The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (27 page)

Reed's invisible body crashed through the door into a chamber filled with
documents, parchments, and ancient writing supplies. Still reeling, Reed
staggered backward, senseless, into a low shelf of ink powders.

Bottles and containers broke open and spilled around him, dumping lampblack
and dried tints on Reed's transparent head and upper body. Groggy and injured,
his assistant struggled back to his feet. But now that he was smeared and dusted
back to partial visibility, his advantage was gone.

Sawyer stood at the parchment room door with a look of determination. No
scrawny little bureaucrat was a match for him. Even without bullets for his
Winchester, he could take Sanderson Reed.

Suddenly a fireball erupted, splashing heat and flames like a wave of lava
crashing against the wall next to the parchment room. With a yelp, Sawyer hurled
himself to the side, barely avoiding another gush of fire. A few loose documents
in the room ignited, and Reed himself scuttled out of the way like a
half-dissolved shadow.

Sawyer glanced up, spluttering. "Now what?"

With heavy clanking footsteps, a second one of Moriarty's ironclad tank men
advanced toward him down the corridor like an angry dragon. Instead of a Gatling
launcher, though, this one had been rigged with a flamethrower.

Sawyer dove out of the way as another fiery river exploded toward
him.

Circling and slashing, round and round, Dorian Gray and Mina Harker fought on
wearily, like an old married couple—but with knives and swords. Each blow, each
slash had only a temporary effect, but still they kept cutting.

Eyes flashing, fangs exposed as she grimaced with the effort, Mina managed to
back Gray into the bedroom, much to his apparent delight. "The bedroom, Mina—
does it give you memories?" He smiled as he swung his cane-sword again. "Or
ideas?"

She leaped at him, whirled, and pushed off the wall with spiderlike agility.
In a flowing movement, she ducked Gray's slash with his rapier and plunged her
knife directly into his groin.

Screaming, he hunched over, backing away from her with his free hand pressed
against his crotch. His fingers came away covered with already-vanishing blood.
His pale face trembled with an unsettled expression. "If that had been
permanent, my dear, I'd have been very upset."

A substantial explosion from the lower factory levels shook the whole room.
The floor bucked and heaved, and dust showered down from the ceiling. Shouts and
screams reverberated through the fortress.

Minas momentary distraction gave Gray the perfect opportunity to skewer her
in the chest. His long cane-sword thrust through her bodice, under the perfect
milky breasts he had so thoroughly enjoyed, and straight through her vampire
heart.

Mina gasped for air, her green eyes bulging with disbelief. She clutched
ineffectually at the sword that had sprouted from her chest and out her back.
Choking on words, she gave Gray one final glare of anger, then fell dead upon
the bed.

Gray frowned down at her lying there. His expression was almost a pout. "I
hoped I'd get to nail you one more time, dear Mina. Didn't think it'd be
literally."

Inside the cluttered high keep, Quatermain and Moriarty continued their
battle to the death. M clumsily swung his rusty makeshift sword, making up for
any lack of finesse with unbridled violence. He slashed and parried against the
old hunter's Bowie knife.

Moriarty poked viciously at his opponents gut, but Quatermain blocked and
twisted the flat iron bar aside. His move, however, gave M the opening to
kidney-punch Quatermain repeatedly. With his bony knuckles, Moriarty hammered
his opponent in any vulnerable place.

Fortunately, Quatermain was tougher than that. Grinding his teeth together
with a wordless roar, he backhanded the gaunt mastermind with his Bowie knife,
slashing at his face. "I'll give you a real scar or two. Make you want to wear
that mask again."

But Moriarty's crude metal bar blocked the knife with a resounding clang, and
the impact sent both weapons clattering off into the darkness among the ancient
torture paraphernalia.

M lunged after him like a madman, and Quatermain found himself on the
defensive. Tripping through the clutter as he retreated, he used anything he
could get his hands on, grabbing at books, lamps, iron tongs. But Moriarty was
unrelenting and drove him back.

Finally Quatermain saw an opening. He managed to grab Moriarty's wrist and
wrapped his other arm around his thin, sinewy throat. Pressing closer, he
squeezed, trying to choke the life out of his enemy.

