Godzilla

by Stephen Molstad

  When Caiman’s face popped back on screen—his earphones a tad too roomy for his dwarfish head—he wore the resigned smile of a sympathetic uncle. “If that same gentleman is watching this live broadcast, perhaps the view of this building will change his mind.”

  Animal swung the camera around to focus on the venerable old concrete-and-glass tower. It was demolished. An enormous hole, roughly twenty stories tall, had been smashed into one side of the structure and through the other side. It was plain to see that the creature had crashed its way through the building. Caiman poked his head into the frame as another helicopter passed by outside.

  “I hope your roaches are up to it.”

  “Look at this mess!” the mayor roared over the noise of the helicopter. “And who do you think they’re going to blame? The same one they always blame—me!” The view out the passenger compartment’s windows was not a pretty sight. The center of Manhattan was already emptying out, but its shores were teeming with huddled masses yearning to get to Jersey and Queens. The commissioner of human resources had called a minute earlier on his car phone to report that looters were working their way down Lexington Avenue. As they flew over the West Side Highway and out across the Hudson, Ebert could see the lines of snarled traffic for several miles. “If this evacuation turns out to be unnecessary, Gene, they’re going to roast me alive. They’ll string me up from the Statue of Liberty’s torch.” It was all too horrible to contemplate. The mayor consoled himself by tearing back the wrapping on a candy bar and eating most of it in three furious bites.

  Disappointed, his chief aide leaned forward and reminded the corpulent candidate, “Didn’t we agree that we weren’t going to eat any more sweets until after the election?” He reached out to take the candy bar, but Ebert reacted with the fury of a rhino protecting its young. After a brief tussle, he wrested the chocolatey treat away and hissed over his shoulder, “Back off, Gene!”

  Mayor Ebert was on his way to the army’s command center, having invited himself. When his helicopter landed a few minutes later on a New Jersey helipad, there was a crowd of people waiting for him on the roof under a canopy of umbrellas.

  “What’s this? Who are these people, Gene? I don’t have time for this!”

  As they stood in the doorway waiting for the stairs to be lowered, Gene leaned in close and explained that they were businesspeople, major stakeholders, merchants and property owners who stood to lose several fortunes if the situation couldn’t be resolved quickly.

  “Who the hell are these clowns? I don’t have time for this nonsense. Screw ’em.”

  “They’re campaign contributors, sir.”

  Campaign contributors? Well, that was a different story. Candidate Ebert’s hectic schedule relented. He ducked under the whirring blades, beaming his sunniest smile, and waded into the crowd for a quick meet-and-greet. After all, these people were his constituents and they were legitimately concerned about the welfare of the city.

  “I share your concerns,” he shouted to them after he’d shaken most of the hands. “You have my personal assurance that I’m going to be looking out for your interests. We’re going to do everything humanly possible to protect your investments and get the city back in business just as soon as possible.” With that, he threw his stubby fists in the air and offered the crowd a double thumbs-up.

  He was shouldering his way past them toward the elevator, shaking hands without breaking stride, when he ran into a human roadblock. A tall man with a salt-and-pepper grizzle of beard stood directly in the mayor’s path. He held a large black umbrella over a long black trench coat, and he moved in on the mayor like a falcon on a field mouse. Reaching into his breast pocket, he produced a business card, twirling it expertly between his fingers as he handed it over.

  “La Rochelle Insurance,” he said warmly and with a thick French accent. “We represent nearly thirteen percent of the buildings in your city.”

  The mayor looked up uneasily. He was in a hurry, and something about this hovering Frenchman made him nervous. He chirped an encouraging word before lowering his head and attempting to bull his way past. But the Frenchman cut him off at the pass, sliding deftly into his path once more, this time reaching out to pat the mayor on the back.

  “I just wanted to tell you how relieved we are that you are in control of the situation.” He patted Ebert on the back of the neck, something the mayor found odd. Probably just one of those weird French things, he told himself. “You can count on La Rochelle for support.”

  “Oh, right, well, thank you. Thanks very much. What was your name?”

