The Lost Army

by Christopher Golden

  He fought on against the horror of the inevitable.

  There was a falsetto scream to his left, and he glanced over to see a Persian soldier impale a man on its sword. The corpse warrior used both hands to pull up on the pommel of its blade, tearing the human’s belly open and spilling his steaming viscera on the ground.

  “Damn you!” Creaghan screamed.

  In the space between heartbeats, Creaghan saw in his mind’s eye what he would do next. Surge forward, driven by rage and desperation, press the barrel of his weapon against the back of the zombie soldier’s head and fire. Not just once, though once would have been sufficient. But three, four times, as many times as he was able before jeopardy forced him to face other enemies.

  But none of that happened.

  In the eyeblink before he moved, Creaghan was brought to a halt by pure astonishment. The Persian cadaver withdrew its sword from its victim, and glanced up, seeking the next. It faced away from Creaghan, and so did not see him. But as the Captain watched, something came between himself and the walking, murderous corpse. A snow-white mist, shapeless, featureless. Quickly it shifted, coalescing into the shape of a woman, but translucent, floating weightless yet in control of its movements.

  Quite in control. This wraith, for Creaghan was certain that was precisely what it was, extended one arm, fingers like long tendrils wrapped around the Persian warrior’s neck. The ghost’s other hand clamped itself on the dead soldier’s head, and ripped it off.

  “Good Christ!” Creaghan shouted, awestruck.

  The wraith turned then, its attention drawn by his exclamation. For just a moment, he worried that it might do the same to him. But the ghostly woman smiled at him, and he recognized her at once: Lady Catherine Lambert.

  Creaghan remembered her words then, when she spoke to them all from a ravaged mouth, her head severed from her body. Her people were all bound to haunt that clearing until the power that held them, the power that had slaughtered them, was destroyed. But obviously there was more to it than that. Somehow, Lady Catherine had a powerful enough will and sense of self that she was able to make contact with the physical world.

  And now that she had done it, the other members of her expedition who had died there were also invading the clearing. Creaghan spun in a circle, astounded and exhilirated to see that the cavalry had arrived in the form of at least twenty powerful wraiths, ghosts who had a score to settle with the Persian dead, and the force which controlled them.

  “Creaghan!” Colonel Shapiro shrieked just behind him, letting loose a stream of fire from his SA-80 that cut three dead Persians in half. “What the hell are they?”

  Creaghan smiled thinly. “They’re on our side,” he replied. “That’s all you need to know.”

  The Captain blew apart a zombie’s head, and bent to pick up the SA-80 of a fallen human soldier. He didn’t even have time to look to see if it was one of his men, or a stranger. He was too busy just staying alive. After all, the cavalry may have come, but it remained to be seen if they would be able to turn the tide.

  Anastasia swam for the tunnel, and Hellboy stayed close behind her. Just before he entered the underwater passage which pulsed with green light, Hellboy glanced down and saw the stone tablet that had fallen from Arun’s clothing during their skirmish. He almost left it behind, but remembered Lady Catherine’s warning that he would need the thing. He turned, kicked his hooves off the stone wall of the pool, and dove for the tablet.

  Then he followed Anastasia into the tunnel.

  The water churned with the trembling of the Earth, and he had a sense that the chain reaction he had started above was not anywere near over yet. Who knew what delicate balance had been destabilized. The flow of water had already increased. Water apparently flowed into the pool from a tunnel behind them, and out through the tunnel they approached. Eventually, he was certain, it dumped into the lake.

  But the current had strengthened dramatically, and continued to grow with each new tremor. For the first time, Hellboy dared hope that he might get Anastasia out alive. He hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself before, but there was no way she could hold her breath long enough to swim out on her own, and with his hooves, he wasn’t the best swimmer in the world himself. He didn’t even know how far they had to go.

