“Screw that!” Hellboy snapped. As fast as Kroenen was, he didn’t get the sword out of range before Hellboy reached out and yanked it from his grip. Snarling, Hellboy brought it up and bent it until it snapped, then flung the pieces away. Kroenen started to backpedal and Hellboy hit him brutally, right in the center of the man’s leather-and-steel mask. The metal crumpled and the two lenses covering Kroenen’s eyes disintegrated into starred glass.
“You killed my father!” Hellboy said furiously, then hit him again, and again. Kroenen staggered backward with each blow, but he still wouldn’t fall. Hellboy punched him a final time and the remains of the mask went flying, revealing Kroenen’s hideously scarred face. “Give your soul to God,” Hellboy hissed at him. “Your ass is mine!”
Incredibly, Kroenen erupted into laughter. The sound was like a series of asthmatic wheezes, short, sharp, and completely unexpected.
Hellboy had maybe a half second to register that something was wrong, then the floor fell out from under him.
A trapdoor! Manning went down with him, followed by the clunky antique phonograph. Hellboy’s stone hand shot out and closed around a rope just as his other hand found Manning’s wrist and locked around it. The rope slid downward, feeding through a copper pulley somewhere overhead; then it stopped with a bone-rattling wrench as a knot in its length lodged in the pulley. Hellboy’s backpack jerked free and dropped away, following the phonograph into the darkness somewhere below.
Silence…then a couple of seconds later, the phonograph hit the ground below them with a resounding crash. Hellboy and Manning hung there, and Hellboy could hear Manning panting below him. “Well,” Manning managed to whisper, “it’s not that big a fall—”
Before Hellboy could reply, a harsh series of clangs reverberated below their feet. More metal—that stuff seemed to be a habit around Kroenen and his creepy buddies—and when the two of them stretched their necks so they could see the ground, it was bristling with sparkling steel spikes that were at least six feet tall.
Wonderful.
Dangling in the darkness, Hellboy waited.
It wasn’t long before his patience paid off. Oh yeah—there was Kroenen, peering over the edge of the trapdoor like an ugly-eyed spider, trying to see what he could see, listening for any kind of a sound. Come on, Hellboy thought. Just a little more…
With Manning now hanging off the back of his utility belt like a heavy monkey, Hellboy threw the length of rope that had been dangling below him up and over Kroenen’s head, catching the monster man in a nice, tidy loop. Hellboy yanked him forward as hard as he could, but Kroenen wasn’t going to be as easy as Hellboy had assumed; before he’d gone three inches, Kroenen had a blade in each hand and he drove them into the floor, giving himself a good, solid anchor. But Hellboy had alternate plans, too, and that hold was just what Hellboy needed; keeping a diehard hold on the lasso around Kroenen’s neck, Hellboy pulled himself up the rope, hand over hand, heading up and out of the pit.
With his lipless mouth pulled back into a grotesque slash across the lower half of his skull, Kroenen brought up one of his blades and swung the sharp end toward the rope.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Hellboy growled. With a fast double-loop of the rope around the wrist of his stone fist, he pulled down as hard as he could. His remaining knife-anchor just wasn’t enough to hold him there, and Kroenen gagged and fell forward, tumbling over the edge of the trapdoor.
He screamed all the way down and landed headfirst on the spikes, wriggling like a fish caught on a hook. But every movement only made it worse and sent him sliding farther down the blades. He was thoroughly and completely stuck.
Hellboy turned his attention to the hatch in the floor above him and began hauling himself and Manning upward. Finally catching the edge, he dragged himself and his cargo over, then sat for a moment as Manning let go of his utility belt and rolled away. Hellboy’s gaze fastened on something off to the side—one of Kroenen’s blades, firmly embedded in the floor. At its back end was Kroenen’s prosthetic hand, still ticking and twitching away. It could mean only one thing.
The fiend was still alive.
Peering over the edge of the trapdoor, Hellboy could just see Kroenen. He’d already freed one arm by slicing through his own bicep—strands of dried-out muscle hung from the stump like dirty pieces of rope. The monster would probably free himself by chopping off half his body, then sewing himself together out of someone else’s parts.
