Two huge hands now appeared over the lip of the exposed cabin and a monstrous creature, twice as tall as a man, pulled itself out of the wreckage. Coils of smoke rose from its flesh, as the torn rags of a jacket and shirt fell, smouldering, to the ground. The monster climbed atop the remains of the Seigfried and raised its bunched fists to the sky, arms bulging with biceps the size of car tyres, the monster gave voice to a bellow of primal fury.
It bellowed.
“HYDE!”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Battle Royal
THE MONSTER’S BULLISH roar was echoed by an answering howl of fury from the far side of the dam.
“Now what the hell was that?” Hercules muttered under his breath.
The ominous armoured forms of the Landsknechts emerged from the smoke as the breeze was blown clear. Standing atop the half-collapsed central stalker was another creature, a monstrous primate of a man. It had to be eight feet tall at least and almost as broad across the shoulders. The knots of corded muscle around its neck and arms were visible even under the long coat it was wearing, and Hercules could make out a mane of greasy black tresses whipping about its head in the breeze.
It was holding some part from the walker triumphantly above its head.
For a split second he found himself entertaining what seemed like a totally crazy idea. Was this second fiend on their side?
Hercules looked back at the first beast, still standing atop the tank. The creature’s skin had an eerie emerald hue to it, as if the blood in its veins had been replaced with chlorophyll. The challenger had succeeded in grabbing its attention.
“I don’t know about that one,” Cookie said, indicating the second beast, “but I think this one over here is Doctor Jekyll...”
“But how…?” Hercules’ voice trailed off in incredulity as he continued to stare at the creature now standing atop the wreckage of their tank. It looked as if it might start beating its chest like an enraged ape at any moment.
It was naked from the waist up, its monstrous musculature clearly visible under its weirdly green-tinged flesh. The trousers that Hercules had found for Jekyll back at the farm, which had been several inches too large around the waist, now clung to his expanded physique, looking like they might go at the seams at any moment. Bits of Jekyll’s tattered jacket clung to its shoulders.
Giving voice to another mighty roar of rage, the second monster hurled the engine part, the greased steel spinning end over end, only for it to be plucked out of the air by the bellowing hulk of a man that – if Cookie was right – Doctor Henry Jekyll had somehow become.
Any thoughts Hercules might have had that the two monsters were actually on the same side were gone now.
“Now that’s not friendly,” the Jekyll-beast growled, and Hercules was surprised to hear it speak with a strong Cockney accent that boomed like crypt doors slamming shut. Grasping the broken piston like a club, the hulking thing brought it down hard on top of the tank, the impact sending shattered links flying from what was left of the tank’s twisted caterpillar tracks.
Still holding the piston as if it were a cudgel, the thing-that-had-been-Jekyll tensed, muscles bunching, and then leapt towards the lank-haired creature, the frame of the tank buckling beneath it as it did so.
Howling with rage, the other creature kicked off from the stricken Landsknecht, sending the walking machine spinning to the ground with a crash, and freeing the trapped Donner into the bargain.
The two behemoths hurtled towards each other with horrific inevitability, the sound of their impact echoing across the dam like a thunderclap. The challenger’s mighty meat-hammer fist connected with the face of the brutish Jekyll. Hercules saw the flesh of his face ripple beneath the punch, even as the transformed doctor’s improvised bludgeon connected with the creature’s ribs.
Hercules’ gaze shifted between the two titans as they struggled. It was hard to tell which was the bigger of them, and from the way the battle was going, they appeared to be pretty evenly matched.
There were, however, distinctive differences between them. There was the unnatural greenish tinge to the flesh of the thing that used to be Jekyll, while the parchment yellow weathered skin of the other creature was criss-crossed by the white lines of old scars.
Both the brutes resembled men, but seen through a glass darkly. Jekyll was now a grossly bulging version of a man, like a freakishly over-enhanced body builder. Whereas the other creature, by comparison, gave the impression of being a patchwork of people, put together from bits and pieces of others, so that nothing quite matched or fitted together as it should.
