A Hard Day's Work

            “You know,” Frank said, waist-deep in colossal lizard shit, “they say that female monsters kill more folks than male monsters do.”

            Johnny, sweating up the hill of greenish waste in his bright-yellow, C.L.E.A.N hazmat suit, stopped in his tracks.  “What?” he said, hoping he hadn’t got spit into the radio communicator inside his helmet.

            “Yeah, I saw it on the news,” Frank said.  Also clad in a hazmat suit, his thoroughly gloved hands clumsily rooted through his utility belt until he found the scanners.  He began placing the small, plastic discs, occasionally blinking with a red light and corresponding “beep,” and continued his story.  “They did a study, and in the past five times Queen Hydrafina attacked, twenty thousand more people died than in the past five times Garganturex attacked.”

            “Queen Hydrafina? The mantis?” Johnny wasn’t as young, or as lean, as Frank was, so it was with panting breaths that he finally reached his share of the pile and started rummaging for his scanners.  “I mean, the broad’s got claws, sure, but what else? Her feet aren’t even that much bigger than me.”

            “She’s no slouch,” Frank muttered.  Johnny winced; he had forgotten that Queen Hydrafina had devastated Harlem during the last big attack.  Many people had been lucky enough to rush home to find that, while homeless, their friends and family had all survived.  Frank was not one of those people.

            “Sorry, man, you know I didn’t mean nothing by that.”  Frank shrugged, his face hard to read in the hazmat suit.  Johnny resolved to take the kid out for a drink after work was over.  “Queen Hydrafina is plenty deadly.  I just mean in comparison to Garganturex, is all.  That dude’s got fifty feet on her, and he’s a dinosaur.  Scales, tail spikes, whatever it is that lets him shoot lightning from his eyes, that stuff’s gotta give him two, maybe three times more weight than just some giant mantis.”

            Frank had already finished planting his scanners.  He yanked a very dirty, yet somehow still functional, smart device out of his utility belt, beginning calibrations.  “That’s just it,” he said.  “The lady monsters, the Queen Hydrafinas and the Squidullas, they get underestimated way more than Garganturex or, or what’s-his-face, the guy with the stab-arms.”

            “Drillferno?”
            “Yeah, Drillferno.  When people hear Drillferno is coming, they head for the shelters like he’s coming directly for them.  But there’s something like a fifteen percent drop in people going to the shelters if the alert says Squidulla is coming.”

            Frank smiled as Johnny stopped his work with the scanners, clearly thinking hard about whether he had a personal anecdote related to the situation.  “You know,” he finally said, “that makes sense.  After that Squidulla attack two years ago, the one where she ate the Toys-R-Us in Times Square, I called my brother to see if he was okay.  You know, my brother who works in the—“

            “Yeah, you told me about him before,” Frank said.  Johnny had actually told Frank about his brother on Wall Street several times before, a clear point of pride.  He resolved to make sure Johnny never, ever tried to introduce his brother to his family, especially his father and especially during an election year.  “He was okay?”

            “He was,” Johnny said, pressing his last scanning device deep into the toothpaste-thick sludge, “but he wasn’t at no shelter.  His building hadn’t evacuated.  Squidulla, raging through Times Square and inking anything that moved, and he was just typing away like nothing was wrong!”

            “Guess his bosses were a little bit sexist, huh?” Frank trudged through the shit towards Johnny, who was having trouble pulling his calibrator out of his belt.  “Here you go,” he said, reaching out and dislodging the device.

            “Thanks, these things crust up real good,” Johnny said.  He started up the device, keying in the pH and temperature readings of the waste they had made beforehand while it slowly detected each scanner.  “How do they count the really big attacks?”

            “The ones with more than one monster?”

            “Yeah.  How do they determine which one killed more people? Before they meet up it’s fairly easy, but do they go in and figure out exactly which building got knocked over by each monster?”

            “You know,” Frank said, wrapping up his calibrations and putting his device away, “that’s a pretty big oversight of the article, now that I think about it.  They don’t mention anything about that.”

            “Well how about that.”  Johnny followed Frank’s suit, turning his device off when it picked up and boosted the signal emitted by the last scanner, and haphazardly wedging it back into his belt.  “Maybe I should write for, uh, who wrote this one?”

            “Mother Jones.” Johnny silently winced, hoping his hazmat suit masked his reaction.  He didn’t want another big political argument.  “Maybe journalism isn’t my bag,” he added, awkwardly.

