The thing had first landed on the Chrysler Building, its dark and glistening body
contrasting sharply with the gleaming deco cathedral. The structure threatened
to collapse under the immense weight as large pieces of the stainless steel
ornamentation peeled away and plummeted nine hundred feet to the pavement where
they crashed into sidewalks and streets and cars. The thing clung to the iconic
spire a moment longer and then it pushed off, scattering what was left of the
beautiful steel and sending the giant antenna down like a mammoth spear thrown
from the heavens. The great wings made a dull roaring with each flap as it soared heavily over the Manhattan rooftops before settling
at the top of the Empire State Building, where it thrust out its tentacled head
and unleashed an unworldly sound, a sound that carried the passage of
dimensions and millennia.
And yet there was no chaotic exodus, no screaming
tumult as New York City’s millions fled the terror that had descended upon
them. An unnatural quiet had seized the city. The world seemed to have gone
dark, and people drifted through it with wide and terrified eyes that saw
nothing. Their faces conveyed terror, not at what was happening around them,
but the terror of battles being fought within their own minds, losing battles
where the stake was sanity itself. The thing lorded over them all, blasting
their senses with its terrible bleating call.
The passage of time had become difficult to calculate,
but soon an ethereal procession marched down Fifth Avenue and
stopped at the base of the Empire State Building. The mindless throng wore hooded robes
and they chanted in unison, “ia! ia! Cthulhu! ia! ia! Cthulhu!”
The thing gave no indication if it heard them or not.
---
For reasons unknown to the two hipsters, Venice was
completely deserted.
“Too much of that Skywalker last night, bro,” one said,
rubbing his eyes. “I think we smoked the world away.”
“Dude, look,” the other one said. There was an open bar
near the corner of Abbot Kinney and Venice Boulevard. They walked in just as
the power died again. The bartender was waxing his mustache and appeared not to
even notice the outage but it came back on after a moment. The TV over the
bar flickered to life, showing the tentacled
creature perched atop the Empire State Building with its great wings folded
around it.
“Occultists believe that the creature you see here is
an ancient entity known as ...,” the reporter looked at his notes again, “... Cthulhu. They
presume that the seismic activity which destroyed much of the Bermuda Islands
was the rising up of the lost city of R’lyeh.”
“Bro,” one of the hipsters said, “that is not Cthulhu.”
“Why not?”
“R’lyeh is not even in the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Says who?”
“Says Lovecraft, bro. South Pacific. ‘In his house at R’lyeh,
dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.’ Atlantic is out of the question.”
“Dude, Lovecraft was a consumptive hack with a bad case
of paranoia. Not exactly hard evidence.”
The bartender put his tin of moustache wax down on the
bar.
“No one,” he said, “speaks ill of H. P. Lovecraft in my
presence.” He turned his mustachioed gaze to the television. “Still, it does
look like Cthulhu. Hard to argue with a beard of tentacles. Now, what are we
drinking?”
“PBR,” one of the hipsters said. “Draft.” The friend
rolled his eyes.
“Dude, that is very two years ago. Nobody drinks PBR
anymore. Definitely not draft.”
“I know, bro. That’s why I ordered it. It’s so
mainstream it’s ironic again.”
“I’ll have a Narragansett,” the friend said, idly
twisting his beard.
The bar tender gave a noncommittal nod and shuffled
toward a cooler. The TV was now showing a giant dinosaur.
“This just in,” the newscaster said, sounding more
bewildered than anything. “Santa Barbara has been destroyed by a giant ... dinosaur.”
Shaky footage played of mission-style buildings being crushed beneath a huge
reptilian foot before whoever was holding the phone turned and fled. “Military efforts
to contain the beast have proven ineffective. If you are in the dinosaur’s
sphere of influence, please take shelter.” The screen showed a graphic of the
towering creature surrounded by a large red circle that now included most of Los
Angeles.
“Not a dinosaur,” one of the hipsters said. “Way too
big.”
“It’s Gojira,” the bartender said as he put the beers
on the counter. “I took a semester of Japanese before manga was a dead scene.”
“What’s Gojira?”
“Typical daikaiju. The Japanese often ascribe
earthquakes to him, though he, or she, has never actually been seen.”
“Nuclear tests,” the other hipster offered. “That’s why
we blew up all those islands in the fifties. Driving it back to the depths. I
thought everybody knew that.”
A dull thud shook the bar. Little waves rippled along
the surface of the PBR.
“I don’t think that was an aftershock.”
There were more impacts, and they grew stronger.
Soon the glasses were falling from the shelves and crashing on the floor.
A deafening roar tore the afternoon apart. The two hipsters walked outside and
the bartender followed. They stepped out into the middle of Abbot Kinney and
looked up at the looming monster.
“Definitely Gojira,” the bartender said.
Two jets flew by and blasted it with missiles that
seemed to have no effect. The monster turned and swatted at them, whipping its gigantic
tail around and leveling scores of apartment buildings. There was the loud
clanking of metal treads as a cohort of tanks moved down Venice Boulevard and
turned up Abbot Kinney, aiming their barrels at the enemy. They fired volley
after volley, deafening the two hipsters and the bartender, but the monster
paid them no mind and strode on toward downtown.
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