He drew the bowstring back, holding all that kinetic energy at bay. He breathed slowly. A practiced hunter. Ready to act, he pursed his lips and whistled a gentle bird call. He could barely hear the sound, but Lilly had exceptional ears, and she’d know what to do. When hunting as a team, she would rush out, forcing their prey to flee toward him. He would take care of the rest, not wanting Lilly to kill with her bare hands. While she was part cat and always would be, he wanted to make sure the feral instincts that kept her alive on Island 731 faded, so encounters like her first meeting with Hudson didn’t happen again.
Lilly emerged from the trees, sailing through the air, fifteen feet up. He’d seen her jump from higher heights in the past, but it always made him flinch. He sucked in a quick breath, but she was soon on the ground and running toward him. An eight-foot-tall, thick-limbed goliath that looked vaguely human, thundered out behind her, backhanding the tree she’d been on.
“Up,” Hawkins said, just loud enough for Lilly to hear. She sprang into the air, landing thirty feet above Hawkins in the tree, keeping Gordon’s eyes fixed upwards.
Crouched down low, leaning against the tree trunk, Hawkins adjusted his aim. Hudson had warned against hitting the orange membrane on Gordon’s chest. Hawkins had seen footage of what happened in Boston. He understood the danger and aimed high, for the head.
The arrow released silently, the gentle twang of the bowstring snapping forward drowned out by the chaos around them. The black arrow slipped through the night, invisible. Accurate. The projectile struck Gordon’s thick forehead. Hawkins worried the arrow would snap or bounce off, but it didn’t. As advertised, it slipped through the giant man’s skin.
Then through his skull and the brain trapped beneath.
Gordon staggered to a stop, looking confused. He knew something fundamentally wrong had occurred to his body, but he didn’t know what. Then he went cross-eyed and saw the arrow.
This is it, Hawkins thought, slipping back behind the tree. He carefully put the bow down and reached into his pocket. When he found what he was looking for, he peeked back at Gordon and felt his hope shrivel away like a Shrinky Dink in the oven.
Gordon yanked the arrow from his head, looked at it curiously and dropped it. He still looked a little stunned, but he was also scanning the trees. Hawkins slipped behind cover, waited a beat and peeked around the tree again.
Gordon was gone.
“Hello there,” said the baritone voice, close enough to feel in his chest.
Hawkins whirled around to find the mammoth Gordon standing above him with a wicked sharp-toothed grin. Hawkins grabbed the bow and tried to scramble back, but he tripped over the tree’s roots.
Gordon reached out.
Lilly descended with a shriek.
She landed on Gordon’s arm and clung to it, her claws digging in deeply. Before the giant man-thing could react, she swiped her razor-sharp talons across his face twice and leapt away. Gordon roared and swung at her, but she was already up the tree, shouting for Hawkins to run.
But he didn’t.
Instead, Hawkins got to his feet, unslung his shotgun and leveled it at Gordon’s face. The Kaiju-man lowered his gaze back to Hawkins and sneered. “I’m going to eat you.”
Hawkins knew that Hudson might say something like ‘Eat this,’ but he lacked the man’s sense of humor. He just pulled the trigger, sending a cloud of 12 gauge into Gordon’s face, filling the gaps between the criss-crossing lines left by Lilly’s claws.
He then pulled the trigger seven more times, staggering Gordon back. Despite having eight shells of shot embedded in his face, the traitorous general remained on his feet.
When the shotgun’s last report faded, Gordon took his hands away from his face and said, “I’m going to eat you slowly.”
“Shit,” Hawkins said, picking up the bow and preparing to run.
When Gordon took one mighty step forward, halving the distance between them, Hawkins knew he couldn’t escape. After surviving the unthinkable, he’d finally met the monster that would kill him.
43
All of the chaos around me—the sirens, gunfire, klaxons, screaming and crumbling buildings—cease to exist in a moment of sickening clarity. I’m a dead man. Not because of any immediate physical threat, but because if the events of today are seen as anything other than a stellar victory, the blame for all this is going to chase me down like a laser-guided missile. I feel faint as the blood drains from my face.
Watching the U.S. Capitol Building be hacked apart by two Kaiju can have that effect. At least, it can when you’re the guy who led them here.
Nemesis arrived at the north side of the Capitol just as Scylla reached the south. There was a brief roar-off, with both monsters hollering at each other like two angry inebriants on either side of a car. While the drunks might then run around the car to slap each other silly, the two Kaiju are going through the building. Nemesis makes short work of the Senate Chamber while Scylla flattens the House.