This post is an entry into the Scholar and Scribe "Thriller" edition invitational. If you'd like to join the fun, you can find the post HERE
This post is actually a sequel to a post I wrote a little while ago based on a Worldbuilding prompt - Worldbuilding Prompt #772 - The Abandoned Amazonian Laboratory. Hopefully it works as a standalone, but I can see the two posts eventually becoming part of a longer-running story.
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"Are you sure this is the place ?"
Lily's whisper oozed caution and doubt.
Captain Randall nodded as he adjusted the telescopic sight on his Westley-Richards rifle, peering through the scope towards the hunting lodge five hundred yards away.
"It's unlikely anyone other than Doktor Von Falken would have a pair of Bavarian jaegers to guard a hunting lodge in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."
He pulled the trigged and one of the unsuspecting jaegers fell. With a smooth motion, Randall moved the bolt back and forth, and his second shot dropped the other guard as he was frantically looking to see where the shot had come from.
Another shot rang out.
"I say, there's a third one !"
"There ! Top window !" the third member of their team, Benjamin Marwell, called out.
Randall fired again, but it took his fourth shot to silence the man who had been skilfully firing from the back of the room.
"Well they know we're coming now," he said grimly.
Using the woodland for cover, they moved swiftly to the lodge, breaking a rear window to gain entry. The agents of Her Majesty's Intelligence Service (Overseas Exploration Division) were renowned for never using the front door when a rear entrance was available.
The inside of the building was nothing like a traditional Alpine hunting lodge. It was as if a steel box had been built inside, leaving just a corridor all the way around the perimeter between it and the false wooden outer skin.
The three agents rapidly moved around it to find an entrance, Marwell in the lead.
There was a crack. The floor tilted crazily. A hidden pivot swung a section of the floorboards downwards.
The other two saw Marwell being tipped towards a pit of dark liquid.
Randall reached out, trying to loop his rifle sling around his slipping comrade. Too late !
Marwell screamed just once, briefly, as the liquid swallowed him, flailing for a few seconds before sinking forever. Fumes rose, and the stench revealed it to be strong sulphuric acid.
Lily's expression was shock, her hands to her face, skin pale.
"I'm sorry, Lily. Now we know this is the right place, no-one but Von Falken would install such a fiendish trap. But we have to go on."
Randall suspected Lily and Marwell had been lovers, but had been far too discreet to ask. Now, it was too late.
Around the next corner was a door. Steel set into steel.
Cautiously, Randall wrapped a cloth around the handle and turned it slowly. It's wasn't locked. Not necessarily a good sign.
Opening the door, they found themselves in a rectangular chamber some twenty foot wide and sixty long, also plated out in steel with another door of the same material at the far end. The door opened smoothly. As it did, the door behind them swung shut, closing with a very clear clunk that told them they were locked in.
From a hidden speaker somewhere in the ceiling came a sudden sharp voice, with a clipped German accent.
"So you found me, Jack Randall. Well done. But you will never leave this place alive. You will never see my Überlegener Soldaten triumph over your puny British army. Now, meet one of my earlier creations"
Into the room stepped a monstrosity. Half man, half machine. The human part was twisted and warped beyond any natural shape. Seven feet tall and with pairs of parallel short, sharp serrated blades where it's hands should have been.
"How does it wipe it's backside ?" Randall quipped quietly to Lily, trying to break the mood of horror.
She shuddered as she drew her service pistol and Randall racked another round into his rifle chamber.
The chamber rang like a bell at the report of Randall's rifle, as he fired into the advancing monster at point-blank range. It swayed back briefly at the impact and then continued it's inexorable advance. A clattering buzz started up as the blades started to slide in and out of their sockets in short movements, the serrations moving in opposite directions to create electric carving knife.
Randall pulled the machete from his belt and charged, ducking under buzzing death-blades and slashing at the creature. A long wound opened up in it's chest. It didn't bleed, just oozed a little green oily goo.
The chamber echoed again as Lily emptied the magazine of her pistol into the construct. Wounds opened up but it seemed unaffected, jabbing downward with it's elbow and knocking Randall sprawling to the floor at it's feet.
He rolled over and over, narrowly missing snickering blades as the thing swiped down repeatedly to try and carve him up.
Then it froze into immobility. Lily had been able to work around behind it while it's limited intelligence focused on killing Randall. From behind, she'd been able to see it's vulnerable spot; a socket in the centre of it's spine. Picking a screwdriver from her belt-pouch, it had proved to be a perfect fit. She'd jammed it into the socket and given a quarter turn anti-clockwise. It was the off switch.
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Randall picked himself up and dusted himself off. "Well, Doctor Fazakerley, shall we see what we find next ?" he grinned at Lily as he stepped towards the open door.
They stepped through, and saw they were in something that was a cross between a laboratory and an abattoir.
A steel table in the centre held hunks of bloody flesh; the remains of several men, stapled together crudely and with a few mechanical devices that looked like servos inserted into some joints. In a chair against one wall was a strapped in corpse, constructed in the same way, seemingly complete, but appearing dead.
A man in a blood stained white lab coat looked up from a pile of papers on the floor.
"Doktor Von Falken, I presume," Randall stated in a flat voice. "You're under arrest."
The Doktor dropped a cigarette lighter onto the pile of papers and pressed a button on the edge of the desk. As he turned to flee, the straps dropped free from the corpse on the chair and it started to jerkily rise.
Faced with this new threat, Randall and Lily had no choice but to turn to face it as the German dashed from the room.
While Lily fumbled to reload her pistol, Randall emptied his rifle into the thing, working the bolt frantically to load round after round into the chamber and firing from the hip. As it lumbered toward the pair the damage to the incomplete creation proved too much, and it toppled at their feet.
In the distance, they heard the rattling and clattering of an ornithopter taking off from a landing pad hidden on the roof. The Doktor had escaped.
Lily stamped on the papers to put out the fire. The fire hadn't had too long to take hold, and although some was destroyed and much was an incomprehensible scrawl, she reached down and picked up one item which jumped out at her.
"Look, Captain. This changes everything."
There, in her hand, was a document written in Japanese with a complex crimson seal imprinted at the bottom.
"He's not working for the Germans at all. This is the seal of the Japanese secret intelligence service, Kempetai Unit 706."
Randall nodded grimly. "I guess we need to keep chasing the good Doktor down. If there's anyone I'd want to have his super soldiers less than the Germans, it's the Japanese."
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio