Chapter 18
It was a town like any other. It could be my town or your town, your cousin's town, any place. That is what made what was happening there all the more frightening, that it could be anywhere and the sad fact is that it was happening everywhere. The only catastrophe that could compare to what had happened to this nameless town, and that was happening to the rest of the world for that matter, was the Black Death that swept over Europe back in the Dark Ages. This time, however, it was far worse.
It was night in the town and few lights were lit to dispel the gloom. Indeed, amidst a night that still rained dust from the Kansas explosion, the darkness seemed to be all encroaching and nothing but the few street lamps that were still standing was there to shed light. Building after building was destroyed, either ruined or smashed flat into so much flaming rubble, while the roads were torn up. Amidst the rubble were two mammoth dismembered corpses; a kaijuologist would have recognized them, or their scattered remains as belonging to the undead cyborg, Mechanstein, and the astronaut turned monster, Uchihikrah. Fighting against their cursed foe across America since the beginning of the US campaign, these two friends had finally paid the ultimate price. The only survivor of this battle was Yetrigar and Salno had barely been able to call him back so that he might live to fight again.
With the town serving as a microcosm, it almost seemed as if the entire world had died and that there was only one man left alive. This nameless man was traveling through an especially ruined part of town, leaving tracks in the ankle deep dust where he walked; where he passed, there were no fires. No, there were no fires here; instead, there was only the silence of the dead, a silence broken by his loud wretched voice.
He was the only person still alive in the town though you couldn't really call the condition he was in "alive." Ugly, deformed, toothless, unwashed, and dressed in rags, the man just kept walking through the streets while dragging a cart behind him, muttering all the while. Looking through the darkened night, he shivered in the cold air, but he just kept walking along the road and dragging his cart. That's all he did, walking and dragging, dragging and walking. He was alone and there was no movement save for the occasional newspapers and leaves that blew past him or an empty soda can that he kicked.
That was when he came across a body.
The wandering man saw that the body was curled up on the broken sidewalk and with that he left his cart to go up to it. The man nudged the person. There was no response. The man tried again and again there was no response. He turned the person over and saw, as if the person had died of fright, that the face was a hideous mask of horror. Well, what little there was of the face anyway. As the wanderer dusted the man off, he saw that the poor person was nothing but a shriveled, mummified, corpse. Confused, the wanderer stripped the dead man of his clothes and saw that the dead man's flesh clung directly to the bone.
Then, as calmly as if he were mailing a letter, the wanderer dragged the emaciated skeleton corpse to his cart where he tossed it atop all the other corpses. With that, the wanderer grasped the handles of his cart and once again the wheels began creaking under the weight of bodies. Clanging his bell and speaking to nobody he croaked "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead!"
The man was a corpse collector.
Strange, you hadn't seen the likes of him since the days of the Black Plague. Yet there he was collecting his prizes and what horrid prizes they were. On the death cart were more people that were nothing but emaciated skeletons; others corpses were so hideously bloated that they had burst apart revealing a feast of entrails and all the squirming maggots therein. Some people had been crushed to death and were little more than bloody smears scooped into the cart. With some of the dead, their skin was falling off in pieces, as if they died in one day from leprosy while others were bleeding from every pore, as if ebola were the culprit.
As he continued his trek, he was approaching a large pit in a part that he himself had dug, a burning pit. Who was this man? He did not know. His mind was so muddled, so ravaged, so empty, that he could not say. All he knew was that he was the only living man among the dead. He no longer remembered who he was or where he came from. He certainly didn't remember what had happened to the town, that it had been a fine little town until the Monster Wars came to America, before the food shortages, before martial law. Its being a fine little town was also before King Ghidorah claimed the Swarm and used it to kill all that lived, to spread plague and pestilence, before the famine and the mass starvation.
Something that UNGCC and the rest of the UN had quickly learned from the records and documents that Salno gave them was that King Ghidorah had the power to bestow power on those he so chose. In this case it was the flies of the Swarm. (Not unlike how another multi-headed dragon of Apocalypse would bestow power on The Beast.) At first, it didn't seem like much but the power this Lord of the Flies bestowed upon his new minions made it especially terrible. The power that the Prince of Skyllans bestowed was the Taint, the power to corrupt life energy thus making any living thing unfortunate enough to suffer its effects to shrivel up and die. For thousands of years, flies had been despised as bearers of disease and it was never truer than it was now.
Everywhere, the flies had flown, and flew still, going hither and yon spreading the Taint that they carried to all that lived. As such, any town or city they so much as flew over was as good as dead because the poor lost souls therein would sicken and perish as if they'd been simultaneously infected with malaria, small pox, cholera, and rabies. Soon a plague of Biblical proportions spread across the North American continent and no amount of Red Water, psychic music or even experimental Regenerator G-1 was enough to ward it off. Although any place that King Ghidorah chanced to visit suffered the effects of the Taint, the people in the United States were especially cursed because of it.
The corpse collector that wandered through the town was in such a poor mental state that he remembered none of this nor of the famine for that matter. If he could have, then he would have remembered the mass looting and mass rioting and mass suicides that had plagued the town for weeks after (and before because of the Taint Plague, but especially after) word came out of the Kansas Incident. King Ghidorah had destroyed President Devlin Emmerich's P3—Plasma Power Plant—which resulted in meltdown the likes of which made Chernobyl look like a mere Three Mile Island. It was an explosion far greater than that of any nuclear or even thermonuclear bomb and it had happened in the worst possible place it could have: Kansas.
