Project Nemesis (A Kaiju Thriller) (28 page)

39

The pain was intense, but brief, flaring out from her chest and then away. When the light faded, the world around her had changed. The life she had sensed all around her no longer existed.

And it felt wrong.

She didn’t know why. The humans were prey.

Though the whales she’d eaten, while not psychologically satisfying, avoided upsetting her growing emotional side. They also satiated her physical hunger long enough to stay focused on the force driving her since she opened her eyes.

Justice.

Retribution.

Vengeance.

In the silence that followed the explosion, her thoughts cleared. There was nothing for her here, which meant her journey was not yet over. Sloshing through the now boiling ocean, she turned south. From her three-hundred-twenty-foot height, she could see the towering skyscrapers of Boston, many far taller than her. Despite their size, she sensed they were nothing more than man-made mountains and posed no threat.

What she saw between her and the city, which called to her with every beat of her tank-sized heart, were a number of objects that made her pause. She had felt the sting of their weapons, and though she survived, the pain was still fresh in her mind. She thought about avoiding the jets in the sky and ships in the sea, but they would just be waiting for her when she surfaced.

Her competing traits—mind, body and soul—fought for the best course of action. Her mind, which was fueled by thoughts of destruction, violence and unbridled revenge for the wrongs done to her, both past and present, wanted to charge forward and crush everything in her path. It’s what she’d always done. What she’d been sent here for. But her emotions riled against such thoughts, tempering the rage with...mercy.

The mind revolted at the thought.

She hadn’t found what she was looking for in the condo building, but she could sense guilty humans all around. There were innocents, too, but their deaths had once been acceptable.
Now...
If not for the explosion, which was not her doing, she would have left the harbor without laying waste to it. Her pursuit for justice took her somewhere else, and when she found the object of her rage, which her intellect did not yet understand, nothing would stand in her way.

Her body was a driving force when hunger struck, the need for sustenance superseding all thought or feelings. Right now, the body sent warnings of imminent pain, but continued to grow and change in ways that supplied the mind unceasing confidence.

A wave of energy suddenly passed through her, drawing her eyes to the tall buildings. She could feel...something.
A signal.
A beacon.
Then it came clear and for the first time she knew. She remembered.

Her emotions welled up, and for the first time since they emerged, they were in concert with her intellect and body, screaming for vengeance. Functioning as a whole, she opened her mouth and let out a roar that every person in Boston, every jet in the sky and every ship on the sea, would hear. They would know she was coming.

If they were smart, they would flee.

If they weren’t, they would die.

She lunged forward into the water, casting up waves that crashed to shore, pulverizing charred homes. She flattened her arms and legs against her body and with a thrash of her tail swam out to sea.

She made no effort to hide her approach or avoid a fight.

Adrenaline fueled her body.

Rage filled her thoughts.

Bloodlust drew her forward—not on a straight line for her target, but on a path that would bring her into direct contact with each and every human that wished to do her harm. That was something she would not stand for. Not ever again.

Seeing in the ocean lacked the clarity that being in the open provided, but her powerful eyes amplified light when needed, and as the images viewed by the eyes were processed by the brain, the distortions created by currents, waves and pollutants were compensated for. The result was a fairly clear image of a submarine three miles away and closing.

Doubling the submarine’s speed, she plowed through the ocean, slipping beneath the surface when it became deep enough to accommodate her size, which was still expanding, and once again growing tight and itchy.

Two small cylinders shot out of the front of the submarine while it was still a mile off.
Then two more, two more and two more.
The way they were fired, in quick succession felt like the panicked kicks of a zebra being chased by a lion. She knew the cylinders were weapons. They might cause her great pain. But she also knew they would not kill, stop or slow her down.

She closed her eyes, lowered her carapace and took all eight torpedoes head-on. They stung, like bees, she thought, but she had only a hazy memory of what that meant. The sound of the explosions rang loud in her ears. In response, she let out a roar. The powerful sound carried perfectly through the water and reached the submarine at full strength, filling the metal tube with an echoing rage.

She could hear the men inside screaming in pain, ears shattered by the force of her roar. The sound drew her closer, fueling her thirst for destruction.

The 377-foot-long submarine was about the same size as her body if measured snout to tail, but it lacked her bulk, maneuverability and ferocity. Before it could fire another salvo, she swam alongside the massive sub, gripped the front of it in one clawed hand and the back in another, freezing it in place.

The modern killing machine was now nothing more than an oversized banana in the hands of a hungry child. Opening her massive maw, Nemesis wrapped her mouth around the sub’s midsection and bit down. Exerting an unimaginable amount of pressure to the diamond hard tips of her teeth, she bit through the hull, filling it with dozens of puncture wounds, each several feet in diameter. When she withdrew her teeth, fountains of bubbles exploded from the sub’s interior. She flexed her arms and the weakened hull snapped in half. Air exploded into the water and rose up as a shimmering cloud. It was followed by the bodies of sailors, some still living, sucked out into the ocean.

