“Leave him alone,” Cooper says from the far side of the room. Her voice is muffled by whatever book, diagram or directory she’s got her nose buried in. “He’s thinking.”
“About what?” Woodstock asks.
I actually hear Watson shrug. He’s a bit...portly, and the shrug manages to push some air from his lungs. Poor guy. If we ever had to evacuate, he’d be the snack that slowed the monster down long enough for us to escape. “Ashley said he didn’t talk much on the way home. Called him a brood, which is actually an alien race in the X-Men comics, but I don’t think that’s what she meant.”
I hear the high-heeled clack of Cooper’s approach. Without seeing her, I can visualize her dark power suit, tightly tied-back raven hair and her thick-rimmed glasses. I’m dressed in my usual summer-time uniform of brown outdoorsy sneakers, cargo shorts, an orange t-shirt and my red beanie cap. My winter uniform includes the addition of a red hoodie sweatshirt. But let’s be honest, sixty percent of men under forty-five in New England wear the same uniform—minus the beanie—like we’re all part of some secret club that has little fashion sense and really warm legs. Or maybe we’re all just lazy douche bags.
Cooper is still kind of a stick in the mud and a scrooge with regulations, but she’s transformed herself over the past year. She nearly died when Nemesis self-immolated in Beverly harbor. Although we were far enough away to avoid being burned, the shockwave shattered the windows—which are now two-inch-thick tactical glass—impaling Cooper. After physical therapy, she kept the same workout schedule, and she now has a sexy librarian look about her. If only Watson could get moving, he might have a chance. The affection is there. The attraction...well, he’s a grown-up Chunk. “Leave him be,” she says, shooing the duo away. “You know he’s—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, lifting my hand in a backwards wave. “I’m done thinking. Anyone catch the Sox game last night?” When I turn around, my team is looking at me like I’ve got Nemesis drool on my face. “What?”
“You haven’t said a word since arriving,” Cooper says.
“Allow me to translate,” Woodstock says, wandering back to his station, which is basically a lounge chair when he’s not flying. He kicks back and crosses his legs. “She expected you to have come to some kind of conclusion or insight while starring off into the blue.”
“How poetic,” Cooper says. She’s not entertained, by either of us.
Watson comes through for me. “Five to three. Sox over the Yankees.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard. On to the—” I search the room—a 1000-square-foot space on the fourth floor of the brick mansion that serves as our home and headquarters. There are ten work stations, most of them unused, and a large, ornate staircase at the back of the space. What once was a highly organized office of mostly nothing, has become a partially organized (thanks to Cooper) mess of case files, sent to us from every conceivable law enforcement agency, local and federal, going back fifty years, long before the inception of digital storage. But there’s one thing missing. “Where’s Collins?”
At the mention of Collins’s name, Buddy, aka Bud or Buddy-Boy, depending on who is talking to the dog, runs up to me, an excited look in his brown Australian shepherd eyes. He looks for Collins, his favorite, despite the fact that he belongs to Watson, and settles for me when he can’t find her. His head appears beneath my right hand, and I dutifully pet him.
“Went to get coffee,” Cooper says. “Said you hadn’t slept much on the flight home.”
That was an understatement. I’m not sure I slept at all. The one time I got close I was woken by a nightmare. Not of Nemesis. It was a clown riding a panda bear, chasing me through a house while smacking my back with a broken car antenna. I’ve had nightmares about bears since my close encounter a year before. And everyone hates clowns. Not sure about the car antenna. Maybe I’m being haunted by the ghost of Truck Betty. It’s more plausible than most of the cases stacked around the office.
“Sleep is overrated,” I say. “Coffee, on the other hand, is delightful.” I walk to my station and sink into my office chair, staring at the black screen for a moment. “Hong Kong...”
I turn to the others and find them waiting expectantly. Even Woodstock sits up and leans forward, hands on knees.
“It wasn’t Nemesis,” I tell them.
“Then what was it?” Watson asks, already typing at his computer, bringing up images of the ruined Hong Kong port. “What else could have done this?”
