Reader's Response
Hi guys, been gone for a while but I'm back and want to say hi! My Godzilla stories and DC Superhero stories are still going on and hopefully will be back to speed As for any comments...
Mojave Courier: Well... if you read his name in Spanish you'll see who I'm basing him on! Don't worry though his jokes are the worst you've ever heard and he'll wind yup having anger management problems concerning President Emmerich.
Sir Thames: Thanks as always for your kind words. ;-)
Everyone else: Love it, hate it, give a review please.
That's all and have a nice day. :-)
[BTW all chapter mistakes have been corrected. THIS is the real story its counterpart, First Blood was only meant to be a one shot. Sorry! -_-; ]
Chapter Two
There was the televised image of President Devlin Emmerich as he walked his Chihuahua Gino on the White House lawn. It was a daily practice but what wasn't daily was a raging wave of protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue crowding madly against the uniformed policemen and the high fence behind them. It utterly dwarfed the meteor protest march that Princess Salno had led as the hate filled people there, fifteen deep, spewed curses and held signs that read "Damn you!" and "Murderer!" Their anger only grew more virulent with how Emmerich deliberately egged on protesters, despite his exasperated staff's explicit advice. They had said that he should stay out of public sight while tempers calmed down but instead he was there in full view, walking the dog, and waving at everyone screamed for blood.
They hated him for having released the monster called King Ghidorah who, the Secretary General had told them, "is a demon seeking to scour the Earth of life and who indeed has the power to do it. A far cry from the space monsters we have faced before, like Dogora and Yog. Credible sources have assured me that he is a space monster that has already killed entire worlds; that was why his last victims sought to imprison him in the sphere. Their hope was that the sphere might never be opened. Yet it was."
Yes it had been opened and before them was the man who had pushed the button. All of a sudden, a lone gunman surged past the crowd and opened fire on Emmerich. The protesters screamed and panicked but the riot police rushed the would-be assassin and clubbed him into submission. The scene froze on the sight of President Emmerich cowering on the ground and the camera pulled back to show James Lawrence, TV anchorman for United World Television News.
"Hello everybody, I'm James Lawrence and the top story of the hour is the attempted assassination of President Devlin Emmerich. It began when a mob of protestors besieged the White House to denounce the President for having opened the meteor that contained the monster called King Ghidorah. While Ghidorah has vanished for the moment his threat is still there and it should not be discounted, especially by those who had doubted he even existed in the first place… such as I.
"As for the President he is unharmed and the gunman, who has been identified is now in prison and awaiting trail. More on this case as it develops."
/o0o\
Kyle Martin tried to wipe the sweat pff his forehead and cursed himself for forgetting that he was in a Hazmat suit to protect from the radiation and infectious agents. He'd been working for several hours now on poisons and toxins and all sorts of things to make a man sick. You see, despite the arrival of King Ghidorah, Project Toxin was still in effect and until he received his orders to the contrary, Kyle would keep at his work.
He looked at the monitor showing what looked like a twisted ladder and thought about the idiotic militarists and about they had gone about it all wrong. Guns, tanks, bombs, no matter what they did, no matter what they tried, Godzilla still lived. Firepower of any kind or magnitude was definitely not the answer. Kyle knew that, everyone knew that, but the question was why?
Though he liked to imagine he had a fair amount of poetry in his soul, Kyle was a scientist and a scientist has to have proof. Not persuaded by claims that Godzilla was some kind of divine punishment and was thus immortal, he'd looked elsewhere. At that, Kyle smiled remembering the crazy tone in his brother's voice when he called and said that Hayashida had cracked Godzilla's genetic code. Raymond and the good doctor had gone through who knows how many sleepless nights of experimenting on pieces of flesh that had been recovered from the 1985 battle with Super-X Attack Plane and more importantly on the genetic bases of thiamine, cytosine, guanine, and adenine but it had been worth it.
To the uninitiated, it might seem strange that a simple combination of phosphates and sugars could yield so much unadulterated joy but when you knew… Done reminiscing, Kyle looked at the small piece of Godzilla flesh that had been acquired after his battle with King Ghidorah back on Infant Island-one of many with the carnage of it. With a surgeon's skill and with great difficulty with the suit, he took a tiny strip and placed it on a slide to be seen underneath the electron microscope; he looked through the device and increased the magnification a further ten fold. At that degree, Kyle could see individual cells, cells still alive and still carrying on their functions even now… though not for long.
