The Lost Army

by Christopher Golden

  Creaghan didn’t plan to be unlucky.

  The jeep bounced high off a slight rise in the dune, and already the grit swirled in his eyes and stung every exposed surface on his body. His men shouted curses to one another and to the wind, but the sound was lost, sucked away by the mighty storm. Beside them, the jeep that Rickman drove slewed sideways a little, then righted itself and kept rolling. Creaghan was amazed that he couldn’t even hear the whine of its engine.

  “There!” Agent Culpepper shouted from the passenger seat, and there must have been a lull in the gale, for Creaghan heard him, though only barely. The Captain looked up and saw the drop in the land where the oasis sat. The trees were high enough that they seemed to poke right out of the sand. Then the ground fell away and the entire oasis was spread out in front of them. But something seemed . . .

  “We’re off course!” Creaghan cried, then began to blare his horn to get Rickman’s attention as he corrected for himself.

  The jeep took air off the side of the hill and landed with a jaw-clacking thud, then bounced and kept rolling down the path to the woods around the oasis. Agent Rickman’s jeep turned in behind him and Creaghan smiled grimly, clenching his teeth to keep the sand out.

  They took air again, just for a moment, and this time the wind whipping down into the oasis from the desert floor got up under them, lifted the jeep just for a second before slapping it back down again. The momentary feeling of weightlessness reminded Creaghan of air turbulence on a plane. But it wasn’t something he ever wanted to feel on land again.

  The wind slackened a bit. Creaghan slowed the jeep to a crawl, and Rickman did the same behind him. He scanned the hillside to his right, where he knew the caves should be. He squinted in the premature dusk brought by the storm, sand still flying at his face, though not as painfully or in such abundance.

  The hillside was spotted here and there with an ugly grey scrub brush, but for the most part, it was dull and featureless sand, earth, and stone. At first, Creaghan didn’t see the caves. He blinked several times, and finally, his vision began to resolve the differences between the scrub and the darker spots that were caves. The nearest was less than fifty yards away.

  “Let’s go!” he called, and his men responded. Further proof that the storm had lessened down in the oasis depression.

  Creaghan turned his jeep from the path and it jounced over the rough terrain, every dip in the land or stone in their path a jolt to Creaghan and his men. It didn’t matter. Reaching the cave was all that truly concerned him.

  The jeep popped up over a small rise, then fell into a rut. As it shot up and out, Creaghan’s head bounced off the steering wheel. His nose was crushed against the wheel hard enough to make his eyes water. Momentarily, he was disoriented, but then they were at the mouth to the first cave. He pulled the jeep to a halt on the steeply angled hillside and prayed for a moment that the vehicle wouldn’t simply roll over on him.

  When the thought struck him, he realized how extraordinary it was that they had made it across the hillside without one of the jeeps doing precisely that. Creaghan pushed all thoughts of luck and good fortune from his mind, afraid the simple awareness of it might be enough to drive the good luck away.

  He leaped from the jeep, sniffed, and ran a hand across his face. He looked down at the back of his hand and saw a deep red streak of his own blood there. His nose was bleeding.

  Creaghan smiled and shook his head. He hadn’t had a nosebleed since he was six years old. If he survived the chaos that he knew was coming from a number of different directions, and had nothing more severe than a nosebleed, he might actually begin to believe in miracles again. After what he’d seen the past two days, he felt capable of believing in just about anything, given a little push.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted.

  His men hefted packs of supplies from the jeep and sprinted into the cave. As Rickman and the others from the second jeep did the same, Creaghan grabbed three large canteens from the back of his vehicle, checked to be certain there was nothing else to be had, and followed them all inside.

  “Rickman!” he yelled. “Post a watch on the cave mouth for regular updates on conditions and developments outside.”

  Then he surveyed the cave they had chosen. He didn’t know what the others looked like, but he felt they’d gotten lucky. It wasn’t a large cave, but it would do. The entrance tunnel led perhaps twenty feet back to a small cavern large enough to have held perhaps three or four more people comfortably. As it was, with their supplies, they would have no trouble waiting out the storm inside the cave.

