nuclear weapons, only the real Army had them. And only the President of the United States could give the order to use them. And he would never do that. Although, theoretically, they were sure a very small one would do the trick. And just as a precaution everyone within a fifty mile radius of Cleveland should evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion.
Panic ensued. The street outside Cody's apartment soon became jammed with bumper to bumper, horn-honking, fender-bending, obscenity-yelling traffic. It was a good thing the National Guard was there to maintain order. That was their job and they did it well and with great enthusiasm. It was better than being deployed to the Middle East at least.
"We'll have to wait for that mess to clear before we can go," said Cody, looking out his window. On TV the monster was being bombarded with increasingly larger and heavier weaponry. Its hide bubbled and swelled and got fatter and wider. It slithered along, eating, crushing, dissolving anything in its path.
"The more they bomb it, the bigger it gets," said Joyce as she watched too. "Who knows what'll happen if they nuke it. It might turn into a blob as big as the city. We've got to tell Doctor Marius about the garlic."
They went out into the rush and crush of the street scene. Joyce said, “We'll make better time if we go on foot, Case Western is only a couple miles from here."
It was not an unpleasant trek as they left St. Clair for Martin Luther King Drive which meandered through a greensward several blocks wide all the way to the university. It was a remnant of the Western Reserve from which the Forest City of Cleveland was hewn, when thick forest had spread for hundreds of miles around the lake. Joyce and Cody tramped along next to the woodsy road as a steady line of cars headed away from the city like rush hour traffic backed up and crawling past an automobile accident.
The University was deserted. They consulted a directory posted on a kiosk and headed for the biology building. Marius was in his lab, hunched over a series of shallow Petri dishes containing monster flesh. Joyce said, "Doctor, we think we may have found an antibody that will attack the monster."
Marius looked up. "Indeed? What?"
Cody got close to the professor, said in a secretive fashion, "Garlic."
"Uh, yes, I see, said the good doctor, sticking his tongue out and waving a hand in front of his face. "Indeed. It might be effective if it’s anything like your breath which could knock a buzzard off a manure wagon."
"I'll bet it could do more than that," said Jody. He took a sip from his thermos and spit it into one of the Petri dishes. The small piece of monster flesh there fell apart, practically melted. "How about that?" Cody said.
"Ah, just like penicillin," said the doctor.
"Huh? How's that?"
"Fleming discovered penicillin when the nasal drip from his cold fell into a Petri dish and reacted with the mold there."
"Far out," Cody replied. "So now all we need is a ton of garlic and a way to get it to the monster and get him to eat it."
Joyce said, "That company that makes those garlic pills they advertise on the radio is in Sandusky. That's not too far from here. They should have plenty of garlic.
But the roads are out or jammed," Cody said. "How do we get to Sandusky?"
“We’ll call the National Guard,” said Marius. “They have helicopters. They’ve been waiting for word from me anyway.” He shuffled over to a side table which held a citizens band radio, unhooked the microphone, pressed down a switch, said, "Breaker breaker, this is Doctor Frankenstein, come on." Embarrassed, he explained, "My code name."
Military helicopters and self-important officers came and went and preparations were made. The monster, meanwhile, went through Cleveland like a scythe, sweeping left and right over the landscape, with the Cuyahoga River in the middle. It was replenishing itself in the river waters, Dr. Marius said. It needed a lot of water for the mussels and it was heavily oozing excrement and loosing fluids.
He also had a theory for why the monster had not devoured Terminal Tower or Gund Arena and Progressive Field. "Too hard to digest," he suggested. "They're too well built."
"Or maybe the guy inside the monster is a sports fan," suggested Cody.
"The guy? You mean the deranged Vietnam veteran who's supposed to be at the heart of the monster?" Actually Louis had spent his entire two year Army career at Fort Bliss Texas driving tanks in the dessert and guarding against a Mexican invasion. But it was during the Vietnam era, so that was close enough for government work and hot news flashes.
The next morning Joyce and Cody and Dr. Marius stood on a bluff overlooking an industrialized section of the Cuyahoga Valley at the southern edge of Cleveland. Below them was the river, a railroad yard, a vast sprawling steel plant and a petroleum refinery. North of the valley the monster approached, slithering along, and making the earth tremble. It was heading right for the factories in the valley, which were full of tasty oils and fortified with iron and other essential minerals.
It was heading too, towards several companies of the National Guard who were waiting with heavy artillery, a backup for the hundreds of firemen with hoses connected to fire engines and a high pressure supply of garlic solution.
It took a few minutes to get the bugs worked out of the system. Or rather to get the garlic solution worked out of the hoses. But then the doctor's radio crackled and the voice of General Curtis said, "We're ready whenever you give the word, doc."
"Let's wait until The Monster pauses at the Cuyahoga to drink," the doctor answered. "It will be most vulnerable then."
"That means the end of those factories," replied the General
"Pity," replied the doctor. He said in an aside to Joyce, "On a clear day you can see forever but when those plants are in operation it's never clear here, the air is a brown haze and the fumes are nauseating. He grinned. "Just doing my bit for the Sierra club."
They waited until the monster had thoroughly devoured its last industrial strength meal and paused at the river to wash it down
Then the firemen opened up with their hoses. A hundred heavy streams of garlic solution hit the monster full in the face, or in and around where a face would be if it had one. It seemed to shiver for a second. Then it shrunk as mussel flesh plopped to the ground in blobs. The hard sprays burrowed holes, created rivulets, made a mudslide out of the monster. The skeleton buried deep beneath that liquefying mass was finally revealed -- the scoop loader.
"Is there something moving in that cab?" said Cody, studying it with binoculars. He never found out. The scoop loader exploded. The National Guard had stood by long enough. First one fiery missile and then another blasted the revealed metal body, turning it into charred scrap. Incendiary devices turned that into a molten mass which burned down to nothing.
That was the end of the monster. But it was the beginning of a true rebirth of Cleveland, rising not from ashes but from compost. It turned out that the excrement the monster had left in its wake was very clean and fertile compost. A perfect bed for the hundreds of thousands of trees, greenswards of grass and all manner of flora which were subsequently planted as the city was rebuilt on a park-like theme. That was sort of the plan all along, the mayor said. At least as far as urban blight went. It was a pity that so much that was so good had to be destroyed too, although he didn't specify what the good part was.
So every cloud has a silver lining. And the silver showered down in the form of federal disaster relief funds and insurance settlements. Jobs were plentiful in the rebuilding of a bright new user-friendly Cleveland that became a pleasant place to live, work, and even walk and breathe. The new city attracted lots of new people, new business and even a convention or two.
Someone actually suggested they erect a monument to Louis Williams, a.k.a. The Monster. That didn't seem like such a good idea, considering his motivation. Others said that every new tree was a monument to him and a reminder that we must maintain a constant vigilance against the conditions which could l
ead to the development of a monster.
Which is the moral of every good monster story.
END
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