  The tunnel seemed relatively straight and level, and Hellboy wondered how deep the oasis lake was. He tried to calculate how far above the level of the lake they had been when they entered the cave on the hillside above the water, as well as how far they had descended to get to Hazred’s underworld.

  Then he pushed the calculation away — math had never been his forté — and put all his energy into stronger, broader strokes. He watched Anastasia carefully as she swam ahead of him. There was some tempation to be distracted by the beauty of merely watching her move through the water. But not much. Not when he knew she must already be panicking. Hellboy could hold his breath at least twice as long as she, and already he could sense the end of his air supply. It was a ways off yet, three or four minutes at least, but it was there.

  Sixty seconds left for her, Hellboy thought. Give or take.

  The light ahead had grown so bright they couldn’t see any further into the tunnel. It took Hellboy by surprise when the right side of the tunnel opened up to a deep cave into which the underground river swirled and eddied. The cave was the source of the green glow, so bright now that they could barely look at it.

  Hellboy had to grab hold of Anastasia’s hand to keep her from being pulled in by the whirling current. Luckily the flow of the river itself was strong, and pushed them from behind. He looked at her face, and was disturbed by the fear in her darting eyes. Not quite panic. Not yet. But on the verge of surrendering to it, certainly. No time to lose, he thought, and kept swimming.

  A tentacle whipped out from the green, glowing cave and just missed snagging Anastasia. Hellboy put himself between her and the cave, though they were almost past it.

  His eyes had adjusted somewhat to the glare, and suddenly, he could see what was inside that cave. The tentacle had only given part of it away. For the lake monster, the creature he had battled many hours earlier — battled and blinded — lay within. It searched with its tentacles, but could not see them.

  It wasn’t alone in the cave. It was protecting something, a cluster of bulbous green spheres which shone like tiny suns where they stuck together in a corner of the cave. They were the source of the light, and if Hellboy guessed correctly, they were the lake monster’s offspring. Its eggs.

  At once he felt both horror — at the thought that there would be more of the monsters — and sympathy for its parental defensive instincts. Then it snaked out another tentacle, reaching for him, and this time it seemed to have sensed his position correctly. He could fight it, but in the time that would take, Anastasia would have drowned. But what . . .?

  Of course!

  Hellboy held the stone tablet in his left hand. He lifted it up in front of him, holding it away from his body, separating himself from the lake monster. Lady Catherine had told him he would need it, and need it he certainly did. The tentacle waved uncertainly in the water, then began to retract. Concerned that it might still launch an attack on Anastasia, he tucked the tablet under his arm again and began to swim as fast as he could to catch up with her.

  He didn’t have far to go. Just past the cave where the lake monster tended its unborn children, Anastasia thrashed in the water.

  She was drowning.

  Colonel Shapiro was raving. Part of him knew it, and the rest of him didn’t care one bit. The dead — both recent and ancient — were stacked around them in mountains, and zombies crawled over them like an army of ants. They stood atop piles of bodies and leaped down on the few of his troops who had survived thus far. Swords whickered through the air, axes entered flesh and bone with a horrid sound nothing at all like chopping wood.

  Like carrion birds, the vengeful spirits of Lady Catherine’s slaughtered expedition fluttered across the battlefi
eld. They fell upon the walking corpses of the Persian soldiers, cracking their bones as if to savor the marrow. Still the tide of dead warriors rolled in.

  Twenty men, maybe fewer, still lived within that clearing. Shapiro himself, Creaghan, a handful of Egyptians and Brits, and an American named Felix to whom Shapiro had never spoken, despite the fact that the man was in his command.

  He regretted that fact profoundly as he watched Felix die.

  The ghosts were fast, swooping and dipping in the air, dodging among the trees, ripping the dead Persians apart so that sand and bone and linen flew into the clearing and onto the vehicles with almost celebratory abandon.

  Shapiro was raving. Of course he was.

