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By kaiju standards, this Anguirus was quite small. Barely a century old, with a spiked shell only a hundred feet long. Even including his neck, head and tail, he was only three times that. Still very big by human standards, but by kaiju standards, just a pup.

He had seen things, though. Like most younglings he was fascinated by the doings of his elders. He watched the great spinebacked King Of The Monsters fight it out with a great hairy ape until both were beaten senseless, and then with unwavering interest he watched an Anguirus older and larger than himself approach the King. Carefully choosing its path to arrive from behind, that Anguirus loosened its jaws and proceeded to swallow the King tailfirst.

The young Anguirus knew that the King had a deadly breath weapon, but the older one knew that too. By the time Godzilla woke he was up to his cheeks in Anguirus maw and that was just where he stayed. Furious, Godzilla blasted everything in sight with his nuclear breath, but with his neck in the opportunistic Anguirus's gullet he couldn't turn his head to blast his tormenter. There he stayed, furious but impotent, and only when the Anguirus's digestive juices had eaten him to death did the spiny Kaiju swallow his head.

It was a massive, impressive meal, and it made that Anguirus best friends with the hairy ape. They stayed side by side as the spiny kaiju regurgitated Godzilla's indigestible back spines and the ape was still nearby as that Anguirus painfully passed the remains of the King. Some of the smaller tail spines made their way all the way through that Anguirus's bowels and it was an unpleasant experience getting rid of them. This would have been some consolation to Godzilla had he not been far too digested to care.

The great ape thought every part of this was hilarious but he didn't consider that Godzilla and the largest of the Anguiruses were longtime friends. Friends, that is, until in a moment of vulnerability the King found himself in his comrade's gullet.

So it was that when another Godzilla appeared, whether the first one somehow reformed or a whole new one with some of the memories of the last, another huge fight blew up between the King and Kong. And to the great ape's chagrin, when it was his turn to be left helpless in front of Anguirus, it was also his turn to see the spiny kaiju's jaws creak wide.

Anguirus swallowed Kong headfirst, not needing to worry about atomic breath, and found the ape much easier to digest than Godzilla. Ape fur doesn't present the same issues to a kaiju's bowels that Godzilla spines do.

The smaller Anguirus spied all this from afar, and learned an important lesson. Food can be easily acquired if you are opportunistic and ruthless enough.

And so it was that one day he poked his nose from a burrow, finding himself near one of the Human cities. Humans weren't very interesting to this Anguirus, but something else was. His eye was drawn to a great silver snake just departing the city on a snake-track made of metal.

To this young Anguirus the whole thing was a puzzle. He lay there and watched the metal snake speed away, and as he lay there considering the situation in his slow kaiju way, he saw another, or perhaps the same metal snake arrive at the city on the track.

Thoughts began to stir in the Anguirus's horned head. The snake was big enough to make a very fine meal, but it was much too fast to catch. It seemed to only move along the metal track, though. Over the course of half a day he watched. There turned out to be more than one metal track. One ran along the ocean shore, through several tunnels, and to the city.

Anguirus pondered this in his kaiju way. He watched long enough to work out how long it took for the metal snake to leave the city from the tunnel, and he waited until the sun set so the presumably keen-eyed metal snake wouldn't see him from its departure point. Then he emerged from his burrow and clambered over a hill until he found where the metal snake's tunnel reappeared.

The snake track turned into a metal and stone bridge over a canyon here, which was just perfect. Knowing that the metal snake would soon enter the tunnel from the far side Anguirus pushed his spikey back under the bridge and straightened his legs. With a shriek of tearing metal the bridge gave way.

Ignoring the clatter of metal and stone falling from his flanks and the lightning of broken power lines too weak to burn through his bony spines, Anguirus listened. There was the hiss of approaching metal snake.

Anguirus had watched the metal snakes all day and knew that while they were very fast, they took a long while to build up speed and a long while to stop. He had waited until the last moment to push the bridge aside and the metal snake was already entering the far end of the tunnel. Even if it somehow sensed the damage to its track, there simply wasn't time for it to stop before it emerged at this end, still traveling fast.

It was not a metal snake, of course. It was a high speed passenger train, fifteen cars packed full of tired salarymen and women anxious to get home. At the front of the train was the control car. Each car had its own electric motors and all were controlled from here, along with the brakes. The train was just entering the tunnel when lights flashed red on the controller's dashboard.

Setsuji was a very experienced conductor and knew this line well. At the far side of this tunnel was a bridge he'd crossed just a few hours before, and he'd just talked to another conductor an hour ahead of him. The rail conditions were monitored electronically and major bridges had cameras. The railway infrastructure in Japan is the best in the world and safety was paramount.

With the limited information available in the tunnel all he could tell was that the overhead power lines seemed to be out on the bridge ahead. The tunnel had its own overhead power but once the train emerged it might well coast to a stop.

In the unlikely event the bridge had failed it was too late to stop but he was ready to take his foot off the dead man's switch and lock up the brakes just the same. The moment the control car came out of the tunnel he'd be able to view the bridge and see if he should call in regarding the alarm. Alternately, he might have to call for a Diesel pusher locomotive to convey the train to the next pullout.

He knew the tunnel well and peered curiously ahead as the train sped through. His brows furrowed when he didn't see light ahead. The moon was full and in the darkness of the tunnel he should see something besides the train headlights bouncing back from...slimy walls?

Horrified, Setsuji jerked his foot off the dead man switch and slammed his hand on the emergency stop button for good measure. It was too late. By the time he realized what was about to happen the control car was rushing past a row of Stonehenge-sized yellow fangs, off the broken end of the track and into a kaiju's gullet.

