Project Nemesis (A Kaiju Thriller) (3 page)

2

Dr. Kendra Elliot threw a manila folder across her office and let loose a string of curses that would make a sailor squirm. The fifty-seven sheets of data-laden paper exploded from the folder like confetti, half en route to the wall, half when the folder hit it. By the time the last sheet slipped onto the dull gray industrial carpet, Elliot’s anger had been replaced by regret. The pages weren’t numbered, and though the pages declared her failure, careful study of what went wrong would help her find her mistake, and correct it.

Hopefully before I die, Elliot thought.

She stood from behind the executive desk that she neither liked nor had gotten accustomed to in the four years she’d sat behind it. Her hip somehow found the desk’s corner as she rounded the cherry wood behemoth. She grunted in pain and clenched her teeth against her returning anger. She wanted to scream out a curse, but held her tongue. She was one of the lead researchers at
BioLance
, a government-funded laboratory working on a slew of different projects ranging from gene-splicing to tissue regenerating foam and to the cure for cancer, and she did her best to act the part. Elliot’s current focus was Project:
ROG
(Rapid Organ Growth). The lab operated like many others around the country with one glaring difference.
BioLance
didn’t exist. It was a code name.

And despite the fact that the facility appeared to be run like any other high-tech firm, Elliot was under no illusions; she worked for the Man. She didn’t mind. The money was great, the resources essentially unlimited and the staff beyond comparison. More than that, since the lab didn’t officially exist, and no one’s real names appeared on any documents, she could bend, or break, any laws she needed to with two exceptions. The two strictly enforced rules were:

1. Never do anything to endanger the public.

2. Never do anything to reveal
BioLance
, its resources, experiments, data and personnel identities to the public.

She suspected that rule number one was actually an extension of rule number two, rather than genuine concern for public welfare. As a result, the facility and the staff that worked and lived there were guarded closely. She didn’t even know where the lab was located, though she suspected the Northeast, based on the trees and terrain she could see through her office window, though it could have easily been Canada.

Elliot glanced down at the corner of the desk that had jabbed her hip. The finish was actually worn from the number of times she’d run into it. And it wasn’t because she had childbearing hips.
Just the opposite.
Her body was tall and rail-like. Not even the tight-fitting power suit she wore could accentuate her curves. There was nothing to accentuate.

It wasn’t the desk’s fault, either. At seven feet long, the desk was large, but the office was far larger, accommodating several bookcases, cabinets and an executive table with ten chairs, with room to spare. It was her eyes that betrayed her. She wore thick glasses that might have been in style thirty years previous. They shrunk her blue eyes to the size of almonds and ruined her depth perception.

With a sigh, Elliot bent down and picked at the fresh carpet of strewn pages. She put them in order by memory, scanning each page as she picked it up. When she reached the final page, her knees were sore, but she didn’t stand. She just looked at the ten numbered lines of text and the word “Failed” next to each one.

She hated that word with a passion.
Failed.
She’d heard it over and over again during her first twenty years of life, as her father, who wanted sons and got one girl, pushed her into sports. She had the body for it, strong, fast and agile, but not the mind. Despite being fiercely competitive, her intellect rarely focused on the field, court or rink.

His death, and the money left to his failure of a daughter, finally freed her to pursue her dreams. Eight years and four degrees later, her past caught up with her. Someone figured out that dear old Dad hadn’t died of entirely natural causes and she was the only suspect. But she wasn’t arrested. She was offered a job.

But she was still failing.

She crumpled the page into a tight ball and tossed it into the barrel across the room.

“You should have played basketball,” General Lance Gordon said from the doorway.

Had it been anyone else, she would have exploded with a torrent of verbal abuse. But Gordon was her employer, as well as the man who recruited her, and as such, he knew she was a murderer. Which might be why he stayed by the door.

She stood, straightened her dress and placed the folder on the desk. “What can I do for you, General?”

“For starters, be honest.”

“About?”

“Is the pressure too much? Can you handle it?”

Yes and no, she thought.
“No and yes.
I’m fine.” But she knew she wasn’t. A year ago, Gordon had asked the impossible. Find a way to grow viable, adult, human organs in under a month. He’d given her an eighteen-month deadline. She was no closer to success than she had been a year ago.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

He doesn’t believe me, she thought. He’s going to fire me right now. Not that people were ever fired from
BioLance
. They were disappeared.

“Tell about the results,” he said.

“You’ve seen the report?”

