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Emma

By Luther

"So when exactly is this presentation supposed to start?" asked the gravel-voiced man seated on the leather backed chair in a dimly lit room. In front of him stood the plate glass one-way mirror that dominated the entire north wall. Beyond it lay yet another room, painted an oppressive white that just screamed test chamber. Currently it was empty, matching his expectations of the whole project.

He was dressed, by all accounts, as one would expect a higher ranking member of military brass, with the all the fancy markings that signified him as a colonel . . . or maybe a major. The only other person in the room, the one he was putting the question to, was a younger lab-coated girl. She really couldn't tell what rank he was and didn't want to risk asking. Whatever he was, he had the chiseled features and piercing gaze of Montgomery and all the coarse swagger of Patton. All he lacked were the aviator glasses or a riding crop and he would be a proper stereotype. The cigar he had already supplied and the long draws he took upon it were chief among the only things preserving his patience.

"Soon, very soon," the she assured him again, it was about the third time she had to so far. It certainly was taking them a while. She tapped her pen against her clipboard nervously. Had something gone wrong? They should be out there by now. She tried to deflect the sense of listlessness: "Have you gone over the booklet that details the purpose of the-"

"Yes, yes, I've read the thing," he said, interrupting. This was by far from the first time he was asked that today.

At long last, a pair of tall double doors in the far wall of the next room opened and out came a lanky technician leading something along on a leash, something big. The colonel's eyes opened widely as he spoke. "Is that a -a . . . it looks like a damn-"

"Tyrannosaurus Rex, yes colonel." She smiled at that. Now it was her turn to interrupt him and it wasn't often one got to take a higher staff officer by surprise. And it most certainly was what looked, for the love of everything, like a dinosaur had stepped from some primordial era into the room. The only difference was that it was in relatively diminuative form, roughly nine feet long, small enough to be led about by a collar by the other fellow, also in lab coat.

"We used the t-rex as a template for its appetite and voracious nature, as outlined in the booklet," she continued, still smiling and emphasizing that last part. The colonel turned around in his seat to look at her incredulously but ultimately said nothing. "But there's no need to worry. The dino has been thoroughly conditioned to not harm people. She's smart enough to know the difference but caution is still advised. She's still very much a creature at heart and might . . . forget if not handled properly."

"She?" he asked.

"Yes. Her name is Emma."

He just shook his head for a moment in disbelief until another technician arrived behind them, wheeling a cart with all sorts of junk items piled on it. The second one took a single quick look at the big reptile and made a hasty retreat back to whence he came.

"Now, as you surely know from reading the booklet, she's been engineered to safely metabolize anything she eats. Anything," she restated the last part to let it sink in. "Possible applications include eliminating or reducing landfill usage, hazardous material disposal, waste-free demolition . . ."

As she continued her recitation the colonel watched, nearly pressing his face against the glass to better see. He watched the technician pick up pieces of junk with gloved hands and toss them, one by one, into the snapping jaws of the dinosaur. His ears had somewhat gone deaf to her pitch, all focus shifted forward. Chunks of rubber, a car battery, glassware: anything and everything he threw to it was caught and gulped down, much like how one would throw fish to a dolphin or orca.

It moved unlike anything he had ever seen, mostly because nothing like it had existed for millions and millions of years up until a few months ago. But even with its strange fluidity of motion, the colonel began to detect something was off about it. It was hard to place but slowly it became clear when he noticed the tyrannosaurus's height in relation to the white tile behind. It had shifted, the dino was higher now. Yes, he could see it now! When he first entered, the technician in there was roughly as tall as the dino was but now he only came up to its chest.

"Holy hell, it's growing! Is it supposed to do that?!" the colonel said.

The woman stopped talking at his exclamation and furrowed her brow, looking out into the test chamber. It took her but a moment to realize what he said was true. This was not supposed to happen, Emma was supposed to be done growing to maturity weeks ago and had gone through several trials just like this one without any occurrence. What on Earth was causing this now?

