THE MONSTER THAT DEVOURED CLEVELAND

a short story written and published by

A.M. Murray

The Monster That Devoured Cleveland, Smashwords Edition. Copyright 2010, A.M.Murray: This story is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share it, please purchase any additional copies. If you’re reading this story and it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of the author.

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Blame TV for the monster if you like. Or blame other modern menaces like pollution, politics, technology or Vietnam veterans. But don't blame the old Dobie Gillis TV show, where Maynard G. Krebs, the cool beatnik character, would often "ooh-ooh" and "oh-wow" and wax eloquent about his favorite movie, The Monster That Devoured Cleveland. That was just a joke.

Cleveland was the butt of that joke due to the fact that back before the current Cleveland Renaissance the city was often referred to as the "mistake on the lake," and it's only real distinction was that its Cuyahoga River had once caught on fire. (Twice actually, but who's counting.)

And the joke might have had nothing to do with Cleveland per se or even the Cleveland Monster hockey team because the is America and not Canada, eh, and who even thinks about hockey unless it’s the Olympics and you have no choice.

The devouring monster joke actually may have simply been a play on the monster genre and the satiric concept of how and why any monster could or would even want to devour, as in eat, any city. Cities are mostly concrete, asphalt, brick, stone and steel after all. Good roughage maybe, but not the stuff of a feeding frenzy. Or so one would think.

The saga of the real-life monster began on a warm spring day as Cleveland native, Louis Williams, sat in his kitchen eating the first of two foot long Deluxe Turkey, Bacon & Cheese sandwiches with all the fixings. Louis, a bald brown man of about three hundred pounds with a gut like a bay window, loved to eat. Prophetic, that.

Louis' repast was interrupted with a crash as a wall buckled, the ceiling cracked and plaster came down like a snowstorm. He reluctantly put down his sandwich and ran outside to find a backhoe ramming his house. There was also a pair of cops, a TV news crew, and curious onlookers. "Hey, stop! Stop it!" Louis shouted.

"What are you doing here?" said one cop, "This place is supposed to be vacated. They sent you plenty of notices. We got a court order."

"Shove your notices and your court order. A man's home is his castle," responded Louis. He posted his bulk solidly in front of his house, arms spread wide. It was certainly no castle and not even much of a home, a tiny little shack, which actually used to be a garage, but at least it was all his. Even so, it and all the houses for blocks around had been condemned and were to be torn down in a vast and sweeping urban renewal. They dragged Louis away, kicking and screaming and the demolition proceeded. It was on TV that night.

"The spirit of renewal is sweeping through our city and making Cleveland truly the best location in the nation," said Thelma Jones, a new six o'clock news anchor from Chicago, who'd anchored in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis before and had touted all those cities as the best with equal conviction. She was a true professional. And best of all, she was quite beautiful with a hint of color to her skin, which gave her universal appeal, race wise, and optimized her value, ratings wise. It was hard to tell if she was black, Hispanic, Mediterranean, Asian or even Italian. Actually she was Californian, which was tantamount to all of the above. And her exquisite coiffure and good dental work and broad white smile and Monica Lewinsky lipstick put to shame all the sculpted hair, gleaming smiles and accented lips of all the other local news nymphs.

She introduced the mayor who came on to explain how Cleveland was once known as the Forest City and would be again, with all the federal stimulus money aimed at ending urban blight. And if Cleveland wasn’t number one in anything else, they frequently took first place for urban blight at least. But that would be a thing of the past. Now they would tear down old decrepit neighborhoods, create more green spaces, and make the city more livable and enjoyable. This was truly the era of a Cleveland Renaissance. Just look at the Cleveland Cavaliers, the mayor said, pointing to a skyscraper sized picture of Lebron James that looked like he was dunking the sun. Noticeable by omission was any reference to theCleveland Indians and the Cleveland Browns. (There’s always next year, sports fans.)

They cut to the video of a construction rig ripping up the ground. The voiceover said, “This is just one of the many monster machines assigned to renovate this blighted neighborhood. It's going to be a huge task tearing down all these old shacks and hovels. There's a mountain of work to be done but nothing will stand in our way, we have monster machines to do it."

This first hint of a burgeoning monster went unnoticed by anyone except Louis Williams, watching TV in a tavern across from the County Courthouse where he had been arraigned and released. He got an idea. With a vengeful gleam in his eye Louis slid off his stool and jogged (or walked fast actually) several blocks to where they were tearing down his old neighborhood. Louis had driven a tank in the Army. Construction rigs worked like tanks, he figured. Several of them stood unattended with their diesel engines idling, ignored by the construction crew that was watching a monitor and admiring themselves on a replay of the newscast. Louis slipped past them unnoticed.

