Project Maigo (12 page)

When it happens, it’s not so much a punch as a bitch-slap. Reaching up one of her mammoth, clawed hands, Nemesis swipes down hard and knocks Scrion away. Scrion falls ungracefully, twitching madly, trying to turn itself over before landing. It fails miserably, landing on its side in fifty feet of water.

After thrashing about pitifully, Scrion rights itself. Still moving quickly, the monster breaks for the shore again, but makes it only two leaps. Nemesis takes a lunging step forward and thrusts out her clawed hand. Her index and middle fingers are the longest—the ring being small and the pinkie not much more than a spiked nub—and the claws extending from them are unnecessarily huge.

They’re also sharp.

Scrion falls flat as Nemesis’s middle claw pierces its hind leg, pinning it in place. But the monster isn’t done. Its madness compels it forward. Nemesis’s claw tears through the leg as the smaller monster pulls away. Brown blood gushes into the blackened earth.

And then Scrion’s free. For nearly two seconds. Then Nemesis is upon it again.

I almost feel bad for the pug-nosed Kaiju. Nemesis is clearly toying with it. Or perhaps testing it. Either way, it’s an unfair fight that could have ended the moment it began, which starts me thinking:
Is this what she’ll do to me?

While pinning Scrion to the ground with her giant left hand, Nemesis catches hold of the wounded leg with her right, grips down tightly and yanks. Scrion’s head turns upward, eyes dazed, as the leg comes free, dangling tendrils of flesh and pouring muddy blood.

Then Nemesis lets go.

And damn, Scrion takes off running. It’s not quite as fast as before with its less coordinated, three-legged hop, but it’s still hauling ass. Not only that, it’s coming around again for another strike. For a moment, I’m impressed with the thing. It’s going to fight to the end. Then its arc becomes a circle. The dazed and wounded creature is playing ‘duck, duck, goose’ all by itself, sprinting around an imaginary ring.

Even Nemesis seems confused by this behavior. She stands still, watching. And then, as though she’s seen enough, she reaches down, catches Scrion by the protective plates of its back and lifts the pitiful thing into the air. Holding the smaller Kaiju aloft, she wraps her big hand around Scrion’s head and neck, and then squeezes. For a moment, there’s some resistance. Scrion is built similarly to Nemesis, and is no doubt powerful. But it’s no match for the original. Nemesis’s hand twitches and collapses inward, crushing Scrion’s head. A smear of brown and white fluid oozes out from between her fingers.

She relinquishes her grip, dropping Scrion’s body into the ocean. A wall of water rushes up and over the beaches, flooding the husks of empty homes.

And then—
shit
—she turns toward me.

And stares.

“Umm,” Woodstock says. He has us hovering a half mile away, which suddenly feels not nearly far enough. “So I’m officially starting to get freaked out by all the giant monsters looking at us the way Michael Jackson looked at kids.”

He’s right. Nemesis’s glare is decidedly unsettling. Unlike Scrion, who’s eyes—despite their focus on us—had beamed with mindless chaos, Nemesis’s eyes, which are brown and quite human looking, reveal something deeper.

Thought? Meaning? I have no idea, though part of me really wants to know.

Her furrowed eyebrows come up. The rage and tension gripping her body melts away. And suddenly, in my mind, she’s no longer Nemesis.

Woodstock sees it, too. “There she is,” he says, his voice something between awe and surprise. “Maigo.”

Knowing Woodstock has seen what I have felt all along sets my resolve, and when I hear the words, “Target locked! Clear to engage?” in my ears, I react quickly, toggling Devine to transmit openly. “Negative! Do not engage! I repeat, do not engage! Scrion is down. Maigo is
not
the target!”

As those few words replay in my mind, I inwardly cringe, knowing that just one of them is going to land me in hot water. I called her ‘Maigo.’ And while Woodstock might agree with me now, the opinion of a sixty-two year old retired Marine Corp pilot re-hired for the FC-P against the advisement of my superiors, is probably not going to help my case.

