Tyrant - 4

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1935. Somewhere beneath the Balkan mountains...

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Up from the pit crawled lumpish, miserable figures assembled from the parts of dead men. Each was a jigsaw puzzle of stitches and flesh, their eyes blazing with an unholy light; upon their backs and chests were the galvanized plugs that controlled their body with intermittent pulses of electricity.

"Do you not see?" Otto Verner cried out. "The scope of my work--"

"--involves making monsters," the elderly Mr. Rook, dressed in his long brown coat and hat, replied. "Yes, we can see that, young man." He lifted his rifle at once and opened fire, but to little avail--the bullets struck the rising tide of flesh but did nothing to discourage them.

"Frankenstein was a fool," Otto Verner continued. The mad scientist had placed himself high above the cavern, atop of a metal scaffold; previous attempts to gun him down had been foiled by the electromagnetic shield produced by his humming generators. "A man with no vision--ressurection through galvanization is not some mere medical plaything. It is a tool--a method of conquest--the means by which the Prussian Empire shall rise once more--"

"Really, now, do you ever clam up?" Ms. Knight, young and spritely, interrupted. Her knives flashed out, one after another cutting apath through the swelling forces of scrambling dead, each blade aimed for the head rather than the heart--with each strike, one of the monsters tumbled back into the pit. "Now, Mr. Rook, if you would be so kind as to aim properly--"

"I don't think killing the deaders is going to get us out of this one," Mr. Bishop said, his own pistols blazing into the horde. "We need to find a way to hit the fellow who's somehow powering them."

"That blasted field," Mr. Rook said. "If only we could somehow deactivate it--one shot is all it would take. Maybe if--"

There was a terrific flash of color, followed by a brilliant light; Otto Verner screamed in surprise as the tip of a sword scissored through his shoulder and neatly cut his mechanical arm off at the joint. The mad scientist tumbled down through the electromagnetic field, crashing somewhere on the floor several stories below; as he groaned in pain, the figure responsible for throwing him down turned the generators off.

The hordes of the dead twitched, spasmed, and fell to the ground, inert.

All three agents looked down at the pile of corpses and then up to the figure who had just recently arrived.

"Hello," the person in the black uniform--with a skull-shaped face-plate--said. "You're--hm. The Chessmen, I assume?"

"Chesspersons," Ms. Knight corrected.

"Oh, don't go off about that again," Mr. Rook said. He then turned his attention to the figure high above. "Who exactly are you, anyway? The Queen send you to give us a hand?"

"No. I don't work for British Intelligence," the figure said. "I'm--uh, it's complicated. Anyway, just here to pick up the electromagnetic shield generator." The figure reached down, then, tearing out what looked like an over-sized Tesla coil mounted on a gun from Otto Werner's control panel.

"Hey--wait just one second," Mr. Bishop said. "That's now officially property of the British--"

There was another flash, followed by a surge of light; in an instant, the figure and the device were gone.

"Well, bloody hell," Mr. Rook said. "Who the blazes was that?"

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