We Need Better Monsters, Part I

It was quite a surprise to us when monsters came out of the night, the beasts and bad guys of legends who for so long gave us a fright. We thought they lived on movie screens, pulpy books, and local folklore, until they came to prey on us, and we all learned that they were much more. The panic, at first, was intense, folks were dying, it seemed surreal, vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, and other such beasties were real. They were as bad as legend said, but we soon figured out one truth, the ways to kill them in legend really worked—we knew what to do. The werewolves were the easiest, you just bought some silver-tip rounds, given all this country’s hunters it took two years to gun them down. As for ghosts, if you do not know, ectoplasm is diffuse matter, floating in air, it is easy prey for the common vacuum cleaner. Then dump it into a furnace, and watch the ghostie burn away, old houses everywhere were safe, no more hauntings came into play. Vampires could blend in the best, of the monsters they killed the most, UV flashlights or smeared garlic was all it took to make them toast. The zombies, good lord, they were slow, and not all that hard to destroy, army snipers would take head shots, and attack choppers were deployed. They’d shoot down with their miniguns, guaranteed they’d catch zombie head, since the undead liked to cluster, an easy target for sprayed lead. We even had a kaiju-type dragged its lumbering form onshore, just as big as a skyscraper, a three-hundred foot carnivore. We fired antiship missiles, half-dozen of them did the trick, set up some coastal air patrols to take care of the beasts right quick. In retrospect, it all makes sense, after all, we are humankind, we’ve been waring since we could walk, countless weapons came from our mind. We’ve killed sabertooths and smallpox, run down real threats without pity, killed tens of thousands in battle, even nuked two of our cities. What’s a werewolf compared to that? What threat’s a vampire these days? Those beasts should be afraid of us, since we always find ways to slay. Maybe we need better monsters, a challenge for our evolved state, something that can inspire fear, the kind we can appreciate— CONCLUDES IN PART II.