“I repeat, Nemesis is not the target.” My order lacks its previous conviction, and I hope using her true designation will help people miss my foible, but I know it won’t. I’ve just put the express shit-train on full speed and sent it toward my doorstep.

The jets fly past overhead. There are nine of them now, converging from the airbases to the north and south. In another ten minutes, there would have been thirty. A line of ten Apache helicopters takes up position along the shore, three hundred feet up, boldly hovering close enough to unleash their payloads.

Nemesis pays them no attention.

“Take us closer,” I say.

Woodstock lowers his head at me to peer over his aviator glasses. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”

“I need to test a theory.”

“I can save you the trouble and just say you have the biggest balls in the world, how ’bout that?”

“Any sign of trouble, we can bug out, and I’ll give the order to fire.”

Woodstock twitches his mustache back and forth for a moment and then throttles us forward.

“Bring us up to eye level,” I say.

“Roger that, Cap’n Ahab.”

As we rise up, growing closer to Nemesis, her brown eyes track us, still oblivious to the helicopters and jets swirling around her like black flies in the summer.

“That’s as close as I get,” Woodstock says, when we’re a hundred feet away. Just out of arms reach. Unless she decides to step forward when she swats us down. They we’re just screwed. But I don’t think she’s going to do that.

Betty rises up until we’re at eye level. The chopper is about the size of Nemesis’s eye, but at a hundred feet away, her face is about the size of someone standing a few feet away. And there is no doubt she’s looking straight at me.

“I’ll be damned,” Woodstock says. He sees it, too.

Then I do something stupid. I reach out a hand and wave, saying, “I’m okay,” quickly adding, “We’re okay,” mostly so I don’t feel so weird.

And then, I’ll be damned, she turns away and starts trudging out to sea.

I go to toggle Devine and find the system still set to broadcast.

Damnit. I hate myself. Everyone heard our little Kodak moment.

“All units, stand down,” I say, trying to sound more authoritative than embarrassed. “Begin tracking protocols. Follow her for as long as you can.”

I switch off Devine and lean back, watching Nemesis retreat peacefully back into the depths, leaving a trail of Scrion’s brown blood in her wake.

“Sooo,” Woodstock says, turning to me. “Wanna tell me what just happened?”

I really don’t want to, but seeing as how I’m going to be asked the same question by just about every damned person on the planet, I decide to answer truthfully, or at least what I believe is the truth. “Nemesis wasn’t here to kill me. Or anyone.”

“But Scrion was,” he says, starting to understand. “It was after us. After
you
.”

I nod. “But Nemesis...she was here to protect me.”

15

The flight back to the Crow’s Nest is made in silence, both Woodstock and I processing the things we just experienced. I feel shaky, mentally and physically, thanks to a now dissipating adrenaline rush. Were I on the ground, I’d take my mother’s frequent advice to me as a child and run around the house a few times. Stuck in a chopper, all this nervous energy has nowhere to go, so I’m bouncing my legs like I’m Lars Ulrich playing
Enter Sandman
double time.

As we descend toward the landing pad atop the FC-P headquarters roof, Woodstock speaks up. “You gotta plan?”

“For what?” I ask, knowing exactly for what, but trying to downplay the whole thing.

“Maigo,” he says, using the name freely.

I shrug.

“You know...” His voice is uncommonly unsure, like he’s going to say something he shouldn’t. His body language belies nothing, but that’s probably because we’re coming in for a landing and one wrong move could send us plummeting to the lawn or smashing into the Crow’s Nest’s thick windows, which actually look a little dirty from the outside. “I always sort of rooted for her. For Nemesis.”

I forget all about the dirty windows. Before he can continue, I double-check to make sure Devine’s transmit function is disabled.

“Not for killing all those people, mind you. But...who she was...once. All she wanted was justice. You helped make that possible. And you saved a lot of people because of it. And I think she knows that. She owes you. I know you feel the same. We all do. You don’t hide it as well as you think.”