Under the force of each other’s blows, the two behemoths spun away from each other and came to ground with concussive force against the fabric of the dam. Jekyll slid to a halt on his back, the already fractured surface of the road gathering in great broken folds behind his shoulders, while the patchwork creature’s flight was arrested by the opposite wall of the dam, the brickwork crumbling at the impact.
The Jekyll-thing sat up, shaking its head, looking like a punch-drunk prize-fighter as it tried to clear its befuddled mind.
And then a sudden, and horrible, realisation dawned on Hercules. This was undoubtedly the thing that had taken out an entire platoon of German soldiers after the Baron von Richthofen had crash-landed behind enemy lines. And he had been unwittingly travelling with the perpetrator of that atrocity ever since.
On the other side of the dam the scar-covered giant was struggling to its feet.
The hulking Jekyll did the same, and Hercules saw that the over-sized boots he had borrowed from the abandoned farmhouse were long gone, the ancient stitching having burst apart, unable to contain Jekyll’s colossal feet.
“Pucker up, big boy,” the green colossus rumbled, as it began to stagger drunkenly towards the lank-haired monster, the cracking of its knuckles like a salvo of cannon fire, “and kiss this.”
With a deafening bang, the thunder hammer cannon spoke again. The spinning shell hit Jekyll in the stomach, blasting him off his feet and punching him clean into the wreckage of the tank, the Seigfried groaning and screeching as the huge body hit it with all the force of a crashing meteorite.
“Shit!” Hercules heard one of the girls gasp from where she was crouched somewhere on the ledge behind him.
“That’s one way of putting it,” he said, stunned himself. “Scratch one British secret weapon. I guess we can forget the mission after all.”
“Wait!” Missy hissed, cutting Hercules off mid-sentence. “Look!” She was pointing at the wreck of the Seigfried.
All eyes swivelled back round to the crumpled chassis of the tank half-buried in the hole the errant eagle-bomber had blasted in the road. Huge fists gripping the sides of the tank, the thing that had been Jekyll pulled itself free of the wreckage once again.
“Amazing,” he gasped, unable to believe his own eyes. There didn’t appear to be a scratch on him.
“Now that really wasn’t very friendly,” the Jekyll-thing snarled, its voice heavy with malice. It was holding something in one ham-sized hand; something large, bullet-shaped and made of metal.
Back on its feet now, the scarred fiend gave voice to another furious howl. Its blood was up.
“Hold your horses,” the Jekyll-creature growled, teeth bared at his opponent like an enraged chimpanzee. “You’ll get yours in good time.” It strode away from the other creature, towards the Donner, the stalker’s crew working furiously to reload the thunder hammer before it was too late. The panicked shouts of the soldiers trapped within what had suddenly become a prison even reached the allies sheltering behind the wall at the dam’s edge.
Hercules watched as the brute tossed the unexploded shell in his hand one more time, as if assessing its weight, and then, with a grunt, hurled it back at the machine.
The shell struck the Landsknecht, detonating on contact, and the percussion touched off the stalker’s remaining payload. The force of the explosion obliterated the fighting ma
chine, liquefying the tarmac on top of the dam and fusing what was left of the machine – its splayed, bird-like iron feet – into the surface of the road. A surge of flame washed back over the dam.
As the echoes of the Donner’s destruction faded over the man-made lake, it was replaced by the beast’s rumbling laughter.
The other creature’s attack caught him off guard, the lank-haired monster covering the last ten yards in a single bound.
The two monsters went bowling across the top of the dam, only stopping when they hit the wall behind which Hercules and the others had taken cover.
Hercules felt the stones shift. A shower of broken mortar, loosened from between the bricks, tumbled away over the side of the dam.
“I think it’s time we got out of here, don’t you?” Hercules said, turning to the leader of the Monstrous Regiment.
“What about Doctor Jekyll?” Cookie asked, following Hercules on her hands and knees as he edged along the wall, heading for the opposite side of the megalithic structure two hundred yards away.