It perhaps doesn't sound important but in fact it was of terrible importance. Just the initial effects of the explosion were enough to warrant it as being one of the darkest days of the republic. The only thing that could compare in terms in shock and disbelief was if terrorists were to hijack airliners and deliberately crash them into New York skyscrapers in broad daylight. Even as empty of people as the Plains now were, early reports indicated immediate casualties due to the explosion as near a million. (However, many more would die slow torturous deaths due to cancer, leukemia, and radiation poisoning in the years to come; not to mention the countless children that would go on to be born with horrible deformities.)
In addition to that, the plasmatic energies swept across hundreds of kilometers rendering the entire state of Kansas—as well as parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri—an irradiated wasteland. True, mass use of radiation devouring, Anti-Nuclear Bacteria prevented further spread of the nuclear blight. But the total loss of America's breadbasket, a place that produced more than half the nation's wheat and sixty percent of its cattle, threw world economy—already in shambles as a result of the Monster Wars—into virtual collapse in the face of global famine. No longer would buffalo migrate in herds whose thunder shook the land, no longer would cattlemen and Native Americans wander these vast and endless plains, for the land was forever destroyed.
It was ironic. America, once called the land of plenty, was suffering a famine the likes of which were thought relegated to third world countries. (This was in no way helped by how King Ghidorah's very presence caused Earth's mana, and with it, the weather itself to go mad. This wasn't to mention how the dust cloud of the Egypt explosion still kept temperatures as low as they were and how the current fallout from P3 made for a second dust bowl.) Ankle deep dust rained down from coast to coast and the sun was blotted out for a week; the two combined to make the America a sad and wretched place. With that, riots and looting in the now, literally, darkened United States, which had before been isolated incidents, were now bordering on a civil war. With the Prince of Skyllans on the rampage from West Coast to East, that was the very last thing that the US needed.
Sadly however, such anarchy could easily happen as it was becoming increasingly clear that Washington DC was King Ghidorah's final goal. He had already destroyed the cities of Annapolis, Fredricksburg, Bethseda, and Alexandria and who knows how many towns in between. He was now circling around the capital like a vulture over the corpse of dying man; that that was his target was clear in how he had already sent the insects of the Swarm to test the waters. The demon had been created with knowledge enough to know the symbols of power and the power of symbols and what a capital city looked like.
America was on the brink of destruction as King Ghidorah wrought atrocities untold on the land. It was in fact so terrible, that the destruction that Godzilla had made the world of men suffer in times past was as nothing compared to it. Even so, the King of the Monster's blood red rage grew in its fury everyday and so did the horror he brought on the world. He sought to kill King Ghidorah and was ready to destroy absolutely everything that was in his way. Day by day, it seemed increasingly certain that the fears spoken of at the dawn of the Monster Wars would come true, that the King of the Monsters and the King of Terror would destroy each other after destroying the world first. They said that life would end in their final battle, a battle of the gods, as if it were some cataclysmic Ragnarok.
There seemed no hope, no chance, at winning and some only prayed that the world be ended quickly. All over the world the living truly envied the dead because it was as if the forces of evil had won and that now the only sin was to wish that you were ever born. However, the forces of good could prove a surprisingly tenacious and stubborn lot because they refused to surrender, no matter what. Even at that moment, even there with the world seemingly teetering on the brink of oblivion, the people of Earth were still fighting for their survival, refusing to give up and refusing to say die.
The UN was having the Red Cross and other multinational relief agencies working around the clock. The UN made sure that it's FAO—Food and Agriculture Organization—was doing all in its power and beyond to make sure that what food that did remain went to where it was needed most. Most importantly, it made sure that all forces under the aegis of the Security Council—the Defense Force of Earth, the Aerial Defense Force of Earth, the Maritime Defense Force of Earth, the Land Defense Force of Earth, and especially G-Force—did everything they could to save the world. Why, even at that very moment, G-Force was planning the final defeat of King Ghidorah in a battle to be waged on the western shores of Chesapeake Bay.
Of course, the corpse collector didn't know any of this; all he knew was that he finally reached his destination. The destination was the large pit that he had seen and had been approaching for some time now. As he had seen, it was a corpse-burning pit that he himself had dug. Illuminating the darkened night sky as if it were a portal to the Inferno, the vile infernal pit reeked and burned with the bodies that had been dumped there… And still more were dumped.
The corpse collector moved his cart to the edge of the pit and tipped it over with all his strength. After a round of huffing and panting, it flipped over and the corpses spilled out. The bloated or shriveled bodies fell and tumbled down the sides of the pit, illuminated by the hellish red light that shone in the pit. On hitting bottom, the bodies caused the fire to temporarily flare up, but it was only for a moment. Soon enough the flare went down and the fire resumed its normal wicked burn.
With that, the corpse collector that neither knew his name was Dean nor that the last corpse he found that day, the one with a mask of fright, had once been called Roland turned around and shuffled away, pulling his cart behind him with one hand. With the other, he rang his bell once again and yelled out "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead!"