The technician saw it too, though not as soon, being distracted with his work in making sure to quickly grab the next object in line. When he next looked to his hungry patient he could not help but notice that he was looking up. The reptile's stance had changed as well. Before, it simply waited for the next morsel to come, now it leaned in towards him, leering expectedly, impatient.

He saw this and gulped. It was becoming impossible to not notice. The collar that had held tight before had snapped off effortlessly, forced off by a thickening neck and leaving the leash, more of a psychological tool than a physical one, lying limp and useless on the floor. He hastened his feeding, much to the dinosaur's temporary satisfaction, tossing some chain, a clump of rock, a broken piece of bicycle, motherboards from old computers, anything he could grab until his hands reached back and pulled thin air. There was nothing left.

And when he failed by running out of food to provide, the predictable happened. The poor fellow had only a few moments to realize how hopeless it was before the world went dark, enormous jaws diving down and clamping around him. He was hoisted into the air by a craning head and allowed to fall down the creature's dark throat as it leaned back. Just like that he was gone, though his shouting could still be heard through the belly for some time after.

Then it ate the cart he had wheeled in for good measure.

All the while the colonel and the scientist were watching. The girl blinked and hurried to find the red emergency button on the console in front of her, pressing it as she spoke. "I think that's enough for right now. Perhaps we should move elsewhere?" Red lights flashed and klaxons blared, dulled somewhat by the thick glass as steel shutters closed over it, removing the growing dinosaur from view.

A short distance away, a young man in lab-coat yawned, having just pressed the elevator call button and prepared to wait for the lift to come down from the third floor. It was the same technician from earlier who more wisely thought to not stick around to feed an engineered apex predator. The lights turned red, a loud bell began to ring, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. There was never a bell for 'everything is fine'. The elevator display zeroed out, no longer functioning during this general alarm.

He spent roughly two seconds wondering why it was sounding when the answer came battering through the demonstration room doors down the hall that he left not moments before. The first thing he saw when he turned around was the unmistakable head shape of the tyrannosaurus but larger, much larger, as in that head was now the size the entire body was before. It seemed Emma was as much outgrowing the room as trying to escape it. The t-rex didn't see him, instead it immediately busied itself by grabbing at the doors with its jaw, pulling them in and crushing them as if they were nothing.

Right, able to eat anything.

The defining wall of the test chamber began to buckle and bow outward, cracking and crumbling around the exposed scales that covered the dinosaur's side. One way or another, she was coming out! He backed up against the metal doors of the elevator that wouldn't come to save him and just barely kept himself from panicking. He noticed a fire exit not ten paces from him and rushed to apply a shoulder to it.

It was stuck on something. Why in the hell was it stuck? The walls! They were bending and shifting and had warped the metal doorframe. He tried again and again until morbid curiosity forced him to spare a look back.

He saw Emma's upper jaw as it sheared its way along the sides of the walls towards him, eating them like wafer crackers. Everything was food and everything went to fill the vacuous creature in vain. The giant reptile chewed through whatever happened to be in its path: the water fountain, chairs, unphased by the electrical cables it ate, the janitor's cart, reaching up to pluck exposed metal girders. Emma was a devouring wall of destruction slowly moving towards him, replacing the interior of the building.

Everything the tyrannosaurus consumed was added to its size, nothing wasted. Thousands of pounds were added at a time courtesy of the ravenous gullet. The reptile thickened in all directions just slightly faster than it grew taller. Fat would be a clumsy word for it and hardly did the appearing justice, though it did come to mind. New flesh formed to accommodate such size, bulk added to bulk as the beast's sides pushed further and further outward. He could hear it too: somewhere between the sound of a balloon filling and someone running their hands over wet rubber.

Why did that seem so cartoonish? Why did his mind go to that when confronted with mortal danger?

Emma was stopped momentarily when it became wedged between the walls it had yet to eat. That almost olive green hide pushed against the windowpanes, smashing them instantly. Flesh bulged from the now empty windows, forming the swells of half-extrusions. Behind those walls built a force Emma's expansion was putting too much reptile in too little space and it wasn't relenting!

