Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  COLONEL KAHLER PAUSED, the loudhailer still to his lips, and allowed himself a small smile. His voice still had influence even when all hell was breaking loose.

  He savoured the moment. He could almost smell the waves of fear and awe coming off the monsters and soldiers gathered in the courtyard below. And he savoured the fact that Teufel was there to witness the dread he inspired in his men. There was room for more than one Devil in Hell after all.

  Teufel wasn’t himself. He had become more and more withdrawn since his adjutant had failed to return from whatever mission it was he had set her upon.

  Taking a deep breath, his chest swelling with pride, Kahler continued. “Prometheans, listen to me. You will cease this disobedience at once and return to your holding cells, where you will be dealt with in due course.”

  Nobody moved, the dying echo of Kahler’s pronouncement echoing from the walls and rooftops of the corpse-factory facility.

  “Now!”

  Still nobody moved. The soldiers looked at each other, and the looming monsters, warily.

  A needle of doubt threatened to the burst Kahler’s complacent conviction.

  Why weren’t the brute beasts doing as he had commanded? His word was law within the confines of Castle Frankenstein, and their continued rebellion was an affront to his position as sole authority within the facility.

  “Obey, now!” Kahler roared, unable to contain his rising anger any longer.

  HIS BACK AGAINST the wall, Adam stared at the camp commandant above him, his smile spreading right across his face.

  The remade had all remained deaf to his orders, which could mean only one thing. The Colonel’s last ditch attempt to regain control had failed. The Nazis had lost. Victory belonged to Adam.

  Giving voice to a bullish bellow of joy, the First leapt from the steps of the keep towards the quaking military personnel; all that now stood in the way of the freedom he dreamed of for his brethren.

  The soldiers knew they were defeated, and fell before him like grain before the scythe. Seeing the way the savages had failed to respond to the commandant’s commands, the fight had gone out of them. They had lost the battle before it had even begun.

  “COLONEL?” REINHARD SAID, shaking Kahler from his stunned trance. “We should leave.”

  The Colonel looked at him with a glassy-eyed stare. “What?” The colour had completely drained from his face, and he appeared to have aged ten years in as many seconds.

  Reinhard was peering past him at the fracas once again consuming the courtyard below. “We should leave while we still can,” he repeated. “The facility has been compromised.”

  “Leave?” Kahler mumbled, staggering from the window, looking like his legs might give way beneath him at any moment.

  “Yes, leave, man!” Teufel suddenly snapped. “Your damn facility’s overrun!”

  “Oh. Yes, very well then.” Kahler turned to Reinhard. “If you think that’s what’s best,” he said, weakly.

  Reinhard nodded. “I do, Colonel.” Turning to Kahler’s guests, he said, “Gentlemen, this way, if you please.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Jekyll asked, worried, as Reinhard led them from the tapestry-draped chamber and into corridor beyond, bustling with panicking clerks and floundering information officers.

  “That’s a very good question,” Teufel interjected. “The enemy have us at their mercy. There’s no way out apart from right through the middle of them.”

  “There’s always another way, Lieutenant-Colonel,” said Reinhard. “You just have to know where to look.”

  CORPORAL REINHARD LED the way through the higher levels of the keep – through information posts and map rooms, clerks and castle personnel milling about in a confused panic – some trying to continue with their work, others packing, as if still expecting to get out alive. They descended ancient twisting stone staircases and passed halls of fleeing scientists, avoiding the chambers where the Prometheans were running amok, until at last their party – Lieutenant-Colonel Teufel, the turncoat Jekyll and the near-catatonic Colonel Kahler – reached the ancient colonnade-turned-hangar in which stood the Iron Eagle.

  The sight of the incredible flying machine brought their desperate flight to a stumbling halt. They had all seen flying machines before – dirigibles, and the part-animal, part-machine cyber-eagles – but never anything like this. That something so heavy could ever get airborne without some sort of gas balloon seemed impossible.

