by Mark Morris
The glass of the rear window was chipped and cracked where the woman had hit it. However, despite what had clearly been a prolonged attack, the window had remained intact, and exhaustion and panic were now weakening her blows. Four uniformed police officers were hovering around the tail end of the car, trying to placate and reassure the woman with soothing words and hand gestures. For some reason, instead of trying to break the window and haul the woman out, they were hanging back, as if reluctant to get too close. Hellboy could only imagine that they were fearful of being sucked into the maw themselves, but that didn’t stop him from being appalled at their willingness to stand by and watch the woman be consumed. Some people in the crowd were baying at the officers to do something, to rescue the woman, but their words were having no effect. Others were weeping, or covering their faces, unable to watch. Most, however, were simply gaping blank faced at the spectacle, too shocked to register any emotion at all.
Hellboy began to push his way through the crush of onlookers. “Pardon me,” he muttered,”pardon me.” People shuffled aside to let him through. Most gaped at him, but some were too dazed by the impossible drama unraveling before them to even register his presence. As he got closer to the jagged black fissure, he realized that there was a gap of around twenty feet between those people in the front row and the back of the yellow car. He thought this was odd, until he reached the front row himself and saw what was holding the cops at bay.
Some sort of blue, frothy slime was leaking from the bottom of the black crack and drooling onto the road. Where the blue slime fell, the road was blistering, splitting, steaming, as though subjected to the most intense acid. Hellboy could see a shoe in the slowly spreading pool that had melted like plastic on a hot plate. He could see a bird too, a once-fat London pigeon that was now nothing but a heap of charred bones and sizzling innards.
“How many steps to the car, do you think?” he asked Liz, who had appeared beside him.
“You’re not going to walk through that?” she said.
“I’m not gonna stand by and watch someone die.”
Liz looked around, searching for inspiration. One of the back tires of the car, which was touching the slime, swelled and popped, running like black treacle.
“Oh, hell,” she said, and ripped off her canvas jacket. “If you’re going to try and get across there, at least have something between that stuff and your feet.”
“You can have mine too,” said Abe, peeling off his flying jacket.
When they saw what he was planning, various onlookers began to offer their coats and jackets too. One of the police officers even unbuttoned his tunic and handed it to Hellboy with a slightly shamefaced, “Here you go, mate.”
Within a minute Hellboy was laden down with donated garments. He gave some to Liz and Abe, and kept some for himself. He strewed items on the ground in front of him as he walked towards the car, creating a makeshift carpet of denim, leather, cotton, and man-made fibers. As soon as the jackets and coats touched the blue slime they began to smolder and warp and melt. Where Hellboy’s hooves pressed down, the layers of material burned even more rapidly. Each of his footsteps was accompanied by a hiss, like the application of a hot iron on a damp shirt, and a curl of smoke around his hooves. Hellboy was halfway to the car when he ran out of garments. He half turned towards Liz, and she threw him a fresh bundle without having to be asked. A few of the flimsier items fluttered to the ground, but Hellboy caught the majority of them cleanly, and once again began to drape them on the ground before him.
In this way, aided by Liz and Abe, he reached the car in less than a minute. He gestured for the woman to move back and then he punched the glass out with his stone hand. As the safety glass shattered into tiny fragments, the crowd cheered and clapped. “Come on,” Hellboy instructed. “I’ll catch you.” Without hesitation the woman scrambled out of the back window and fell into his outstretched arms.
The applause intensified. Hellboy ignored it. He carried the woman back towards where Abe, Liz, and the four police officers were standing, gritting his teeth against the burning pain on the undersides of his hooves, where the blue corrosive stuff had seeped up through the rapidly disintegrating layers of clothing.