“Not sure,” I say. “Something we haven’t seen.”
Cooper crosses her arms. “How do you know? There weren’t any witnesses.”
“There was one,” I say, thinking of the mysterious blonde. “Whatever struck the port glowed orange like Nemesis, but was much smaller.”
“What about the prostitution ring?” Woodstock asks.
“Slave traders,” Cooper says, clarifying the crime.
Woodstock nods. “Right. What ’bout them? Don’t they fit Nemesis’s M.O.?”
“They do,” I say. “But there weren’t any bodies.”
“What’s your point?” Cooper asks, brows furrowed.
“Nemesis stopped eating people once she was fully grown. We’d hardly make a snack for her now. So why would Nemesis raid the port, eat nearly three hundred people and then leave?”
Watson scratches his head. “She’s...growing again?”
“Not her.” I say.
“Oh,” Watson says, pausing mid-scratch. His hand slowly falls to his lap. “Ohhh.”
I nod. He’s figured it out. “Whatever this thing is, it’s growing, too.”
A blaring sound from Cooper’s station makes us all jump. After I calm myself, I recognize the klaxon for what it is. “Is that Homer Simpson screaming?”
While Cooper runs for her desk, Watson says, “I set it up for her. She likes The Simpsons.”
First, Cooper doesn’t let anyone play with her computer. Second, I didn’t know she had a sense of humor. I’ve clearly spent too much time out of the office. “What’s the alarm for?”
“Nemesis sightings,” Watson says, and I feel my face pale, as the blood leaches away.
I head for Cooper. “Where?”
“Australia,” she says. “Sydney. At the Opera House.”
“How did it get from Hong Kong to Sydney in a day?”
No one has an answer, because its impossible.
“There’s photos this time. Lots of them.” She clicks away with her mouse, and the large view screen on the side wall of the room lights up, displaying several pictures of what appears to be a 100-foot-tall, part hammer-head, part gorilla creature with a familiar glowing triangle of membranes at the center of its chest.
“Could Nemesis have shrunk?” Woodstock asks.
“That’s not Maigo,” I say, letting slip my alternate name for the creature who nearly killed Cooper.
She shoots me an annoyed glance, but says nothing about it. “Then what?”
I step up to the large screen, looking at photos and watching short video clips. The monster is eating people. Devouring them whole, like a kid reaching into a bucket of Halloween candy. Ravenous. Starving. I’ve seen this before, when Nemesis was still pounding her way through Maine. But this...this isn’t her. “I’m not sure. It’s something else. Something...new.”
That’s when another alarm sounds, once again making us all jump. But this time, we’re all looking around, trying to understand from which station the dull air-raid klaxon has come. That’s when I realize it’s not coming from inside the Crow’s Nest. It’s coming from outside, but it’s muffled by our brick walls and armored windows.
I step over to the wall of windows and look out toward the ocean, where a vast dark shape is sliding through the water, heading straight for shore. Homer starts screaming again, beating me to the punch.
Nemesis has come back.
8
The ocean grew warmer as she rose from the depths, moving steadily toward shore, toward the
life-force drawing her attention. She had lurked in the deep for a year, healing, until the tug of mankind’s wrong-doing became impossible to ignore. But her strength had not fully returned. Struggling to ignore the ever present urge to lay waste to mankind, she fed on whales, giant squid, schools of fish, sharks or anything else she could find.
With her strength returned, she felt herself pulled in all directions. Evil was everywhere, calling to her, beckoning her wrath. As she swam toward a city she knew was called Rome, she felt pulled in the opposite direction, back toward the site of her birth.
Vengeance for a legacy of wrong-doing was so close, she fought against the desire to return home. But in the end, the mighty Nemesis lost the battle. She turned around, just twenty miles from the coastline of Italy. With every beat of her tail, a sense of urgency blossomed at her core, mixed with a strange new feeling she didn’t understand.