  “God in heaven!” the Devil gasped, clearly awestruck.

  “Gentlemen,” Reinhard said with a proud wave of his hand, “our way out of here.”

  “Astonishing!” Jekyll spluttered.

  Colonel Kahler said nothing, but just stared into the middle distance, lost in a dark world of his own.

  “You intend to fly that thing out of here? But how?” Teufel asked.

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant-Colonel,” Reinhard reassured him as he picked up the pace, “I have everything in hand.”

  Almost running, now that the cavorite-impregnated flying machine was in sight, Reinhard glanced at the glass roof of the hangar above them. There was no time to open it, and he was certain that it would prove to be no obstacle to the great iron eagle at the moment of take-off.

  “Quick, on board!” he commanded the others, ushering them inside.

  Teufel was the first up the ramp, leaving Reinhard to drag Colonel Kahler after him alone. Doctor Henry Jekyll came last.

  Turning at the open hatch at the top of the ramp, Reinhard saw Jekyll panting towards the bird, after them. “Hurry, man!” he shouted in English.

  It was then that the door on the other side of the hangar burst open and a second ragtag band burst through it, not pausing for even a moment as they raced towards the Iron Eagle over the stone-flagged floor.

  “Hurry!” Reinhard screamed at Jekyll, as the doctor set foot on the ramp, before throwing himself through the hatch and into the bird, pushing Kahler aside as he scrambled up the ladder to the cockpit and the pilot’s position above.

  “THEY’RE GETTING AWAY!” Cookie shouted as she sprinted after Hercules.

  Cat, Jinx and the Russian were keeping up, but their other mysterious liberator, the one calling himself Shelley, was beginning to flag and fall behind.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it!” Hercules panted as he ran. His eyes were locked on the figure struggling up the bird’s tail ramp.

  “Jekyll, you bastard!” he shouted, dropping his spent sub-machine gun as he ran and pulling a liberated Walther PPK from the waistband of his trousers in its stead.

  Such was the authority in his voice that for a moment Jekyll turned his head to see who was pursuing him.

  “You have been found guilty of treason!” Hercules continued.

  Panic giving him a fresh burst of speed, Jekyll scrambled up the ramp, a green haze obscuring his vision as if he were looking at everything through an emerald sea.

  Hercules’ finger tightened on the trigger, both hands on the gun to steady his aim. “The sentence is death!”

  And with that, as the turncoat Doctor disappeared through the hatch at the top of the ramp, Hercules fired.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Talented Mr Hyde

  THE CRACK OF the pistol resounded in the echoing hangar, as did the second shot Hercules fired through the closing hatch after the fleeing Jekyll.

  The door closed with a dull boom, and a strange vibration set the very air to pulsing.

  Shoulders sagging from exhaustion, Hercules lowered his gun and stumbled to a halt.

  “Too little, too late,” he grumbled.

  “What do you mean?” Cat asked, suddenly at his side. “Why have you stopped?”

  “Listen,” was all Hercules would say in reply.

  And then the rising, throbbing hum became more than just a vibration in their bones and all present heard the thrumming of esoteric engines powering up.

  “But there must be something we can do!
” Cookie railed.

  With a grate of machinery grinding into operation, the steel-flighted wings of the great iron bird flexed, half folding behind its back and unfurling fully once more.

  Jinx was staring at the great bird in awestruck amazement.

  “I hate to admit it,” the team’s mechanic said, “but that is one impressive piece of kit.”

  Hercules nodded grimly. “And now it’s going to allow our quarry to escape.”

  “But there has to be something we can do?” Cat shouted. The rising hum had become a painful, eardrum-pounding roar.

  Hercules raised his pistol again, his face red with barely-contained rage. He squeezed off another three rounds at the craft in quick succession. Each one ricocheted dramatically from the steel hull of the eagle, causing Cat and the edgy Shelley to duck.

