Building-K was a massive space. Its arched ceiling was covered with lights that really did little to illuminate the wide open space, partly because of the distance and partly because of the giant hangar’s contents. He’d heard the building described as a morgue, and it was, in every sense—chilled air, dead bodies, haunting atmosphere—but it was the deceased that made this morgue stand apart from all others. Here, the dead were Kaiju.
The first, of which he was currently walking along the perimeter, was called Nemesis Prime. The ancient monster had been recovered from the frozen wilds of Alaska. The tech company Zoomb, with whom DARPA had contracts, had dismantled the beast and shipped it to a warehouse. They had since lost custody of the creature’s corpse, though he doubted they knew where it went. In the wake of the disaster in Washington D.C., Director Cole determined that they couldn’t be trusted with the corpse, or its DNA. Moving quickly in the days after the battle that nearly destroyed the country’s heart, GOD had used every element at its disposal, including its private security force, to transport Prime, and her spawn, the now deceased Nemesis, to the Lompoc facility. The remaining five Kaiju, also deceased, were taken off-shore to an undisclosed island far above Reynolds’s pay grade. But everyone knew that the Kaiju that really mattered, the monster that killed five rivals, was here, lying beside her ancestor at the west end of Building-K.
Moving quickly and silently, the three men reached the far end of the warehouse and rounded the dried-out husk of Prime’s head. The ancient, gray skin stretched back to empty eye sockets the size of swimming pools. Despite its mummified, dehydrated state, the disassembled Kaiju had been laid out on its stomach, the way it would have been in life. Had the thing been living, it would have stood eye-to-eye with Nemesis, but with even more bulk. The ancient plates of armor and long spikes rose up toward the ceiling like an alien city.
As they circled around the far corner, a whispered voice tickled his ear. “West end clear.” It was Cross. “Coming your way. Over.”
“Copy that,” Reynolds said. “East end is clear, too. En route. Over and out.”
Despite the dark confines of Building-K, the goggles let him see everything clearly, including his men, five hundred feet away. What he couldn’t see was any sign of the Dark Matter, Brice’s precious ‘Tsuchi.’ And he didn’t really expect to. They were clearing the perimeter as a matter of course, but with all of the Kaiju nooks and crannies, a creature the size of a small dog would have no trouble hiding.
If it wanted to.
But Brice was confident the Tsuchi wouldn’t hide. Once they were out in the open, it would attack. And its brazenness would be its downfall.
The two groups merged halfway down the backside of the warehouse.
“All clear,” Cross reported, though he didn’t really need to. Had they seen something, Reynolds would know about it.
The Chief looked across Building-K’s interior. The space was divided by the two massive corpses, one on each side. Between the bodies was a large staging area and a laboratory. Flood lights, currently unlit, surrounded tables of equipment and sample trays. Most of the recent work was being done on Nemesis. While Prime was still a curiosity, Nemesis’s fresher body gave up her secrets more readily...at first. Now they had to drill through several feet of hardened, rubber-like skin that had slowly grown back, like a fungus, over the past year. While the body beneath lay still, the outer layer of skin, which some believed was a separate, non-sentient organism, grew a little each day.
Reynolds looked back and forth between Nemesis and Prime. They were equally huge, but only one of them still frightened him. It was why he hadn’t covered the west end. He’d never admit it, but being close to the goddess of vengeance unnerved him, primarily because he knew for a fact that he wasn’t a good man. None of them were. They were mercenaries with questionable pasts, given asylum and big paychecks, courtesy of GOD, its influence and its black budget. “Form a perimeter around the staging area. Facing in.”
“Facing in?” McAfee asked. “You want us to turn our backs on a Dark Matter target?”
“I want you to watch each others’ backs. And mine. We need to lure this thing out, and that means making it think we’re easy targets.”
“Copy that,” McAfee said with great reluctance.
Moving single file, the team flowed toward the staging area, but never made it. Gilmour stopped short. “What the hell...”
“Where?” Reynolds asked, switching to his KRISS rifle.
Gilmour pointed toward Nemesis’s body.
Reynolds saw it and lowered his weapon, eyes widening. “Dammit.”
He knew what the three exercise ball-sized holes in Nemesis’s side meant—it meant they were fucked.
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