Project 731, page 22
part #3 of Kaiju Thriller Series
“Fire!” Hawkins shouted.
Alessi and Woodstock opened fire, Woodstock taking one man with three clean shots and Alessi spraying the other three in the same amount of time, thanks to the KRISS’s rapid rate of fire and lack of recoil.
Hawkins withdrew his blade, wiped it off on Silhouette’s sleeve and slipped it back into its sheath. He stood with a groan.
“Sthuffering thucatash,” Lilly said from the end of the hallway. Her eyes were wide, a half smile on her face. She giggled, but she was cut off by a massive rumbling shockwave pulsing down from above. The whole facility shook and then went black.
36
“You’re okay,” I tell Maigo, crouching in front of her, my arms around her back, my forehead leaning against her hair. Despite my encouraging words, I’m feeling the same abject horror about the creatures in this room, but to a lesser degree. I don’t think anyone could walk into this space, memories of past tortures or not, and not be disturbed. A glance up at Collins confirms it. Of all of us, she’s got the toughest emotional skin, built up to deal with her previous abusive husband, and even she looks mortified, a hand over her mouth.
“They’re dead,” I whisper, glancing toward the three, square, liquid-filled tanks. They look like oversized fish tanks, each a perfect cube, each with a different occupant. “They’re all dead.”
I don’t try to push her. This girl who was one part of a city-destroying Kaiju, and has the strength of who knows how many men, is shaking under my arms. So I just rub her back and turn my attention to understanding what I’m seeing.
The tank nearest us contains what looks like a very pale, very blond human man. But I’m pretty sure he’s not human. The first tell is that he’s a good ten feet tall, but not in the lanky way abnormally tall humans look. He’s built like a professional wrestler—the Hulk Hogan variety, not Andre the Giant, who’d look small next to this guy. And then there is the symbol on the man’s chest. It’s not a tattoo, it’s like an indentation, like it was carved out of him, but with perfect edges. There are three circles, one inside the other, centered on the man’s broad chest. A single line protruding down from the center circle extends downward through the next two. I have no idea what it means, but I commit it to memory.
The next tank contains something that is very much not human, and completely unrecognizable to me. In some regards, it’s humanoid, with a head, two arms and two legs...but that’s where the comparison ends. Its face is fugly, covered with boney horns that look like they punched out of the skin. Its mouth, frozen open in death, is full of large white teeth. It has three red eyes on either side of its long domed head, which ends at a mane of hair, flowing out behind it in the water. Its body is powerful, like a cross between the blond giant and a hairless, gray lion. Its hands and feet are tipped with long, deadly looking claws. Its long, powerful tail is tipped with a tuft of hair, like a painter’s brush. While its body isn’t as big as the alien Viking fellow, it looks like it could make short work of him.
And that brings us to the third tank, where the creature Maigo and I both recognize from Nemesis Prime’s memories is contained. It’s not the whole creature. Just its head. At its full height, the creature would probably be a good fifty feet tall. It’s not Kaiju big, but these are the things that captured Nemesis Prime, tortured her and turned her into something she might not have been without them. It reminds me of the way people train elephants for the circus; the smaller, but smarter life form, plucking the larger, more malleable-minded giant from its habitat and training it, often through violence, to perform a duty. I look at its two, basketball-sized, black eyes, and even in death, I see a ruthless intelligence. The bald head was covered in gleaming white skin, stretched down to where its mouth was hidden by a mass of tentacles that remind me of spiky star fish limbs.
“What...are they?” Collins asks.
Endo steps up to the center glass tank containing the gray creature. “I don’t know the details, but they’re not of this Earth. Like Nemesis Prime. Our Nemesis is different. Thanks to Maigo, she is, at least partly, of this Earth. But I think these creature have something to do with Nemesis.”
He doesn’t know, I think, and for some reason, I decide to tell him. “The big one on the right...trained Nemesis Prime and brought her to Earth. Or, at least, his species did.”
