Project Hyperion (A Kaiju Thriller) (Kaiju #4)

The anesthetist laid Gordon back on the operating table and directed the bright lights above him toward his chest. “Just lie back and relax,” she said while checking the IV already in his arm. “Time for a nap.” She took a rubber stopper off the end of a previously prepared syringe and injected the sedative into his IV line.

The wrinkles in Gordon’s forehead smoothed out as he relaxed. He turned his head lazily toward Endo. “She’s okay.”

Was he talking about Maigo? Or were the drugs already making him silly?

But Endo nodded as though he knew what this meant.

The anesthetist slipped a mask over the General’s nose and mouth. “Count back from ten.”

He made it to “four” before losing consciousness.

“We’re good to go,” the anesthetist said.

While the nurse began shaving Gordon’s chest, one of the surgeons lifted Maigo’s freshly severed heart from her chest. The organ should have captivated Elliot, but she couldn’t look at it. Instead, she gazed at Maigo’s still form.

She’s dead.

A deep sense of sadness confused Elliot. Researchers sometimes became attached to their specimens. Rooted for them. Secretly wished they would live. But Maigo had been around for such a short amount of time. Then again, in that time, she’d become a fully grown and stunning woman. And now, she was a bloody, torn-open corpse.

Ignoring the doctors prepping for the real surgery, Elliot stepped up to Maigo and looked down. She cringed at the sight of the girl’s spread ribs and the open cavity between them, where her heart and inflated lungs had been. She shook her head slowly. Moving on autopilot, Elliot disengaged the rib separator and placed it on the medical tray. The ribs flexed back together at a jagged angle. It was then that Elliot noticed a few of the ribs had broken. The surgeon had been unnecessarily rough.

A sudden burst of anger gave her clarity. She was identifying with Maigo, who’d been just a girl not long ago and had just undergone a gross abuse. Elliot wanted to be angry at Gordon and the doctors, but she was really to blame. She created Maigo to save her own life.

You had to die, she thought. I’m sorry.

With tears in her eyes, she lifted the skin back in place. She pushed everything back together and kept her eyes on Maigo’s face.

A hand on her shoulder made her flinch.

She turned.

Endo.

Her pulse quickened, but she saw no threat in his eyes.

“She was beautiful,” he said.

What was this? Endo had never spoken to her. Not once.

He turned to Elliot. “We are aligned, you and I.”

Aligned?

Then she understood. When Gordon said, “She’s okay,” he was talking about her!

“You two really don’t need to be here now,” said one of the masked surgeons. “In fact, it would be great if you could remove the body.”

Endo lifted a sheet up over Maigo’s body, covering her torso and head. He turned to Elliot again. “You can take her. I’ll remain here.”

The way he spoke those last three words churned up old fears. There was a threat in his tone, but it wasn’t directed toward her. It’s the doctors, she realized. I’m okay, but the doctors...

She decided that it didn’t matter what happened to the doctors. Elliot let out a sigh and smiled. “Thank you, Endo.”

He gave a nod and stepped back to the door, opening it for her. She unlocked the gurney’s wheels and turned the mobile bed toward the door. As she passed by Endo, he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Thank you, Dr. Elliot. The General is a good friend. To both of us.”

Before she could reply, he stepped back inside the room and let the door close.

Endo’s transformation from silent killer to kind ally felt so strange, but she wasn’t about to debate it with the man. She rolled the gurney down the long white hall, took the elevator down two flights to the basement and then headed for the morgue, where she would later oversee a post-mortem dissection to learn what she could about Maigo’s altered physiology. She wasn’t sure she could figure out exactly what the foreign DNA had done to Maigo, but if she was now in the General’s good graces, he might well tell her.

She stopped the gurney next to a large refrigeration unit where the body would be kept until the rest of the BioLance staff returned.

But who knew how long that would be?

Elliot decided she couldn’t wait to learn more. Although she wasn’t qualified to perform a post-mortem examination, she had five more Maigo embryos ready to go. She could have another adolescent and still-living subject to examine by the time Gordon woke up. Feeling invigorated, she pushed the corpse quickly inside the refrigeration unit. As the gurney passed through the open door, the sheet covering Maigo’s body caught on the door’s lock and slid away, exposing the body.

With an annoyed groan, Elliot turned toward the falling sheet. She caught just a glimpse of Maigo’s body as she turned, but it was enough. With a shout, she jumped back and slammed into a wall of chilled supplies. A bottle, filled with some kind of horrible smelling chemical fell to the floor and shattered. But Elliot barely noticed. Her eyes were locked on Maigo’s chest.