Project 731 (23 page)

35

Mark Hawkins stood by the machine in which Lilly lay. The base was like an operating table, but with eight robotic arms emerging from the flat surface. Lilly laid on the table, beneath a clear plastic shell. A series of sensors swept over her body. At first, he felt apprehensive, but then medical reports, x-rays and other information were displayed on a wall-sized screen behind the strange machine.

It showed multiple fractures in one arm, three broken ribs and a fractured skull. Lilly had taken a beating saving that man from the falling building. It was a foolish and risky thing to have done, but he’d never felt more proud of her. She might have inherited some of Joliet’s brashness, but she’d also inherited her strident sense of right and wrong. A willingness to risk her life to save others was a quality that parents feared, but also hoped their children would develop. Part of him said that if Lilly had better training, she might have made it out unscathed, but he knew that no one else on the planet could have escaped that falling building alive, let alone with a startled janitor in tow.

The machine then went to work, administering general anesthesia and quickly cutting away her clothing. Next, it set bones and cleaned wounds, the robot arms, all bearing a logo reading
Mohr
, moved in a perfectly choreographed dance. Wounds were glued shut and bandaged. Her set arm was sprayed with a foam that expanded and hardened from her wrist to her shoulder.

Hawkins wondered if the machine would have made the same call if it knew Lilly was covered in hair. That foam was going to be hard to remove.

Lilly was then lifted up, and her torso was wrapped in a wide, white, rib belt that would protect her from jolts and keep everything in place. Her head was wrapped next. Lilly was placed back on the table, and then the robotic arms slid silently back into holes that sealed behind them. A message blinked on the screen.

Bed rest – 2 weeks.

Rib belt – 3 weeks.

Cast disintegration – 6 weeks.

At least the cast will take care of itself,
Hawkins thought.

A small tray extended from the side of the machine. It contained a single orange pill bottle labeled:

Percocet - 5mg/325.

Take orally as needed.

Max 12 tablets in 24 hrs.

The clear cover lifted away with a hiss, and the machine fell quiet. While Endo was right, that Lilly’s injuries would be tended to quickly, he still had an unconscious girl, who outweighed him, to get back outside.

The facility shook from some kind of impact, the lights flickering. Hawkins turned his eyes to the ceiling. He didn’t know how far below the surface they were, but that they could feel the impacts of the Kaiju above told him they weren’t quite deep enough to not worry. To make matters worse, they were behind enemy lines with three of their party injured.

Hawkins searched the large medical room for a gurney or wheelchair to roll her out in, but found nothing.
Looks like we’ll have to use the field stretcher
, Hawkins thought, heading toward the door to get Alessi. He was stopped by a weak voice behind him. “Why do the cheeseburgers taste like pancakes?”

Hawkins did an about-face and dashed to Lilly’s side. “Hey kiddo. You feeling okay?”

“I wanted a cheeseburger, but all they have are pancakes...and tweetie birds.” Her face fell flat for a moment, and then she laughed. “Tweetie birds aren’t real food, are they? But, they are for Sylvester.” The laughter just as quickly transformed to pouty crying. “But I wanted a cheeseburger.”

Hawkins wasn’t sure which was worse, an unconscious and still Lilly, or a mobile tripping Lilly. He put his hand on her good shoulder. “Hey Lilly, look at me.”

Her head lolled, but she made eye contact. Her pupils were dilated, causing her to squint when she saw the lights on the ceiling. “So bright in here.” Then she gasped. “Are we on a spaceship? Oh. My. God. We were abducted!”

The smile that came to Hawkins’s face was unbidden, but he couldn’t hold it back. Their situation was precarious, but he still wished he had a video recorder of some kind to capture this.

A sudden commotion from the hallway caught his attention. Shouting voices. But no gunfire.

“Lilly,” Hawkins said, making eye contact again. “Do you know who I am?”

“Daddy,” she said with a smile, and she leaned her head on his chest.

You’re breaking my heart, kid
, he thought, wanting to just hug her until her head cleared. Instead, he pushed her back. “Lilly, I need you to wait right here. No matter what you hear, just wait for me to come back.”

She seemed to sober a little. “And if you don’t come back?”

“I will.”

Her eyes glazed over again. “Get me a cheeseburger.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, heading for the door. “Tomorrow, you can have all the cheeseburgers you want.”

Lilly tried to clap her hands, but was befuddled by the cast that kept her arm bent at an unmoving forty-five degree angle. “Awww.”