Not this time.
Hellboy got to his feet and glared down at the struggling Kroenen. “You like playing possum, you Nazi pinhead?” he growled. Hellboy took two strides to the right, where a massive cogwheel had been pushed out of the way. He got a solid grip on the piece of machinery’s edge and with a grunt, hauled it over to the opening in the floor. With a cry of satisfaction, he forced it over the edge. “Then try playing dead.”
Kroenen had just enough time for a blood-freezing scream before he was crushed completely.
Hellboy watched as Manning tore pieces off the bottom of his custom-made dress shirt and carefully bandaged his gashed arm. He had to admit that it looked pretty painful—cut to the bone, blood soaked through the covering almost immediately and it was definitely going to need a whole bunch of stitches. Even so, the guy seemed to be taking it like a trooper.
“Are you okay?” Hellboy finally asked. When Manning gave him a weak but stubborn nod, Hellboy dug in his belt and found a cigar stump, stuck it between his lips, and fired up his Zippo. “You’d better stay here,” he decided. “I’ll find a way out, and we’ll come back for you.”
For a moment, Manning only watched him. Finally he asked, “You call that thing a cigar?” He seemed to have found a little strength to put into his voice.
Hellboy’s eyebrows raised and he chewed on the stump a little for good measure. “Yup.”
Manning shook his head, disgusted. “You never, ever light a cigar that way.” As Hellboy watched, Manning pulled out one of his own fine cigars, snipped off the end with a clipper he dug out of his pants pocket, then held it out. “Use a wooden match,” he said. “It preserves the flavor.”
Hellboy took the offered cigar and ground out his stump. When Manning held out a lit match, he was more than willing to take him up on the offer. The smoothness of the tobacco gift was a definite pleasure, and he grinned.
“Thank you,” Manning said solemnly.
But Hellboy only grinned. “My job.”
22
LIZ AND MYERS PICKED THEIR WAY FORWARD IN ANOTHER narrow, stone-and-earth-walled tunnel in a different part of the underground tomb. Littered with rocks and bits of the crumbling stone walls, this one wasn’t nearly as smooth-sailing as the one that Hellboy and Manning had headed off in. To make sure that things stayed on the challenging side, it wasn’t long before the two of them came face-to-face with a cave-in that made them eye the ceiling and walls nervously, then compare it with the bits of ceiling, rocks, timber, coffins, and corpses that formed the chaotic barrier that now blocked their way. After a moment of hesitation, they decided to squeeze past the debris, taking advantage of a thin opening on one side of the pile.
“So,” Myers said as he led the way, “he thinks that you and I…” He hesitated, then decided to skip over the details. He rushed on. “That’s why he’s mad at me.”
Moving sideways, Myers slid a few inches farther through the space next to the cave-in. Liz was right next to him, moving in tandem. A few small bones rolled down the debris in front of her and wet earth trickled down and over their shoulders. Both drew their arms tightly against their body, pointing their beams at the ground. For some reason, Myers thought it felt oddly intimate, and it gave him the courage to blurt out his next question.
“But…it’s not true, is it?”
He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but Myers could hear the surprise in Liz’s voice, feel it in the blank silence that fell before she finally asked, “What?”
He took a deep breath. “That you
feel the same way about me.”
There was a second of dead silence, then she asked, “You want to know that? Now?” He sensed more than saw her shake her head in disbelief, heard her impatient exhalation. “Red, white…whatever. Guys are all the same.”
Myers clamped his mouth shut, feeling like an idiot. Finally getting past the cave-in, he and Liz could turn and walk normally. He heard her behind him, but embarrassment kept him from saying anything more about the subject of him and her…if there was a subject at all, and he certainly didn’t have the guts to turn and look at her right now.
Abruptly the tunnel widened and unpleasantly cold water filled their shoes. Myers found his footing but it wasn’t good; he turned and shined his light down on the water to light Liz’s way as she angled her foot toward a large stone. “Watch out,” he said. “It’s slippery.”
Damn—there went his light again, shorting out. He shook it, then banged it against his leg, but this time it did no good. Without being asked, Liz stepped around him and aimed her flashlight beam into the darkness.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed.