Abe and one of the police officers moved as close to the edge of the still-spreading pool of slime as they could, holding out their arms to take the woman from Hellboy’s grasp. They were lifting her clear when what looked like a fleshy length of pinky-red tubing came snaking out of the jagged black crack behind Hellboy. It ranged about blindly for a moment, slapping against the metal bodywork of the yellow car. Then slowly, with whatever senses it possessed, it seemed first to become aware of Hellboy, and then to fasten on him. It rose into the air, all twenty or thirty feet of it, its featureless blob of a “head” weaving from side to side like that of a king cobra. And then, with a high and hideous squealing sound, it struck out.
“Hellboy!” screamed Liz, her voice merging with the battle cry of the creature, but he was already spinning round.
Even so, he barely had a chance to react before the tubular thing was corkscrewing around his torso, tightening its grip with each slithering revolution.
“Dammit!” Hellboy shouted, and began to wrestle with the creature, trying to grab its “head,” tearing at it with his stone hand. It responded by lifting him into the air. The crowd gasped as he was lifted thirty feet, forty, and then higher still.
The creature, which was still coiling, seemingly endlessly, out of the black fissure, suddenly flexed its body and cracked like a whip. Its “head” end, which was coiled around Hellboy, snapped forward, smashing him face first into the side of a building.
Yells of panic and dismay rose from the crowd, and there was a wavelike ripple through the sea of bodies as they tried to scramble back from the sudden tumble of broken glass and shattered masonry.
“Son of a bitch!” yelled Hellboy. That had hurt. The stubs of his horns were throbbing and his nose was a fiery starburst of pain. With renewed fury he dug the fingers of his stone hand into the pinky-red hide of the creature and tore. However, the thing’s flesh was as tough as fortified rubber, and at first nothing happened. Hellboy gritted his teeth and dug his fingers in deeper, and suddenly the creature’s skin ripped a little. A milky-white ichor, sticky and hot, came trickling out. Hellboy roared in triumph and clawed savagely at the tear. The wound widened, and all at once the milky stuff was gushing out, coating Hellboy’s hand. It smelled disgusting, worse than the rotting whale blubber he had smelled once in Iceland and had hoped never to smell again. Even so, he continued to work at the wound, widening it, ripping off chunks of flesh with his bare hands.
The thing screamed and began to thrash more wildly. Hellboy was whipped back and forth in the air. It was like being on the world’s most vomit-inducing fairground ride.
He smashed into the wall of a building again — his left shoulder this time. More glass broke; more rubble fell.
He felt something tightening around his ankle and looked down. Another of the pinky-red serpents, or tentacles, or whatever the hell they were, had emerged from the fissure and was coiling over his still-smoking hoof and up his leg. For an instant, before his temporarily steadying vision once again became a careering blur as he was whipped through the air, he glimpsed a third tentacle emerging from the crack.
Great, he thought. One was bad enough. How many more of these damn things were there?
Suddenly he heard the boom of a gunshot. Clasped by the weaving tentacle many feet above the ground, he twisted his head, trying to focus his vision on the antlike crowd below.
There! Abe and Liz standing with their arms outstretched, weapons drawn. There was another boom and as the whistling screech of the creature suddenly intensified, Hellboy felt the crushing grip around his ankle loosen. Looking down, he saw that one of his friends — and he’d guess it was Abe; he was the best shot of the three of them — had succeeded in cutting the tentacle that had hold of his foot clean in half. The lower section
appeared to be in its death throes. It was thrashing from side to side, ichor spraying in all directions, spattering across the fronts of buildings and over the crowd below. Meanwhile the severed top half of the creature unspooled lifelessly from Hellboy’s leg and fell to the ground like a dead snake, landing with a thump in the blue slime.
“Ha!” he shouted, and renewed his attack on the creature’s flesh, trying to injure it still further. It screamed and smashed him against the wall again. Hellboy swore and spat out blood that was trickling down the back of his throat, but he didn’t let up. He got the fingers of his stone hand deep into the gushing wound he had created, grasped a flap of skin the size of a large rump steak and pulled upwards with all his might. The flap of skin stretched and then gave, tearing clean off and pulling a sizable lump of flesh with it. There were stringy white things attached to the flesh, veins or tendons maybe. The creature bellowed in pain, the whistling screech it made so loud that windows shattered and people on the ground below clapped their hands over their ears.
