Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

were starting to put their thumbs on the scale again. People were forgetting, returning to the practices that had screwed up the global ecosystem so badly in the first place. The global ecosystem that Godzilla was apparently the steward of.

What if Godzilla came to see not another Titan as his competition for alpha predator, but the human race as a whole? Maybe three years ago he had seen humanity as the lesser of two evils, and one of those evils was now gone. Perhaps his priorities had shifted to meet the new reality. Maybe he had changed.

If so, then it was like Emma all over again, with Godzilla making the cold calculation that a certain amount of human death and misery was necessary for the good of the planet.

“Mark?” Chloe said. He realized he had been staring mutely at the screen for a long time.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking. Your shift is over, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Yes, but Kennan is late.”

“It’s okay,” Mark said. “I’ll keep an eye on things until he gets here.”

“Thanks,” she said.

As she left, he poured himself a cup of coffee, then went back to his workstation and started doing his weekly report. But he kept glancing back at the map, and Godzilla’s track.

You’re thinking too much, Mark, old boy, he thought. This obsession nearly wrecked you once. It nearly cost you everything. Do not let it happen again.

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