The Lost Army

by Christopher Golden

  But soldiers had a tendency to shoot first. Hellboy was always uneasy around any kind of military personnel; no matter how hard he was to kill, it didn’t make him immortal. To send a numbskull like Creaghan up against something paranormal was just asking for trouble. Hellboy didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire.

  “Let’s go,” Anastasia said, and tugged lightly on his arm.

  Her touch sent a wave of feeling through him, a protective affection that she had chastised him for in the time when their relationship was still intimate. She could take care of herself. He knew that. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t going to make absolutely certain that, no matter what else happened, no matter the cost, Anastasia would be safe. While he was at her side, it was the least he could do.

  Creaghan was at the head of the group as they cut through the trees and Hellboy glared at his back. Captain Creaghan was a dangerous man. But he’d never met anyone like Hellboy before.

  Ahead, several more members of Anastasia’s team were gathered at the edge of a small clearing. They stood in a tight group, speaking softly to one another. When Creaghan arrived, they moved aside, and Hellboy felt Anastasia stiffen next to him.

  She might be in charge, but Creaghan had the authority of his position, and of the Crown, behind him. Their conflict was bound to continue.

  Creaghan and his men froze at the entrance to the clearing. Hellboy could smell the water from the oasis, which likely sprang from an underground reservoir or river of some kind. It was a sweet, fresh smell, and welcome. But it was tainted. Tainted by blood.

  “Oh dear God,” Anastasia cried.

  Across the clearing, the upper limbs of dozens of trees were strewn with gory decoration, red streamers that might once have been the viscera of human beings. Half bodies hung from trees, leaking crimson ichor on the tall grass.

  Behind him, Arun Lahiri turned and vomited profusely between two tall trees. Hellboy ignored him, and started across the clearing. After a moment, Anastasia began to follow. He did not turn, but he sensed her approach, and was proud of her.

  Creaghan went with them, in silence.

  They stood several feet from where the green grass was sprayed with blood and bone and other human matter. The bodies appeared to have been mutilated horribly, slashed to ribbons, and their remains strung about the trees with a revoltingly gleeful abandon.

  “How long ago did you say these people disappeared?” Hellboy asked.

  “Come now,” Creaghan huffed. “How can we be certain this is even the team we’re searching for?”

  Hellboy frowned and turned to regard the square-jawed blond man as though he were an idiot.

  “Now who else would it be?” he asked. “I guess you can tell the Queen her cousin won’t be summering at Buckingham Palace this year.”

  “You disfigured, simian oaf!” Creaghan cried. “How dare you speak of Her Majesty with such disrespect.”

  “Put a sock in it, pal,” Hellboy snapped. “You’re not even supposed to be here, remember? You’re invisible, a ghost. Why don’t you start acting like one?”

  Creaghan appeared to consider his response, but in the end said nothing. Part of Hellboy felt disappointed. He wanted to pummel the Captain. But the BPRD frowned on him causing international incidents. So it was all for the best.

  “Several weeks at least,” Anastasia said, and the tension between Hellboy and Creaghan dispersed. At least, temporarily.

  “What?” Hellboy asked.

  “The team disappeared several weeks ago,” she repeated.

  “But this massacre just happened, a few hours ago, no more,” Hellboy observed. “They weren’t anywhere that we could find them, but they were alive, and well fed until they were brought here and slaughtered.”

  “How can you know all that?” Anastasia asked.

  “Trust me,” he responded. He didn’t think she would want him to point out the stomach and intestines he had spotted several trees over, their contents spilling out through a vertical slash.

  “So you think whoever abducted these people, desert pirates or aliens or what-have-you, murdered them just to warn us off?” Creaghan demanded, his voice filled with testosterone-supplied bluster.

  “Well the British government doesn’t hire men who frighten easily,” he continued. “Your job is over now, Dr. Bransfield. But I’m going to find these terrorists and show them what kind of justice a man might expect for perpetrating such monstrous acts!”

