Project Maigo(12)

The monster’s head vaguely resembled a hunched-forward hammerhead shark, in that its eyes were set to the sides of its horizontally elongated skull. Its lower jaw dropped open, revealing long, curved teeth that looked both fragile and deadly. A thick right arm reached up out of the water and dropped down on the marble walkway, sending a shockwave through the crowd.

The impact jarred everyone from their stunned immobility, and a collective scream of horror filled the night like an orchestra of the damned, voices booming off the granite stairway.

Olivia cringed at the noise, which drowned out her voice. But she kept reporting, commenting on the scene like no one watching through the TV could decipher what was happening.

The crowd’s scream, as harsh as it was, sounded like the gentle chirp of a cricket compared to the fog-horn roar that blasted from the monster’s open maw. Tendrils of saliva stretched out of the thing’s mouth, clinging to its teeth before losing their grip and spraying the fleeing crowd.

Warm air and the scent of rotting flesh washed over Olivia. She gagged, but maintained her composure. She faced the camera again, speaking unheard words, while the monster in the background reached into the crowd, swept its giant clawed hand to the side and lifted twenty well-dressed people into the air. Its hand gave a mighty squeeze, squelching out the few people still screaming in horror, and filling the air with the sound of snapping bones. It then scraped the victims over its lower jaw, depositing most of them into its mouth and impaling a few on its teeth. As the bodies slid down the long, smooth teeth, the creature reached out again, this time leaning forward.

Olivia knew that all hell was breaking loose behind her. She didn’t bother looking, but she could hear the monster feasting on the crowd. While safety in numbers normally didn’t apply, she felt the monster wouldn’t pay attention to a single person standing still. At least not while the chaos of a fleeing audience held its attention. She would be hailed as the world’s bravest reporter, her job secured for all eternity.

She stayed at her post, even when Jim glanced up, eyes wide, and ran away from his tripod-mounted camera. This is how she wanted the audience to remember her. Stalwart. Brave. Wrinkles be damned.

Then a two-ton, black hand slammed down atop her, smearing her into the granite, unnoticed by the monster above and quickly forgotten by the audience, as they watched the feast continue for ten more horrific minutes through the undamaged camera.





7



The view from the Crow’s Nest, the FC-P headquarters, is bleak, even after a year of clean-up. Located atop the tallest hill in Beverly, Massachusetts, we’re provided with a view of the surrounding city to the north, south and west. To the east is the blue ocean, as pristine as ever. But between us and the harbor is a mile of charred destruction. The far side of the harbor, in Salem, looks just as bad. The bridge between the two cities is still in ruins, but a temporary structure has been erected. The blackened remains were left in the wake of what I’ve come to call Nemesis’s ‘self-immolation.’ That orange blood, or whatever it is, ignites upon contact with the air. Expose enough of it, and you’ve got yourself something just short of a small nuclear blast, minus the radiation.

At first, I believed the explosive fluid was some kind of defense mechanism—wound the monster in the wrong place, and you pay the price. But later on, she purposely gouged out the membranes over her chest, using the resulting explosion to punch a hole through downtown Boston. If that wasn’t bad enough, her final stage, the bright white, winged goddess of vengeance, allowed her to focus sunlight into a powerful beam that incinerated Maigo’s murderous father, the building I stood on and the Hancock building, which nearly fell on my head. I call that particular attack her ‘divine retribution.’

Corny, I know, but I was a comic-book kid. Attacks need names. And oddly enough, the military asked for attack codenames, to more quickly communicate Nemesis’s tactics in the future. Of course, other than self-immolation and divine retribution, ‘smashing the living shit out of everything’ covers the rest of her attacks adequately.

I’ve looked at this slowly changing view of the devastation for the past year, not because it’s pretty, but because it reminds me that despite being part Maigo, Nemesis is also a monster. She destroyed my city. She attacked my country. She murdered thousands of innocents. And it’s my job to make sure that doesn’t ever happen again.

So in addition to investigating new sightings of the strange and otherworldly, my office—Cooper and Watson mostly—has been coordinating military strategies and deployments around the country, primarily on the coasts, since Nemesis can’t head inland without being noticed. While the military works on developing weapons capable of piercing Nemesis’s super-thick skin, we’re making sure that every mile of coast is protected. There are fighter jets in most small airports now, including Beverly airport. Harbors are protected by lines of howitzers or tanks. Our country’s coasts haven’t been this well protected since World War II.