  The SA-80 in his hands, perhaps the fourth one he’d fired, jammed suddenly. Two dead Persians rushed him. One seemed to be madly grinning, although he realized it might be that the damned thing just didn’t have any lips. Shapiro returned the grin, long since having begun the slide down into insanity. He rushed forward rather than wait for them, and the one on the right missed him with a long sword stroke even as the other lifted a long-handled crescent axe.

  The Colonel kicked the axe-wielder in the chest and rammed the butt of his SA-80 into the skull of the swordsman, crushing it. The thing dropped at Shapiro’s feet in a spray of sand. He turned to face the other, but he was too late. Before he could even begin to block, the dead Persian warrior’s axe split Shapiro’s chest, imbedding itself irretrievably in his ribcage. Blood fountained up from the wound onto the face of his attacker. The last thing Shapiro saw was a withered tongue snaking out of a dead, lipless mouth and licking that wound clean.

  “No!” Creaghan shouted as he watched Shapiro fall. “Damn you, no!” He held his finger on the SA-80’s trigger and scythed a cutting spray of bullets across a half-dozen dead Persians. Nearby, a pair of restless ghosts lifted another zombie warrior off the ground and literally tore it apart.

  It wasn’t enough. The wraiths had not turned the tide, only prolonged the inevitable. They were all going to die. Of that, Creaghan was now quite certain.

  In the crumbling underworld village where Hazred once ruled, seven people still lived. There might have been a handful of halflings in the tunnels somewhere, and it was possible they would survive. But the seven in the cavern they had once called home knew that their lives were over.

  Hazred was dead, destroyed, nothing but dust.

  The ground shook, fissures appeared in the walls, floor, and roof high above. Massive hunks of stone shook loose from above and crashed to the cavern floor, crushing people and destroying homes. And the tremors were getting worse.

  At the center of the cavern, eight feet from the heaving, shattered stone floor, was a hole in the world. A hole in the fabric of universal reality, edges burning, crinkling . . . diminishing. The hole was closing. Little by little, without any anchor to perpetuate the power of Mar-Ti-Ku in the world, reality was repairing itself.

  In moments, it had dwindled to no more than a pinprick through which a terrible orange light radiated. The roof of the cavern finally gave way, thousands of tons of rock and earth sliding, pouring down to fill the massive natural chamber. The floor of the cavern bucked and quaked, and surged up to meet the falling roof.

  It is said that nature abhors a vacuum.

  That horrid orange light winked out, the hole ceased to be. The space where it had been was filled as the earth collided and contracted, eradicating any trace of the existence of Hazred or his people.

  The shockwave might have resulted from the convulsions of the earth, or the repulsion of Mar-Ti-Ku. There would never be any way to tell.

  Anastasia was drowning, sucking water into her lungs in greedy gulps as if she had never wanted anything but to die in that underground river. Hellboy was frantic, swimming away from the light and the lake monster, and toward what he hoped would be the exit. He held the tablet in one hand, and dragged Anastasia with the other, praying he could keep the monster away and get Anastasia to the surface in time.

  Then the shockwave hit, the water pressure pounded on his eardrums, and suddenly swimming was redundant. The river surged up behind them, almost seemed to vomit them up through a much wider tunnel which the lake monster had left behind when it first went after Hellboy. The water pressure forced them up into the open lake. They broke the surface and shot several feet above it before splashing back down. Hellboy inhaled vast lungfuls of air as he dragged Anastasia to the shore.

  She wasn’t helping. In fact, she wasn’t moving at all.

  There was a thunderous sound, as if a bomb had gone off somewhere close by. Night had fallen and Creaghan was prepared to feel the slice of a blade at any second. He stood in a rough circle with five other men, the only survivors of that nightmarish massacre, desperately fighting off the onslaught of dead men. Ghosts flitted about their heads. One of the human survivors screamed, and Creaghan knew that he and four others were all that remained to defend themselves.

  Then he heard the explosion, if that’s what it was. He risked a quick glance up above the treeline, and saw the hillside where he and his men had hidden abruptly collapse on itself, bringing acres of desert and tons of sand down after it.

