Project Maigo(82)

Hawkins turned right onto Executive Avenue at a sprint, dodging past a burning tank and a group of soldiers tending to the wounded. He wanted to stop and help, but he wasn’t responsible for those men. It was Lilly he was concerned about. Hudson had offered to create a preserve—fenced-in private land, where Lilly and her daughters could live in peace. But it came at a high price. He needed Lilly’s muscles. He needed Lilly the monster, not Lilly the girl.

While Lilly, who had been separate from the world but desperate to experience it, was on board from the get go, Hawkins had had serious reservations. It wasn’t until Hudson offered to look into the DARPA mess and find out who was responsible, that Hawkins had come around. If Lilly and her...litter, could be safe—truly safe for the rest of their lives—the risk could be worthwhile.

But Hawkins had never pictured anything like this. It was a warzone.

He slid to a stop in the mud of what once was the White House’s front lawn. In the distance, past a stand of flattened trees, he could see the Kaiju known as Drakon, impaled atop a monument. Brown blood pooled around the scene.

This was worse than a warzone.

An aggravated shout turned his attention north, toward the White House. He didn’t recognize the baritone voice, but he recognized the tone of it. That was Lilly’s doing. She was kind and gentle, but she was a young woman and could be infuriating when she wanted to be.

Sticking to the trees, and feeling more at home, Hawkins moved through the shadows, well concealed thanks to the body armor Hudson had given him. He held his weapon of choice, a compound bow, at the ready. The bow shot arrows at 400-feet per second. It was quieter than a BB gun and highly accurate, thanks to its fiber optic sight. The weapon was powerful enough to take down nearly any living thing on land, short of an elephant, and the prey—or in this case, the enemy—wouldn’t be tipped off to his location because of sound. Even better, Hudson’s colleague, Endo, had supplied some specially modified arrow heads. If they performed as promised, he thought they would make a real difference.

His back-up weapon, supplied by Hudson, was slung over his back. The Benelli M4 semi-automatic shotgun could fire eight 12-gauge shells as fast as Hawkins could pull the trigger, each of which could remove a man’s limb. He wasn’t hunting a man, though. Hudson seemed to think the shotgun would only slow Gordon down. A weapon of last resort. “Aim for his face,” had been Hudson’s advice.

Watching Nemesis charge off through the city like it wasn’t there, Hawkins would have preferred something closer to a giant-sized sci-fi laser cannon.

A second frustrated shout drew his attention north again. He crouched by the trunk of a tall maple tree and scanned the area. He spotted Lilly on the other side of the lawn, scrambling up a tree. A massive black hand reached around from the other side and dug its fingers into the bark, just missing Lilly.

If he caught her...

Hawkins nocked one of Endo’s arrows, which he promised would pierce Gordon’s thick skin. He looked down the sight, waiting for the right moment, trying to ignore the sounds of destruction and human suffering behind him. What mattered to him most was straight ahead, and in danger.

He drew the bowstring back, holding all that kinetic energy at bay. He breathed slowly. A practiced hunter. Ready to act, he pursed his lips and whistled a gentle bird call. He could barely hear the sound, but Lilly had exceptional ears, and she’d know what to do. When hunting as a team, she would rush out, forcing their prey to flee toward him. He would take care of the rest, not wanting Lilly to kill with her bare hands. While she was part cat and always would be, he wanted to make sure the feral instincts that kept her alive on Island 731 faded, so encounters like her first meeting with Hudson didn’t happen again.

Lilly emerged from the trees, sailing through the air, fifteen feet up. He’d seen her jump from higher heights in the past, but it always made him flinch. He sucked in a quick breath, but she was soon on the ground and running toward him. An eight-foot-tall, thick-limbed goliath that looked vaguely human, thundered out behind her, backhanding the tree she’d been on.

“Up,” Hawkins said, just loud enough for Lilly to hear. She sprang into the air, landing thirty feet above Hawkins in the tree, keeping Gordon’s eyes fixed upwards.

Crouched down low, leaning against the tree trunk, Hawkins adjusted his aim. Hudson had warned against hitting the orange membrane on Gordon’s chest. Hawkins had seen footage of what happened in Boston. He understood the danger and aimed high, for the head.

The arrow released silently, the gentle twang of the bowstring snapping forward drowned out by the chaos around them. The black arrow slipped through the night, invisible. Accurate. The projectile struck Gordon’s thick forehead. Hawkins worried the arrow would snap or bounce off, but it didn’t. As advertised, it slipped through the giant man’s skin.