The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (16 page)

"And
I'm
an immortal, not a gazelle," Gray said. He coolly regarded
the shaking city as if it held only minimal interest for him. "How can we outrun
this devastation?"

At that moment, the door of the
Nautilus
hold slammed open with a
metal bang. Prefaced by the roar of an engine, Nemo's amazing six-wheeled car
burst out and hurded down the gangplank, pulled into a screeching skid, and
fishtailed to a perfect halt on the widening walkway that led up into the
Venetian streets.

Tom Sawyer poked his head out, grinning from behind the controls. "Care for a
spin?"

Mina leaped into the back of the vehicle. "I'd love it!"

Quatermain jumped in the front, taking the seat next to Sawyer. He looked at
the young American with an appreciative smile. "Good idea. Wish I'd thought of
it."

"I was watching you all in the car back at the London museum," Sawyer said,
revving the engine. "Made up my mind back then that I wanted to take 'er for a
drive."

As Dorian Gray climbed in beside Mina, she primly shifted her skirts away
from him. Quatermain shouted at the cringing, uncertain doctor still on the
towpath. "Jekyll, hurry man! Get in!" But the man froze, as if every alternative
were equally miserable.

Captain Nemo stepped up to the drivers compartment and spoke to Quatermain as
Tom Sawyer impatiently shifted the controls, anxious to be off. "I will need
specific coordinates to launch my rocket. Our targeting must be absolutely
precise, or we will cause even more damage than we hope to prevent."

"Can you track this thing?" said Quatermain, rapping on the side of the
unusual car.

"Of course. I planned for all contingencies when I drew up my designs."

Quatermain pulled his flare gun. "Then launch when you see the flare! We'll
lead you right to the bull's-eye."

With each passing minute, more Venetian buildings groaned and collapsed,
continuing the devastating ripple of the chain reaction. The captain hurried off
to the gangplank into the
Nautilus
. "Ishmael and I will make the
preparations immediately."

Quatermain turned to Sawyer, slapping his palm on the control board. "Full
power!"

The young man floored the gas—and the engine prompdy died, causing a moment
of stunned shock. From the rear, Gray let out a quiet, disbelieving snort.
Sawyer desperately tried to restart the engine, blushing and hiding his sheepish
expression. "I, uh, think I killed it."

At the rear of the car, two of Nemo's uniformed crewmen tried to push the car
forward, hoping the engine would turn over. Sawyer struggled with the controls,
and the car's flooded engine coughed but refused to catch.

Quatermain realized that the last member of their team had not yet climbed
into the car. "Jekyll! What are you doing? Come on!"

But the mousy doctor stood immobile, terrified of setting free his brutish
alter ego. "I—I…"

With a new, violent blast, another building collapsed, this one nearer.
Overhead, the stone bridge spanning the canal wrenched and cracked, but still
clung together. Debris fell all around, pelting the hull of the
Nautilus
.

"We'll need Hyde!" Quatermain insisted. "Look around you."

Finally, the cars engine roared to life again, and Sawyer beamed in triumph,
ready to go. But Jekyll remained helplessly frozen on the towpath. "No! Hyde
will never use me again. I swear—"

"But without him, my dear doctor, what use are you?" Gray said with a
taunting lilt in his voice. "Do you plan to apply bandages and iodine to our
scrapes once we're all finished?"

"Just go," Quatermain said in disgust to Sawyer. "A damned inconvenient time
for the man to have second thoughts about his purpose here."

The young American put Nemo's car into gear and they raced away, leaving
Henry Jekyll alone with his fear, and Skinner—literally—nowhere in sight…

The car raced along up the narrow street, inches from the crumbling walls on
one side and the canal edge on the other. Its six wheels held their traction, in
spite of the rubble that continued to fall onto the roadway.

"All right!" Sawyer said, then whooped as they careened over a particularly
large bump. "So… where am I going?"

Quatermain pulled out the map of Venice that Nemo had provided before
dispatching the team. He squinted in the dim light as the car lurched and
bounced, then he drew out his eyeglasses again. After adjusting them, the old
adventurer could finally read the fine lines and letters on the map. "Right
ahead, then a left turn."

"No, go right after the canal forks." Mina leaned forward from the back.

