Project 731 (4 page)

“In Oregon,” Joliet says, doubling the effect of Collins’s statement. “It has nothing to do with us.”

“You heard the report,” Hawkins says. “A turtle with eight legs and a tail.”

The description is instantly familiar. Hawkins’s BFSs. The Big Fucking Spiders. We have a detailed account of what happened to him and Joliet during their stay at what they call ‘Island 731,’ where a surviving group of World War II Japanese scientists called Unit 731—responsible for some of the worst atrocities and human experimentation ever performed—continued their research under the supervision of a clandestine group within DARPA. Lilly, and her monstrous mother, who was actually named ‘Kaiju,’ were a direct result of that genetic research, which also created a variety of monstrous chimera, the worst of which were the BFSs. Part spider, part turtle, part who-knows-what, the creatures had eight legs, were protected by a turtle’s shell and had prehensile tails with scorpion-like stingers at the end. They were able to reproduce rapidly, by injecting their spawn into the guts of their victims. The young would tear free, fully grown and able to breed, within a minute. They were a nightmare scenario, as deadly as a Kaiju, but spread out. Impossible to stop.

“And it has everything to do with us,” Hawkins continues. “They’re not going to find us here, but we can find them there.” He turns to me, eyes blazing.

These are the people who committed some of the worst crimes against humanity, and they weren’t World War II scientists. They were modern-day, American scientists working for the government. In the past year, while subtly seeking them out, we’ve found nothing. They’re buried deeper than I can look without being noticed. But now...

“I made you a promise,” I tell Hawkins. “Looks like it’s time to deliver.”

4

“Tell me, how do you feel?”

Sean Johnson’s eyes fluttered open. Hazy white filled his view. “What? W—where am I?”

“You’re safe. How do you feel?”

“Cold.”

“Understandable.” To Johnson, who felt like he might fall back asleep, the man’s voice sounded colder than the chill wracking his entire body. He had never felt such pervasive coldness, down to the marrow.

“I can’t feel my body,” Johnson said. “Did something happen?”

“Something? Yes. But your back is fine, if that’s what you were thinking.”

A ghost-like apparition slid across Johnson’s view, white on white. Just a subtle shift in the light ahead. “I’m having trouble seeing.”

“It’s from the cold. Nothing to worry about.”

“Why am I cold?”

“You’re safe,” the man said. “Are you experiencing any pain? Anything at all?”

“I t-told you,” Johnson said, teeth chattering, “I can’t feel anything.”

“Good. That’s good.”

Johnson’s exasperation grew. He couldn’t feel. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t really see. “W-why is it good?”

“Still nothing?” the man asked again. “Nothing at all?”

“No, I—” But then he could feel something. It wasn’t pain. It was...like lifted weight. He felt lighter...and a steadily increasing sense of tiredness. “Is something happening?”

A sigh. “Mr. Johnson, I’m normally remiss to discuss the particulars of what I do with my...patients. But given your situation, I feel that full disclosure poses no risk. Do you understand?”

“No. No I d-don’t. What’s happening? Where am I?”

“You’re back at DARPA,” the man said.

“In Virginia?”

“Oh, no. Not remotely. We are still on the West Coast. But that’s hardly the most interesting line of questioning. You’re no doubt feeling something
now?
”

Johnson tried to look down, but found himself unable. “I can’t move my head.”

“You’re restrained.”

“Why?”

“It’s better for you.”

“Why? What’s happening to me!” Johnson’s voice cracked with desperation, his heart beating faster, adrenaline surging and returning some small sense of feeling to his brain. And in that fraction of a second, his body sent a faint signal, detected by a few sentinel neurons, which received and repeated the message—
I am dying
. “Oh God. You’re killing me!”

“Me? No. But yes, you
are
dying.” A blurred-out form slipped into view. A man. Dressed in white. But concealed, like he stood behind a wall of frosted glass. “Do you really want to know how?”

