“You can’t,” Alessi says.
“It’s going to kill him,” I counter, and part of me asks, why do I care?
She looks down at Endo. “Only he can break the connection.”
Endo’s eyes open wide. He reaches out and clutches my arm. “I was right. It’s you. He’s going to kill you. But it...has to be...him. Ahh!”
Gordon is seething. He stumbles about, grunting and groaning, thrashing back and forth like Endo is still clinging to his shoulders. As I watch the twisting giant, his chest flexes. The ruined skin splits, revealing bands of orange light.
Like Nemesis and the other Kaiju, Gordon now has an explosive defense system, which I now know from experience, also makes for a useful propellant. As strong as Gordon is, I suspect he lacks the mass to stand against the force of that kind of explosion.
“Endo,” I shout. “Move him away. Get out of his thoughts, and move him toward the ocean!”
Endo and Gordon gasp in unison. Their thoughts in sync for just a moment as they both turn toward the ocean and speak, “She’s coming.”
Since the events of the previous year, there is pretty much only one reason why someone might look to the ocean in fear and speak those words. Nemesis. My unwanted protector. Racing to the rescue. And she’s hard to miss. Two miles out, a 50-foot-tall mound of water rushes toward the shore, cut through by the 30-foot-tall spikes that line the carapace of her back.
While the monster’s intentions are noble, or instinctual as the case may be, she’s going to get us all killed. When she stops—if she stops—that massive wave is going to keep right on coming. I think it’s safe to say that Nemesis has no understanding of Newton’s first law of motion.
But before we can head for higher ground, we need to deal with Gordon.
“Endo,” I say. “Focus, you son-of-a-bitch. Push him toward the water.”
Gordon, eyes still on Nemesis, takes a furtive step. Then another. He must realize that he’s being controlled again, because his movements become shaky and unbalanced. Endo’s body quivers. His eyes roll back. But Gordon keeps on moving.
I point to the large cube of inscribed granite. “Take cover!”
Collins and Alessi drag Endo behind the five-foot-thick marker while I drag myself. All of my limbs are working, but the pain I feel with each step slows me down. When I reach the others, I look back to Gordon. He’s a good two-hundred feet away. Far enough, I decide, and I draw my pistol.
“Endo, if you can hear me, turn him around.”
Gordon slowly faces us, his eyes locked on me. I am so getting sick of being on the receiving end of a Kaiju glare.
“Open his arms,” I say. “Flex his chest.”
My unwanted teammate shakes. Drool slides down his cheek.
Gordon shakes, fighting the movement, not because he knows what I’m going to do, but just because he’s a stubborn prick who doesn’t like to be controlled. Which is understandable. I’ve been in his position.
With a pain-filled shout, Endo arches his back and falls unconscious.
My head snaps back to Gordon. He roars with victory, raising his fists. He turns his head skyward and lets out a howl, doing exactly what I wanted him to.
Looking over the barrel of my handgun, I notice that my vision is a little blurry. No time to let it clear. I squeeze off a shot. Then another. And another. They have no effect. Because I’m missing.
A louder gunshot rings out to my left.
Collins.
Oh crap. Collins won’t—
The world turns orange as a hand shoves down on my shoulder and pushes me behind the large stone. Heat and flames rocket past. My face stings. My armor heats up. And then it’s gone. While the explosive force from those orange membranes is impressive, the blast begins and ends very quickly, as the wound gets cauterized.
The grass on either side of us is charred and smoldering. I stand to find Gordon still on the rocky coastline, the area around him blackened by the blast. He’s on his knees, clutching his chest. He didn’t know, I realize. The explosion must have come as a shock, and probably hurt like hell. For the first time, he looks weak. Wounded. Perhaps vulnerable.
I’m not sure we could kill him, but having seen how Nemesis handled Scrion, there is no doubt she could make a snack of him.
Speaking of which... “Woodstock, we need immediate evac!”
Betty circles around overhead, dropping toward the stone between us and Gordon—and the giant wave, which is now just a half mile and thirty seconds away.
