Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (28 page)

It was noisier here, too. Now and again they would hear a shriek--maybe rage, maybe pain, maybe madness--and the walls and cavern kept the echoes alive forever.

Soon a new sound whispered around the corners, then rapidly began to build with a fearsome energy: footsteps, a multitude of them, on the run.

"Guns out," Hellboy said. "I've got a feeling these might be the ones that were supposed to intercept us the other night."

They stood back-to-back and triangulated, Liz at his left shoulder and Abe at his right. The way things echoed here, it was hard to tell exactly where the stampede was coming from.

"And remember," he added, in case anyone had forgotten how the armored car's crew had fallen,
"don't
let these things get close enough to bite."

Moments later a group of bottom-dwellers--there had to be at least thirty of them--poured out of the passageway between two of the baroque black walls ahead of him. They may have been lean and leathery, but there was nothing feeble about them. They looked able-bodied enough to do damage--latter-day disciples who'd arrived long after the Berliners littering the caverns and streets, or maybe those that Tartarus had ensnared and then converted.

"We've got more back here, too," Abe said.

Hellboy cursed and started to aim. Flanked from two sides, they couldn't handle this simply by stepping back and letting Liz broil them as they came head-on. This was happening too fast, and she needed time to get control, and Abe was too close to risk it if she didn't. No, they'd have to do this the messy way.

At his shoulders, they started shooting at the attackers coming up from behind.

Abe and Liz carried nine-millimeter automatics with high-capacity magazines. In one sense Hellboy was at a disadvantage, stuck with a six-shooter after all, but then, what it lacked in capacity it made up for in firepower. It could put rounds through a cinderblock wall as though it were cardboard. Flesh and bone were no barriers at all.

He chose his shots carefully as they came, didn't fire until he could take them lined up one after another, five and six deep, then he would squeeze the trigger and drop them by the handful, blasting through the chest of the first one, the huge round tearing out his back and into the next one, and so on, like watching them fall to a reaper's scythe.

Behind him, Abe and Liz were firing more quickly, brass casings bouncing underfoot across the stone. Men, women, and dear god even children...without the advantages of night and surprise they had no chance, yet they kept coming no matter how many fell around them, hurled into harm's way by masters to whom they were expendable.

The gunfire rolled through the darkened canyons in overlapping echoes, and Hellboy was already feeling sick with revulsion by the time he dug into his pocket for a speedloader to feed the revolver's cylinder another six rounds. His bullets, Abe's bullets, Liz's...they were only finishing the work begun years ago, decades ago. Bodies crumpled and disintegrated, they came apart and splashed the streets with blood and bile. He cursed at the senselessness of it. This was Hell's idea of sport, idle amusement. Like throwing water balloons at them.

Ahead of him, the last survivors were starting to fan out--one bullet, one kill now. With his gun reloaded for the third time, he moved forward, saving his shots for the ones that looked like they might be trying to slip around and come at them from the side. The ones directly in front he let get close enough to punch or backhand, swatting them to the ground and grimacing at the feel of breaking bones.

He heard an impact and a burst of breath, caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. He glanced around, saw that one of the group from behind had gotten through, close enough to take Liz down with a flying tackle. She was trying to stiff-arm him up and away, the top of her pistol wedged lengthwise across his open mouth, the way you'd block an epileptic from biting his tongue.

He reached in opposite directions--fired at his nearest attacker while crushing the neck of Liz's assailant, then wrenching him off her, hurling him at two more to send them sprawling with knees shattered backwards.

"Let's get moving!" he shouted, and made sure Liz and Abe were both upright and ready to go before rushing forward. Except for a few stragglers and wounded, the path ahead was clear, if littered with bodies and parts, strewn about like the aftermath of a bombing. Step light enough, fast enough, and you could almost fool yourself into thinking they were something else underfoot.

They sprinted past black walls scored with filigree and rivets, and openings into corridors as dim as sewers. Once they'd run far enough to put these behind them, they came to a kind of open plaza, with long views all around. Back the way they'd come, the last of their pursuers had given up the chase, still milling about the middle of the street the equivalent of a block away or more, not even showing an inclination to take cover as they were picked off one by one, at leisure. Aim, fire, watch them drop. There was no triumph in it, and it had even gone beyond the point at which Hellboy could think of them as mercy killings.

Liz fired until empty and the slide of her pistol locked open, then she hunched forward with both hands braced on her knees.

"What was the
point
of all that?" she said. "It was nothing but a slaughter, and they just kept coming."

"The way you're looking right now--that
was
the point of it," he told her softly. "Just to get under your skin."

"Well, it worked," she said.

He knew how she felt, had hated every moment, being forced to render so many bodies into pulp and kindling. The kids were the worst. And there was no way to hold accountable the ones responsible for it.

But in lieu of anything better, Matthias Herzog would suffice.

They found him on a throne in a hall fit for mad kings.

If they'd wanted, they could have spent weeks in this section of Tartarus alone, exploring and mapping and charting the apparent purposes of each edifice. Most seemed made for worship--their version of it, at least--topped with bell towers that soared from the sanctuary roofs on piers of malignant blue-black stone.

But to Hellboy's eye, one building looked different from the others, as if made to serve other needs. Its appearance was more primeval, its base flowing outward like slag, and into its outer walls they'd cut niches for statues, hundreds of them in apparent homage to their rulers or to themselves. The steps were fractured slabs, as if to test the mettle of all who dared to ascend them, and over the doors was a hollow in which burned a sulphuric yellow flame.

"You think it's here?" Abe said. "The scroll?"

