Unnatural Selection

by Tim Lebbon

  The bird stilled its strident calling and seemed shocked for a few seconds, standing there with giant wings unfurled and head tilted as it stared down at this other firestarter.

  "I have this," Liz said. She turned her hand over, and the fire consumed her arm, moving up to her neck and curling around her throat like a pet snake. "It's a true power, isn't it? And it's beautiful. Feels like a cool kiss on my skin." She played with the fire. The familiar thrill came to her, unbidden and mostly unbearable. She hated what this curse had done, yet she loved this gift. Hellboy had once told her that something could be both, and he should know. You only had to open your mind to see the ugliness and beauty in everything.

  The phoenix was watching the fire twist and coil around her arm, transfixed. Liz could hear its breathing above the sound of the car cooling. If the fuel tank goes up ... she thought, but there was little she could do about that. Dimitris' best chance was for her to distract this thing, or even to calm it down. Anything else — more fire, more flames, more rage — and he would die.

  The bird's breath was like the whistle of a tuned flute. It sang to her, or to her fire.

  "No rage or anger here," she said. "Nothing to hurt you, nothing to hate. Just the fire we both know so well. Let's look at the fire for a while ... " Liz stared at her own hand, bewitched. Control was good, but at times like this, she knew that there was really no such thing. She could funnel her power but never truly manage it. It was untamed. Like a wild animal performing tricks in a circus, it was merely obeying her command. Deep down where it really came from, down in the depths of her mind that she had never been able to plumb, it was ferocious.

  And as her curiously becalmed mind acknowledged that, the phoenix began to laugh.

  Liz dropped her hand and let the fire gutter away to nothing.

  The bird was snorting through nostrils high on its beak. It shook, but with mirth this time instead of rage. The car vibrated below it, Dimitris crawled out, and the phoenix looked down at his blackened head, the clothing scorched from his body, his olive skin turned red, split, weeping ...

  "Liz," Dimitris croaked, raising his hand as if to hold on to her memory.

  The phoenix reared up, clapped its wings together, and conjured the greatest conflagration it would ever know.

  * * *

  Liz retreated into herself. Even the heat of this mythological fire could not mirror the fury of her own memories. She was eleven years old again, living with her family, and something went wrong, and everything was heat and light and pain — physical pain for the people she loved, mental pain for her. Anguish that would last a lifetime, and beyond. Guilt that would swallow her up and spit her out many times over. There was screaming and melting and dying, and it was all because of her and through her.

  From outside, other fires came in. They merged with her experience and became memory, and there was a single new scream — brief but intense — that added itself to her gallery of screams, all those exhalations of terror that she had heard through the years, all those cries that came because of her, and what she was, and what she could do. She collected screams, and in her nightmares she viewed this collection.

  When Liz surfaced, the new phoenix was rising from the remains of the old. It shrugged itself from the scalding remains, testing its new wings, their colors fresh and vibrant even through the layers of ash. It looked at Liz, and she was sure it was staring down at her hand. She flexed her fingers, and fire danced there.

  The phoenix turned away and gathered its mummified father into its claws, ready to launch itself for its fledgling flight to Egypt. Then it took off without sparing Liz another glance.

  She stood shivering in the heat, gathering the remnants of her scorched clothing around her, crying. The tears washed a clean route through the soot on her face. They burned.

  "No!" she exclaimed. "Oh, no!" She almost went to him, but she knew there was no need.

  Dimitris was little more than a greasy stain on the road.

  * * *

  Somewhere over the North Sea — 1997

  THE RUKH DRIFTED ON air currents high in the sky, its massive wings spread wide to catch the updrafts. Its great beak cut through the air, so streamlined that there was no noise as the atmosphere parted around it. Although it was more than strong enough to carry the weight of the two fully grown cows, each claw hung low beneath it, and wind raged around them. They were dragging it down, and every now and then it beat its wings once and soared a hundred feet higher. One of the cows still bayed helplessly. The other was dead, the bird's talons having pierced its heart upon lifting it from the ground.

  Hanging from the rukh's beak were the fleshy remnants of the rest of the herd.

  It drifted northward. The slate-gray sea far below offered no points of reference, and yet the bird knew exactly where it was going. Home was a bright point in its mind. The sea was shaded by different tides, varying temperatures, and here and there white smears told where waves had broken and given birth to brief white horses. Clouds wisped the air below and around the bird, and sometimes it dipped itself through the tailing edge of a cloud, reveling in the coolness the moisture bestowed upon its warm body. The effort of flying so far had tired the rukh; even though it had just eaten, the flight had been long, and the cows were growing cumbersome.

  Way overhead, the deep, dark blue of the edge of space. A mile below, the shaded gray of the North Sea. And around it, the wide open sky.

  At last, in the distance, a blur appeared on the textured sheen of the ocean. The bird cawed once, cracking the air like thunder. It tilted its wings and drifted lower. The surviving cow, ears shattered by the rukh's call, bayed one more time and then died. The rukh twitched one wing and turned a few degrees to the left, aiming for the blot on the ocean, delight filling its impossible mind.