She had struggled over the past year, trying to understand what she had become. Her thoughts were primal. Driven by emotion. She knew who and what she was—Nemesis. Her place in the world went without question, and in her absence, a darkness had consumed mankind. It was her place to purify the world. But her thoughts and feelings were muddled. Confused. There was a time when she sensed only the energy emitted by vile acts. Now, she felt so much more—sensations for which she had words: love, forgiveness, mercy—but which she did not fully understand or enjoy. If anything, she longed to unleash her wrath more than ever before.
The long ocean crossing gave her rage time to fester and build. But it also gave her time to think...something she’d rarely done before.
Her identity was called into question, dual sets of memories coming and going. Separate goals, desires and morals had been fused.
I am Nemesis, she thought, but the very idea of thinking so specifically called her identity into question. Nemesis felt. She didn’t think.
As she neared the coast of her home, her emotions rose, drowning out the smaller voice tucked away inside her mind. She wasn’t drawn to any particular source of wrong-doing. This time, it was a person calling to her.
Visions of destruction filled her thoughts. Of fire. Explosions. A battle with humanity. Her massive heart beat faster, surging hot blood through veins big enough for a person to swim through. Her thirst grew as the new continent’s population and all their dirty secrets reached her. Beckoning retribution.
But it was the man who held her attention.
Her...target.
Why him? she wondered, and then she sneered at the wondering. Why, didn’t matter.
As she slid through the familiar waters, her belly hovering just feet above the bottom, a surge of confusing emotions made her flinch. She’d felt intense pain here. Both of her halves had. The memories stung, but they were being smothered by something darker. An intense evil drowned out her small voice, sending her into the purest of rages.
Her tail beat harder against the water, kicking up billows of silt and clouding the ocean water above her. The closer she got to shore, the more intense her feelings became. But there was something else there, mixed in with the rage. She had no word for it, but it somehow intensified her anger. She hadn’t felt so driven and focused since Boston, when she’d...
The images were squelched.
Her thirst for justice surged once again, powered by a second source of evil.
Something familiar.
Something confusing.
With a roar heard by every submarine monitoring the Atlantic Ocean, Nemesis rushed toward the coast, the energy and force of her body generating a wave above her. All thought vanished. All that remained was the unceasing desire for vengeance—for what, she couldn’t recall or detect. But her thirst would soon be quenched.
9
In the silence that follows my discovery of the approaching shadow, I head to the white board, grab a dry erase pen and head back to the window. The shadow is moving in a straight line, its trajectory predictable.
“What are you doing?” Cooper asks. “We need to coordinate—”
“She’s been spotted,” I say, placing a black dot on the glass, at the front of the distant shadow. “All of our protocols are going into effect right now. What we need, is information. Why is she here? Who is she after? What’s her target? The quicker we figure all that out, the sooner we can redirect her.”
Several of the President’s military advisors suggested that we simply offer criminals up to Nemesis, that she be allowed to exact her scorching justice. After all, it worked for me, and it saved Boston. But that was a decision made out of desperation, after thousands of people had already been killed. After pointing out that such a plan was illegal and unconstitutional, which was hard to do without incriminating myself, we opted for an alternative—find the target and move them. Far away. From there it would be a waiting game to see whether Nemesis would give chase and how far she would go.
Would she circumvent entire continents to track someone? Would she cross continents on land? Or would the distance take that person off her retribution radar? This will be our first chance to attempt answering those questions.
But avoidance can take us only so far. Eventually, we’ll have to find a permanent solution to our Nemesis problem. It’s not my favorite subject, but I understand the need. Maigo doesn’t just threaten individuals, her compunction for leveling everything and everyone in her path makes her a threat to the entire planet.
I draw a second dot and measure the distance between them with a ruler. After a quick mental calculation, I say, “She’ll reach the coast in three minutes.” With the pen and ruler, I draw a straight line between the dots and step back.
The line is perfectly vertical.
“The big gal’s coming for us,” Woodstock says, voicing my thoughts with one exception.
She’s coming for me.
“Cooper, Watson, implement evacuation plan alpha,” I say. This removes them from the site and initiates an offsite backup of our data, which would not include the stacks of old cases still waiting to be scanned. “Get the hell out of town.”
