He saw the Deathodactyls flying overhead and let out a friendly roar. He knew that the three of them were supposed to be devastating dinosaurs of destruction, but for some reason he could never take them seriously. They were once parrots, but mega-radiation had caused them to grow hundreds of times their original size. They were prehistoric killing machines, but to him they always looked like a trio of plucked chickens.

Not that he was one to talk. A few months after the accident he had finally managed to see himself reflected in the mirrored windows of a skyscraper in downtown New York. He may have been the lizard that walked like a man, but he looked more like a turtle crossed with duck. It had been at that exact moment of dawning self-awareness that the army chose to unleash the neurotoxin bomb. At least no one saw him crying as he collapsed into unconsciousness, taking the building with him in a futile gesture against his own image.

Having reached his destination Utoth sat back on his haunches. The northern side of the volcano was where he was supposed to meet Gargelon, but he wasn’t there yet. Watches didn’t come in giant monster size, and it was hard to make plans. Roaring wasn’t the most effective means of getting your point across. But when it’s all you have, you make do.

After they had captured him the government really hadn’t know what to do with him. There had been a token effort to reverse engineer the “miracle cancer cure” that had turned him from a Nobel winning scientist into a rampaging lizard-man of destruction, but nothing they tried had done much good. Meanwhile they kept him locked him up in an aircraft hanger, keeping Becky around to make sure he behaved. It was a cheap trick, using the woman he had once loved as a way to soothe the savage beast. But he had to admit that having her there made his head clearer somehow, and he felt a bit more human when he looked into her tiny blue eyes.

Once the couldn’t save him the army had planned to destroy him. He had killed thousands of people after all, and done billions of dollars of damage to New York, and there wasn’t much chance they could put him in jail. And when the Japanese had first offered to let him join the population on Creature Island the US government had originally turned him down, until Seargent Carter (now Becky’s fiancé) had come up with a plan – turn Utoth into a spy. The US wanted to know what was going on at Creature Island, and he was big enough that no one could find the spy cameras, and dangerous enough that they couldn’t look to closely.

Gargelon finally arrived, making a spectacular entrance as he ripped through the jungle canopy. Utoth hated to admit it, but he was damn handsome for a monster – certainly far cooler than a mutated man-turtle. 250 feet tall and brick red, the space dinosaur’s craggy eyes literally smoldered from the nuclear furnace that burned inside of him. His claws were like obsidian daggers, and inside his mouth were, inexplicably, rows of giant diamond shark’s teeth that glimmered every time he let out a bellow.

Besides being the best looking monster, Gargelon was also the brightest and the toughest. He had animal cunning, but was also capable of planning and plotting when necessary. And he seemed to be invulnerable to almost everything from poison gas to tank-mounted high-powered lasers. The humans had only caught him by using a sonic resonance cannon recovered from the same ten million year old alien spacecraft where they had found the monster in stasis. Utoth had read about it when he was still human. There had, in fact, been stolen sample of the monster’s alien DNA in his anti-cancer formula. Besides testing it on himself, that was probably his biggest mistake.

Utoth and Gargelon roared hello at each other for a bit. He wasn’t sure exactly what the monster was telling him, but they’d “spoken” enough to know that Gargelon wasn’t at all happy about being trapped on Creature Island. He was planning a break, and soon. And the big red guy was willing to bring along any monster who was intelligent enough to tell him that they wanted to join him.

The US government voices in Utoth’s head had told him that they wanted him to join along so that he could let them in on the plans for the escape. But even if he could tell them exactly what the giant red terror was up to, things were still complicated. After all, the Americans couldn’t tell the Japanese where they’d gotten the information without blowing his cover as a spy on Creature Island.

But the main problem was that he liked Gorgelan. When he’d first been put here he’d been the new monster on the bloc, and Apetor had been constantly picking on him – shooting knives at him from his nipples, which was almost as disturbing as it was painful. But all that had stopped once Gargelon had torn the big gorilla’s arms off. Sure, they grew back, but it was good to know that he had someone watching his back.

And even if Gargelon did escape, there was no way the human world could let him live. He was kind of alright if you were another monster, but the big red alien dinosaur had a hard-on for human flesh that made Slayaxe the Thirster’s taste for blood seem tame by comparison.

But there was nothing he could do. How do you tell an alien monster that he needs to do something he doesn’t want to do through a series of groans and roars?

Utoth was trapped in the middle and lying to everyone. Whatever happened, it wasn’t going to end well.