Daikaijuzine

I apologize for not telling you in person, but it’s a lot easier for me to write this down than talk about it. I hope you understand. You can’t read the statement I made at the time, it hasn’t even been released to the general public here in Australia. Even if you could, there were one or two things that were either too personal or too embarrassing to put on an official document.

Yes I was in Sydney when it happened, but being there was pretty much all I did. I actually worked with Sam Jackson, though. She was just a senior constable then, and I was a rookie barely three months out of training when that bloody great thing heaved out of the harbour and started smashing everything in sight.

When you graduate you’re a bit of an idealist, keen to get out there and change the world.  I was at the stage just after that, when you discover the heady delights the uniform can bring. Some call it the ‘discount uniform’, and there’s a certain breed of woman that finds it an aphrodisiac. I was still new enough to the Police Service to pronounce the ‘o’ though, and keen to get whatever field experience I could.

That was why I was glad to be working with Sam. She was rough as guts and cute as a button, a combination that got my attention. There were girls that looked as good as her back at college, but I thought delicate beauty was delicate, that when they got out into the world of wife beaters and twelve year old suicides they would crack like china dolls.

Sam showed me different. She didn’t take crap from anyone. One guy saw how good she looked in the uniform and thought she was a stripper. Two minutes turned him into a little boy in a principal’s office. If some neckless bikie tried to push her around, a squirrel grip would soon get him to Assist the Police in Their Inquiries.

I knew where the hole was in her armor, though. I learned pretty quickly that police don’t get much thanks from civilians, no matter how much they put their lives on the line. Most of the guys at the station couldn’t see past that figure of hers either, and she was too much of a workaholic to find a husband. So who was there to tell her it was all worthwhile? An awestruck rookie, that’s who. We needed each other.

The day before they started putting biologists in the army, Sam and I were going pee pee on Circular Quay. That’s what she called Police Presence, where you stroll along and be seen so all the suits with coffee nerves feel safe. We were checking buskers licenses when Incremental Sergeant MacPherson’s voice came over the four-channel on my belt. He was usually a stickler for procedure and ‘professionalism in the service’, but that day he sounded like he was calling a horse race with his crotch on fire.

We’d seen him earlier that morning on George Street, but didn’t know where he’d gone. I’d asked him to repeat when there was a thud and the ground shook. I mean bam, like someone banged on a table and we were all pepper shakers.

My first thought was that something happened at the train station just behind us, but then I saw Sam’s eyes bug out. I followed her gaze and saw a head poking over the top of the Sydney Opera House.

You’ve seen it a million times on the news by now and everybody’s so familiar with it that it’s hard to imagine what it was like to first see something like that. We could only see the head and neck- the caterpillar bit in the middle was behind the building, and its tail was probably still in the water. The bloody thing looked like an emu with those round, mad eyes. A scaly emu that was vomit-chunk orange and breaking off slabs of the opera house like pavlova.

What was just as weird to me was that so many people didn’t see it at first. Sure there were some that began to run and scream like movie extras, but a good half of the people just looked around a little as if construction work was going on.

I don’t remember what my first words were, but I doubt you’d hear them on TV until late. I picked my jaw up and said to Sam, I said: ‘Is this a joke?’ But it wasn’t one of those inflatable monsters they put on buildings to promote movies, or some animatronic tourist thing. It was alive, as big as an ocean liner and growling like a Tasmanian Devil.

I thought I stood there for only a second, but it must have been longer because Sam grabbed my arm and said ‘move’!

I only ran toward the creature because she did. By the time we’d passed the ferry terminals and a few shops, the opera house was smoking and people were starting to run back toward us. One of them was the sarge.

He had his Glock out of its holster and was shouting at us to get the people back. He’d called it in with base, and we had to hold the thing off until the State Protection Group could get there. I don’t know how he convinced the operators at base that it was real. I know I wouldn’t have believed it.

I’d had a steady hand on the range, but when I pulled out my nine mm. it was shaking like I had Parkinson’s. The thing was down on the opera house steps by then and we could see all of its legs rippling under that striped body, as if it was a caveman-powered bus.

It wasn’t easy to miss. That was the first time I discharged my weapon without ear protection, and I thought I was deaf after putting a few shots into it. It wasn’t worth it either, it didn’t even notice. It just pointed that big flat beak at the toaster building- you know, the square one that was next to the opera house- and let fly.

The papers said it breathed fire, but I’ve seen more flame on farts. It breathed heat, and the air in front of its gob shimmered like a desert road. As the building hit flashpoint I saw a light post wilt, and half a dozen al fresco chairs ran like silver yolk. When I saw that, I was bloody glad it ignored us.

By then it was bedlam. The Manly Ferry had been coming in; it did a rocking waltz and churned water to get out of the quay. The opera house was burning, and the toaster turned out to be named pretty well. The crowd that ran screaming only made it a hundred meters before running into the crowd that had come to look.

All we could do was keep ahead of the beast and try to keep everyone out of its way. That wasn’t hard- it didn’t move all that fast, and still wasn’t paying much attention to people. Maybe we were too small for it. The thing seemed to be annoyed with buildings It went to town on any structure it could see, breathing and smashing with that club of a tail.

Sam, always proactive, prompted the sarge that we needed a plan. I guess she could tell that even when the SPG guys showed up they wouldn’t be able to do much more than we could.

You have to remember that this was the first time anyone had seen one of these. The Navy probably had something we could have used at their Garden Island base (it was less than a click away), but it was like when the War on Terror first started. There was no communication between services. The Macrofauna Division didn’t even exist back then, and the largest net you could find at that time was strung on a soccer goal. There was just us, and a lot of milling people.