  As long as they didn’t get trapped inside by some kind of sand-slide.

  “Captain!” Agent Rickman cried from the cave mouth. “You’ve got to see this!”

  Creaghan left his men to unpack their supplies and sped back through the short tunnel to stand beside Rickman and peer out of the cave. Only when the sand and wind began to batter his face again did he register what a relief it had been to be out of it.

  “What is it?” he asked, scanning.

  Rickman merely pointed.

  Colonel Shapiro’s troops swarmed over the edge of the oasis depression. In jeeps and troop carriers, they bounced down the path toward the tree line, vehicles bearing British, Egyptian, and American flags, as well as the flag of the United Nations.

  A tank appeared, its gun turret jutting out over its dark metal body, over the hill’s edge, before it tipped forward and slammed down against the hill like an awkward diver doing a belly flop.

  “I guess the bloody fool took me seriously after all,” Creaghan said quietly.

  Some of Shapiro’s men were on foot. When they’d arrived, they had had enough room for all the troops aboard vehicles. But Creaghan remembered that a lot of their supplies had been airlifted in. Whatever they took in the trucks had displaced soldiers from the vehicles. The solo men, dozens of them, ran along the edges of the path, weapons at the ready, though Creaghan couldn’t have said what they were ready to combat. Bullets wouldn’t do a hell of a lot of good against a sandstorm.

  He and Rickman watched the progress in silence. Shapiro had more than one thousand men under his command. Less than half that number had made it over, six or seven jeeps, a dozen troop carriers, two tanks.

  All the while, the storm worsened. The sky darkened above, and the wind whipped even faster over the edge of the depression. Then it seemed as if there was a lull, which left Creaghan’s ears ringing as he realized just how loud the storm had become. And as that thought crossed his mind, the howling gale returned, its strength vastly increased.

  A jeep bounded over the edge of the depression, moving too fast. The storm got under the vehicle and shoved it, up and to one side, just enough so that the jeep went over. It tumbled, sideways, down the hill, rolling toward the rest of the convoy. The jeep struck the back of a troop carrier. Several men leaped from the back of the truck, but the jeep’s passengers had been killed. The troop carrier moved on.

  Another tank crested the hill and began the descent. That was it.

  Several men, one after another, dove over the edge of the hill and were driven to the ground by the wind. One of them must have struck a rock, or just hit wrong, for he didn’t get up when the others did.

  They were the last. Creaghan judged that little more than half of Shapiro’s troops had made it into the oasis. He prayed some of the rest found a way to survive the storm out in the open desert.

  “Captain, do you see it?” Rickman asked, his voice hushed with awe.

  Creaghan glanced back up at the lip of the depression. The storm was there, swirling, darkening with each passing second. The sand in the sky blotted out the late-afternoon sun completely. As it spread across the sky, it would be as if night had fallen. Creaghan only hoped it was over soon.

  Even in the cave’s mouth, Creaghan could feel the intensity of the storm increase. But there was no question the sunken quality of the oasis was cutting the power of the storm quite a bit. They’d be all r
ight if they just stayed where they were. He wasn’t as confident as to the fate of Colonel Shapiro and his men.

  Then the storm began to snake tendrils of pounding sand out over the oasis. Like fingers of a giant hand, the tendrils began to whip down into the oasis and out into the air above it. The body of the storm soon followed.

  “Do you see it, sir, or is it just me?” Rickman asked plaintively.

  Creaghan had thought Agent Rickman just meant the massive concentrated center of the storm. But his tone said there was something else to see. Something Creaghan was missing.

  Then he saw it. His testicles drew up tight against his body and his throat constricted. Up in the dark brown center of the storm, where he now believed his flesh would be scoured from his bones were he to be unprotected up on the surface, Captain Creaghan saw something which inspired terror, bone-deep and spreading.

