Project Nemesis (A Kaiju Thriller) (2 page)

Endo gave a curt nod and without a word, dropped to the ground and slid into the hole.

“You’re sure about this, General?” Wilson said. “You don’t need to go in there.”

Gordon craned his head around toward Wilson, a single eyebrow perched high on his forehead like a pterodactyl swooping in for the kill. “I didn’t fly over the whole damned country of Canada to stare at a hole in the ground.”

Wilson snapped to attention, gave a nod and followed after Endo, landing on his feet. Gordon entered behind him.

A light bloomed. Endo aimed the powerful beam at the floor, letting the reflected light illuminate the area around them. Wilson did the same with his flashlight, as did Gordon.

“Where is it?” Gordon asked.

Endo stepped to the side and raised his flashlight. The beam penetrated the darkness and lit up a wall of what looked like mottled brown marble. He raised the beam higher, stopping when it reached what looked like a hooked stalactite taller than Gordon.

With a sigh, Wilson added his light. “Know what it is?”

Gordon aimed his flashlight at the ceiling. It was fifty feet up. He found the top of the object and followed it down to the floor.
Thirty feet tall.
He played the light to the right, stopping when the beam’s reach faded, more than two hundred feet away.

“Did anyone else see this?” Gordon asked.

“No sir,” Wilson said.
“Just the two of us.
And not for long.
The few details we saw before leaving are in our reports.”

“Your reports no longer exist,” the General said as he stared up at the empty eye socket big enough to drive a
Humvee
through. “As of right now, we are the only three people with any real knowledge of...this. And I would like it to stay that way. Do either of you have a problem with that?”

“No,” Endo said.

“No, sir,” Wilson added.

“Good,” Gordon said. “As of right now, you both work for me.”

Wilson managed to take his eyes off their discovery and looked at Gordon. “Endo’s Japanese, sir.”

The pterodactyl rose on the General’s forehead. He didn’t miss much, especially the plainly obvious. “I can see that.”

Wilson wilted a little and diverted his eyes back to the thing.

“I’ll need both of you here for the next few years before—”

“Next few years?”
Wilson said in surprise, though he never took his eyes off the monster.

“You have a problem with that?” Gordon asked.

“Not if my family can join me,” Wilson said. “I’m scheduled to head home in a month.”

“Family.”
Gordon said the word like it tasted bad coming out of his mouth. He turned to Endo. “You have family?”

Endo shook his head. “I am yours.”

The declaration was more intimate sounding than Gordon would have preferred, but when Endo turned his gaze back to the creature’s remains and the man’s eyes glowed with excitement, he realized the words had more to do with the beast than they did with him.

When Endo looked back at Gordon, the General waved him closer, but spoke to Wilson.
“How many kids, Master Sergeant?”

“Two, sir,” Wilson replied.
“Boys.
Five and seven.”

While Wilson replied, the General drew his side arm. He turned it around and handed it to Endo, who looked at the weapon with wide eyes before casting his gaze on the General.

Gordon motioned to the back of Wilson’s head. Gave a nod and a smile like he was welcoming Endo to a theme park, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Endo looked down at the weapon in his hand. It was a sound-suppressed M9 9mm handgun. Not the world’s most powerful gun, but more than enough to do the job.

Endo frowned.

Then shrugged.

He raised the pistol, pointed it at the back of Wilson’s head and pulled the trigger.

PROLOGUE II

Two Weeks Ago

Maigo
Tilly
dropped her bright pink Hello Kitty backpack onto the kitchen’s cold, tan slate floor. It glowed with innocence. Her high forehead pinched together at the midline, eyebrows twisting up. Her lips trembled in time with her fingers. She stared at the red.

The growing pool found the floor’s grout and flowed down the straight track, heading for
Maigo’s
stocking toes. She stepped away from it, keeping to the center of a single tile while her mother’s blood flowed around her, following the grout like the channels of a sacrificial altar.

