Gojiro Read Free Page A

long before Shig ever got at them with his hot splicer. Sure, it looked like that slaverfaced Opposer’s sword of glowing PCBs slashed through the monster’s previously impervious leathers in Gojiro vs. Dungeons and Dragons Freaks in the World under the Bed and it might have seemed like that Southpaw Sludgicle hypnotized the big fella into nearly strangling himself with his Louisville Slugger tail in Gojiro (8) vs. Hideous Chemical Creatures (6) in the Ballparks of the Night. But all that was just for suspense’s sake, cheap movie logic, setups, so much fish in a barrel. None of those supposed Opposers ever laid a glove on the great Green Machine.
    Which made it a bitch if you were trying to commit suicide. “Wouldn’t be no big thing if I was a regular movie star,” the massive reptile thought. “Any regulation, above-the-title player, they just blow into town, chisel their shallow aspect upon the Rushmore of culture, tip out before everyone gets tired of looking at them. The whole beautiful corpse configuration. But not me! Nooo, I got to live forever.”
    Being denied death was the irony of ironies. After all, wasn’t he the Heater’s Child, and isn’t Doom what the Heater dealt—the opportunity to end it all with one depressed button? He didn’t even have to die completely. It wasn’t the living that was killing him, it was the thinking . What he needed was a little reductive surgery on that burgeoning torture chamber up between his earwhorls. Lobotomy! To be a sedate zucchini, staring thoughtlessly from beneath the fluorescent lights of a Miami Beach hotel, a thin smile on his placido domingo.
    That was the plan: blow out the Quadcameral. That was the offending organ, wasn’t it? It had to be plucked out. Obliterated. Nothing must be left over. The monster knew if he left a single vestige of his fabulous brain alive, a lone neuron, a solitary synapse, Komodo would be in there with his ever-healing hands, weaving those suffocating gray curls back to life.
    Gojiro figured one of those old enhancing mirrors might do the deed. Years before, when Komodo poured the mold for the massive reflectors, the monster couldn’t believe it. If there was one thing he didn’t need it was a device that magnified whatever was put in front of it by fifty times. More of himself? How much more could there be? Fifty tons, five hundred feet from webfoot to cranial dome—wasn’t that enough? Now, however, he imagined he could put the special properties of the enhancing mirrors to use. He’d rage a roar of Radi-Breath straight at the silvered glass, and when it came back at fifty times the investment, it’d blow his brain to kingdom come.
    It was evil, he knew. Attacking his own matchless Quadcameral mind—was there any greater taboo? The Quadcameral was the compendium of Life’s great march from the days of the reptilian, up through the mammalian limbic belt, to the humanoid Neo-Cortex, and onward to that mysterious, yet unspecified, upper zone. The Quadcameral was unique among minds. It was the wellspring of Cosmo, the citadel of Evollooic Thought! The Four-Tiered Oracle! How many times had the monster heard Komodo spout these sanctified phrases? How many times had he invoked them himself? To angle a death ray into the clearinghouse of everything they knew or would know—once it would have been inconceivable, akin to blotting out the sun. But things weren’t as they were. The Quadcameral wasn’t as it was. The great brain was befogged, degraded, irretrievably stained. No, Gojiro told himself, this would be no violation. He wasn’t murdering the Q-cam, just putting it out of its misery.
    The plan was an amalgam of junk he’d seen on the Dish: how the cowboy uses a polished beer mug to ricochet a bullet, how the Israelites turned their shields to the sun, blinded the Romans, made them steer their chariots into fiery pits. A nursery rhyme recurred in the monster’s head, something about things coming “back on you, like