  In the center of the storm, high up, were two oblong shapes that could only be one thing: eyes. The storm had eyes, and it was looking for them.

  Creaghan pulled Rickman back into the cave with him.

  “I’ll take first watch,” he said. When Rickman appeared about to protest, Creaghan glared at him until the other man relented.

  “Yes, sir,” Rickman finally said. “Try to stay out of sight, sir.”

  Hellboy hated being carried. It was humiliating. The pasty-faced mutant runts were like ants running away with an apple pie in some cartoon, carting him over their heads with prodigious strength. At least, for their size. It still took eight or so of them to carry him. And they’d already put him down twice and passed on the burden of his weight to another set of twisted munchkins.

  He was fuming.

  Somewhere up ahead, the sorceror walked with Arun, Anastasia, and Carruthers. There were pale, thin humans as well as the squat amphibian-looking beings, and they were all armed with an assortment of weapons, from spears and clubs to axes and swords. What little he had been able to see of Hazred pretty much gelled with the man’s voice: it reeked of power. But thus far, he hadn’t shown more than a little magic, parlor tricks, really.

  Hellboy wanted to know just what he was up against, but couldn’t think of a way to find out without getting his friends killed.

  Of course, friends might have been pushing it a bit. Carruthers was hardly his friend, and was not good for much more than violent ravings these days. Arun was better only in that his lunacy seemed to come and go. Lady Catherine was already dead. He could feel her spinal stump squirm against his leg from time to time, and though he had a strong stomach, it made him want to puke.

  But Anastasia was another story. Hellboy vowed to himself that no matter what he had to sacrifice, including himself, she would survive this subterranean nightmare.

  As their captors descended along a tunnel that corkscrewed down into the Earth, Hellboy could not hold back his curiousity. It was true that he had never put his whole heart into his studies the way his mentor, Professor Bruttenholm, would have liked. But that did not mean he felt nothing when confronted by such an extraordinary mystery.

  He wanted to know the secrets of that underground world almost as much as he wanted to shatter Hazred’s face with his fist. And that was saying an awful lot.

  Hazred barked something at his minions in his guttural language. Hellboy knew he shouldn’t be able to understand, but automatically, his mind translated. Just as it had by the lake with those Persian zombie warriors.

  “Put the demon down!” he ordered. “Let the next group carry him for now.”

  Hellboy was jostled hastily and the dwarfish men beneath him were so exhausted from bearing him up that they nearly let him fall to the stone floor of the tunnel. Instead, they lowered him gently and with great effort. Throughout his cocooning by the spiders, Hellboy had continued to flex his muscles as tightly as possible. When he relaxed, there was some give to his bonds, but not enough to allow him to escape.

  Now, at least fifteen minutes had passed since Hazred had captured them. The web had begun to weaken, perhaps even deteriorating slightly. And Hellboy, of course, had begun to get his strength back after taking such a beating from the spiders.

  When his back touched the stone, Hellboy acted. Flexing his muscles as tightly as he was able, straining the webs to their limit, he struggled within the cocoon. It was too tight.

  His bearers moved away, and the new crew moved in to pick him up. With them came spear- and sword-wielding men and gnarled halflings. They knew he was trying to escape, but couldn’t realize he only wanted freedom from his bonds. And with his mouth webbed, Hellboy could not explain it to them. Not that he’d ever been all that good at explaining things in a fight situation.

  Tilting his head forward, he was able to see that they had surrounded the others with weapons as well. Probably they expected Anastasia and Arun to make a break for it, given Hellboy’s actions. He prayed they didn’t. Now was not the time.

  “Come on, you bloody freaks!” Carruthers screamed suddenly. “Come and get some if you want to die so bad! I’ll be happy to go with you! Freaks!”

  The mad MI5 agent launched a quick elbow at the chest of one of the tall, thin men, then drove his right hand, fingers flat and pointed, into the throat of another. Both men went down. For half a second, Hellboy stared in appreciation. MI5 trained their people better than he’d expected.