"I hope I have your fire when I'm your age," Moriarty said, wheezing the
words through a constricted windpipe.

"You won't live beyond today. That's a promise." Quatermain pressed his angry
face so close he could have bitten off M's ear.

Then from outside the chamber came a challenging roar—a voice that sounded
like Hyde's. The impacts of a furious battle shook the whole room, giving
Moriarty the chance to twist free again and suck in a huge gulp of air.

He head-butted Quatermain, who shook it off and head-butted Moriarty back.
Moriarty staggered briefly, stunned and reeling.

Then they were both at it again.

After the armored colossus was defeated, Dante shouted for the rest of his
fleeing cadre to turn around and redouble their attack against Mr. Hyde. "Use
your bare hands if you have to! Would you rather face the Fantom?"

Many of the men clearly would, but they hesitated and came back. Then,
gathering courage, they swept together, yelling as they charged forward in a
concentrated offensive against the brutish man.

Now straining with the effort, Hyde protected the surviving
Nautilus
crewmen as best he could, using the battered iron shield to deflect a few
frantic potshots. "Go find Nemo," he roared, and the crewmen ran to aid their
captain in freeing the hostage scientists.

M's henchmen careened forward, stupidly attempting hand-to-hand combat with
their monstrous opponent, but Hyde was brutal. He had no patience for the
squirming annoyances that raced toward him.

Now that he no longer needed to protect the crewmen, he met their foolish
charge by stomping forward and swinging the iron door like a ton-weight cricket
bat.

He swatted away the first wave of henchmen, sending them flying like rag
dolls over the mezzanines edge and down into the ruined lab area.

Nemo had gathered the terrified hostage scientists and pushed them out the
barred laboratory door, where they were met by his surviving crewmen. Behind
him, Hyde's victims crashed spectacularly into the shattered glassware,
destroying the last few scientific implements that had survived Nemos battle
with the guards.

Hyde hurled the metal door in front of him, crushing two of his henchmen,
then stalked toward the remaining few. His heavy feet trod on the fallen iron
plate, under which the dying henchmen stopped squirming and started oozing. When
he reached the last scrambling henchmen, his punches and blows sent battered
victims flying in every direction.

Finally he faced Dante: the final man standing.

Seeing his doom approach, the Fantom's lieutenant scrambled backward, trying
to find shelter as Hyde stormed in for the killing blow. Dante fumbled in his
pockets, frantically searching… He found it: an unbroken vial of Jekyll's
potion, which he had kept for himself from the leather satchel he'd delivered to
M. It was a desperate chance.

With Hyde's swollen form looming over him, Dante pried off the stopper and
gulped down all the liquid.

"God, no!" Hyde howled, realizing what the man had done. "Not the whole
thing!" Not even Jekyll in his weakest moments had ever consumed so much of the
elixir at once.

Too late. Dante glared hatefully at him and wiped the last drops from his
lips. Suddenly he writhed and screamed as the transfigurative chemical took
hold.

A jet of curling flame rolled down the hall toward him, and Tom Sawyer dove
headlong into the parchment room. He sprawled on the floor among rolled
parchments and documents that Sanderson Reed had knocked from the shelves. But
hundreds of ancient—and flammable—documents remained stored in the chamber.

The towering flamethrower man clanked to the doorway and raised a reinforced
metal arm. With a whoosh, he unleashed another flood of incinerating fire,
blasting the whole room while Sawyer scrambled for cover. A wall of parchments
caught instantaneously.

Like a cornered river rat, Sawyer cast around for an escape route, but
fireballs cut him off in every direction. The ironclad colossus closed in on
him, raising the flame-throwing arm again.

From inside the armored walker suit, the voice of the Fantoms' man sounded
surprisingly thin and small. "You left your luck on the doorstep, boy."

Sawyer found himself trapped in a corner with nowhere left to go. The
flamethrower man loomed through the burgeoning smoke and took aim with his jet
arm. Just as he shot a spurt of flames, something knocked the reinforced arm
aside, and the fiery blast went wide.

The walking ironclad roared in confusion, and his fire jet petered out after
incinerating a wall of empty shelves. Sawyer opened his eyes and saw the armored
titan struggling with an invisible assailant. A long knife protruded from
between the walkers iron plates, shoved deep to reach the man's vulnerable
organs. Rising smoke delineated the outline of the newcomer.