Hawkins pushed his way through the doors into the hallway, and then he stopped. Woodstock and Alessi had taken cover behind medical equipment and were aiming their weapons down the hallway, where Silhouette, once again dressed, but without his telltale reflective mask, stood with four non-BlackGuard soldiers. While the soldiers had M4 rifles, Silhouette appeared unarmed.

“Ahh, Ranger,” Silhouette said. “Was wondering where you were. Is your kitty all patched up now?”

“Go to hell,” Hawkins said. He had a sidearm, but hadn’t thought to bring anything bigger, as he had been preoccupied with carrying Lilly.

Silhouette smiled. “How about this? You and your pals can walk. We’ll hang on to Lilly.”

“What happened to your word?” Hawkins said. “You said you wouldn’t take her.”

“It’s called psy ops,” Silhouette said. “Hearts and minds, Hawkins. Hearts and minds.”

Hawkins was in motion before he gave it any thought. Even if they managed to escape, Silhouette would hunt them down, would eventually find Lilly. Silhouette—and GOD—had to be stopped here and now, or Lilly would spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. And that wasn’t going to happen with a gun fight. That would just get them all dead. But if he was right, Silhouette, like most tough guys, wouldn’t back down from a fight.

When Silhouette stepped forward, rolling his neck, Hawkins knew he had pegged the man’s personality right. But now came the hard part. Hawkins had been in a few fights, had survived an island of monsters and gone toe-to-toe with a grizzly bear and walked away from it, but he wasn’t the world’s most skilled fighter, like Endo, or Collins. Still, he was tough. And he swung first.

His fist struck the side of Silhouette’s face with all the force he could muster. The blow sent the BlackGuard leader sprawling into the wall. But when the man rebounded and spun around, it was with a smile on his face and a blur of motion.

Hawkins was struck three times, and he only caught a glimpse of the first strike, an open palm to his forehead that snapped his head back. The second punch struck his gut, bringing him forward and into the third strike, a solid blow to his sternum that slammed him into the wall behind him and stole his breath.

The pain just fueled Hawkins. Before he was ready, he flung himself off the wall, big hands reaching out for Silhouette’s throat. But he never made it. Silhouette was as fast as he was strong. He dove to the floor, wrapped his legs around Hawkins’s feet and twisted, flinging him to the floor.

Hawkins landed hard, but rolled over and got back to his feet where he was immediately greeted by a trio of punches to his face. He stumbled back, toward the wall. He could feel his face swelling and the wet warmth of blood flowing over his face.

“How did a man like you ever survive the island?” Silhouette said, sounding disappointed. “How did you ever kill a bear?”

Hawkins pushed off the wall. “Because I don’t stop getting back up.” He rushed forward, diving for Silhouette with his arms spread wide. The tackle couldn’t be avoided, and both men dropped. Hawkins gave Silhouette a strong headbutt, stunning him momentarily. “And because I don’t fight fair.” Hawkins then reached behind his back. He drew his eight inch knife from its sheath just as smoothly as he slipped it into Silhouette’s side, between the man’s ribs and into his heart.

Silhouette’s body seized, and an expression of surprise froze on his face, his legs twitching and kicking. Hawkins glanced up at the four soldiers, their guard lowered, shock on their faces. But it wouldn’t last long.

“Fire!” Hawkins shouted.

Alessi and Woodstock opened fire, Woodstock taking one man with three clean shots and Alessi spraying the other three in the same amount of time, thanks to the KRISS’s rapid rate of fire and lack of recoil.

Hawkins withdrew his blade, wiped it off on Silhouette’s sleeve and slipped it back into its sheath. He stood with a groan.

“Sthuffering thucatash,” Lilly said from the end of the hallway. Her eyes were wide, a half smile on her face. She giggled, but she was cut off by a massive rumbling shockwave pulsing down from above. The whole facility shook and then went black.

36

“You’re okay,” I tell Maigo, crouching in front of her, my arms around her back, my forehead leaning against her hair. Despite my encouraging words, I’m feeling the same abject horror about the creatures in this room, but to a lesser degree. I don’t think anyone could walk into this space, memories of past tortures or not, and not be disturbed. A glance up at Collins confirms it. Of all of us, she’s got the toughest emotional skin, built up to deal with her previous abusive husband, and even she looks mortified, a hand over her mouth.

“They’re dead,” I whisper, glancing toward the three, square, liquid-filled tanks. They look like oversized fish tanks, each a perfect cube, each with a different occupant. “They’re all dead.”

