Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (25 page)

“
Son of a bitch
!” yelled Hellboy. That had
hurt
. The stubs of his horns were throbbing and his nose was a fiery starburst of pain. With renewed fury he dug the fingers of his stone hand into the pinky-red hide of the creature and
tore
. However, the thing’s flesh was as tough as fortified rubber, and at first nothing happened. Hellboy gritted his teeth and dug his fingers in deeper, and suddenly the creature’s skin ripped a little. A milky-white ichor, sticky and hot, came trickling out. Hellboy roared in triumph and clawed savagely at the tear. The wound widened, and all at once the milky stuff was
gushing
out, coating Hellboy’s hand. It smelled disgusting, worse than the rotting whale blubber he had smelled once in Iceland and had hoped never to smell again. Even so, he continued to work at the wound, widening it, ripping off chunks of flesh with his bare hands.

The thing screamed and began to thrash more wildly. Hellboy was whipped back and forth in the air. It was like being on the world’s most vomit-inducing fairground ride.

He smashed into the wall of a building again — his left shoulder this time. More glass broke; more rubble fell.

He felt something tightening around his ankle and looked down. Another of the pinky-red serpents, or tentacles, or whatever the hell they were, had emerged from the fissure and was coiling over his still-smoking hoof and up his leg. For an instant, before his temporarily steadying vision once again became a careering blur as he was whipped through the air, he glimpsed a
third
tentacle emerging from the crack.

Great
, he thought. One was bad enough. How many more of these damn things were there?

Suddenly he heard the boom of a gunshot. Clasped by the weaving tentacle many feet above the ground, he twisted his head, trying to focus his vision on the antlike crowd below.

There! Abe and Liz standing with their arms outstretched, weapons drawn. There was another boom and as the whistling screech of the creature suddenly intensified, Hellboy felt the crushing grip around his ankle loosen. Looking down, he saw that one of his friends — and he’d guess it was Abe; he was the best shot of the three of them — had succeeded in cutting the tentacle that had hold of his foot clean in half. The lower section appeared to be in its death throes. It was thrashing from side to side, ichor spraying in all directions, spattering across the fronts of buildings and over the crowd below. Meanwhile the severed top half of the creature unspooled lifelessly from Hellboy’s leg and fell to the ground like a dead snake, landing with a thump in the blue slime.

“
Ha
!” he shouted, and renewed his attack on the creature’s flesh, trying to injure it still further. It screamed and smashed him against the wall again. Hellboy swore and spat out blood that was trickling down the back of his throat, but he didn’t let up. He got the fingers of his stone hand deep into the gushing wound he had created, grasped a flap of skin the size of a large rump steak and pulled upwards with all his might. The flap of skin stretched and then gave, tearing clean off and pulling a sizable lump of flesh with it. There were stringy white things attached to the flesh, veins or tendons maybe. The creature bellowed in pain, the whistling screech it made so loud that windows shattered and people on the ground below clapped their hands over their ears.

Hellboy’s ears were ringing too, and he was covered in ichor. As soon as he felt the thing’s grip around him slacken, he dropped the chunk of flesh he was holding and reached for his gun, which had previously been inaccessible. Slipping his hand beneath the loosening red coil of the creature’s body, he dragged the weapon from its holster. The weight of the revolver, a big-bored, .50-caliber thing that had been especially made for him, felt good in his palm. With no thought for his own safety, he placed the muzzle of the gun against the injured part of the creature — the part that was wrapped, albeit more loosely now, around his waist — and pulled the trigger.

The gun roared, the pink tentacle came apart, and Hellboy fell.

His body turned over once as he plummeted towards the ground. It was not the first time he had fallen from a great height, and he tried to relax, knowing that if he braced himself the pain when he hit would be worse.

He landed on his back, not on the sizzling slime-covered road, but on the buckled roof of the half-consumed yellow car. The car was tilted at a forty-five degree angle, and the full force of Hell-boy’s quarter-ton weight slamming down on it had the same effect as someone karate-chopping a similarly angled piece of wood. With a screeching crunch of metal, the car broke in two, the back end, with Hellboy on top of it, crashing onto the ground. The impact rattled Hellboy’s bones and caused his teeth to clash together. Damn, he was gonna be sore in the morning. But for now he had work to do.

He allowed himself a couple of seconds to catch his breath, and then he propped himself up on one elbow. The fissure, the crack, the rift, the mouth, the eye — whatever the hell that thing that had opened up in the center of London actually
was
— was directly behind him now, mere inches, in fact, from the little ponytail at the back of his head. As he had fallen, Hellboy had managed to keep hold of his gun (he
always
kept hold of his gun), and he twisted round with it now in his hand, the tortured metal of the wrecked car creaking in protest as he shifted his weight on its roof. He pointed his weapon directly into the impenetrable blackness of the fissure and he began to blast away, firing slugs into God only knew where.

Eventually he stopped.”Let that be a lesson to you,” he growled. This close to the fissure he could feel the strange sucking pull of it, could feel its icy chill, not on his skin but deep inside him, where the nightmares, if he should ever have any, would reside.

He didn’t know whether shooting the “eye” had made the slightest bit of difference, but at least the corrosive blue slime had stopped trickling out of it, and at least the third tentacle — the only one that he or his friends hadn’t blasted to bits — had disappeared back to where it had come from. The other two tentacles were lying like shattered drainpipes on the ground. The slime wasn’t affecting them, as it affected everything else on this side of the fissure, but maybe something else was — the London air or the daylight, perhaps — because already the tentacles were turning the dull gray of old cement. They were withering too, becoming as brittle as autumn leaves. If the present rate of decay was maintained, Hellboy doubted there would be anything left in an hour or two.

