The Lost Army

by Christopher Golden

  Hellboy stood and brushed himself off. His hands came away from his calves sticky, and even as he lifted them to his face, he caught the scent of blood. He whirled in horror to see the shattered, bloody corpse of the camel he had landed on. The two Bedouins were staring at him, pointing in gape-mouthed horror.

  “Oh, jeez,” Hellboy said, biting his lip. “I am so sorry. I didn’t even see him until the last minute.”

  The Bedouins ran, screaming in terror, spouting epithets in Egyptian, a language Hellboy had never even thought of studying.

  He looked around at the surviving camels, who glared balefully back at him. Hellboy shrugged.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  At the edge of the Great Sand Sea, Anastasia Bransfield stood atop a dune and wiped sweat from her brow. Squinting her ice-blue eyes against the sun, she removed the elastic that held her strawberry-blond mane in a ponytail. Anastasia ran her hands through her hair, and let the wind blow it across her face for a moment before tying it back up again.

  Exhaustion had begun to settle into her bones, and it was only the second day of the search. The very idea of a search was laughable, she thought. The desert was constantly in motion, evolving, folding in upon itself. It would swallow its secrets in moments, and only give them up when it desired.

  But search they would. That was their job, after all. Anastasia only hoped war did not break out with Libya while they were camped scant miles from that nation’s border.

  Idly, she wondered how long the British government would continue to search the shifting sands before calling the whole thing off and chalking it up to good old unexplained phenomenon. This investigation stank of weirdness and mystery. Two of her favorite things. But there was nothing Anastasia hated worse than a mystery she couldn’t solve.

  “Stacie!” a voice called from behind her. “Dr. Bransfield!”

  Anastasia turned. A man stood on the dune behind her, his words being stolen away by the wind. She recognized him despite the linens he used to shield his balding scalp and dark-skinned face from the sun.

  “What is it, Arun?” she cried.

  Arun Lahiri, the expedition’s historian, pulled the linen veil away from his face. Anastasia could see the anxiety etched into the man’s features.

  “It’s the bloody MI5 again, Stacie,” Arun shouted as he trudged closer to her. “A couple of Bedouins stumbled into camp, raving about a sand demon or some such. The gits from Intelligence jumped in a jeep and off they went, without any comment as to where they were headed.”

  “Rude of them, eh?” Anastasia commented, smiling broadly.

  “Make fun if you like,” the British-born Indian man sniffed. “But I don’t trust those bastards a bit.”

  “They’re MI5,” Anastasia explained. “You’re not supposed to trust them.”

  Arun didn’t return her smile. They’d known one another for several years, their relationship lingering somewhere between acquaintance and friendship. Although at one gala museum benefit, Professor Lahiri had had the bad taste to drunkenly proposition her. He had smiled that night, but now that she considered it, Anastasia wondered if she’d ever seen him smile since.

  “All right,” she surrendered to his paranoia. “Let’s get a jeep and check it out.”

  “Already done,” Arun replied. “Bottom of the dune.”

  Anastasia slipped on the New York Yankees cap she had received many years earlier as a gift from an American friend. She pulled her ponytail through the back and fitted the cap snugly on her head. As long as they didn’t get a bad sandstorm, it would stay on.

  She squinted and stiff-legged it down the dune behind Arun. Across the endless stretch of sand she could see the investigative team’s base camp. More than a dozen large tents, seven trucks, two jeeps, and what she considered to be a herd of camels. And the people. Archaeologists, British Intelligence agents, geologists, translators, and an ever-changing staff of Bedouin guides, cooks, and supply couriers.

  Her team. Her expedition. Or at least, it was supposed to be. The whole lot of them answered to her, but that didn’t include the morons from MI5. They weren’t even officially there, or at least that was the word from the Prime Minister. They were ghosts.

  But they had to be fed, and quartered, and they didn’t take orders from what the MI5 commander, Michael Creaghan, called “some upstart little tart thinks a Ph.D. makes her queen of the bloody universe.” Anastasia smiled at the memory. She’d been called worse, but never in so colorful a manner.

