Betrayal on Monster Earth

Betrayal

on

Monster Earth

James Palmer and Jim Beard

~~~

Smashwords Edition

Edited by

James Palmer and Jim Beard

Concept by Jim Beard

Cover Art by Eric Johns

A Mechanoid Press Book

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously.

No giant monsters were harmed during the making of this book.

BETRAYAL ON MONSTER EARTH

Copyright © 2014 by James Palmer and Jim Beard

Cover Artwork © 2014 by Eric Johns

"Introduction: copyright © 2014 by James Palmer & Jim Beard

Big Juju copyright © 2014 by Jim Beard

The Fox and the Hedgehog copyright © 2014 by Fraser Sherman

Reggie copyright © 2014 by Jeff McGinnis

A Haunt of Jackals copyright © 2014 by Edward M. Erdelac

Giants of Industry copyright © 2014 by Thomas Deja

The Time of the Spider copyright © 2014 by James Palmer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form, save for brief passages to be quoted in reviews.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A Mechanoid Press Book

www.mechanoidpress.com

Books by James Palmer

Slow Djinn

Four Terrors: Weird Horror Stories

As Editor

Monster Earth

Strange Trails

Robots Unleashed!

As Contributor

Gideon Cain: Demon Hunter

Blackthorn: Thunder on Mars

Tales of the Rook volume 2

Mars McCoy: Space Ranger volume 2

Contents

INTRODUCTION by Jim Beard

BIG JUJU by Jim Beard

THE FOX AND THE HEDGEHOG by Fraser Sherman

REGGIE by Jeff McGinnis

A HAUNT OF JACKALS by Edward M. Erdelac

GIANTS OF INDUSTRY by Thomas Deja

THE TIME OF THE SPIDER by James Palmer

CONTRIBUTORS

OTHER BOOKS

Introduction

Jim Beard

It is a time of chaos on Monster Earth.

For almost five decades, giant creatures have walked the planet alongside humans, sometimes aiding them yet too often bringing them immense pain and suffering. But, by the dawn of the eighth decade of the 20th century, Man has learned to live with Monster to some degree, and each nation on Earth either lays claim to a creature or searches for one to bring about to their will and sovereign authority.

But, of course, that’s all about to change.

It’s 1985 and an underground band of zealots are in search of something. Something to bring about a new age on Monster Earth. Until now, the monsters have sprung from the planet through the strange and mysterious machinations of Nature, an organic process that while still a puzzle to Mankind, remains part of the larger Order of Things.

No more. The beginning of the end of that Order has begun, and Betrayal and Chaos will be its replacements…

Big Juju

by Jim Beard

One

Africa, the Congo.

1985

"Runrunrunrunrunrun!"

He hit the treeline a clear two seconds before the immense ball of snapping, spitting, scratching, howling scales and hair. A half-moment later and he’d have been grafted onto the jungle, permanently.

Listner flung himself into some short growth at the edge of the clearing, then dared to look back over his shoulder. He didn’t regret it; the scene before him was one for the ages.

The Son of Johnson was on top, pulling apart from his adversary just enough to get his long, furry arms in front of him and grapple for its slavering jaws. Trees snapped and broke around the combatants, falling like blades of grass before a scythe. Soil and plant matter erupted around the melee. Birds flew away like puffs of brightly-colored streamers.

Listner had problems with the scale. He knew SoJo was eighty meters, his dancing partner at least that tall, but from his vantage point, the two creatures seemed man-sized. He wondered at the strange phenomenon, but the screams of the fighters drowned out his thoughts and he scrambled to his feet, ready to give them more room.

Unagi’s short forearms were nearly useless, unable to reach the hairy beast bent over it unless it moved in close. SoJo, wary of the massive jaws lined with spear-sharp teeth snap-snap-snapping at him, swung his fists at the reptile’s relatively-soft underbelly. The drum-like blows echoed through the jungle clearing.

Then, Unagi wrangled its muscular tail to wrap around one of SoJo’s legs and the jig was up. In the blink of an eye, the huge reptile got its feet on the hairy monster’s own midsection and pushed.

Listner ran like the Devil himself was after him.

Several tons of hair-covered mammal landed with a mighty crash where he’d stood, making the ground quake. Toppled trees crashed down on SoJo, covering him. Unagi was back up on its feet, tail whiplashing and jaws clacking together, over and over and over again.

The American monster flung the trees off of him and leaped to his feet. Listner caught the look in the brute’s eyes immediately; there was nothing else save those blistering, burning orbs.

Uh-oh, said Listner to himself. He’s flipped.

