Project 731 (3 page)

We don’t gloat. We don’t need to. Lilly is upset enough as it is, kicking grass and grumbling. She turns on Hawkins. “How did you get past the girls?”

The ‘girls’ are Lilly’s immaculately conceived brood of three black cats, which lack her human traits, yet are unlike any other big cat species on the planet. They are jet black, like pumas, the size and build of Siberian tigers, and they’re incredibly intelligent. While they can’t speak, it’s clear they understand most of what we say, and they don’t view us, or people, as prey. That’s not to say they’re not dangerous, but they are absolutely devoted to Lilly, who gave birth to them by laying eggs... True story. I wasn’t there, but Hawkins swears by it. And that’s just the tail end of the weirdness he endured along with Joliet and Lilly on an island in the Pacific.

“Bacon,” Hawkins says with a shrug.

“Wha—” Lilly’s head lolls back, her mouth open in a silent groan. “Bacon? For real?”

“Good game,” I say to Lilly, willing to leave it at that, and I raise my hand.

To my surprise and delight, she gives me a high five, and says, “Next time, I’ll feed the girls first.”

While the others hang back and talk and joke about the match, I stroll away and pull out my cell phone, tapping on a contact’s name and placing the phone to my ear. It rings six times and goes to voicemail. Although we’re in East Nowheresville, there’s always cell service on the preserve. I made sure of it.

She should be answering. She always answers. On my way back to the others, my heart starting to beat faster, I try again with the same result.

Collins must see the look of concern on my face, because she asks, “What is it?”

I lower the phone. “Something’s wrong. Maigo’s not answering.”

2

The black Suburban sits alone on what remains of the paved road leading to the ruined laboratory. Not far from here is a large cabin that belongs to the FC-P. Hawkins, Joliet and Lilly spend most of their time here, training in the woods and hiding from the public—Lilly for obvious reasons, Hawkins and Joliet because they’re convinced they’re being hunted by someone within the government, specifically within DARPA. While Joliet is now part of the team, her involvement is off the books, and Hawkins works under a fake name, Dustin Dreyling, though we just call him ‘Ranger’ when on mission.

I’m out of breath when I reach the Suburban, having run the distance. The others aren’t far behind. Lilly, as usual, is several steps ahead. Unable to see through the tinted glass, I reach for the SUV’s door.

“She’s not in there,” Lilly says. “I already checked.”

I believe her, but I open the door anyway, looking for clues. Maigo’s cell phone is in the back seat, where she’d been sitting. No signs of a struggle.

Maigo is kind of a solitary soul, except when it comes to me. We’ve maintained the bond developed while she was inside Nemesis—while she
was
Nemesis. It really is impossible for anyone to fully understand what she’s going through. Lilly gets what it’s like to not be fully human, and the two girls have made a connection. And I have a vague understanding of what it’s like to share a head with a three-hundred-foot-tall
Kaiju
. I got a taste of Maigo’s world, too, when I slipped my consciousness inside the Kaiju, Scylla. But Maigo...

She was once a normal little girl. She lived and went to school in Boston. Her mother was Japanese, and her father was a wealthy, white business man—and a murderer. He killed Maigo’s mother, and then, when the then ten-year-old girl walked in on the scene, he killed her as well. Maigo’s recollection of her previous self begins and ends with her own murder, the memory hazy but real, passed on through her cells.

Using Maigo’s harvested organs, General Lance Gordon—who is now dead, thank God—fused her DNA with that of an ancient, long dead Kaiju, who we now call Nemesis Prime, and whose origins are still a mystery. If mythology is to be believed, she was the ancient Greek goddess of vengeance, a role she filled again when the Maigo clone grew and changed, into a colossal monster. Nemesis reborn. She carved a path of destruction from this very spot in Maine, all the way to Boston, eating people—which Maigo remembers—whales and anything else she came across on her route. The smorgasbord fueled Nemesis’s rapid growth. The creature found Maigo’s father in Boston, turning him to dust, along with half the city. Then there was that whole mess in D.C., where instead of eating people, Nemesis was protecting them, though she was really just there to protect me. The monster Nemesis gave her life to save us, and somehow left Maigo, who was arguably the monster’s soul and conscience, behind in a giant chrysalis. Maigo was reborn again, this time as a teenage girl. She has no real age, but our best guess is sixteen, a few years younger than Lilly appears...though she’s also technically much younger.

The point is, Hawkins and I are now the father figures for the two most screwed up teenage girls that have ever lived. How the hell that happened, I’ll never understand, but here we are, doing our best to protect and raise two girls who shouldn’t exist, but do.