Endo looks uncommonly surprised. “You’ve seen them before?”
“In Nemesis’s memories.” I rub Maigo’s back. “We both did. Saw them and felt what they did to her, how they made her the goddess of vengeance.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Endo asks.
“You’re not exactly a team player,” Collins says on my behalf.
Endo frowns, perhaps reconsidering his life choices, but probably just pouting about not being the all-knowing Nemesis fanboy.
“I’m okay,” Maigo says as her shivers stop. She holds onto my arms, and we stand together. She turns toward the contained monsters. “Why are they here?”
Maigo steps out of my arms, her strength and resolve that of a Kaiju, returned in full. She heads for the big, tentacle-faced floating head. She stares the thing down, and I wonder for a moment, if she faced this thing, at its full height, would she be strong enough to take it down? She might be, but I hope to never find out.
With a sudden roar, Maigo draws her fist back, ready to punch the glass. A voice stops her.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Zach Cole says, standing behind us, having entered the room without making a sound.
Maigo glares back at him. “Why not?”
He shrugs. “It’d make a mess. And you could destroy a one of a kind specimen.”
“Just another one of your sick collections?” I ask, slowly lowering my hand to my sidearm.
Cole boldly steps up beside Maigo, his hands clasped behind his back. I’m not sure what’s more surprising, that he seems unafraid of Maigo or that the ample bellied man in a suit can reach his hands that far back. “This collection might help the human race survive long enough to have a future.”
“Explain,” Endo demands.
Cole smiles at his former subordinate. “The BlackGuard command is yours if you want it, Specter. You’ve proven yourself more than a match for our best, and Silhouette...” The man looks up toward the ceiling, which shakes as if on cue. “His fate is uncertain.”
Endo considers the offer, but then shakes his head. “My fate lies elsewhere.”
Cole shrugs and turns his attention to me. His arrogant body language sets me off, and I take a swing, desiring to put him in his place before letting him continue his diatribe. My fist is on target, but it strikes nothing. My follow-through pulls me forward, and I stumble to the floor. No way the fat man could have moved so fast. I turn around in time to see the amused Cole flicker.
A hologram.
“You’re not even here anymore, are you?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Long gone.” He motions to the specimens. “Now, if you’re ready to hear me out...” I pick myself up without a word and wait for him to continue.
“What you see before you is the reason GOD exists.” He motions to the gray creature and the floating head. “While we’ve only known about these creatures for ten years, these brutes—” He points to the blond man. “—have been on our radar since World War II. The Nazis fancied themselves the descendants of these giants, and to a degree they were right. These men joined the human population thousands of years ago, their blood commingling with ours over millennia the same way ours did with Neanderthals, but their bloodline has been severely diluted by time.”
“Who are they?” Collins asks.
“That’s where it gets complicated,” Cole says. “While they are not human, or even from this planet, we all know about the fabled Atlanteans. But they weren’t an advanced civilization of humans. They simply lived among us, and we think, were sent here to strengthen us.”
I step up to the tank containing the blond man, my guard still up, but curiosity officially piqued. “Sent here?”
He points at the gray creature, “By them.”
“The Atlantean looks like the smarter of the two,” Collins points out.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Cole says and nods at me, like he knows me, like he’s earned the right to rib me. I really don’t like this guy. “But this is where our knowledge takes a sharp uptick.”
“There was an encounter,” Endo concludes. “Contact made.”
Cole nods. “Like I said, ten years ago. In the Arctic. A team of scientists, funded by Brian Norwood’s Global Exploration Corporation, in the northernmost part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, in Northern Canada, raised a complete mammoth from the tundra. From the mammoth came a woman. And in her arms, a beacon. It led them to an ancient citadel buried in the ice. They were pursued by these—” He motions to the gray corpse. “—creatures. The Ferox. The research team lost most of their crew, but a few of them survived and relayed their story to me, after we tracked them down and recovered what remained of their conflict, including this specimen. In a way, the Ferox made us who we are today: warring people capable of great violence and the ability to create weapons of unbelievable destructive capability.”
