Godzilla

by Stephen Molstad

“It’s okay, driver, I’ll get out here.”

  He told me I couldn’t do that, that I had to wait until we were inside the compound, and that I would have to get it approved by the colonel. But I was on a mission and there wasn’t much he could do to stop me without abandoning his vehicle. I hopped out and quickly sliced my way between the news crews toward the blinking red sign. When I reached the sidewalk, I noticed a street vendor who had set up shop under a doorway. He had a display table full of trinkets: dinosaur toys, key rings, coffee mugs, and of course T-shirts. One of them was actually very cool. It featured a freeze-frame image taken from Animal Palotti’s daring footage of the creature, the shot where the huge gray paw was coming down on top of the camera. I thought about buying one but figured I’d better see how much my trip to the pharmacy was going to cost first.

  I complimented the nondescript salesman. “It’s amazing how fast you got these T-shirts made up.”

  “It is our job,” he replied. I think he had a French accent.

  A bell over the door tinkled as I stepped into the pharmacy. The place seemed deserted. “Hello?” I rang the bell on the counter a couple of times before a woman in a wrinkled smock shuffled out from the back room.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes. I need a home pregnancy test. I’m looking for one that tests for gonadotropic hormones, but if you don’t have any, one of the clomiphene citrate kits will do the trick.”

  She laid one package after another on the counter. She carried six different over-the-counter brands. “This is all we got,” she informed me. I heard the bell tinkle on the door as another customer entered the shop.

  Without reading the labels, I reached for my wallet. “I’ll take them all. One of each.” I wasn’t going to be able to afford the T-shirt. As the pharmacist was accepting my money, I heard a woman’s voice come over my shoulder.

  “You must have quite a harem.”

  I recognized the voice and froze stiff for a moment before turning around to see who it was. She wore a long raincoat over a red dress and a dark beret over blond ringlet curls. She was dripping wet and even more darling than I remembered. The sight of her sent a quick, arrow-sharp pain shooting through my chest.

  “Audrey? Is that you? Wow. Hi. Hello. You look …” I almost said incredibly beautiful, but caught myself in time. “You look … wow, how’ve you been?”

  “Good to see you, Nick.”

  “Here’s your change.” The pharmacist poured a few coins into my palm and handed me my bag full of test kits. Something was different about Audrey. She seemed more determined, more direct than I remembered her. I assumed it was the result of her success in her new career. She had an official press badge and everything.

  “So you made it.”

  “What?” She looked confused, so I pointed to the photo ID she was wearing on her trench coat.

  “You’re a reporter. That’s what you always wanted to be, right? I’m happy for you. Really, I am.”

  “Yeah, well …” She didn’t seem quite convinced, but at the time I thought she was just being modest. We stepped outside and stood under the overhang of the drugstore’s doorway, keeping out of the rain. “And you? Are you still picking apart cockroaches?”

  That was a hell of a way to say hello after eight years. I felt condescended to. “I’m into earthworms now,” I answered testily, “but I don’t want to bore you with my work. I know invertebrate biology isn’t exactly your bag.” My tone of voice must have betrayed some of my bitterness.

  “You’re still mad at me.”

  “Ha!” I scoffed. “Mad? I’m not mad. Why would I be mad? You think I’m still mad?” I tried to make it sound as though it were the most ridiculous idea I’d ever heard and dismissed the whole matter with an imperious wave of the hand.

  Then I changed my mind. “Well, yes,” I admitted, “you left without so much as a phone call. No letter, no nothing. Maybe it was wrong to ask you what I asked you, but I think you should have … you could have at least … yeah, I guess I am still a little mad.”

  “That was eight years ago, Nick.” She made it sound like an eternity. “Some people change, you know.”

  “Most people don’t,” I said bluntly.

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.” She turned up her collar and walked out into the rain.

