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

While Wilson replied, the General drew his side arm. He turned it around and handed it to Endo, who looked at the weapon with wide eyes before casting his gaze on the General.

Gordon motioned to the back of Wilson’s head. Gave a nod and a smile like he was welcoming Endo to a theme park, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Endo looked down at the weapon in his hand. It was a sound-suppressed M9 9mm handgun. Not the world’s most powerful gun, but more than enough to do the job.

Endo frowned.

Then shrugged.

He raised the pistol, pointed it at the back of Wilson’s head and pulled the trigger.





PROLOGUE II



Two Weeks Ago



Maigo Tilly dropped her bright pink Hello Kitty backpack onto the kitchen’s cold, tan slate floor. It glowed with innocence. Her high forehead pinched together at the midline, eyebrows twisting up. Her lips trembled in time with her fingers. She stared at the red.

The growing pool found the floor’s grout and flowed down the straight track, heading for Maigo’s stocking toes. She stepped away from it, keeping to the center of a single tile while her mother’s blood flowed around her, following the grout like the channels of a sacrificial altar.

But the blood couldn’t hold her attention. The frozen scene beyond it called to her. Her eyes rose slowly, first seeing the bare foot of her mother, twitching as her life faded. Then the twitching stopped. Maigo could tell her mother was dead by her skin. Normally tan, it was now sickly pale. Her mother’s designer dress was stained with red from below, the fluid pulled up through the cotton fabric.

The shaking in Maigo’s lips grew severe as her eyes skipped past her mother’s hands and the horror there, and looked at her face. Whatever the woman had been feeling at the time her life ended had been erased. The face revealed nothing. Her skull, however—everything. Her head, once a smooth curve, was now a crescent. Most of it was missing.

Not missing.

Scattered.

Maigo looked higher. The 33rd-floor penthouse of the Clarendon Back Bay building provided stunning views of downtown Boston and the harbor. It was a castle in the sky—the kind reserved for Boston’s elite. It came with every amenity the seven-million-dollar price tag could fetch, including a Jacuzzi hot tub big enough to swim in, remote controlled everything and massive windows lining every outside wall. But the view of downtown was marred by streaks of maroon and clumps of pink. When a particularly weighty dollop of brain matter slipped free and struck the floor with a wet slap, Maigo finally gasped.

And then again. And again. She’d been holding her breath.

“It’s okay, Maigo,” her father said.

He was a stark contrast to her mother—plump, balding, pale and unkind. Maigo didn’t like her father much, but he was around so rarely that she was able to bear his moods. Also, her mother insisted. Told her to be thankful. To look at the view. To enjoy their many blessings.

Maigo said nothing. She was incapable.

“It was an accident,” he said. “No, it was—”

While her father decided what had happened, Maigo looked back to her mother’s hands. Her left arm and hand, perfectly manicured, lay to the side. Tears filled Maigo’s eyes as she remembered the feeling of those long, red, fingernails on her back, scratching her gently to sleep. The sadness faded when she looked at her mother’s right hand, interlocked with her father’s hands and a gun. A pistol. It was the kind a woman might own. Small. But Maigo knew everything about her mother. They had no secrets.

Not about school. Or boys. Or the bruises her mother hid.

She didn’t own a gun. She loathed them.

Maigo’s trembling hands became fists when she saw that her father was wearing white plastic gloves, the kind that doctors wear.

“You did this,” she said, before she could realize she shouldn’t.

“No,” he said, “No! I found her like this. She did it to herself.”

Maigo watched her father carefully loop her mother’s finger around the gun’s trigger.

“She killed herself, Maigo.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“She did.”

Fueled by anger, Maigo shouted, “You killed her!”

Her father frowned, but just a little. He picked up her mother’s hand, moving it again.

“Leave her alone,” Maigo said.

“Your mother killed herself, Maigo,” her father said, “but she killed you first.”

Maigo looked at the gun and noticed it was now leveled at her core. The last thing she saw was a small grin on her father’s face. Then—nothing.





1



Now



“You have got to be kidding me!” I shout to myself when Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me blares from my pickup truck’s feeble speakers. If the flashback to my childhood wasn’t bad enough, every thump of the bass drum releases a grating rattle. Whoever owned the beat up, faded red Chevy S-10 before me blew nearly every speaker. Probably some teenager. Man, I’d like to punch that kid in the face. Of course, right now I’d like to punch every radio DJ within a hundred miles, too.

I tap the radio’s “seek” button. Boston. More than a Feeling.