Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (8 page)

"Get the hell out of here," she whispers, and the drone turns and leaves. She continues her final walk to the stern.

The first of the chambers is hot and humid, bustling with activity. Drones dash here and there, fussing about the huge steel vat that stands at the center of the chamber. Abby feels a thrill of power as she hides back in the shadows to watch. She came from a vat — perhaps even this one — drawn out of the Memory and given life. That was natural, and that was also magic, and she has spent the years since her birthing struggling to come to terms with both. She walked, she thought, she talked with Voice, and she dreamed, but she could make out no true dividing line between what Benedict Blake plucked out of nature and what he forced back into it. Magic was a bending of its rules, but it was far less simple than that. There were complexities and subtleties, and however many birthings she witnessed — scores, perhaps a hundred — she never understood what she was truly seeing.

"One last time?" she whispers. "Shall I try to comprehend what I'm seeing one last time?" Her head tells her to flee, now that the idea of escape is upon her. But her heart bids her to stay, to watch. Because in truth, each birthing is beautiful. And every new creation she witnesses makes her feel more justified in being alive.

The vat — huge enough to hold Abby a hundred times over — is starting to shake and smoke, and several drones dash out from beneath it, squealing. Something has pattered down on their gray hides, and patches of skin seem to be fading into nothing.
The Memory is leaking,
Abby thinks. She tries to make out shapes in the darkness beneath the vat, wondering what can be slipping through between sheet-metal whose rivets have been weakened over the decades. Shadows flail, another drone runs out, its rear half already seemingly vanished.

"More hydrochloric acid!" a voice roars. Blake is in the room.

She sinks farther back into shadows, kneeling behind a pile of discarded crates. What they contain she does not know, but they stink of fish and chalk. She peers between two crates and watches the man walk down a metal staircase.

His long coat swings around his feet, giving the impression that he floats rather than walks, and his gray beard reaches his chest. His shoulders are narrow, his hands splayed as if it hurts for his fingers to touch. Blake's face burns with excitement, and his eyes catch the weak electrical light and reflect it back as a fierce glare. "More acid, damn you!"

Two drones scamper up steps set into the side of the vat and swing on a metal wheel. It squeals and then opens, letting a spray of fluid down into the vat. The smoke and vibration lessen, and the drones close the wheel and drop back to the deck.

"Bring it through too soon, and it'll never coalesce," Blake says. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and stands with hands on hips, staring up at the vat even though he cannot see what it contains. The drones fuss around him, but he ignores them. The vat shakes again, as if whatever it contains senses Blake's presence, and Abby realizes that he is the center of the
New Ark
, its heart, its tainted soul. There is nothing grand or even intimidating about his appearance — he is an old man — but he seems to exude a power that keeps the vat turning. "Not long now," he whispers, and his voice fills the chamber. "Not long now, and the next of my children will be through."

What this time?
she thinks. Hidden away behind the crates, she thinks of all the strange creatures this ship is home to, and she tries her best to imagine what could be forming in the vat even now. Does it have wings or horns? Does it breathe air or water? Can it make fire or ice? Her hackles rise as a noise erupts from the vat — boiling liquid, or the growl of something already there — and she feels her own hidden strangeness aching to break out.

Blake hurries to a control panel set in the side of the vat. He taps some dials, shades a display from the flickering light, and moves in close so that he can read it. He seems happy with what he can see. "Coming along fine!" he shouts, and Abby wonders whom he is talking to. The drones? Unlikely.

Me?

She shifts uncomfortably. She's still certain that Blake does not know of her presence; he must be talking to himself. After so long out here, he must crave company. She wonders for the thousandth time why he has never spoken to her since her birthing, though she is one of the few 'children' of his possessing intelligence enough for the gift of speech. The potential answer — that he does not truly care — hurts her as much as ever.

"Crazy," she whispers. "He's a crazy old bastard." Even on the verge of escape, she almost goes to talk to him.

