Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (33 page)

"How do you know he'll be here?"

The demon closed its eyes. "Blake is being chased here even now. An old man, a fool, a lamb to the slaughter." It opened its eyes again. "Lamb. I was once an enemy of sheep, but the shepherd put me down. Do I have the taint, Abby? Can you see his mark upon me?" It turned to her, this demon that was her friendly Voice, and she tried to look at its face without falling into its eyes once again. But she could not. She averted her gaze, looked down at her hands, noting how long her nails were now and how badly her body was shaking. She could not fight off the change for much longer. She was going to lose control very soon, and the last thing she wished for — the very last thing she wanted to see — was Blake taken apart. She wanted to do it herself, desperately ... and yet if fate had decided that a demon would be his end, so be it. Abby had argued with fate many times before, and it was ironic that now, at her strongest moment, she suddenly felt so weak. She could almost feel the puppet strings buried in her mind and soul, guiding her every movement since she had first fled the
New Ark
and leading her back here, now, to this exact moment, with Leh standing before her, blood coursing a monstrous change through her body, and Blake being chased toward them ...

But chased by whom?

"Who's chasing?" she asked, but her yoke crackled from the phlegm suddenly flooding her throat. Saliva dripped from her lips, pink from the blood of her wounded gums.

"Oh, I think you'll know them when you see them," Leh said.

Abe,
Abby thought.
Oh, Abe, I never wanted you to see me like this.

"Not Abe," the demon said. "But close enough."

Abby changed. The world retreated from her for a while, and despite the intense physical pain, this was the one moment when she found true mental peace. She was nowhere for a while, a place without dream or nightmare, with no Memory or reality. Simply a blank.

When she woke up, the world was a very different place.

"I can smell him," Hellboy said. "An old man. A
fading
man. He's almost passed into Memory, but we can't let him get away. Come on, Liz, run!" They pelted headlong along corridors, passing through huge rooms that had once held creatures of untold size and power.
Maybe we've come up against some of them already,
Hellboy thought.
Maybe some we have yet to meet. But if we catch Blake soon, instead of letting him escape into this maze of rooms and corridors, we can hope we'll never have to meet them at all.

"Stop!" Liz said. Hellboy paused, glanced back at Liz. She was holding up her finger. "Hear that? Footsteps." Hellboy heard them, racing off way ahead. "Our echoes?" Liz shook her head. "Only one set. Come on." The deeper they went, the more amazed Hellboy became. "Has Blake really been here for so long?" he said. "What about fuel, food, repairs?"

"There are a hundred ports where he'd get help with no questions asked," Liz said. "We can worry about the past later, after we've sorted out the present."

"Right," Hellboy said. But as ever, it was the future that worried him the most.

So they followed the echoing footsteps, and soon, far too quickly for Hellboy to think it was luck, they saw the shape of a shuffling man ahead of them. He looked back, eyes going wide, and skirted sideways into a narrower gap between walls. Liz followed him first, Hellboy squeezing in after her.

"Nearly there," Liz said. "Blake! Stop!"

"Yeah, like he'll listen," Hellboy said. "Stop, police!" he shouted, then laughed.

"Sarcasm doesn't suit you, HB," she said.

"I'm just trying it on for size." The smile suddenly slipped from his face, and he was glad that Liz was hurrying on ahead, unable to see his expression.
That's cold,
Hellboy thought.
That's so cold, so empty, so wrong. That's not Blake. He's mad, he has magic, but he isn't ... evil. I smell evil. Black as pitch and stinking a hundred times worse.

They emerged into a huge chamber, a place that reeked of old oil and something else, something much more distant and unearthly. "Liz," Hellboy said, "get behind me."

"Don't you start with all that macho — "

"I mean it." The fact that Liz moved quickly behind Hellboy assured him that she had seen the look on his face. "This is so much more than Blake."

At the center of the chamber, suspended from the ceiling, hung a huge vat. Gray stuff had congealed around its rim and dripped down its sides like melted wax. Whatever this thing was, it hadn't been used for a while. It made Hellboy uneasy. He didn't like the smell coming from the thing, or the sight of it, and it felt so out of place in this world.
This is where he brought them through,
he thought. Then he heard the old man scream, and everything began to move very quickly.

