Project Nemesis (A Kaiju Thriller) (26 page)

I nod.
“A lot bigger.”

36

By the time we get back to FC-P, it’s two in the morning, and after the last couple of days, my eyes are hanging heavy. I sit at my desk while retelling the details of what we found at the beach. I ask Cooper to put the Coast Guard and Navy in the area on a higher alert, and ask that those sweeping the waters to the north, work their way south. My last request is a pot of coffee.

When Cooper leaves, Watson confirms that the land in Alaska is owned by a series of shell companies leading back to
Zoomb
. As he explains how he uncovered this information, I lean my head back and close my eyes. I hear him saying something about showing me satellite photos of the site.

And then, the coffee is there, tickling at my nose.

I open my eyes to what feels like a spotlight. “Turn the lights down,” I say, covering my face with my hands.

“Hard to turn off the sun,” Cooper says.

The sun?

I open my eyes again, moving out of the light by rolling my chair to the side, and I find the early morning sun pouring through the fourth story windows, the way they do every morning.

Cooper stands next to me, still looking impeccable in her power suit, but there are bags under her eyes. She stayed up all night. She’s holding a large, steaming coffee mug.

“You shouldn’t have let me sleep,” I say.

“I would have woken you if anything new developed,” she says.

I take the mug, and take a blissful sip. My body relaxes from the heat, familiar flavor and the knowledge that caffeine will soon hit my bloodstream. I blink my eyes and sit up straighter. Watson is at his computer, typing away. He doesn’t like to use the same cup twice, so there’s a collection of empty coffee mugs next to his workstation.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Six in the morning,” Cooper replies.

Six is hardly my typical wake-up time. Cooper’s words sink in—I would have woken you if anything new developed. My heartbeat doubles its pace. “What happened? Do we need to leave?”

“Nothing that requires immediate action,” she says.

As my racing heart slows, I notice that Collins and Woodstock aren’t present. “Where are the others?”

“I assigned them rooms on the second floor,” Cooper says. “They decided to sleep when they saw their fearless leader passed out in his chair.”

I look up at her in time to see a small smile before she can hide it. “Coop, was that a joke?
And a smile?
We’re going to have to keep you up all night more often.”

“I’d rather not,” she says, returning to her normal straight-faced self. For a moment, I wonder if she’d be a fun drunk, but then I remember seeing her drink half a bottle of wine one Christmas while we three loners, with no place to go, watched the snow fall, and later, kids sledding in a neighboring backyard. The alcohol seemed to have no effect, but that might have simply been a result of whatever Christmas memories she was trying to ignore.
That,
or she just needs something stronger.
An experiment for another day.

“Do you want me to wake them?” she asks.

“Get Collins,” I say. “Woodstock needs as much sleep as possible.”

She nods in agreement. “Tired pilots are never a good thing.”

“And he’s old,” I say, looking for a smile.
Nothing.
“Tell me what happened.”

“Last night, sometime before you were called out to see the whales, a booze cruise steamship out of Portsmouth disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Last known contact was with the harbor master, who ordered all ships dock after the creature took to the ocean in Portland.”

I nod. I’m the one who made the request that all ships return to port.

She continues. “But the ship never returned. There was no mayday sent. No GPS locator activated. This morning, the Coast Guard spotted debris that could have come from the steamship, but there was no way to identify it. However, based on the circumstances, I think it’s safe to say that the ship was destroyed and everyone on board killed.”

I cringe.
“How many on board?”

“Manifest shows three hundred, but it was a private party, so whoever showed up was let on board. The person running the ticket booth at the time said he stopped letting people on board once it reached capacity.”

“Which is?”

“Three fifty,” she replies. “Apparently, many of the last to board were...entertainment.”

“You mean hookers,” I say.

She nods.

“
Which is going to make identifying them a little harder.
” I say.

“With all due respect to the dead, that’s not our problem,” she says. “Local police and FBI can handle those details. We need to focus on the big picture.”

The emphasis she puts on, “big,” makes me think she’s being funny again, but her face is like solid stone.

“Which is?” I ask.

Watson stops typing, sits back from his computer and picks up a couple of manila folders. He rolls across the hardwood floor and stops next to me. He hands the folders to me and says, “Open the top folder.”

All of Watson’s normal joviality is gone. “You sound like her,” I say, motioning to Cooper.

“Not all of us got to sleep last night,” he says, sounding genuinely irritated, but then he softens. “Sorry. That was stupid. I was sitting at a desk while you were getting shot at and almost eaten.” He looks at me, waiting.

“Don’t sweat it,” I say, freeing his mind to get back on task.

I open the top folder to an 8x10 print of a satellite photo. It’s a big brown patch of land lacking any trees or any other kind of growth. There’s a large tunnel at the center of the picture, reinforced with a concrete archway. The rest is scoured earth, either dug out by heavy machinery or blown to bits with precision explosives. Scattered around the image are tractors, dump trucks and people in hardhats. “This is the land in Alaska? Looks like a mining operation.”