  Creaghan was a Neanderthal. Anastasia couldn’t wait for the Cold War to end so people like Michael Creaghan would cease to be necessary. She wasn’t fool enough to think such people wouldn’t find work, but then at least she wouldn’t have to deal with them.

  Arun fired up the jeep and motioned for her to hurry.

  “Keep your pants on, Lahiri,” she grumbled, but knew the words would be stolen by the wind before they reached him.

  With a foot on the front tire, Anastasia pulled herself up into the jeep.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s go see our Bedouin sand de . . .”

  Anastasia blanched. She spun on Arun and grabbed his arm.

  “Sand demon?” she cried. “The Bedouins saw a sand demon?”

  “That’s what they said,” Arun replied, glaring at her as though she were insane. “But I don’t think we’ve anything to be afraid of.”

  “Jesus!” Anastasia barked. “Step on it, Arun, before they start shooting at him!”

  “Shooting at . . .”

  “Drive!” she shouted.

  Arun gunned the engine and the jeep tore off across the desert. Anastasia stood up on the passenger seat and held a hand above her eyes, trying to see over the rolling plains of sand.

  “There!” she cried. A funnel of dust blew up into the air, the trail left behind by Creaghan’s jeep.

  “We’ll never catch him,” Arun observed.

  “Just try!” Anastasia shouted.

  Hellboy trudged across the desert in the general direction of the camp he’d seen from the sky. He held a tether from which three camels trailed. He’d had to leave the dead one behind, which was a shame because he thought the people in camp might want to eat it. He didn’t know if people ate camels. The idea had never before occurred to him. But he supposed that out in the desert, you might eat just about anything after a time.

  It was hot. But he’d known worse.

  Every once in a while, the camels became stubborn and held back for no apparent reason. Twice, he nearly left them. Let those idiot Bedouins come back and get them, he thought. But that wouldn’t be practical or responsible. Sometimes doing the right thing was a pain in the ass.

  It wasn’t long before Hellboy saw the trail of sand dust pluming into the sky ahead. Seconds later, a second plume appeared in the distance behind the first. After half a minute or so, he could see that the sand cloud was caused by a jeep that bounced across the desert toward him.

  “Hey!” Hellboy shouted, and waved to get the attention of whomever drove the jeep. “Hey!”

  The jeep rocketed toward him over the sand. Its engine buzzed like a chainsaw, a disconcerting association, given the barrenness of the desert. Hellboy could see it better now, an open vehicle with at least four passengers.

  With a whine of its engine, the jeep took air off a small dune and its tires spit sand as it landed. Hellboy squinted against the sun’s glare. Something about the approaching vehicle didn’t seem right to him. He looked more closely at the passengers.

  Then he saw the guns.

  “So much for the welcome wagon,” he muttered under his breath.

  As the vehicle slewed sideways in the sand and choked to a halt fifty yards from where he stood, Hellboy thought about going for his own gun. He decided against it. Guns bothered him. Of course, they bothered him most when they were pointed at him. But he had no way of knowing what the men in the jeep were up to.

  What was that old saying? he thought. Hope for the best, a
nd expect the worst, and you’ll never be disappointed. But Hellboy had always had a problem with expecting the worst. No matter how grim he thought a situation might become, the world never failed to surprise him with something far beyond his capacity for pessimistic imagination.

  When the jeep’s driver killed the engine, the four passengers leaped out and leveled their weapons. They wore black jumpsuits without insignia. Each carried the new British SA80 rifle, with tele-optic sights. Hellboy had read about the SA80 — so much for me not doing my homework, he thought — in a pile of documents about new weaponry Dr. Manning had given him the week before. The assault rifles were gas-operated, and fired about a dozen rounds a second.

  “Not another step!” one of the gunmen shouted.

  Getting shot had never appealed to him. Getting shot with that particular gun appealed to him considerably less.

  The driver climbed out of the jeep and signaled two of the men forward. Apparently, he was the leader. As they moved to box him in, Hellboy lost his patience.

