The Fire Wolves

by Tim Lebbon

  Mario had been talking with a young woman for a couple of minutes, trying to persuade her to lend them her car. They conversed rapidly in Italian, Mario’s pleas accompanied by expansive gestures, his voice raised. He pointed ahead of them at the volcano, then turned and waved his hands towards where they had come from. Traffic on the other side of the road slowed but did not stop, and Hellboy was keeping his eyes open for police or army. There was no time now to deal with them.

  Adamo stirred, and Hellboy felt a flush of warmth radiating from the old man.

  “Mario,” he said.

  Eyebrows raised, Mario glanced back. He looked at Adamo, turned back to the woman, and then nodded at Hellboy’s gun.

  “Oh crap,” Hellboy said. He stepped forward and pulled the gun, keeping it aimed down at his foot. At a word from Mario, the woman looked at the gun and backed away. She threw Mario her keys, muttered something, ducked into her car, and pulled out her handbag. She kept backing away, and not once did she take her eyes from Hellboy.

  “What did you tell her?” Hellboy asked.

  “Does it matter? We have a car.”

  “Yeah. You drive.” Hellboy opened the back door, easing Adamo inside and climbing in after him. “I don’t think we have long,” he said as Mario dropped into the driver’s seat.

  “The police will be after us now,” Mario said.

  “Least of our problems.”

  “The other two are dead?”

  “Very.”

  Mario started the car, shoving it angrily into gear and hitting the gas.

  “Mario?” He glanced at Hellboy in the rearview mirror. “We need to get there in one piece to make this work.”

  “All my family are dying, Hellboy,” he said.

  Hellboy wrapped the seatbelt around Adamo, clicking it tight and resting his hand on the old man’s chest. The first flush of heat, the first sign of fire, and Hellboy would shoot until his head was gone. Perhaps that would slow the fire wolf change down, perhaps not, but right now it was all he had.

  “The fire wolves stole the skin and flesh of your Esposito ancestors, Mario. But that doesn’t make them Espositos. You should still be proud of your family, and you’re fighting for those left alive.”

  Mario nodded once, concentrating on the road ahead.

  Kid’s amazing, Hellboy thought. Since leaving Amalfi, the man had barely paused to question what was happening. He saw an end, a solution, and he worked towards that.

  “I’m going to stop this blight on your family,” Hellboy said. “I am.”

  “And what will be left?” Mario asked. But then he shrugged, and offered Hellboy a weak smile in the rearview mirror.

  A few minutes later, over a rise in the land, they saw Vesuvius.

  Adamo whined in his sleep. The ghost sighed. Hellboy smiled. Almost there.

  “How close do we need to get?” Mario asked.

  “No idea. This is my first time too.” Hellboy looked at Adamo, but the old man offered no easy answers. He was stirring a little more now, mumbling, eyes rolling behind closed eyelids. Having nightmares. “Our priority’s finding Franca.”

  Mario sighed, slowing the car slightly.

  “What?”

  “That’s just . . .” Mario shook his head, sighing heavily again.

  “What?”

  “One more level of difficulty. Hellboy, how many times can we be lucky? If I hadn’t clipped their car just right, nudged it into that canal . . . that was pure chance. How long will he stay like that? If he turns into the fire wolf again, he’ll kill me and maybe you, and it’ll all be over. We have to get to the volcano and put him in, if we can, and putting Franca between us and that—”

  “If they put Franca in first, the eruption stops and they go to ground. We lose them.”

  No, the ghost said. Let them put her in, then we track them!

  “I can’t allow any of that.”

  Mario seemed to be fighting with his doubts and fears, but the car kept moving. The vehicle picked up speed again.

  “So how the hell do we find her?” Mario asked.

  “Hmm,” Hellboy said. He looked at Adamo, twitching more and more beneath the tight seatbelt. He leaned forward and looked up at the cloud rising from the cradle of Vesuvius. “Dunno.”

  “Excellent.”

  Ten minutes later, however, they found the beginnings of the trail they would follow.