Turning away from the microscope he picked up his tools and looked to a small Petri dish where something special was stirring. He had used it to grow some viral cultures and that was perfectly routine work but what wasn't routine was what was being grown. After taking the top from the dish with gloved hands, he used needles finer than human hairs to extract some samples of the virus and placed them on the slide with the Godzilla cells. Looking through the microscope, it was as Kyle suspected. Despite their ugly power to corrupt DNA, the virus was in seconds destroyed by white blood cells that seemed to duplicate themselves at an insane rate. As for any damaged cells, they seemed to recreate themselves as their processes for reconstruction accelerated to several times their normal speed.
Kyle looked to the screen at his side and saw that radiation levels in the strip of cells had dropped; it was because the radiation had been used to aide the healing process. The young scientist had just witnessed Godzilla's miraculous healing power and was even now amazed by it. One cell turns to two, two to four, four to sixteen, all in a matter of seconds, Kyle shook his head as he looked at the screen where footage of that had been stored and saw the ruined cells come back to life. He looked at the cells recovering and even dividing… with the most beautiful part being when the double helix of DNA split and recombined. When the chromosomes were completely cleaved in half and went into two new cells, it was like watching the process of Creation…
He knew that this was due to Godzilla's "M-Base." Ordinary creatures had only four genetic bases, adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine but kaiju had a fifth base. It was only poorly understood but the fact that a fifth base was there had to be what allowed kaiju to exist. Before M-Base's discovery, many a scientist had torn his hair out because of the fact that kaiju with their being hundreds of feet tall and shooting beam weapons where biological impossibilities. It was what allowed Godzilla, among other things, to instantly heal from any wound. It had first been described by Doctor Shinoda who had long advocated finding a way to apply it to medicine and Kyle had heard that the man was already beginning initial research to those ends. And yet, just as easily as it could be used for good, it could also be used for evil: biological weapons.
With that, a perverse glee entered Kyle. He took a sample of freshly irradiated Godzilla cells and put them under the microscope. Even now the cells could be seen to divide, making ever more copies of themselves. He took the slide and, after donning a lead apron, took some radioactive isotopes, the same kind that had been used to fell the Rhedosaurus that attacked New York City so long ago. Kyle had liquefied the isotopes now placed a drop on the slide with Godzilla cells.
Back at the microscope, Kyle looked at the Godzilla cells as they were now. They seemed no worse for wear and if anything seemed healthier with the traces of radiation in the isotope. It was then that he turned back to the small dish and took another sample of the virus, just as before. Unlike before, when Kyle introduced the virus, there was no rush of the immune system and no reconstruction of cells. Existing only to destroy, a virus is capable of nothing but infecting a cell and corrupting its DNA. It was done with its own RNA—the filthy little pathogen was too primitive for anything else—which mutated the double helix and enslaving the cell until it worked to death as a factory for making still more viruses.
Indeed, after looking away from the microscope to look at the strip of Godzilla flesh, it was clear that the blood poisons of the Rhedosaurus were still as potent as ever. (How ironic, Kyle thought. The isotope that killed the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and its poisons together to kill another monster.) The fact that the kaijuolgist had even tailored it to latch onto the beast's DNA was seen as the tissue sample had visibly begun to decay and the blood that kept oozing from it was raising an infernal stink.
Completely protected by his suit Kyle was unaware of any smell but he couldn't believe his eyes when the entire fingernail sized piece of skin began to smolder and burst into flame. Though he looked with eyes wide open at the thin, twisting plume of smoke, Kyle turned his head towards the screen and picked up the remote control. He switched and saw how the isotopes had managed to deactivate the gene responsible for Godzilla's healing power, Regenerator G-1... thus leaving Godzilla open to any attack.
And with his having used the viral plagues found in the blood of the Rhedosaurus, it was quite an attack. It had taken years of Herculean effort to adapt the grisly diseases and re-engineer them so they would only begin working in the presence of the isotopes but it was well worth it. If it worked, no one would lose family to the monster again. That's when he got a call, something about having to go to the main hanger. He went cheerfully. His assistants were nearly as skilled as he was and they had his notes. Time to go save the world.
