Gojiro Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes didn’t do much for him either. Still, he was starving, so he pounced. But the several quick steps he planned turned into one thud, and the furball was crushed beneath his foot, mashed down so as to be indistinguishable from the other little dots stuck between his toe claws. The giant reptile licked off all the spots, but it wasn’t like there was a balanced meal there.
    Nothing was as it had been. When he tried to forktongue a snaky caterpillar from a branch, he wound up inhaling the whole tree and picking glass splinters out of his mouth for hours. After that, he hid himself inside the ’cano. He would rather starve than hunt again.
    And now there was this boy outside, calling for him. “Lizard! I have no friends either. We can be friends for each other. Please!”
    If only he could scream back, tell this boy that he didn’t need him to be his friend, that where he came from there was no such thing. No, the frightened lizard thought, in my world it’s different. Your friend is every other zard, those living and those who have lived, and those who have yet to live. A hundred zards, five hundred, a thousand, all piled up, a carpet of scales, a great quilt of ’tiles, not one inch of ground visible. A thousand zards, ten thousand, a million, maybe more—pressed and touching, closer and closer, so the blood in one as good as runs into another, until they blend into the Enormous One.
    That’s how it is, Gojiro thought, where I come from. At least that’s how it was  . . .
    The boy’s shout came again.
    And Gojiro screamed, “Here I am. HERE I AM!”
    * * *
    Gojiro noticed the concentric circles on the boy’s chest as soon as Komodo came into the ’cano. Three rings—the outermost almost a foot across, the inner half that. In the glimmery light they almost glowed: a heart with a target.
    For weeks, the monster refrained from commenting on the strange pattern. It didn’t seem right. Komodo, after all, never mentioned his not inconsiderable deformities. It was only after a semibucolic jaunt out by Mycotoxin Pond that Gojiro brought it up. Komodo had spent most of the wan afternoon peering into the ever-still waters there, running his fingers over the slight humps of the maroon rings.
    “My friend,” Gojiro ventured, “do they hurt you?”
    “Excuse me?” Komodo answered, lost in thought.
    “Those scars on your chest, those circles. Do they cause you . . . great pain? They’re . . .”
    Komodo grinned, showing his sharp teeth. “Grisly?”
    Gojiro was embarrassed. “They do look kind of bad.”
    “No, my friend, they don’t hurt a bit.”
    “Must have when it happened.”
    “I would assume,” Komodo sighed. “But I have no recollection. I don’t remember any of it.”
    “I don’t remember nothing of what happened to me, neither. Just that I used to be one way, and now I’m like this.”
    “Yes,” Komodo said, his voice veering off.
    Truth was, Komodo did recall some of his days before he came to Radioactive Island. Every so often, tiny snatches of his life in that Okinawa infirmary would return to him. He remembered the constant stream of fake earnest officials, each anxious to have his picture taken placing a small toy by the bedside of the famous Coma Boy. There was also the conversation of doctors, distant whitemasked men, discussing him as if he weren’t there at all.
    “What do you make of these marks here?” one doctor said to another, poring over Komodo’s torso.
    “Yeah, those circles,” the other drawled. “Search me. He looks like he’s a branded steer off the Triple Ring Ranch.”
    It drove Gojiro crazy when Komodo told him that. “Cracker navy scumbags,” the monster railed. Making jokes over who the Heater marked! Still, the term stuck.
    “These Triple Rings,” Komodo said wistfully, “ride upon my chest like a question mark. I sense a great mystery about them. Sometimes I think if I were to find out what they meant, I might learn many things.”
    “Like