At last his adrenaline-fueled body was able to push hard enough to make the door give way. He had reached his fight-or-flight response long ago and he sure as hell wasn't fighting. As he bolted from the fire escape door the fire alarm sounded, as if anyone were able to hear it.

Somewhere behind him the building was crumbling to pieces around the great rising form of one of pre-history's most deadly predators given new life. It stood at least three stories tall, teeth gnashing and tail whipping about. What spared him and many others was the fact that this particular tyrannosaur was busying itself with consuming the very pieces of the building collapsing all about it, the debris being just as valid and a far larger meal than any one scared human. This gave anyone with even half of their given sanity the chance to run for their lives.

Having gluttonously reduced even rubble to nothing, the still growing behemoth shifted its widening feet, lumbering from side to side in search of more to gorge itself upon. A public city bus had the misfortune of being too clumsy to be able to turn around in a crowded street of cars left behind by their owners. Fear had seized the occupants in the slim hope that the monster wouldn't see them if they remained hidden inside. Unfortunately, Emma didn't know or even care that they were within. The vehicle itself was a meal.

Much like Emma had done with that first poor lab technician, the dinosaur clamped its jaws tightly onto the front of the bus, sending it rocking, tires skidding across the pavement as it was slowly picked up and wrenched upward into the air by neck muscles powerful even for their size. The whole thing bucked and tossed and everyone attempted to get off: through the doors, through the windows, racing to the back and climbing over one another. Some managed to escape but others were less fortunate as the t-rex used the momentum to swing the entire thing up, align it with its throat, and begin swallowing. Glass shattered from the breaking windows as the dinosaur punctuated chomping down with man-sized teeth to better compact the vehicle while the bed that was its tongue helped it glide downward.

At length, the rear bumper disappeared into that maw and out of sight. Already Emma was swelling monstrously once more, adding the mass from the bus to its own. Deep furrows were carved into the black asphalt of the street, raked into being as enormous claws dug into it and shuddered in something akin to pleasure.

Eating directly stimulated the reward centers in Emma's brain. This was a fact known only to a few but it wasn't difficult to guess. The way the reptile quickened its pace when something was in its mouth, the way it moved and reacted to becoming ever larger, gaining a primal and predatory glee behind its eyes. It was excited, even if it only meant that a bigger mouth could eat faster.

The more Emma ate, the bigger Emma got. None who helped develop the creature could figure out exactly why. The more it ate, the more it -wanted- to eat. This was the biological programming, after all. That much worked perfectly. At normal size it could be influenced, stopped by conventional means. But this? What could stop this?

Emma may have had a name but it was most certainly a creature. Nobody watching the dinosaur could think of it as anything else as a terror or a gluttonous force of nature. Emma had far more in common with a natural disaster than a rational, thinking person, clever as it was. Simply put, Emma was a thing, a terrifying monstrous thing. Despite what the creators might say: Emma was not a 'she'. Emma was an 'it'.

At the very least the behavior was very unbecoming of a lady.

Here was a creature designed to eat, born to eat. If becoming larger throughout the process was a byproduct of doing its job, then so be it. It only enabled the beast to fulfill its function to even greater degrees. Having scarcely just completed one meal, Emma was already looking for the next, paying no heed to the helicopter overhead.

"Can you fly us closer?!" yelled a young, red-haired woman, holding the hem of her dress down against the wind and trying to keep her helmet firmly on her head. The radio headset in it relayed her message to the pilot as well as his response.

"Lady, you've got to be crazy but I'll see what I can do."

If anyone had told her today would be the day she'd be hopping into the Channel 8 news chopper to fly over the city and cover the story of her life, she would think them crazy. Yet here she was. She hated heights but she loved the idea of finally getting her big break. She wanted to catch this thing on film as it ravaged its way across the city and when the fighter jet arrived to put it down. She turned to her cameraman and he gave a thumbs-up signal. He knew what she was going to ask and he was ready.

