Project 731 Read Online Free PDF Page A

knees and back as I push through the tight downward grade, flashlight gripped in my teeth. Top secret father of the year award, here I come . The tunnel is fifty feet long, descending at least three stories. The deeper I go, the more it becomes clear that this straight shot down was not formed naturally. Someone made this tunnel.
    Maigo.
    She’s been holding out on me.
    While the rest of us have been training in the woods, assuming she was back here, nose in a book, she’s been excavating a tunnel back to the scene of her first...what? Murder? Meal? She was still part human at that point. Thinking about what I’ll find and how it will affect her, I move faster, skinning my knees and embedding a few pebbles in my palms.
    The tunnel ends at a four foot drop, where part of a hallway remains intact. The walls are scorched and cracked, but the fire was smothered before the whole place could be consumed. Flashlight aimed forward, I creep down the hallway feeling a little spooked. If Maigo, who is half Japanese with straight, long hair that often hangs in front of her face, steps out looking like Samara from The Ring , I’m probably going to scream. Accepting the potential for future embarrassment, I push on, finding a ragged hole to the left, where there was once a door labeled Morgue .
    My mind flashes back to the first time I entered this room. Well, ‘entered’ is a gentle way of saying, ‘ran for my freaking life into this room.’ I was with Collins, though not yet really with her. We hid in separate coolers meant for corpses. How many dead were left down here? At least one , I think, and I step around the corner. I sweep the flashlight through the liquid black, death-scented space, its ceiling ragged and sagging. And then all at once, I’m sent sprawling back into the hallway, gagging for a moment before finally screaming.

 
     
    3
     
    “Well...” I cough and push myself up against the far hallway wall. “That was way worse than I expected. Seriously, were you trying to scare me?”
    Maigo steps into the ruined doorway, lit by the diffuse light from my flashlight, which now lies on the floor, pointed at a wall. Even though I know it’s her, and that I’m in no danger, I can’t stop the chills that shake through my body. Not only is her hair hanging in front of her face, but she’s also covered in dust and debris, her pretty self hidden behind layers of gunk. Worst of all are her eyes, the pupils fully dilated and black in the near absolute darkness.
    Speaking of which... I glance around Maigo, back into the morgue. She had no light.
    Definitely holding back. But why?
    “I killed them,” she says.
    “Not helping.”
    “I’m being serious.”
    Her eyes shift slightly, sparkling with the first signs of tears. The girl who was once a three-hundred-fifty-foot-tall destroyer of worlds needs a hug. I climb to my feet and reach my arms out. She falls into them, crushing herself into my embrace. While this is all new and strange to me, the connection she felt to me, as Nemesis, has not dulled. I have seen into her mind, and she has seen mine. We know each other in a way most parents can never really know their children. And as we stand here, underground, in the dark, away from the outside world, that connection takes root in my psyche. Without realizing it, I’ve started crying, too. The pain this kid is dealing with...it’s just not right.
    “I killed them,” she says again.
    “Is the woman still there?”
    I feel her nod against my chest. “The word, too. Nemesis .” She pronounces the word with a Greek tang, the way people might have said it in ancient Greece, but without the “oh my God it’s going to step on me” terror.
    “I remember,” I tell her, “but that wasn’t you.”
    “Part of it was,” she says. “But it’s not just the woman in the next room.” She releases me and takes a step back. “It’s everyone.”
    Ouch . Nemesis killed upwards of ten thousand people between here and