Aching pretty much all over, and coated with the creature’s life fluid, which was now drying to a foul-smelling gum on his skin, Hellboy clambered off the roof of the car and lowered himself to the ground. He picked his way carefully back to where Abe and Liz were standing across the carpet of coats and jackets, treading on the areas where the layers of material were so thick that the blue slime hadn’t yet burned all the way through to the surface.

So intent was he on not adding to his already considerable physical woes that he didn’t realize he was receiving what amounted to a hero’s homecoming until he was almost back on safe ground. Suddenly he tuned in to the noise, and looked up to see that everyone was clapping and cheering and grinning at him. There were whistles and whoops of delight. Liz stepped forward.

“Despite what the papers say, I think they love you,” she said.

Chapter 11

As he worked his way through the jubilant crowd, wincing at the congratulatory back slaps raining in on his bruised and battered body, Hellboy’s phone started to ring. He fished it from the pouch on his belt and held it to his ear.

“Hellboy, it’s Rachel Turner,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Hey, Rachel,” Hellboy said, “what’s up?”

She sounded under strain, but in control. She informed him that reports were coming in of fissures opening up in midair all over London.

“Yeah, we’ve just encountered one firsthand,” Hellboy said. He told her what had happened at Tottenham Court Road.

“Jeez,” she said. “We’re getting reports of creatures coming through in other places too — all different kinds from the sounds of it.” She hesitated a moment, as if trying to gather herself. “So what do we do about it, Hellboy? This is your call.”

“Just do exactly what you’d do if I weren’t here,” Hellboy said soothingly. “Evacuate the areas where the cracks have appeared, and have them monitored constantly by armed personnel. Get everyone in on this, Rachel. Call the government, the secret service, the army, and the police. Make them realize that this is an emergency — no, more than that: make them realize that this could be the
direst
emergency this country has ever faced. We need everyone working together. We need a unanimous promise that a coordinated containment operation will be implemented immediately. You got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Rachel said, responding to the authority in his voice.

“Okay, good,” Hellboy said. “As for me, I’ll be on the front line with Abe and Liz — which means I’ll need a comprehensive list of locations where the fissures have opened up, plus details of exactly what kinds of creatures have emerged from each of them.”

“I’ll have that information faxed to your hotel as soon as possible.”

“Great,” Hellboy said. He was still walking through the crowd, Abe and Liz in tow, phone clamped to his ear. “Once we know exactly what we’re up against, we’ll prioritize the threats and deal with them as best we can. The three of us will split into two operating units with military backup — Abe and Liz in one and me in the other.”

“I’ll organize that for you,” Rachel said.

“But one thing you gotta make the army guys realize, Rachel, is that this is a B.P.R.D.-led operation. Some of the things that have emerged from those fissures are
bound
to be impervious to conventional firepower. So I don’t want people getting all gung ho and taking unnecessary risks. I want the casualty rate to be as low as possible. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Rachel said.

Hellboy was pretty much through the crowd now. He lengthened his stride. “By the way,” he said, “what
is
the casualty rate so far? Do we have any numbers?”

“Hang on,” said Rachel, “I’ll check.” She was back thirty seconds later. “We’ve got twenty-seven confirmed fatalities to date,” she said, “but there are ... things loose all over the place, Hellboy. It’s going to go higher, no matter how fast we move on this.”

“I know it,” said Hellboy grimly. “Just do your best, okay?”

“Will do,” she said, and let out a breath. “Can I just ask — do we know what these fissures are exactly?”

“They’re cracks in the dam,” Hellboy said. “We gotta plug ‘em for now, but we’ve also gotta figure a way of sealing the whole thing up for good. Otherwise ...”

“The entire structure will collapse and we’ll be swept away in the torrent?” guessed Rachel.

“You got it,” Hellboy said quietly.

He heard her swallow. In a slightly shaky voice she said, “Before you go there’s just one more thing. We think we’ve got a lead on the torso killings. Our guys have tracked down a vagrant who claims to have information on one of the murdered men.”

“Is he on the level?” Hellboy asked.

“I think so — as much as you can tell anyway. He asked to speak to you, but I guess you’re a bit busy just now.”

Hellboy thought about it. “Can you get him to the hotel in the next half hour?”

“Sure, if you think it’s worth it?”

“Do it,” said Hellboy. “If there’s even the slightest chance of finding out who’s behind all this or where they’re hiding, then we gotta take it. Okay, well, if that’s everything ... ?”

“It is,” said Rachel.

“Then you better go and make those calls,” Hellboy said. “Catch you later.”

As soon as he cut the connection, Abe and Liz started to ask questions, but Hellboy held up a hand. “Just give me one more minute, guys.”

He called directory inquiries and got the number for the Three Cups. Then he called the pub and asked to speak to Cassie. Abe and Liz waited patiently while he briefly explained to her what was happening and told her to sit tight.

“I’ll come for you when I can, okay?” he said. He listened to her response and grinned. “Yeah, you too. Stay safe.”

On the walk back to the hotel he filled Abe and Liz in on his conversation with Rachel Turner and their plans to combat the threat.

“It worries me that we’re still not getting to the real heart of the problem, though,” said Liz. “We’re only tackling the symptoms, not the cause.”

“It’s all we can do for now,” said Hellboy. “Damage limitation.”

“Yeah, I know,” she sighed, “but still...”

“Maybe this homeless guy can lead us to our enemy,” said Abe.

The homeless guy was called Duggie. He was waiting nervously in the hotel foyer with a B.P.R.D. agent when they arrived. Duggie was tall and scrawny, with bad teeth and a bird’s nest of filthy-looking hair. One of his eyelids was red and swollen, as if it was infected.

To the disapproval of the snooty hotel manager, Mr. Trenchard, Hellboy ordered a pot each of tea and coffee and then, accompanied by Liz and Abe, led Duggie into the hotel bar.