  The blot grew to a spot, the spot to a definite shape. Long, and from this distance still narrow and small. Behind the shape lay a smeared white line in the ocean, evidence of where the shape had just been, pointing at where it had yet to go. The rukh drifted lower and adjusted its grip on the dead cattle. It would have to drop them before it could land.

  The shape resolved itself into a boat, and it grew larger and larger as the rukh approached. And larger still. The boat dwarfed even the huge bird. Fifteen hundred feet long, more than two hundred feet wide, the former oil tanker had lost all trappings of its previous existence. No slicks accompanied this vessels movement across the ocean. No port of registration appeared anywhere on its hull, for it was its own home, and it had not rubbed against a dock in almost twenty years. And its true name appeared only in the minds of its inhabitants, human and otherwise. The New Ark was a whole new world in itself ... and what a world.

  The rukh cried out again in delight and prepared to make its landing run. One set of the ship's great hold doors was lifting, the vessel opening itself up to the bird, and it could see shapes scurrying across the deck in preparation for its arrival. The horn blared as if to answer the rukh's call.

  On the parapet surrounding the high bridge, unmoving and yet more visible than any other living shape on the ship, the rukh could see its father.

  As it neared the vessel, the bird could make out the hidden protection that had kept it secret for so long. Just as the ocean seen from on high had different shades, so did the sea in the immediate vicinity of the hull. Great shapes drifted below the surface, their direction and speed having nothing to do with temperature, or depth, or the raging currents. These shapes — some of them almost a third the size of the massive ship — dictated their own direction. Some kept pace with the New Ark others moved farther afield, and some rose from and dived to depths that light never reached. Their shapes were concealed, their true nature unfathomable. They were shadows on the sheen of reality.

  The giant bird approached the New Ark hovering lower. Downdraft from its wings disturbed the waters around the hull, creating whirlpools and eddies. When it was directly above the hold, it dropped the two cows down into the
belly of the ship — that strangest of places, that dark hole where the light of creation burned fiercely and this world no longer really existed — and looked up at the bridge.

  The rukh's father was there. And he was smiling.

  The rukh called out once more, its joyful cry winging across the North Sea like a spirit only recently set free, and then it settled itself into its home once more.

  * * *

  The man on the bridge continued to smile as the hold doors closed slowly above the giant bird. A unicorn galloped along the deck, and his smile broke into a grin. A mile to starboard the sea erupted as something huge and bright red broke the surface for a few seconds. A forest of tentacles slapped at the air as the thing dived for unknown depths, and Benedict Blake's grin erupted into a laugh. Nowhere near as loud as the rukh's call, still it filled the sky and winged its way out over the waves. Soon his voice would at last reach the ears of those who mattered. And then it would be his time once again.

  * * *

  Baltimore, Maryland — 1997

  IT WAS NIGHTTIME, AND it was hot, and Abby Paris should have been back at BPRD headquarters hours ago. Instead she was walking the streets, just another face hiding an anonymous life behind averted eyes. Most people wandered in pairs or groups, chatting and laughing, shouting and giggling. Light and noise spilled from bars and restaurants. The smell of food permeated the air, steak and seafood and sweet stuff all adding their own signatures to the night. She tried to shut out that sense, but she could not. Heightened smell was another part of her curse. As was hunger; but not for this. She stopped by a street vendor and bought six doughnuts, ate them, then vomited them back up ten minutes later. She held on to some park railings and heaved, splashing her shoes. A passerby paused for a moment and watched, then moved on. A police cruiser slowed and sped up again, and she wondered what the policemen had seen that had prevented them from stopping and arresting her. Just another drunk? Or something else entirely?

  Abby wiped away her tears and looked at her hand, but there was no change there. It was several days until full moon, but as always she wanted meat.

  She had reported in to BPRD after killing the werewolf. He had reverted seconds after she put the bullet through his brain, but she knew that many of the bystanders had seen what she had seen, heard what she had heard. She knew also that the human mind had a way of ignoring such strangeness and relegating it to the stuff of nightmares. Most of those present would shake their heads, look down at their feet, assume that the shock of what had happened had conjured fanciful images in their minds. Those who doubted their eyesight less would still say nothing, through fear of ridicule. And if there had been one man there, or one woman, who truly believed what he or she had seen, that person would be called insane.

  For all anyone cared, Abby had killed a man in cold blood and then walked away.

  She had spoken to Tom Manning. He had told her to come in, she had agreed, then she had gone for a walk. And now she was still walking, and it felt good. It was good to be out from BPRD, free for a night. They were her family, but they were also her prison guards, keeping her locked away for her own protection and the protection of those around her. These people here, swaying along the pavement and paying homage to the alcohol in their blood. Those people there, sweating and grunting in a shadowy doorway. Innocents all of them, cattle going about their daily lives of eating and drinking and rutting without realizing that monsters lived among them.

  "Monsters like me," she said, but she shook her head so hard that she cricked her neck. No, she was not a monster. She had shed that name the instant she escaped from Blake.

