GOJIRA
AFTERMATH
by Randall Kaplan
I
We'd known all about Hiroshima and the tests of '54. We'd all seen the grainy black and white photos of those laid to waste. The charred remains, the mutant children...generation after generation bound to a nuclear lineage.
That was all a long time ago, we thought. It's history, something you read about, something you might muse about with friends, debate over the rights and wrongs of the sins of your father's fathers...
Never in my darkest nightmares did I ever foresee anything like It coming to our city.
Terrorism had become commonplace and fear was God. Every day there was another horror, a new atrocity to glare at and drool over the gory details. Still, no one would have ever had the slightest inkling that it would come to this.
I remember the first attack. God, I hate myself for thinking this...but it seems so miniscule...so minor in retrospect. 20,000 people vaporized...and now it seems like nothing.
It was a few smuggled in suitcase nukes detonated by five Arab students. The history leading up to it, of course, is far too long and sordid to even hope to find meaning in. There were no "good guys"...no justified acts...only hideous, raging fanaticism. We had bombed them, they had bombed us...for the longest time it was like a sick game...until it hit home.
We were all eager for revenge. And revenge we got...with a price that still looms over all of our heads.
They were literally wiped off the face of the earth. An entire country...a chunk of a continent choked to nothingness by nuclear flame...
Millions gone in a flash. Punished for the stupidity of a few.
And the moment they were destroyed...It was given new life.
It was there...all along...deep within our oceans...lurking beneath us...waiting to be reborn.
That name...it had always been just part of history, along with those old dusty photographs...something so alien and distant that we'd even make jokes about it. And it's funny now just how truly stupid we were.
That name...the dread of old toothless Japanese men...the essays upon essays of a god that walked the earth...
That name...to even think of it now causes a thick lump of sick to well in my throat and my body to go numb with heat.
That name...
...Gojira.