“Tell me,” Johnson said. If he was going to die, he wanted to know why.

“You don’t remember?”

Johnson searched his memory. He was on a mission with the BlackGuard. His first mission. To the
Darwin
. They searched the ship. There were bodies. So many bodies. With holes from where something had come out. But then...what happened? “There was a room. It was dark. And—and the dark, it moved. It was
alive
. It was—”

All at once, he remembered. “It attacked me. Put something inside me! The Dark Matter. And the others...oh my God, I was
never
on the team. I was just—”

“A vessel,” the man said. “Not as dumb as everyone thought. But dumb enough.”

Johnson’s vision began to fade. A strange taste filled his mouth.

“Take comfort in the fact that you have done this organization, and perhaps your country, a great service. It is a more honorable death than you would have managed on your own. Now then, would you like to see your gift to us?”

The man didn’t wait for Johnson to respond, perhaps because he could see Johnson’s fading lucidity. He rubbed his arm against a hard, clear surface, scratching away a thin layer of frost and revealing his face, which wasn’t a face at all, but the reflective mask of a biohazard suit.

The man rapped his gloved knuckles on the glass, creating a hollow gong that echoed in the tight space. He spoke with a sing-song voice, like there was a dog nearby. “Here. Over here. Come say hello.”

The sharp
tick tack
of small, hard limbs striking the floor filled the air. With a shriek, a black blur launched at the cleared glass. Claws scrabbled for purchase, while a dagger-sized stinger at the end of a long, wiry tail struck the glass three times.

The man on the other side showed no reaction. No fear. No surprise. Johnson couldn’t see his face—couldn’t see much of anything as his vision narrowed—but he detected a hint of pride from the masked stranger.

“Goodbye, Mr. Johnson. I believe it is time for you to fulfill your secondary role.”

Johnson was too weak to ask what that meant, but he had his suspicions confirmed when he faintly felt a series of pin pricks travel up his body. The black shape crawled over his face, eight legs twitching with energy. As the monster’s mandibles turned toward his wide eyes, Johnson used the last of his life to scream.

No one heard him.

No one missed him.

And within the hour, when the feast came to an end, there was nothing left of him.

Dr. Alicio Brice
turned away from the containment unit, which was a five-inch-thick glass dome, fifteen feet across and ten feet tall at the apex. Like many of the other units on this level, it held a biological threat. Not a virus or bacteria or anything else belonging to the realm of the micro. Those kinds of things were kept in the basement. Brice dealt exclusively with the macro, the killers that existed outside the human body, but would be happy to consume it just the same. Some came from nature—various big cats, snakes, spiders and crocodilians, all the most efficient killers mother nature had conjured up.

But there were the others, the best and worst creations of man. Some came from the island before it was destroyed, like these newest additions, which he called Tsuchigumo, or Tsuchi for short. In Japanese mythology, the Tsuchigumo were a race of spider-like phantoms. The
YMkai
. Like the chimera now consuming Johnson’s body, they could take on many forms, spiders and turtles most common among them. They were deadly and crafty. The name fit.

“You did well, Silhouette,” Brice said, as he turned around and removed his mask. Though it wasn’t necessary, he always wore a mask when dealing with uncomfortable situations. He’d never been good with people and was even worse with people about to die. The mask helped. Hid his emotions. He’d always wished he could be unattached, like a sociopath or a Vulcan, but he felt emotion like anyone else. He had experienced sorrow for Johnson since the moment he had chosen the unexceptional, very alone boy to transport the Tsuchi. But any misgivings he felt were dwarfed by his ambition, his desire to change the world—or perhaps even remake it. In his line of work, where emotions could be a liability, masks helped.