The sound of an over-revving engine filled the air like an air raid siren, as a Louis-driven backhoe reeled about in a spastic fit for a moment and then roared clumsily out of the worksite. He yelled from on high in the control cab, "Down with the Court House! Down with City Hall! Nothing will stand in my way!"

“This could be a disaster," said Joyce, the one-man TV crew, or one woman actually, to be politically correct. (And quite sexy woman too, to be politically incorrect.) But bad news is always good news in the news business and she saw the potential for a national story here. She grabbed her camera and set out running after Lewis and the backhoe.

This turn of events was not lost on Cody Greene, a sandy-haired, lantern-jawed backhoe operator. He saw his chance to be a hero and make an impression on Joyce, whose camera technique and tight jeans he'd been admiring for some time. Cody clambered into his rig and set out in hot pursuit. "I'll catch him," he shouted. Police sirens began to wail in the distance as Cody caught up to Lois on the Main Avenue Bridge where the Cuyahoga River oozed along a hundred feet below.

He crashed into his opponent, his opponent crashed back; they butted heads like two large mechanical rams trying to assert dominance. Two monster machines (hint, hint) plunged off the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga and sank into the fetid waters like a ton of bricks, or two tons of bricks. Or steel actually. Whatever. Cody came up out of the river, coughing and gasping. Louis never surfaced. Not in any recognizable form. Divers sent down to find his body couldn't even get at the backhoe's crushed cab, buried upside down, in the river muck.

In the immediate aftermath, Cody and Joyce shared a drink on the outdoor deck at a bar in the revived party district known as The Flats, situated on the banks of the Cuyahoga River where it fed into Lake Erie. Joyce told Cody he was lucky to be alive. "Yeah,” he replied, “that was some drop. Even worse was that nasty water." He sniffed as if fighting back a cold, pulled tight at the woolen blanket in which the paramedics had wrapped him. "Think I'm gettin' a sore throat," he said as he gave his best hang-dog look, hoping for sympathy and tender comforts.

"Poor baby," said Joyce. She patted one of his hands. "We'll get you some nice hot tea." Not what Cody had in mind. He sniffed again, held her hand, said, "Sounds good. Uh, I gotta get home and get a hot shower first though. Gotta wash this river water off me, it itches like battery acid or something. Can you come over to my place?” She could and would.

Actually the Cuyahoga had been cleaned up a lot since the infamous fire-catching and even if it was still unfit for human consumption or bodily contact and didn't smell real good, it was quite scenic and just fine for floating a boat. So, to clear the all-important shipping and recreational boating lane of the river, a trawler was dispatched to drag away the sunken bodies of the crashed construction rigs. A thick, angry cloud of deeply disturbed underwater goo trailed the submerged wreckage all the way to into Lake Erie where it was laid to rest. Lake Erie had overcome its old pollution problems even more than the Cuyahoga River. So much so that your average angler could expect to easily catch his or her limit of the abundant perch and walleye which thrived in the lake and were big and fat and delicious to eat and had only trace amounts of dioxins in them. Not enough to be significant. At least not to the charter boat captains and the lucrative Lake Erie fishing industry.

More significantly for this discussion, the fertile waters of the lake had also become an ideal environment for the ubiquitous zebra mussel. Those tiny, striped, hard- shelled mollusks had come to Lake Erie from some unknown source by way of the St. Lawrence Seaway and had spread rampantly. They encrusted any submerged surface in short order and had to be scraped from boat bottoms and aquatic inlets with annoying frequency.

So it came to pass that the underwater scoop loader became thoroughly encrusted with zebra mussels and then emerged from Lake Erie in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

It didn't look like a scoop loader any more though. It looked like a...dare we say it...like a monster. Or at least a zebra mussel encrusted Pac Man of monstrous size. A hungry Pac Man Monster that wanted something to eat. Something substantial. Like a city. Forat the core of the monster was a hungry and revenge-minded Louis Williams. If they were going to take down his neighborhood, he would take down the whole damn city.

So the Monster gobbled along, it's huge jaw tearing up streets and buildings and entire city blocks, its zebra mussel hide dissolving anything with which it came into contact like the super scrubbing bubbles of some new and improved household cleanser. The massed mussels oozed and excreted, leaving a thick, muddy trail in the monster's wake. The police arrived and did what cops liked to do most and wished they could do more of. They sent a blizzard of bullets at the Monster. They were joined in the fusillade by the considerable firepower of local hunters, sportsmen, NRA members and other gangs with guns. But they might as well have been throwing stones at a mound of gravel. What didn't bounce off the hard shells of the zebra mussels were absorbed and digested by the monster's living hide.