  With a clunk, the bird’s docking clamps began to disengage. The launch sequence was underway.

  The iron eagle shook, straining to be free of the ground.

  “Like I said,” Hercules said, bitterly, “we’re too late.”

  “At least you got that bastard Jekyll,” said Cookie, patting his arm consolingly.

  Hercules grunted. “Did I?”

  The engine note dropped and the painful whining of turbines eased.

  The eagle shook again, but this time those gathered in its shadow heard a crash from inside the flying machine.

  The engines suddenly cut out completely and they were able to hear the screams for the first time.

  The voices coming from inside the craft were shrill, high-pitched cries that should never have been made by men, and certainly not by masters of the Third Reich.

  As abruptly as they had started, the screams cut out one by one, until they ceased altogether.

  The British Agent and his companions waited. Nobody moved. The only sound that could be heard now was Shelley’s laboured panting.

  There was a clunk, the sound of a lock disengaging, and the door at the top of the eagle’s ramp swung open.

  Pistol raised once more, Hercules took several cautious steps forward and froze as a figure appeared within the hatch; a vast silhouette blocking out the ruddy light from inside the bird.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” Hercules demanded.

  Ducking its head to fit through the hatch, the figure squeezed itself out of the Iron Eagle and stepped onto the ramp, where it was able to unfold itself to its full height once more. The ramp bowed under its weight.

  The hulking figure was wearing the ragged remains of a dark suit, the jacket – and the shirt beneath – ripped down the back, the trousers now bunched around the knees. It wasn’t wearing any shoes at all.

  As it stepped into a pool of light, its skin seemed to glow with a green translucence.

  “Ladies,” the colossus said, a wide yellow grin splitting its blunt simian features as it laid eyes upon the four women in the party. Blood and lumps of flesh dripped from his knuckles. “Gentlemen.”

  It bowed stiffly.

  “Mr Edward Hyde, at your service.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The Great Escape

  “HYDE,” HERCULES HISSED, eyes locked on the leering colossus, along with his gun.

  Hyde grinned. “Hello again.”

  “Step away from the bird,” Hercules instructed, slowly.

  The echo of a distant detonation reverberated from the girders of the hangar roof.

  “Why, what have I done?” the hulking brute said, the smile vanishing from his face. “You’ll have to remind me. Memory like Swiss cheese, you see. That’s my problem.”

  “You heard what he said.” It was the other man who had spoken, the one with half his face wrapped in bandages. He had a Karabiner rifle trained on the giant.

  “Now, now, gents, there’s no need to be like that,” he said gruffly. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

  Eyeing Hercules’ roughshod uniform suspiciously, he added, “You’re not Nazis as well, are you?”

  Hercules hesitated before answering. “No, you know we’re not. We’re British agents, sent to put an end to this place and the work being carried out here.”

  “Oh,” Hyde replied, a smile curling his lips once more, “that’s alright then, ’cause if you were Nazis I’d have had to kill you.” He took in each member of the party in turn. “I may be many things – a thief, a murderer, occasional rapist – but I am no Nazi-lover, that I can promise you!”

  Hercules raised an eyebrow. “Not like Jekyll, then?”

  “Cowardly little shit!” the brute snarled. “But at least we won’t be seeing him again, thank God!”

  Slowly Hercules lowered his gun. “He’s dead then?” He could hardly believe what he was asking.

  “As a dodo,” Hyde chuckled. “And thank fuck for that, that’s what I say. Good riddance to bad rubbish, the weak-willed, snivelling little cocksucker. I, for one, won’t miss him.”

  The monster’s heavy brows knotted as if he were trying to recall some deeply buried memory.

  “You were working with him, weren’t you?”

  “Jekyll? Yes, until he turned traitor and sold us all out.”

  “And what about the rest of them?” Hyde asked Hercules, taking in the rest of the ragtag band at a glance.

  “After a fashion. They rescued us from Schloss Geisterhaus.”

  “What, all of them?”

