Project Maigo (32 page)

Watching Nemesis charge off through the city like it wasn’t there, Hawkins would have preferred something closer to a giant-sized sci-fi laser cannon.

A second frustrated shout drew his attention north again. He crouched by the trunk of a tall maple tree and scanned the area. He spotted Lilly on the other side of the lawn, scrambling up a tree. A massive black hand reached around from the other side and dug its fingers into the bark, just missing Lilly.

If he caught her...

Hawkins nocked one of Endo’s arrows, which he promised would pierce Gordon’s thick skin. He looked down the sight, waiting for the right moment, trying to ignore the sounds of destruction and human suffering behind him. What mattered to him most was straight ahead, and in danger.

He drew the bowstring back, holding all that kinetic energy at bay. He breathed slowly. A practiced hunter. Ready to act, he pursed his lips and whistled a gentle bird call. He could barely hear the sound, but Lilly had exceptional ears, and she’d know what to do. When hunting as a team, she would rush out, forcing their prey to flee toward him. He would take care of the rest, not wanting Lilly to kill with her bare hands. While she was part cat and always would be, he wanted to make sure the feral instincts that kept her alive on Island 731 faded, so encounters like her first meeting with Hudson didn’t happen again.

Lilly emerged from the trees, sailing through the air, fifteen feet up. He’d seen her jump from higher heights in the past, but it always made him flinch. He sucked in a quick breath, but she was soon on the ground and running toward him. An eight-foot-tall, thick-limbed goliath that looked vaguely human, thundered out behind her, backhanding the tree she’d been on.

“Up,” Hawkins said, just loud enough for Lilly to hear. She sprang into the air, landing thirty feet above Hawkins in the tree, keeping Gordon’s eyes fixed upwards.

Crouched down low, leaning against the tree trunk, Hawkins adjusted his aim. Hudson had warned against hitting the orange membrane on Gordon’s chest. Hawkins had seen footage of what happened in Boston. He understood the danger and aimed high, for the head.

The arrow released silently, the gentle twang of the bowstring snapping forward drowned out by the chaos around them. The black arrow slipped through the night, invisible. Accurate. The projectile struck Gordon’s thick forehead. Hawkins worried the arrow would snap or bounce off, but it didn’t. As advertised, it slipped through the giant man’s skin.

Then through his skull and the brain trapped beneath.

Gordon staggered to a stop, looking confused. He knew something fundamentally wrong had occurred to his body, but he didn’t know what. Then he went cross-eyed and saw the arrow.

This is it
, Hawkins thought, slipping back behind the tree. He carefully put the bow down and reached into his pocket. When he found what he was looking for, he peeked back at Gordon and felt his hope shrivel away like a Shrinky Dink in the oven.

Gordon yanked the arrow from his head, looked at it curiously and dropped it. He still looked a little stunned, but he was also scanning the trees. Hawkins slipped behind cover, waited a beat and peeked around the tree again.

Gordon was gone.

“Hello there,” said the baritone voice, close enough to feel in his chest.

Hawkins whirled around to find the mammoth Gordon standing above him with a wicked sharp-toothed grin. Hawkins grabbed the bow and tried to scramble back, but he tripped over the tree’s roots.

Gordon reached out.

Lilly descended with a shriek.

She landed on Gordon’s arm and clung to it, her claws digging in deeply. Before the giant man-thing could react, she swiped her razor-sharp talons across his face twice and leapt away. Gordon roared and swung at her, but she was already up the tree, shouting for Hawkins to run.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Hawkins got to his feet, unslung his shotgun and leveled it at Gordon’s face. The Kaiju-man lowered his gaze back to Hawkins and sneered. “I’m going to eat you.”

Hawkins knew that Hudson might say something like ‘Eat this,’ but he lacked the man’s sense of humor. He just pulled the trigger, sending a cloud of 12 gauge into Gordon’s face, filling the gaps between the criss-crossing lines left by Lilly’s claws.

He then pulled the trigger seven more times, staggering Gordon back. Despite having eight shells of shot embedded in his face, the traitorous general remained on his feet.

When the shotgun’s last report faded, Gordon took his hands away from his face and said, “I’m going to eat you
slowly
.”