Momentum sealed the fate of every passenger on the train. Lights went out and an ear-piercing shriek filled the passenger cars as the brakes locked up but a fast moving train takes a long time to stop. As the passengers were thrown forward by the sudden deceleration, in one car after another they saw a series of yellow-white fangs the size of cars flash past before their car, like the one before it, disappeared into Anguirus's slimy gullet.

All the kaiju had to do was keep his mouth wide open as he was fed what he viewed as a great metal snake. The walls of his throat were coated with an inches-thick layer of lubricating slime to make swallowing prey easier. The slime worked as well on the bullet train as it had on various other prey he'd gulped down and Anguirus's scaly neck bulged as train car after train car disappeared into his maw. Only when the control car arrived in his stomach and struck the far end was there any real slowdown.

It was a train crash muffled by thick layers of kaiju flesh. A weird groan emerged from beneath Anguirus's scaly hide as the control car was crushed between the kaiju's stomach wall and the speeding cars behind it. The train of cars proceeding down his throat buckled and would have derailed had they been on actual tracks. Instead they were kept from sliding sideways by thick fleshy gullet walls and though several front cars were crushed, the whole mass of them kept sliding forward.

Some passengers were killed instantly, crushed in the forward cars. Hundreds more were injured as the train came suddenly to a near stop and they were flung through the air to impact on each other or interior surfaces. The passengers in the rear cars fared the best, and the ones in what would once have been called a caboose shook off the shock and looked out the windows as Anguirus pulled his jaws away from the tunnel mouth.

"Look!" A terrified salary man pointed as great yellow fangs closed around the rear of the car. Before anyone could run for the rear emergency exit a great muscular tongue rolled up over the back of the train and pushed it into Anguirus's throat. Terrified shrieks emerged from the closing jaws and the last thing the rear car's passengers saw before everything went dark was slimy gullet sliding by the windows. Anguirus swallowed, his belly swelling with the arrival of more than a dozen intact train cars and several more crushed into unrecognizable masses.

Over a thousand people were still alive when he swallowed. Some lived for an unfortunately long time. The powerful contractions of his swallowing muscles crushed some amid the ruins of their cars but almost half the passengers were still alive when the undulations of his gullet pushed the last car into his gut.

Then began a desperate and doomed struggle. Some cars were toward the bottom of his belly and a caustic flood of digestive juices rushed in through broken windows and buckled doors. His stomach juices could break down another kaiju swallowed whole and people who were enveloped by the flood were killed in moments.

The less lucky were above the level of the acids, briefly. The young and fit climbed atop the scrambling bodies, up the seats of cars lying vertically and even out doors and windows. The slowly rising acid would reach them eventually even if it didn't dissolve the cars they stood on but a hopeful few, survivors of the ones that lost their grip and tumbled into the waiting acid, reached the very top of the belly.

Internal phosphorescence showed them the great sphincter that closed as the cars were swallowed and the lucky few were clawing ineffectually at it when the inward crush of thick stomach walls pushed much of the air out of Anguirus's stomach.

Belly full and well satisfied with his meal of metal snake, Anguirus was climbing over the hill back toward his burrow when a great belch rumbled up out of him. A dozen of the fittest men were blown up into his gullet when he burped and one lucky man bounced safely off the slimy walls and landed on the back of the kaiju's tongue.

What an odd taste, Anguirus thought in the way kaijus do, and the man on his tongue just had time for a despairing scream as the kaiju swallowed. The man in his gullet was no bigger than a Tylenol capsule would be to a human but the contraction of the swallowing muscles sent him slithering down the gullet to join the ones who hadn't made it that far. The acid was waiting.

As Anguirus climbed back into his burrow and proceeded deeper, seeking one of his subterranean chambers for a nice nap to while away the digestion of his meal, there were a series of strange noises from within his gut. The thickly muscular walls of his stomach squeezed inward as he moved, crushing the thin-walled train cars. The pressure of the tunnel walls helped and Anguirus let out a series of belches as the air was forced from the remaining pockets. A few survivors barely had time to scream before the acid found them. The lucky ones had already passed out from lack of oxygen.

By the time Anguirus settled down to digest his meal his swollen belly had shrunken noticeable. Thousands of tons of steel sizzled in powerful kaiju stomach juices. Nearly all the passengers were only skeletons already and the ones exposed to the acid first were only a slurry of nutrients and powdered bone. Cell phones popped and sizzled as the acid ate into them but nothing as inconsequential as a few lithium batteries could trouble his stomach. A few bits of gold jewelry were resistant enough to eventually show up in his next day's bowel movement. Nothing else made it through intact.

Digesting steel, electric engines and over a thousand people would not challenge Anguirus's stomach. Kaiju need metals and minerals in their diet to support their gargantuan frames and his stomach was well suited to breaking down such fare. The metal snake barely put up a struggle as he swallowed it, and his burps tasted pleasantly like copper.

Though his meal wasn't as large as it at first seemed, crushed to less than half its original volume, he was content. Anguirus flopped on his side to let his gurgling belly spill out. Down inside him one last hopeless scream went unheard as the acids found the last pocket of air and last survivor.

Up above, alarms had stopped the trains on the severed line before another arrived at the chasm. It wouldn't be hard for the humans to work out what happened, from the kaiju tracks. Anguirus was a tricky beast in its way, though. With its ability to tunnel, it could pop back up anywhere. And in his simple way, this Anguirus was thinking about just that.

"That wasn't such a big meal after all," Anguirus thought as he settled down to digest the train. "I'll be hungry again soon."