  Good riddance, I thought. I have every right to be angry. You see, Audrey and I had met when our campus newspaper sent her to cover a protest rally I’d organized. There had been an instant attraction, a chemical bonding. We became inseparable pals, and one thing led to another. We practically lived at each other’s apartments. And four years later, on the verge of graduating, we were still going strong. At least I thought so. One morning as we were walking up the hill to class, I told her how much I loved her and how I couldn’t imagine my life without her and asked her to be my wife. To show you how out of touch with reality I was, I was expecting her to say, Yes, of course I’ll marry you, Nick darling, without even blinking. Instead she reacted with shock and told me she’d need some time to think it over. She had to decide whether she wanted to spend the rest of her life with a guy whose idea of a hot Saturday night was renting a National Geographic video about gastropods (it’s excellent, by the way). She didn’t say how much time she would need to mull the question over. But it was apparently quite a while, because I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since that day. Rather than do the right thing and tell me the truth, Audrey skipped town. She even missed the graduation ceremony so she wouldn’t have to face me. Who wouldn’t be angry?

  Although I had every right to be angry, it was painful watching her disappear into the crowd, and I suddenly regretted my haughty attitude. I didn’t want it to be another eight years before I saw her again, before I could at least hear why she’d left me in the lurch like that.

  “Audrey, wait!” I ran down the sidewalk and caught up to her. “You’re right. It’s been a long time. Can I offer you a cup of tea or something?”

  She hesitated. “Sure. I’d, er, like that.” She hesitated again. “One thing, though. Who’d you get pregnant?”

  “It’s a long story.” I smiled and we headed off to search for that cup of tea. Unfortunately, nothing was open. We walked around in the light rain for a while, chatting, catching up. She was asking all the questions, and I did most of the talking. I told her who I was working for and described a few of my earthworm-related misadventures in the good old Ukraine. She seemed genuinely curious about what I’d been up to, and it felt so good to talk to her that I’m afraid I rambled on and on without asking her any questions about what she’d been doing all that time. Or was that her plan?

  Still, I hadn’t forgotten why I’d gone into the drugstore in the first place. Eventually I steered us back to the command center and told the guards at the entrance gate that she was with me on official business. We headed for my tent. The army had set up individual tents for Mendel, Elsie, and me, each of them stocked with all sorts of advanced scientific equipment. We continued to chat while I prepped the blood sample for testing. It was a little tricky because all the kits I’d purchased were designed for testing urine, but I knew how to get around that.

  “I still can’t believe it,” she said, pouring some coffee from one of the lab beakers. “Remember that time we chained ourselves to those railroad tracks? I was terrified of being arrested, but you—you were such a militant. You practically ran the whole nuclear freeze movement in the state of Ohio, and now look at you. You cut your hair, shaved your beard, and now you look so … I don’t know … establishment. It’s kind of ironic, if you don’t mind my saying so. How does a guy go from being an antinuke activist to working for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?”

  “When you and I used to attend rallies in college,” I explained, mixing fluids, “we helped to create awareness and mobilize public opinion. But now that I’m on the inside, I can actually affect policy. Real change.” I looked up from my work and said pointedly, “I may have put down my pic
ket sign and cut my hair, but I never lost my idealism.” I needed some tweezers and popped open my tool kit. I’d forgotten about the photos of Audrey taped to the inside of the box. I snatched the tweezers up and slammed the lid closed before she saw them. Although I was trying to focus on my work, talking to her was stirring up a lot of murky emotions that had settled to the bottom of my heart long ago. I didn’t know whether to be more hurt by the suggestion that I had somehow sold out or the hint in her voice that she thought I looked better with the beard.

  “And exactly what changes are you trying to effect?”

  “Well, I’ve been doing some rather groundbreaking work, actually. I’m tracking mutations in earthworm morphology caused by nuclear contamination in and around the Chernobyl power station. They’re getting bigger all the time. And, at the same time, I’m preparing a census for the government, cataloging new species that have been created as a result of man-made changes to the environment.”

  “Human-made, you mean?”

  “Right, sorry. Human-made changes to the environment—in particular, changes brought on by an increase in the levels of radiological contamination.”