But then something rises from the vat, something black and huge and monstrous, and Blake steps back, arms wide, face split by a maniacal smile, and he cries out in joy. "Black dog! My black dog!"

The dog — five times the size of Abby, coated with slime and still spitting weird green ectoplasm at the shady air of the vat chamber — opens its mouth and barks for the first time in living memory.

Later, rushing through the ship, everything she
sees
crushing in on her, Abby at last realizes the importance of everything she has seen and known. It is as if leaving has given her sight, allowed her truly to perceive the very
wrongness
of all this. These creatures are terribly real and yet awfully redundant, their purposes on this world having long since faded away. They have had their time. Evolved out of humankind's collective mind, these things have been relegated to something darker and more distant than simple memory, a place where even legends no longer live and the memories of legends are less than sighs in a hurricane.

Abby is one of those legends, and rushing through the ship, she feels that more keenly than ever. The knowledge cuts her, stabs her to the quick. It almost carves out her heart. But Abby has a mind, and she has a soul, and being here, though not of her own devices, is something she cannot deny. She is here, and she wants to continue being here. Life is precious. Perhaps, she thinks, even legends can find their own places in the world once more.

Later, when she realizes that she has been fooling herself all along, the memory of her last contact with Blake will seem like the last time she has ever been alive.

Abby runs the entire length of the ship, from compartment to compartment, hold to hold. She rushes past the compounds and cages and cells, hearing their occupants screeching at her passing and growling at her meaty presence. She shoulders by things milling in corridors, creatures with dripping maws and the blistering stares of memories given a second chance. She even speaks to some of the things in the ship — a man who lives by drinking blood, some women with the tails offish bobbing in a huge water tank — but she is nothing like them. They are blanks upon which Blake has cast his anger and rage. However smart they may seem — and in one room there is something like an angel, singing songs of deliverance and growling the threat of vengeance falling from above — Abby is running with her own mind, not standing around waiting in tune with the mind of another.

She wonders briefly why that can be, but dwelling on it will make her just like them.

She hopes that news of her impending escape will not reach Blake's ears. By its very nature, the ship contains things that run, fly, or squirm their way back and forth, and she does not seem to attract any undue attention. Yet intent is there, and she hopes it will not mark out this particular running woman as something different.

At last, at the giant ship's stern, with the cold night pressing in and the promise of colder water already tingling her skin, she hears the voice she has wished to never hear again.

"You can't leave me," Blake says.

Abby pauses, panting, and turns to face her father. "I can. I am. I'm not like you, not like any of
them
." She waves her hand back the way she has come. She is terrified. She has no idea how he got here before her — the last she saw of him, he was bending over the black dog back in the birthing chamber — but there is still so much she does not understand.

"No, you're not," Blake says. "You're unique. Every one of you is unique."

"I'm not a monster."

Blake steps forward, and a light on the bulkhead stutters on. He is unruffled and calm, though he looks older than she has ever remembered. "What
is
a monster?" he says.

"Something ... something that ... "

"Yes?" He moves closer still, and she sees what he is trying to do. Shadows flit at the extremes of her vision, and though she cannot see them, she can sense the drones creeping into position. Soon they will grab her, and then she will find herself imprisoned until freedom is Blake's choice, not her own.

She steps to the rail and curves one leg over. The cool metal sits across the underside of her thigh, and she realizes this is the first time even a part of her has been beyond the ship.

"Full moon soon!" Blake says, glancing at the sky. "The hunger will be upon you. The griffin will come in with your food, and you'll rip and tear and thank me. But if you go ... what then? What will a werewolf eat in a world she doesn't know?"

"Stay away from me!" she says, holding up a hand. The nails are longer, fingers more muscled. Full moon tomorrow, yes, but tonight the tides are already at war in her blood, and her flesh is weak.

"Look at me," Blake says. "I'm no monster. I bring my children back to the world simply because they've been forgotten, allowed to fade away. That's no way to treat a child."