  The Frenchman only smiled and stepped aside. “Have a nice day.”

  Mayor Ebert, spotting his opening, plunged forward and continued on his way, completely unaware that he’d just been bugged. Protruding from the collar of his shirt was a pin-sized object that hadn’t been there when he stepped off the helicopter.

  THREE

  Audrey scanned the faces of the people on the subway, wondering if they knew. Wondering if they could tell just by looking at her that, less than thirty minutes before, she had committed the first crime of her entire life—the theft of Caiman’s press ID. And could they see that she was on the verge of committing yet another misdeed, a forgery? Each time someone in the crowded train glanced in her direction, she felt an impulse to confess everything. Was this only the beginning? Was she edging out onto the slippery slope of criminality? Would she, in time, become addicted to the reckless thrills of the outlaw lifestyle and end up robbing banks? Where would it all end?

  She and Lucy were riding the PATH train toward New Jersey and WIDF’s temporary production facilities, which consisted of Big Ed sitting behind the mixing board in the truck while the rest of the staff stood outside with umbrellas. Like most of the news outfits in New York, WIDF had set up shop as close to the command center as they could. Luckily, Animal and Lucy’s apartment was only about a mile away.

  Lucy examined Caiman’s press ID before digging through her purse in which she carried, seemingly, everything. She found a strip of photo-booth pictures that she and Audrey had taken some weeks before, then pulled out a pair of nail scissors. She cut out an almost-square picture of Audrey acting almost serious and found that it fit almost perfectly over the picture of Caiman.

  “Well, that’ll have to do. It’s the only picture of you I’ve got where you’re not acting like a mental patient.”

  “I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” Audrey fretted. “I mean, what if Caiman finds out I took it?”

  Lucy stared at her with an angry, don’t-even-think-of-going-there facial expression. “Come on! You’re finally starting to show a little chutzpah. Don’t wimp out on me now. Caiman doesn’t even need this pass. Everybody in town knows his face. He won’t have problems getting in anywhere.”

  “Yeah, I suppose.” Audrey bit her lip, still doubtful. “But what do you think he’d do if he found out?”

  “Who cares?” Lucy exploded. All the other passengers looked at them, but Lucy couldn’t have cared less. “Look, you gotta ask yourself the following question: How often are you gonna have an ex-boyfriend on the inside of an international story? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, girlfriend. Now, you gonna do this or not?”

  Audrey thought of her three years of slave labor under Caiman’s harsh yoke and of how he’d repaid her with an invitation to “dinner.” She had tried her best to play by the rules, but now she realized it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. Lucy was right, she acknowledged; it was time to take matters into her own hands if she ever expected to make a career for herself as a reporter in this tough-as-nails town. Right then and there she made up her mind. (And take it from someone who knows: Once Audrey makes up her mind about something, she can be a real mule.) She curled her lip back, imitating Edward G. Robinson in an old gangster flick, and laid her cards on the table.

  “Yeah, I’m in.”

  “Good. We need some glue or something to stick your picture on this badge.” Lucy had ever
ything else in that purse of hers, but she didn’t have glue.

  “Foolish me! I left my forgery kit at the office again.”

  “Hardy-har.” Luckily, there was a group of schoolkids a few seats away, and they were carrying backpacks. In her sweet-as-horseradish way, Lucy spoke to one of the boys. “Hey, kid, you got any glue?”

  “Maybe,” the pudgy thirteen-year-old sniffed. “And what do I get out of it?”

  “Will ya get a load of the cheek on this youngster?” she snorted. “How about that warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing you helped out your fellow man?”

  “Blow me,” the kid shot back.

  That cracked up everybody who had followed the exchange, including Audrey. But a minute later, after Lucy had walked over and held a brief but pointed conference with the young scholar, she came back holding not one but two containers of glue, one stick and the other liquid. He had offered to throw in his stapler, but Lucy said that wouldn’t be necessary.

  “My friend Joshua told me that I may keep these,” she said politely.