“You know how I feel about those reports,” he said. “Until one of you eggheads starts writing them in plain English, I’m not going to know what’s being said.” He motioned to the trash can containing the crumpled list of failures. “Though the last page sums up everything pretty well, I’d say.”

She cleared her throat. “In layman’s terms, we’ve successfully increased subject growth rate. Through a combination of genetic tinkering, steroids, electrical impulses, and raw materials provided by the umbilical, we can grow a twenty year old male inside of a month.”

“But?”
Gordon asked.

“But once it’s removed from the amniotic fluid, it loses viscosity. Organs become sludge.
Bones powder.
The body just falls apart.”

“But before that happens,” Gordon said, “the body is...alive?”

“Physically,” she said, “not mentally. We’ve engineered the bodies to grow with only a cerebellum, which controls bodily functions such as respiration, digestion and the heart. But there are no higher brain functions. No soul, if that’s your concern.”

“Hardly,” he said, and then reached into his leather jacket—no one wore uniforms—causing Elliot to flinch. Gordon paused, a smile on his face. “Don’t worry, Kendra, you’re still too valuable to let go.”

Still, she thought. She swallowed and determined always to be valuable.

Gordon took a glass vial from his
jacket’s
inside pocket. It contained a clear liquid. He held the vial out to her slowly. “Treat this like it’s your child.” He paused and corrected himself, “Unless you would treat your child like you did your—”

“I get the idea,” she said, and took the vial. A hand-written label had been stuck on the side, and up over the top, keeping the cap in place. She read the words aloud.
“
Kyodaina
”.

“Endo’s name,” he explained. “Not sure what it means. Don’t really care.”

Elliot was not a fan of
Katsu
Endo. She stood nearly five inches taller than him, but his eyes burned with a passion that made her uncomfortable. His unflinching loyalty to
Gordon,
and the gun worn on his hip, left few questions about the fate of the few people who’d lost their jobs during her time with
BioLance
. She’d share their fate, too, if she didn’t start producing results. She closed her eyes, imagining her end—staring in the burning brown eyes of
Katsu
Endo.

She wouldn’t allow it to happen. She would do anything—anything—to avoid it.

“What is it?” she asked, stepping closer to the General.

“DNA,” he said.

“From what?” she asked.

“You don’t need to know.”

She didn’t like that answer, but hid her aggravation behind a smile. “The computer is going to tell me what it is the moment it’s analyzed.”

“No. It’s not.”

Elliot stood so close that she felt his breath on her face and smelled the coffee he’d been drinking. French
Vanilla,
artificially sweetened. She looked in his eyes.
Tired and bloodshot.
Decaf.

“Just add this to your stew and see what happens.”

“That’s not very scientific,” she replied, her face just inches from his. She tilted her head and opened her lips slightly, the invitation as easy to read as a billboard.

“You’re not my type,” Gordon said, nonplussed by her blatant advance.

“You’re a man,” she replied. “Does it matter?”

He looked down briefly, his tongue flicking between his lips for just a moment.

It didn’t matter, she knew. Something else was stopping him.

She connected the dots.

“Our chances of success might increase if we focused on a single organ,” she said. It was a lie, but his answer told her everything she needed to know.

“The heart,” he said without missing a beat.

She stepped back and nodded. “Heart it is. I’ll get the team—”

“Not the team,” he said.
“Just you.”

“W—what?”

“You’re on your own, Kendra. Your team has already been dismissed.”

She blanched, which drew a laugh from Gordon.

“They’re confined to quarters.”

“Confined to quarters?” It didn’t make sense. What he was asking would take the entire team months of trial and error. That he was simply confining the staff to their quarters meant she had a very limited amount of time. “How long do I have?”

“Two days,” he said.

She flinched at this and dropped the vial. A gasp slipped from her lips as she bent down and tried to catch it. She missed.

But Gordon didn’t. He snatched the glass vial from the air just inches above the floor. She looked up into his angry brown eyes. “That is the last mistake you’ll make. Understood?”

She nodded quickly, her eyes locked on his for just a moment, before she snatched the vial from his hand and made for the door. The clock was ticking. Her life, and she suspected Gordon’s, depended on her success.

“Try not to worry, Kendra,” he called after her. “I think you’ll be surprised by the results.”

She held up the vial and looked at the clear liquid. What the hell is this?

3

My body and the screen door behind it are no match for the bear. It lowers its head like a bull, plows into my gut and shoves. As my insides shift and the air bursts from my lungs, I feel the door’s crossbeam flex and crack across my back. Pain lances through my arms and legs, and for a fraction of a second I worry that I’ve broken my spine. But then I feel the tug of the metal screen on my body as I pass through it and catapult to the ground, my landing cushioned only by my ass and the layer of brown pine needles covering the forest floor like wall-to-wall carpeting.

