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

“I don’t know,” Woodstock says.

“That person could be in trouble,” I say.

“All right, listen,” he says. “I’m gonna bring us down, but I’m not going to land. I’ll keep her a few feet off the ground.”

“You can do that?” I ask.

“You pick up a trick or two when you’ve been flying long as I have.” He starts the descent. “Just haul ass to that truck, find that person and haul ass back. If you’re in decent shape, we can be back in the air inside what, ten minutes?”

I nod, but then remember how crappy my body feels. “Make it fifteen. If we’re not back in twenty head back up and come check on us.”

He gives a nod and slowly adjusts the controls so that we stop just three feet above the ground. “Last stop.”

Collins and I leap from the chopper and duck-run away from it as the rotor wash kicks up dirt and sprays marsh water. We run for a quarter mile and then slow to a jog. Fifteen minutes might not have been long enough, I think. Then I spot the truck up ahead.

I reach for my gun and find it missing. Crap. Collins is unarmed, too.

Collins sees me reach for my non-existent gun and says, “Probably should have stayed in the chopper and covered you from above.”

Damn. She’s right. If we don’t switch from reactionary thinking to strategic thinking soon, it could cause problems.

“If it makes you feel better,” she says, unclipping something from her belt and tossing it to me.

I catch the small bottle in my hands and look down at it. Pepper spray. For a moment, I smile. Then I see the truck, or rather, what’s left of it.

The right side of the black pick-up is shiny and new. The left is scarred with mottled gray streaks and is tilted down, its tires missing. No, not missing. Melted.

I see the person standing beside the truck, partially concealed by a fallen tree and shadow. “Hey!” I shout. “We’re here to help.”

When the figure doesn’t turn or even acknowledge the sound of my voice, I know something is wrong, but I’m not prepared for how wrong. Collins beats me by a few steps, but backs away just as quickly, hands going to her mouth. “Oh my God!”

I stop, see the body for what it really is—a well done, charred human being—and I do my own back-step. Whoever this was, he or she—it’s impossible to tell—has been cooked through and frozen in place. “How is it still standing?”

“Look at the shotgun,” Collins says.

I hadn’t even realized the elephant trunk-like object clutched in the black hands was a gun. But now that I’m looking, I see it for what it is, a 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun.

“Whatever burned the victim was hot enough to melt the gun, the tires and parts of the truck,” Collins said. “I think the body was burned fast enough that the victim was dead and charred in place.”

I look at the bent and broken trees. “So our creature comes out of the woods, finds the truck, cooks the owner and then—” I turn to the opposite side of the road and find more broken trees leading into the forest on the other side. “—and keeps on going.”

An idea strikes me and I pull out my phone. No signal. I hold my hand out to Collins. “Phone.”

She hands her phone to me. It has just a single bar. But I’m not about to watch ten hours of Nayan Cat, so it will do. I call Watson. When he picks up, I start speaking before he can greet me. “Ted, get my GPS location. Draw a straight line between the BioLance lab and where I am now, then extend that out in a straight line and tell me what’s there.”

He doesn’t reply, but I can hear him working. He comes back on the line a moment later and says, “Looks like Ashton, a small town fifteen miles out, and then its nothing but trees all the way to Portland and the ocean.”

Portland. Shit. It’s the largest and most densely populated city in the state. It has something like 63,000 residents, but on a nice summer day like this, that number might be double.

I hang up. “We need to—”

The ground shakes. It’s subtle, but I can feel it in my legs, and I can see by the look on Collins’s face that she can too.

A roar follows, and it’s nowhere near subtle.

I don’t know if it has our scent or if it hears the nearby chop of the helicopter, but the creature is nearby.

The ground shakes again, more violently.

Correction, it’s not just nearby, it’s coming back.





22



I’d like to say that Collins and I are having some kind of simpatico moment that reveals we’re like-minded and destined to be soul mates, but I’m pretty sure that sprinting away from the man-eating monster like a pair of terrified ostriches is what most everyone on the planet would do. We’re neck and neck down the dirt road, neither of us speaking, all wounds and weariness forgotten.

The booming footfalls of the charging creature grow louder. Closer.