fishing industry.
More significantly for this discussion, the fertile waters of the lake had also become an ideal environment for the ubiquitous zebra mussel. Those tiny, striped, hard- shelled mollusks had come to Lake Erie from some unknown source by way of the St. Lawrence Seaway and had spread rampantly. They encrusted any submerged surface in short order and had to be scraped from boat bottoms and aquatic inlets with annoying frequency.
So it came to pass that the underwater scoop loader became thoroughly encrusted with zebra mussels and then emerged from Lake Erie in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
It didn't look like a scoop loader any more though. It looked like a...dare we say it...like a monster. Or at least a zebra mussel encrusted Pac Man of monstrous size. A hungry Pac Man Monster that wanted something to eat. Something substantial. Like a city. For at the core of the monster was a hungry and revenge-minded Louis Williams. If they were going to take down his neighborhood, he would take down the whole damn city.
So the Monster gobbled along, it's huge jaw tearing up streets and buildings and entire city blocks, its zebra mussel hide dissolving anything with which it came into contact like the super scrubbing bubbles of some new and improved household cleanser. The massed mussels oozed and excreted, leaving a thick, muddy trail in the monster's wake. The police arrived and did what cops liked to do most and wished they could do more of. They sent a blizzard of bullets at the Monster. They were joined in the fusillade by the considerable firepower of local hunters, sportsmen, NRA members and other gangs with guns. But they might as well have been throwing stones at a mound of gravel. What didn't bounce off the hard shells of the zebra mussels were absorbed and digested by the monster's living hide.
Clearly, more firepower was needed. The Ohio National Guard was summoned. Not the old National Guard of the Kent State days but the new and improved Guard of the Iraq and Afghanistan deployments. They knew the difference between noisy protestors and armed terrorists. And they were better shots too.
In the meantime, the monster went munching along. All of Cleveland lay before it, with its tall glass and steel towers and spires. A veritable cornucopia.
Sunday morning dawned, gray and foreboding. Cody and Joyce, in Cody's apartment on the outskirts of the city, thought the distant rumblings were the sounds of a thunderstorm coming. They didn't know it was the sounds of battle with the monster.
"Morning, how you feeling?" said Joyce. Cody coughed lightly, winced from the pain in his throat. She kissed him softly on his warm forehead. He was in bed. She'd slept on the couch. What had started as a promising evening had come to a wheezing halt with the intensified onslaught of his sickness, which he didn't want to give her and she didn't want to get. This morning she was showered and smelling fresh, her hair down, her lovely legs sticking out of his old Browns sweatshirt which she'd borrowed and which fell off one bare shoulder and came down just far enough around her hips to be decent. The Browns had never looked so good.
"Feel like eating anything this morning?" Joyce innocently asked.
Cody didn't even feel like making the obvious joke. "Not really. Maybe some tea and toast." She made it for him and he drank but couldn't eat, it hurt too much going down.
"Try gargling with warm salt water," she advised. He did that and it helped a little. "Do you have any garlic?" she asked then.
"Huh? For what? Vampires?"
"No silly. It's a natural herbal remedy. Kills germs. Even repels pests in the garden. Maybe that's where the vampire thing came from. Garlic's good for your heart too, they say. Haven't you ever heard the ads for those garlic tablets on the radio?"
"Oh. Yeah. Well, I think I have some garlic powder and uh, some garlic and onion chip dip. Will that work?"
She put a lot of the powder in the dip and put some on toast and he ate. It stank like the devil and tasted like hell but it slid down nicely. He thought he could feel a tingle in his throat and nostrils. Cody turned on the TV and lay back on the couch while Joyce turned to the Sunday paper. But there was nothing on TV. Not just nothing to watch as usual (even with 99 cable channels to pick from) but nothing on the air. Channel after channel was nothing but electronic snow. Until, finally he picked up channel 23 from Akron, whose broadcast tower had not yet been devoured by the monster.
Channel 23 normally didn't carry news or sitcoms or any of the usual sleazy and mindless television pap. It had been taken over by a family- value network which showed only the more wholesome (and profitable, because even good Christians have to make a living) fare of repeat TV series and old movies. But in this emergency it was showing footage of the conflict looking like a war zone, which everyone was used to seeing on TV, but usually in the Middle East, not in downtown Cleveland.