Wheezing for air, I scramble back from the cabin until my head whacks Betty’s side. My head spins from the impact and from lack of air, but I notice my arms and legs are working just fine.

Not paralyzed, I think.
Yet.

The bear steps out of the cabin’s front door with all the grim intent of a father who’s just found his teenage daughter in bed with a boy. It stands again, looking at me, trying to intimidate me and succeeding.

I find my breath and shout at the bear, “
Hiyah
!” But it comes out as a pitiful wheezy thing. If I ever do come up against a Sasquatch, I’m screwed.

My legs shake beneath me, but I manage to get to my feet. Now the bear thinks I’m trying to intimidate it. I’m not, but if I was, I’d be failing. The bear grunts again, taking two steps toward me before dropping to all four paws and pounding down the steps.

I grab the driver’s side door and yank. My hand painfully rips away from the handle.
Locked.

Why the hell did I lock my truck out here? Even in Beverly, Betty wouldn’t be a blip on a car thief’s radar.

The gun, I remember. I left my gun in the cab. That’s why I locked it. Unfortunately, that’s also why I’m trying to get in the cab.

The bear grunts as it reaches the bottom of the steps and makes a beeline for me.

An involuntary shout rises from deep inside me, fueling my flight. I turn around, plant my hands on the side of Betty’s flatbed and leap over and in. I land hard on my back, coughing for air and wincing in pain. But I’m hidden.

For about half a second.

The bear rises up, grabbing on to the side of the truck. Its long black claws squeak against the metal, grating on my ears. I roll to the far side of the flatbed, out of reach. As the truck rocks and more screeching fills the air, I realize the bear is actually trying to claw its way inside.

Black bears are rarely this aggressive, though there are plenty of accounts of people being mauled. And there is always the chance that this bear is rabid.

I reach into my right pants pocket, fumbling for my keys, but don’t find them. I’m momentarily confused, as though I’ve looked up and found the sky had turned red. I always keep my keys in my right pocket. I check the left anyway and as I suspected, find nothing.

That’s when I remember.

I unlocked the door.

When the bear charged, the keys were still in my hand. And since they’re not now... I sit up fast, which makes the bear flinch and fall, landing hard on its side.

I look over the side and can’t help but smile at the suddenly silly looking bear. “Looks like we’re both kind of screw-ups,” I tell it.

The bear gets back to its feet with a quickness that surprises me, lunging up and swiping at my face, missing by inches. I stumble back, catching myself on the cab before falling out of the flatbed with less grace than the bear.

“Keys,” I tell myself. “Find the keys.” Without them, I could be playing tag until the bear either gets bored or I get dead.

I glance toward the cabin, but have trouble focusing as my eyes keep flicking back to the black ball of death beating the shit out of my darling Betty’s paint job. I scour the porch.
Nothing.
No key.

I look into the dark doorway, but the cabin’s interior is deep in shadow. I strain my eyes, looking for the keychain, which holds five keys, a pocket jackknife and a mini-flashlight. A breeze tickles my skin and sifts through the trees. The pines creak. The maples sound like a librarian quieting some unruly patrons with a serious “
Shhhhh
”. Light dances across the pine floor of the forest, then up the stairs and into the doorway.

It’s just a flash of light, but hallelujah, my path has been revealed. The keys are a foot inside the door, on the floor.

Now I just need to get past the bear, snatch the keys, get back to Betty, unlock the door, hop inside and not get mauled.
No problem,
I tell myself,
for Chuck Norris.

The plan evolves in my subconscious and spurs me into action long before I can realize how stupid it is.
Some people might say this is instinct—acting quickly, without thought, to stay alive. As I hit the ground on the far side of the truck, I just think
it’s
nuts.

But I’m committed.

As is the bear.

The moment my feet hit the ground, the bear disappears from view. I know it’s running toward me, but I’m not sure if it’s going around the front or back of the truck. So circling the truck is out of the question. Going under the truck is too. Betty rides low to the ground and it would take a good minute to shuffle all the way to the other side. Over the top, I decide and hop back up into the cab.

The bear is faster than expected and nearly catches my foot in its jaws.

The bear took just two seconds to round the truck. That will give me about a three second lead if you figure in my speed and its reaction time. Not much. But I’ll work with what I’ve got.