"—a left turn that will lead us into the Calle del Luna—" Quatermain
continued, ignoring her.

"It's not the best way," Mina insisted. "I've spent some time in this city.
That counts for more than any map."

"Good thing we're all on the same team," Sawyer muttered, then decided to
listen to Mina after all. He hauled the car hard right at the fork, missing the
center divider by a hairbreadth.

"Caution, boy!" Quatermain yelled.

Suddenly, bullets spanged off the car's hood, leaving silver starbursts of
impact. Sawyer wrestled with the steering, screeched the car to a halt.

On the villa roof's edge overhead, a sniper sprinted away, grasping a long
rifle. The silhouettes of other snipers rose up, materializing from behind
nearby statues in the streets. They fired a hailstorm of bullets at the car.

Looking uncharacteristically furious, Gray kicked open the door to the car
and leaped out. "Damn Skinner! He must've told them we were coming." Heroically,
he pulled his cane-sword, slashing the thin silver blade in a menacing arc, and
launched himself into the fray as the air filled with projectiles. "Just
go!"

"Dorian, it's no use —" Mina shouted.

"Keep driving, lad!" Quatermain said.

Sawyer gunned the engine and swerved under the partial cover of a narrow
colonnade, smashed through a column, bounced off a wall, and kept going. He let
out another whoop, as if he was actually enjoying this.

Glancing back through the rear car window, Mina caught a last fleeting image
of Dorian Gray savagely fighting the snipers man-to-man. His cane-sword was
already slick and red with blood.

Quatermain tried to aim the modified Winchester that Sawyer had given him,
but the passing stone columns broke his line of sight. "I can't get a clear
shot."

Sawyer, wild with the moment, pulled two pistols of his own. "Then take the
wheel!" He stood up, leaned out the door, and fired wildly as the unguided
vehicle lurched along.

Quatermain grabbed the wheel, but with far less than his usual confidence.
"Sit down, you buffoon! I don't know how to drive this thing." The car swerved,
barely under control. Up ahead, though the end of the colonnade was approaching
too swiftly, Sawyer hadn't slowed at all.

"Save your bullets, both of you—these men are mine!" Mina said with vengeance
in her voice.

As Nemo's fabulous car emerged from the colonnade, bouncing and scraping,
Mina sprang from the racing vehicle with superhuman agility. She flew briefly
through the air and landed on a nearby wall, where she clung like a bat.

Setting his hot pistols beside him, Sawyer sat back down behind the wheel,
looking even more enamored with the mysterious pale woman. "Did you see that?
Did you see what she did?"

Left behind, Mina scrambled up the wall, finding tiny finger- and toeholds,
moving with creepy agility. It was unbelievable.

"Keep your eyes on the bloody road," Quatermain said. "We've got our own part
to do."

Inside the
Nautilus's
brightly lit rocket room, huge machinery moved
a rocket from its pallet to a firing tube. Diligent crewmen did their work
without panic, accustomed to drills and having had plenty of experience in
previous adventures.

Nemo barked orders at Ishmael. "Tune the tracer to the car's frequency. The
rocket must be ready to fire as soon as we see their flare."

The first mate activated the tracer unit on the rocket rooms wall, adjusting
it until a sequence of lights shone green. The tracing device began to plot the
car's position as an ink trail on a cylindrical map roll. "There he is,
Cap'n."

The fresh line zigzagged and jittered, showing Tom Sawyers weaving path
through the streets of Venice.

Impacts rang on the hull in an echoing sequence of booms, as if an army was
trying to batter its way into the floating
Nautilus
. Two of Nemo's
crewmen dashed out, ready to fight against the Fantom's minions—but there was no
enemy other than the surrounding structures, breaking apart and raining chunks
of masonry onto the vessel. The crewmen ducked, shielding their heads.

More debris pelted the exterior of the submarine vessel. The polished gold
trim and white ceramic plates were scraped, scuffed, stained. The arched bridge
overhead groaned and splintered, ready to fall entirely at any moment.

"The buildings are coming down! We must away!" shouted a terrified
crewman.

Nemo scrambled into the crows nest, rising high to where he could view the
city through a complicated binocular instrument. He watched as the sinking of
Venice progressed. "No, we will stay, and we will do our job."