I don’t try to push her. This girl who was one part of a city-destroying Kaiju, and has the strength of who knows how many men, is shaking under my arms. So I just rub her back and turn my attention to understanding what I’m seeing.

The tank nearest us contains what looks like a very pale, very blond human man. But I’m pretty sure he’s not human. The first tell is that he’s a good ten feet tall, but not in the lanky way abnormally tall humans look. He’s built like a professional wrestler—the Hulk Hogan variety, not Andre the Giant, who’d look small next to this guy. And then there is the symbol on the man’s chest. It’s not a tattoo, it’s like an indentation, like it was carved out of him, but with perfect edges. There are three circles, one inside the other, centered on the man’s broad chest. A single line protruding down from the center circle extends downward through the next two. I have no idea what it means, but I commit it to memory.

The next tank contains something that is very much not human, and completely unrecognizable to me. In some regards, it’s humanoid, with a head, two arms and two legs...but that’s where the comparison ends. Its face is fugly, covered with boney horns that look like they punched out of the skin. Its mouth, frozen open in death, is full of large white teeth. It has three red eyes on either side of its long domed head, which ends at a mane of hair, flowing out behind it in the water. Its body is powerful, like a cross between the blond giant and a hairless, gray lion. Its hands and feet are tipped with long, deadly looking claws. Its long, powerful tail is tipped with a tuft of hair, like a painter’s brush. While its body isn’t as big as the alien Viking fellow, it looks like it could make short work of him.

And that brings us to the third tank, where the creature Maigo and I both recognize from Nemesis Prime’s memories is contained. It’s not the whole creature. Just its head. At its full height, the creature would probably be a good fifty feet tall. It’s not Kaiju big, but these are the things that captured Nemesis Prime, tortured her and turned her into something she might not have been without them. It reminds me of the way people train elephants for the circus; the smaller, but smarter life form, plucking the larger, more malleable-minded giant from its habitat and training it, often through violence, to perform a duty. I look at its two, basketball-sized, black eyes, and even in death, I see a ruthless intelligence. The bald head was covered in gleaming white skin, stretched down to where its mouth was hidden by a mass of tentacles that remind me of spiky star fish limbs.

“What...are they?” Collins asks.

Endo steps up to the center glass tank containing the gray creature. “I don’t know the details, but they’re not of this Earth. Like Nemesis Prime. Our Nemesis is different. Thanks to Maigo, she is, at least partly, of this Earth. But I think these creature have something to do with Nemesis.”

He doesn’t know
, I think, and for some reason, I decide to tell him. “The big one on the right...trained Nemesis Prime and brought her to Earth. Or, at least, his species did.”

Endo looks uncommonly surprised. “You’ve seen them before?”

“In Nemesis’s memories.” I rub Maigo’s back. “We both did. Saw them and
felt
what they did to her, how they made her the goddess of vengeance.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Endo asks.

“You’re not exactly a team player,” Collins says on my behalf.

Endo frowns, perhaps reconsidering his life choices, but probably just pouting about not being the all-knowing Nemesis fanboy.

“I’m okay,” Maigo says as her shivers stop. She holds onto my arms, and we stand together. She turns toward the contained monsters. “Why are they here?”

Maigo steps out of my arms, her strength and resolve that of a Kaiju, returned in full. She heads for the big, tentacle-faced floating head. She stares the thing down, and I wonder for a moment, if she faced this thing, at its full height, would she be strong enough to take it down? She might be, but I hope to never find out.

With a sudden roar, Maigo draws her fist back, ready to punch the glass. A voice stops her.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Zach Cole says, standing behind us, having entered the room without making a sound.

Maigo glares back at him. “Why not?”

He shrugs. “It’d make a mess. And you could destroy a one of a kind specimen.”

“Just another one of your sick collections?” I ask, slowly lowering my hand to my sidearm.

Cole boldly steps up beside Maigo, his hands clasped behind his back. I’m not sure what’s more surprising, that he seems unafraid of Maigo or that the ample bellied man in a suit can reach his hands that far back. “This
collection
might help the human race survive long enough to have a future.”

“Explain,” Endo demands.

Cole smiles at his former subordinate. “The BlackGuard command is yours if you want it, Specter. You’ve proven yourself more than a match for our best, and Silhouette...” The man looks up toward the ceiling, which shakes as if on cue. “His fate is uncertain.”

Endo considers the offer, but then shakes his head. “My fate lies elsewhere.”