Clearly, more firepower was needed. The Ohio National Guard was summoned. Not the old National Guard of the Kent State days but the new and improved Guard of the Iraq and Afghanistan deployments. They knew the difference between noisy protestors and armed terrorists. And they were better shots too.

In the meantime, the monster went munching along. All of Cleveland lay before it, with its tall glass and steel towers and spires. A veritable cornucopia.

Sunday morning dawned, gray and foreboding. Cody and Joyce, in Cody's apartment on the outskirts of the city, thought the distant rumblings were the sounds of a thunderstorm coming. They didn't know it was the sounds of battle with the monster.

"Morning, how you feeling?" said Joyce. Cody coughed lightly, winced from the pain in his throat. She kissed him softly on his warm forehead. He was in bed. She'd slept on the couch. What had started as a promising evening had come to a wheezing halt with the intensified onslaught of his sickness, which he didn't want to give her and she didn't want to get. This morning she was showered and smelling fresh, her hair down, her lovely legs sticking out of his old Browns sweatshirt which she'd borrowed and which fell off one bare shoulder and came down just far enough around her hips to be decent. The Browns had never looked so good.

"Feel like eating anything this morning?" Joyce innocently asked.

Cody didn't even feel like making the obvious joke. "Not really. Maybe some tea and toast." She made it for him and he drank but couldn't eat, it hurt too much going down.

"Try gargling with warm salt water," she advised. He did that and it helped a little. "Do you have any garlic?" she asked then.

"Huh? For what? Vampires?"

"No silly. It's a natural herbal remedy. Kills germs. Even repels pests in the garden. Maybe that's where the vampire thing came from. Garlic's good for your heart too, they say. Haven't you ever heard the ads for those garlic tablets on the radio?"

"Oh. Yeah. Well, I think I have some garlic powder and uh, some garlic and onion chip dip. Will that work?"

She put a lot of the powder in the dip and put some on toast and he ate. It stank like the devil and tasted like hell but it slid down nicely. He thought he could feel a tingle in his throat and nostrils. Cody turned on the TV and lay back on the couch while Joyce turned to the Sunday paper. But there was nothing on TV. Not just nothing to watch as usual (even with 99 cable channels to pick from) but nothing on the air. Channel after channel was nothing but electronic snow. Until, finally he picked up channel 23 from Akron, whose broadcast tower had not yet been devoured by the monster.

Channel 23 normally didn't carry news or sitcoms or any of the usual sleazy and mindless television pap. It had been taken over by a family- value network which showed only the more wholesome (and profitable, because even good Christians have to make a living) fare of repeat TV series and old movies. But in this emergency it was showing footage of the conflict looking like a war zone, which everyone was used to seeing on TV, but usually in the Middle East, not in downtown Cleveland.

A middle aged woman reporter wearing a lot of jewelry and too much makeup, to make up for her age, finally appeared, saying, "That was a live scene from downtown Cleveland and the developing crisis. This is not a movie, this is not a hoax, this is not our usual programming. It's a war zone out there. A monster is on the loose. It's devouring Cleveland! Where the monster came from is not clear but the military is doing everything it can to stop it. There is one local scientist though who has a theory. Here's Dr. Albertus Marius of Case Western Reserve University. He's analyzed bits of monster hide blown off by assault teams."

They played footage of white-haired Einsteinish doctor Marius saying, "The flesh of the creature seems to be a mutated hybrid of zebra mussels. I suspect a radioactive agent may be responsible. The monster was first seen coming out of the lake near Edgewater Park which is actually composed of landfill in which radioactive wastes were buried many years ago. Radioactivity has been reported there in the past after rain storms saturated the ground and stirred up the lake bottom. Most recently some construction rig wreckage was towed to that site, stirring up the lake sediment, adding further toxicities from deposits dragged in from the Cuyahoga River. I must conclude that all this contributed to the accelerated mutation of the zebra mussels and the growth of a monstrous membrane over one of the construction rigs, a radioactively mutated membrane which has taken on a life of its own."

The bejeweled woman came back on the screen, cleared her throat and said, "In the interests of fairness and due to official, uh, requests, we are providing equal access to a counter viewpoint."

Three somber officials appeared, representing the Perry and Fermi nuclear plants on the shores of Lake Erie, the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They agreed, in well-rehearsed fashion, that any radioactive waste or discharges from the nuclear plants were very low- level and well within established safe levels --which coincidentally they themselves had established at a level which would ensure public safety without hamstringing the vital energy industry which was devoted to serving the public. They implied, with all due respect, that Dr. Marius was anti-business, anti-government and possibly an anti- American card-carrying member of the notorious Sierra Club.

