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

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