The nose of the aircraft turned and dipped and the rotors spun to new life as her pilot attempted to maneuver behind the immense beast. Slowly and surely, he tried to stay to the dino's backside, downwind if he could, and slowly crept up upon it . . . as much as a two-ton machine with screaming engines could creep.

Every stalled and abandoned car below was a potential morsel. Emma lowered its head and elevated an increasingly rotund tail to counterbalance. All the dinosaur had to do was approach one and step forward as its huge jaw pushed along the earth, scooping the vehicle and chunks of pavement up like some living steam shovel. Each passed into the mammoth creature's stomach and was gone almost immediately, made a part of the greater whole that was Emma.

After the fourth or fifth such delicacy, the t-rex lifted its head once more and took a deep breath. It opened its mouth and projected a bellowing roar with enough force to make the cameraman's equipment rattle. Exactly why Emma felt the need to make such a display was anyone's guess. The sound broke every window in the vicinity and sent a rain of broken glass cascading down buildings and down into the streets below, some of those buildings the dino's own head was now beginning to crest over. Twenty-odd stories tall, enough tonnage to split the streets open, and no slowing down.

It was damn good footage, the sort of monster that Hollywood could only have actors pretend was actually there while a cloud of ones and zeroes took its place on screen. But this wasn't quite good enough for the would-be news reporter.

She wanted to get a good shot of this thing's face.

"Can you come about in front of it?!" she yelled once more over the wind. There was a short pause before her earpiece clicked again.

"Now that's where I draw the line," the pilot answered. "I do -not- want it seeing us! You may have nothing to lose but I've got a damn kid. Whatever you got will have to do."

With that, the helicopter sharply turned away from the entire thing. Nobody else heard him mutter under his breath about not being paid enough for shit like this, words hidden by the whipping wind as the craft sped away to safety.

Elsewhere, a fellow in his mid-twenties yawned as he stretched to banish the sluggishness of bed. It was only the afternoon but he was just now waking up in preparation to cover the evening-to-night shift later. It always took him forever to shake off the effects of sleep and, being such a heavy sleeper, he could slumber through an earthquake if he had to. Lacking any other focus, he grabbed the remote control and turned on his television, idly pressing buttons to summon up new channels when the previous ones bored his rapid-fire expectations. And then something caught his eye. It was what appeared to be live feed from an overhead new, as if from a news helicopter. It showed a city below but the usual mottled grey color of the urban was cut by black smoke and red fire and buildings reduced to rubble as if some meteor or other disaster had struck. The words "giant monster attack" in bold typeface was splashed across the bottom of the screen.

That's usually an eye catcher.

Then the camera panned to reveal the cause of the destruction: what looked to be an impossible enormous tyrannosaurus, easily twice the size of any building around it. He chuckled a bit, musing to himself. "Must be some sort of commercial for a movie. Man, that's some terrible CGI," he muttered. Then his eyes widened a bit. That looked an awful lot like his neighborhood.

"Wait. What the fu-"

His world promptly exploded, replaced with a confusing bedlam as the far wall flew to pieces, smashing his shelves, the television, and sending him flying backwards as the shock knocked over the couch. He saw, for the briefest second, what looked to be a giant claw that had replaced the area where the wall stood. Now he was looking straight up at the sky and the sky was filled with monstrous tyrannosaurus, a shape blotting out the otherwise blinding sun coming down from the new hole in his roof.

He sat there, reclined. His mind has not yet been able to process exactly at what exactly it was looking. The perspective alone was terrifying: the base of his vision was the scaled ankle and leg of this massive beast, tapering so slightly past the knee to become its main body. The body was most of his field of view. He couldn't see the head, it looked as if the creature had craned it to the ground somewhere out of view, doubtlessly eating or wrecking something. He heard helicopters buzzing somewhere nearby with no intervening walls to block the sound but they were barely noticeable in front of all this.

