Mr. Thomas took the question literally. “He’s a lizard, so it’s a little hard to tell, isn’t it?”
Semple turned on Jesus. “Can’t you make him throw it away or get rid of it somehow?”
Jesus shrugged. “He’s running the show right now.”
“Does he even know what it is?”
Mr. Thomas nodded. “Oh, I think so.”
And with that, Gojiro tossed the atom bomb somewhat higher, caught it in his mouth, and swallowed it with a gargantuan gulp, much the way a particular kind of extrovert human might toss a peanut into his mouth, or a chocolate-covered Whopper. Semple stood stunned. “I don’t believe it.”
“Oh yes, he swallowed it.”
“What the hell happens now?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
For approximately five seconds, Gojiro sat perfectly still. His eyes closed and the enormous hawser muscles in his neck worked convulsively. Mr. Thomas stroked his beard with a front hoof. “He looks like a pachuco who swallowed a full half pint of tequila on a bet.”
“Gggggggrrrrrrrwwwwwzzzzzz.”
Gojiro let out a long rasping wheeze that reverberated through the dome like a ripple in its very fabric and caused Semple to grab again for the couch. At the end of the breath, a perfect smoke ring of brightly glowing vapor floated from his mouth.
“Krrrkkk.”
Semple’s legs felt weak. “I see it, but I hardly believe it.”
Mr. Thomas seemed equally awed and even Jesus was unable to remain totally blase. “So it seems the Big Green’s digestive track can neutralize nuclear fission.”
Semple sank down on one of the arms of the couch. “I can’t handle this and stand up at the same time.”
Jesus, on the other hand, done with being impressed by the King of the Monsters’ gastric prowess, wanted to get back to the wanton destruction of the city. “I imagine we can assume that Anubis has nothing else to throw at us.”
He keyed commands into the remote, but Gojiro remained sitting. Jesus frowned. “He refuses to move.”
“He’s just put away one hell of a snack. Perhaps he doesn’t feel too good.”
“We can’t just sit out here in the desert doing fuck-all. There’s Necropolis to tear down.”
Mr. Thomas looked at Jesus as though he secretly considered him an idiot. “After digesting an atomic blast, he may not be too hungry.”
Jesus worked the monitor again. At first it seemed as though Gojiro absolutely wasn’t going to move. Then the monster belched.
“Bbbbbrap.”
Very slowly, he lumbered to his feet. He looked around for a few moments as though confused and possibly disoriented. Sniffing the air, he appeared to make up his mind. Falteringly at first, but quickly gathering speed and momentum, he started in the direction of Necropolis.
Jesus laughed out loud. “I guess the suburbs go first.”
***
The totality of the darkness was only punctuated by the struck blue sparks that told Jim Dr. Hypodermic was still with him. All was silent except for his own breathing and the occasional reverberating rattlesnake buzz and hiss that also confirmed Hypodermic was near. Obviously the Doctor’s tour was still in progress, but Jim had no clue where they might be or even why the Mystere had brought him to this place, which seemed to be devoid of absolutely everything except their own presence. Then the light appeared. At first it was nothing more than a point, a lone and errant flame-yellow star, but as it grew in the sky, Jim could see that it was actually one point of light surrounded by a strange flattened halo. It took Jim some time to realize that what he was really seeing was a light moving across water. It was the ripples in the halo that gave it away and his whole perspective suddenly changed. He grasped that he was standing on some dry-land vantage point, overlooking a vast black unseeable sea.
In the moment the visual revelation came, Jim also heard distant music drifting like smoke across the water. Male-voice Wagnerian singing, unaccompanied but pitched to Nordic perfection in a minor key, robust but at the same time mournful. He had to wait a while longer as it drifted closer to see the source of the light and the singing. A Viking longship with dragon prow, most of its deck consumed by flames, floated silently past, followed by a second boat with a black sail and a crew of dark warriors who, with swords uplifted, sang the lament.
Jim turned to where he imagined Dr. Hypodermic to be standing. “The nine-forty-seven to Valhalla?”
“You’re beginning to learn, mon frere.”
***
Semple was gratified that the very first thing that Gojiro attacked was the same elevated highway the procession had taken on its ceremonial way to the Divine Atom Bomb Festival. His first move was to remove most of the traffic with wide sweeps of his tail. The smaller vehicles went flying with hardly a second glance from the Big Green, but then a Necropolis city omnibus attracted his attention. He picked up the double-decker in both hands and flattened it end to end, like a small boy crushing a cardboard box. He destroyed a couple of large semi trucks the same way, but then the tanks started rolling down the highway toward him. The gold-plated armor of Anubis’s crack elite came in with pennants flying and guns blazing. The peppering the tanks gave him with their cannons and heavy machine guns did Gojiro no actual bodily harm, but nonetheless irritated him intensely. Rather than deal with them piecemeal and have to tolerate the gadfly pinpricks of their firepower, he seized the two sides of the highway in his flatcar hands and began to pull up the roadbed, ripping it loose from its supporting pillars. He then proceeded to roll it up, like a crusty old carpet so reinforced with filth and chewing gum that it just had to go. The tanks tried to reverse away from him, but Gojiro could roll up highway faster than they could retreat, and they were crushed inside the curl of steel and concrete like the filling in a jelly roll.
Within the tumor in the monster’s brain, Semple watched the multiple images in awe and wonderment. “How strong is he? Are there no limits to what he can do?”
Outside the dome, blue and blinding electricity crackled as banks of synapses went into reptilian overdrive. The industrial-strength dinosaur brain-lightning was visible though the fabric of the dome/tumor, which was now translucent. Mr. Thomas looked up at Semple in the eerie flickering light. “Almost no limits on this scale. Especially when his dander’s up. The Big Green has a wicked temper.”
Semple glanced around anxiously. “Are we safe in here?”
Jesus laughed and gestured to the images. “A lot safer than in that building.”
When the roll of highway became an untidy spiral bale more than half his own considerable height, Gojiro appeared to decide that the logistics were too taxing and transferred his rage to punching the tensile integrity out of a twenty-story high-rise. Semple had never imagined that the buildings in Necropolis were particularly well made, but she hardly expected that a couple of right and left jabs to the middle floors were all it required to reduce the structure to a pillar of dust and rubble. From Semple’s point of view, the only unfortunate part of the King of the Monsters’ attack was the considerable number of wretched underclass shacks that were crushed underfoot each time he made a move. Although she had personally not fared well at the hands of the Necropolis poor, she didn’t really believe that they deserved to be trampled by a living mountain. On the other hand, it wasn’t something she was going to waste too much time or regret over. What with all the pollution, oppression, poverty, and cannibalism, for many it was probably a merciful release.
She also couldn’t quite see why the great lizard was so content to hang around in the suburbs, crushing shacks, rolling up roads, and knocking down modest buildings. “Is there any way to get him to move on to downtown? I want to see him total the palace and the TV studios.”