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

and down the coast. Why’d Godzilla target Pensacola? Wanna know my theory? It’s all about patterns and variables.”

So, on many levels Mad Truth was pretty far out there, she thought, as she went back through the earlier stuff about crop circles and chemtrails, alien visitors, and the works. But when he talked about the Titans, and Apex, he mostly made sense.

Mostly, she thought, as she scrolled past one entry, “Mothra Pregnant?”

She’d been present when Mothra was born—or at least when she went from egg to pupa—and his speculations on the details of a Mothra pregnancy were ill-informed at best. But his inside information about Apex seemed pretty solid and fit with a lot of what she knew or suspected.

“Stick with me, I’m gonna take you back to grade school with this. Godzilla only attacks when provoked, that’s the pattern. Pensacola is the only Apex coastal hub with an advanced robotics lab, and that’s the variable, and add them up and your answer is? That Apex cybernetics is at the heart of the problem.”

Right, she thought. Exactly what she had been thinking. Godzilla only attacked when triggered by something, or when there was another Titan looking to be the alpha. You could add to that at least one case in which he had attacked humans who were trying to capture a Titan. There had been no other Titan in evidence at Apex. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. What if Apex had a captive Titan, and Godzilla had been trying to free it?

But that didn’t wash either, because if that were the case, why hadn’t he freed it? The handful of jets firing on him would never have stopped him. It was pretty clear that whatever Godzilla was looking for, he hadn’t found it, and then he’d just left.

Then it hit her. What if Apex had figured out how to build an ORCA?

The ORCA was a bioacoustic device her mom and dad had invented together to try to communicate with cetaceans. When they tried to use it, it had been a horror show; a pod of killer whales had beached themselves. They had decided to abandon the whole project—or at least, Dad thought they had. Later on Mom started tinkering with it again to try to deal with Titans that were hunting Godzilla and just generally wreaking havoc. Later, after her mother and father split up and she was living with Mom, she had perfected the device as a way of communicating with Titans. And if you tuned the thing to sound like an Apex Titan, it tended to control the lesser ones and attract the alphas—like Godzilla and Ghidorah.

Her father had shelved the device after Ghidorah was dead and the threat was over. He and Monarch had deemed the technology too dangerous to fool around with. But a lot of people knew about it, knew what it could do, and there were plenty of recordings floating around on the internet of the ORCA working; after all, she had played it over the broadcast system at the ball park to disrupt Ghidorah’s hold over the other Titans. Enough clues for a genius like Walter Simmons to reverse engineer the device, right?

Why? She didn’t know. Simmons seemed to have a real hatred for Godzilla. Maybe he had lured him to trash his Pensacola facility to frame the Titan. Or maybe he had a deeper, more devious plan.

Or none of that. She didn’t have enough information.

But she knew someone who might.

Mad Truth. She had to find him. In person.

And she might know how.

She called Josh.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m gonna need a favor, okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said.

She told him the favor.

“I meant of course not,” he said. “You know you can ask me anything—except maybe that. Yeah, definitely not that.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Make it work. In about an hour, okay? Before my aunt gets back.”

She hung up on his objections, then went back to her computer. She found her Mad Truth files, clicked on “episode transcripts” and began parsing through them. As she listened to the latest installment, she thought she remembered something, about bleach…

“Okay, class, listen up. In the midst of Godzilla’s attack on Apex Pensacola, I found some crazy tech with no official classification. What I saw didn’t match any of the engineering specs I’ve ever seen, so what are they working on in such a black-ops secrecy room? This could be the thread that finally unravels the Apex sweater of conspiracy. You better believe I’m gonna keep tugging. For now I’m secure, anonymous and hiding in plain sight…”

It took a while, but she found it. The thing about the bleach, and Chinese grocery stores…

She jerked at the loud bang outside of her window, her reflexes immediately pulling her back in time, to the gunfire in the Monarch facility in China, the bodies everywhere, people she knew, alive one minute, gone the next. And then later, in Antarctica, all of those people…

She jumped up and ran to the window, heart thumping, but there were no guns, just a van backfiring. An ugly, dirty, beat-to-pieces van. Music blared from within; her friend Josh sat in the driver’s seat.

She smiled. She had known he would come through.

She grabbed her things and ran down to the curb. Josh had stepped out, meeting her halfway to her door. As usual, his mop of dark hair was in disarray, and he looked put-upon. He was here, obviously, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“Just to be clear,” Josh said, scowling at her through his black-rimmed glasses, “my brother can never know.”

“To be clear,” Madison retorted, nodding at the junked-up van, “even if we got into an accident, I don’t think he could tell.”

Josh started for the driver’s seat, but Madison beat him to it.

“No, no, no,” he said. “My brother would never let you drive.”

“My mission,” Madison said. “My wheel.”

He reluctantly walked around to the passenger window, but he stopped, a conflicted expression on his face, one that she had come to know quite well.

“I just