Berserker rage flooded through the hairy man-mountain, his fingers clenching and unclenching in spasms. At that moment, Listner observed gorilla traits in SoJo as the monster bent over, scraped the ground with his big feet, snorted through his nostrils once, twice, then steamed forward.

Unagi screeched in unearthly fury. The Son of Johnson slammed into the reptile, the sound of the impact nearly deafening and loud enough to shake the jungle growth around them.

SoJo went nuts. Crazed like no one had ever seen him before, the hairy monstrosity pummeled Unagi mercilessly, all the while howling in a frightening, high-pitched cacophony. His opponent seemed to be dazed, sluggish, its lizard-like agility and speed leached away. The jaws still snapped and the clawed feet still kicked, but with only half the fierce fury of a minute before.

Unagi was losing; this was very clear to Listner.

Foliage flew up into the air, raining down upon him and choking his surroundings. He fell backwards, tripping over a root or a downed tree. His head hit something, probably a rock. He tried to get up, but he feared that if he did, he’d be staring smack-dab into the ugly, bloodshot anger-laced eyes of the very thing he’d been put in charge of.

He squeezed his own eyes shut, praying to God for the fight to end. It seemed to go on for hours, a grudge-match of epic proportions, a struggle with its roots in the history of the planet, warm-blood versus cold-blood in a battle to decide the rulership of the Earth.

Finally, after a stretch of time impossible for him to measure, it stopped.

Listner pried open his eyes, wiping the dirt from them, smearing it over his face. He found he could barely move, but he craned his neck up just enough to catch a glimpse of the fog of debris that hung in the air before him, nearly cloaking the entire clearing. If there’d been a victor, there was no sign of one.

Then, a hairy arm appeared. Then another. The Son of Johnson waddled into the light, picking branches and other matter from his unruly fur. Listner saw that the monster was covered in blood.

SoJo took a few steps in his general direction, then collapsed down onto one knee, panting.

Goddammit, Listner swore, struggling to get up. This wasn’t what he’d signed up for.

He realized with a rush of clarity that a tree had fallen over his legs, locking him down like a vise. He had no idea how in the hell he’d get out from under it.

Soldiers appeared around him suddenly. Listner wiped at his eyes again, but it only made his vision worse.

Dort? he croaked.

He received a grunt in reply. Typical, he thought.

Get that offa him, he heard a gruff voice command. He’s gonna want to see this.

*

"Dead? What do you mean dead?"

Major Dort, a muscular black man of average height, skewered him with a look. You’re a scientist. Figure it out for yourself.

Dr. Sam Listner poured water from a canteen over his face, tried to wipe away what dirt he could and spit out what had ended up in his mouth. The bad taste from the battle remained.

He disliked the major within seconds of meeting him, but the surly officer commanded the mission and that was that. He’d put up with the man like he’d put up with every other military type he’d worked with before. But he didn’t have to like it.

Let me see the body, Listner said. Walking again, though his legs yowled at him to stop, he moved toward the scene of the battle. Dort got right in front of him.

"You square away that shit-smell beast first, Doctor. Then we’ll let you look at his handiwork."

In his head, Listner heard every grouse, every complaint that Dort had issued during the trip and after they’d landed. That he’d only been assigned to an African mission because he was black and that he hated the continent and why the hell was he being saddled with monsters and so on. Listner tried to tune it out, but it had seeped into his consciousness.

For his part, the young doctor had been approached by U.S. military a year previously, with an overture to work with the American beast called Son of Johnson, nothing more. Now, he stood in the Congo, in Africa, covered with dirt and who the hell knew what, a proverbial fish out of water, surrounded by soldiers and monsters and sweating his very life away in a heat and humidity he never imagined existed.

That ‘shit-smell,’ Major, is what’s controlling SoJo, he told the uniformed man. I’d think you’d be grateful for that, but what do I know?

The major got right in his face again, forcing Listner to back up a step.

"Apparently not much, Doctor. He swung one arm out and pointed at a large mass in the clearing. You call that ‘controlled’? We were ordered to bring it back alive."

The pheromone specialist marched around the major and got a good look at the aftermath of SoJo’s rage.

Unagi, apparently, was dead.

Damn, he whispered, then turned back to Dort. Are we still in Zaire?

Yes, said the Major, spitting at the ground.

How much time do we have?

Well, replied Dort, affixing a wicked, humorless grin on his face, "that depends. If Mobutu is a man of his word, then about twenty hours. If his people are good on their word, maybe a little more. If they’re all shit-eating bastards, and I figure that’s likely, we’re pretty much screwed."

Somehow, and Listner didn’t care in the slightest to know exactly how, the army had secured a kind of permission for their expedition to move through Zaire for a limited amount of time. President Mobutu promised non-interference by his troops, but only to a point.