  Hercules looked from Cookie, Jinx and Cat to the vampire and Shelley and then back at the hulking colossus.

  “Again, after a fashion. Suffice it to say that if you are no friend of the Nazis then you are a friend of ours,” he said, trying not to be distracted by the monster’s gory knuckles.

  “What, ‘the enemy of my enemy’ and all that?”

  “If you like.”

  Mr Hyde grinned. “Works for me,” the giant said, jumping down from the embarkation ramp and taking in the details of the hangar’s architecture. “So, you want this place razed to the ground?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright then, where would you like to start?”

  “Dashwood,” the bandaged man in prison fatigues at the back of the group suddenly said. “We have to find Daniel Dashwood.”

  DAWN WAS BREAKING over the mountains of the Bavarian Forest two hundred miles to the east when the party regrouped several hours later, beneath a torn Nazi banner in what had once been the state rooms of the castle. Hercules Quicksilver gazed out a broken window pane as the flat white disc of the sun rose higher in the sky, spilling its meagre October warmth into the room.

  An eerie stillness hung over the corpse-factory after the chaos that had possessed it for much of the night. The battle for the fortress was over. Fires were burning within the northern range of the production plant, while in the outer courtyard of the castle, amidst the wreckage of half-tracks, personnel carriers and staff cars, Adam’s ramshackle army of Prometheans were mopping up the last few pockets of resistance, dragging soldiers and lab technicians from where they had holed up within the bowels of the castle.

  An eerie stillness, yes, but not silence. There was the roar of the fires still burning in the corpse factory, the wailing of the dying and the mentally broken – victims of a new kind of shellshock in the aftermath of the monsters’ rampage – and the campfire crackle of burning vehicles littering the devastated courtyard.

  Castle Frankenstein was theirs. Their mission had been a success. But that didn’t stop him feeling like someone had just punched Hercules in the stomach.

  He turned from the window to the curious band of allies gathered together in the Frankenstein Corps’ former conference room.

  Cookie and Jinx had pulled up a couple of chairs, while Edward Hyde was leaning back in the leather-upholstered seat at the head of the table, its swivel bearing creaking under his weight, his huge feet crossed on the desk in front of him. He was playing with something in his hands. Something that looked suspiciously like a grenade.

  Shelley was perched on the edge of an
other chair, his haunted gaze nearly permanently on Hercules, making him feel uneasy; either on him or the cat burglar, who was now leaning against a bookcase behind Hercules. Shelley had found a suit of clothes somewhere within the castle and had even managed to fashion himself a proper eye-patch.

  Now that the man had been able to clean himself up, there was something strangely familiar about his face. From the way Cat was looking from Hercules to Shelley and back again, he knew that she could see it too.

  That just left the mysterious, and strangely alluring, Agent K. She had hidden herself away in the corner of the room, remaining in deep shadow and keeping out of reach of the creeping fingers of daylight.

  “So what you’re saying is there’s no sign of this Daniel Dashwood anywhere within the castle.”

  “Indeed,” Shelley said.

  “And nor can you find any sign of the Icarus Cannon.”

  “An intercontinental-ranged death ray? It would be a little hard to hide. But Dashwood is the key. If we don’t stop him…” The one-eyed wretch broke off momentarily, lost for words. The hollow ticking of a clock within the room suddenly seemed laden with meaning. “There’s really no easy way of saying this… If we don’t stop Dashwood, the future of your world is doomed.”

  “But how can the actions of one man make such a dramatic difference?”

  Shelley gave a bark of mirthless laughter. “Try telling the Führer that.”

  “You haven’t answered the question,” Cookie said, shooting Prisoner Zero an acid look.

  “It would take too long to explain and even then you might not believe me,” he muttered. “You just have to trust me on this. The thing is, you see, this man Dashwood holds the very future in his hands, and is prepared to offer it to Hitler and the Third Reich on a plate. And we just can’t let that happen.”