Project Maigo
Project Maigo
Jeremy Robinson
1
Colorado
You would think that being deep in the woods of Southern Colorado with a smoking hot redhead, with no one else around for miles, would give me nothing to complain about. Under other circumstances, that would be true, but it turns out I don’t know what poison ivy looks like. Also good to know, if you get the oil on your hands and then proceed to scratch your arms, stomach and balls? Your world pretty much goes to hell.
Seriously.
My arms and stomach are bearable, but it’s the middle of summer. It’s hot and humid here on the Ute reservation. So I decided to go commando. Didn’t even pack underwear. My boxer-briefs would have at least held everything in place. But now, every movement instigates a wicked stinging itch. My loins are literally burning. What should have been another useless, but otherwise memorable, investigation of a strange-creature sighting has become an itchy wet blanket the likes of which I doubt any man has ever before experienced in the history of the world.
To make matters worse, we’re leaving. Again, doesn’t sound too bad, but we’re ten miles from our car and another twenty from the nearest pharmacy, where I will single-handedly boost the stock of calamine lotion.
I’m walking like I just spent the past month riding bareback, and the toe of my boot strikes a rock funny. I stumble forward just a little bit, but it’s enough for things to move around like some kid with ADHD is ringing the bells of St. Mary’s.
I stagger to a stop, wincing. Legs splayed like the St. Louis Gateway Arch. “Fuuuck.”
Ashley Collins, my investigative partner at the Department of Homeland Security’s one and only Fusion Center dedicated to protecting the United States from paranormal threats, stops in her tracks. She turns around with that adorable smirk of hers, and I already want to slap it off her face. Of course, she’d kick my ass if I tried. “Man up, Hudson.”
“I will only accept criticism from someone with testicles,” I say, hands on knees.
“I’ve got an elastic band in my pocket,” she says, still wearing the smirk. “My uncle showed me how to castrate a goat once. Just put the elastic on tight, stop the flow of blood and—”
“C’mon,” I say, unable to keep myself from chuckling. “Seriously, this hurts.”
She digs into her pocket, pulls out the elastic, stretches it a few times and in a sing-song voice, says, “We could be gal-pals.”
I find myself unable to reply. Not because I don’t have a comeback. We tease each other like this frequently. We could ping-pong creative insults back and forth for hours. It’s the hair on the back of my neck, standing straight up that stops me. And I have no idea why. I didn’t hear anything. Or smell anything. It’s just an instinct. Some part of my mind shouting at me to run, or fight.
When Collins slowly moves her hand to her sidearm, I know she feels it too.
We’re being stalked.
“What is it?” she whispers.
I shake my head, but I know it’s one of two things: a brown bear or a mountain lion. Both are common enough in this part of the country, and both occasionally take a whack at people. My preference would be the bear. Not only do I have experience fending off bears, but we’d hear it coming. A cougar...their hunting and fighting abilities are nearly supernatural. So much so, that they’re revered by the local Ute population. We wouldn’t know it was here until it attacked, which is exactly what’s happening. I give my answer without fully processing the potential ramifications. “Mountain lion.”
Collins’s hand moves from the holstered handgun on her hip and shifts toward the tranquilizer rifle slung over her back. Dressed in camouflage, carrying a backpack and armed like a guerrilla, she looks like she should be in a Red Dawn reboot. I’m dressed the same, but right now, with me all hunched over and uncomfortable, she’s the only one who really looks the part. “Or maybe another big cat,” she says.
The realization causes me to stand up straight and ignore the molten lava between my legs. Like Collins, I reach for my rifle. But while hers contains a tranquilizer dart, mine contains a tracking device. We’re not exterminators. We’re only here to find out what people are seeing. In this case, the creature of choice is a black, cat-woman. Over the past year, Collins and I have investigated scads of creature reports, including chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, a handful of ghost sightings, poltergeists, UFO sightings, alien abductions and natural phenomena. If you don’t count the 300-foot tall monster that laid waste to Boston—and Bigfoot, which we found and tagged a few months later—the FC-P department of the DHS has once again become a black hole of wasted time. That’s if you’re only looking at our investigations into the strange. We’ve also been busy building cases against several people involved in the debacle that led to thousands of deaths at the hands, and feet—that’s awful—of an ancient vengeance goddess genetically merged with a murdered little girl named Maigo. I shake my head at the thought. Nemesis. That a laboratory could take the DNA of a girl and merge it with something probably long dead, and horrible, to create a gigantic, city-destroying monster, still sounds impossible. Yet, that’s what happened. And she stomped her way south, from Maine to Boston, eating people, whales and everything else with a heartbeat. With each meal, she grew, every pound of flesh eaten transferred to her own mass. But she wasn’t just eating. She decimated everything in her path—homes, ships, entire cities and everything the military threw at her—until her thirst for vengeance was sated by the dramatic slaying of Maigo’s father.