Project Maigo

by Jeremy Robinson

  To Watson’s credit, he handles the news far better than I did. He strolls across the room, calm as can be. Before reaching Cooper, who is still frozen in place, he bends down and takes the pregnancy test from the trash. He lifts it gently, like it’s a baby. The gentleness with which he holds the urine-covered device makes me feel like an asshole. He glances at Cooper. “This is yours?”

  She nods.

  “Ours?” he asks. His hand is shaking now.

  Cooper nods again, and before I understand what has happened, they’re in each other’s arms, rocking back and forth.

  “Thank God,” Watson says, and I’m not sure if he’s expressing happiness over the baby or the fact that Cooper wasn’t injured today. Maybe both. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that the man is joyful. Not terrified.

  Dammit, I am an asshole.

  “I was going to tell you at the end of the day,” Cooper tells him.

  Watson shakes his head, messing up her perfect bun. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Feeling like an asshole and a peeping Tom, I say, “Why don’t you two take some time. Collins and I will help our...visitors get settled.”

  After the briefest of nods from Cooper, the pair head for the stairs. An odd couple, no doubt, but their affection for each other fills the room like warm taffy, gooey and sweet. I’m happy for them, really, but I’m glad when they’re gone, because gooey and sweet is not the mood I want lingering when I speak to Endo.

  I turn toward my own personal nemesis, or one of them. What’s that make him? One of my nemesi? Nemesises? Or can you only have one nemesis by definition? Endo is still grinning at me. So is...fuck.

  “What’s your name?”

  I can’t keep thinking of her as Lucy Liu. It’s totally racist.

  “Maggie Alessi,” she answers, not a trace of an accent.

  So is Maggie.

  I take a step toward them but am stopped when Collins takes hold of my wrist. No pressure point this time. She grins up at me. “Not married, yet?”

  I try to hide my grin, but fail. “Shut-up.”

  When I head for Endo again, I’m feeling far too happy. Not only are Watson and Cooper an item with a baby on the way, but Collins caught me with my guard down. Found out what was on my mind before I wanted her to. Looong before. So when I pull a chair around, sit down on it backwards and says, “Let me catch you up to speed,” it tastes bad coming out.

  I clear my throat and stand. “Let me try that again.” I sit back down and point to each of them as I speak. “Fuck you. And fuck you.”

  Alessi raises her eyebrows, her lips turning in the opposite direction like I’ve impressed her somehow. “He’s more articulate than you said.”

  Collins clears her throat. She’s standing behind me, arms crossed, face grim. Alessi’s smirk goes into full retreat. Collins is so much more badass than me, it’s not fair.

  “Why are you here?” I ask. “And please, no bullshit. I’ve been ordered to work with you, but if you’re not 100% honest with me, I’ll feed you to Nemesis.”

  “You mean, Maigo,” Endo says. I’m about to rip him a new one, when I realize that he’s not taunting me. He thinks of her the same way I do: part monster, part victimized child. “And I’m sure she would oblige you. After today, I mean.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Collins asks.

  She didn’t hear, I realize. But somehow, Endo did. He knows exactly what happened and what was said. I lean to the side, looking at Endo’s ear. There’s a small device inside.

  He confirms my suspicion, saying, “Your emergency network isn’t as secure as the DHS would like to believe. If you’d had Zoomb—”

  “I know why you’re here, Endo,” I say, hoping to change the course of this conversation. “And I’m telling you right now, you’re never going to control Nemesis. She will never be your weapon. Or Zoomb’s. Orders from the President be damned, I won’t allow it.”

  “I’m afraid you misunderstand our intentions,” Endo says. His voice is annoyingly calm and confident. “While I share your...infatuation with the monster, Maigo, I lack your...connection.”

  I feel Collins shift behind me. She’s still not on the same page, but she remains silent.

  “If the technology works, the U.S. Government will be paying Zoomb untold billions of dollars. I won’t be me controlling her, nor will any other Zoomb employee. The technology will be owned and used by your employers, a fact that will be kept secret from the rest of the world.”