Cole shrugs and turns his attention to me. His arrogant body language sets me off, and I take a swing, desiring to put him in his place before letting him continue his diatribe. My fist is on target, but it strikes nothing. My follow-through pulls me forward, and I stumble to the floor. No way the fat man could have moved so fast. I turn around in time to see the amused Cole flicker.

A hologram.

“You’re not even here anymore, are you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Long gone.” He motions to the specimens. “Now, if you’re ready to hear me out...” I pick myself up without a word and wait for him to continue.

“What you see before you is the reason GOD exists.” He motions to the gray creature and the floating head. “While we’ve only known about these creatures for ten years, these brutes—” He points to the blond man. “—have been on our radar since World War II. The Nazis fancied themselves the descendants of these giants, and to a degree they were right. These men joined the human population thousands of years ago, their blood commingling with ours over millennia the same way ours did with Neanderthals, but their bloodline has been severely diluted by time.”

“Who are they?” Collins asks.

“That’s where it gets complicated,” Cole says. “While they are not human, or even from this planet, we all know about the fabled Atlanteans. But they weren’t an advanced civilization of humans. They simply lived among us, and we think, were sent here to strengthen us.”

I step up to the tank containing the blond man, my guard still up, but curiosity officially piqued. “Sent here?”

He points at the gray creature, “By them.”

“The Atlantean looks like the smarter of the two,” Collins points out.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Cole says and nods at me, like he knows me, like he’s earned the right to rib me. I really don’t like this guy. “But this is where our knowledge takes a sharp uptick.”

“There was an encounter,” Endo concludes. “Contact made.”

Cole nods. “Like I said, ten years ago. In the Arctic. A team of scientists, funded by Brian Norwood’s Global Exploration Corporation, in the northernmost part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, in Northern Canada, raised a complete mammoth from the tundra. From the mammoth came a woman. And in her arms, a beacon. It led them to an ancient citadel buried in the ice. They were pursued by these—” He motions to the gray corpse. “—creatures. The Ferox. The research team lost most of their crew, but a few of them survived and relayed their story to me, after we tracked them down and recovered what remained of their conflict, including this specimen. In a way, the Ferox made us who we are today: warring people capable of great violence and the ability to create weapons of unbelievable destructive capability.”

Collins glares at Cole. “That’s your defense for monsters like the Tsuchi? For experimenting on human beings? For warping nature?”

As much as I abhor the idea, I can see where Cole’s logic is leading. Fight monsters with monsters. But that doesn’t make it right.

“It is the nature instilled in us by the Ferox, who have taken human form, and over thousands of years, molded us—trained us—into a true fighting force. They strengthened us by interbreeding humanity with the Atlanteans. They also rebelled strongly against the idea of being enslaved. Freedom is everything to humanity today, because it is everything to the Ferox and the Atlanteans.”

“And why would these Ferox do this to us?” I ask and turn my attention to the floating head. “It doesn’t seem that dissimilar to what these guys did to Nemesis.”

“In the long run, it’s not,” Cole admits. “And that’s probably because they’re cut from the same cloth, so to speak. There was a time when the Ferox and this race of giants, the Aeros, were one species.”

“They look a little like Cthulhu,” I point out.

Cole chuckled. “Brice theorized that Lovecraft was influenced by a Ferox, in an attempt to train the human race to fear creatures of Cthulhuean appearance. And you’ll note they have almost nothing in common with the Ferox, despite their shared genetic history. As they spread through the cosmos, two distinct races emerged, and a race war began with the more intelligent and cunning Aeros driving the Ferox back. In a bid to turn the tide, the Ferox found developing worlds and molded their higher life forms into warriors willing to aid their cause. It’s a war that’s been waged since before homo sapiens were the dominant species on Earth.”

“How does this all involve Nemesis?” Maigo asks, her voice quiet, her glaring attention still locked on the large floating head.

The ceiling shakes from an impact high above. When we all look up, listening to the rumble, Cole says, “We’re safe down here. Not even a nuclear blast can reach us. As for Nemesis, we believe Prime was sent to Earth by the Aeros as a kind of watchdog. So when the Atlanteans, brought to Earth by the Ferox, set up shop, Nemesis Prime exacted her vengeance on them. In the end, Prime was defeated—how, we don’t know, though the corpse shows signs of a battle with something equally large—but not before the battle destroyed Atlantis and scattered the few survivors.”

“Okay, thanks for the history lesson, chubs,” I say. “But you still haven’t given me a good reason to not hunt you down and shoot you, put you in the Viking’s tank, and arrange you in an embarrassing pose.”