Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  Hercules steeled himself, trying to choose the optimum moment to jump.

  “Last one out’s a Nancy boy!” Hyde laughed wildly, flinging himself out of the back of the bird, arms flailing.

  Hercules jumped an instant later.

  But suddenly there was nothing beneath him but cold mountain air, a precipitous drop down the side of the mountain. He had left it too late.

  THE MAIDEN FLIGHT of the iron eagle came to an abrupt end as it nosedived off the edge of the elevated platform, its iron beak burying itself in the base of another rampart tower moments later. The foundations fractured as the great metal bird punched through them, bringing a landslide of brick and stone down on top of it as the tower crumbled. A cascade of kicking, screaming bodies came tumbling down the mountain side amidst the broken ramparts.

  Hercules could see the side of the platform rising before him and then he was falling, twisted metal and black rock hurtling past his eyes as he followed the tumbling Germans to a messy death on the icy crags below.

  Then Hercules cried out in pain, as his fall was arrested so abruptly that it felt like he’d dislocated his shoulder.

  He hung for a moment, his body swinging gently from side to side, the icy wind ruffling his hair, the underside of the platform edge less than a foot from his nose. As the pain subsided, Hercules opened his eyes and looked up.

  His right hand had been completely swallowed by a huge green fist. It looked like an adult’s, holding the hand of a toddler. Above the hand, and the thickly-muscled arm it was attached to, peering over the edge of the crumpled gun deck, was Hyde’s hugely grinning face, a wicked glint in his jaundiced-yellow eyes.

  “What a rush,” the beast chuckled, his words awash with laughter. “Can we do that again? Oh, and by the way, you’re a Nancy boy.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  The Eagle Has Landed

  “IS EVERYONE ALRIGHT?” Hercules asked, as Mr Hyde hauled him back up onto the platform.

  Keeping low, the rest of the assault squad gathered at the edge of the platform.

  “We’re alright,” Cookie said, touching him tenderly on the arm. “What about you?”

  And suddenly Cat was there in front of him, throwing her arms around him, and burying her face in the hollow of his neck so that the others wouldn’t see her tears.

  “I thought we’d lost you,” she sobbed. Hercules slowly put his arms around her trim form in return, just as much in shock as she was. He could feel her body shuddering within his embrace.

  Machine-gun fire chewed up the sundered skirts of the platform, sending the party scattering.

  Hercules hunkered down behind a length of the devastated cannon barrel, his back to the still-warm metal, Cat and Cookie on either side. Glancing to his right, he saw Jinx nursing her sore knee in the shelter of a fallen block of concrete ten feet across, Hyde crouched beside her. To his left the mysterious Shelley, whom they had all risked so much for and whose obsessive undertaking had ultimately brought them here, was peering out from beneath a toppled gantry, the blonde vampire hiding in the deep shadows behind him.

  The machine gun fell silent again, but it seemed at least one gun emplacement remained operational.

  “Damn,” he grunted.

  Cat smiled at him and squeezed his hand. “Just another typical shitty day at the office for us girls,” she said.

  He couldn’t help but return her smile.

  “And, if it is our day to die,” she went on, “at least we’ll go down together.”

  “Let’s hope you’re wrong,” Hercules said, “about it being our day to die, I mean,” he added, suddenly flustered. “I like the other bit, about us being in this together,” and he squeezed her hand in return.

  Releasing her hand, he checked the load on his gun. The rest of the team were already doing the same.

  Shelley had fixed him with his single, haunted eye, now ringed by tiredness. Just looking at him made Hercules want to yawn. In fact, how long was it since any of them had last had any sleep?

  “We have to get inside!” the man hissed across the smoke-washed deck. He peered over the top of the broken barrel.

  The machine gun immediately opened up again, hard rounds rebounding from the pressed steel deck plates and kocking chips from Hyde’s concrete shelter.

  “You do, you mean,” Hercules threw back. “The rest of us just need to make sure you make it. What you need is some kind of distraction.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hyde called across to them having, incredibly, heard every word. “I know something that might work.”