Yet he still saw no sign of Quatermain's flare.

A ceiling had collapsed, and fresh rubble blocked the door of the secret
conference room. Three of the guards had already been killed, and the world
leaders clung together like frightened children beneath the heavy table.

When the floor cracked and greenish-brown water began oozing up from between
the tiles, they realized they were trapped.

"The Building! She is sinking!" the Italian said.

Leaving their empty bottles of wine on the floor, the representatives
scrambled out and sloshed through the deepening pools toward the exit. The
German climbed onto the heavy table and stood there like the commander of a navy
ship.

"We can't get out." The British ambassador stood with water rising past his
ankles. "Bloody hell."

The bearlike Russian joined the German on the table. Since it was the only
dry and sturdy place, the other representatives joined them. "We are lucky this
table is well built and strong, like Mother Russia!"

The wood groaned in protest and wobbled as the last of the world leaders
pulled themselves onto it.

While the water deepened on the floor, empty wine bottles floated like
defective glass fishing boats; they slowly filled, then sank with a gurgle.

"Perhaps this would be a good time to resolve our differences," the Spanish
ambassador suggested.

Leaving the colonnade and the tangled canals behind, the six-wheeled car
screeched onto a wide street.

"There, ahead," Quatermain said, gesturing out his side of the car. "It's a
straight shot from here."

On villa rooftops on both sides of the cobblestoned street, a swarm of the
Fantom's snipers rose ominously, took their positions, readied their deadly
rifles.

"Straight shot for them, maybe," Sawyer said, "a gauntlet for us."

But the snipers weren't the only figures visible. A liquid shadow, Mina
Harker raced along in eerie silence above their heads, finding impossible
perches, clinging to the walls like a nimble spider as she moved.

Quatermain pointed, nodding with unexpected admiration. "Not at all. The
vampire has us covered."

Sawyer set his jaw, grasped the controls, then roared forward into the deadly
targeting zone. Nemos amazing car entered the gauntlet just as Mina attacked the
snipers.

She took them completely by surprise, a blurry wraith of dark, jittery
motion. Gunshots rang out, most of them fired in desperation and terror. The
vampire woman pounced from man to man along the roofs edge, slashing and
ripping. One moment she was air-borne, the next skittering to another victim.
Her claws and teeth flashed in the moonlight and the growing fires of explosions
and destruction. For all her beauty and grace, she no longer looked remotely
human.

At breakneck speed, Sawyer lurched the car along the exposed street, picking
up speed past the deadly snipers. The vehicle would have been a clear target for
a rain of gunfire—if one set of the Fantom's killers hadn't been so suddenly
preoccupied with their own survival.

But the snipers on the opposite side of the street took aim and opened fire
on the racing car, shattering cobblestones, puncturing the metal sidewalk and
roof.

From the villas high rooftop, Mina lifted her delicate chin, opened her
bloodied mouth, and keened a bone-chilling note. Her piercing cry shot through
the night sky, audible even above the loud explosions and roars of collapsing
buildings.

From the darkness, a shadowy swarm answered her summons.

A huge flock of black-winged bats swooped through the night like a cloud of
angry hornets. In a squeaking storm, hundreds and hundreds of bats descended in
a flurry to engulf the snipers on the opposite roofline.

Mina continued the slaughter on her side of the street, while her winged pets
savaged the overconfident snipers on the other side. It all happened so
shockingly fast that the Fantom's men were not even aware of their danger until
each screamed and wheeled around in turn, their throats torn open, eyes slashed,
faces cut.

Three frantic men screamed and flailed, trying to drive away the flood of
ravenous bats. They stumbled and fell from their high perches to strike the
street far below with a wet, cracking sound…

Holding on for dear life in the shuddering car, Quatermain peered through the
bullet-pocked front windscreen to a wide canal at his right—and was astonished
to spy the Fantom himself.

Helmeted henchmen were escorting the masked man toward a creaking dock. An
armored gunboat floated in the canal beneath the walkway. The Fantom turned his
silver-covered face to take in a last glance of the fires and continuing
destruction he had brought about, then with a swirl of his black cape, he
stepped onto the pier.