Poison from a Dead Sun. Michael Hemmingson

be so sure of that, ladies.”

      “Once Armadilgeddon defeats Goldgotha,” one Sachiko told me with a snicker, “we will place our mind-controlling devices into the monster, and with it we shall smash the cities of the Earth, and we will rule this planet like we were destined to!”

      I started to have my doubts about Goldgotha’s power to win…but I should have known better. I thought about how long it had been since Goldgotha had done battle, at least any battle that I knew about…but Goldgotha had never let me, or the world, down, and he wasn’t about to start.

      With the Sachiko aliens, I watched the war of the monsters from a view screen in the spaceship. It was quite a fight. Both monsters did considerable damage to each other with lasers and lightning bolts, not to mention the physical blows to each of their massive bodies. It wasn’t looking good for Goldgotha—he’d lost part of his dorsal fin, he was bleeding green blood, so he retreated into Coronado Bay. The Sachikos were cheering for their creature. I felt doomed. I wanted to tell Goldgotha I was sorry. But Goldgotha attached himself to a nuclear aircraft carrier that was docked at the North Island Naval Base, sucking away at all the nuclear power; this made Goldgotha twice as big, and with renewed strength, he was back in action and quickly stomped on Armadilgeddon, ripping out his foe’s intestines.

      He whopped that big armadillo’s mutated ass three ways to Jupiter.

      The Sachiko aliens were scared now. With Armadilgeddon dead, Goldgotha turned its fishy attention to the spaceship. Before the Sachikos could get the craft started to fly away, Goldgotha hit the ship with his laser breath. The ship crashed into the water. The Sachikos turned into their gaseous form and escaped out the air vents. Goldgotha sucked them into his gills and feasted on them.

      I was able to get myself free—I always could, but I didn’t want the Sachikos to zap my head off.

      Goldgotha ripped open the spaceship with his giant teeth. He peered in.

      We were face-to-face, in a matter of speaking.

      “Goldgotha,” I said, very softly.

      He made a sound…a sound of compassion.

      I could feel him.

      He was happy to see me again.

      We still had our connection. We always would.

      * * * *

      Goldgotha returned to the sea and I was a hero. My personal kaiju—my friend—saved the earth from the evil aliens from Jupiter’s seventh dimension.

      Hero. This was fine by me. I didn’t mind the unwarranted attention. I only wished Dr. Lory could have been there to witness it, share it.

      I blamed myself for his decapitation and death.

      I returned to school to finish my graduate work, but my heart was no longer in the academic study of monsters.

      I switched to communications, with an emphasis on print journalism.

      And ten years later, I was a professional reporter…leaving the ethnography of the kaiju far behind me, but not too far when it came to invaders and the fate of the earth.

11. Reamy, Thomas. "Unexpected Lives—On the Mortality Rate of Monsters in a Post-Structural Society.” The Journal for the Academic Study of Contemporary Kaiju. Vol. 5, Issue 3.