  Arun and Anastasia fell to their knees, weapons pointed at them from all sides.

  “Get back before I . . . ,” Carruthers began to order, then shrieked as a spear passed through his right shoulder just under the clavicle.

  “No!” Hellboy shouted, but it came out as more of a grunt through the webbing covering his mouth.

  With a huge heave, an instinctual burst of strength as he drove both legs and arms out, and spread his back and shoulder muscles as wide as he was able, Hellboy tore himself free of the webbing.

  Too late. Carruthers had doubled over in pain. A misshapen half-man buried an axe in the MI5 agent’s head. He went down with a wet thud on the stone floor.

  “You little son of a bitch!” Hellboy shouted. “Damn you! He was out of his mind, couldn’t you tell?”

  He waded through Hazred’s minions before they were prepared for him, lifted the little man from the ground by the tatters he wore for clothes and slammed his stone fist into his face. At the last second, he pulled his punch. He didn’t know what these guys were, or how responsible for their actions they might or might not be.

  As far as he could tell, the real trouble was still standing silently a little way down the tunnel, watching it all unfold. As he turned on Hazred, whose eyes seemed to glow green in the shadows cast by the light of his followers’ torches, Hellboy was surrounded once more. Spears jabbed his legs and tail, his abdomen and arms. A tall, thin swordsman stepped in and swept his blade around toward Hellboy’s head. He put up his right hand and the sword shattered on his fist.

  A bald, little pale halfling jabbed him in the ass with a spear. He turned and slapped the weapon away. Bent and poked his finger into the dwarf’s face.

  “Stop that!” he demanded. Then he turned back toward Hazred. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you Hazred, you sick bastard?” he accused. “You could have prevented that.”

  Why should I have wanted to? he asked telepathically. Apparently, he didn’t know that Hellboy could understand his spoken words. Probably a good secret to keep. You are my prisoner. Are you going to come along, or do I have to kill your other friends as well?

  “I’ll come,” Hellboy agreed.

  For now, he wanted to make sure Anastasia and Arun were okay. But if he saw an opening, he was going to take it. And when that happened, nothing was going to stop him from taking Hazred down as well.

  You seem to know my name, demon. What is yours? Hazred asked.

  “They call me Hellboy,” he answered.

  Oh, Hazred said, and smiled thinly. How diminishing.

  Hellboy muttered under his breath, but said nothing more. He wanted to carry Ca
rruthers’ body with them when they set out along the tunnel again, but his guards would not allow it. Instead, he was hurried along until he walked side by side with Arun and Anastasia.

  “I hope you have a plan,” Anastasia said softly.

  “Don’t I always?” Hellboy asked.

  “Oh, great!” Anastasia sighed, and rolled her eyes.

  They continued in that downward spiral for about ten more minutes. After a time, the end of the tunnel began to glow with the same greenish light they had seen from far above, at the bottom of the chasm of the spiders.

  “Oh my God,” Anastasia said, as they exited the tunnel.

  The path they were on continued down, but the tunnel opened up into an extraordinarily large cavern. Inside the cavern, a city. Well, perhaps not a city, due to its size, but certainly a village. At least a dozen structures, two- and three-stories high, surrounded a massive citadel whose spire scraped the ceiling of the cavern. The outer buildings seemed hewn from stone and finished with iron and wood, while the citadel itself appeared to be constructed entirely of bronze.

  In front of the citadel, at the center of the village, was a large pool of water which Hellboy assumed was part of an underground river system. The water rippled outward from the center of the pool, though Hellboy could not see any reason for the surface motion.

  The cavern was lit with a bright, eerie, green glow. Bathed in that light, he felt queasy, and noticed Anastasia and Arun seem to react as well. His head hurt slightly, but he shook it off. The light itself emanated from the pool, from deep within the water. Somehow, he realized, all of the underground water system must be infiltrated with that light. Or a portion of it. He had seen it deep underwater when he had dived in the lake, just before battling that creature.