Project Maigo (2 page)

Tinman took his first gasped breath. The woman looked down at him, sweat melting away makeup from her forehead, revealing a red scar...or was it something else? She paid him little attention and shouted to her partner. “All clear?”

“Affirmative,” the other woman replied, her accent Russian. “We are good.”

“Let’s wake ’em up,” the blonde said, pulling a cylinder from her pocket. She mashed down the top of it. White gas hissed out, quickly filling the container.

Tinman tried to hold his breath. He didn’t know what kind of gas the woman had deployed. But his need to breathe after being kicked overrode his caution, and he sucked in a lungful. His body felt instantly revived. Energized. Though the intense pain of his injury remained.

He heard the women around him wake from their stupors, their confusion melting away with a din of rising voices. The blonde was now a ghost in the mist, but he could hear her shouting commands in a variety of languages.
More than a cop
, he realized.

The ship beneath them shifted again, canting backwards at a sharp angle. For a moment, Tinman thought he was feeling another wave, but he quickly realized the ship was tilting in the wrong direction. And they weren’t dropping back down. It was as though some immense weight were pulling the aft down.

He wracked his mind to come up with a theory of what could cause the massive ship to tip back so quickly. Only one theory made sense. The realization helped him to his feet, but the shipping container was struck hard from above. The jolt swept his feet out from under him. He hit the floor again hard, leading with his face this time.

The woman’s shouting grew more fervent, and the sounds of running feet echoed all around him. Then her boots clanged on the floor. Despite the danger, she was leaving last. Well, not exactly last. For a moment, he hoped the sudden flood of women fleeing across the deck of his ship would buy him time, but then he remembered what motivated the monster.

Nemesis.

Poems called her the winged tilter of scales.

She’s here for me
, he realized.

A shriek of metal turned his eyes upward. Huge claws hooked into the container’s ceiling and pulled. The top came off like the lid of a can of soup. The white gas the blonde had deployed was sucked up by the lifting ceiling. The breeze carried it away. The container was empty now, save for him and Dingle. The two guards lay at the end, dead or immobilized. The women, all thirty-three of them, were gone.

Tinman got back to his feet, stepped over Dingle, who sounded like he was gagging, maybe even dying, and ran for the shipping container’s end. Before he made it five steps, he noticed his shadow, long and framed by bright orange light from above.

He was right. She was here.

For justice.

For vengeance.

For him.

Tinman turned around to confirm his fate. He turned his eyes upward and screamed more loudly than any of the women he’d bought, sold and tortured ever had.

1

Colorado

You would think that being deep in the woods of Southern Colorado with a smoking hot redhead, with no one else around for miles, would give me nothing to complain about. Under other circumstances, that would be true, but it turns out I don’t know what poison ivy looks like. Also good to know, if you get the oil on your hands and then proceed to scratch your arms, stomach and balls? Your world pretty much goes to hell.

Seriously.

My arms and stomach are bearable, but it’s the middle of summer. It’s hot and humid here on the Ute reservation. So I decided to go commando. Didn’t even pack underwear. My boxer-briefs would have at least held everything in place. But now, every movement instigates a wicked stinging itch. My loins are literally burning. What should have been another useless, but otherwise memorable, investigation of a strange-creature sighting has become an itchy wet blanket the likes of which I doubt any man has ever before experienced in the history of the world.

To make matters worse, we’re leaving. Again, doesn’t sound too bad, but we’re ten miles from our car and another twenty from the nearest pharmacy, where I will single-handedly boost the stock of calamine lotion.

I’m walking like I just spent the past month riding bareback, and the toe of my boot strikes a rock funny. I stumble forward just a little bit, but it’s enough for things to move around like some kid with ADHD is ringing the bells of St. Mary’s.

I stagger to a stop, wincing. Legs splayed like the St. Louis Gateway Arch. “Fuuuck.”

Ashley Collins, my investigative partner at the Department of Homeland Security’s one and only Fusion Center dedicated to protecting the United States from paranormal threats, stops in her tracks. She turns around with that adorable smirk of hers, and I already want to slap it off her face. Of course, she’d kick my ass if I tried. “Man up, Hudson.”

“I will only accept criticism from someone with testicles,” I say, hands on knees.

“I’ve got an elastic band in my pocket,” she says, still wearing the smirk. “My uncle showed me how to castrate a goat once. Just put the elastic on tight, stop the flow of blood and—”

“C’mon,” I say, unable to keep myself from chuckling. “Seriously, this hurts.”

She digs into her pocket, pulls out the elastic, stretches it a few times and in a sing-song voice, says, “We could be gal-pals.”

I find myself unable to reply. Not because I don’t have a comeback. We tease each other like this frequently. We could ping-pong creative insults back and forth for hours. It’s the hair on the back of my neck, standing straight up that stops me. And I have no idea why. I didn’t hear anything. Or smell anything. It’s just an instinct. Some part of my mind shouting at me to run, or fight.

When Collins slowly moves her hand to her sidearm, I know she feels it too.

We’re being stalked.

“What is it?” she whispers.

I shake my head, but I know it’s one of two things: a brown bear or a mountain lion. Both are common enough in this part of the country, and both occasionally take a whack at people. My preference would be the bear. Not only do I have experience fending off bears, but we’d hear it coming. A cougar...their hunting and fighting abilities are nearly supernatural. So much so, that they’re revered by the local Ute population. We wouldn’t know it was here until it attacked, which is exactly what’s happening. I give my answer without fully processing the potential ramifications. “Mountain lion.”