After what seemed like quite the length of time for him, he finally regained his sanity and senses. This was real. It was the conclusion his mind had come to. The man rolled backwards and stood up, certainly no longer tired now, and was thankful for his retreat. That clawed foot (or rather the small portion of it that had broken his house) was creeping steadily towards him and was now half pushing and half crushing the couch he was just sitting on. But not once had it shifted or picked up its foot, for that might have been the end for him if it did. His brain only came up with one impossible answer to an impossible situation: it was growing towards him, sliding and grinding over the ground as it did so.

Everything it crushed or smashed against the wall as the giant foot grew was valuable to him, though not so valuable as his life, but to this ungodly creature it didn't even register as a thought. In a way he was grateful the monster paid him no regard as he darted out the front door, not even pausing to grab his coat or glasses. Those things were worth nothing to a dead man.

He ran. He ran like crazy and he never once looked back until he was blocks away. What he saw shocked him almost as much as his first encounter: a voracious head atop a neck too thick for it atop a body almost too big for that, packed with meat and muscle and standing fifty stories tall. How could something like this appear from nowhere? In some strange way it seemed to be even bigger than when he was right next to it just a minute ago.

Vastness is a word with a meaning not quite fully appreciated by most. When viewed from a far distance, the Earth can be seen fully and understood to be so neatly self-contained. But when walking upon it, humans took millennia to even consider the shape of it beyond what could be seen.

So too did a girl unfortunate enough to be in one of the tall buildings that the creature demolished yet fortunate enough, by some miracle, to be just above the titan as it passed. With a racing heart she dangled from a windowsill and saw it moving beneath her as her only chance and, fighting everything her instinct told her, let go and found herself tumbling onto its back.

She expected to be harmed by abrasive skin or sharp scales but the short fall itself was the worst part and, on hands and knees, she came to see that the surface of this impossible beast was smooth and almost springy. Despite her predicament, she found herself running a hand across the almost hypnotizing, pressing fingers into the rebounding flesh to see if it was actually real.

Its size was so great that, where she expected to be tossed from it like one would from a raging bull, it was nothing unlike being on the deck of a ship sailing through choppy waters. Still, she clung to it with everything she had. Its inertia carried her with it though the constant pitching and swaying was beneath her. She screwed her eyes shut and her mind flashed to the story of Noah and the whale, of being confronted with something so much greater than one's self . . . but words failed. The whale, big as it might be, was nothing compared to this.

Gone was the normal droning noise of a busy city that she took for granted. In its place were the regular but short earthquakes to her that rattled her teeth, the beating heart of the creature, as well as the barely audible straining that signified an unyielding growth. Gone was the visible earth below her. Her vision was instead filled with a sea of smooth skin, flowing like water over muscle and fat. It was pulled comfortably snug across an equally immense expanse of flesh beneath, compounding upon itself ever outward. A sense of vertigo overcame her, the dinosaur was gaining height so quickly that she could feel it, that same feeling one gets in an elevator.

There was a time where she actually forgot she was still on a living thing and not cleaving to the side of a mountain. The folds of its hide were like canyons when they formed on the back of its neck, where the competing thickness of its body met and pushed against itself, upward like tectonic plates creating some mountainous range. But this was no rocky crag. This had none of the roughness of the wild stone, closer to living glass yet was undeniably solid, warm, and just barely pliable to her hand. It was an altogether alien sensation that only reminded her that she was just an ant clinging to a giant.

Far away, yet perhaps not far away enough, stood the observers of what was unfolding. An extra-long draw from a cigar forced the embers to glow bright orange. The man holding it needed it. He leaned against his staff car, now parked on a hill overlooking the city and its fate miles away. Even from this extreme distance the figure of the dinosaur was clearly visible without so much as the need to squint. It was the same colonel who had watched the project spiral out of control into what he saw in front of him

The same scientist girl had somehow gotten a ride with him. He wasn't sure how but he wasn't about to begrudge her that at this moment. He sighed and tried to block out the handful of people around him, each vying for his attention. They were just bureaucratic suits and corporate mouthpieces assigned to him as 'staff' that did nothing but make his life hell to protect the interests of their masters. He raised a hand to signal for their silence and, after some measure, he got it. At a time like this they didn't know what else to do but follow the man with the most shiny metal on his uniform.