By this time, Cody was holding his throat like he was about to vomit. He said, "Geez, the monster has to be that guy in that scoop loader. I went into the same waters he did. This sore throat, what if I'm contaminated too?"

Joyce replied, "Do you have a sudden urge to go outside and start eating on the city?"

"That's not funny!"

"Sorry. But you said the garlic made you feel better so I wouldn't worry." Joyce snapped her fingers. "Hey! Garlic! What if it'll work on the monster? We gotta get hold of that Dr. Marius and tell him so he can test it." As Joyce went to the phone, Cody went to the kitchen, poured the rest of the shaker of garlic powder into his tea pot, swirled it around and drank some. It tasted like bitter medicine but it felt good going down.

Joyce said, "Phone's dead." There was a fluttering beat in the air and they went to the window to see a helicopter flying low past the cityscape. From Cody's third story apartment they looked straight down St. Clair Avenue to where it was going, toward the heart of the city, hazy in the distance. The monster lurked there, like a gargantuan gobbling Pac Man, chomping down not on electronic dots but on the buildings of downtown Cleveland.

The helicopters attacked the immense beast, shooting at it with smoking rockets. The monster twitched from the impacts but kept on eating. On TV a close-up showed some bits of monster flesh flying but most of the explosive power was absorbed, making the zebra mussel hide bubble like a thick lentil soup on slow boil.

The woman on TV despaired, wondering what could be done.

Tough-faced General Curtis of the National Guard came on, confident with his answer. "We'll blow that thing back to the stone age," he said. "We'll step up the attack and shell it with tanks and artillery. It won't be able absorb that."

"But what if it does?" the woman had to ask.

"Well, I'll guaran-damn-tee you it won't be able to absorb a nuclear warhead."

Joyce, watching TV in Cody’s apartment, couldn't believe what she'd heard. "What, are you nuts?" she screamed at the TV

Apparently a lot of other TV viewers were of a like mind because it took only minutes for the governor's office to issue a retraction, saying the general was just talking theoretically. The National Guard didn't even have nuclear weapons, only the real Army had them. And only the President of the United States could give the order to use them. And he would never do that. Although, theoretically, they were sure a very small one would do the trick. And just as a precaution everyone within a fifty mile radius of Cleveland should evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion.

Panic ensued. The street outside Cody's apartment soon became jammed with bumper to bumper, horn-honking, fender-bending, obscenity-yelling traffic. It was a good thing the National Guard was there to maintain order. That was their job and they did it well and with great enthusiasm. It was better than being deployed to the Middle East at least.

"We'll have to wait for that mess to clear before we can go," said Cody, looking out his window. On TV the monster was being bombarded with increasingly larger and heavier weaponry. Its hide bubbled and swelled and got fatter and wider. It slithered along, eating, crushing, dissolving anything in its path.

"The more they bomb it, the bigger it gets," said Joyce as she watched too. "Who knows what'll happen if they nuke it. It might turn into a blob as big as the city. We've got to tell Doctor Marius about the garlic."

They went out into the rush and crush of the street scene. Joyce said, “We'll make better time if we go on foot, Case Western is only a couple miles from here."

It was not an unpleasant trek as they left St. Clair for Martin Luther King Drive which meandered through a greensward several blocks wide all the way to the university. It was a remnant of the Western Reserve from which the Forest City of Cleveland was hewn, when thick forest had spread for hundreds of miles around the lake. Joyce and Cody tramped along next to the woodsy road as a steady line of cars headed away from the city like rush hour traffic backed up and crawling past an automobile accident.

The University was deserted. They consulted a directory posted on a kiosk and headed for the biology building. Marius was in his lab, hunched over a series of shallow Petri dishes containing monster flesh. Joyce said, "Doctor, we think we may have found an antibody that will attack the monster."

Marius looked up. "Indeed? What?"

Cody got close to the professor, said in a secretive fashion, "Garlic."

"Uh, yes, I see, said the good doctor, sticking his tongue out and waving a hand in front of his face. "Indeed. It might be effective if it’s anything like your breath which could knock a buzzard off a manure wagon."

"I'll bet it could do more than that," said Jody. He took a sip from his thermos and spit it into one of the Petri dishes. The small piece of monster flesh there fell apart, practically melted. "How about that?" Cody said.

"Ah, just like penicillin," said the doctor.

"Huh? How's that?"

"Fleming discovered penicillin when the nasal drip from his cold fell into a Petri dish and reacted with the mold there."

"Far out," Cody replied. "So now all we need is a ton of garlic and a way to get it to the monster and get him to eat it."