But the blood couldn’t hold her attention. The frozen scene beyond it called to her. Her eyes rose slowly, first seeing the bare foot of her mother, twitching as her life faded. Then the twitching stopped.
Maigo
could tell her mother was dead by her skin. Normally tan, it was now sickly pale. Her mother’s designer dress was stained with red from below, the fluid pulled up through the cotton fabric.

The shaking in
Maigo’s
lips grew severe as her eyes skipped past her mother’s hands and the horror there, and looked at her face. Whatever the woman had been feeling at the time her life ended had been erased. The face revealed nothing.
Her skull, however—everything.
Her head, once a smooth curve, was now a crescent. Most of it was missing.

Not missing.

Scattered.

Maigo
looked higher. The 33
^rd
-floor penthouse of the Clarendon Back Bay building provided stunning views of downtown Boston and the harbor. It was a castle in the sky—the kind reserved for Boston’s elite. It came with every amenity the seven-million-dollar price tag could fetch, including a Jacuzzi hot tub big enough to swim
in,
remote controlled everything and massive windows lining every outside wall. But the view of downtown was marred by streaks of maroon and clumps of pink. When a particularly weighty dollop of brain matter slipped free and struck the floor with a wet slap,
Maigo
finally gasped.

And then again.
And again.
She’d been holding her breath.

“
It’s
okay,
Maigo
,” her father said.

He was a stark contrast to her mother—plump, balding, pale and unkind.
Maigo
didn’t like her father much, but he was around so rarely that she was able to bear his moods. Also, her mother insisted.
Told her to be thankful.
To look at the view.
To enjoy their many blessings.

Maigo
said nothing. She was incapable.

“It was an accident,” he said. “No, it was—”

While her father decided what had happened,
Maigo
looked back to her mother’s hands. Her left arm and hand, perfectly manicured, lay to the side. Tears filled
Maigo’s
eyes as she remembered the feeling of those long, red, fingernails on her back, scratching her gently to sleep. The sadness faded when she looked at her mother’s right hand, interlocked with her father’s hands and a gun.
A pistol.
It was the kind a woman might own.
Small.
But
Maigo
knew everything about her mother. They had no secrets.

Not about school.
Or boys.
Or the bruises her mother hid.

She didn’t own a gun. She loathed them.

Maigo’s
trembling hands became fists when she saw that her father was wearing white plastic gloves, the kind that doctors wear.

“You did this,” she said, before she could realize she shouldn’t.

“No,” he said, “No! I found her like this. She did it to herself.”

Maigo
watched her father carefully loop her mother’s finger around the gun’s trigger.

“She killed herself,
Maigo
.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“She did.”

Fueled by anger,
Maigo
shouted, “You killed her!”

Her father frowned, but just a little. He picked up her mother’s hand, moving it again.

“Leave her alone,”
Maigo
said.

“Your mother killed herself,
Maigo
,” her father said, “but she killed you first.”

Maigo
looked at the gun and noticed it was now leveled at her core. The last thing she saw was a small grin on her father’s face.
Then—nothing.

1

Now

“You have got to be kidding me!” I shout to myself when Def
Leppard’s
Pour Some Sugar on Me blares from my pickup truck’s feeble speakers. If the flashback to my childhood wasn’t bad enough, every thump of the bass drum releases a grating rattle. Whoever owned the beat up, faded red Chevy S-10 before me blew nearly every speaker.
Probably some teenager.
Man, I’d like to punch that kid in the face. Of course, right now I’d like to punch every radio DJ within a hundred miles, too.

I tap the radio’s “seek” button. Boston.
More than a Feeling.

Again.
Jane’s Addiction.
Pets.

One more time.
Aerosmith.
Love in an Elevator.

I punch, literally punch, the radio’s power button, but all I manage to do is spin the volume up. Steven Tyler howls in my ear. The vibrating speakers make him sound like a smoker with an artificial voice box. I tap the button more carefully, despite the racket, and silence fills the cab once more.

My neck cracks as I roll it, releasing my music-induced tension. “Welcome to Maine,” I say, doing my best DJ impression, “home of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and...
that’s
it.”