The pair springs into action, Watson moving far quicker than I would have ever thought him capable. He lands in his chair, rolls to his terminal and taps a few keys. “Backup in progress.”
“I’ve updated the DHS,” Cooper says, stepping away from her computer, keys in hand. “I’ll start the car, babe.”
Babe? I’m about to ask when Watson replies. “Be down in a second.”
Holy shit, I think, and I look at Woodstock. He gives me a sideways grin that raises one side of his mustache. “Might need to brush up on your investigative skills, boss.”
While this revelation is almost more shocking than the arrival of Nemesis, I file it away for later and say, “Get Betty warmed up.”
“You think buzzing her again is a good idea?” Woodstock asks. “She’s gonna swat us good, eventually.”
“We don’t need to get close,” I say. “We need to see if she follows us.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
I glance at Watson. He’s busy backing up a laptop that will allow him to continue his job off site. In a low voice, I say, “I think she’s here for me.”
Woodstock’s squinting eyes tell me he’s still not following.
“I’m the only one here who had any kind of direct contact with her. Maybe I shouldn’t have offered Tilly up? Maybe I made it too easy? We have no idea how she thinks. But if she’s coming here, it’s for me. Has to be.”
“And if you’re right and she follows us?”
“We’ll rendezvous with the Theodore Roosevelt strike group. They’re stationed off the Cape.” The strike group holds enough firepower to single handedly conquer most countries on the planet. In addition to the aircraft carrier, referred to as ‘Big Stick’ by its crew, and its ninety attack jets and helicopters, the strike group has eight destroyers, two nuclear submarines and a host of support ships. Basically, the collection of vessels and their firepower are the human equivalent of a
Nemesis monster, only bigger and with a wider reach. If we bring Nemesis to them, they’ll have a go at her, but I’m fairly certain conventional weapons will just make her angry.
“And from there?” Woodstock asks.
“You come home.”
“And you?”
I smile at his concern. “Protocol says Siberia, if the Russians are still willing. You want to come?”
“Home sounds good,” Woodstock says, heading for a side door that leads to the roof stairwell. “We can be airborne in one minute.”
“I’ll catch up,” I say, as he charges up the stairs. When he’s gone, I turn to Watson, still packing his bag. “Watson.”
He glances up. “What?”
“Leave.”
“But I need—”
“She’s going to make landfall in the next sixty seconds. When that happens, she’s only a hop, skip and a jump from our doorstep. This hill is two-hundred-feet tall. We’re at the top, on the fourth floor of the hill’s tallest structure. You don’t want to be the filling in this brick tart if she decides to take a bite.”
“You don’t think...”
“I don’t intend to be here when she arrives.”
He nods quickly and stands, cords dangling from his bag like dreadlocks.
“Do me a favor and contact Collins. Tell her not to come home.”
He hasn’t stopped nodding yet. He heads for the stairs down, whistling for Buddy, who is quick to follow, while I make for the roof. Before I reach the stairs, the air-raid siren skips a beat and then pulses three times before continuing. I recognize the protocol. I wrote it. Something has changed.
I haul myself up the stairs, but I don’t run for Helicopter Betty’s open door. Instead, I run beneath the wash of the chopping rotors and stand at the edge of the eastern facing roof, hands planted firmly on the short brick wall.
A mile away, ocean water parts. A face emerges.
Not Nemesis.
It’s another creature, like the one in Australia, and I’m assuming Hong Kong. Unlike the Australian creature, though, this one has a pug face, squished inward, lips permanently stretched up in a sneer, revealing large triangle-shaped teeth. Its eyes are wide and frantic, brown like Nemesis’s. As it hops through the shallows on all fours, moving like a short dog, I see it has the same thick black skin as Nemesis, as well as plated armor over its back, sides and limbs, mixed with rows of black spikes. As the thing emerges, it looks like some kind of canine-turtle-Nemesis hybrid.
Project Maigo Page 5