Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (34 page)

Some lights were still working. They cast strange shadows in such turbulent waters. Several times Abe thought something was swimming right at him, but it always resolved itself into nothing more than another surge, another gush of fuel-tainted water being forced along passageways by the pressures of sinking. He forged on, smelling blood here and there and trying to follow its trail. He lost it, found it again, went deeper. The ship was turning as it sank, and he was almost deafened by the sounds of metal twisting and breaking apart. The thumps of distant explosions crushed him against bulkheads. Doors swung open and blocked his way. Something soft and warm grabbed at him, and he kicked out, feeling his feet connect with a slippery thing. By the time he'd turned around, whatever had reached for him had vanished into the chaotic shadows.

He went deeper, sometimes swimming, sometimes rushing through trapped air pockets, always dodging destruction. He looked for Abby. But he found nothing.

The broken ship was way below the surface now, and he could feel pressures building without and within. The sounds of buckling metal grew almost unbearable. And he thought,
Perhaps there's still time.

They waited while the ship sank, waited some more until Abe finally surfaced, then they winched him up.

"Did you find her?" Liz asked.

"No," Abe said. "But that doesn't mean she's dead." He sat wrapped in a blanket and stared out over the sea. Hellboy sat next to him, scanning the assorted floating wreckage silvered by the full moon. None of it moved except to the rhythm of the waves.

"W
HEN WE GOT BACK TO
London, we landed right beside what was left of the Anderson Hotel. The SAS were leading the politicians out onto the forecourt and loading them into helicopters. Couple of the presidents saw me and panicked, but I think most of them knew who I was. Big red guy. Easy to identify. But with some of the things they'd seen that day, I'm not surprised I unnerved them. To most people I'm just not natural.

"We reckon that just about the time Abby killed Blake, the cryptids broke off their attack. Went from trained kill-creatures to ... well, animals. Some of the more vicious ones kept going, but it was much more random. Lots of them escaped into London and caused chaos on the streets, in the Tube, and beyond. Lots of people died. Even after it was all over and Blake was dead, lots of people died." Hellboy took a long draw on his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly, watching the shapes it made. Occasionally he thought he saw things in there, but most of the time he guessed he was imagining it all.

"But you saved so many more," Amelia said.

Hellboy raised his eyebrows. "We did? I'm not sure. I'm not entirely sure we did much at all. It was Abby who killed Blake in the end. If it weren't for her, Leh would have sent him into the Memory and maybe opened it up. And who knows what else would have come through then?"

"Do
you
know, Hellboy?"

He puffed again on the cigarette, watched the smoke, saw something writhing in there until someone opened the bar door and the breeze blew it away. "I have a few ideas," he said.

"And what of his sons? You saw nothing of them?"

"Nothing on the
New Ark
at least," Hellboy said. "But I think they're out there somewhere. Always have been. Kate Corrigan is the authority on Blake and de Lainree's
Book of Ways,
and she reckons there's no way Blake could just conjure the cryptids. He must have had some trace, some physical evidence of their existence, to bring them up out of the Memory. She thinks his sons had the book, not him, and they were out there finding the evidence for him."

"What sort of evidence? DNA?"

Hellboy shrugged. "Maybe that's the science part of it, at least."

Amelia finished her beer and ordered two more. "I saw it all on TV," she said. "It looked like a movie. The coverage of the attack was so complete that a lot of people I know still think it really
was
a movie."

"Good," Hellboy said. "It'll help them sleep at night." The new beers came, and they drank in silence.

"So," Amelia said after a while. "Abe?"

Hellboy sighed and shrugged. "Blames himself, of course. But me ... I think it was inevitable from the start. Abby is one of those people who has a course set in life, and there's nothing anyone can do about it."

"I never feel like that," Amelia said. "Life's what you make it. Living to fate's song ... that must be awful."

Hellboy drained the new bottle of beer to avoid looking at Amelia.
Yeah,
he thought.
Tell me about it.

Later they stood together looking up at the statue of Christ the Redeemer. The waning moon hung just over his left shoulder.
Strange,
Hellboy thought.
It all started here for me, and finished with Leh, and Leh was supposedly put down by Christ, Sometimes the turning wheels are just too damn oiled.

"What now?" Amelia asked.

"Well, Britain's got a lot of new creatures roaming its countryside, and there are those that Blake released around the world as diversions. They'll spread, maybe mate. We've had reports of something huge in the Indian Ocean, bigger than anything ever seen before. So I guess BPRD is going to be busy. In some ways Blake's new world might just come about, only nothing like he imagined. And who knows, maybe people can learn to live with dragons and banshees."

"Hmm," Amelia said. "OK, but ... I sort of meant, what now?'"

Hellboy looked down and returned her smile. "Oh," he said. "I see. Well ... is there a place around here we can get a good meal?"

"Plenty."

"Good. It's on me."

R
ICHARD VISITED HIS
brother's grave every month for those first couple of years. As time went by the visits grew less frequent, partly because the grief had lessened and partly because Richard had found a new life. He was living in a leaky old house with a beautiful Italian woman, someone who loved him for what she said he would be rather than what he had been. He adored that idea of falling in love with the future. In a way he supposed his father and brother had done just that, but in very different ways. They had been mad.

He liked to think that through time he had discovered sanity.

But still he sometimes went back to that little graveyard, sat by his brother's unmarked grave, and thought of everything that might have been. Occasionally he read of sightings of strange creatures around the globe, leviathans in the deep, and now and then he would see photographs or grainy footage on TV. As time moved on, he was able to disassociate himself from these things. In a way, he supposed, there was wonder in the world again.

And he thought of that most of all. Not all the people who had died, or those who had been maimed or orphaned. The wonder. That's what kept him going.

That and the knowledge that if he ever needed it again, the
Book of Ways
was safe and sound in his dead brother's folded arms.

Tim Lebbon lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include
Dusk, Face, The Nature of Balance, Changing of Faces, Exorcising Angels
(with Simon Clark),
Dead Man's Hand, Pieces of Hate, Fears Unnamed, White and Other Tales of Ruin, Desolation,
and
Berserk.
Future publications include
Dawn
from Bantam Spectra and more books with Cemetery Dance, Night Shade Books, and Necessary Evil Press, among others. He has won two British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Tombstone Award; and he has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. Several of his novels and novellas are currently under option in the United States and the United Kingdom. Find out more about Tim at his websites:
www.timlebbon.net
and
www.noreela.com
.