Hellboy’s ears were ringing too, and he was covered in ichor. As soon as he felt the thing’s grip around him slacken, he dropped the chunk of flesh he was holding and reached for his gun, which had previously been inaccessible. Slipping his hand beneath the loosening red coil of the creature’s body, he dragged the weapon from its holster. The weight of the revolver, a big-bored, .50-caliber thing that had been especially made for him, felt good in his palm. With no thought for his own safety, he placed the muzzle of the gun against the injured part of the creature — the part that was wrapped, albeit more loosely now, around his waist — and pulled the trigger.
The gun roared, the pink tentacle came apart, and Hellboy fell.
His body turned over once as he plummeted towards the ground. It was not the first time he had fallen from a great height, and he tried to relax, knowing that if he braced himself the pain when he hit would be worse.
He landed on his back, not on the sizzling slime-covered road, but on the buckled roof of the half-consumed yellow car. The car was tilted at a forty-five degree angle, and the full force of Hell-boy’s quarter-ton weight slamming down on it had the same effect as someone karate-chopping a similarly angled piece of wood. With a screeching crunch of metal, the car broke in two, the back end, with Hellboy on top of it, crashing onto the ground. The impact rattled Hellboy’s bones and caused his teeth to clash together. Damn, he was gonna be sore in the morning. But for now he had work to do.
He allowed himself a couple of seconds to catch his breath, and then he propped himself up on one elbow. The fissure, the crack, the rift, the mouth, the eye — whatever the hell that thing that had opened up in the center of London actually was — was directly behind him now, mere inches, in fact, from the little ponytail at the back of his head. As he had fallen, Hellboy had managed to keep hold of his gun (he always kept hold of his gun), and he twisted round with it now in his hand, the tortured metal of the wrecked car creaking in protest as he shifted his weight on its roof. He pointed his weapon directly into the impenetrable blackness of the fissure and he began to blast away, firing slugs into God only knew where.
Eventually he stopped.”Let that be a lesson to you,” he growled. This close to the fissure he could feel the strange sucking pull of it, could feel its icy chill, not on his skin but deep inside him, where the nightmares, if he should ever have any, would reside.
He didn’t know whether shooting the “eye” had made the slightest bit of difference, but at least the corrosive blue slime had stopped trickling out of it, and at least the third tentacle — the only one that he or his friends hadn’t blasted to bits — had disappeared back to where it had come from. The other two tentacles were lying like shattered drainpipes on the ground. The slime wasn’t affecting them, as it affected everything else on this side of the fissure, but maybe something else was — the London air or the daylight, perhaps — because already the tentacles were turning the dull gray of old cement. They were withering too, becoming as brittle as autumn leaves. If the present rate of decay was maintained, Hellboy doubted there would be anything left in an hour or two.
Aching pretty much all over, and coated with the creature’s life fluid, which was now drying to a foul-smelling gum on his skin, Hellboy clambered off the roof of the car and lowered himself to the ground. He picked his way carefully back to where Abe and Liz were standing across the carpet of coats and jackets, treading on the areas where the layers of material were so thick that the blue slime hadn’t yet burned all the way through to the surface.
So intent was he on not adding to his already considerable physical woes that he didn’t realize he was receiving what amounted to a hero’s homecoming until he was almost back on safe ground. Suddenly he tuned in to the noise, and looked up to see that everyone was clapping and cheering and grinning at him. There were whistles and whoops of delight. Liz stepped forward.
“Despite what the papers say, I think they love you,” she said.
Chapter 11
As he worked his way through the jubilant crowd, wincing at the congratulatory back slaps raining in on his bruised and battered body, Hellboy’s phone started to ring. He fished it from the pouch on his belt and held it to his ear.