  “Are you through?” Hellboy asked quietly.

  “What?” Creaghan snapped.

  Anastasia looked at Hellboy curiously. Across the clearing, the rest of the people who had witnessed the carnage watched, unable to determine what, exactly, was being said. Hellboy ignored them, but he gave Anastasia a confident look, meant to reassure her. He hoped that it worked.

  “I asked if you were through, Creaghan,” Hellboy repeated. “I think you’re way off on this one. I don’t think this massacre was meant to scare us away. I think that whoever did this wanted us to find these corpses so we would know exactly where to start looking. This is their way of shouting, ‘Hey, here we are, come and get us!’ They want to be found.”

  “But why?” Anastasia asked. “Why not just kill us, if that’s their goal?”

  “I don’t know,” Hellboy confessed with a shrug. “It’s all just hunches, you understand. But then, why didn’t they kill all these poor bastards until now? What were they keeping them alive for?”

  There was a moment of silence, then. None of them really seemed to want an answer to that question.

  “Well, you seem to be the expert on savagery, Hellboy,” Creaghan sneered. “Where would you suggest we start looking for whoever did this horrible deed? They can’t have gotten far.”

  Hellboy raised his eyes above the tree line and stared at the dark holes in the hillside.

  “Let’s check those caves first,” Hellboy said. “There’s nowhere else to hide around here.”

  Nobody spoke. Hellboy turned, curious at the lack of response. Anastasia and Creaghan were staring across the clearing toward the lake at the center of the oasis. Hellboy followed their line of sight through the trees.

  Something moved at the edge of the lake. Lumbered up from the water and shambled into the trees, headed toward them. Not just one thing, but several.

  “What are they?” Anastasia whispered as she stared at the lurching things that glistened in the harsh desert sun.

  “I can’t make it out, but I think they’re carrying swords,” Creaghan said.

  Hellboy could see them just fine.

  “They’re soldiers,” he said. “Persian soldiers.”

  Creaghan and Anastasia turned to stare at him. Hellboy strode grim-faced toward the lake.

  “Maybe we can finally get some damn answers around here!” he snarled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  —

  Low branches stung Anastasia’s face as she set off after Hellboy. He wasn’t running, but his strides were long enough that she had to jog to keep up. Captain Creaghan and the pair of MI5 agents that always accompanied him followed close behind her. Some of the others might have followed as well, but Anastasia didn’t bother to look.

  It was insanity not to simply flee, and let those trained for such things deal with the monstrous men dragging themselves up the lakeshore. But Anastasia kept running. The horror she had witnessed in the clearing left her numb and nauseous. The fear was nearly overwhelming. But she forced herself to ignore it. Hellboy was there, just ahead, and she had faced the unknown with him before and survived. In truth, she had been far more afraid nearly six years earlier, when the Obsidian Danse were preparing her for sacrifice, than she was now. Perhaps that experience had desensitized her. Her fear now was more for him than for herself.

  Ahead, Hellboy strode purposefully between trees toward the lake. The sun splashed on his flesh and made it seem to glow with vitality. The deep red of his skin had always seemed to her so healthy. He still wore the small tuft of
hair at the base of his skull tied in a knot, as she had suggested long ago when he had wanted to shave it off. The rest of his skull was covered with a dark black stubble, the harsh feel of which she remembered well.

  As he stalked toward the killers, his tail curled stiffly, clenched with anger and purpose as surely as he clenched his fists where they hung by his sides. His duty was to question the unknown, but as long as Anastasia had known him, Hellboy had shown himself far more likely to beat it into submission. If Anastasia had the power, she had always told him, that was how she would have dealt with her fears as well.

  Hellboy moved to the left for a broader opening in the trees, and Anastasia stumbled to a halt on the path. She could see the men moving up the shore now, and knew without question that they were exactly what Hellboy had said they were: Persian soldiers.

  Soldiers who had died two thousand years earlier.

