Project Maigo(44)

Gordon remembered he no longer had a bed.

Or a home.

He opened his eyes slowly. The subtle movement exhausted him. He hadn’t felt this weak in a long time. The darkness of slumber was unchanged by the opening of his eyes. So he focused on his other senses. He could feel the bed and blanket. The weight of it felt good, but it was warm...and damp. As was the air, which smelled of rotting meat. Whale meat. He’d come to know the scent well, as his children swam the oceans, consuming everything they could catch to keep up with their rapidly expanding size. Lacking the growth hormones given to Maigo, they couldn’t match Nemesis’s growth factor, but they were catching up. And while three of them were smaller, the other two...

Gordon grinned.

He knew where he was.

The blanket was a tongue.

Rise, he thought, and he felt the bed beneath him shift. When it leveled out again, he thought, open. Wide jaws opened slowly and carefully, like the cargo door of a C-130 Hercules transport plane, if you ignored the three-foot-tall teeth.

The tongue lifted, and Gordon stood. He walked to the edge of the mouth on shaky legs and held on to a tooth for balance. It was night, but he could see the ocean before him, lit by the moon.

He’d been afraid of the ocean as a young man. Mostly because of Jaws. Being eaten alive, while drowning, had been the most prevalent nightmare of his youth. Now, there wasn’t a creature alive that he feared. Save one. Part of him wanted to run the other way. He had the children. In time, their strength would match Nemesis’s. Combined, they already did. But while he had the children, he also had her heart, and it was impossible to ignore. He needed her back, or...

His mind, still in the gap between sleep and wakefulness, considered new options. He’d been driven to strengthen his tether with Nemesis, to make himself whole again. But what if that tether could be fully broken? Painful, perhaps, but he would be free from this constant nagging desire.

No, he thought, the idea of losing that part of him felt revolting.

But... If there’s no other recourse...

“I’ll kill her,” he said, speaking to the ocean. Saying the words aloud made him cringe. Could she hear his thoughts? Could she feel his desires? There were times he felt the connection between them growing stronger, but it always faded, leaving him feeling empty and lost.

His eyes dropped and his head turned down. He was weary. His chest looked different. Where there had once been thick, black skin, there was now a smooth, milky band of flesh. He placed a finger against the surface and rubbed. The white came away like wet chalk. He squinted at the gunk, confused by its presence, but he quickly forgot about it as a soft orange light glistened over the night time water. He searched the area for a boat. For a helicopter. But he was still alone, with his child.

The light is coming from me, he realized, looking down again. From my chest! He wiped at his chest, shucking away sheets of white until the darkness was pushed back by a warbling orange glow. Gordon grinned. His chest was full of swirling orange liquid.

Memories of his last confrontation with Jon Hudson and Katsu Endo returned. The explosion. It hadn’t been a weapon. It was him. He’d exploded! The blast had weakened him, but he had survived. For a moment, he dared to hope that Hudson had been killed in the explosion, but his connection to Nemesis had not changed. The man still lived.

For now.

And Endo. He’d done something. Violated his mind. Controlled him. But that wasn’t all. In the moments before the explosion, Gordon glimpsed Endo’s thoughts. He felt Endo’s desires. He saw how they would be accomplished. And he understood the enemy’s plan. Endo had unknowingly supplied Gordon with the keys to victory.

As his strength returned, Gordon smirked. He reached up to the side of his head, felt the device still there, and pinched it gently. With a secure grip, he pulled it from his thick flesh and looked at it. The small device looked harmless, but Gordon understood its threat. It could turn anyone, or anything into a weapon. It could undermine his control of the children and prevent him from reconnecting with Nemesis.

Endo and his employers would need to be eliminated. Then Hudson. And if the connection to Nemesis couldn’t be re-established, she would follow. It was a vague plan at best, but it was a start. And upon its completion, he and the children would carry out the deepest desires of their hearts—the judgment and execution of the human race.

Gordon closed his eyes and focused on the children, spread out around the world. At first, they had dispersed to feed, so that the disappearing wildlife would be less noticeable. When they rose to strike Hong Kong and Sydney, it was to spread confusion, to keep the enemy looking elsewhere while he closed the distance. If not for Nemesis, that plan would have worked. But now...there was no reason to hide. No reason to separate.