Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (read people like a book .txt) 📕

your hands? This is a battery I made that is very sensitive to that. Ah!”

He picked up a tiny circuit board. “See this? Check this out.”

Horace looked at it.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You see that?”

“I do.”

“That right there is radio mesh networking with a voice-record sub-processor … guess from what, c’mon.”

“I don’t care,” Horace said.

“A toaster!” Bernie said, with a weird air of triumph. “Look at this thing. You know my Sara, she said this is how it begins. Robot uprising, right here.”

That was it. There was no way he could be near Bernie for another second. Horace got out of his seat. He felt like he had termites all over him.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“Oh,” Bernie said. “Is it one or two? Because if it’s two it’s probably from those apples. Hey, you want to use some of the hand sanitizer that I made? Okay, I’ll just … stay here.”

Bernie’s voice faded with distance as Horace fled the scene.

Santa Rosa Island, Florida

Jenny Tuazan swam in darkness, enjoying the gentle pressure of the water enveloping her. Other nights she might have walked a few hundred feet south and enjoyed the surf rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico to break on the thirty-mile-long spine of Santa Rosa Island. Those nights she would ride the waves, sometimes fight them, like some ancient goddess of the sea. So she had pretended when she was a girl, and secretly did so even now as she approached thirty. When she was a child, her family had come here often to camp and swim and beachcomb. It was less than a hundred miles from where she had grown up in Louisiana, but it had always seemed so different, so exotic to her. So far from the family business, which also involved the sea, but there it was all work, long hours on the boats and then mornings pulling the heads off shrimp. This place, with its white beaches, restaurants, hotels, and National Park had been all about fun, relaxation, family time.

When she grew up and became a park ranger, she had managed to get a job here, on the westernmost end of the island. After nine, the general public was locked out, but she had the run of the place and full communion with the beach and the bay and the memories they contained for her.

Tonight she wanted solitude and quiet, so she swam on the bay side of the island, across from which the city of Pensacola glittered like so many strings of Christmas lights.

She came up for air and felt the wind; in the distance thunder rumbled; a storm was rolling in. She smiled, thinking how her father would have made her get out of the water at the first sign of bad weather for fear she would be electrocuted by distant lightning. She figured she would take a few more moments here, then walk over to the Gulf side and watch the waves get wild. She was already wet, and she didn’t mind a little rain.

Four fighter jets shrieked by overhead. Pilots from the Naval Air Station training, probably. It seemed like a weird night for it, with the storm rolling in, but maybe the pilots needed to be certified for rough weather, or something.

She took a breath, and went back down, hands searching for the bottom.

And heard something.

There were plenty of things to hear in these waters, even at night. Shrimp boats going out, tourist ships cruising the harbor, comings and goings at the port. Tonight thunder, rolling along the surface of the bay, and the fading sound of the jets. And … helicopters? But this noise she heard now was none of that; it was something different. A sort of deep thrumming, like a heartbeat. She surfaced again and blinked water from her eyes and looked around but saw nothing unusual.

But then the sound—more a vibration, really—changed. She was feeling it now from below her. She went a little shallower, and there it was; the submerged earth beneath her feet was pulsing, very slowly, boom … boom … boom…

Maybe someone was using explosives to generate tremors and search for oil? But they weren’t supposed to be doing that, not in these waters.

She turned back toward Pensacola, and when the earth shuddered again, she noticed waves spreading across the bay in the reflected light.

“What the hell?” she muttered. Could it be an earthquake? She had never been in one, and down here she had never expected to be.

Then the stars in her peripheral vision were blotted out. And the resulting darkness … moved.

She stared off west and saw him then, rising from the sea with each step, a massive, unmistakable outline she had seen hundreds of times in stills and videos. And even so, he was so much bigger than she had imagined.

“Godzilla,” she breathed.

And as if he’d heard her, the massive, craggy fins on his back flickered with blue light, and then began to glow. She watched in amazement as he moved through the entrance to the bay. Not an animal, not a monster even. A god of the sea, from before the times when any human eye had laid eyes on the world. She saw the jets coming back now, and helicopters drawing near, and wanted to laugh. What could they do to him? Piss him off, maybe. If even that.

And then it occurred to her. Godzilla hadn’t been seen in years. If he was here, that might mean another Titan was too, like when he’d shown up in Savannah to drive Scylla away from the city.

The prospect of a Titan fight was almost as exciting as it was terrifying.

The water started to pull at her, like when one of the big container ships came in, creating an artificial tide dragging her into the bay.

But this was stronger than that, much stronger, and already her feet were no longer touching the bottom. Gasping, she put everything she had into swimming toward shore, only to watch it