And right now, I feel like a pretty big failure.

Or maybe I’m just being overprotective. We’re in the deep woods of Maine, at a fenced-in preserve with a halo of motion-sensitive security cameras. If Maigo had approached the fence, Watson would have called. And I’ve got two of the world’s best trackers with me.

I turn to Lilly, whose acute senses can track most anything. “Find her.”

She bounds off the Suburban’s roof and darts into the woods. It won’t take her long to search the entire preserve if she needs to. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Hawkins arrives, quickly assesses the situation and without saying a word, he goes on the hunt for a trail. While Lilly can instinctually track, Hawkins is a pro, teasing out details from the environment that even the cat-woman can miss.

Collins and Joliet arrive last, looking a little too casual for my taste. “You could help,” I tell them, still scanning the vehicle for any hint of foul play. While no one, and I mean
no one
, knows about Maigo’s, Mark’s or Joliet’s true identities, not to mention Lilly’s existence, the very public nature of the FC-P’s past exploits has made some of us celebrities. We’re targets for conspiracy theorists, secret hungry corporations, rival governments and worst of all, fanboys.

If someone took her...
The thought stops me short. I glance back at Collins and Joliet, who are basically the yin and yang of feminine body types—Collins the Amazon, Joliet the almost boyishly figured sprite. I’m about to complain again, but I stop myself and turn to them. “What do you know?”

Collins grins. “She’s a teenage girl who actually has good reasons to feel boatloads of angst.”

“So...she’s what? Off brooding somewhere? She was alone here. She could have brooded in solitude without leaving.”

Joliet actually laughs and sighs, but she might as well have offered a condescending, “Men.” She tries to hide the humor when she sees my annoyance, and slugs my shoulder. “C’mon, lighten up. Odds are she’s fine, and I’m willing to bet you can find her first. No one knows her or understands her better than you. Just take a minute to step out of your panic and think. Where would she go?”

I sigh. I hate it when Joliet is right, mostly because she usually is. Collins, too. I’m surrounded by women who are better than me at everything, except, as Joliet has pointed out, understanding Maigo...and just about everything weird, whether it be Kaiju, Bigfoot, chupacabra or anything else supernatural. What started off as a dead-end job for a slacker agent has really become my life’s calling. “Fine,” I say, and I wander away from the Suburban.

I don’t pick my direction for any other reason than it takes me away from the others.
Think like Maigo
, I tell myself. But how can anyone think like Maigo? Not only is she fairly silent most of the time, she also doesn’t share a whole lot. After me, she speaks to Watson the most, primarily because they like the same cartoons. But that’s all surface level. And...

I stop.

I’m standing in front of the burned out concrete rubble. It’s all that’s left of the lab where Nemesis, and Maigo, were born. I’ve looked at this mass of debris several times, remembering my visit here with Collins, when a young Nemesis nearly made a snack of us, and we faced off against Katsu Endo, aka, a pain in my ass who has gone missing.

I’m about to turn away when I notice a gaping hole where there used to be none. Someone moved a large chunk of rebar-infused concrete to the side. “What the...”

Ever prepared, I pull a small flashlight from my cargo fatigues and turn it on. There is a tunnel beyond the hole, large enough to crawl through, leading down.
To the basement
, I think, and then I remember what I found there two years ago—what I thought had been destroyed along with everything else.

I know where she is.

The tunnel’s rough surface assaults my hands, knees and back as I push through the tight downward grade, flashlight gripped in my teeth.
Top secret father of the year award, here I come
. The tunnel is fifty feet long, descending at least three stories. The deeper I go, the more it becomes clear that this straight shot down was not formed naturally. Someone made this tunnel.

Maigo.

She’s been holding out on me.

While the rest of us have been training in the woods, assuming she was back here, nose in a book, she’s been excavating a tunnel back to the scene of her first...what? Murder? Meal? She was still part human at that point. Thinking about what I’ll find and how it will affect her, I move faster, skinning my knees and embedding a few pebbles in my palms.

The tunnel ends at a four foot drop, where part of a hallway remains intact. The walls are scorched and cracked, but the fire was smothered before the whole place could be consumed. Flashlight aimed forward, I creep down the hallway feeling a little spooked. If Maigo, who is half Japanese with straight, long hair that often hangs in front of her face, steps out looking like Samara from
The Ring
, I’m probably going to scream. Accepting the potential for future embarrassment, I push on, finding a ragged hole to the left, where there was once a door labeled
Morgue
.