Collins glares at Cole. “That’s your defense for monsters like the Tsuchi? For experimenting on human beings? For warping nature?”
As much as I abhor the idea, I can see where Cole’s logic is leading. Fight monsters with monsters. But that doesn’t make it right.
“It is the nature instilled in us by the Ferox, who have taken human form, and over thousands of years, molded us—trained us—into a true fighting force. They strengthened us by interbreeding humanity with the Atlanteans. They also rebelled strongly against the idea of being enslaved. Freedom is everything to humanity today, because it is everything to the Ferox and the Atlanteans.”
“And why would these Ferox do this to us?” I ask and turn my attention to the floating head. “It doesn’t seem that dissimilar to what these guys did to Nemesis.”
“In the long run, it’s not,” Cole admits. “And that’s probably because they’re cut from the same cloth, so to speak. There was a time when the Ferox and this race of giants, the Aeros, were one species.”
“They look a little like Cthulhu,” I point out.
Cole chuckled. “Brice theorized that Lovecraft was influenced by a Ferox, in an attempt to train the human race to fear creatures of Cthulhuean appearance. And you’ll note they have almost nothing in common with the Ferox, despite their shared genetic history. As they spread through the cosmos, two distinct races emerged, and a race war began with the more intelligent and cunning Aeros driving the Ferox back. In a bid to turn the tide, the Ferox found developing worlds and molded their higher life forms into warriors willing to aid their cause. It’s a war that’s been waged since before homo sapiens were the dominant species on Earth.”
“How does this all involve Nemesis?” Maigo asks, her voice quiet, her glaring attention still locked on the large floating head.
The ceiling shakes from an impact high above. When we all look up, listening to the rumble, Cole says, “We’re safe down here. Not even a nuclear blast can reach us. As for Nemesis, we believe Prime was sent to Earth by the Aeros as a kind of watchdog. So when the Atlanteans, brought to Earth by the Ferox, set up shop, Nemesis Prime exacted her vengeance on them. In the end, Prime was defeated—how, we don’t know, though the corpse shows signs of a battle with something equally large—but not before the battle destroyed Atlantis and scattered the few survivors.”
“Okay, thanks for the history lesson, chubs,” I say. “But you still haven’t given me a good reason to not hunt you down and shoot you, put you in the Viking’s tank, and arrange you in an embarrassing pose.”
Cole’s face gets serious, but I don’t think it has anything to do with my blatant disrespect. “Ten years ago, when the citadel in the Arctic was raised, we detected a powerful signal sent from near-Earth orbit and into deep space. We later learned that the Ferox attacking the scientific crew were simply trying to prevent that signal from being sent.”
“We’ve been compromised,” Endo says. “Their influence on us revealed.”
“Yes.” Cole takes a deep breath and sighs. “And the Aeros are coming back.” He looks me in the eyes. “We don’t know when, but they’ll eventually come, and we’re doing everything we can—” He turns to Collins. “—including breaking every rule in the book, in an effort to save the entire God damned planet. Imagine what a single Tsuchi could do if it was set loose in an enemy ship. We’d stand a real chance of surviving—”
“But at what cost?” Collins asks. “If we have to become something worse than human to survive, do we deserve to survive?”
“Anyone they didn’t kill would be enslaved.”
“There has to be a better way,” Collins says.
“When you figure it out, you let me know. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would all leave without further conflict.” He puts his hand to his ear, where I see a small earbud. “It seems your friends have survived an encounter with Silhouette—”
As much as his words tense my muscles, the impact is dwarfed by a sudden impact that jolts the floor beneath us and fills the base with an echoing rumble. The lights flicker and go out.