She was about to eat the men, but a distant thrum,
thrum
, thrum turned her south toward Boston. Vengeance was near.

The cleaved halves of the sub sank to the bottom, the ballasts ruptured. Thirty-two sailors remained behind, free floating in the ocean’s depths.

She left the scene, swimming fast again, cresting the surface where she found two large ships, six helicopters and four circling jets waiting. Brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, jaws snapping, she let out a war cry that made the hearts of the men standing in her path quake with fright.

Then, she charged.

40

I wake with a groan, confused by where I am and my spinning view of the world around me. When I start to feel nauseous, I close my eyes and focus on what I can hear—nothing but a high pitched whine—and what I can smell. The odor is familiar.
A mix of mechanical and human scents, one of which is Collins.
I hadn’t realized she had a distinct smell before, but I know she’s here. I reach my hand out, and I feel something solid and curved. I then register the tightness across my chest.

A seatbelt.

Then I remember.
Nemesis.
The attack.
The explosion.

I’m in the helicopter.

I open my eyes again. I’m less dizzy, but everything is still shifting left to right. I fight it long enough to look to my left. Woodstock is in the pilot’s seat, slumped forward. His chest rises and falls with a steady rhythm. I look back for Collins. She’s sprawled across the two back seats, but breathing.

When I look forward again, the world twists around me, but I notice another reason for my disorientation. The helicopter landed askew. One skid is on the foot-high landing pad. The other isn’t.

I push open my door, but it slams shut again. Stupid gravity, I think, and then shove it open again with enough power to open it all the way. I can see it’s balanced precariously between “it’s safe to exit,” and “I’m going to smash your face in,” so I unbuckle and pull myself out slowly and carefully.

My legs feel weak when I hit the concrete landing pad, so I take a moment to steady myself. After several deep breaths, I stand up straight and open my eyes. The world is no longer spinning, but I wish to God it was.

I stumble toward the ocean-facing side of the mansion’s roof, taking in a scene of destruction straight out of an apocalyptic movie.

A ring of black covering the land in Beverly and Salem, segmented by the ocean, is the first thing I see. Portions of both cities fringing the coast line for at least a quarter mile inland have been incinerated. I don’t see any fires burning. Everything is just charred to the core—burnt so hot and fast that there isn’t even smoke, though I can smell the burn on wind.

How many people were left in those buildings? How many more people have died?

I clench my fists. If the President was here, I would kick him in the nuts.

A curtain of rising white mist, like a giant ghost, pulls my eyes to the harbor.
It’s
steam, I realize. The ocean is hot.

Sunlight cuts through the steam, shimmering off the water’s surface and thousands of small reflective objects.

Dead fish.

Everything within a quarter mile of the blast’s epicenter has been superheated—land and sea.

“Oh my God,” Collins says, stepping up next to me. I’m surprised by her arrival, but too shocked to react in any way other than to just look in her direction. “Where is it? Where is Nemesis?”

In my dazed state, I forgot to look for the creature. I focus on the part of the harbor where I last saw the behemoth.

Nothing.

I search farther out to sea.

“There’s no sign of her,” I say.

“I can’t imagine anything surviving an explosion like that,” she says. “Maybe it was destroyed?”

I look for signs of Nemesis’s body. She was massive, so there should be chunks of her everywhere, scattered around the city, maybe farther, but I don’t see anything. Maybe she was vaporized? Is such a thing even possible?

“God damn,” Woodstock says.

I turn around to find him climbing out of the chopper. He gives the helicopter a quick once over, more concerned for it than
himself
or us, which means he’s fine.

“Any damage?”
I ask him.

“She’ll fly,” he says. “Our next take-off is going to be a might wonky, but she’ll fly.”

A shouting woman draws my eyes to a neighboring house. All of the ocean-facing windows have been blown out. I look down the street and see the same thing. I turn around, looking at the houses on the backside of the hill.
The same.
Stepping to the edge of the mansion, I look down. The Crow’s Nest has no windows, which means all that glass is now inside.

Shifting glass from below is followed by a grunt,
then
I hear Watson say, “Cooper? Cooper!”

I’m running for the roof door before he’s done shouting her name. I thunder down the single flight of steps and burst into the Crow’s Nest, which is now a kaleidoscope of glass shards. Most of it litters the floor, but several large triangles protrude from the walls like a clan of glass-flinging ninjas rode through.

Watson is on the left, by Cooper’s station. He’s bleeding from a wound on his forehead, but it doesn’t look too bad, and not nearly as bad as Cooper. She’s lying on the floor with a five inch shard of glass rising from her chest. I rush over and fall to my knees beside Watson.