“I rather think he can take care of himself, don’t you?”
The seven of them edged their way along, while the grunts and thunderous impacts of the two duelling monsters sent shockwaves shuddering through the Darmstadt Dam.
It felt to Hercules as if the entire structure was shaking beneath him. What with the eagle’s bomb, the destruction of the Landsknecht and the tremors resulting from the monsters’ prolonged battle, he began to wonder how much more damage the dam would be able to take before something catastrophic occurred.
There was a sudden violent crack and a section of the wall in front of Hercules exploded in a shower of brick dust and broken stones, as a huge misshapen head burst through it. For a moment Hercules found himself staring into the half-closed eyes of the stunned, yet still monstrous, Jekyll. And then it disappeared as Jekyll’s opponent grabbed him by the hair and hauled him back to the fight.
Hercules watched, crestfallen, as a good twenty yards of the ledge underneath the fracture crumbled and fell away right there in front of him. They wouldn’t be going that way now.
With the roars of the grappling giants ringing in his ears, Hercules couldn’t help peering back over the wall to watch the battle unfolding between them.
“Looks like it’s time Mr Hyde taught you a lesson,” the hulking brute gloated as it seized the patchwork monster in a one-armed, crushing headlock, bringing its other fist around into its opponent’s face. Hercules found himself vaguely wondering who this ‘Mr Hyde’ was.
Was this thing, now calling itself Hyde, Jekyll or not? If he wasn’t Jekyll, then where had Hyde come from? There certainly hadn’t been room inside the tank to keep a secret as big as that hidden.
So Hyde had to be Jekyll, but horribly transformed. But how?
And then Hercules found himself recalling the words of Professor Knox back at the Medical School in Edinburgh, before he had introduced him to the frozen Jekyll: “My colleagues and I have tried to continue the doctor’s ground-breaking work, in our own small way.”
Was Hyde what Knox had been talking about?
Hercules watched as Hyde hurled the other creature from him, only for the brute to come at him again, its massive hands twisted into savage, blunt-ended claws. Mr Hyde responded by beating his chest and tensing his biceps like some sideshow strongman.
And then, just as the scarred savage was almost on top of him, Hyde curled himself into a ball. The other creature went sailing over its target, only for Hyde to come out of his crouch at the last minute and grab a trailing foot. He yanked violently at the limb, halting the creature’s flight and bringing its wrist in reach of his other hand.
“Time to dance!” Hyde boomed.
With one hand gripped tight about the monster’s wrist and the other about its ankle he began to spin about on the spot, whirling his captive as if they were caught up in some rural folk dance, or as if he was preparing to throw the hammer.
As the creature howled and struggled to free itself of the hulking brute’s grasp, Hyde completed one rotation, then another, speeding up as he did. With a guttural snarl, he hurled the creature away over the edge of the dam, towards the river gorge, the monster coming down into the black waters of the lake several seconds later and a good fifty yards downriver.
Cautiously rising to his feet, Hercules watched the ripples spread from the monster’s splash. There was no sign of the creature for several seconds, and Hercules began to wonder if the hulking Hyde really had discovered the best way to defeat it.
An eerie calm fell over the dam, broken only by the crackle of flames and the hiss-clank of the last of the Landsknechts.
Suddenly aware of another presence nearby, the thing that had been Doctor Henry Jekyll turned to face Hercules. The brute’s chest and shoulders heaved as he panted for breath after his incredible exertions. He glowered at the British agent in the Nazi uniform. Hercules smiled back weakly.
Hercules stepped through the gap Hyde’s head had created in the wall, and thrust a hand towards the looming half tonne of muscle and pent-up rage. The beast stared back at him in incomprehension, as if they had never met.
“Quicksilver,” Hercules said, frowning uncertainly. “Hercules Quicksilver.”