I should probably invest in a new stereo system someday. Hell, I should probably buy a car with anti-lock brakes, eighteen airbags and all the other things most people care about. But that would require an effort beyond my actual desire to replace Betty.

Yeah, I named my truck. Betty was the name of my first girlfriend. Like this truck, she had a grating voice and a high maintenance personality. Despite girlfriend-Betty being easier on the eyes, I stayed with her for only six months. Pickup truck-Betty talks less.
And doesn’t complain when I turn her on.
We’ve been together for going on five years now, and even though she’s rough around the edges, she’s just about the only thing in my life that makes any sense.

I glance in the rearview. The road behind me is as empty as the road ahead. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror and shake my head. I don’t look like a DHS agent.
DHS—Department of Homeland Security.
Most of the people working for the DHS are straight-shooting, tight-ass suits. An inordinate percentage of the men have mustaches, like they’re 70s porn stars or 1900s Englishmen ready to engage in some old fashioned fisticuffs.

Of course, I am sporting the beginning of a beard myself, but that’s less of a style choice and more of a result of my ancient shaver, pilfered from my father when I moved out ten years ago, crapping out a week ago. I think it looks good, but if any of my superiors saw it, I’d probably get a good talking to.
Proper dress.
Appearances matter.
That kind of stuff.
It’s a good thing my superiors don’t give a rat’s ass about me or my department. I don’t think I’ve seen or heard from someone with a higher pay scale than mine in the last six months.

I adjust the maroon beanie cap covering my crew-cut brown hair. The tight-fitting knit hat has become a staple of my wardrobe, and it is a style choice, mostly because it disguises the fact that my hair is slowly retreating like soldiers from my muddy battlefield. I think it makes me look like The Edge, from U2, a band of the eighties, nineties, and today that I actually wouldn’t mind hearing on the radio.

My
smartphone
—which is really a company phone—cuts through the silence, saying, “Turn right,” in a far from sexy, yet feminine voice that is the closest thing I’ve had to a girlfriend in a year. Other than Betty, I mean. I spot the dirt road up ahead and turn onto the uneven surface. The road is covered in half buried stones the size of grapefruits and rows of hardened ridges formed by water, which, in combination with Betty’s rigid suspension, bounces me around like I’m on a grocery-store horsey ride, having a seizure.

Twenty minutes and a headache later, I arrive at my destination. I pull the truck into the lone parking space, put it in park and kill the engine. The car door creaks as it opens, allowing the outside world to wash over me. Warm summer air chases away the chill of Betty’s air conditioning, which works like a champ. The smell of pine and earth and, I think, water, fills my nose.

It’s been too long.

Once upon a time, I’d been a real salt of the Earth type. I camped, fished, hunted, slept under the stars and smoked a
doobie
or two. It’s been at least ten years of indoor and pot-free living since then. Thank God I’m not in drug enforcement. I’d be horrible at it, mostly because I think I’d let
all of the
potheads walk.

The small cabin is on loan to me from Ted Watson, one of two people I actually oversee. I’m supposed to hire two more team members out of whatever law enforcement branch I can entice them from, but I haven’t really bothered. Seeing as how every case I have is like a bad episode of The X-Files, but without the actual monsters, aliens and government conspiracies, I just don’t see the need to deal with more personalities.

Not that Ted is hard to deal with. He’s kind of like a grown up version of Chunk, from The
Goonies
—chubby, funny and he occasionally breaks into a
jiggly
dance. He’s also brilliant with computers and electronics. I’m pretty sure he got posted to my team because, like me, he doesn’t exactly fit the company profile. Anne Cooper, on the other hand, does. Cooper, who I call Coop, mostly because it bothers her, is a straight-laced administrator who does things by the book, even though so little of our mandate is in any book not written by a fiction author, a lunatic or both.

They’ve been with me for three years now, manning the home front—a house perched atop Prospect Hill in Beverly, Massachusetts. From the top floor you can see the ocean and, on a clear day, Boston. It’s a nice place to live and work, but it’s not the great outdoors.