  A trail of the dead.

  —

  Franca cried as the soldiers burned.

  The roadblock was there to help people, to keep the curious and the stupid away from the slopes of Vesuvius, and now the fire wolves were killing the soldiers who manned it. Franca had heard a few shots, the reaction of shocked, terrified men. But the gunfire had soon ended, and by the time the fire wolves had extinguished back into human form and returned to the lead car, the stench of burning meat was everywhere. Calvo drove them through the roadblock, and Franca recoiled as she saw the greasy, spitting fires eating what had so recently been people.

  “Quiet,” Sophia said. “Please.”

  “Screw you!” Franca yelled. She struck out at the old woman but Sophia was ready this time, catching her hand and squeezing her wrist, then sending a pulse of heat into her flesh. Franca squealed and snatched her hand back, looking at the reddened skin and the shrivelled heads of burnt hairs.

  “They’d die anyway,” Sophia said. “If we didn’t do this, they would die, and many more with them.”

  Sophia turned away, sickened by the old woman’s attempt to explain, to justify. She bit back the tears and closed her eyes. They were past the roadblock now, and she could feel the road starting to climb. The lower slopes of Vesuvius were gentle, and they were on their way up.

  “It’ll take you,” Franca said, because she could think of no way of striking back at Sophia and the others. “It’ll smell you and eat you, and somehow it’ll get you.”

  “Never has before,” Sophia said mildly.

  Franca’s head rattled against the window as Uncle Calvo steered the car from a paved road and onto a rougher track. She caught the first whiff of something wrong with the air, and she heard Sophia gasp.

  —

  One of the army trucks had caught fire, and it was blazing brightly as they passed by. The other wagon had not yet ignited, but several smaller fires were scattered between them. Hellboy recognized the smell of burning people.

  “Drive on,” he said.

  Mario did so without speaking.

  Minutes later they caught their first smell of the gases thrown up by the volcano. It was a rotten, sulphurous stench, and it made Hellboy gag.

  Adamo shivered and came awake. His eyes were wide, his hands rising to the belt across his chest, and he looked around as if unaware of where he was. A word tumbled from his mouth, a language that Hellboy had never heard before. Perhaps it was a name.

  “Almost home,” Hellboy said, pressing the muzzle of his gun against Adamo’s head.

  The old man was still shaking. He glanced at Hellboy, the fear in his eyes genuine.

  “There!” Mario said. He pointed uphill to his left, and Hellboy looked. He could just make out a ball of flame rising from something further up the slope, billowing up and out from a recent explosion. “That’s them!”

  “How can you be sure?” Hellboy asked.

  “I can’t. But it’s the right direction.”

  He turned off the main road into the mouth of a rougher trail, knocking down a couple of gears and then flooring the pedal again.

  Adamo continued muttering in the unknown language.

  “What’s he saying?” Mario asked.

  “Not a clue. Hey you, what’s he saying?”

  A language I heard so long ago, the ghost said. Demon whispers. Rumors from the dark. But rumors of things I have never known.

  “Yeah, well, you’ve been dead a long time.”

  Hellboy leaned forward and looked through the windscreen up at the mountain before them. The great, wide colum
n of smoke and dust rose from the shattered mouth of Vesuvius like an extension of the mountain itself, so huge that its movement was as imperceptible as that of an hour hand on a clock. Lightning played high up in the sky, jagged arcs that danced across and through the clouds, and lower down was the unmistakeable glow of fire.

  “Can’t see any lava,” Hellboy said.

  “It’s the pyroclastic flow that’ll get us first,” Mario said.

  “Comforting.” It was awe-inspiring, and Hellboy could not help watching in wonder. It was rare that an eruption such as this happened anywhere, and he suspected there would be helicopters buzzing the slopes higher up. What would they think of this car and its foolish occupants, climbing the gentle slopes towards Vesuvius’s deadly mouth? He knew what he’d think.

  He glanced back at Adamo, and the old man had started smoking from his mouth. No, not smoking . . . steaming. He coughed up filthy canal water and it hissed into the atmosphere.