Myers jerked around, his flashlight banging hard against the wall. Suddenly the beam came on, spilling a good, solid cone of light into a large, natural cavern circling out from the tunnel entrance they’d just exited. Facing them, glittering in the double line of light like a curtain of amber beads, was an entire wall of translucent eggs.
A movement to the right drew their attention and Liz and Myers automatically turned their flashlights that way. What they saw made them freeze: Sammael, pallid and slimy, squatted in the water like a filthy, feral dog, gnawing ambitiously on a human arm bone. At the end of the bone jiggled a ragged human hand, still seeping blood. Sammael’s milky pupils constricted when the glow of the lights crossed his eyes; clutching the dismembered arm in one clawed hand, he snarled at them with a red-soaked mouth.
The sound brought more company—another Sammael rose from the brackish water, shaking its marble-white skin like a wet animal. Then a third one lifted its blue-veined head, presenting Myers and Liz with a trio of impending death.
They didn’t need a discussion to know they had to get the hell out of there, but when Liz and Myers turned to run—
Clank!
Too late. The rusted hulk of a previously unseen metal door surged up from beneath the water, cutting off any hope of escape. Trapped, they had no choice but to stand and fight.
Myers whirled and grabbed for a pair of the explosive grenades, but before he could set the timer on one, a handful of claws raked them from his grasp, cutting deeply into his flesh in more than one place. He cried out and clutched at the bloodied, torn fabric across his midsection, then toppled into the ground-water and rolled away, sputtering and coughing.
Heart hammering, Liz jammed her finger against the Talk button on her walkie-talkie. “Marco! Marco!” she said urgently. The triple Sammaels were tracking her and Myers, their albino eyes narrowing hungrily. Didn’t these things ever stop eating?
“Get your Big Red butt over here now!”
He’d left the injured Manning behind, and now Hellboy was in a steep tunnel, the only other way out of the hexagonal room. The ground had gradually inclined until he’d ended up on enough of an upward slope that he had to labor to climb it, pulling himself along on the more sturdy rocks and roots. Finally it leveled out enough for him to catch his breath.
Except he was at a dead end.
Wait…there. On the ground a few inches to his right. It was a crack, thin but still wide enough to let Hellboy see the vaguest hint of light. Was that voices? Curious, he pressed one ear to the ground. Yes, definitely—Liz and Myers, and they were right below him. Suddenly the radio on his belt squealed to life, and he was hearing Liz’s panicked cry from both directions at once—through the ground below him and through the puny speaker in the walkie-talkie.
“Marco! Marco! Get your Big Red butt over here now!”
He couldn’t see anything through the crack, but there was no mistaking the urgency in her voice. With the dead-end wall in front of him and the way back to absolutely nothing behind him, Hellboy chose the only way that would get him to Liz. He leaned over and began to pound furiously on the floor with his stone hand. “Hang on, kid—I’m coming for you!”
Wham Wham Wham!
Three tremendous strikes later, the rocks began to crumble. Two more—
Wham Wham!
—and he could see Liz and Myers below, and the sight didn’t bring him any comfort. They were caught in a circle of Sammaels, four of them, and there was no way they were getting out alive without some Hellboy help. For a second, Hellboy was mesmerized as Myers yanked out his gun and shot the one that had crept the closest. Three shots, three hits, all in the head…and although the creature backed up a few feet, it shook off the bullets as though the agent had pelted it with pebbles.
The Sammael to that one’s left sprang for Myers at the same Hellboy put his full weight into a mighty stomp on the already weakened floor. It gave way and crashed down, dumping a good ton or two of stone onto the creature in midair, with Hellboy adding his own not insubstantial weight to the mix. He landed hard but unhurt, then bounded to his feet with his fists up and ready, but the creature was crushed.
Hellboy saw Liz jerk at something behind him and realized that two of the eggs on the wall were glowing, already pulsing with life and metamorphosing into new Sammaels at terrifying speed. In a matter of seconds, where there had been three Sammaels left, now there were five.