  She sipped her coffee, feigning innocence, while I continued working. “Is that what you think created this lizard? Nuclear contamination?”

  It didn’t occur to me that I ought to be careful about what I told her. When we were in college I used to tell her everything, and I guess I fell back into that old habit. Although she was now a member of the press, I was relating to her like, well, like Audrey, my old and trusted friend. “Yes, contamination, definitely. Specifically, the fallout from French tests in the South Pacific. I found this blood sample earlier this evening after it—”

  “Blood sample? My God, Nick, how close did you get to that thing?”

  I took my eye away from the microscope lens and thought for a moment. “I got … pretty close.” The slide I was examining looked good. I poked an eyedropper into the blood sample and suctioned up a few cc’s of the serum, which by that point was a milky yellow color.

  “What else did you find out?”

  Distracted by my work, I told her more than I should have. “Well, we know he eats tons of fish. He’s a member of the reptile class, obviously. He displays physiological traits associated with Theropoda, a suborder of prehistoric dinosaur. But he seems to be a hybrid of some sort. Not only is he a genetic combination of at least three different species, but his DNA has obviously been exposed to high levels of radiation. The gene mutation is pretty darn spectacular. In fact, he’s probably the first example of an entirely new species. He’s a burrower, he’s amphibious, he’s relatively young, and …” I squeezed a drop of the yellow, hormone-rich fluid onto the white litmus paper of the test kit. The paper turned dark red at once. I felt a rush of goose bumps erupt on the back of my neck as I announced, “And he’s pregnant.”

  “He is pregnant?” Audrey asked, understandably confused.

  Immediately I began preparations for a more rigorous test to confirm the results of my experiment. “Obviously, these tests weren’t designed to be given to giant lizards, but fundamentally they look for the same hormonal patterns that would indicate pregnancy in a human female. And according to this test, our friend is very, very pregnant.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said suspiciously. “You just said it’s the first of its kind. If that’s true, how can it have babies? Doesn’t it need, like, a mate?”

  I started thinking out loud. “Not necessarily. Keep in mind that this creature is an aberration, a mutant. We don’t know how it reproduces. Some species are actually born pregnant. Or it might be a hermaphrodite. Or, more likely, it might reproduce asexually.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” she asked.

  I decided to ignore that question and continued thinking out loud. “I’ve been asking myself why—why would he travel all this way, almost exactly halfway around the world? But now it makes perfect sense. Think of all the different species that migrate great distances in order to bear their young. That’s why he came to New York—he’s nesting!”

  “Nesting?” The idea made her uneasy.

  “Yes! And Audrey, do you realize that most species of lizards lay up to a dozen eggs at a time?”

  “No, I didn’t realize that.”

  “Think about it: a dozen eggs. It means our problems might be only beginning.” I grabbed my sample materials and marched out into the rain. Of course, I needed to verify these astonishing findings before presenting them to Colonel Hicks and the others. I hurried toward the army’s mobile laboratory, an ambulance-sized truck that was parked close by. They had a very sophisticated chemistry lab inside staffed by an expert crew. I was halfway there before it dawned on me that I’d abandoned Audrey without a word. Then the most curious thing happened. I experienced a vague sense of déjà vu. I felt guilty about having become so excited about my work that I’d failed to even ask her to wait for me, and this triggered a memory. I recalled that in the weeks before I’d asked her to marry me, I’d been immersed in a series of experiments on the digestive system of Reticulitermes flavipes, a type of leech. The work had been so exhilarating that I could scarcely talk or think of anything that spring but leeches. In fact, I believe I started talking about it right after she told me she’d need time to consider my proposal. I wondered if that had anything to do with her sudden disappearance. And there I was, eight years later, doing the exact same thing all over again. I dashed back to the tent and explained.

  “Forgive me, but I’ve got to run these things over to the lab in order to confirm all of this. Be right back.” And once again I disappeared into the downpour.