  A nondescript man in nondescript clothing came walking through the rain carrying a bag of Yum Yum doughnuts and a large to-go cup of coffee. There was nothing memorable about him. If anyone had happened to stop and ask him for the time, they wouldn’t have been able to describe him five minutes later. If anyone happened to ask what he did for a living, he was prepared to explain that he worked for an international insurance agency. Let us call this man Jean-Luc.

  A thick ceiling of storm clouds blocked the late afternoon sun, bringing an early twilight to the city. A light but steady rain was falling as Jean-Luc paused on the curb near an ordinary-looking van and pretended to sip the coffee. After a surreptitious glance up and down the block, he knocked the secret knock on the vehicle’s rear door. It clicked open, and a second later he evaporated completely from the street.

  “Merci beaucoup,” said Phillipe Roaché as he pulled off his headphones and took possession of the junk food. He had only just arrived himself, still in the suit and tie he’d worn to see the mayor. Now, if what he told me much later is to be trusted, he was seated at the controls of a floor-to-ceiling portable eavesdropping console. Pretty fancy equipment for an insurance agent. He hungrily opened the bag and lifted out a doughnut. Obviously, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. The sight of the powdered-sugar snack seemed to confuse and wound him slightly. He looked up at Jean-Luc. “No croissants?”

  “Il n’y en a pas—there aren’t any.”

  Warily Roaché tore off a sweet, greasy mouthful and grimaced at the taste. To wash it away, he quickly drank from his coffee. But that was even worse than the doughnut. After he succeeded in forcing the bilge down his throat, he complained to Jean-Luc, “You call this coffee?”

  “I call this America. Il n’y a pas de café ici!” he declared.

  The two other men in the van wholeheartedly agreed that there was neither edible food nor potable drink in les États-Unis. They haughtily declared that the best reason for a Frenchman to visit the States was so he wouldn’t be tempted to go off his diet.

  Still regarding the coffee as if it had betrayed him bitterly, Roaché put the headphones back on and listened. He quickly turned up the volume when he heard the mayor storm into the command center screaming, “Tell me this is all a cruel joke!”

  Elsie, Mendel, and I were hanging around the edges of our tent headquarters on the banks of the Hudson, waiting to see what would happen next. The top brass from each branch of the military were converging on the site, and the mood of tension in the air seemed to escalate with the arrival of each new officer. They all seemed angry with Hicks for having failed to intercept the creature before it reached American waters and stomped through the front door of the most populous city in the nation. At the same time, none of them wanted to strap himself into the hot seat. So, while Hicks was allowed to continue leading the hunt, his superiors let it be known that they had him on a very short leash. In addition to deploying arms and munitions in the city and monitoring reports from his search teams, Hicks was busy answering the generals’ questions.

  “What are you calling this thing?” was a question he was asked more than once.

  “Dr. Chapman, have you people come up with a name for this thing yet?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” she said, “but since Dr. Tatopoulos was the one who first realized this thing is a distinct species, he should be the one to name it.”

  I was taken aback, both by Elsie’s generosity of spirit and by the fact that everyone in the tent was suddenly looking at me. “I’ll have to give it some thought,” I said.

  “I’ve got a suggestion,” Hicks’s immediate supervisor, General Anderson, announced. “Let’s call it ‘the target.’ ”

  It was loud under the command center’s tent. Phones were ringing, printers were spitting out status reports, technicians were speaking into radios, and a hundred people were coming in and out. But the noise level tripled with the arrival of the right honorable mayor of New York City.

  “Tell me this is all a cruel joke. Tell me this isn’t really happening,” Ebert bellowed. He walked to the center of the room and stood surrounded by high-ranking military personnel and government officials, not to mention we three scientists. Other men might have been intimidated into a show of good manners, but Mayor Ebert was indignant. He’d recently learned that the army had no idea where “it” was. “You’re telling me that in an election month, I’ve ordered the evacuation of the entire city, and ten minutes later this thing disappears? My own mother, ladies and gentlemen, is on a train for Pittsburgh. When she finds out this was a false alarm, even she won’t vote for me!”

