“I would never harm you or your girls,” I say, holstering my weapon. Sensing the girl’s unease, I step forward and extend my hand. She stares at it for a moment, and I think she might bite it off, but then she takes hold and shakes. Her fur is soft, but her grip is killer. “My name is Jon. Nice to meet you, Lilly.” I motion to Collins. “This is Ashley. She’s my partner.”
“She’s more than that,” Lilly says with a sly grin. The kid has been watching us for a while, since before I got my poison ivy. Speaking of which, I turn my attention back to Hawkins. “I don’t suppose you have any calamine lotion, do you?”
“Back at the house,” he says.
“Thank God.”
“But first,” Hawkins motions behind me. I turn to find a small blonde holding a handgun and an old Ute man with a rifle. “This is Howie Goodtracks and Avril Joliet.”
“AKA, backup,” I say with a grin. I take a step toward them, hand extended, when my sat-phone begins playing the Imperial March from Star Wars. This will be my colleague, Anne Cooper. We follow a strict radio-silence rule during investigations. What’s the point of searching for elusive creatures if a ringing phone might scare them off? But we also have to remain available, hence the sat-phone. And if Cooper is calling, that means something bad is going down.
I answer the phone. “What’s happening?”
As I listen to the voice on the other end, my face falls flat. Collins steps closer, a look of concern on her face. Hawkins, Joliet, Goodtracks and Lilly join her, all waiting to hear what I’m being told.
“I need an address,” I say to Hawkins. When he hesitates, I clarify. “For a helicopter pick-up.”
He gives me an address, and I relay it to Cooper before hanging up.
“Is it Nemesis?” Collins asks.
“Where?” Hawkins asks. He looks ready for action, and I wonder what his life has been like and how Lilly came to be a part of it. We’ll have to catch up on all that later. Right now, we have a helicopter to catch—and that bottle of calamine lotion.
I turn north and strike out, answering, “Hong Kong.”
3
Katsu Endo, formerly of the Japanese Self-Defense Force, had done things he wasn’t proud of to survive. First, was the shooting of Master Sergeant Lenny Wilson. But the act had saved his life and ingratiated him with General Lance Gordon. But his allegiance was never to Gordon. It was to the dead monster they had found buried in the wilds of Alaska. He’d spent his childhood admiring Japanese Kaiju, or ‘strange beasts,’ the way other kids admired superheroes. So, where the monster’s corpse went, his allegiance followed. And right now, his loyalty belonged to Zoomb, an Internet search engine turned technology behemoth.
At first, his duties involved protecting Zoomb’s CEO, Paul Stanton, but over the past year, fear of reprisal from Gordon had faded. Endo’s unique skill set, combining high intelligence, lethal fighting skills and special ops training, made him the ideal candidate for the R&D unit’s ‘field research team.’ In less politically correct terms, they were a corporate-espionage strike team, capable of stealing the competition’s technology and prototypes, ferreting out leaks or simply handling competition the old fashioned way—with bribery, extortion and threats of violence. In the corporate world, motivated primarily by money, these techniques worked better than actually killing people, which pleased Endo, because he was not fond of taking lives. He was driven but not coldhearted.
Thankfully, his passion and the goals of Zoomb’s R&D department were aligned. There was no higher priority for them than the original monster, Nemesis-Prime. They wanted to understand the creature. Where it came from. What motivated it. They wanted to extract technologies. They not only saw massive profit potential, but a way to change the entire world.
They had the original Kaiju creature’s carcass hidden away, but its petrified form kept most of its secrets well guarded. Although they had managed to extract a viable sample of the creature’s DNA, it had been lost with the destruction of the laboratory that gave birth to the new Nemesis. They had nearly succeeded in advancing medicine to a point where lives could be saved and extended, but instead they had succeeded only in creating a new monster—a successor to the original. But the monster’s creation also provided opportunity. For science. For medicine. And for war.
Zoomb didn’t just want to study the new beast, they wanted to control it.
So when reports of the attack on Hong Kong came in, Endo and his team were on board a Cessna Citation X—the world’s fastest private jet, clocking in at 717 miles per hour—cruising across the Pacific, covering a mile every six seconds.
Endo crossed his legs, settled back into the plush leather seat and glanced out the window at the blue sky and bluer ocean below. Somewhere down there was a 300-foot tall monster capable of destroying entire cities. Perhaps the world. A smile came to his face.