When I look at Cooper’s chest, I’m both horrified and relieved. The shard is large and there’s no way to tell how deep it is without yanking it out, and I’m sure as hell not going to do that. She’d bleed out in less than a minute. My relief comes from the wound’s placement, far to the side of her lungs and heart.
If she can get to a hospital, and soon, she’ll make it.

I turn to Woodstock, who followed me down with Collins. “Warm up the chopper. You need to—”

A hand grips my wrist. It’s Cooper. “Is it dead?”

I think for just a second and answer truthfully. “I doubt it.”

“Then you need the chopper,” she says.

“Horseshit,” I say. “You’re—”

“Hudson!” she says, her voice surprisingly commanding despite the grave wound. “Everything bad that has happened so far has mostly been because people are not listening to you. They’re going to wage a war on U.S. soil and I’m not sure we can win. Millions could die. Entire cities might be destroyed. If they can’t kill it, you need to stop it. It’s why we’re here. It’s your job.” She looks at the others. “And it’s your job, too.”

As I listen to Cooper’s passionate plea and see the way she’s fighting against the pain, I realize how much I have come to respect and admire her. More than that, I now know she is a dear friend. She notices the wetness forming around my eyes and takes my hand. “I’ll be fine, but you need to stop it.”

I nod. I have no idea how such a thing will be possible, but she’s right. Stopping threats like Nemesis is why FC-P was formed. I’d never taken it seriously before, but I now understand the reason for our agency’s existence. Paranormal threats do exist and it’s our job to stop them, even if it is just once every five years. And I can’t ignore that responsibility because Cooper is injured, or even if she dies.

“You’re still going to the hospital, though.” I turn to Watson. “Drive her to the hospital. It’s just five minutes by car. Make sure they know who she is and see her immediately. Go now. They’re going to be very busy, very soon.”

“Wait,” Cooper says, then to Watson. “Did you tell him?”

“Tell me what?”

“General Gordon surfaced,” Watson says.

“Where?”

“In Boston,” Watson says. “He’s on the roof of the Clarendon Back Bay building. Has a hostage.”

“Who?”
I ask, continuing the game of twenty questions.

“News choppers got some pictures, which
is
how Gordon was
ID’d
, but the hostage is wearing a hood. Police tried to breach the roof, but the stairwells are all booby trapped. Two officers died.”

“What the hell is he doing?” I ask, and I’m sure no one has an answer for that, but then Collins says, “Hold on. When did Gordon show up on the roof?
While we were in the chopper?”

Watson nods, and I think I know what Collins is thinking.

“Around the same time Nemesis was about to put the smack down on that condo?” I ask.

“Actually,” Watson says, “Yeah. The bulletin went out around the same time, maybe thirty seconds before. I was going to tell you when I saw Nemesis raising its arm. But...it has to be a coincidence, right? Gordon is in Boston.”

“And Nemesis has been heading south,” I say. “Once you have Cooper admitted, find out if there is a connection between the condo and something in Boston.”

“Think you also have to consider that this Gordon guy is somehow controlling the creature,” Woodstock says. “He was there when it was made, right?”

“Actually,” I say, “he had her made...and I’m pretty sure he has part of her inside him.” That Woodstock made this connection means I made the right call asking him to be on the team. It also means I need to sharpen my intellect. I don’t know if he’s right, but I should have thought of it. “Find out if Gordon has a connection to the condo, too.”

Watson nods, runs to his station and picks up a laptop bag, which he throws over his shoulder. “Our power is out, which means we have no network access, but the hospital is far enough away from the blast zone that they still might have connectivity, and even if they don’t, they’ll have backup power. I’ll be in touch.” He bends down and scoops Cooper into his arms. I have always thought of Watson as pure
pudge
, but the way he lifts Cooper up reveals he’s got some serious muscle hiding beneath his chubby exterior.

As Cooper is carried toward the stairs, she points to her workstation.
“Hudson, on my desk.”
Then they’re gone, moving down the three flights of stairs to the cars parked outside.

I move to the desk, expecting to find some kind of report or folder full of information. Instead, I find a maroon beanie cap. With a smile, I brush off the broken glass and place the cap on my head. I know Cooper didn’t have time to go out and buy me a new cap, so she must have already had this one on hand, just in case.

Take care of her, I think in my head, and I realize I’ve just said a prayer for the first time since I was a kid. If there can be three-hundred-foot tall giant alien monsters, why not God? And if there is a God, we’re going to need him, or her, or whatever, on our side.

I head for the stairs leading to the third floor and my bedroom. “I need to get something. Anything you need to do to get that chopper ready, do it.”

“Boston?” Woodstock asks.

“Boston.”