  “We don’t have long,” Hellboy said.

  “I’m going as fast as—”

  “I mean it, Mario.”

  They passed another burnt out army truck, several more bodies scattered around, and at least they knew they were on the right road.

  “Hold on,” Mario said. He dropped a gear and floored it, and the engine started to scream. The car shot forward, protesting at the misuse, but still it carried them higher.

  No way we can get close to the crater, Hellboy thought. We’ll suffocate long before we get there. But minutes later, after the road had given way to little more than a rough trail, and the car kicked stones and dust behind them as it struggled to maintain a grip, they came to the first vent.

  It was a fresh wound in the land, ragged and sharp-edged, with the debris of its birth scattered all around, from gravel to boulders almost as large as the car. Smoke rose from the hole as if forced under pressure, and from a distance they could see the unmistakeable glow of immense heat inside.

  “Lava channel?” Mario asked, and Hellboy could hear the hope in his voice.

  “Maybe. But we can’t just put him in here.”

  “Why not?” He stopped the car. Motionless and with the engine idling, they could hear the sounds from outside. Roaring, whistling, cracking, and the fine rattle of dust pattering down across the car’s bodywork.

  “Franca first,” Hellboy said. “Besides, the lava down there is flowing away from the volcano, and that might not work. We might need to put him right inside.”

  No way to tell, the spirit said. No way, and we cannot risk—

  “Okay, okay.”

  “The crater?” Mario gasped. “We’ll suffocate—”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Hellboy said, nodding. “Just get us closer, and higher.”

  “What about him?” Mario asked.

  Hellboy looked at Adamo, and he was wondering the same thing. But the old man seemed to be dreaming, still affected by his dunking in the canal.

  Hellboy hoped they were nightmares.

  CHAPTER 18

  —

  Vesuvius

  —

  Uncle Calvo continued driving even though he screamed. The woman in the seat next to him had curled up into a shivering ball, and Sophia had dug her fingers into the car’s upholstery, head pressed back, tendons standing out on her neck.

  The car ahead of them slewed back and forth across the road, as if steered by a child.

  They’re trying to get me right to the crater! Franca thought. They were terrified, and she hoped it was all to do with coming home.

  She took her chance. Moving as quickly as she could she reached across Sophia and around Uncle Calvo’s shoulder, flipping up the door lock on his door that mastered the rest of the car. Then she fell back into her seat and plucked at the door handle, pushing against it as it opened, rolling out of the car and bringing her arms up to protect her face as she fell. She hadn’t taken time to judge the speed they were travelling, nor the terrain, and she struck the rough ground with a staggering impact. Her arms were both smacked against her face and she tasted blood. She rolled twice and came to a halt, and the car continued on without her much further than she could have hoped.

  They hardly know I’ve gone, she thought, and then the brake lights blinked at her.

  Standing, she could only look in wonder for a couple of seconds. Without the car restricting her view, the whole wonder of the eruption was before her, and it was like another world. Further up the hillside, past the second car, was another open vent, gases hissing out in an opaque curtain. Above that she could see great cracks in the shoulders of the land.

  I can end all this right now, she thought, looking at the vent and imagining tumbling inside. It wouldn’t be too painful, surely? A moment of heat, and she’d be dead the instant she struck the lava. But dead how? Would her heart explode from the shock. Would her brains boil? Or would the intense heat melt the flesh from her bones, giving her just that brief instant of measureless agony before reaching inside and snuffing out her existence?

  The two cars exploded almost simultaneously. She saw the flames of the fire wolves, enraged by her escape, erupting seconds before the explosions, and she knew her time had come. But like anyone with any sort of life, she craved a final few impossible seconds, and as death faced her, she realized that she would do anything she could to grab them.

  So she turned and ran downhill. Metal clanged behind her as car doors came off, and then, above the continuous roar of the volcano, she heard a different whisper of fire, and saw her own shadow thrown before her. It started long, but quickly shrank as the fire wolves closed in.