Joyce said, "That company that makes those garlic pills they advertise on the radio is in Sandusky. That's not too far from here. They should have plenty of garlic.

But the roads are out or jammed," Cody said. "How do we get to Sandusky?"

“We’ll call the National Guard,” said Marius. “They have helicopters. They’ve been waiting for word from me anyway.” He shuffled over to a side table which held a citizens band radio, unhooked the microphone, pressed down a switch, said, "Breaker breaker, this is Doctor Frankenstein, come on." Embarrassed, he explained, "My code name."

Military helicopters and self-important officers came and went and preparations were made. The monster, meanwhile, went through Cleveland like a scythe, sweeping left and right over the landscape, with the Cuyahoga River in the middle. It was replenishing itself in the river waters, Dr. Marius said. It needed a lot of water for the mussels and it was heavily oozing excrement and loosing fluids.

He also had a theory for why the monster had not devoured Terminal Tower or Gund Arena and Progressive Field. "Too hard to digest," he suggested. "They're too well built."

"Or maybe the guy inside the monster is a sports fan," suggested Cody.

"The guy? You mean the deranged Vietnam veteran who's supposed to be at the heart of the monster?" Actually Louis had spent his entire two year Army career at Fort Bliss Texas driving tanks in the dessert and guarding against a Mexican invasion. But it was during the Vietnam era, so that was close enough for government work and hot news flashes.

The next morning Joyce and Cody and Dr. Marius stood on a bluff overlooking an industrialized section of the Cuyahoga Valley at the southern edge of Cleveland. Below them was the river, a railroad yard, a vast sprawling steel plant and a petroleum refinery. North of the valley the monster approached, slithering along, and making the earth tremble. It was heading right for the factories in the valley, which were full of tasty oils and fortified with iron and other essential minerals.

It was heading too, towards several companies of the National Guard who were waiting with heavy artillery, a backup for the hundreds of firemen with hoses connected to fire engines and a high pressure supply of garlic solution.

It took a few minutes to get the bugs worked out of the system. Or rather to get the garlic solution worked out of the hoses. But then the doctor's radio crackled and the voice of General Curtis said, "We're ready whenever you give the word, doc."

"Let's wait until The Monster pauses at the Cuyahoga to drink," the doctor answered. "It will be most vulnerable then."

"That means the end of those factories," replied the General

"Pity," replied the doctor. He said in an aside to Joyce, "On a clear day you can see forever but when those plants are in operation it's never clear here, the air is a brown haze and the fumes are nauseating. He grinned. "Just doing my bit for the Sierra club."

They waited until the monster had thoroughly devoured its last industrial strength meal and paused at the river to wash it down

Then the firemen opened up with their hoses. A hundred heavy streams of garlic solution hit the monster full in the face, or in and around where a face would be if it had one. It seemed to shiver for a second. Then it shrunk as mussel flesh plopped to the ground in blobs. The hard sprays burrowed holes, created rivulets, made a mudslide out of the monster. The skeleton buried deep beneath that liquefying mass was finally revealed -- the scoop loader.

"Is there something moving in that cab?" said Cody, studying it with binoculars. He never found out. The scoop loader exploded. The National Guard had stood by long enough. First one fiery missile and then another blasted the revealed metal body, turning it into charred scrap. Incendiary devices turned that into a molten mass which burned down to nothing.

That was the end of the monster. But it was the beginning of a true rebirth of Cleveland, rising not from ashes but from compost. It turned out that the excrement the monster had left in its wake was very clean and fertile compost. A perfect bed for the hundreds of thousands of trees, greenswards of grass and all manner of flora which were subsequently planted as the city was rebuilt on a park-like theme. That was sort of the plan all along, the mayor said. At least as far as urban blight went. It was a pity that so much that was so good had to be destroyed too, although he didn't specify what the good part was.

So every cloud has a silver lining. And the silver showered down in the form of federal disaster relief funds and insurance settlements. Jobs were plentiful in the rebuilding of a bright new user-friendly Cleveland that became a pleasant place to live, work, and even walk and breathe. The new city attracted lots of new people, new business and even a convention or two.

Someone actually suggested they erect a monument to Louis Williams, a.k.a. The Monster. That didn't seem like such a good idea, considering his motivation. Others said that every new tree was a monument to him and a reminder that we must maintain a constant vigilance against the conditions which could lead to the development of a monster.

Which is the moral of every good monster story.

END

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Check out other Smashwords offerings by A.M. Murray

- The Best of Luck –:Get luckier in life & the best gambling games

- The Secret of the Serpent Mound -:Death & mystery at the famous earthen effigy

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