As the one nearest Liz turned its sickly gaze on her, Hellboy gestured at her to flee. She followed his lead instantly, dashing to safety before the creature could start in her direction. Hellboy whirled and caught Myers’s eye. “Sorry,” he couldn’t help quipping. “Just couldn’t leave you two alone!” Before Myers could retort, Hellboy scooped him up and sprinted to where Liz crouched, dropping him in what he hoped was a safe place…for now.
As he started to turn back, he saw Myers’s eyes widen when the man’s flashlight beam caught something behind Hellboy. He had time only to grunt before one of the Sammaels leaped onto his back and another clamped its sharp, pointed teeth around his leg. The damned thing bit down and chewed, making Hellboy howl in surprise and pain. As the third one joined the fray and the fourth looked for a way into the pile, Hellboy felt like a zebra being brought down by a pride of lions.
But this time, the zebra was going to fight back.
Somewhere between the punching and the biting, he got his hand free and dragged out his gun. A squeeze of the trigger put a round dead center into the chest of the one gnawing on his leg and its teeth fell away with the rest of its dead body…but barely five seconds later, two took the place of the one that had fallen.
His torso covered with blood, Hellboy pounded and snarled and fought for all he was worth. But when the two newly born Sammaels sprang on top of him, even he knew he was in a world of trouble way too deep for him to get free.
Liz’s own fear was paralyzing her.
She watched in frozen horror as Hellboy was covered by the Sammael creatures, as they beat him and clawed him, as their teeth tore into his red-tinted flesh and coated it with the darker liquid of his lifeblood. He had done this for her—taken their attack onto himself—and he would die to protect her.
And all she could do was stand here, with her heart jackhammering in her chest and her breath coming in short gasps, her eyes bulging but with only the barest ripple of heat shimmering over her body. Why? Why, damn it? She wasn’t positive—hell, she wasn’t even thinking clearly—but she had an inkling of the answer: fear wasn’t the trigger.
Anger was.
Myers had managed to claw his way upright again. Now, dripping and bleeding and badly hurt, he was all but helpless to do anything to assist Hellboy. Without taking her gaze from the battle raging in front of her, Liz swatted Myers on the arm to pull his attention away from the losing battle going on a few yards away. “Hit me,” she ordered.
Despite his injuries and his pale, pain-soaked face, Myers still gaped at her. “What?”
“Hit me,” she repeated. When he still only stared, she said, “All my life I’ve run away from it. Now I want it to happen—do it!”
They both jerked as Hellboy screamed beneath the pile of attacking creatures. Water exploded from underneath the writhing bodies, and suddenly two of the Sammaels turned their attention toward Liz and Myers.
Even so, Myers shook his head. “I-I can’t. I—”
Liz slapped him, and Myers gasped in shock. “I know now,” she told him in a nearly singsong voice. “I love him. I’ve always loved him.”
Myers swallowed and stared at her. Liz could see in his face that her words had stung, but she knew it still wouldn’t be enough to make him strike her. Nothing she said or did would ever be enough—he was that kind of man. But she could also see that he would do what she asked because it was the only thing that would save Hellboy, and her, and only as a side part of it, himself.
She saw the muscle in his jaw tense, then he pulled back his hand and smacked her hard across the face.
There was a sudden…pulse around the both of them, a rise in heat that was enough to make the air shimmer in a circle like a desert mirage at the high heat of summer. She wasn’t really angry, but the effect she’d wanted was there—her body was going to react as though she was. The air around Liz actually vibrated and abruptly her pupils glowed and reflected red light, the crimson eyes of an animal caught by the flash of a camera. Amazingly, she even managed to send a faint smile in Myers’s direction. “Go now,” she instructed him in a deceptively gentle voice.
He didn’t need to be told twice.
Myers found himself a spot in the hollow of the ground and behind an oversized rock just as Liz’s arm suddenly blazed with fire. The two Sammaels that had abandoned the attack on Hellboy were almost upon her, and she faced them fearlessly and calmly, with her lips pulled back in a hellish expression that might have been grin or grimace. Somewhere in the mist of her vision she saw one of the Sammaels that was on top of Hellboy pause and raise its head. The movement might have been curiosity or fear, like prey hearing the hunter’s first gunshot.
Hellboy Page 18