The darkness lasts just a few seconds, and then power is restored. Cole is headed toward the wall, which in his location, must be a door. “Leave now, while you can. If you stay, I will consider you all property of GOD, to be used however I deem necessary.” He stops in the doorway. “Hudson, if these guys come back...”
“Call me,” I say.
Collins looks ready to clock me, but if everything Cole has just said is true, then we can’t be kept out of the loop. If I can make deals with demons, I can make deals with devils, too, especially if it means saving the human race, which at the moment contains a good number of people I care about.
“No one will stop you on the way out,” Cole says. “But you’re on your own now. The Tsuchi and Nemesis are your problems.”
“But the Tsuchi...” Endo starts.
“Is retreating northeast, I’m told.” He taps his earbud. “As is Nemesis.”
“Cole,” I say, stopping his exit. “You’ll leave us alone?”
He ponders this for a moment, and then says, “You don’t step on my toes, I won’t step on yours.”
Collins takes hold of my wrist. She doesn’t like bowing to evil men. She’d rather knock them senseless. “This is for the girls,” I say, and she loosens her grip. I turn back to Cole. “Done.”
He nods and steps toward the wall, pixelating and fading away, leaving us with the manipulators, invaders and potential destroyers of the human race. I stand there for a moment, looking at the bodies, feeling a powerful sense of impending doom...but that could have more to do with the Tsuchi above us and Nemesis closing in. Sometimes, this job sucks.
37
Back in the elevator, Collins, Maigo, Endo and I are all silent, digesting the unbelievable information Cole has just laid on us. How much of it is true and how much is speculation, or exaggeration, I don’t know, but one thing’s for certain, the FC-P is going to need a bigger budget. I turn to Endo. “How much of what he said do you believe?”
Endo answers without thought. “All of it.”
“Multiple races of aliens. The manipulation of the human race for thousands of years. At-freaking-lantis.”
“You say that like Atlantis is the strangest of all those revelations,” Collins says. “And I’m not sure why, but I believe him, too. Not that it excuses the way they have been preparing for the Aeros. And you—” She burrows into my skull with her eyes. “—you will not be collaborating with these people.”
As tempting as it is, I know she’s right. Becoming monsters to fight monsters has never been our style...if you ignore the fact that Lilly is a cat woman, Maigo has Kaiju strength and I once controlled a Kaiju by taking over its mind. Ignoring all that, our humanity is still intact. “Can we agree that milking them for information is acceptable? We still have no real idea what we’d be up against, should said invasion ever take place. For all we know, it might not happen for another hundred years. If the Aeros and Ferox have been duking it out for thousands of years, I doubt they operate on the same time scale as us. That they’re not here yet, ten years later, means it’s probably not a hop, skip and a jump through a wormhole or something.”
“Milk away, but don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Collins says.
“That was one of the worst mixed metaphors I’ve ever heard,” Endo says.
Collins, Maigo and I all crane our heads toward him at once.
I shake my head. “Seriously, why does every asshole in the world think they can pal around with us?”
Endo stands grinning. “You’re easy targets.”
Collins and I are both surprised when Maigo lunges forward, picks Endo up by his chest armor and slams him against the elevator wall. “Not as easy as you.” The tone of her voice is dark and brooding. The creatures we saw, and the memories they conjured, must have deeply affected her.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Easy now. Maigo...”
“I won’t let them hurt you,” she says to me. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
The sentiment seems overly simple, but is familiar. It’s basically how Nemesis acted a year ago, when Maigo was still part of the monster. In response to my helping the creature exact revenge on Maigo’s murderous father, Maigo bonded to me. While our relationship has become a more complex father-daughter affair, today’s events have returned her protective nature to the surface.
Endo bows his head. “Apologies, Maigo. I meant no harm. It wounds me to know that I have upset you. I will respect your...parents from now on.”
While his apology sounds sincere, he definitely had to force the word ‘parents,’ and I can’t blame him. As much as he would like to have a relationship with the girl who was once Nemesis, she sees us, even though we’re not married—yet—as adoptive parents.