  So there she was. Audrey Timmonds, the fledgling reporter who only hours before had been told she didn’t have what it takes to be a professional reporter in a survival-of-the-fittest town like New York, was alone in a tent full of information pertaining to the biggest news story of the year, the decade, maybe the century. She must have felt like the kid in the proverbial candy store, surrounded on all sides by temptation. She began to poke around, examining some of the materials I’d left scattered on the desktop. One item in particular caught her attention, a videotape labeled FIRST SIGHTING. After a look over her shoulder, she inserted the tape into the machine and pushed play. It contained most of the information we’d gathered up to that point on the origins and movement of the creature: the old cook in the hospital bed screaming “Gojira, Gojira”; the decimated village in Panama; the ruined ship on the beach in Jamaica. It was all information that Colonel Hicks had warned me not to discuss with anyone.

  After she’d fast-forwarded through the video, Audrey ejected the tape and did the right thing. She put it back in its case and put the case back where she’d found it. A reporter like Caiman wouldn’t have thought twice about putting the tape under his jacket and rushing back to the studio with it. But Audrey wasn’t the kind of person who would stab an old friend in the back just to get a story. She sat down and sipped her coffee, waiting for me to return.

  As she sat there she must have remembered how Animal and Lucy had laughed at her in the diner, telling her she wasn’t tough enough for the journalism jungle. Something happened to dear, sweet, innocent Audrey Timmonds while she waited for me to return. A change came over her, a mutation that had nothing to do with nuclear contamination. Metaphorical fangs grew beneath her lips; her fingernails morphed into dagger-sharp claws. She set down her coffee cup and glanced outside to make sure no one was looking, then committed her third—and most serious—crime of the day. She grabbed the videotape, buried it in the folds of her trench coat, and fled into the rain.

  Very soon thereafter I came back and found her missing. In her haste, she hadn’t even taken her bright red umbrella. I looked around the tent, then went to the door and shouted her name into the downpour. She was nowhere to be found. Once again she’d suddenly disappeared from my life without explanation, without even leaving a note. And this time, I thought to myself, she was probably gone
forever. Some people change, she’d said. But after all those years, one thing had apparently remained the same: Audrey Timmonds wasn’t interested in spending her time with a boring worm guy.

  Ed, the tech wizard who ran WIDF’s mixing board, was sitting at the controls of the station’s studio-on-wheels. Audrey was hanging over his shoulder, scrunched into the narrow aisle behind him. Their eyes were on one of the monitors where a recently shot videotaped image of Audrey was doing a stand-up report. Animal Palotti hovered nearby, helping himself to Ed’s cache of junk food, watching the tape he’d shot for his blond friend only moments before. He did not seem entirely pleased with the situation.

  Audrey in the truck silently mouthed the words Audrey on the screen was saying as the report drew to a close: “… the disturbing prospect of Gojira giving birth to a dozen offspring. Which is why, in this case, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to put the Big Apple together again. Audrey Timmonds, WIDF, New York.”

  “Bee-yoo-tee-ful,” Big Ed declared as soon as the tape was over. “Good report! By the way, you owe me breakfast for mixing it.”

  “I should have pulled my hair back,” Audrey worried. “Victor, what do you think? Was it okay?”

  “Real good, a real good piece,” Animal said between mouthfuls of a muffin, “but I’m curious. How did you get hold of this footage? And how’d you learn so much stuff about the lizard?” The way he asked the question let Audrey know he suspected the truth.

  “Like you said, good guys finish last—first law of the jungle.” With that she slid her clawed hands through the sleeves of her coat and headed outside. It was coming down cats and dogs, which wouldn’t have bothered the old Audrey. But the new one quickly decided she wasn’t going to look like a drenched rat the next time she stood before the cameras. As she headed down the stairs of the mobile studio, she reached out and snagged the umbrella away from a woman who was heading inside—“Hey, thanks so much!”—and got away before the lady could do anything about it. She ran out into the rain and quickly spotted her station manager.