  “You guys got some kind of problem?” Hellboy barked angrily, and took a long stride forward, leaving the camels behind.

  Bullets punched the sand inches from his hooves.

  “Perhaps you’re a bit deaf?” the leader suggested. “Or a bit daft.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Hellboy agreed. “I’m a little deaf. Why don’t you come a whole lot closer so I can hear what you’re saying?”

  The man smiled. He had blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. If not for the British accent, Hellboy might have thought somebody thawed out one of the SS troopers the Schrecksturm had put on ice back in ’49. The idea made him shiver. Nearly all of Hellboy’s childhood nightmares prominently featured Nazis. He hated Nazis.

  “Okay!” Hellboy snapped. “I’m getting a little cranky standing out here doing nothing.”

  “You’re trespassing, Hellboy,” the blond man said.

  “Oh yeah, prime real estate you’ve got here. I know you, pal?” Hellboy asked, uncertain.

  “No, but I’ve heard of you, of course,” the man responded. Weaponless, he moved cautiously toward Hellboy. “Though I always assumed you were a hoax, or some genetic mutation, or perhaps just tragically ugly. No offense.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Captain Michael Creaghan, British Intelligence,” the man said. “And I’ll ask you again, sir, what you are doing here?”

  MI5, Hellboy thought. Great. And the guy was a real charmer, too.

  He started toward Creaghan. The four other agents who accompanied Creaghan brought their weapons to bear on him, but Hellboy kept walking. A sudden breeze blew sand in his face, and he wiped the grit from his eyes.

  “Captain?” one of them asked, obviously waiting for orders to perforate their target.

  Creaghan unholstered his pistol and pointed it at Hellboy’s forehead. Hellboy did not break his stride. Creaghan cocked the pistol and tilted his head slightly. That gesture might have indicated curiousity regarding Hellboy’s choice of action. Or the man might simply have been concentrating on his aim. Either way, it gave him pause. He’d been shot before, plenty of times. But point-blank in the head? That might be a problem.

  “I was invited,” Hellboy said.

  “Why is it nobody told me you were on the guest list?” Creaghan asked.

  “Maybe it was supposed to be a special surprise,” Hellboy suggested, his deep voice sharp with sarcasm. “This your birthday or something?”

  “You aren’t funny,” Creaghan said. “I thought you should know that. Normally, I would have shot you already. But since I don’t believe anyone could impersonate you, I am certain you are who you say you are. All I want to know is, why are you here?”

  Hellboy sighed.

  An engine roared suddenly, and a second jeep took air off a dune behind Hellboy. He half-turned to see it land, wheels throwing up sand. The jeep shuddered to a halt, and Hellboy recognized the woman in the passenger’s seat immediately.

  “Dr. Bransfield!” Creaghan shouted. “I must insist you remove yourself from this area immediately. You are compromising a . . .”

  “Oh, sod off, Creaghan,” Anastasia snarled.

  She jumped from the jeep and stormed angrily over to Creaghan.

  “Just what the devil do you think you’re doing, anyway?” she demanded. “I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t recognize Hellboy, Captain. It isn’t as if there are a lot of enormous red gentlemen with cloven hooves and tails running around, is there?”

  “You’re out of line, Miss Bransfield,” Creaghan began.

  “No, it’s you who are out of line, sir,” Anastasia said coldly. “I am in charge of this investigation. As such, I asked Hellboy to lend us his services as a personal favor . . .”

  “Told you I was invited,” Hellboy said, and smiled. “Moron.”

  “You ought to have informed me of his impending arrival, then,” Creaghan sniffed. “We might have avoided . . .”

  “I didn’t know when or even if he would arrive, Captain,” Anastasia explained. “Now, if you’re through pointing guns at my guest?”

  Hellboy watched the faces of the men from MI5. Their eyes flicked from Anastasia to their commanding officer. They lowered their weapons slightly, illustrating their confusion, their hesitation.

  “We will discuss this at length when you return to base camp,” Creaghan stated.

  He waved his men back to their jeep and they all climbed in. The jeep coughed into life and Creaghan drove them off across the desert, back the way they had come.