Hyde’s face held the surprised look of a hungry cat to whom a mouse had just held out its paw in greeting. He slowly held out his own massive, green-hued hand. “Hyde,” he said, in his deep Cockney rumble. “Mr Edward Hyde. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Hercules was suddenly conscious of the hiss of the flame-thrower’s pilot light and the glug of naphtha sloshing into a pressurised propellant chamber.
Hyde’s wary expression suddenly became a grimace of anger and Hercules felt his own pulse quicken, preparing him for whatever was about to happen next.
Rather than take Hercules’ hand and shake it, Hyde’s own massive palm suddenly smacked the man aside, flicking him away as if he were no more than a fly.
A split second later, a torrent of incendiary naphtha gushed across the road, and splashed across the hull of the stricken tank.
The crew of the last Landsknecht had closed the gap between them and the Seigfried in a few clanking steps.
Hyde himself leapt clear but not before he was caught by the stream of blistering naphtha. Flames licked at his unnatural flesh, leaving it scorched black with soot but otherwise unmarked.
The stalker’s secondary weapon opened up then, the rattling Gatling gun peppering the road surface with bullets.
From where he now lay flat on his back on the road – having been saved from the Blitzen’s hungry flames by the hulking Hyde – Hercules was certain he saw several rounds hit Hyde himself, only rattle onto the road, leaving the green giant unharmed. However, the force of the fusillade sent the brute stumbling back towards the tank.
The flame-thrower was still throwing out a torrent of flame, the burning naphtha pouring over the dented wreckage of the Seigfried and into the crumpled crew compartment.
“Jump!” Hercules shouted, scrambling to his feet and running for the wall.
Cookie stared at him aghast and then at the tank and the licking flames streaming from the Landsknecht.
“Now!” Hercules screamed.
The woman’s own instinct for survival – honed by military training and experience in the field, as well as the life she had led before taking on the moniker ‘Cookie’ – took over and she turned and leapt.
Hercules vaulted from the top of the dam a split second later, sailing out beyond her. And then they were both falling, dropping like stones.
Having worked out what was going on, the rest of the squad threw themselves after their leader and the British agent.
The fall seemed to last for an age. Focusing on the churning white-water below, Hercules prayed that they would hit the river and not the dam’s massive stone footings.
They still had another two hundred feet to fall when the heat of the flame-thrower’s caresses cooked off the m
unitions still locked inside the tank’s magazine.
Spears of smoke and flame tore through the plate armour of the Seigfried as if it were no more than a model constructed from paper and card.
The tank was consumed by a ball of greasy smoke and retina-searing pyrotechnics that continued to expand, swallowing the top of the dam. Secondary detonations were swallowed by the vast roiling explosion, producing a fireball of extraordinary size.
And then the turmoil of the churning river was suddenly right there under them and Hercules and the others hit the water with a succession of splashes. The waters of the river closed over their heads and the powerful pull of the current dragged them away downstream between the steeply wooded banks of the valley below.
Fragments of blackened steel and shattered cogs rained down around them, hissing as they were cooled by the river, throwing up great clouds of steam.
Hercules surfaced moments later, gasping for breath and treading water, trying to gain some semblance of control over his careering course as the river dragged him further and faster downstream. He saw six other spluttering faces looking back at him, hair and make-up a mess after the impromptu dunking.
As the aftershock echoes of the explosion faded, another seismic rumbling took its place.
Hercules twisted mid-stream and stared in amazement as the top of the dam collapsed and the lake began to pour down into the valley after them in a Biblical flood.
The destruction of the tank had been too much for the Darmstadt dam, weakened as it had been by the assaults it had already had to endure.
Thousands of tonnes of water and rock tumbled down the cliff-like face of the dam’s foundations. Colossal pieces of masonry bounced over the rough terrain to come to rest further downstream, where they proceeded to clog the river once again. The gushing waterfall now cascading from the shattered dam crashed down into the newly spreading pool, the river breaking its banks as millions of gallons of water went rushing through the valley below, uprooting trees and carrying boulders the size of jeeps before it.
Anno Frankenstein Page 12
