Game Over

Chapter 62





THE CREATURE’S FOOTSTEPS were registering on seismographs as far away as Beijing. As I rushed toward the water, I was forced to leap repeatedly into the air to avoid getting swallowed up in sandy fissures or washed a mile inland by a monster-induced tsunami.

It was no big surprise that getting closer to the creature wouldn’t make things any safer. I needed to be at the water’s edge, which meant being within range of its radioactive fire, its enormous feet, and its spiky, sixty-foot-long tail.

“Poor little Alien Hunter,” it boomed, looking down at with me with a toothy display that might have been a sneer or a smile. “Not as high up on the food chain as you thought, are you?”

“Last time I checked, Alpar Nokians were still way above monsters made out of nothing but brainless bugs,” I shouted back, dodging a swipe from its enormous hand.

The Godzilla form roared and suddenly sprouted another head. Two of the black eyes moved into it. Then the heads turned to each other and began talking in booming monster voices.

“What a horrible little boy, Colin.”

“The product of poor parenting, if you ask me, Ellie.”

“Yeah,” I yelled up at them, “my folks couldn’t hold a candle to you two. I mean, not everybody thinks to raise their child on a diet of insults, neglect, and, of course, that fundamental pillar of good child rearing: eating your young.”

“Oh, it’s not just our young we eat,” boomed Number 7’s monster head.

“No, no,” continued Number 8’s head. “We eat any young.”

“Or, truth be told,” said Number 7, running a big forked tongue along his six-foot-high teeth, “even the not-so-young.”

I could probably have come up with a good retort right then but my mind was elsewhere. Our little conversation had given me the chance I needed to apply some of my recent studies to Kildare’s formulas. I’d begun by visualizing a series of molecules, then I measured the proper proportions, oriented a series of catalysts, and, finally, isolated the very precise conditions required to initiate the reaction.

And now it was time to stop visualizing and begin creating. I materialized a handful of the two principal reactants in Kildare’s formula—one came out as a yellow powder, the other a greenish liquid—and quickly cast them down into the wave that just then was breaking at my feet.

What happened next wasn’t magic; it was pure, hard-core science. But the results were so dramatic that I imagine the world’s greatest magicians would have paid to see it themselves.

A scream like a billion wailing mice went up, and the two-headed Godzilla in front of me began to sway back and forth. Its screams became louder as it lunged for me, but instead of a giant hand swiping at me, there was nothing there.

Because the creature’s body was melting away. Dissolving into tiny black globs of decomposing alien, which were now beginning to rain down on the beach.

“Get him! GET HIM!” the voices screeched, but its body was breaking down too quickly. “We are indestructible! This is IMPOSSIBLE!”

I jumped back as the now limbless torso began pitching forward and landed in a heap at my feet. I held my ground and watched as the entire beach became covered in a black slick of alien protoplasm.

You see, salt water plus 1.9 pounds of the compound created by Kildare’s formulas result in a self-sustaining reaction that produces a gas which basically interrupts the communications between all the “cells” in the bodies of Number 7 and Number 8’s species.

In other words, I’d created a kind of nerve gas that destroyed the bonds between the tiny pieces of Number 7 and Number 8. They literally fell apart in front of my eyes.

“That’s for Kildare, you scum,” I shouted.

But I felt no joy from having destroyed my nemeses. Instead, as I wiped the oily stuff from my eyes and ran out into the polluted water, all I felt was loss and horror at what I’d done. I dove again and again into the waves—flailing around, searching frantically.

This was not part of the plan. After all, it was his formula I’d followed. Kildare was supposed to be here.

Kildare was supposed to live.