to be here tomorrow. This is just notice that you’re on call. So make whatever arrangements you have to. If that big lizard resurfaces, I will want you on site ASAP.”

  Too tired to protest further, Mark agreed and ended the call. He was about to pocket the phone when he saw another missed call, from a different number.