He looked over to the girl for a moment but her eyes were focused straight ahead. One again, the two of them sat from a nominally safe distance and watched the creature known as Emma mercilessly eat and grow. Eat and grow, that's all it did.

After a long pause, he finally spoke. "The bomb's on its way."

She snapped to him. "Surely -surely you don't mean-

He put his hand up, dismissing her more grave concerns. "Thermobaric, ultrahigh-yield, highly localized for its force," he said. "Non-nuclear. But it's as mean as you can get without crossing that threshold. And it's already done," he said. His jaw had seldom felt so heavy than with the weight of those words.

Still, she glared at him unbelievably.

"It wasn't my order," he continued. "I don't have that kind of pull. Nor do I have what it takes to stop it. Came from the top, way on high where they decide who lives and who dies. I just heard about it."

There was a long moment of silence as the gravity washed over them. "Are we safe here?" she asked.

"Yes. Provided it kills it," was all he said.

"She isn't an 'it'. Her name is Emma," she said and fell silent. She had no idea why she was still sticking up for the monster at this point.

The colonel exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked at her. He tossed the cigar stump on the ground and pressed his boot against it, snuffing it out with a grinding motion.

"Was."

They heard a screeching roar but Emma's mouth was closed this time. In rode a flight of military jetcraft riding on the sonic wings of the Doppler effect. Or rather, they had just made their run and the ghostly reverberations echoed in their wake. They were hard to spot and their payload even harder. In truth, the guided bombs were in the air for as little time as safely possible, the margin for error with such weaponry in a city was practically non-existent.

The tiny oblong silhouettes impacted the side of the beast's face and neck perfectly, turning to fiery orange blossoms that engulfed its head quickly. Their hearing the blast was delayed from the distance but when it arrived it more than rivaled any roar Emma could have made.

Though the fire and the smoke, it was difficult to tell if Emma's head was even damaged save for the streaking char pattern along it. This creature was certainly something beyond mortal ken. Still, this did not discourage the colonel. Most the damage this particular weapon did was typically less visible.

Even with the monster still intact, the effect was a one-two combo of thirty tons of TNT rolled into a suckerpunch that could floor even a target of that magnitude. The great dinosaur sputtered in the fumes, all oxygen around it spent in the blast, fell off balance, toppled, and came crashing to Earth, shaking it in the process.

Emma was down.

Time passed, dust began to settle, and sirens blared in the distance. Somewhere on the massive bulk, that shadowy shape lying collapsed among the swirling smoke that marked the city's newest and most prominent landmark, stood a girl. Her knees were shaking and her ears still ringing with the sound of the explosion and the experience of riding atop the titan. She was spared from the blast by virtue of the sheer distance between its head and where she had clung to its side. Whatever power was watching over her did not abandon her today.

A block away, a dust-covered man coughed into the rag he held to his mouth and peeked out from the relative safety of a cafe window. It was the same man whose apartment now lay in ruins but he counted himself fortunate beyond fortunate. Mere things could be rebuilt and replaced and appreciation flooded his thoughts long before they turned to whether or not his insurance would cover giant dinosaur attacks.

In the near distance, a helicopter landed on a building's rooftop and a young woman disembarked. She hurriedly motioned for her camera crew to resume filming from a better vantage. She cursed herself for not being able to capture the impact but some small comfort arose in knowing that somewhere, someone did. This would be a chapter in history not soon forgotten and may yet make her career.

And in the center of it all lay Emma, unmoving. The unstoppable growth and destruction had been ground to a halt in the blistering crater the beast's body occupied. But for some reason, even that temporary ease and relief that accompanies a vanishing disaster did not fall over the city. No cloud break of sunshine, no sweet gentle breeze after the storm had gone.

But why not? The monster was dead, right?

. . .

Right?