  “I don’t believe this!” Collins walks away for a moment, rolling her head from side to side. She returns, fists on hips. “You’re going to weaponize her?”

  “She will be under the full control of a responsible government agent. Her actions will—”

  “Who?” Collins asks. “What kind of an idiot would control—”

  “Shit.” The word comes out as a whisper, but stops Collins in her tracks. She’s heard the whispered expression enough to know I’ve figured something out. “Shiiiit.”

  “You know who it is?” Collins asks.

  I look up at her, the weight returning to my limbs. “Me.”

  17

  My legs burn as I trudge up the hillside. Collins and I are out for a walk, while the blissful Watson and Cooper babysit Endo and Alessi. I figured a few minutes alone with the two lovebirds would be enough to wipe the self-righteous smirks off their faces. Also, I needed some time with Collins. Working together as a couple isn’t always easy. We spend a lot of time together. If things get tense between us, we suck at our jobs. So we try to work things out before they become things at all.

  As usual, the first few minutes of our stroll around the streets atop Powder Hill—named for the civil war gunpowder house that still stands just up the street—are spent in silence. A year ago, the homes here were full of families. Kids roamed the hilltop in packs, playing hide and seek, playing dingdong ditch and breaking windows with balls of every shape and size. Now, there isn’t a child, man, woman or car in sight. Although the hill was cleared for residents six months ago, no one returned. ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets, and no one ever comes to look. Some people incorrectly worry about radiation or some other kind of poisoning leaking from the destruction that begins at the bottom of the hill to the east. Others worry, more accurately, as seen today, about a repeat. The suckiest part about those people being right is that I think it’s my fault we had a repeat at all. If I’d been somewhere else...

  “So,” Collins says.

  I shake out of my thoughts. I’m standing at a tall oak tree in front of a white house. A family used to live here. I remember them. Three boys. Two golden retrievers. Lots of noise. The home was a focal point for other kids. Always busy. Now the place is empty. The windows, blown out a year ago, have been boarded up. Shards of broken glass glitter in the tall, un-mowed grass. I place my hand against the old tree and peel off a shard of bark. I flip it over in my hands. The rough, diamond shape reminds me of the reflective scale-like ‘feathers’ that fell from Nemesis’s wings.

  “What happened today?” It’s been nearly twenty seconds since her “So.” She’s afraid to ask. I suppose she should be. Being in a relationship with a man who attracts Kaiju is probably not the best choice. Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet Jon and his 350-foot-tall baggage.

  “How’s the head?” I ask.

  “Fine,” she says.

  And that’s all she’ll give me. It was a weak attempt at best. Paramedics already saw to the wound and declared her fit for ass kicking. Nothing a few painkillers couldn’t manage, though they asked her to avoid any further impacts to the head for a week, as if she threw herself into the brick wall on purpose.

  Seeing no other way to delay or derail the conversation, I say, “They were here for me.”

  “Endo was ordered to be here. We have no choice.”

  “Not Endo.” I shake my head. If it were only Endo, this would still be a salvageable day. “The Kaiju. Scrion. Nemesis. They were here for me.”
>
  “Don’t be—”

  “Ask Woodstock. Scrion came to kill me. Nemesis came to protect me.”

  “You can call her Maigo around me,” Collins says.

  “I’m not sure that thinking of her that way is a good thing,” I say. “She’s a monster. She killed thousands of people and destroyed Boston.”

  “But she was driven by the memories of a murdered little girl,” Collins says. This perspective is new for her. She’s either been doing some thinking or she’s just trying to be supportive. “I think the people we really need to blame are the ones who made her, accidentally or not.”

  “Gordon,” I say.

  She nods. “And Zoomb.”

  “And Endo.”

  “We just need to play nice, okay?” She grabs my shoulders and digs her thumbs into my back, loosening the tension. “You can’t go all ‘fuck you’ to everyone and expect to gain their trust—”

  “Or gain any useful information.” I toss the chunk of bark into the grass. “I get it. But I’m not happy about this. The idea of controlling Nemesis...it’s just...no.”