My mind flashes back to the first time I entered this room. Well, ‘entered’ is a gentle way of saying, ‘ran for my freaking life into this room.’ I was with Collins, though not yet really
with
her. We hid in separate coolers meant for corpses. How many dead were left down here?
At least one
, I think, and I step around the corner. I sweep the flashlight through the liquid black, death-scented space, its ceiling ragged and sagging. And then all at once, I’m sent sprawling back into the hallway, gagging for a moment before finally screaming.

3

“Well...” I cough and push myself up against the far hallway wall. “That was way worse than I expected. Seriously, were you
trying
to scare me?”

Maigo steps into the ruined doorway, lit by the diffuse light from my flashlight, which now lies on the floor, pointed at a wall. Even though I know it’s her, and that I’m in no danger, I can’t stop the chills that shake through my body. Not only is her hair hanging in front of her face, but she’s also covered in dust and debris, her pretty self hidden behind layers of gunk. Worst of all are her eyes, the pupils fully dilated and black in the near absolute darkness.

Speaking of which... I glance around Maigo, back into the morgue. She had no light.

Definitely holding back. But why?

“I killed them,” she says.

“Not helping.”

“I’m being serious.”

Her eyes shift slightly, sparkling with the first signs of tears. The girl who was once a three-hundred-fifty-foot-tall destroyer of worlds needs a hug. I climb to my feet and reach my arms out. She falls into them, crushing herself into my embrace. While this is all new and strange to me, the connection she felt to me, as Nemesis, has not dulled. I have seen into her mind, and she has seen mine. We know each other in a way most parents can never really know their children. And as we stand here, underground, in the dark, away from the outside world, that connection takes root in my psyche. Without realizing it, I’ve started crying, too. The pain this kid is dealing with...it’s just not right.

“I killed them,” she says again.

“Is the woman still there?”

I feel her nod against my chest. “The word, too.
Nemesis
.” She pronounces the word with a Greek tang, the way people might have said it in ancient Greece, but without the “oh my God it’s going to step on me” terror.

“I remember,” I tell her, “but that wasn’t you.”

“Part of it was,” she says. “But it’s not just the woman in the next room.” She releases me and takes a step back. “It’s everyone.”

Ouch
. Nemesis killed upwards of ten thousand people between here and Boston, many of which she ate. If Maigo really can remember each individual death... No wonder she’s so quiet. Well, that and being squirted out of a Kaiju like a chick in an egg. That can’t be too good for the psyche either.

“Look,” I say, “I know you remember doing everything that Nemesis did. They’re your memories. You feel like you made those choices. But it wasn’t just you in there. The space was shared.”

“Still is,” she says, and it takes a colossal effort to hide how this makes me feel—heartbroken and terrified.

“What do you mean?” I say, the words coming out slowly. “Some part of Nemesis’s consciousness is still—”

She shakes her head. “Just memories.”

“But Nemesis started... She was created...” There’s no easy way to say this. “You both began life together, right? You both have the same memor—” The answer pops into my mind. “Oh. Oooh. Really?”

She nods and turns away, looking back into the dark morgue like she can see just fine. “Nemesis Prime. Her memories started as dreams, but are coming back faster. I can’t remember the end of her life, but I
can
remember the beginning.” She looks back at me. “So can you.”

I would like to forget it, but she’s right. During one of our surreal connections inside the head of Nemesis, we relived the monster’s beginning. The ancient Nemesis Prime had endured tortures beyond description and had been infused with the ability to detect injustice and the desire to seek vengeance, no matter the cost.

“She wasn’t born a monster,” she says. “They made her one.”

Dammit
, just once I would like the rabbit hole to not go down so deep. “They?”

“I don’t know what they’re called. Or where they’re from...other than...”

I raise my eyebrows. “Other than...”

She looks up.

Aliens
.

Double dammit
.

If I’ve got the story right, Nemesis Prime, captured by an alien race, was turned into an injustice-seeking vengeance-delivering machine, and sent to Earth to...what? Judge us? Keep us in line? Destroy us? Or maybe she was just entertaining these aliens, the destruction of ancient cities broadcast throughout the galaxy. But it’s not their motivation that really bothers me. It’s their existence. An alien race capable of containing something like Nemesis Prime would be a problem far greater than any one Kaiju. Or even a dozen. The FC-P would need some kind of miraculous extraordinary help to keep them from making short work of the human race.

“If it makes you feel better,” she says, “it was like ten thousand years ago.”

It doesn’t. “Ten thousand years? But that predates the Greeks by...a lot.”

“She was around for a long time, sometimes hibernating long enough for people to think she had died, but when she wasn’t sleeping...”