“Shit,” Hawkins said, picking up the bow and preparing to run.

When Gordon took one mighty step forward, halving the distance between them, Hawkins knew he couldn’t escape. After surviving the unthinkable, he’d finally met the monster that would kill him.

43

All of the chaos around me—the sirens, gunfire, klaxons, screaming and crumbling buildings—cease to exist in a moment of sickening clarity. I’m a dead man. Not because of any immediate physical threat, but because if the events of today are seen as anything other than a stellar victory, the blame for all this is going to chase me down like a laser-guided missile. I feel faint as the blood drains from my face.

Watching the U.S. Capitol Building be hacked apart by two Kaiju can have that effect. At least, it can when you’re the guy who led them here.

Nemesis arrived at the north side of the Capitol just as Scylla reached the south. There was a brief roar-off, with both monsters hollering at each other like two angry inebriants on either side of a car. While the drunks might then run around the car to slap each other silly, the two Kaiju are going through the building. Nemesis makes short work of the Senate Chamber while Scylla flattens the House.

Unlike me, Endo seems to be taking great pleasure in the destruction, laughing lightly, an open mouthed smile frozen on his face. When the Kaiju reach the rotunda and lay into it with their giant claws, the dome exploding like a crushed egg, Endo turns to me. “It’s like Godzilla versus King Kong.”

A vague memory of a childhood movie returns. Godzilla on one side of a tall Japanese building. King Kong on the other. The monsters smashing through the building to get at each other. Endo is right. It’s like the monsters are doing an homage.

Endo holds a small pair of binoculars out to me. “So you can see.”

I’m not sure I want to see this any closer than I can right now, but I take the lenses and put them to my eyes just in time to witness the end of an iconic American building of untold historical and financial value.

With a swipe of Nemesis’s mighty arm, the Capitol Building ceases to exist. In her fervor to reach Scylla, Nemesis has left herself open to attack. While Nemesis is overextended, the hammerhead monster lunges forward. Its lower jaw drops open, revealing those horrible teeth—the longest and sharpest on any of the Kaiju. The massive jaws wrap around Nemesis’s forearm, and compress.

There is resistance for a moment, but the blade-like teeth slowly slip through the thick flesh. Nemesis doesn’t react at first, and I think the Kaiju must not have pain sensors in their armor or skin. But once the teeth are a few feet in, Nemesis throws her head back and roars in pain.

She flinches back, lifting her arm and dragging Scylla through the Capitol Building’s remains. Scylla holds on, latched in place, while Nemesis shakes her arm back and forth, reacting to the pain without thought.

The teeth sink deeper. Nemesis’s roar becomes high-pitched. Something stirs within me. All of my fear and trepidation is forgotten. I stand and shake my fist at Nemesis. “Fight back!”

Endo glances at me. He doesn’t say anything, but I can see he’s pleased by my outburst.

I grip the side wall around the top of the White House roof as Scylla begins shaking its head, thrashing back and forth. Red blood flows from Nemesis’s arm, dripping on the Capitol ruins.

Slowly, Nemesis lifts her arm, higher and higher until Scylla is lifted off the ground. The display of strength is impressive to say the least, but Scylla hardly notices. It just clings to the arm like a dog to a dangling rope, wiggling back and forth. I think it might even be growling. When Nemesis levels a brown-eyed stare at Scylla, the Kaiju finally stops moving.

There’s a shift that takes place, and it has nothing to do with physical violence—yet. Scylla’s body language changes slightly, like it knows it’s severely fucked, but can’t back out.

A distant roar, deep and powerful, announces the approach of Karkinos. Typhon isn’t far behind. I can see them just over the horizon, rising up over the city, just a few miles off, but approaching quickly. There isn’t a lot of time before this becomes a three-on-one fight, and while Scylla is still fifty feet shorter than Nemesis, the other two look to be her match.

A sneer forms on the sides of Nemesis’s mouth, revealing sharp teeth. She’s moving past the pain and into the mindset in which she feels most at home: rage.