  “It’s dangerous,” she says.

  “It’s a break of trust,” I say. “If I do have some kind of connection with Nemesis now, if she’s somehow locked on to protecting me, then maybe the best thing for the world is for me to move to Antarctica or something?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Collins says, but I’m not so sure. If it kept Nemesis from making paste out of people, I’d gladly spend my life in the frozen South. Well, maybe not gladly, but I can’t put my personal happiness above the rest of the world.

  Speaking of which... “I can’t stay here.”

  She stops rubbing my back. The silence that follows is a big question mark.

  “Gordon was here for me. Scrion was here for me. Scrion is dead, but if Gordon comes back, we might not be able to stop him. You all got lucky the first time. And there are probably two more Kaiju roaming the planet right now. If he’s controlling them, too...”

  I don’t have to finish the thought. My presence here puts the team in danger. It makes the whole city a target. And I’m not about to let Beverly become my own personal Tokyo, to be stomped on over and over.

  “Wherever you go,” Collins says. “I’m coming with you.”

  I’d like to be the brave and noble hero and say, ‘Never! You must live your life, fully and gloriously and blah, blah, blah,’ but I don’t. Instead, I wrap my arm around her waist, my fingers finding her hip bone, and I pull her close. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  My phone rings, playing Gangnam Style by Psy.

  “Who’s that?” Collins asks.

  “Endo,” I say. “I programmed him in before we left.”

  She smiles. “You are so totally racist.”

  “What? Endo is Japanese! Psy is—”

  “Korean.”

  Dammit!

  I answer the phone. “What?”

  I listen to Endo speaking, his voice calm as usual, with a trace of arrogance or superiority. As he talks, I hear Betty’s rotors chopping through the air in the distance as Woodstock warms her up. When I hang up, I have a mix of feelings. First is anger. Endo is highjacking the FC-P. Second is anger. Yeah, that’s the same as the first, but they’re directed at different people for different reasons. Apparently, when Endo was trying to control Gordon’s mind, he was also embedding a tracking device.

  On the plus side, I dodged the matrimony bullet that was no doubt coming next. That conversation scares me for two reasons. First, I haven’t fully thought it through yet. I don’t even really know how I feel about it. Second, and this is what really scares me, I haven’t the foggiest clue about what she thinks. Her first husband turned out to be an abusive prick. I’m not sure that’s a path she wants to walk down again, and if we could avoid the topic, that would be dandy. Of course, with a little Cooper-Watson on the way, that might be hard. Pheromones are in the air.

  “What’s going on?” Collins asks, when I lower the phone without saying goodbye.

  “Gordon,” I say. “We know where he is.”

  18

  By the time Collins and I reach the helicopter, its rotor spins madly. Gravity struggles to hold it down. It took us only a minute-thirty to get back, but we then took the time to prepare for an encounter with hulk-Gordon. We’re both wearing black tactical gear. While the armor we’re wearing isn’t designed to stop bullets, it helps absorbs impacts and is designed specifically to stop knife attacks, or in this case claw attacks, which in our line of work, is the more common danger. But that doesn’t stop us from arming up like Schwarzenegger in Commando. Beyond our usual high caliber side arms, Collins and I are packing M4 assault rifles with M320 grenade-launcher attachments and laser sights. That’s more Mission Impossible than Commando, but I prefer muscles and cigars over missile-launching wrist watches. Mostly because the latter isn’t real. If I could have a missile-launching wrist watch too, I would. The point is, we’re carrying enough firepower and ammo to make a Mexican drug cartel jealous.

  Which is why I’m surprised to find Endo and Alessi, sitting in the chopper’s rear cabin, still dressed in their black business attire. Their only new accessories are the headphones covering their ears. I just shake my head and let it go. Maybe Gordon will take care of Endo for me.

  Collins gets in the back with Endo while I take my seat up front.

  “Already got the coordinates plugged in,” Woodstock says, after I’ve donned my headphones. “Just waitin’ on you.”