Believe it or not, I’m not on vacation. I’m working. Watson’s family just happened to have a cabin in the area, and I felt like being nostalgic for a night before beginning my “investigation.”

With a shake of my head, I push away thoughts of the ridiculous day I’ll have tomorrow and hop up the steps to the front door. Despite the apparent disuse of the cabin, the porch wood feels firm beneath my feet. Maybe it’s faux worn, I wonder, like those beat-up looking hutches made for rich old ladies who want to have rustic kitchens without the actual rust.

I dig into my pocket for the key while scanning the area. Most of the trees are pines, though a few maples line the dirt road, their leaves glowing lime green in the afternoon sun. There’s no mailbox or even a number on the cabin. As I pull the key from my pocket, I lean back and peer down the road.
Nothing.
And there wasn’t a single house on the way here, which suits me, because while I don’t have any
doobies
, I do have a twelve-pack buried in a cooler full of ice.

I’m not supposed to drink on the job, but I’m not technically working right now and I’m pretty good at warding off hangovers. Besides, I’m pretty sure that even drunk off my ass, I’ll be able to figure out the mystery of Sasquatch.

Yeah, Sasquatch.

Fucking Sasquatch.

I work for the Department of Homeland Security, and I’m investigating a rash of
squatch
sightings in the northern woods of
Boonie
-town, Maine. When the DHS was created in 2002, in the wake of 9-11, the bill was loaded with “riders,” tacked-on provisions that wouldn’t normally pass if they weren’t attached to something guaranteed to pass, like the creation of the DHS. Riders usually have nothing to do with the actual bill, but the one that created my division did. The DHS has seventy Fusion Centers around the country. They’re hubs where
intel
and resources from federal and local law enforcement agencies can be pooled in an effort to openly share information between departments—something that might have helped avoid the events of 9-11. Each hub has its own lead investigator tasked with investigations that affect multiple law enforcement agencies, and that are a threat to national security. That’s me, lead investigator, except my Fusion Center has yet to be involved in any serious investigation. Fusion Centers are most commonly identified by the city they’re in, such as Fusion Center – Boston, my closest neighbor in the DHS, otherwise known as “those assholes in
Beantown
”.

The Fusion Center I head up is known as Fusion Center – P. The P is for “paranormal”.
Seriously.
The supernatural paranoid who added the rider believed the end of the world was nigh and that it would be a supernatural event. That’s also why we’re located in Beverly, Mass, next door neighbor to Salem, Mass. Salem being the apparent gateway to hell and home to the gruesome Salem witch trials, as well as scores of modern witches like Susan Beacon, who claimed she caused the “perfect storm” with a curse. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t praise the good Lord she made that claim before my stint at the FC-P began or I would have had to investigate it as a threat against the United States.

FC-P is the seventy-first Fusion Center and it doesn’t technically exist. You won’t find us in any public documentation. Despite its creation, the FC-P is pretty much an embarrassment. That’s why the ‘Paranormal’ on our IDs was reduced to the letter P.

The deadbolt unlocks smoothly, barely making a sound. I push the door open and step in. The dim room holds two comfortable looking rocking chairs, a dining room table, a wood stove and what appears to be a large, black bean bag. I try the lights, but nothing happens.

The breakers, I think, vaguely remembering Ted saying something about them being shut off. I move to take a step into the cabin, and freeze before I leave the doorframe.

The bean bag moved.

I reach for my gun, but find it missing. It’s in the truck.
Haven’t worn it in two years.
Imaginary creatures and specters don’t normally pose a threat.

Before I can think of what to do next, the screen door finally decides to slam shut behind me. The bean bag explodes with motion, rearing up a round head the size of a large pumpkin. Two large black eyes fix on me with unwavering focus.

Moving with slow, measured movements, the bear stands. It’s just about the same height as me, but is probably upwards of seven hundred pounds. I raise my hand in an “
its
okay” posture, like the bear will understand it, and I back away, but I don’t get far. My back smacks into the closed screen door, which makes a loud snapping sound.

The spooked bear huffs angrily, throws itself forward and charges.