            “Anyway,” Frank said, “I think those attacks might not be as bad overall.  It’s never two female monsters fighting each other; if any are involved, they’re fighting Garganturex or Ragersaur or whatever.  So when people hear they’re coming, they get the fear of God put into ‘em and—“

            Frank’s theory was interrupted when both his and Johnny’s calibrators started vibrating wildly.  The two clumsily pulled them out, looking through the scanning feed.  “What do you got?” Johnny asked.  “Any biohazards?”

            “No,” Frank said, “and no military hardware either.  No combustibles, no super-viruses, no…wait.  Jesus.”

            Johnny was about to ask Frank what he had found, but as he scrolled through the feed, he stumbled on it too.  The scanners were registering a human heartbeat, eight feet to his left and six feet down.  “We got a live one,” he yelled, sprinting with Frank to position, “and apparently somebody with one Hell of an air pocket.”

            “You’ve done this before,” Frank said, pre-emptively reaching for his utility belt.  “Is it deep enough that we can do a partial vaporization?”

            Johnny took about a second to think about it.  “Normally we signal the satellite with the scanners, and they vaporize the whole thing at once,” he said.  “The minimum for a partial vape, if one is required, is four feet.  We’ll have to stay an extra hour while the laser recharges.”

            “Well, it’s not like we have a choice.”  Frank tried to hide his excitement from Johnny; he’d only had this job for nine months, and he’d never seen a partial vaporization before.  “There’s a person down there.  Do we get overtime pay?”

            Johnny laughed.

            “Ah, well.”  Frank pulled out his transceiver, programmed to transmit directly to the joint C.L.E.A.N. and US Army laser satellite they’d sent up after Space Garganturex attacked.  He plugged in the depth and coordinates of the spot, and stepped back the requisite five feet with Johnny.  The two waited for around forty seconds before the laser came down.

            When viewed through a high-speed camera, the satellite laser, white-hot, looks like somebody is rapidly erasing part of the footage in postproduction.  Frank and Johnny were not high-speed cameras, so to them it was only a bright flash.  Suddenly, there was a perfectly square, three-by-three hole, five feet deep.  “Okay,” Johnny said, as Frank helped him scrabble down into the hole, “call an evacuation team.  They’ll probably need a chopper.”

            Frank nodded, still marveling at the perfect edges of the hole as he grabbed for his communicator to HQ.  Johnny, meanwhile, shoveled fistful after fistful of green glop out of the way, until he finally felt empty space, than something solid.  “Hey, buddy,” he said, scooping up a gasping, emaciated man in his middle age, shivering violently and completely green.  “You’re okay now.  We gotcha.”

            “Are…are you guys military?” the man chattered.  Johnny chuckled; when people outside of work asked him this question he usually lied his ass off.  For some reason, people were much more impressed with the idiots who tried to fight the giant monsters with wholly ineffective weaponry than those who actually helped clean things up.  This time, he was honest.

            “No, sir, my associate,” he shrugged towards Frank, who looked down and gave a thumbs-up, “and myself are with the Colossal Leviathan Excrement Annihilation Network.”

            The man was preoccupied with gulping in “fresh” air, which compared to his prior conditions only faintly reeked of rotten meat and moldy bread, but he eventually answered.  “C.L.E.A.N? I…I’m sorry, I voted to cut your budget on the Hill last year.  I won’t do that again, I can promise you that.”

            “You’re a congressman?” The man nodded.  “Hey, Frank! We got us a genuine congressman down here! You want to yell at him about student loans or something?”

            “If he voted against immigration reform, put him back in the hole.”

            Even through layers of giant monster dung, Frank could tell from several feet above him that the congressman had turned white.  “I’m just kidding!” he yelled, while Johnny almost dropped him, shaking with laughter.  “You’re safe now, sir! There’s food and a shower en route as we speak!”

            Things were awkward between Frank and the congressman after that.  Fortunately, evac only took forty minutes to arrive, which wasn’t too long a time to suffer through an uncomfortable silence.  “You know,” Frank said, as he and Johnny watched the helicopter carry the representative away to hours upon hours of decontamination procedures, “we did good work today.”

            “Hey, don’t talk like that,” Johnny said, punching Frank in the arm as he slowly trudged down the pile of shit.  “We do good work every day.”

            “You know what? You’re right.”  Frank clapped Johnny on the back, leaving a green smudge on his already dirty hazmat suit.  “We still got awhile until the satellite charges back up; Hawaii saw Son of Piranha near Honolulu and they had to zap it.”

            Johnny grinned.  “Do you still got that blackjack app installed on your calibrator?”

            Frank had already pulled his out.  “Your wallet wishes I didn’t, old man.”

            “We’ll see who’s old after we play.”  Side by side, Frank and Johnny continued through the pile of Garganturex poop covering Central Park, searching for that sweet, shallow spot where they could sit down and play cards.