"Hellboy!" a voice said. "Long time."

"I've never met you, demon."

Leh shrugged. "Have it your own way." It was standing on the rim of the huge vat, twenty feet above the deck, and it held Benedict Blake in one hand. Hellboy could see the demons fingers clasped inside the man's throat, as if Blake were becoming transparent.

Hellboy and Liz had rounded the vat just in time to see the demon grab Blake and leap, landing on the vats rim with uncanny balance. Hellboy had seen a shape slink back into the shadows at the corner of the room, but he wasn't sure Liz had seen, and he did not want to make Abby the center of this. Not yet. Not unless he had to.

"I came here for him, not you," Hellboy said.

"Him?" The demon went to drop Blake into the vat. "He'd make a fine brew, I'm sure."

"Who are you?"

"Leh."

"Leh is dead."

"Really, Hellboy ... you know better than that. Old demons don't die, they just retire disgracefully." The demon in human form smiled, and its teeth glimmered in the vague light. "Oh, and haven't you seen Abby yet? What a girl she's grown into! Although she's a trifle hirsute, I must say. I prefer my females shaved. Saves on the fur balls." He coughed and spat, his saliva sizzling on the deck.

"What are you doing here, Leh?"

"So you admit I'm Leh?"

"I admit nothing." Word games pissed Hellboy off. He clenched his fist, wanting to punch something. The vat. Maybe that would do.

"I'm here because this idiot's charming sons found me," Leh said. "Simple, really. He brought me back, and now I'm ... well, I'm not going to tell you."

"You're going to drop Blake into the vat to open a passage to the Memory," Hellboy said.

The demon shrugged. "Good guess."

"I've had a lot of practice. Is this all your doing?"

The demon shook its head, looked around at the grubby walls and ceiling of the old oil tank. "I suppose you could just call me lucky," it said. "I've no concern at all about what this little man is doing, but he serves a purpose. And now, if you don't mind — "

"You don't want to go back there," Hellboy growled. "I know demons."

"As well you should," Leh said. "No, I'm not going back to the Memory. Awful place, so boring, and no ass to be had for love or money."

"So you're inviting something through."

The demon turned to Blake, pressed its pale visage into the old man's face, and growled. "You left a friend of mine in there, when it could have made you a god."

Hellboy shook his head, stepped forward, and then the room shook as though kicked from all sides by something with size infinity boots.

For a second Leh's eyes opened in wonder, and the demon turned and looked down into the vat. But Hellboy knew that the impact was from a more earthly source, and the second explosion that followed quickly on the first confirmed it. The
New Ark
was under attack.

Abe must have told them about the ship,
Hellboy thought. Hellboy jumped at the vat, clawing his way to the top and reaching for Leh's ankles. The demon sidestepped his grasp with ease and laughed — Hellboy hated demon laughter — before letting Blake go.

A shadow leaped from the other lip of the vat, grasped Blake in its jaws, and tumbled to the deck, rolling into shadow and taking the screaming man with it.

"No!" Leh yelled, and the ship shook again. "Abby!" All the demon received in response was a long, low howl, a haunting noise that filled the room and gave an alternative accompaniment to the sound of continuous explosions.

"Liz!" Hellboy shouted, but he needn't have bothered. Liz was already running after Abby, fire springing alight in her palm to light the way.

"And you," Hellboy said, turning, "can go back — "

Leh was on him, grabbing hold of his right fist and pulling him up onto the lip of the vat. They stood there, demon and man-demon, facing each other as the ship shook and shuddered around them. On Hellboy's left was a drop to the deck. On his right something different. He glanced down, but he could not see the bottom of the vat. It was too dark.

"Like what you've done with your horns," Leh said.

"Thanks."

Leh kept glancing past Hellboy at the doorway Liz had disappeared through.
He needs Blake,
Hellboy thought.

Needs the old man's magic and science to keep the route open from the Memory, But for what? He
glanced down again, and the depth of the darkness made him woozy.
Something with tentacles, I'll bet.

"Hows life?" Leh said.

"Just dandy."