  Hellboy and Anastasia watched Creaghan’s jeep disappear over a dune. The sun felt much warmer, suddenly. Uncomfortable. Or perhaps it wasn’t the sun at all. Hellboy glanced at Anastasia’s jeep, and the thin, bespectacled man behind the wheel. The man gaped at him in astonishment.

  “Your friend thinks he’s at a sideshow,” Hellboy said.

  “Well, you are quite unique, after all,” Anastasia replied.

  He felt her staring at him, but for a moment could not turn and face her. Every day they spent together in the short time they had shared played itself over again in his head. In his heart. All the things he had faced in his life, all the horrors he had witnessed, and he couldn’t meet the eyes of a woman he cared for.

  Well, he thought, I’m only human.

  “Why the smirk?” Anastasia asked.

  Hellboy hadn’t been aware that he had smiled, much less smirked. Of course, Anastasia was likely one of only two or three people in the world who might have been able to tell the difference.

  “Just thinking about your MI5 buddies,” he lied. “They’re getting pretty punchy out in the desert, I think.”

  “Well,” she said, “you could have made all of our lives easier and explained to them what you were doing here.”

  “I don’t think they would have listened,” Hellboy replied. “What are they doing here, anyway? I thought, what with the whole Libyan crisis, that there might be troops here. But MI5?”

  “It’s a long story,” she said vaguely.

  Finally, he turned to look at her. Their eyes met, and for a moment he thought he could see pain in hers. Then they were only blue. Anastasia smiled, and stepped toward him, arms open.

  Hellboy took her in his arms and held her tight.

  “Jeez, it’s good to see you,” he confessed, trying his best to make the words harmless.

  “You too,” she said. “Though, as usual, I think you’ve cracked a couple of my ribs.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered, and let her go.

  “That’s okay,” Anastasia replied, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “I’m just not used to it anymore, I guess.”

  That led to a protracted moment of silence.

  “You haven’t changed at all,” Hellboy finally said.

  “You have,” Anastasia countered. “You’re a lot quieter than I remember you.”

  Hellboy ran a hand over the stubble on his head. He scratched his skul
l absently, then shrugged.

  “I guess I’m more careful of what I say,” he explained.

  Anastasia smiled. “Oh, I doubt that,” she said.

  The man in the car beeped. Anastasia took Hellboy by the arm and walked him back to the jeep.

  “Arun Lahiri, I would like you to meet Hellboy. Arun is an historian from the British Museum,” she explained.

  Lahiri held out a hand and Hellboy shook it.

  “We met very briefly back in ’79 in Cameroon,” Lahiri noted. “I was on Jim Powell’s third Mokele-Mbembe expedition. You probably don’t remember, but I’m honored to meet you again. Also, of course, your reputation precedes you.”

  “Thanks, I think,” Hellboy said. “But don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Why don’t we head back to camp?” Anastasia suggested.

  “What about the camels?” Hellboy asked.

  “Well, they can’t ride with us, and it’s quite a walk. I’m sure the Bedouins will come out and get them once I tell them what happened. Once I explain to them that you aren’t a sand demon,” she said, and grinned.

  “Sand demon,” Hellboy sniffed. “What’s wrong with these guys?”

  Hellboy climbed into the back of the jeep, and Anastasia followed, leaving the front passenger seat conspicuously vacant. Lahiri gave Anastasia an angry, rather proprietary look.

  “What am I, a chauffeur?” the professor asked, then smiled weakly.

  Despite his words, Hellboy wondered if the man’s thinly veiled anger was based more on Anastasia’s forsaking the seat next to him, and less on feeling like a servant.

  Lahiri cranked the engine over, and they began to roll across the sand.

  “I guess I should tell you why you’re here,” Anastasia began, not even bothering to address her associate’s sarcasm.

  “I was wondering when you would get around to that,” Hellboy admitted. “I don’t fly halfway around the world and jump out of an airplane over the desert just for anybody, you know.”

  Anastasia smiled. In that moment, it was as if they had never been apart.