“Jeesum Crow!” Woodstock’s shout punctuates Betty’s sudden maneuver. The chopper pitches back and shoots away. Behind the thunderous rotor chops, I hear a splash, like a vast, wet, sucking noise.
A shadow covers the area.
Then it rains.
I turn my gaze upward and see the strangest looking, low hanging rain cloud ever. My misinterpretation of the shape is quickly undone by three orange circles.
Dammit. It’s another Kaiju.
The monster has leapt out of the fresh-water quarry and is soaring over our heads like some demented version of Free Willy. The creature is smaller than Scrion, seventy-five feet from snout to tail tip, and faster. I can’t see its face or back, but it’s got four long, spike covered limbs jutting from its sides, like a lizard. And its long tail is flattened vertically at the end, perfect for swimming. This thing isn’t here to fight, it’s Gordon’s getaway vehicle.
The monster pays us no attention as it lands between us and Gordon. It simply runs forward on its wide-spread legs and opens its triangle-shaped jaws. It scoops Gordon inside, almost delicately, and then the thing is in motion again. It dives into the ocean, and with two hard swipes of its tail, it disappears into the water.
The mountain that is Nemesis quickly alters course, giving chase, but it’s clear the larger Kaiju will never catch the sleeker model now racing out to sea.
Propelled faster by Nemesis’s sudden turn, the tidal wave races toward the shore.
“Let’s go!” Collins shouts. Her voice pulls me out of spectator mode. Woodstock is already landing again. Collins hefts Endo over her shoulder and runs for Betty. Alessi is right behind her. And me...I’m hobbling after them like the Hunchback of Notre Dame with a leg cramp.
Collins throws open the side door and tosses Endo onto the floor. Alessi doesn’t complain about the rough treatment. She just dives inside.
Looking through the open door and the window on the opposite side, I see nothing but water, racing up the shore.
My lungs feel like they’re not working. I can’t catch a breath, drowning in the open air. I know something is really wrong when my vision starts to fade. But I don’t stop. I can’t stop.
Collins reaches for me. “C’mon!”
I jump.
And collide with the outside edge of the chopper’s floor. Pain shoots through my body, so intense that I can’t feel anything save for the sick twisting sensation in my gut. Darkness blocks my sight. I try to fight it, but in the end, I decide I might not like to be awake when I drown, so I let myself slide into oblivion.
21
She felt...chaos.
Everywhere.
Her mind was torn. Her body burned with energy, but she was pulled in separate directions. Even as her holy rage compelled her to lash out and silence the corrupt voices in the world—everyone in the world—that still small voice that was also her, whispered for her to stop. To have mercy. To protect. There was a time when the voices sang in unison, for blood and retribution, but now, they were at odds.
And yet, they were each other. The same.
Nemesis and Maigo.
Monster and girl.
Every situation she encountered and each set of decisions, while tearing the pair apart, unified them in the end, as confusion became action, and action felt...good.
She knew the dark man. Felt her heart in him, as she had once before. But while she had changed, he had not. His thirst for vengeance, for destruction, grew. While those feeling
s were still a part of her, and were a thirst she would quench, she had found balance. She sensed the dark man’s desperate longing and ignored it. Their hearts, once the same, were no longer aligned.
But there was another. She sensed his heart only vaguely, but she knew it well. She felt it the day retribution had been brought upon the man who... As powerful as she felt, the memories—the pain and loss of that day—were still too disturbing to think about. She had been helpless then.
He understood that.
He...sympathized with her pain.
And he had helped deliver her from it.
While the world around her cried out for punishment, his weakness drew her attention. Because the dark man still lived. And his dark heart wanted to consume the other. The...light man.
So the world and its evil would wait until the dark man tasted vengeance for his crimes against the light. The most recent of which nearly claimed his life. He was alive, she knew. Though she could sense the billions of souls on the planet, his stood out as a beacon and a reminder of who she had been.
Who she still was.