Without pausing to look at the bear, I jump from the flatbed, land in a roll that springs me back to my feet and sprint to the cabin door. I can’t see the bear, but a loud grunt lets me know it’s in hot pursuit. I take the stairs in one leap, scoop up the keys as I pass through the door, and then remember the deadbolt.

I grip the heavy wooden door and fling it shut behind me, still heading toward the back of the cabin.

The door slams shut, the spring loaded deadbolt snapping loudly into place. A second slam shakes the entire cabin, but the door holds. I stop in the center of the living/dining room and look back. The door vibrates under a second attack, but holds. The bear can’t get through.

I plant my hands on my knees, catching my breath.

The bear has given up.

I twirl the keys around on my finger and laugh. At least I’ll have a story to tell this time.

A raspy mewl spins me around like an ice skater. My leg kicks out, connecting with an end table and knocking a vase full of fake flowers crashing to the floor.

The mewling grows frantic and I see the source.

Two baby bears.

Several things occur to me at once.

One: the bear is a mama protecting her young, which explains a lot, but kind of sucks, since this is pretty much the only scenario in which a bear will kill a human being.

Two: the door, which I have just locked behind me, was already locked when I arrived, which means mama bear has another way in. I’ve just locked myself in the bear’s den.

Three: I’m fairly screwed.

I back toward the front door, preparing to unlock it and bolt, but it’s suddenly slammed again. I jump away with a shout that scares the cubs.
Their mewl
becomes a frantic cry for help. A rectangle of light beyond the cubs catches my attention. The kitchen has a back door. It’s wide open.

The view beyond it catches me off guard. The cabin sits atop a small hill. Below that hill is the most pristine lake I’ve laid eyes on, outside of a National Geographic documentary, in ten years.
Sparkles of sunlight flicker on the windswept waves, shifting across the surface like a flock of birds.
The trees fringing the lake sway hypnotically, holding my attention.

That is, until the view is blotted out by seven hundred pounds of hungry mamma. If not for pausing to sniff her crying cubs, I’d be dead. In that two second
pause
I manage to unlock the front door, fling it open and throw myself down from the porch. By the time I hit the ground I hear the bear’s loud huffing and know she’s coming again.

I run into the car, crashing against the door and fumbling with the keys until I find the right one. Luckily, Betty and I have been together for a while—we’re simpatico, like long-time lovers—so slipping the key in and unlocking the door takes no thought. I slide behind the wheel, take hold of the door handle and pull. It crashes shut with such force that I think I’ve just transformed into Captain Marvel, though I don’t recall shouting “
Shazam
!”
That,
or the bear rammed the door. I look to the left.

It’s the bear.
Which is too bad.
I used to really like Captain Marvel.

I stick my tongue out at the bear and hold it just long enough to get it covered in glass cubes when the bear stands and brings its paws down on the window. I shout again and slide over to the passenger’s seat while Smokey the psychotic bear claws the crap out of Betty’s fake leather upholstery. Using the
keychain’s
smallest
key,
I unlock the glove compartment and grab hold of the holstered gun inside.

That’s when the rope holding the passenger side door shut since I was T-boned two months ago decides to give way. I spill out backwards, landing hard on my back. I groan and slowly open my eyes. They snap the rest of the way open when I see four clawed paws rounding the front of the truck.

I feel the holstered gun in my hand and with a practiced familiarity, unbutton the clasp and free the weapon with one smooth move. I turn the muzzle skyward and without looking, fire two shots in the air before pointing the weapon at the approaching jaws.

But I don’t fire.

There’s no need.

Even mamma bears can be spooked. With a cry that sounds like a deeper version of the cubs’ call, the bear backpedals and runs away, heading toward the lake. It calls out again as it passes the cabin and is joined by the two cubs, who scurry along behind. The
trio run
until I can’t see them. With any luck, they’ll keep going until they’re miles away.

Gun in hand, I feel safer than I did inside the truck’s cab. Speaking of which... I lean my head up, and look at Betty. “I put up with a lot. You know I do. But you almost got me killed here.”

I lean my head back, catching my breath. “It’s just not working out, Betty.”

It’s a joke.
For myself.
Fueled by the elation of not being gored.
But it actually makes me a little sad. I get to my feet, leaning my battered body on the truck’s hood. I pat the dull red metal. “I don’t mean it. I should have got the door fixed months ago.”

But I didn’t. Because that’s the way I am. I make a mental note to change my lax ways before they get me killed. Then I grab the twelve pack and head into the cabin.