MacPherson shouted that he’d take any ideas we had. I couldn’t see any way of stopping it that didn’t involve one hell of a lot of explosives, not that we had any. Besides, the risk to civilians was too high for something like that. Sam looked dubious, but said she thought she could buy us some time. She winked at me and ran into a convenience store.

In the madness of the moment I almost laughed. Maybe she thought the creature would stop for chips and a drink. But that was when it got stuck under the train overpass, so I forgot all about Sam in a hurry.

The footage of that bit did the rounds of the Internet, so you’ve probably seen how the creature thrashed like a Rottweiler with its head through a cat door. It buckled the train line and the expressway above it- you wouldn’t believe the noise! Later I saw the cars, a spilled box of dominoes. It was a good thing the peak hour trains were so late, or there would have been even more of a mess.

A couple of idiots with cameras approached it from the front, before we could work our way around there to stop them. I guess they wanted good shots of its squealing and squawking. When they were crisped, the whole place began to smell like burnt pork. We had no trouble in keeping civilians away from its gob after that, and I wasn’t so keen to get more field experience.

The Fire Brigade turned up then, and our guys were right behind them- the SPG had sent the Tactical Operations Unit. They spilled out into the street and went to work without even consulting the sarge. I thought that was a bit arrogant, but I guess if you’re used to waiting for hours at a house siege, one hundred and fifty meters of many-legged urban renewal comes with a pretty clear-cut objective.

If I’d only known how much the creature was into ‘urban renewal’, I would have gone home then and there and saved myself a lot of counseling.

In our Code of Conduct and Ethics, one of the core values we’re told to strive for is ‘Citizen and Police Personal Satisfaction’. There was a lot of striving. All a clip from an mp5 did was embed some lead in its hide. They tried hosing down its beak, but that just made it madder. It pushed itself free in a cloud of steam and snapped up the fire truck, shook it like a chew toy and tossed it to the road half melted.

It sure noticed people now, and didn’t like us one bit. It breathed all around, microwaving a few cars and people. I kept my distance but the guys at the station still called me lobster face for days.

After that it started up the old AMP Building- that tall striped one behind the train station. It gave some steam whistle hoots as it climbed, those chorus-line legs punching into the concrete and glass.

The sarge came up to me with his radio in his hand. ‘When a courier turns up from forensics’ he said, ‘take his package to Sam’.

I told him okay, but I was busy just then. The workers in the building were following their fire evacuation drill, filing calmly down the stairs and right out under where the creature was dropping big chunks of masonry. I’d grabbed a megaphone from one of the firies and I directed the workers to stay inside, until the creature moved around to the side of the building.

When I spotted the bike courier he was balancing a big drum on his knee, labeled by our forensics lab. I grabbed it from him and radioed Sam. She told me to take it to the top of the building. She was already on the way, ‘cause the sarge had somehow got her a chopper. I think it was one of those radio station traffic ones that had come to look.

I had to run in the main entrance. The building was apparently the biggest in Sydney once, but it was only 20 stories or so. Still, I didn’t want to go up that many stairs, and the drum was heavy.

The doors had barely closed in the elevator when it (or the whole building, I couldn’t tell) began to shake, bambambam.

There was nothing I could do about it, so I popped the lid of the drum to have a look. A wisp of winter breath wafted out. It was used for freezing perishable evidence, like DNA or sperm, but there was nothing in it except dry ice.

The pounding didn’t stop. I was sure it was the whole building by then, and was starting to wish I’d taken the stairs.

The radio gave a crackle. The sarge felt a need to tell me his theory why the creature had attacked the other buildings but not this one. It must have been discouraging the competition, because it had started to mate.

Now I’ve never felt any great empathy with the building I was in, whether it was my office, home or pub, but that day the beast was a dog and the office block was my leg.

Even if you could imagine the sick combination of terror and revulsion that puts into a man, you can’t begin to understand what happened next. See, that building is one where you have to change elevators to get to the top, and Murphy’s Law being what it is I got off where… well, where it did.

That’s all I’ll say about that part, except that I still have nightmares and I haven’t gone through a car wash since.

The top floor was all boardrooms and those stupid success posters on the walls. I had to find some cowering dweeb in a suit to tell me how to get to the roof. The newer buildings are covered with aerials and receiver dishes, but this one had enough room for Sam to be set down.

She had a shopping bag in her hand and was looking over the edge at the thing, and didn’t notice me until I was right next to her. She spilled some cans from the bag and grabbed the drum from me. ‘Quick’ she said. ‘It’s seen me. Dip these in and flake off the metal’.

You’ve probably heard from the papers how the police had special foam that we used on the monster. Truth is, Sam remembered a high school prank. You take a can of shaving cream and dip it into dry ice. It freezes the stuff gas and all, and the can turns brittle. Pop the unwrapped creamsickle into someone’s car, and it begins to thaw. When the poor sucker finds their car it’s as full as a cappuccino. I could imagine Sam doing that as a kid.

When it went into the creature’s beak, that shopping bag had six frozen cans of General Gallagher’s Rapid Shave.

Sam figured it’d gum up its gob a bit to at least stop it burning things, but in the heat of that maw it took only a few seconds for its lungs to be full, frothy and scented like a real man. It snorted foam clear over my head and then fell… Well, you know where it fell, don’t you? There’s that shiny memorial there now.

I joined the service to catch criminals, not gargantuan horny fiends from the depths. I quit as soon as I could. It put Sam’s career through the glass ceiling, though, and she got enough recognition for anyone’s lifetime. All I got out of it was a drinking problem and a whole new appreciation of architecture.

I still see her from time to time. I asked her once how she thought of throwing that stuff in its mouth, and she said that she got the idea from one of the bystanders that we pushed out of harms way.

See, when it first crawled down from the opera house she said a little asian man pointed at it and shouted “Gob filler! Gob filler!” If that’s what she says, that’s good enough for me.