Collins’s hand moves from the holstered handgun on her hip and shifts toward the tranquilizer rifle slung over her back. Dressed in camouflage, carrying a backpack and armed like a guerrilla, she looks like she should be in a Red Dawn reboot. I’m dressed the same, but right now, with me all hunched over and uncomfortable, she’s the only one who really looks the part. “Or maybe another big cat,” she says.

The realization causes me to stand up straight and ignore the molten lava between my legs. Like Collins, I reach for my rifle. But while hers contains a tranquilizer dart, mine contains a tracking device. We’re not exterminators. We’re only here to find out what people are seeing. In this case, the creature of choice is a black, cat-woman. Over the past year, Collins and I have investigated scads of creature reports, including chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, a handful of ghost sightings, poltergeists, UFO sightings, alien abductions and natural phenomena. If you don’t count the 300-foot tall monster that laid waste to Boston—and Bigfoot, which we found and tagged a few months later—the FC-P department of the DHS has once again become a black hole of wasted time. That’s if you’re only looking at our investigations into the strange. We’ve also been busy building cases against several people involved in the debacle that led to thousands of deaths at the hands, and feet—that’s awful—of an ancient vengeance goddess genetically merged with a murdered little girl named Maigo. I shake my head at the thought.
Nemesis
. That a laboratory could take the DNA of a girl and merge it with something probably long dead, and horrible, to create a gigantic, city-destroying monster, still sounds impossible. Yet, that’s what happened. And she stomped her way south, from Maine to Boston, eating people, whales and everything else with a heartbeat. With each meal, she grew, every pound of flesh eaten transferred to her own mass. But she wasn’t just eating. She decimated everything in her path—homes, ships, entire cities and everything the military threw at her—until her thirst for vengeance was sated by the dramatic slaying of Maigo’s father.

But whatever is hunting us now, it isn’t Nemesis. She’s hard to miss. Whatever this is...it’s good at hiding. I spin around, taking in every tree, searching every shadow.

Very good at hiding.

Rustling brush spins me and Collins around, rifles raised. We won’t kill whatever is there, but if Collins’s aim is true—and it usually is—her target shouldn’t make it more than a couple of steps.

The brush shifts again. Low to the ground. Something small and black flits in and out of view.

I lower my rifle. “Was that a skunk?”

Collins sighs and lowers her weapon. “Looked more like a house cat to me.”

“Was walking kind of funny for a house cat.” The hair on my arms springs up as I speak, and my subconscious tightens my grip on the rifle. Before I fully comprehend the small creature I saw, or respond to the fresh wave of panic coursing through my body, a breeze blows past.

Moving with the breeze is a shadow that smells like roses.

I react on instinct, raising the rifle as I spin toward the shadow. The rifle, armed with a tracking device, will do little. My attacker doesn’t know that, though, and reacts to the pointed weapon with violence and intelligence. The barrel is thrust into the air. The fired dart is sent sailing into the forest.

I don’t care. My gaze is held by a pair of yellow eyes, both feline and human at the same time. They’re framed by a feminine face, again human, but with a small nose and whiskers. The cat-woman. She’s real.

And pissed.

The rifle barrel bends in her hands. An amazing feat of strength that I would applaud, if I wasn’t concerned about the same technique being used on my arms.

Collins takes aim with the tranq rifle, but never gets to fire. The cat-woman spins and kicks out a clawed foot, knocking the rifle to the tall grass around us. Continuing her fluid spin, the cat-woman slams her foot into my chest, knocking me back against a tree and knocking every molecule of oxygen from my lungs.

Collins goes for her sidearm. She’s a quick draw, but the cat-woman has leapt into the air—
twenty feet
into the air—flipping up and over Collins. The creature lands behind her. Collins spins around to fire, but her weapon is yanked up. A single shot tears into the air, garnering several small squeaks of fright from the nearby brush. Collins shouts in pain as she’s forcefully disarmed. But she’s a warrior. She gives up the weapon so she can use another. Her fists.

The cat-woman doesn’t see the first blow coming. Collins’s fist connects solidly with the side of the furry head. I recognize the strike. She was aiming for a knockout blow, to end the fight without having to kill the creature. But the cat-woman doesn’t go down. The creature staggers for two steps, shakes it off and lunges, tackling Collins to the ground.

I try to run to Collins’s aid, but I can’t complete a single step before falling to my knees. I have yet to catch my breath. The best I can do is plead with the animal. I suck in a loud breath and manage a whisper. “Stop.”

The creature rains down blow after blow, using fists. She has fingers, I realize, not paws, though I’m fairly certain she has claws, and I’m glad she’s not using them. Collins is doing a decent job fending off the punches, but she’d be shredded by claws. The cat-woman is tempering her attack. Given her strength, I’d say she’s pulling her punches, too. Still, too much more of this and Collins will be in real trouble.

Remembering I’m carrying an actual gun with real bullets, I reach to my hip and draw the weapon. My arm shakes as I take another deep breath. Not wanting to kill the creature, or Collins by accident, I speak again, this time finding enough strength to shout. “Stop!”

I don’t really expect the cat-woman to respond. But she does. She stops—and glances back at me, her eyes full of anger, distrust...and understanding.