"You know I'm going to get him, don't you?"

"I can't let you."

"Think you can stop me?"

Hellboy shrugged. "It's been one of those days. I figure I can give it a shot."

"Oh, by the way," Leh said, then the demon stepped from the lip of the vat.

Hellboy was quick. He grabbed the demon's leg and squeezed, crushing flesh and bone and feeling the warm burst of blood. The demon shouted, but Hellboy was not fooled; this was just a shell. He almost lost balance. Leh suddenly gained weight and tipped them down toward the deck, but then there was a huge explosion from somewhere nearby, the ship tipped, and Hellboy swung his fist behind him, tilting the balance and falling back.

"No!" Leh said.

Hellboy let himself fall into the vat, grabbing on to its lip with his free hand.

"No!"

Hellboy dragged the demon up over the lip and swung it above his head, letting go and watching as Leh fell, and fell, and fell, twisting down into the darkness of the Memory, its screams dying out just as its falling body finally faded from sight.

"Back where you belong," Hellboy said. He groaned. Blood was pulsing from his fresh wounds. And below him something waited. Usually he didn't mind heights, but that endless darkness scared the crap out of him.

He hauled himself back over and fell to the deck, wiping blood from his eyes before taking off after Liz.

He'd only had a fleeting look at Abby — the fur, the muscle, and the teeth — but he knew that he didn't want Liz facing that on her own.

The ship shook again, and he felt the first waft of heat from distant fires.

Damn,
he thought,
they sit around doing nothing, and when they do act, they're too damn efficient.

Hellboy figured he had a few minutes before he became fish food.

Liz found him huddled in a small room with a broken door, bleeding to death. His throat had been ripped out, and chunks of meat were torn from his stomach, legs, and back. Nothing had been swallowed. The werewolf had spat the chunks of Benedict Blake across the floor, as if leaving them as a sacrifice or an offering. To what, Liz did not know. She stood and watched the old man staring at bits of himself as the life slowly bled from him, and when Hellboy arrived, she turned and walked away.

Hellboy took one look into the room and saw that the man was dead. More than dead, he was fading. Becoming transparent. Slipping away into Memory. He should be famous, but he had been shut away in this old ship for so long that, ironically, no one would ever remember him.

"Maybe Leh will have use of you yet," Hellboy said. It was a pretty uncharitable thought, he supposed, but that's just the way he was feeling.

He ran after Liz, and together they made their way up on deck.

The
New Ark
was sinking. It listed badly to port, the bridge had been all but blown away, and a great slick of debris and fuel had spread across the ocean from the holes in its hull. Several parts of it were on fire, and smoke billowed skyward and merged with that already there from the destroyed helicopter.

The sun was sinking into the land visible to the west.

From the south, two Tornados were streaking across the waves on an attack run.

"I think we should jump," Liz said.

Hellboy shook his head. "I think we'll be OK. Look." There was a helicopter hovering a hundred yards off the bow, and in its open doorway stood Abe Sapien. He waved once at Hellboy and Liz, but he was looking elsewhere, scanning the deck, searching the waves.

Hellboy's satellite phone went off. "Hellboy, where is she?"

"She's still inside, buddy."

"You didn't bring her out? You didn't stay to find her?"

"Abe, I really don't think she wants to be found."

A pause. "That's what she said last time," Abe said. They watched him drop the phone back into the helicopter and dive into the sea. He went in with hardly a splash.

"This baby's sinking," Hellboy said. The sea was now swelling up over the deck, and the sounds of ripping metal and rupturing bulkheads were deafening. He was very tired.

His wounds had begun to hurt for real. Liz held him up and waved the helicopter in, and as the deck vanished below them, they were winched up into its cabin.

Below the surface, the sea was in chaos. Bubbles and wreckage from the ship obscured Abe's view, and the water stank from the ruptured fuel tanks. He pulled himself past floating debris and headed for the sinking vessel, and he did not even hesitate before diving deep and finding his way in. It was suicide, he knew that. But he had found Abby through her own suicide attempt, and there was no option but to try to save her again.

The ship swallowed him up, and he started to feel his way through its ruined corridors and water-filled holds.