  Picking up a buckled piece of metal that looked like it might have been part of the collector array, and holding it before him in both hands so that it shielded his whole body, the giant stepped out from behind his hiding place.

  The machine gunner opened up again, the chugging weapons-fire spanging off the makeshift shield. Hyde simply marched forwards.

  “Come on!” the giant called back. “What are you waiting for?”

  The machine gun cut out again, there was a moment’s silence and then the plink, plink of two metal spheroids landing on the deck in front of the advancing Hyde.

  Hercules, peering out from behind the cannon segment quickly pulled his head back in with a sharp intake of breath.

  A second later, the grenades exploded.

  The full force of the blast hit the crumpled dish, but, incredibly – legs braced against the force of the double explosion, his toes gouging indentations in the steel floor – Mr Hyde stood firm, smoke and flame swirling past him like the sea crashing against a cliff.

  Glancing back over his shoulder at the others the giant gave a slow shake of his head.

  “Come on!” the brute repeated. “What do you want, a bloody invitation?”

  Tendrils of smoke still clinging to his makeshift shield, Hyde took a hold of it by the rim and, with a sharp flick of the wrist, sent it spinning out across the platform and towards the castle wall.

  The dish whickered through the air with a thrub-thrub-thrub noise, and vanished in the shadows half way up the side of the tower with a clatter of metal and a wet snapping sound.

  The machine gun position remained silent.

  Hyde turned to regard the anxious faces peering out at him.

  Hercules was on his feet in an instant, pistol in hand. His Nazi uniform was a mess – torn, scorched and blood-stained. He was never going to pass for one of the Führer’s men looking like this.

  “Come on!” He turned to the others. “Like the man said, what are we waiting for?”

  SHIELDED BY MR Hyde’s hulking form, the party made their way from the wrecked gun platform down a twisting spiral staircase, finally entering the castle through the rent torn in its flank by the plummeting bird. They scrambled over a scree of broken bricks and fallen gargoyles, and entered the eerily empty interior of Schloss Adlerhorst.

  Ulysses had no idea how many personnel should have been active within the Schloss in the first place. The destruction of the Icarus Cannon and the damage done by the crashing iron eagle had taken their toll, as had Hyde’s actions with the machine gun emplacement. But how many desperate men still lurked inside the ancient fortress, he wondered? Men with nothing left to lose, reckless enough to sell their lives and the ideals they still clung onto at as high a price as they could.

  They passed from one draughty, vaulted passageway – the bare stone walls lined with pipes and cable trunking – to another, seeing no sign of anybody, alive or dead. The occasional Nazi banner fluttered in the chill breeze that whined through the castle, but there was no sign of resistance until they came to a crossing of the ways buried in the depths of the fortress.

  As Hyde led the way towards the junction, knuckles dragging across the floor, he stopped abruptly.

  “What is it?” Hercules hissed, coming alongside the monster, who was still just about wearing what was left of his torn suit.

  Hyde’s head was up, nostrils flaring.

&n
bsp; “I can smell them,” he said, his voice a wet growl.

  “Who?”

  “Nazis, of course,” Hyde retorted. “I can smell their fear.”

  His pronouncement was followed by a rattling of weapons being readied.

  Cookie silently signalled Cat and Jinx forward with a wave of her hand. The cat burglar and the driver took point, flattening themselves against opposing walls at the end of the passageway. They peered down the passageways opposite them. Cat signed that the way ahead of her was clear. Jinx drew two fingers back and forth across her throat. The passageway to the left was where the danger lay.

  “Shall we?” Hyde asked, grinning as he turned to face Hercules.

  “After you, Mr Hyde,” the other replied, a wry smile on his face.

  Hercules turned to Ulysses then. Ulysses knew what was coming, before his father said a word.