It was why he could speak to the man known only as Silhouette, whose eyes were always hidden behind those reflective sunglasses that made him look more like a State Trooper than the leader of the BlackGuard. He and his men—Shadow, Obsidian and Specter—were the best at what they did, which was to serve none other than GOD—the Genetic Offense Directive. In extreme situations, they could mobilize military assets if ‘national security’ was at risk, as they had done to ensure the island’s destruction. Most of the time, the BlackGuard did GOD’s dirty, wet and covert work.

GOD was an arm of DARPA, and their research was defined by two words: weaponized biology. Few in DARPA knew of GOD’s existence, and none of those few saw a need for oversight. Plausible deniability was essential for this kind of work. Killer robots remained acceptable, while anything organic was seen as abominable, despite being cheaper and deadlier. Aside from the island’s loss two years previous, they were making progress far faster than labs who had to abide by federal regulations. While the island had been GOD’s first outpost, their headquarters was now located on the mainland, hiding in plain sight. And thanks to their many patents and shell corporations, not to mention a sizable black budget that increased by 5% every year since 1959, they had more resources and a larger GDP than many small nations.

Silhouette gave a curt nod, but said nothing. His penchant for silence unless asked a question was another one of his redeeming qualities.

“No witnesses, I presume?” Brice asked, using the reflection in Silhouette’s glasses to fix his blond hair, sweeping it over the top of his head to cover the growing bald spot. He’d considered following Silhouette’s example and shaving his head clean, but he hadn’t found the time. He waved his hand, brushing away his words. “I know there weren’t. Silly question. And the ship? Sunk?”

“To the bottom,” Silhouette said.

“Were there many Tsuchi?”

“More than a hundred. In the mess hall.”

“And they’re all dead?”

“They can’t swim.”

“Would you say there is a margin of error?” Brice sat behind his gleaming white desk, which held only a laptop. He bounced twice in the swivel chair and then spun in a slow circle, marveling at the scope of his work. The three-hundred-foot-long lab was one of fifteen he oversaw, three per floor, housed in the building’s top five floors, which he had deemed
Incubators
. A row of glass domes, each containing various species or mixes of species, stretched from one end to the other. On the far side of the space was an empty walkway, at the center of which sat his solitary desk. No windows. No co-workers. Just Brice and his creations. But this incubator wasn’t a functional lab. It was simply his office, where the best, and most dangerous creations were kept under his watchful and admiring eye. The real work happened in the other nineteen incubators, which held as much lab equipment as glass domes, and in the more recently constructed five-hundred-foot-long hangar next door, which was less of an incubator and more of a morgue. “If there were one hundred fifty Tsuchi on board the
Darwin
, would you say there might have been a .75 percent margin of error?”

“Do you have a point?” Silhouette didn’t like games. Didn’t like much of anything.

“No fun,” Brice said, and swiveled his laptop monitor around. “This was taken from a dash cam and uploaded to Flickr an hour ago. Note the red circle with the words, ‘What the hell is this?’ above it. Can
you
tell me what this is?”

Silhouette showed no reaction beyond a tightening of his lips.

“What do you think the odds are, that amid the chaos, a Tsuchi survived and found itself afloat on a piece of debris that later washed up on shore? Certainly higher than .75, yes?” Brice turned the monitor back around and looked at the grainy image. No one outside GOD could identify the creature in the image. Most people would believe it to be yet another cryptid hoax. They would give it a name. Something catchy. And make documentaries about it.

The trouble was, if they actually went out looking for it, and found it, it wouldn’t be long before the whole world knew about the Tsuchi. And that could lead to trouble worse than exposure. If a Tsuchi reached the general population before controls had been implemented, life on Earth would be fundamentally changed forever. North and Central America would fall first. South America, too, if they didn’t think to destroy the Panama Canal’s three bridges. Then, when winter arrived and the arctic ice reached out across the top of the world, Greenland would fall. Then Russia, Asia, Africa and most of Europe. Only the island nations would survive. All because Silhouette had allowed the .75 percent margin of error to exist. It didn’t matter how it had happened, it only mattered that he corrected the error before it was too late.