  Admiral Phelps had a deep, baritone voice. In contrast to the mayor’s arm-flapping histrionics, he remained cooler than a cucumber. “We’ve been monitoring the waters on all sides of the island. As far as we can tell, it hasn’t left the area.”

  “Yes, but what I’m hearing”—Ebert gestured toward his own ears—“is that you don’t know for sure. This lizard or whatever could have been long gone by the time you started watching for it! Nobody has even seen it for hours. This evacuation is no longer necessary. Let’s call it off.”

  Colonel Hicks shook his head and explained why that wouldn’t be possible. “There’s still a very good chance it’s in the city. We have reason to believe it may be hiding inside one of the buildings within the sequestered area.”

  “But you don’t know for sure! Do you have any idea what this is costing the city every hour in lost revenues? Do you know how many Upper East Siders are going to spend the night out in the rain?”

  Sergeant O’Neal rushed into the tent, stopped a few feet from Hicks, and stood frozen in a rigid salute. I think Colonel Hicks noticed him right away but decided to ignore the interruption. He didn’t need any more bad news, especially not in front of all those cranky generals. And especially not midway through Ebert’s tirade.

  “Mr. Mayor,” Hicks growled nicely, “I sympathize with your position. Believe me, I do. But I cannot and will not give the all-clear until we’ve inspected each and every building inside our perimeter. For the safety of your city’s people, I’m sure you’ll agree that—”

  Whatever Sergeant O’Neal had to report couldn’t wait another second. He stepped right into the middle of the heated Hicks-Ebert discussion and re-saluted.

  “What now?” asked the colonel, popping an antacid tablet into his mouth.

  “Excuse me, sir, but inspecting the buildings inside the perimeter might not be enough.” O’Neal, an edgy soldier who desperately wanted everything to run smoothly and by the book, stared straight ahead, ramrod erect.

  “What is it now?” Hicks asked, although by then we had a fair idea of what the answer was going to be.

  “Sir, we’ve run into a problem, sir.”

  The question raised by the visiting generals about what the creature should be called makes this an opportune moment to discuss the problem of naming. Up to this poi
nt, I have referred to the story’s central character as “the creature,” “the beast,” “the monster,” or “the really big lizard.” Also, after finding evidence of femoral glands, I knew the animal was a male, so I sometimes called him “him.” Confusing? Why, the reader might well ask, don’t you simply go ahead and call him Godzilla—after all, that is the name on the cover of the book.

  There are two reasons. First of all, we still hadn’t settled on a name among ourselves. We were using terms like “it” and “the thing” and “the creature.” Although we had seen the videotape with the old Japanese cook repeating the word gojira, we still didn’t know what that meant. Secondly, the name Godzilla is nothing but a butchered mispronunciation of the creature’s true historical name. As we will see, it was the result of one unscrupulous reporter’s misreading, a man who was small in both spirit and stature. The name Godzilla appears on the cover of this book against my wishes, and only because it is the term that has come into common usage. As someone who constantly has to correct the way people pronounce my last name, I am perhaps overly sensitive to this issue. I urge all my readers not to call this animal Godzilla. That’s not his name. No more than my name is Tadapoleus, Topapodalus, Dopatodolus, or any of the other things I’ve been called.

  To quote Audrey: “It’s Gojira, you moron!”

  As soon as O’Neal told us about the problem he’d discovered, we piled into a set of armored personnel carriers and tore off toward the city.

  Twenty minutes later we were cruising the rain-streaked streets of Chelsea at better than sixty miles per hour. On a normal night, Eighth Avenue would be crowded with pedestrians and taxicabs. But at eight-fifteen that evening, all the shops were shut down and the lights turned out. The only people we saw were the soldiers directing traffic. They stood in dreary pools of light under the street lamps, wearing black rain slickers, and saluted as we whizzed past. The deserted city looked like one large Edward Hopper painting. Up ahead, we could see the lead vehicles in our convoy turning west on Twenty-third Street.