  The man knew who I was talking about. Blake! He denied it, but in his eyes I saw that spark of understanding ... and something else. Something that could have been recognition. And that was why Abby walked. Because of Benedict Blake, and what he had done, and the secret that she had carried from the second Abe Sapien set his strange hand on her arm in Paris and rescued her from the night.

  * * *

  She could remember few details of her life before Paris. There was Blake, the force in her mind and the physical presence that had nurtured her, and there was her escape from him. Plunging through the night into the ice-cold embrace of the ocean; the panicked swim; those massive things moving beneath her, deep down and yet so huge that they seemed to exert a fearful gravity, pulling her down with them. Something touched her legs more than once on that long swim, but it never held her back. Fear drove her on, fear of what Blake was and what he might one day do. Somehow she could fear him — the others did not — and that was another secret she had dwelled upon ever since. After that, there were only fleeting memories of Paris, none of them good. None, that is, until Abe Sapien touched her arm. His touch had seemed to welcome her to the world, unnatural thing that she was. And Abe had welcomed her into his life. We have like minds, he had said as she coughed the Seine water from her lungs.

  But he did not know her. And deep down, she hoped that he was wrong.

  * * *

  She had plenty of guilt to walk off. She could pretend it was culpability at the killing of the werewolf, but that was not true. When she thought of that thing lying in the road as she put a bullet through its eye, she felt nothing. This was a deeper, sicker feeling, one that stank of betrayal. Betrayal of her friends. They had taken her in and cared for her, and she had told them nothing. She had lied. She found it strange that freedom only increased that sense of guilt.

  She passed a burnt-out building and paused for a moment, wondering whether she should go inside and find somewhere to sit for the night. A man and a woman passed her and averted their eyes. She stared at them, hoping they would say something that would change her mind. But they walked on, wrapped up in their own small world. Sometimes Abby scoffed at such narrow-mindedness, but most of the time she wanted to be just like them.

  Her satellite phone rang, and she sighed. That would be BPRD asking where she was. Tom, probably, the concern in his voice barely masking the worry he had about her being out on her own. She plucked the phone from her pocket.

  "Hello."

  "Abby? Tom. Where are you? I thought you were coming in."

  "I ... I am, Tom. I'm still in Baltimore. Walking. Couple of things about the guy I killed I'm still trying to work through in my head."

  "Hmm. Well, can you work them through back here? The shits really hitting the fan right now, and I could do with your help."

  "What's happened?"

  "Sightings," Tom said. "Lots of sightings."

  "Sightings of what."

  "Well ... things. Dragons. Sea serpents. Other weird stuff."

  "Where?" Abby already felt a chill, the sweat on her brow cooling.

  "Everywhere," Tom said. "Abby, come home. Abe's on his way back, and I'm hoping to hear from Hellboy and Liz soon. I think we're in for a busy couple of days."

  Abby cut the connection and pocketed the phone without agreeing to return, hoping that Tom would take that as a yes. Dragons ... sea serpents ... other weird stuff. She closed her eyes and allowed in the memory of her dreams, and they were filled with bad things.

  Blake.

  And she suddenly knew that she would not be returning home.

  * * *

  Abby Paris remembered her dreams, and she knew that the dreams were memories in disguise. In those memories she was nameless, because she had yet to be named; she was empty, waiting to be filled with history; and she was unsettled.

  Yet still she remembered herself as Abby, because to remember herself with no name was like being nothing.

  * * *

  She walks through the New Ark a young girl in a world she does not understand, and yet she regards it as normal. She knows nothing else. She is a teenager, but she can remember nothing of her childhood. She knows the reasons for this — the evidence is all around her — though she does not understand that, either. Understanding is for Blake; her job is simply being. That is what she had been told. You exist, creature, because I gi
ve you my will to exist, Blake told her. You are here because I brought you, you breathe air because I allow it, and in your creation there was a pledge of faith to me. Wander the ship, but do not wonder. See what is happening but do not question. Your time in the Memory is over, and now you have a new home in reality. Accept that, accept me, and your future is one of triumph.

  That was the only time Blake ever spoke to her. She has seen him many times since then, working at a vat or wandering through the ship. But although he always offers her a smile and a nod, he never speaks. He is a tall, thin, ghostly figure, and for some reason he always reminds Abby of her time before memory began. That is a dark time, and Blake carries darkness with him. It is also a deep, hollow time, filled with nothing but space, and when she looks into the tall man's eyes — past the light of passion, past the shades of madness — she can see the hollowness that lies at his core.

  The hollowness of her own mind has its ghosts as well. They are knowledge and intelligence, things that she was born with but that are not exactly hers. Her first memory is of Blake staring down at her, smiling as he uses a rough old cloth to wipe fluids from her eyes, clearing them, ensuring that he is the very first thing she ever focuses on. Even then she has a strange awareness, and yet everything this awareness brings up feels as though it has been left behind in her mind by someone or something else. Her life is new, her mind old. She screams. Blake steps back, still smiling, and she thinks her first true thought: He's more than used to this.

  Experience with no history; life with no true birth; knowledge without a past. She accepts them all and yet yearns for something more: understanding.

  The hollowness inside her, haunted though it is, needs filling. And this is when she first perceives her need for escape.