“Hellboy, it’s Rachel Turner,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“Hey, Rachel,” Hellboy said, “what’s up?”
She sounded under strain, but in control. She informed him that reports were coming in of fissures opening up in midair all over London.
“Yeah, we’ve just encountered one firsthand,” Hellboy said. He told her what had happened at Tottenham Court Road.
“Jeez,” she said. “We’re getting reports of creatures coming through in other places too — all different kinds from the sounds of it.” She hesitated a moment, as if trying to gather herself. “So what do we do about it, Hellboy? This is your call.”
“Just do exactly what you’d do if I weren’t here,” Hellboy said soothingly. “Evacuate the areas where the cracks have appeared, and have them monitored constantly by armed personnel. Get everyone in on this, Rachel. Call the government, the secret service, the army, and the police. Make them realize that this is an emergency — no, more than that: make them realize that this could be the direst emergency this country has ever faced. We need everyone working together. We need a unanimous promise that a coordinated containment operation will be implemented immediately. You got that?”
“Yes, sir,” Rachel said, responding to the authority in his voice.
“Okay, good,” Hellboy said. “As for me, I’ll be on the front line with Abe and Liz — which means I’ll need a comprehensive list of locations where the fissures have opened up, plus details of exactly what kinds of creatures have emerged from each of them.”
“I’ll have that information faxed to your hotel as soon as possible.”
“Great,” Hellboy said. He was still walking through the crowd, Abe and Liz in tow, phone clamped to his ear. “Once we know exactly what we’re up against, we’ll prioritize the threats and deal with them as best we can. The three of us will split into two operating units with military backup — Abe and Liz in one and me in the other.”
“I’ll organize that for you,” Rachel said.
“But one thing you gotta make the army guys realize, Rachel, is that this is a B.P.R.D.-led operation. Some of the things that have emerged from those fissures are bound to be impervious to conventional firepower. So I don’t want people getting all gung ho and taking unnecessary risks. I want the casualty rate to be as low as possible. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Rachel said.
Hellboy was pretty much through the crowd now. He lengthened his stride. “By the way,” he said, “what is the casualty rate so far? Do we have any numbers?”
“Hang on,” said Rachel, “I’ll check.” She was back thirty seconds later. “We’ve got twenty-seven confirmed fatalities to date,” she said, “but there are ... things loose all over the place, H
ellboy. It’s going to go higher, no matter how fast we move on this.”
“I know it,” said Hellboy grimly. “Just do your best, okay?”
“Will do,” she said, and let out a breath. “Can I just ask — do we know what these fissures are exactly?”
“They’re cracks in the dam,” Hellboy said. “We gotta plug ‘em for now, but we’ve also gotta figure a way of sealing the whole thing up for good. Otherwise ...”
“The entire structure will collapse and we’ll be swept away in the torrent?” guessed Rachel.
“You got it,” Hellboy said quietly.
He heard her swallow. In a slightly shaky voice she said, “Before you go there’s just one more thing. We think we’ve got a lead on the torso killings. Our guys have tracked down a vagrant who claims to have information on one of the murdered men.”
“Is he on the level?” Hellboy asked.
“I think so — as much as you can tell anyway. He asked to speak to you, but I guess you’re a bit busy just now.”
Hellboy thought about it. “Can you get him to the hotel in the next half hour?”
“Sure, if you think it’s worth it?”
“Do it,” said Hellboy. “If there’s even the slightest chance of finding out who’s behind all this or where they’re hiding, then we gotta take it. Okay, well, if that’s everything ... ?”
“It is,” said Rachel.
“Then you better go and make those calls,” Hellboy said. “Catch you later.”
As soon as he cut the connection, Abe and Liz started to ask questions, but Hellboy held up a hand. “Just give me one more minute, guys.”
He called directory inquiries and got the number for the Three Cups. Then he called the pub and asked to speak to Cassie. Abe and Liz waited patiently while he briefly explained to her what was happening and told her to sit tight.