"You think this place needs bank vaults?" Hellboy said. "If they brought it down here at all, they brought it down to wait for something. And
this
is a place for planning wars. Not praying for the outcome." He looked back at Liz, who'd gone very quiet since finding the dead French girl, and almost totally silent after they'd been forced to gun down so many attackers. "You doing okay?"

"I don't know what I am, H.B.," she said. "I just know I'll be better when I'm out of here."

He shoved the doors wide and in they went.

There were no bodies here but one, and he waited for them at the far end of the hall. Half the length of a football field to reach a throne built for something that had never occupied it. The man in it now was a poor substitute, mortal flesh and bone, and withered almost beyond recognition, although he carried one last great joke played upon him. His left arm, lost on a battlefield long ago and far away, then slowly restored from infancy to manhood as a promise of power, had continued to grow. It hung from his misshapen shoulder like a knotty club, tipping him forever to one side--not so large he would be anchored to one spot, but a grotesque weight he would have to drag behind him. He had the festering scrapes and sores to prove it.

Hellboy, still many paces away, lifted his right hand and made a fist. "Get past a certain size, they start to turn impractical, don't they?"

Matthias Herzog said nothing. The only way Hellboy knew he was still alive was the reverberant sound of his breath, like a whisper of wind forced through dried corn-husks.

Abe, he'd noticed, had drifted toward the right side of the hall, taking Liz with him. The same yellow fires as over the entrance burned in a row along the walls as well, but smaller, in receptacles like oil lamps. Abe seemed drawn to something above them--carvings, they looked like, panels of them, but in the dancing light and shadows Hellboy couldn't make out the details.

He slowed, though, as he approached the throne, inspecting the floor ahead with care, and the ceiling too. He doubted there were traps--couldn't imagine the builders anything but secure in their invincibility--but sometimes caution was a virtue, a hard-earned lesson he still forgot sometimes.

"Hellboy," Abe said quietly, urgently, and Liz came running back over to him.

She put her hand on his shoulder and pulled, made him stoop so she could put her mouth to his ear. "Take off your coat," she whispered. "Belt too. Everything."

"How come?"

"Because if Herzog's as half-blind as the rest of the old ones, he can't see you yet. I don't know what he can hear, or understand of English, but I don't think he's seen you yet. You can
use
that..."

As he left them on the floor behind him, the outer trappings of his life, Hellboy began to understand. The clothes make the man, and
un
make the demon--he'd known this for as long as he could remember. It had been his tactic, however feeble, for reassuring those who might be prone to fear him.

But here it would be a liability. Here it was better to be feared.

Better to approach the throne not as something pretending to be a man, but in the body he was born in, the fury of his color undiminished.

His hooves clicked upon the brittle floor. He squared his shoulders and let his breath rumble deep in his chest, and with every step let himself grow back into the demon.

The throne.
It could've been his if he'd wanted it. He could cast off this pitiful pretender, tear apart the fragile body and decorate the hall with the pieces, then wait for the doors between worlds to open.

But that was not his nature.

Although Herzog didn't need to know this.

He shot his left hand forward and seized the wattled throat; thrust his huge right hand out flat, demanding what was his with a wordless roar. He leaned in close, almost nose to nose, eye to milky, opaque eye. Under hair like sparse gray weeds, Matthias Herzog's scalp was as yellowed as tallow, and looked just as likely to melt. Behind a beard as patchy as what remained on his skull, his mouth smelled of rot.

If he let himself, if he looked at Herzog as a man rather than a monster, Hellboy could almost feel sympathy for him, as he would for anyone in this state. But all that went away as soon as he reminded himself of what Herzog was: He'd bred babies for the fire. He'd give the whole world over to the fire. He'd led hundreds, maybe thousands, down his path.

And he smiled. Into a pitiless red face, Herzog smiled.

"Ist es Zeit?"
he wheezed. Is it time?

"Ja,"
Hellboy answered.
"Jawohl."

Herzog sighed with satisfaction, the pleasure of a job well done, and in a display as humanly painful as anything Hellboy had seen in years, let his ugly tree branch of an arm tumble to the floor, then dragged himself off the throne after it. He turned then, back to the throne, grunting as he heaved a section of its seat upward on unseen hinges.

In the hollow lay the titanium case, stolen from Hellboy's wrist almost a week ago. He could have grabbed it, but why bother--every movement Herzog made looked to be an excruciating effort. Let him finish what he started, even if it ground his bones to splinters.

Hellboy took the case when offered; found it unlocked but undamaged, the scroll inside looking no worse for its detours.

Leaving Herzog gasping on the floor for now, he joined Abe and Liz at the wall.

"What's over here?" he asked.

"Past and present, some of it," Abe said. "And one possible future."

In the jaundiced flickering of the flames beneath each one, he began to see the carvings for what they were. Scenes and tableaus cut into rock, they served the same purpose as stained glass windows and cave art: telling a story that must be preserved, depicting events to come so they'll be that much more likely to happen.

Such plans they'd had for the scroll.

The first scene in which Hellboy spotted it, it was in the possession of a horned figure shown giving it to some sort of holy man who looked a bit like a pope, and then again he didn't. False pope, anti-pope, rival pope, none of the above. Maybe some figure yet to emerge, still biding his time in obscurity. His power was evident enough, if not his identity or position. Other panels followed, other holy men--by their headgear you shall know them. In their raised hands they clenched the scroll, but he couldn't tell who spoke in endorsement of it and who spoke in denunciation. Each looked as furious as the one before.

The armies came next, the rallied faithful, although it wasn't clear what they were faithful to, or if they even knew for sure. Pogroms and persecutions, jihads and crusades. The dead piled up like mountains and blood poured from the sky and the door to Hell burst its locks.