Description
The Director saw it as his personal legacy builder: the Perfect Monster, the Engineered Killing Machine. Half animal, half machine, all deadly. Thousands would be ordered by the U.S. military, and The Director's company, the inappropriately-named Institute for Life and Learning Advancement (ILLA) would make hundreds of millions of dollars. He would be lauded as a genius and a patriot, and would retire in a blaze of fame and glory. But the U.S. Government didn't get it. The “suits” and the military command saw the "E-KIM Project", as they termed it, as one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived, and The Director as a half-comic, half-mad scientist. But like all egomaniacs, The Director was undeterred. The program would proceed as planned. As the first "E-KIM" was rolled out, he beamed like a proud father, and began devising a plan to show the bureaucrats how wrong they'd been. After a "Proof of Concept" (in which The Director would use the E-KIM to settle an old score), the thing would be ready, and if the government didn’t want it, The Director was sure another country (or perhaps a terror or criminal enterprise) would.
But The Director was unaware that not everything in the E-KIM project had gone according to his plan. Darius Woldley, the Master Programmer at the ILLA computer lab, upset that his signature work had gone into developing a weapon instead of what he’d been told (a humanitarian super-being), had surreptitiously re-programmed the creature's brain in a way The Director could never have anticipated. When it escapes and leaves a trail of eviscerated bodies in a nearby city, The Director knows he has to get things back on track without regard for the possible consequences.
Meanwhile, police detectives and new partners Tom Clark and Lori Lewis are assigned the task of stopping the killings. First though, they must figure out who (or what) is responsible for them, all while dealing with their reluctant mutual attraction. Lori Lewis must also reckon with a bitter and irate ex-husband who’s hell bent on making her life miserable, or maybe making her dead.
It all comes to a bone-chilling climax one dark night in the middle of a vast, wooded wilderness on the edge of town as The Director, a hired killer, Lori Lewis, Tom Clark, The Perfect Monster and a surprise newcomer meet face- to -face in an “only the winners get out alive” confrontation.