  I plug in my phone and swipe a finger across it to open up Devine’s menu. I’m going to treat Gordon like a Kaiju and bring in everything I have. A hand on my arm keeps me from activating the transmit feature. I turn to find Endo’s fingers on my arm. I nearly punch him in the nose, but he’d probably dodge it and make me look like an idiot, so I refrain. “What?”

  “We need to go alone,” he says.

  “You need to see a psychiatrist.” I turn back to my phone.

  “If we show up in force, he’ll be gone before we get there. He’s still on land, but if he enters the ocean...”

  Not wanting to waste any more time, I nod to Woodstock and point to the sky. We’re airborne a moment later, heading northeast toward Halibut Point State Park, in Rockport. The old, fresh-water filled quarry, which is separated from the ocean by a 50-foot-thick band of solid rock, should be devoid of civilians. Most towns to the north and south of Beverly should have evacuated their coastal areas, too, which is probably how Gordon made it there without being spotted, unless he’s driving a really big truck with tinted windows.

  “...we’ll never find him again,” Endo finishes.

  My thumb hovers over the transmit button. “What’s your plan?”

  “If we can control Gordon, we might be able to diffuse the situation with the children.”

  I simulate the sound of a tire screeching. “Back up. Children?”

  Endo looks annoyed, like this is something I should already know or have figured out, which pisses me off, because it means that maybe I haven’t been doing a good job this past year. “The Nemesis-Prime carcass, which, before you ask, is in a secure location, was discovered beneath a mountain in Alaska. Removal of the body completed around the same time that Maigo-Nemesis emerged in Maine. Those in charge of the excavation decided to close up shop before they were noticed.”

  “You mean Zoomb,” I say.

  Endo shrugs. “But the excavation was incomplete. On the final day of digging, a clutch of five large eggs was discovered. Lacking the time and resources to safely and securely remove the eggs, they were left behind with the intention of removing them at a later date, when the fallout from the incident in Boston subsided. But when they returned—”

  “The eggs were gone,” I say.

  “The eggs had hatched,” Endo says. “The bones of several people, as well as moose, deer, elk and bears were all that remained. Analysis of the footprints revealed all five of the young were alive an
d well. But they weren’t alone.”

  “Gordon was with them,” Collins says.

  “Gordon raised them,” Endo says. “Do you know why Gordon is the way he is? A heart transplant. From the Maigo clone before she grew into Nemesis. He has the girl’s heart—the monster’s DNA—in his chest. It is likely Prime’s young bonded to him at birth. Before the events in Boston, Gordon developed a strong bond with Nemesis, feeling her desires and acting to help fulfill them. I suspect that bond was broken when you fulfilled Nemesis’s goal, but I believe that same bond might exist now between Gordon and the children.”

  “They’re carrying out his desires,” I say. “His new soldiers.”

  “Exactly,” Endo says. “And for the most part, those desires are compelling the young to eat and grow. If they grow at the same rate Maigo did, we will have four 300-foot Kaiju to deal with, inside of a few days. And with Gordon here...it is likely the young will follow. Scrion was just the first.”

  “The question is, why is Gordon here?” I say.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Endo says.

  I hate this man.

  He doesn’t wait to hear my theory. “Gordon is here for you.”

  “I know that,” I say, “but why?”

  “Gordon is a military man. He is responding to a threat.” Endo leans forward, like it will help me hear him, but he could lean back and I’d hear him the same. “Imagine that Gordon is part of a special ops team. He is in hostile territory, but he can’t act until he gets orders. Now imagine that the enemy has put up a tower that blocks communications. What do you suppose becomes his primary target?”

  “I’m the tower,” I say.

  “I wasn’t sure until Maigo saved you today. While you lack the deeper connection that Gordon had, I believe the potential for that connection exists.”

  “With your mind-control doohickey.”

  “It is a neural implant,” Endo says. “It allows us basic, thoughtless, control of the target through electrical impulses to various parts of the brain. We can render the target immobile, as you experienced, or we can put them in a rampage. But there is a second option. A pathway into the target’s mind that allows for a deeper connection, which would facilitate complete control and transmission of detailed instructions.”