David Golemon - Ripper

“I said this was your object lesson. Problem-solving capacity amongst the strongest, most ruthless creature in the world has been obtained. They need no key old friend. The last journal explains it all. They have been opening and closing the locks on their chains since the third series of injections. So I had to change the locks to a more advanced model. Now they have the reasoning to avoid capture, just like I had in London twenty years ago. It works, Singh, the formula works!”

Singh felt his heart jump in his chest as he absorbed the words from Ambrose. Then his heart stopped when he heard the cell door behind him open. He closed his eyes and then he suddenly realized what he had to do before his own life became forfeit. He pulled the trigger.

Ambrose was hit in the chest and thrown back just as test subject number two jumped onto the back of the manservant. As the professor absorbed the large-caliber bullet and as he hit the table with the remaining syringes on its top, he heard the beast as it tore its teeth into the neck of Singh. He reached down and started to gather the remaining doses of Perdition’s Fire from the floor. He looked down at the wound he had sustained and saw the blood pumping out of his chest from the bullet hole. He laughed as he watched the flow of life-sustaining blood dwindled to a trickle.

While the quickly dying Ambrose started giving the final injections to the last eight patients, he ignored the sounds of test subject number two as it did what it was created to do as its brain functions started to die — it was dismembering, tearing apart, killing, and worst of all something else that had not been programmed into its cycle of violence during the professor’s long-winded readings to his test subjects, something the professor could never figure out — it would feed on the corpse of what it had just killed — a basic throwback to the primitive days of beast against beast. The total brain function brought on more than just advanced IQ; in some ways the formula reverted it also.

For the world as a whole, the genie was now out of the bottle, and a new form of warfare was about to explode onto the landscape of the Mexican chaparral.

The living versus the dead — and the dead had the advantage.

Perdition’s Fire was now perfected.

Ambrose laughed as blood spilled onto the wooden flooring. As he stared at the last test subject he felt his knees weaken and his mouth go dry. His head started to spin and he quickly gave the last dosage. Then without realizing what was happening he turned and stumbled out of the cell and crashed into the dosage table, knocking it over.

Ambrose knew he had injected himself too late to stem the flow of blood from the bullet wound and now he would die before he could prove to the outside world that his theory of chemical balancing of the entire brain and the releasing of controlled violence would never be achieved. His eyes started to flutter closed. Suddenly he felt the sharp jab of something through the lab coat and into his arm. He opened his eyes as he felt the rush of the drug as it coursed up his arm. His strength was returning fast. He was pulled to his feet, and that was when he realized it was test subject number two. The beast had finished his work with Singh and had actually refilled one of the used syringes and had injected him again.

“That is too much, the dosage will kill me.”

“As you have us?” came the slow, deep voice from test subject number two. The beast let him go and then smiled. His mouth was wide and filled with large carnivorous teeth. “Now your only option is to fight … fight alongside of those you have condemned to hell with your God-like man building. Now FIGHT!”

Ambrose felt his mind let go as the section of his brain he had only barely touched on in London came to full life. Instantly memories came to him of those nights in Whitechapel and the pleasure he took from testing his serum.

“Yes, YES!” Ambrose shouted as the physical change went far beyond anything he had ever experienced.

Jack the Ripper and Mr. Hyde combined was now loose upon the world.

As First Lieutenant George Patton led the 8th Cavalry over the last rise, the early morning sun burned off the last of the fog and illuminated a strange scene below. Women and children, peasant farmers, and their animals were streaming out of the hacienda and the outbuildings that surrounded it. Patton galloped toward the front gates of the main building. Each troop in the unit did as previously ordered. They split into four separate companies for each side of the massive hacienda.

As Patton rode past the first of the terrified farm workers, he could sense they were not only running from the danger posed by the raid, but from the way they turned their heads back, also from something inside the hacienda. They braved the charging horses of the 8th to distance themselves from their employer — or something even more terrifying.

The main troop with the lieutenant in the lead never hesitated as they charged two abreast through the wide double gate at the front of the hacienda. Patton was the first to discharge a weapon that morning as a man with an old Winchester rifle was downed in the center of the wide courtyard. Then other loud reports were heard as the troopers behind Patton opened up on several men, both armed and unarmed.

The first six men reigned in their mounts and came to a sliding stop on the flagstones of the courtyard. Patton held up his hand and then gestured for them to split up to cover the eighteen possible entranceways into the main building. More gunfire erupted on the other side of the house. The other troops opposite Patton’s men were coming across the same sort of weak defense. The man beside the lieutenant raised a boot and then smashed in the French style doors before him. He held a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun before him as he stepped into a large room. A man in a darkened far corner came from the shadows with his hands held high in the air. The sergeant turned quickly and fired both barrels into the man who flew backward until a whitewashed wall stopped him.

“Jesus Christ, Sergeant!” Patton said angrily as he shook his head to clear his hearing after the loud report from the shotgun.

“Sorry, sir,” said the small but stocky sergeant as he broke the weapon he was holding and pulled free the two smoking and expended shells. As he did this he looked up in time to see a darker shape lunge from another room. He quickly shoved Patton out of the way and swung the empty shotgun at the man’s head. It connected solidly but seemed to have little or no effect on the strangely shaped man in front of him.

Patton kept his balance after being pushed out of the way of the charging man. He turned in time to see the twin barrels of the sergeant’s shotgun strike the attacker in the side of the head. He could have sworn he heard the sound of cracking bone, therefore he was surprised to see the man just turn his head slowly back toward the sergeant. Patton hurriedly raised his Colt. The crazed-looking man actually growled in the split second that he jumped on the sergeant. Patton couldn’t believe the speed at which the man moved. It was like watching a large predatory cat lunge at an unwitting victim. Each blow rained down upon the sergeant was something that was so shocking to see that Patton was frozen. This time he knew for sure he was hearing bones break. The sergeant never had time to scream before his skull was crushed. The attacking beast was crazed. His dark hair looked ragged and wet. The exposed muscles bulged with each movement of arms or legs. The nails on its fingers were long, dirty, and as lethal looking as small knives.

Finally the shock of what he had just seen slid from him as if he had just awoken from a momentary nightmare. Now Patton became angry that whatever this thing was had caught him by surprise. He quickly aimed and fired two times into the right side of the man-beast as it finally straightened from the dead body of the sergeant. The two bullets hit almost simultaneously. The first struck the sergeant’s attacker in the armpit, the second just below the ribcage. The man only staggered. It screeched something and then jabbered something else as it looked toward the man that had caused it the pain it was feeling. The malformed man then turned its horribly misaligned features up toward Patton. It tilted its head and then screamed a murderous roar as it started forward.