  “I rather think it’s time we went our separate ways,” Hercules said, offering the stunned Ulysses his hand. “We have done what we set out to; now it’s your turn. And the best way we can help you is to occupy the fascist bastards lurking around that corner while you and your friend here” – he nodded towards Katarina – “can complete your mission and put an end to whatever madness it is that Germany’s desire for world domination has spawned here.”

  Ulysses took the proffered hand in stunned silence, a mawkish expression on his face, his mouth hanging open. This might very well be the last time he would see his father alive, and that alone felt like losing him all over again. He was suddenly a fifteen-year-old boy once more, standing in his father’s study, being told by Nimrod that his father was dead.

  There was so much that he wanted to say to him. He wanted to tell his father how much he loved him. He wanted to tell him how much he still missed him. But more than anything he wanted to warn him – to tell him about his death.

  “We have to go, now,” Hercules said, interrupting Ulysses’ thoughts as he tried to pull his hand free of Ulysses’ white-knuckled grip. “I’m not sure how long I can keep Hyde on the leash, as it were.”

  With a world of words he wanted to share with his father, all Ulysses said was, “Thank you.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s been fun,” Hercules said, breaking free of the handshake at last, “but it’s been an adventure, I’ll give you that.”

  “But you’ve done so much,” Ulysses said. “More than you’ll ever know.”

  Hercules smiled. “Just make sure you get the bastard for us, won’t you? That’s all the thanks we need right now.”

  “Alright,” Ulysses said, blinking away the tear forming at the corner of his one remaining eye. “It’s a deal.”

  “Right you are then,” Hercules said, turning back to the imposing figure of Hyde, who was starting to look a lot like a Rottweiler straining to be let off its lead. “Mr Hyde, after you.”

  Hyde didn’t need to be told twice. He strode along the corridor and turned into the passageway to the left, calling, “Right then, ladies, shall we dance?”

  As Hyde’s invitation was answered with the chugging clamour of a Czechoslovak, accompanied by the monster’s own furious roar, the women followed him around the corner, guns at the ready.

  But Hercules hung back. “Look, I know this isn’t quite the time but…” He broke off, suddenly lost for words. Ulysses felt his heart quicken inside his chest. “Look, we’re not…”

  Ulysses opened his mouth to speak.

  “No, I know, it’s a ridiculous notion,” Hercules interrupted before his son could say anything. Rattling gunfire echoed from beyond the junction. “And it’s time we were both on our way. Good luck!” And with that, Hercules was gone.

  Ulysses turned to Katarina. Her grim expression stopped the words that were already on the tip of his tongue.

  “There is something between you two. What is it?”

  “I-I don’t know what you mean,” Ulysses stammered.

  Katarina frowned. “Yes you do,” she said. “You just do not want to admit it, for some reason.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Ulysses repeated, as if restating the lie would somehow make it sound more plausible. “But I do know that I won’t be able to rest until I have stared into Dashwood’s dead eyes for myself.”

  “The two of you are related.”

  Ulysses turned sharply on his heel, making for the right-hand turn of the junction. “Are you coming or not?”

  Katarina darted gracefully after him, shaking her head.

  ULYSSES AND KATARINA hurried along draughty corridors and through abandoned chambers, all empty except for the ever-present wintry wind. It was as if the Nazis had fled the eyrie, the elemental spirits of the air taking up residence in their stead.

  Neither of them said anything. They both knew what had to be done and there was no point discussing it.

  Besides, right at that moment, Ulysses couldn’t have articulated anything worth hearing anyway. Grief vied in him with an immense sense of relief, excitement with nervousness. There was also a deep-seated and growing feeling of apprehension twisting his guts. What if Dashwood wasn’t there? Worse still, what if he was?

  But there was one emotion that was stronger than all others, that drove him onwards despite all else, and that was cold hatred, steadily rising to boiling fury.

  Whatever else happened, Ulysses Quicksilver was determined that Daniel Dashwood would pay for what he had done to his one true love Emilia; to her father, old man Oddfellow; to his indefatigable manservant Nimrod; and to Ulysses himself.