  When she tripped, Franca knew that was the end of her. But at least she’d tried.

  And then a car veered around a ridge below, spitting gravel as it roared uphill towards her, and in the driver’s seat sat Mario.

  Behind him, in the back of the car, flames.

  —

  There was little warning when Adamo went hot. One second he seemed to be unconscious, mumbling slightly in that old, unknown language, and the next—with the ghost suddenly screaming in Hellboy’s head and the mountain spewing fire and gas around them—he was on fire.

  The fire wolf went for Mario, not Hellboy. It reached out and closed its flame claws around the driver’s seat, but Mario leaned far forward, and only the headrest caught fire.

  Hellboy reached into the heart of the thing with his right hand and clung on, pulling hard against its flexible innards, leaning into the corner of the back seat to drag it as far from Mario as he could. With his other hand, he scrabbled at the door lever.

  “Franca!” Mario shouted, and the fire wolf hissed.

  Hellboy looked between the front seats, and what he saw froze his breath. Franca was running, and she tripped just as she saw them, sliding on her chest and belly down the gravel slope. Behind her, eight fire wolves were streaking down the slope away from two burning cars. They were gaining on her rapidly, and the first was seconds away.

  “Go,” Mario said, gripping the wheel and pressing his face against it. “Hellboy, go.”

  Hellboy knew instantly what Mario meant. Beyond the burning cars there was another rent in the land, gas and smoke hissing upward under tremendous pressure.

  “Mario—”

  “No choice.” His voice was calm now, quiet, and even when the Adamo-wolf lashed out and burnt a weal across his scalp, he did not let out a sound. He was determined, and Hellboy knew that talking would do no good.

  As they approached Franca, speeding up rather than slowing down, Mario tweaked the steering to aim at the fire wolves.

  Hellboy spat at Adamo’s fire wolf struggling beneath and around his clasping right hand, and he heard a sizzle as the spit struck. Then the fingers of his left hand caught the door catch and he pulled.

  As he fell, he opened his right hand and freed the fire wolf.

  But the demon was not finished with him yet. Hellboy felt a searing pain in his left leg as he tumbled from the car, an internal
fire that seemed to settle in his bones and travel through his entire body. It hurt so much that he forgot to break his fall, and his head thumped at the ground, his body rolling and shoulders twisting as the momentum scraped him uphill.

  It’s still with us! Into the flames, Hellboy, throw yourself in now and take it—

  “Shut up!”

  The fire wolf growled and opened its black-mawed mouth, snapping for Hellboy’s face. He brought his arm up just in time and fire-teeth pierced, settling in the bone and joining the fire from his leg.

  Franca struggled to her feet just as the car struck the first fire wolf pursuing her. Mario must have missed her by inches, and the vehicle flung the burning thing high into the air, careering into the others and spilling them across the hillside. They hissed and roared, unhurt but angered. Some of them streaked after the car, but four converged on Franca . . . and surrounded her. She stepped this way and that, but the things prevented her escape, careful not to burn her but determined never to let her go.

  The car skidded across the rough road, spinning on the gravel, wheels smoking as they sought purchase, and it fishtailed as Mario drove it hard back down the hillside. Three fire wolves clasped onto the bodywork, their flames streaked back by the wind force, but another seemed to have smashed its way into the car.

  Mario’s hair was on fire.

  “No . . .” Hellboy muttered, and the Adamo fire wolf burning into his arm opened its mouth to utter a rumbling laugh.

  “Funny, is it?” Hellboy asked. He punched at it with his right hand. “Funny?” He punched again, growling, bitter, angry and hurting.

  “Mario!” Franca screamed, because she had seen what was becoming of her cousin.

  Hellboy saw too, and in the young man’s blazing hair and melting face, he perceived such a grimace of determination—and hatred—that he knew he had to do everything he could to help Mario go through with his final heroic, desperate act. So he punched the fire wolf again, and grabbed hold of its insubstantial insides, and as the car roared downhill he leapt into its path.

  Hellboy knew that this was going to hurt.

  But they were all out of time.

  —