I’m alive! she thought, and then she started forming a plan. She glanced left, looking to the car park, where her Toyota sat, unmolested. I’ll head east, she thought, through the Angeles National Forest and keep going until I reach the East Coast. What are the odds that this would happen in Maine again?
She took one step to the dresser where she kept her keys and stopped. The world around her shifted. The apartment fell away. As nausea spread out through her body, she thought the second floor had collapsed beneath her. But when the whole world fell away, she knew that couldn’t be. She looked down at the fading landscape and saw a long pole, like the end of an elephant tusk, protruding out from her gut.
Realization came in time with her ear-shattering scream that would have landed her a starring role in a Hollywood slasher film. The tail had swung back as the Kaiju continued forward, punching a hole through her back and lifting her up and over the monster, pulling her down, into the creature’s gaping maw, which twitched and ground its previous victims like metal in a junkyard auto shredder. She was deposited in the jaws feet first, her mind exploding with pain, and then she was sent to merciful oblivion as the two mandibles shoved her in, jolting her body with a lethal dose of electricity once both made contact with her shoulders.
26
The butterflies in my stomach go Kaiju on me, tearing at my insides with ruthless ferocity, their razor blade wings slicing me into little Yan Can Cook chefs. A little there. A little there. Done! It’s not because I’m expected to place a bacteria bomb on the back of an extremely lethal Nemesis-spawned Tsuchi, it’s because we’re about to disembark a DARPA aircraft to meet our team, along with two of the men who raided the cabin, shot Joliet and would have killed them all—if not for the interference of Maigo, whose abilities are now out of the bag, for the team, and for the enemy. As is Lilly’s location. To heap even more insult after injury, Collins and I are now dressed in GOD uniforms.
“They’ll understand,” Collins says. She’s seated across from me, looking as good in a black, armored uniform as she does in everything else.
“We’ll see,” I say.
Maigo, despite her constant state of near-silent glum, is a calm person. I’m not expecting much of a reaction from her, but then, I’ve never seen her face-to-face with men who tried to kill her and the people she cares about. She killed eleven men. So, I suppose she’s really a wild card, which puts her in the same category as Lilly and Hawkins. While Joliet is the most rash of us, the normally cool-headed Hawkins has been holding this grudge for years. And while I can’t say I blame him, knowing that GOD’s experiments resulted in the deaths of his colleagues and friends, he might be quick on the draw. And then there is Lilly, who not only survived Island 731, but was born there, to a monster created by GOD. It wouldn’t surprise me if her very DNA was patented by the secret organization. Of all of them, she has the most reasons to see GOD taken down, not to mention the ability to make it happen. I’d love to see it happen, but right now we need GOD, their fancy flying machine and their weapons.
The X-35 sets down on the tarmac with nary a bump, the VTOL repulse engines blowing my mind. Where will we be in thirty years?
Probably dead.
Or fighting zombie robots.
One of the two.
“Let us go out first,” I say to Silhouette and Obsidian. “Smooth things over.”
“No argument here,” Silhouette says, and I give Collins a knowing smile. As badass as these guys are—and I’ve seen them in action—they’re in no rush to deal with...with who? Not Lilly. From what I understand, Lilly never really took part in the fight, a fact that must be eating her up. It’s Maigo they’re afraid of.
Collins and I stand at the back hatch. I dial Hawkins on our new Devine phone. He picks up on the second ring. “Who’s this?”
For a fraction of a second, I’m surprised by the tone, but then realize they haven’t heard from us since our last known location was pancaked by Nemesis, and this phone no doubt shows up as an unknown caller. “It’s me.”
“Hudson.” He sounds relieved. “Where are you?”
“Did you see the weird plane set down about three hundred feet from your Zoomb jet?” I ask.
“You mean the DARPA plane that Lilly is already on top of and we all have our weapons pointed at?”
I smile. “You guys are on the ball.”
“We try.”
“Well, when the hatch opens, it would be great if Lilly didn’t gut me.”
“That’s you?” he says. “Did you steal it? I know Woodstock is good, but a UFO?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” I say. “And before I open this door, I need your word that no one is going to get violent.”
“I don’t like the sound of this...”
“How’s Joliet?” I ask.
The question throws him, softening his tone. “She’ll live. But she’s going to be in the hospital for a few days.”
“Then all of our people made it out of Maine, okay?”