  And that was how they continued, the only sound their running footfalls and Ulysses’ panting breath, guns ready in their hands, senses alert to any sign of the man they had come here to kill.

  When it came, it was not what either of them had been expecting.

  It happened as the corridor they were following opened out into a vast, devastated chamber. The destruction of the Icarus Cannon had blasted a rift in the chamber wall twenty feet high.

  The single shot rang out sharp and clear. Ulysses jumped, feeling suddenly cold to his core. He glanced down at his chest, instinctively putting a hand to his heart. But there was no blood on his fingers when he pulled his hand back again – and no bullet wound.

  Katarina was standing in front of him, having been beside him only a moment before. She gave a faint gasp and fell to her knees. Black blood welled from the hole punched in her tunic over her heart.

  There was a flicker of movement in front of them.

  Ulysses’ gun barked in his hand. For a moment he thought he had missed, but then a figure slowly slumped to the floor from behind a towering support pillar, the gun the sniper had been holding clattering onto the stone flags beside him. Scratch one assassin, Ulysses thought.

  Shooting wary glances at the bare stone walls all around them, but seeing no sign of any further snipers, Ulysses dropped to his knees beside Katarina, his hands hovering over the gun shot wound in her chest, not sure what he should do.

  “Leave me,” Katarina gasped, clutching at her chest. Her breathing was already becoming heavy and laboured.

  “But you’re wounded; I can’t leave you,” he protested. “You took a bullet for me.”

  “Go on,” she urged him, grabbing at his arm now with one palsied claw. “Find the one responsible and – how do you say?” she gasped. “Make him pay!”

  “You’ll be alright,” Ulysses said, slowly rising to his feet.

  “It is alright,” she spluttered weakly, her eyelids fluttering closed. “I have lived long enough.”

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s not your time,” Ulysses pressed. “Trust me.”

  But there was no reply. Katarina had stopped shaking and was now lying, curled in a foetal ball on the cold paving stones at the entrance to the cathedral-like space.

  “But I can’t wait for you now,” Ulysses went on, even though he was not sure Katarina could hear him anymore. “I have a job to do. I have to finish this now.”

  Quickly kneeling
beside her again he laid a kiss on her cheek. Her flesh was as cold as marble.

  “See you in about fifty years,” he said, and then, gun in hand, he turned and entered the wind-swept chamber beyond.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Modern Prometheus

  THE COLD WIND stung his cheeks and chilled his hands as it moaned through the devastated castle, as if the ghosts of the dead of Schloss Adlerhorst had returned to haunt him, to make him pay for every German life lost that day.

  The high vaulted chamber must have once been one of the deepest chambers of the castle, the stone arches of its high vaulted ceiling filled with shadows and ancient cobwebs. But now it was awash with bright, Alpine sunlight.

  The chamber had been cracked open from floor to ceiling. Lumps of blackened masonry lay strewn across the floor of the chamber.

  But the ruination he witnessed here meant nothing compared with the other sight that greeted Ulysses’ one remaining eye.

  Cold daylight streamed in through the towering fracture to his right, while darkness reigned amidst the looming pillars to his left. But the far side of the chamber was bathed in sparking waves of actinic radiance.

  His heart-rate quickening, he began to stride between the pillars towards the clinging shadows and spasmodic bursts of lightning, because half-hidden by the pillars was something Ulysses had never thought he would see again.

  It looked quite different to its last iteration, but it was still unmistakably the same machine.

  The broken concentric rings of the gyroscope had gone, to be replaced by two interlocking rings, joined perpendicular to one another. Someone appeared to have made some improvements since the last time Ulysses had seen it.

  The gleaming steel rings bristled with connectors and electrodes, from which the barely contained energies harnessed by the device dissipated into the atmosphere. Ulysses’ hair was standing on end and the air was thick with the smell of ozone, while the stone-flagged floor of the sepulchral chamber trembled beneath his feet.