A middle aged woman reporter wearing a lot of jewelry and too much makeup, to make up for her age, finally appeared, saying, "That was a live scene from downtown Cleveland and the developing crisis. This is not a movie, this is not a hoax, this is not our usual programming. It's a war zone out there. A monster is on the loose. It's devouring Cleveland! Where the monster came from is not clear but the military is doing everything it can to stop it. There is one local scientist though who has a theory. Here's Dr. Albertus Marius of Case Western Reserve University. He's analyzed bits of monster hide blown off by assault teams."
They played footage of white-haired Einsteinish doctor Marius saying, "The flesh of the creature seems to be a mutated hybrid of zebra mussels. I suspect a radioactive agent may be responsible. The monster was first seen coming out of the lake near Edgewater Park which is actually composed of landfill in which radioactive wastes were buried many years ago. Radioactivity has been reported there in the past after rain storms saturated the ground and stirred up the lake bottom. Most recently some construction rig wreckage was towed to that site, stirring up the lake sediment, adding further toxicities from deposits dragged in from the Cuyahoga River. I must conclude that all this contributed to the accelerated mutation of the zebra mussels and the growth of a monstrous membrane over one of the construction rigs, a radioactively mutated membrane which has taken on a life of its own."
The bejeweled woman came back on the screen, cleared her throat and said, "In the interests of fairness and due to official, uh, requests, we are providing equal access to a counter viewpoint."
Three somber officials appeared, representing the Perry and Fermi nuclear plants on the shores of Lake Erie, the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They agreed, in well-rehearsed fashion, that any radioactive waste or discharges from the nuclear plants were very low- level and well within established safe levels --which coincidentally they themselves had established at a level which would ensure public safety without hamstringing the vital energy industry which was devoted to serving the public. They implied, with all due respect, that Dr. Marius was anti-business, anti-government and possibly an anti- American card-carrying member of the notorious Sierra Club.
By this time, Cody was holding his throat like he was about to vomit. He said, "Geez, the monster has to be that guy in that scoop loader. I went into the same waters he did. This sore throat, what if I'm contaminated too?"
Joyce replied, "Do you have a sudden urge to go outside and start eating on the city?"
"That's not funny!"
"Sorry. But you said the garlic made you feel better so I wouldn't worry." Joyce snapped her fingers. "Hey! Garlic! What if it'll work on the monster? We gotta get hold of that Dr. Marius and tell him so he can test it." As Joyce went to the phone, Cody went to the kitchen, poured the rest of the shaker of garlic powder into his tea pot, swirled it around and drank some. It tasted like bitter medicine but it felt good going down.
Joyce said, "Phone's dead." There was a fluttering beat in the air and they went to the window to see a helicopter flying low past the cityscape. From Cody's third story apartment they looked straight down St. Clair Avenue to where it was going, towar
d the heart of the city, hazy in the distance. The monster lurked there, like a gargantuan gobbling Pac Man, chomping down not on electronic dots but on the buildings of downtown Cleveland.
The helicopters attacked the immense beast, shooting at it with smoking rockets. The monster twitched from the impacts but kept on eating. On TV a close-up showed some bits of monster flesh flying but most of the explosive power was absorbed, making the zebra mussel hide bubble like a thick lentil soup on slow boil.
The woman on TV despaired, wondering what could be done.
Tough-faced General Curtis of the National Guard came on, confident with his answer. "We'll blow that thing back to the stone age," he said. "We'll step up the attack and shell it with tanks and artillery. It won't be able absorb that."
"But what if it does?" the woman had to ask.
"Well, I'll guaran-damn-tee you it won't be able to absorb a nuclear warhead."
Joyce, watching TV in Cody’s apartment, couldn't believe what she'd heard. "What, are you nuts?" she screamed at the TV
Apparently a lot of other TV viewers were of a like mind because it took only minutes for the governor's office to issue a retraction, saying the general was just talking theoretically. The National Guard didn't even have