I smile. “Not like you?”

“Boy, I was in the Marines for thirty God dang years, and I was never once written up for anything unsavory. You know why? Ain’t cause I was a goody two-shoes. It’s cause I can hide shit from a turd-burglar. But you? You transmit your feelings to the world like a billboard. I swear if you weren’t an FC-P agent you’d be some kind of crunchy artist type, thrusting your inner self all over everyone.”

He’s got me laughing now, despite the shit-storm no doubt descending on the FC-P. “You realize how gross that sounds, right?”

“Other people’s emotions usually are,” he says. “Point is, you gotta work on keeping that shit to yourself. Cause your job isn’t about paintin’ happy trees or retarded looking faces. It’s leading the damn world against a monster who also happens to be a little girl. Now git out of my chopper and go face the music. I’ll be down in a few.”

I was so intent on listening to Woodstock that I hadn’t even noticed we’d landed. After removing my headset, I give him a pat on the shoulder. “Thanks.”

“Ayuh,” he says, and that’s the end of it. Everything he just told me amounts to a few weeks worth of talking to an old Mainer like Woodstock. Means he cares. And ‘Ayuh,’ means it’s time to shut the hell up about it.

I find myself running toward the roof exit. I’m not sure why. There shouldn’t be anyone here. The rest of the area will stay evacuated for 24 hours, but Cooper, Watson and Collins will come back sooner, along with other emergency services. The evacuation alone probably caused more than a few accidents, heart attacks and violence. The police, fire department and hospital are going to have their hands full for a few days at least.

As I drop down the stairs three at a time, the dirty window returns to my thoughts. I’d stared out that window this morning. There wasn’t a spot of dust or a smudge anywhere on it—well, except the line I drew. So what had smeared all over it while the Crow’s Nest and everyone else for ten square miles was busy evacuating?

For some reason I’m not consciously aware of, I draw my sidearm upon reaching the bottom of the stairs. When I shove through the door to the Crow’s Nest, I have the gun up, sweeping back and forth, looking for trouble. The first thing I notice is that there’s no one here. That’s a good thing, because they’re supposed to be gone. The second thing I notice is that it looks like someone rolled a giant bowling ball down the middle of the space. Chairs are overturned. Two workstations have been obliterated. And the water cooler is slowly bleeding to death through a crack in the blue plastic. But it’s the third thing I notice that holds my gaze. The smear on the window is fluid—and brown. It’s either a chocolate milkshake or Kaiju blood.

My gut says it’s the latter.

Seeing no one inside, I head for the main stairwell and slide to a stop. There’s a big, round hole in the wall directly across from where I’m standing, ten feet up from the first landing. My first thought is
rocket-propelled grenade
, but there is very little debris on the stairs, meaning that whatever punched the hole in the wall, came from
inside
.

I descend the stairs like a peregrine falcon, shrieking out names, “Ashley! Watson! Coop!” Part of me is relieved when I get no reply, but silence often means one of two things: they’re gone or they’re dead. Detecting no signs of life or trouble on the second and first floors, I sprint over the dark hardwood floor and make for the home’s rear exit. The wooden door is open.

While we don’t have a ton of security here, we still follow the basic rules of a mansion living on the fringe of an urban city. The door should be closed and locked. Whatever happened here, it led outside. Of course, the rhinoceros-sized hole in the wall told me that, too.

I hit the screen door at a run, smashing the handle down as I barrel outside onto the driveway and a scene of destruction.

The first thing I see is a body laid out on the pavement, by the husk of what used to be Cooper’s car, ironically, a coupe. Even the clothing I can see—black pants and slick black shoes—is all wrong. My first thought was that this was Collins. But then
she
stands up on the other side of the wall that is Watson and looks my way.

My relief is short-lived. Collins is alive, but her eyes look a little hazy and her blouse is stained with blood. As is her hair. I rush toward her, lowering my weapon. Then I see the body’s face. Endo.