  Hellboy emerged from the trees forty feet from the water. His hooves stabbed the firm ground. After only a handful of hours on sand, he was grateful for solid footing.

  The surface of the oasis lake shimmered in the sunlight, and Hellboy felt the temperature difference immediately as he left the cool tree shade. Behind him, he heard several people come to a halt at the tree line. He didn’t have to turn around to know they were staring. And not at him.

  Halfway between Hellboy and the water, three horrifying forms shambled stiffly up the shore. They were garbed in soiled linens, their flesh wasted away, dried and cracking upon their bones. Where once the soldiers might have had eyes, now there were only deep pits glowing with an arcane green light visible even in full sun. Their mouths had rotted away, leaving their decayed teeth bare in an eternally corrupted smile.

  While once they might have worn some covering for their heads or chests, nothing was left but thin, wispy, dark hair and papery skin. The metal glint that Hellboy and the others had seen through the woods was not armor after all, but weaponry.

  The ghoulish soldier closest to Hellboy wielded a double-headed iron axe with a handle at least three feet long. The walking corpse held the weapon with both hands. Behind it, the other two staggered forward. They seemed burdened by their own weight, but not at all by the weight of the heavy iron and bronze swords each held at the ready. They all wore daggers strapped to their bony hips.

  “Not another step, zombie-boys!” Hellboy barked. “I want some answers.”

  The Persian warriors paused, apparently taken aback by his presence. Green light glowed ever brighter from their shriveled eye sockets. Hellboy wondered if that meant they were actually looking at him.

  The axe-wielding leader opened its mouth. The flesh around the teeth, or what remained of them, cracked and peeled back like a snapped elastic. Then it spoke.

  “Our quarrel is not with you, demon,” the warrior said, but its voice seemed more an echo of a voice. An echo of words spoken from the depths of a dank, crumbling well, or through muffled cemetery earth.

  “We are bound to obey our master, himself the slave of Mar-Ti-Ku,” the creature declared. “Stand aside, and you will survive the day.”

  “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen,” Hellboy muttered. “Look, I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you guys tell me who your master is, and where he’s hiding. Then we’ll get to the bottom of this. I’d like to know what happened to the archaeological team whose remains are decorating the trees back there.”

  The rotting soldier turned slightly, as if to stare off into the forest despite its lack of eyes. When its head swiveled back toward Hellboy, the green light in its eye sockets had diminished to a pair of furious pinpoint embers.

  “They were trespassing,” the thing said simply, in that hollow, faraway voice. “Now, will you stand aside?”

  “No,” Hellboy answered. “Why don’t you take me to your master? Maybe he and I can . . .”

  Faster than Hellboy would ever have imagined, the desiccated walking corpse hefted the battle-axe and swung it at him.

  “Hey!” Hellboy cried, ducking under the blow that was meant to sever his head. The axe glanced across his brow, metal clanging on the stumps of his horns, and the warrior began to bring the axe around again.

  Hellboy unholstered his gun, thumbed back the hammer on the old weapon, and blew a massive hole through the Persian soldier’s chest. It staggered back, axe faltering in its hands, and stared down momentarily at the ribs protruding from its torso.

  It glared at Hellboy.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  The other dead warriors moved to join the first. They held their swords at the ready and moved to either side, trapping Hellboy between them. In front of him, the corpse with the axe hefted his weapon and moved in, more cautiously this time.

  “Hellboy, look out!” Anastasia screamed behind him, but Hellboy didn’t dare look around.

  He was in trouble. Creaghan and his men could probably take down one or two of the dead men with their weapons, but they would just get up again. Whatever he did had to be a bit more permanent.

  The axe fell. By instinct, Hellboy swung his right arm up and blocked the blow with his stone hand. One side of the double-edged axe shattered on that hand. With his left, he reached out, grabbed the axe-wielder by the throat, and spun the soldier to the left, impaling it on its comrade’s sword.