Nemesis unleashes a roar the likes of which I’ve never heard out of her, drool spraying from her mouth. She lifts Scylla higher and then yanks her arm down. Scylla’s body swings out and then drops. As the Kaiju’s giant body swings back toward Nemesis, she kicks out with one of her massive feet. Scylla’s body folds around the foot as it drives into the monster’s gut and forces the air from its lungs in a gargling scream. The impact forces Scylla’s jaws open. The teeth slip free with geysers of blood. And then Scylla is airborne, punted over the ruins of the Capitol.

The hammer-headed Kaiju lands across buildings, which absorb its fall like a memory foam cushion, except that when the giant stands and shakes off the attack, the buildings remain squashed.

Ignoring the approaching Kaiju, Nemesis leans forward and roars again, but she doesn’t move. She’s instigating her adversary. Scylla takes the bait, thundering toward Nemesis, mouth agape.

When Scylla reaches the point of no return, Nemesis spins around, dragging her tail through a line of cars that are sent spiraling through the air. When her back is to Scylla, she pulls the tail around behind her, whipping it up and out, catching Scylla beneath its outstretched arms. One of the nasty spikes on the end of Nemesis’s tail stabs into the monster’s side, and the force of the blow knocks Scylla up and over, flipping the Kaiju head-over-heels. It seems impossible, that something so large could spin through the air like that, but there it is; a big-ass Kaiju, cartwheeling like Mary Lou Retton.

Scylla slams through the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, crushing both horse and rider, before landing in the Capitol Reflecting Pool with a mighty splash. The impact rolls beneath the White House like an earthquake. Scylla thrashes in the water, draining the large pool. Its groans are pitiful. The monster attempts to roll and sit up, but fails. Then it falls back with a grunt, brown blood flowing from its side. Scylla is down, but not out. Its eyes remain open, its chest heaving with each breath. Mostly it looks confused.

It’s never felt pain before
, I think.

And now that it has, it’s stunned. Bewildered. But definitely not mortally wounded. Not if it’s related to Nemesis. It won’t be long before Scylla’s back on its feet. And with the arrival of Karkinos and Typhon, that would be a bad thing.

Nemesis is going to need some help.

I lower the binoculars and take out my phone, dialing Woodstock.

“We’re here.” It’s Alessi.

“Why didn’t Woodstock answer?” I ask.

“He’s flying,” comes the curt answer.

“Why didn’t Collins—”

“She was shot,” Alessi says.

In the fraction of a second before she speaks again, I find myself feeling lightheaded. Panic races through my body, erasing the effects of the adrenaline that’s been coursing through my veins for the past twenty minutes. I feel my legs grow weak. I feel short of breath. My chest hurts.

“Her armor stopped the bullet,” Alessi says, “but she’s pretty sore.”

“I’m fine,” Collins says in the background, her voice barely audible over the chopper’s thrumming rotor blades.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“A mile out from the two bigger Kaiju,” Alessi says. “To the east. We’re within range.”

I glance through the binoculars, looking past the twin titans that are Karkinos and Typhon. Even if I could see past their towering bodies, the smoke, fires and flashing lights of a city gripped by horror make it impossible for me to spot Betty’s running lights in the night sky. “How many shots do we get at this?”

“Two,” she says. “Which one should we target?”

I look at the two approaching Kaiju. Karkinos is a beefier version of Nemesis. It’s a little shorter, but far thicker and more muscular, easily out-weighing Nemesis. It’s also covered in boney spikes, and sports a carapace running down its back, no doubt hiding a pair of reflective wings. I used to think that Nemesis perfectly represented what I thought a monster-god of vengeance would look like, but Karkinos reveals that Nemesis is a more delicate version of what she could have been, probably thanks to Maigo’s DNA.

Typhon is eerily human-like. Very masculine as well. Of all the new Kaiju, he’s the only one I really feel comfortable assigning a sex to. This monster is a dude, hands down, even if he does lack any kind of discernable Kaiju junk. He carries himself with a confidence that is obnoxious. Like he’s actually a god and we’re all ants, barely worth his attention. While the other Kaiju are ruled by emotion, Typhon seems almost cold and calculating. But he’s also far less defended. While he’s got spikes and claws in strategic areas of his body—elbows, knees and forearms, most of him is covered in thick, ropey flesh. The perfect target.