“Yes, and it’s very similar to a mining operation,” he says. “They definitely took something out of the ground, but the site is no longer active. No machinery. No people.”

“I see plenty of people in this image,” I say.

“That’s an archived image from eleven months ago,” Watson says. “It was taken by a mapping satellite on a routine flyby. Turn to the next image.”

I flip the photo over. The next 8x10 doesn’t look anything like the first. It’s just a mass of brown earth. I compare the two, noting the color of the soil. “It’s the same place. When was the second image taken?”

“Three months ago. I don’t have a live image yet because it’s still dark in Alaska, but I expect it to look just like that.” He points to the second image. “Whatever they were doing up there, they’re done, and I doubt they left anything behind.”

“Still,” I say. “Someone up there should take a look.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Cooper says.

“What’s in the second folder?” I ask.

When the question brings a frown to both Cooper and Watson’s faces, I know it’s not good.

“It just came in ten minutes ago,” Watson said. “It’s why we woke you up.”

“Is it Nemesis?” I ask. “Did it come back?”

“It’s General Gordon,” Cooper says.

I flip open the second folder. I’m greeted by an image no one should see just a few minutes after waking up. Four dead
men,
piled in the back of a black SUV. The vehicle and suits scream “agency”. The mental leap to their identities isn’t hard to make.
“FBI?”

“These are the men we had watching
Zoomb
headquarters at the Prudential Tower in Boston. Their bodies were discovered two hours ago after a cleaning crew discovered the bodies of four security guards and a receptionist on the fiftieth floor.”

I turn the page and see the bloody carnage.

Nemesis wasn’t the only monster on the loose last night.

I turn to the next image. It’s of one of the FBI agents. He’s been laid out on the pavement, half concealed by a body bag, but his shirt has been opened to reveal his chest, which has been caved in.

“The coroner hasn’t examined the bodies yet,” Cooper says. “But based on the size and depth of the impact wound, he thinks a steel beam fell on the man’s chest.”

I shake my head, no, remembering Gordon’s strength. “He was punched.”

“Punched?” Cooper actually sounds surprised.

“I don’t think Gordon is fully human anymore,” I say. “What was he
after.
”

“Looks like he was there for Paul Stanton,
Zoomb’s
CEO. There were signs of a struggle in the office, and a broken window, along with a second ten floors below. Witnesses recall a helicopter taking off from the building late last night. We thought that Gordon had kidnapped Stanton, but he turned up in Martha’s Vineyard and claimed to have been there all night.”

“Any sign of Gordon since?” I ask.

“None,” she replies.

The sound of approaching footsteps turns us all around. Collins pads into the Crow’s Nest wearing one of my T-shirts...and that’s it, as far as I can see, anyway. Her wavy, orange hair is in a tussle. Her eyes are half closed. Totally unaware of her powers, she pauses to stretch, lifting her
arms,
and the shirt, arching her back and pushing out her chest.

“Whoa,” Watson says.

“This will just not do,” Cooper says.

I mentally take my “let’s take it slow,” decree to an imaginary firing range, shoot the shit out of it and then light it on fire.

As she walks closer to us, we watch her in silence. The light dims as a cloud moves in front of the morning sun and Collins opens her eyes a bit wider.

“Hey,” she says, sleepily. “What’s going—holy
shit!
”

Her eyes pop open, locked on the wall of windows.

I spin around and nearly fall out of my chair.

We’re a mile from the ocean. Powder Hill, the tallest in the area, is two hundred feet at its peak, which is the land the Rosen residence was built upon. Being on the fourth floor adds another forty feet. We’re pretty used to looking down at the rest of the world from the Crow’s Nest, which I think was the intent of Mrs. Rosen’s grandfather, but the object blotting out the sun stands just as tall.

Nemesis wades through Beverly Harbor like a kid walking out of the surf a foot from shore—the water coming up to its knees.

I stumble to the window and rest my hands on the glass, frozen in amazement. It’s over two hundred and forty feet tall.
Pushing three hundred at least.
While still lithe for a towering monster, its body has some extra bulk where, what were once bumps on the elbows, knees and high ankles, have grown into horrible looking spikes. Plates of thick armor cover much of its body, along with twisting coils of thick flesh. The thing’s hands are now massive and while the thumb appears to have grown in a way I’d expect, the index and middle fingers have fused into a single, double tipped digit, while the ring and pinkie fingers have receded. The pinkie isn’t much more than a claw protruding from the side of the hand. The tail looks even more deadly as each of the three pronged blades looks to be the size of a 747 wing. Its facial features have lost all traces of humanity—except for the eyes. Those remain deep brown. Its thickly plated black brow is furrowed, and its lips are upturned in a permanent sneer that reveals its mammoth tusk-sized teeth. Overall, Nemesis is still recognizable as the same creature it was before, it’s just a shitload bigger, and exaggerated in dangerous looking ways.