  “Oh, God!” someone shouted behind him, and Creaghan spun to defend himself, holding up his useless weapon to ward off a sword stroke. But there was no sword. No sword, no dead Persian soldier attacking. In the instant of the explosion, the rest of them, all that remained of the lost army of Cambyses, imploded in a shower of sand and began to merge with the desert which had preserved them for so long. The spirits which had aided Creaghan and his comrades retreated into the stretch of trees which were still draped with their tattered entrails.

  It was over. Hundreds of men had died that day, without explanation. Night had fallen. But it was finally over.

  Creaghan let his weapon fall to the ground. Without a word, he had resigned his commission as Captain with MI5.

  Hellboy pumped Anastasia’s chest half a dozen times. He exhaled air into her lungs. He pumped her chest again.

  When water trickled out of her nose, hope ignited within him. A second later, she began to choke, then rolled onto her side and threw up about a gallon of water.

  She groaned, her eyes fluttered open.

  Anastasia looked up at Hellboy, her stomach still lurching, her breath still coming in ragged gasps. Her throat hurt and she felt too weak to move anything. Even in the gathering dark, with his crimson features melding with the night, she couldn’t miss the broad grin on Hellboy’s face.

  It gave her the strength to smile back.

  “You alive?” he asked. Her eyes began to adjust and she could see the outline of his horn stumps against the night sky.

  “Barely,” she replied, her voice harsh and low. “What happened?”

  “I guess I started some kind of chain reaction,” he explained, rather sheepishly.

  “Bloody well right you did,” she teased. “Of course you know you obliterated the archaeological discovery of the century.”

  He brushed damp strands of hair away from her face and Anastasia wanted to hug him but didn’t have the power to sit up.

  “Hey,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “somebody had to do it.”

  EPILOGUE

  —

  “You know, you really should get rid of that goatee,” Anastasia said archly. “It’s so fifties.” “What do you want?” Hellboy asked. “I’m an old-fashionedkind of guy.”

  Anastasia’s smile was painful to him, because he knew it would be a long time before he would see her again. Their lives led them down vastly different paths, and from time to time pushed them together as well. For that, he was very grateful. He was also happy that she smiled at all, after everything they’d been through the previous few days. They had seen a lot of death; Anastasia had lost a lot of friends.

  The noonday sun beat down on them, its heat shimmering over the desert which had swallowed Hazred and his people and absorbed the remains of the los
t army, but left the corpses of hundreds of soldiers to be bagged and tagged by horrified United Nations workers.

  Of the U.N. soldiers who had not made it to the oasis with Colonel Shapiro, no trace had been found. As it had been with the Persians two thousand years before, Hellboy suspected that no trace ever would be found. The sandstorm had taken care of that. It had changed the topography of the desert completely. Their campsite had vanished as well.

  They had spent the morning in the oasis, but far from the carnage — Hellboy, Anastasia, Creaghan, and four other men, two British and two Egyptian — until they heard the familiar pounding rhythm of military helicopters cutting the air. Creaghan and the others had already gone, anxious to be on the first helicopter departing the area. Anastasia had amazed Hellboy by offering to stay behind and help with the cleanup and investigation.

  There wasn’t another woman like her on Earth, he’d often said. And that day, he was painfully aware of the truth of those words.

  Hellboy scratched the stubble on his head and shifted his hooves uncomfortably where they sank into the sand. He wasn’t any good at saying good-bye. Never had been.

  “Thanks again,” Anastasia said.

  “Hellboy, come on! Let’s go!” Liz Sherman shouted from the BPRD chopper. They had arrived several hours after the other helicopters, having finished their mission in Scotland just in time to airlift him home. Professor Bruttenholm fussed over him like any anxious parent. Hellboy had felt a familiar relief when Abe and Liz followed his mentor out of the chopper. His family had arrived. He was going home. The prospect was decidedly bittersweet.