“I get it,” I say, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You’re bearing a weight I don’t think anyone else but you could handle. If you’ve still got a little bit of the Kaiju muscle in you, that’s probably a good thing.”

Her eyes go wide. “You sure about that?”

“As sure as I am that you’ve been hiding it from me.”

Caught, she turns away again, this time entering the morgue. I recover the flashlight and follow. We stop in front of a pile of bones. Above her, scrawled in now dark blood by Maigo’s then clawed hands, is the single word:

Greek for Nemesis.

“When were you going to tell me?” I ask, before Maigo can distract me with ancient tales of woe.

“I didn’t...” Her head sags.

“You thought you would change again?”

“I don’t want to be
her
again. I don’t want to kill any more people. I don’t want to
eat
anyone!”

I rub my hand over Maigo’s back the way my mother used to do mine. “You’re not changing.”

“I’m getting taller! And heavier!”

“You’re sixteen...we think. You’re still growing. Give it another year and you’ll be done.” This seems to resonate. As she calms, I mentally pat myself on the back. This parenting stuff isn’t too bad. Of course, we haven’t yet addressed the non-standard stuff. “So...what can you do? Besides eat people.”

Maigo flinches away, but she’s smiling. She gets my sense of humor, which can sometimes be morbid and is almost always inappropriate. She swats my shoulder, and for the first time, I can see just how much she’s holding back. “Dad!”

Whoa...

Dad.

This is new.

While Lilly jumped right into dubbing everyone uncle, aunt and in Maigo’s case, sister, Maigo has never once called me anything other than ‘Jon.’ She’s almost formal with people, her emotional boundaries strict and rigid.

I play it cool. “So let me guess. You can see in the dark. Any other sensory stuff?”

“Mostly just the eyes. I can see really far, too. And I can feel this... I don’t know what it is. But I remember what it felt like to be me. To be
just
human. And the me now, in my head, is different. I feel something like static, but faint. Sometimes I feel it pulse, but most of the time it’s just a steady pull. I’ve gotten good at ignoring it.”

“Huh.” I have no idea what this could be, and I’m certainly not the person to figure it out. That’s more up Joliet’s alley. “And you’re strong, right? Dug a hole all the way down here.”

“Yeah,” she says, smiling this time. “I’m strong.”

“
How
strong?”

“Stronger than you.” She laughs, and I feel a weight fall away. She’s returning to herself. Quiet. Reserved. And sometimes funny, but usually only when it’s just the two of us.

“Stronger than Lilly?”

Her grin widens.

“Really?” I’m genuinely surprised.

“Don’t tell her,” she says. “I don’t think she’d like that.”

“Lilly doesn’t like a lot of things, but she gets used to it. Speaking of which, we beat her today.”

“Then definitely don’t tell her about this.”

“We’ll keep this between you and me until you’re ready,” I say, “But if you’re worried about changing, Joliet can probably run some tests...or wait...did Ash have the feminine talk with you yet?” I make air quotes with my fingers when I say ‘feminine.’

“And now things just got weird.” She steps around me and heads for the door.

“Really? We can talk about eating people, ancient goddesses and what it feels like to be a Kaiju, but we can’t have the feminine talk?”

“If you say ‘feminine talk’ one more time, I’m running away.” She heads into the hallway and walks out of view. She’s seriously embarrassed and fleeing, which is a good thing. Once again, the day is saved by Jon Hudson’s wry wit. Emotional bomb defused.

As I follow her back up the tunnel, my mental defenses fade. The seriousness of what we’ve just discussed seeps into my gut, twisting it. We’ve got some hard times ahead of us. She really has endured an inhuman amount of torture, from the returning memories of Nemesis Prime, to her time as a Kaiju and now, trying to figure herself out as a human being, while somewhere in a Boston graveyard, the original Maigo lies dead. Could there be a more screwed up situation?

After we reach daylight again, I help Maigo dust off. I’m expecting cheers and a “How did you find her,” from Lilly. Instead, I hear my name shouted by Collins. “Jon!”

“Here!” I step out from around the rubble, Maigo beside me, once again folded into herself.

Collins stands beside the Suburban with Joliet and Hawkins. She’s on the phone. Lilly is perched on top of the vehicle. None of them were looking for us. Either they had complete faith in my ability or whoever Collins is talking to has bad news.

My phone chimes. I glance at the screen. Cooper and Watson both called me. I must have lost my signal while underground. “What’s happening?”

Before Collins can answer, Hawkins speaks up. “It’s them. It’s DARPA.”

This puts me on guard. I spin around, looking for danger. “They know you’re here?”

“Tillamook State Forest,” Collins says in her best ‘chill out’ voice.