The dark man slid away into the darkness, her tether to him growing more faint. Like the light man, the dark man’s heart had grown weak. But he was protected, too. Swept away by a creature like her...but not. It saw the world as she did, in shades of light and dark, good and evil, but it judged the world more harshly, as she had once done, when she was separate. When she was alone.
But was that other self, so long ago, the same being she was now?
Questions like this, malformed and jumbled, entered her mind on occasion, but she was not of the mind to find answers. She was a creature of instinct. Of purity in all its forms. She could feel only the answers.
And she felt the light man.
So faint.
And weak.
So she waited in the deep, at the base of a steep shoal, where her bulk would go unnoticed by the enemies still seeking her out.
When the light man woke and the dark man returned, she would rise to exact her justice, first on the dark man, and then...then, she didn’t know.
22
I wake to the sound of wheezing mixed with a chorus of beeps. With my eyes still shut, I know where I am. The antiseptic scent and background voices of a busy hospital are easy to identify.
My eyes flutter and open. I have a spectacular view of the speckled white, drop ceiling above me. I dwell on the night sky in reverse image, my mind slowly returning to me.
I remember Gordon, the new Kaiju, Nemesis and the wave. And the pain, which regrettably hasn’t really faded. Movement to the left draws my attention. A wall-mounted television. The Golden Girls. An involuntary groan escapes my lips. My mother watched The Golden Girls religiously, starting in 1985 and ending on the day of her death, twenty three years later, when I found her in front of the television, a smile on her face, Betty White playing dumb to some kind of accusation.
That had been a hard day. My father had died five years previous. But it wasn’t until mom went that I felt...free. When her soul left, she mercifully pulled away a burden that I had buried long ago. But she’d forgotten to take my loathing for the Golden Girls.
Estelle is talking. Loudly. Something about spaghetti sauce.
“Fuck you, Estelle,” I say to the TV, hoping my mother is somehow able to hear how I feel about the show, which I could never express while she lived.
“Ehh?” says a too loud voice that hurts my head. “What’s that?”
My neighbor looks old enough to be Estelle’s father. He’s gotten to the ripe, old age where liver spots cover more of his skin than not, no hair remains on his head and the size of his nose is dwarfed only by the girth of his ears. If we were in a jungle rather than a hospital, I might mistake him for a proboscis monkey.
“Nothing,” I say, waving him off. My voice is raspy and deep. I feel like someone took a cheese grater to my throat. Tubes, I think. They had tubes down my throat. I look at my hand. An IV line runs up to a clear bag hanging nearby. A heart monitor—the beeping—is attached to my index finger.
“Suit yourself,” the old man says, but he knows. He’s clutching the TV’s remote. Golem’s precious. No one with any good taste or sense of decency watches The Golden Girls, especially the spaghetti episode. He knows, all right. He catches me looking and hugs the remote tighter.
“Hey,” says a sleepy voice.
It’s Collins, sitting on the other side of me. Looks like she just woke up, but she’s otherwise just as smoking hot as usual. A couple of details leap out at me, though. Her tactical gear is gone, replaced by jeans and a t-shirt. And her red hair has some bounce to it. She’s had time to shower and change. Assuming Woodstock flew straight here, during the middle of the day, and Collins stayed by my side through the night—like she would—until someone sent her home to change out of her stink, all that and the now missing throat tubes tell me a few things. First, I was in bad shape. Second, I’ve been here for at least a day.
“Two days?” I guess.
“Three,” she says.
“Nemesis?”
“Gone,” she says. “Gordon, too. It’s been all quiet.”
“Too quiet?” I ask with a chuckle that makes me pay in pain.
“Try not to laugh,” she says.
“Is that why The Golden Girls is on?”
“What?” she asks, glancing at the TV. I’ve never told her about my loathing for the show. She’d probably think I just hate old people. I glance at my neighbor. Right now, I kind of do. He catches me looking and makes a face which communicates an unmistakable ‘fuck off.’
I raise my middle finger at him and he turns away.
“Hey!” Collins says, smacking my shoulder, which actually hurts a lot.