"They're not children!" she snaps.

Blake shrugs, and she sees a glimmer in his eyes — amusement. She is amusing him. He's talking to her, biding time while his drones prepare to grab her, and he's finding this humorous.

"You're mad," she whispers.

Blake raises his eyebrows and holds up one hand. "Ahh," he says. And then he nods.

Abby falls sideways to the deck, and the first drone passes over her, crashing into the railing. She kicks out and sends it shrieking into the sea. The second drone grabs her arm, but she twists away, snapping at its throat and ripping flesh and sinew. She spits. The blood is rank, like old oil, and the flesh tastes bland and insipid. There is nothing to these things. Two more drones attach themselves to her, Blake laughs ... and instead of fighting them off, Abby goes for the old man.

The next few seconds are a confusion in her memory. Blood and screams, the impact of flesh on flesh, her teeth crunching together, and a long, desperate howl that can only be her own as she falls from the ship and splashes into the water. She swims hard, kicking against the flow, pulling with her hands, knocking aside the drones that fell with her, and hearing their panicked squeals as they are sucked into the giant propellers. Seconds stretch into minutes, and at last she floats on her back, riding the swell and surprised that she can swim. She looks up at the shadow of her father, standing at the railing high above and staring down at Abby. Believing, perhaps, that she is dead. He says nothing. He does not move. Abby floats, staring up past her father at the waxing moon, and even as the tanker moves quickly away, she
sees
him standing there, looking back at her with mad eyes she hopes she will never see again.

Abby sat in the shade of a huge, anonymous building in Baltimore and cried. She remembered swimming ashore at last and finding her way to Paris. Freedom had never tasted the way she thought, and soon the Seine served to drown her sorrows. And then Abe was there, giving her a place in the world, whereas Blake had only given her a life ... and that was too painful to dwell upon as well. Because she was about to betray Abe — him and everyone at the BPRD — simply because she could not face admitting her lie.

Her tears were not for herself but for that girl she had been. Innocent, unknowing, ripped out of myth and given something that resembled life by Benedict Blake, all to further his own madness and feed his hate. She cried also for what was to come. Because if the werewolf she had killed really was from Blake, then the other things even now being sighted across the globe were probably his as well. And that could mean only one thing: whatever insanity he had been courting over the decades was soon to come to fruition.

And she knew exactly what the
New Ark
contained.

"Help us all," she sobbed. "Oh, God, whoever, help us all now that he's here!" Unable to calm herself, she gave in to the tears. Once she was cried out, she knew, she had to leave to find Blake. He was her creator — her father — and only she had an inkling of how he could be stopped.

Having escaped, and lied, Abby Paris felt responsibility crush down upon her.

T
OM MANNING, DIRECTOR
of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, was having a very bad day.

"Where the hell is Hellboy?"

"I don't know, sir." The man running the Bureaus communications that day, Chris Moore, shrank down in his seat, offering Manning a smaller target.

Manning seemed to grow, pumped up with disbelief. "You don't know? How the hell can you not know? The guys seven feet tall and red. Someone in Rio must have seen him!"

"I've got a lecturer on the phone," Moore said. "She was with Hellboy when — "

"Is it Amelia Francis?"

"Yes, sir."

Manning closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He held out his hand without looking at Moore, still breathing slow and deep. "Here. Let me." He felt the communications officer place the headset in his hand, sensed him rise and walk away, and Manning silently cursed himself for losing his cool. In this job, cool was essential. "Thank you," he said. He looked at Moore; the poor kid was pale as chalk, his shirt patched with sweat. "Do me a favor, Chris, and bring me some coffee."

"Decaf?"

"Full-fat. Strong as you can get. I want a bucket of coffee I can float a horseshoe in." Manning was pleased to see Moore break a smile as he left the room.

"Amelia."

"Tom ... " She sounded scared; bad sign number one. And number two: there was screaming in the background.