  Hellboy glared over the warrior’s shoulder into the glowing eye sockets of the swordsman. The axe-wielder spat orange bile and writhed, impaled on the other’s sword, which jutted from its stomach. The swordsman tried to slide the blade out, but Hellboy snagged the razor-sharp point with his invulnerable right hand and pulled. The swordsman’s arm burst through its comrade’s back as if the entire body were made of rotten fruit.

  A blade slashed across Hellboy’s back and he cursed loudly. He had not forgotten the third dead Persian soldier, merely lost track of the dead thing’s location in the course of battle.

  “Damn!” he snarled, cursing the pain.

  He tore the blade from the first swordsman’s hand, lifted it high, and used all his strength to bring it down in a slashing arc, hacking the heads from the two interlocked corpses. The heads tumbled to the packed earth, and the dead men fell to the ground, their bodies cracking open like piñatas, spilling desert sand instead of gore.

  “What the . . . ?” Hellboy began.

  A sword pierced his back and he grunted as it first stretched, then tore the skin of his abdomen. Its point dripped with blood and Hellboy looked down at it in amazement. Behind him, the dead soldier gripped its sword with both hands, and twisted it within Hellboy’s body, with strength far more than human.

  Hellboy fell to the sand. Above him, the last of the three Persian warriors towered over him, dagger in hand, and moved in for the kill. Hellboy looked up to see that all but Creaghan, his two lackeys, and Anastasia, had fled the scene.

  Hellboy and Creaghan locked eyes, and Hellboy saw the fear there.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” he demanded weakly. “Shoot him!”

  Creaghan blinked once, and signaled to his men. Their SA-80’s exploded in a torrent of bullets which literally tore the third dead soldier apart. Sand flew everywhere, and when it was over, nothing remained of the dead soldiers other than their weapons.

  Hellboy tried to move, but the point of the sword had imbedded itself into the dirt when he fell. The pain was excruciating.

  “Got to take this out,” he groaned.

  He looked up at Anastasia, who stared down at him in horror and sympathy.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Dead guys,” Hellboy mumbled as unconsciousness began to claim him. “There’s just no talking to them.”

  The immediate danger was over. Anastasia forced away the fear that had nearly overcome her moments earlier. Hellboy needed her, and she wasn’t going to let him down.

  She scanned the people assembled on the lakeshore. Creaghan was flanked, as always, by two MI5 agents who might have been his bodyguards. Anastasia knew their names, Burk
e and Carruthers, but the two men were so emotionless and devoid of personality that she could never recall which was Burke and which Carruthers. One of them, whose dark hair was slightly lighter than the other’s, wore a canteen strapped across his shoulders. It was the desert, after all.

  “You!” Anastasia snapped and pointed at the canteen. “Give that to me!”

  The agent’s eyes widened and his eyes darted quickly to Captain Creaghan for some indication as to how he should proceed. After a moment’s hesitation, which Anastasia believed the man feigned merely to establish his authority, Creaghan nodded.

  The MI5 agent held out his canteen and Anastasia snatched it from his hand. She heard gasps from the tree line and glanced up to see that some of the members of her investigative team had returned. She didn’t see Arun Lahiri there, and mentally cursed him for his cowardice.

  Hellboy lay on his stomach, the sword protruding from his lower back. Its point had penetrated through his torso and into the ground below. His head was turned slightly to one side, so the left side of his face was visible.

  Anastasia upended the canteen, splashing water on Hellboy’s head, neck, and face. He spluttered and his muscles tensed.

  “Don’t move,” she barked, and he froze.

  Hellboy grunted, winced. His eyes flickered open, and relief flooded through Anastasia. She had seen him in far worse conflicts, seen him sustain more devastating injury, but she had never seen him pass out before. The twisting of the sword, and the impact as it hit the ground while still inside him, must have overloaded his pain receptors, Anastasia reasoned. But it had been quite alarming, no matter the cause.