Godzilla thinks about what he can do now. Unbidden. He can burn without guilt. He can stomp without guilt. Not only that, they’ll send him a check. He has been hired by his adopted country to clean out the bad spots as they see them.
Godzilla stops near the first place on the list:
Godzilla suddenly feels something move inside him. He knows he’s being used. He turns around and walks away. He heads toward the government section of town. He starts with the governor’s mansion. He goes wild. Artillery is brought out, but it’s no use, he’s rampaging. Like the old days.
Reptilicus shows up with a megaphone, tries to talk Godzilla down from the top of the Great Monument Building, but Godzilla doesn’t listen. He’s burning the top of the building off with his breath, moving down, burning some more, moving down, burning some more, all the way to the ground.
Kong shows up and cheers him on. Kong drops his walker and crawls along the road on his belly and reaches a building and pulls himself up and starts climbing. Bullets spark all around the big ape.
Godzilla watches as Kong reaches the summit of the building and clings by one hand and waves the other, which contains a Barbie doll.
Kong puts the Barbie doll between his teeth. He reaches in his coat and brings out a naked Ken doll. Godzilla can see that Kong has made Ken some kind of penis out of silly putty or something. The penis is as big as Ken’s leg.
Kong is yelling, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m AC/DC, you sonsofabitches.”
Jets appear and swoop down on Kong. The big ape catches a load of rocket right in the teeth. Barbie, teeth and brains decorate the graying sky. Kong falls.
Gorgo comes out of the crowd and bends over the ape, takes him in her arms and cries. Kong’s hand slowly opens, revealing Ken, his penis broken off.
The flying turtle shows up and starts trying to steal Godzilla’s thunder, but Godzilla isn’t having it. He tears the top off the building Kong had mounted and beats Gamera with it. Even the cops and the army cheer over this.
Godzilla beats and beats the turtle, splattering turtle meat all over the place, like an overheated poodle in a microwave. A few quick pedestrians gather up chunks of the turtle meat to take home and cook, ‘cause the rumor is it tastes just like chicken.
Godzilla takes a triple shot of rockets in the chest, staggers, goes down. Tanks gather around him.
Godzilla opens his bloody mouth and laughs. He thinks: If I’d have gotten finished here, then I’d have done the black people too. I’d have gotten the yellow people and the white trash and the homosexuals. I’m an equal opportunity destroyer. To hell with the twelve-step program. To hell with humanity.
Then Godzilla dies and makes a mess on the street. Military men tip-toe around the mess and hold their noses.
Later, Gorgo claims Kong’s body and leaves.
Reptilicus, being interviewed by television reporters, says, “Zilla was almost there, man. Almost. If he could have completed the program, he’d have been all right. But the pressures of society were too much for him. You can’t blame him for what society made of him.”
On the way home, Reptilicus thinks about all the excitement. The burning buildings. The gunfire. Just like the old days when he and Zilla and Kong and that goon-ball turtle were young.
Reptilicus thinks of Kong’s defiance, waving the Ken doll, the Barbie in his teeth. He thinks of Godzilla, laughing as he died.
Reptilicus finds a lot of old feelings resurfacing. They’re hard to fight. He locates a lonesome spot and a dark house and urinates through an open window, then goes home.
Bubba Ho-Tep
Elvis dreamed he had his dick out, checking to see if the bump on the head of it had filled with pus again. If it had, he was going to name the bump Priscilla, after his ex-wife, and bust it by jacking off. Or he liked to think that’s what he’d do. Dreams let you think like that. The truth was, he hadn’t had a hard-on in years.
That bitch, Priscilla. Gets a new hairdo and she’s gone, just because she caught him fucking a big tittied gospel singer. It wasn’t like the singer had mattered. Priscilla ought to have understood that, so what was with her making a big deal out of it?
Was it because she couldn’t hit a high note the same and as good as the singer when she came?
When had that happened anyway, Priscilla leaving?
Yesterday? Last year? Ten years ago?
Oh God, it came to him instantly as he slipped out of sleep like a soft turd squeezed free of a loose asshole, for he could hardly think of himself or life in any context other than sewage, since so often he was too tired to do anything other than let it all fly in his sleep, wake up in an ocean of piss or shit, waiting for the nurses or the aides to come in and wipe his ass. But now it came to him. Suddenly he realized it had been years ago that he had supposedly died, and longer years than that since Priscilla left, and how old was she anyway? Sixty-five? Seventy?
And how old was he?
Christ! He was almost convinced he was too old to be alive, and had to be dead, but he wasn’t convinced enough, unfortunately. He knew where he was now, and in that moment of realization, he sincerely wished he was dead. This was worse than death.
From across the room, his roommate, Bull Thomas, bellowed and coughed and moaned and fell back into painful sleep, the cancer gnawing at his insides like a rat plugged up inside a watermelon.
Bull’s bellow of pain and anger and indignation at growing old and diseased was the only thing bullish about him now, though Elvis had seen photographs of him when he was younger, and Bull had been very bullish indeed. Thick-chested, slab-faced and tall. Probably thought he’d live forever, and happily. A boozing, pill-popping, swinging dick until the end of time.
Now Bull was shrunk down, was little more than a wrinkled sheet-white husk that throbbed with occasional pulses of blood while the carcinoma fed.
Elvis took hold of the bed’s lift button, eased himself upright. He glanced at Bull. Bull was breathing heavily and his bony knees rose up and down like he was peddling a bicycle; his kneecaps punched feebly at the sheet, making puptents that rose up and collapsed, rose up and collapsed.
Elvis looked down at the sheet stretched over his own bony knees. He thought:
Elvis pushed the sheet down to do what he had done in the dream. He pulled up his gown, leaned forward, and examined his dick. It was wrinkled and small. It didn’t look like something that had dive-bombed movie starlet pussies or filled their mouths like a big zucchini or pumped forth a load of sperm frothy as cake icing. The healthiest thing about his pecker was the big red bump with the black ring around it and the pus-filled white center. Fact was, that bump kept growing, he was going to have to pull a chair up beside his bed and put a pillow in it so the bump would have some place to sleep at night. There was more pus in that damn bump than there was cum in his loins. The old diddlebopper was no longer a flesh cannon loaded for bare ass. It was a peanut too small to harvest; wasting away on the vine. His nuts were a couple of darkening, about-to-rot grapes, too limp to produce juice for life’s wine. His legs were stick-and-paper things with over-large, vein-swollen feet on the ends. His belly was such a bloat, it was a pain for him to lean forward and scrutinize his dick and balls.
Pulling his gown down and the sheet back over himself, Elvis leaned back and wished he had a peanut butter