"Skinner!" Sawyer cried. "The real one this time, I hope."

"I thought you Yanks were supposed to be the cavalry," Skinner said. A grin
was barely visible on his smoke-stained face.

The wounded flamethrower man spun his armored body and knocked Skinner aside
with an ironclad arm. He turned his fiery nozzle in the direction of his
unexpected opponent and blasted at the invisible man, who skittered away.

Skinner didn't move quickly enough, and the leading edge of fire scorched
him. Large areas of his transparent skin were burned visible: a patch of his
back and part of one buttock, now bubbling and blistered. He yowled and cursed
in a drawn-out, incomprehensible wail.

Tom Sawyer acted without thinking. He grabbed a piece of shattered shelving
and charged the armored flamethrower man from behind, rammed into him, and
knocked him spinning. He whacked against the tank on the ironclads back until he
pierced the fuel reservoir. Sparks flying from the inferno in the room caught
the flammable liquid and ignited the tank, causing it to spew fire like a
Catherine wheel.

Sawyer rushed to where Skinner lay on the floor, burned and suffering. "Are
you hurt bad?"

"Oh, no, it's really quite pleasant," the invisible man said sarcastically.
"I can't wait to do it again."

Then Sawyer froze as another knife blade was suddenly pressed against his
throat, drawing him up. He lifted his chin and swallowed hard.

It was Reed, still semivisible from the smeared ink powder. "You know what
they say, Yank. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer."

While in his excessively muscled bestial form, Edward Hyde had never before
felt intimidated. Now, however, he started back from the huge and monstrous
thing that Dante had become. The lieutenant's metamorphosis left him in a
horrific form that would have made even a prehistoric carnivore tremble.

His face still rippling and writhing from the agonies of the change, the
Dante-beast loomed up, and up
—
then he struck. The blow he
landed knocked his opponent backward across the mezzanine. Hyde slammed into a
wall, smashing whole stone blocks into gravel, and fell to the floor, stunned
and drooling.

The Dante-beast lumbered forward to pummel him again.

After Captain Nemo had sent the freed scientists fleeing with their hostage
family members, he rushed back to the pillared mezzanine to help his fellow
League member.

In his Nautilus, Nemo had seen awesome sights that few men alive had
witnessed: sunken cities, undersea mountains and volcanoes, a horrific giant
squid. But when he saw what Dante had become, he froze in disbelief.

The Fantom's lieutenant was now twelve feet tall, tremendously deformed,
engorged with muscle and sinew. His spine had twisted, as if unable to support
so much power and fury. His face, no longer even remotely human, was swollen
with popped blood vessels and spiny facial hair that grew like a forest of
bristles.

Hyde struggled to his feet just in time to meet Dante's next charge. The
larger beast-man stormed at him. The force of his roundhouse punch sent the
League member careening into a thick support pillar. The stone column cracked,
teetered, and fell, bringing down a precarious arch. Hyde fell amid a shower of
stones and rubble that blocked the exit passage.

A thick arm knocked the heavy blocks away, and Hyde hauled himself out of the
rock pile. The Dante-beast immediately waded toward him and began his merciless
assault once again.

Though he was being battered to a pulp, Hyde broke the attack and swung a
powerful uppercut. "Come on, then, if you fancy a ruckus." The blow slammed the
Dante-beast back into a structural column, toppling it and collapsing another
section of the ceiling.

As Hyde continued to advance, Nemo joined him, a wicked scimitar held in his
right hand, his left raised and ready to assist with the fight. Despite his
martial arts skills and the curved blade, the captain looked absurdly small in
the company of the two behemoths.

Hyde stopped him with an outstretched hand as large as Nemo's head. "No, no.
Leave this to me." He cracked his knuckles. "This will be my pleasure."

Reeling to his feet again, the Dante-beast charged at Hyde. Hyde ran back at
him. They looked like two stampeding rhinos.

On one voyage when he had visited mysterious Japan, Nemo had seen a match of
enormously fat Sumo wrestlers. Although this colossal struggle brought back the
memory, that contest had been a mere child's game in comparison.