G. Brett Williams #14 – The Engine

This is “eh,” but I am a day behind so I just grabbed something from the vault. haha

William Mundy was a confederate soldier turned guerilla fighter in the border territory between Kentucky and Ohio. Disillusioned by the incompetence of his command, Mundy formed a small group of guerilla fighters hellbent on exacting terror and destroying Union supply lines in Southern Ohio. His legend grew as tales of his exploits reached supporters on both sides of the war. Eventually, Mundy and his compatriots were captured and hanged by the Union army. Mundy’s legend persisted though in a number of stories and dime novels published and disseminated throughout the Confederate population. What most Confederate supporters did not know was that Mundy’s body was turned over to a highly secret group of inventors and doctors working on a sort of super science program for the Union army. The men experimented on Munday, outfitting his body with a combination of electrical power and steam locomotion that enabled his brain to operate at higher function and his body to function on a near superhuman level. The scientists and doctors rigged Munday’s head with a machine that would fire electrical impulses into his brain and his torso with a modified steam engine that powered his heart and granted him unnatural strength and vitality. It was the hope of the team that they could control their new monstrosity and use him as a sort of super soldier against the advancing Confederate army, but their plan backfired when Mundy rebelled against his creators, murdering them and escaping into the wilderness. Eventually the Union army found and overtook Munday, shutting down the machinery that kept him alive. Instead of destroying the man’s body they preserved it and locked it away in a secret government facility. There he stayed until the 1930s, when a new secret fringe science arm of the American military discovered the long missing body of Willim Mundy and revived him, improving upon the methods of control utilized by the original scientists. With the advancements of industry, America had lost sight of some of its more pastoral beginnings. With these advancements came a loss of concern over the darker corners of rural American life, places where monsters and other dangerous things still existed. This new scientific group was tasked partially with dealing with these occult threats and they thought Mundy would be the perfect choice for a warrior in their secret war. After all, send a monster to fight a monster. The Engine deals with the exploits of Mundy learning to live in this new world as he copes with his strong Confederate ideology, his monstrous existence and his distrust of this new time and new government where life as he knows it is a distant and painful memory. Also, monsters get punched!

Category: 2011, Scifi, Steampunk