To a point. It was that last little edict that worried Sam Listner. He’d heard that there was very little true law on the African continent, and there he was, sneaking around with U.S. soldiers on foreign soil with a goddamn monster in tow, looking for another monster. He might as well just slit his throat and get it over with.

Open up those big pots again, he said to Dort. The blue ones. SoJo will go where he’s directed.

Pheromones. It was all because of pheromones and aromas. He concocted a mixture that enabled the U.S. military to control the Son of Johnson like never before, and they seemed very happy for his work. Then, they wanted him to go hunting one of the greatest monster mysteries of the 20th century, the so-called living dinosaur of the Congo.

Well, they’d hunted it, found it – using what was basically a big pheromone trap like they used for insects – and now they’d killed it. Correction: the great American monster had killed it.

That wasn’t the plan at all.

A camera whirred and snapped just over his shoulder. Listner swung around to look at the photographer, his one saving grace on the entire expedition, if he could call her that.

Not your fault, Sam, said Corporal Lovey Hart, army photographer. SoJo went crazy. That big dino just hit him where it counted.

Lovey – that was her real name; they’d had a chuckle over it – was right. It wasn’t his fault. The hairy monster went off book and used a little extra muscle – they’d wanted to bring Unagi back alive, but maybe, just maybe, something could be salvaged from the whole, huge mess.

Pack it up, he said. We’ll take it back with us."

Dort nearly pulled his hair out, fuming and screeching, but Listner concentrated on the sway of Corporal Hart’s hips and the near-perfect roundness of her behind under her government-issue uniform pants as she walked toward the corpse, snapping pictures all the way. He’d take his pleasures where he could, if he was to suffer the major’s inane arguments for the entire trip back to the States.

"How do you propose we do that, Listner? The young doctor looked around him, as if wondering where the voice had come from. We’re not far from the river, right? Have your men on the ship whip up a…a barge of some sort, and SoJo can drag the body down to the water and load it up. Then we just sail it back to the ship."

Dort just stared at him for a minute.

"Just whip up a barge, huh? And you say you’ve never held any public office, Doctor? Because you think like a politician: bat-shit crazy-ass ideas that roll off your tongue like honey. Do you have any idea what…"

He walked away from the Major, allowing the man some space to come up with the particulars of Listner’s plan. He’d be able to do it; Dort was fairly capable, though bullet-headed.

Approaching Lovey Hart, he sidled up to her and gazed out at Unagi’s gigantic corpse.

Dinosaur, right? she asked him, still looking through her viewfinder. Her lovely auburn hair was coming loose from the tight bun she wore it in, but he was glad to see that she hadn’t tried to fix it back up. There was something wild about it that suited the moment and their surroundings.

Dunno. Not really my specialty, but yeah, I guess so. Look at those forearms and the claws. But that body shape and the legs, more like a plant-eating dinosaur than a carnivore. Weird, but at least we know it has a Jacobson’s organ, or something like it. Wish I could have seen if it exhibited a Flehman response.

Corporal Hart nodded and snapped another photo. One of our greatest puzzles, solved. And we get to take it back home with us?

Listner smiled and shrugged. "Somehow, sure. Dort will figure it out. Not much more for us to do."

She turned to look at him with her pretty green eyes. He hoped she’d be smiling, too, but her lips remained very serious when she spoke.

Except to get drunk, I suppose.

Two

It’s big juju, Lovey said, turning a glistening green-blue scale over with her hands.

Before he could respond, the lights dimmed and the singer took the stage.

They’d made their way to a club in a town called Muanda, on the coast, though Listner had no real idea of what country they were in, only that they were somewhere near the mouth of the Congo River. The club had seen much better days, but it offered a limited menu and plenty of spirits. At the moment, he was sipping on something he guessed was rum.

The clientele of the club – an intriguing mixture of Africans, French, and a smattering of Asians – kept right on conversing and drinking, all but ignoring the stage show.

Listner watched as the singer, who, like the club, had seen much better days, approach the microphone and wait for the opening few bars of a tune from the band. The musicians were all white, save for a single portly Japanese man on the drums.

The woman looked familiar to him, but he couldn’t figure why that would be. She was tall and was apparently once a redhead, but now she was pushing fifty, he guessed, and the heavy makeup on her haggard face could barely conceal the lines of age and worry.

The tune from the band was anchored in the past, a Sixties lounge motif that staggered around the room, played somewhat competently, but without enthusiasm. Listner suspected a few of the musicians were drunk.

The singer opened her garishly painted lips and warbled out a song.

He needs someone to love

Someone as soft as a dove

But he’s like a leather glove

Strong and sure

Love is like falling down the stairs

It only hurts for a minute

And then you get back up again

Listner stared at