I sigh, slowly and carefully, managing the intensity of the pain. “So, what’s the damage?”
“Two broken ribs. A scratched lung. They said it was very nearly punctured. And a lot of internal bruising, but no bleeding. You hit your head pretty good when you fell in the chopper.”
“I thought I jumped.”
“If you jumped, it was the most pitiful jump I’ve ever seen. Like this guy—” she nods to my neighbor, “—doing hurdles.”
The image of the old guy tumbling through a line of hurdles brings a smile to my face. I nearly laugh, but tamp it down with the memory of pain. Collins smirks at my struggle. “Jerk,” I say.
“So, have you picked out a ring yet?” she asks.
I involuntarily convulse with surprise, which sends lightning bolts of anguish through my body.
Collins covers her mouth, laughing at my pain.
“Asshole!” I say, smiling despite the pain. When the pain subsides, my thoughts turn back to my last memories. “What happened to Endo?”
She motions to the wall behind me. “Next room over. He’s...in a coma.”
This sobers me up quickly. I still loathe the man, but I clearly recall him saving my life.
“They haven’t figured out why yet, but I think—”
I know where she’s going. “The neural implant.”
She nods. “Lessi thinks it overloaded his mind. That with time he’ll be fine.”
“‘Lessi?’”
“We’ve had time to get to know each other.” Collins looks at the wall like she can see through it. “She cares about him. Though I don’t think their relationship is anything but professional. She’s still here, though. Says a lot.”
I reach out and take Collins’s hand. “Yeah, it does. Should I give you the ring now?”
Collins gasps and leans back, eyes wide, hand to her mouth. When I laugh, it hurts like hell, but it’s worth it. Vengeance is mine. I’m Nemesis with a sense of humor. When I’ve recovered once more, I set my mind to more serious things. “Cooper and Watson?”
“Fine,” she says. “Monitoring the coast and overseeing the evacuation’s end.”
“I meant the baby.”
Collins smiles like it’s the sweetest thing in th
e whole wide world. “Yes, all three of them are okay.”
“What about Zoomb?” I ask. “Any word on their prototype?”
“I haven’t asked,” she says. “The small version on Gordon nearly killed Endo. I can’t imagine what would happen if—”
“But it worked,” I say. “He controlled Gordon.”
Any good humor she had a moment ago, melts away. “And almost died.”
“Gordon was resisting,” I point out. “Maigo—”
“Is a monster!” Collins stands, hands on hips. “She destroys cities. Kills mercilessly. If you go inside that mind, you might never come back.”
“She also saved my life. Twice.”
“And nearly killed you in the process.”
“If me being in a coma for a while is the price I pay for saving thousands or even millions of people, so be it.”
Collins stares at me. She knows I’m right. It sucks, but I’m right.
“I hate you,” she finally says, and sits back down. “But not until you’re better.”
“Or until she makes another appearance. Speaking of which, maintain evacuation protocols. If I’m still here...”
“Right. Shit.” She takes out her phone and stands. “I’ll be right back.”
As she leaves the room, phony laughter pulls my eyes back to the TV. Estelle is in her nightgown. I roll my eyes toward my aged neighbor. “Hey buddy, just so you know, Nemesis eats people who aren’t nice to me.”
He stays calm, leaning back in his bed. “Yeah, well, you haven’t met my wife.”
We share a smile. Peace made.
If Nemesis is anything like the old guy, this mind-meld thing will be a snap.
I take a breath and let it out slowly. Yep, I’m screwed.
23
Gordon woke slowly, a lingering dream about his childhood home fading, as he became aware of his surroundings. He was in bed. A heavy blanket covered him. Protected him. Nightmares couldn’t reach him here. Since the operation that gave him a new, more powerful heart, Gordon’s body had undergone significant changes, but so had his mind. Powerful nightmares filled his sleep. That’s what he believed them to be at first. But he knew better. They were glimpses into the past. Into her past...and his. Millennia of strife. Of war. Hate. All of it calling to him in his dreams. Fueling his bloodlust.
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