Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (9 page)

The skies were clear in the chilly autumn night, and she found it hard to look away. If they came, she feared they would come not like doves but like missiles.

She was inside the armored car then, a cross between an ambulance and a bank vault, Hellboy practically tossing her in the way men in cartoons pitch noisy cats out the door in the middle of the night, and then Abe was right behind her, with H.B. bringing up the rear, the titanium case bouncing at the end of its chain as if it were no more to him than a trinket on a charm bracelet, and the guard was pushing the doors closed and Hellboy turned and pulled them the rest of the way, two bone-rattling impacts and a sequence of sharp metallic clacks as he engaged the locks.

And they were in. Safe.

He stood framed by the doorway, staring at her peering behind him.

"What are you looking at?" he asked.

"Just making sure you cleared your tail," she said, and burst into laughter that was more relief than anything. "Because if you didn't, I don't think you'd even realize."

A moment later they heard and felt the slam of the front side door as the guard jumped back in the cab, and the armored car surged forward into traffic they couldn't see.

"So what's the plan here?" she asked once they were settled into the seats. "I feel like I'm in a hazing. You guys have grabbed me up but I don't know where I'm going."

While they'd been waiting in the museum lobby, Kate Corrigan had already filled her in on the Masada Scroll, so she'd been apprised of that much. And that the end goal--until opposing factions in the Vatican had no more reason to antagonize each other--was to get it back to BPRD headquarters, where the scroll could be safely stored inside the old fireproof bunker where she'd spent so many long days and nights weathering the turmoil of adolescence. The prison of her own making, she'd thought it on good days; on bad days, it was just the dungeon. Burn up enough bedrooms during accidents and bad dreams, and you get a reputation.

But for traveling back to the States, Hellboy had decided that flying was out of the question. They had to cover all that distance under the assumption that they might be attacked with the same ferocity that had befallen the Vatican Archives, by assailants to whom altitude apparently meant nothing. On the ground, they might have a fighting chance--it was, after all, the reason she was here--but in the sky they would be vulnerable to the point of suicide. After fireballs at 36,000 feet, and the inevitable crash, there wouldn't be enough of the team left to scrape up with a shovel.

Surface travel it would have to be, then. With the main objective getting the scroll out of Rome and, for its first way station, to a BPRD safehouse in England. Once there, on secure ground, they could work out a method for moving it across the ocean.

Even so, Rome to England wouldn't be an easy jaunt. A few months earlier, they might have motored north out of Italy and into France, then headed for the western coast and taken the English Channel Tunnel. Not now, though. It was mid-October, with snow already falling in the Alps, and they could ill afford to risk getting stranded on a mountain pass in the north of Italy or the south of France.

Under the circumstances, the best way out of Rome lay at the end of a twenty-mile drive southwest from the Vatican: the Mediterranean. Earlier in the day, Hellboy had arranged for a charter yacht that would be waiting for them on the other end of this armored car ride, at the docks of Ostia. It would take them west across the sea, out the Straits of Gibraltar, then up past Portugal and the tip of Spain, and ultimately to the harbor of Falmouth, on England's southwest coast. From there, they could motor to the BPRD safehouse near Bodmin, in the middle of Cornwall. Here the scroll should be secure enough for the time being in the basements, while they finalized the rest of the journey...which, with luck, Kate and the British team would already have arranged by the time they arrived.

It would take longer than flying, but posed no risk of a fiery crash. And if the worst happened and they were attacked, the saving grace along most of the journey would lie beneath them: all that water. The seraphim were going to boil an ocean dry? Not likely, Hellboy said.

"They wouldn't have to," she told him. "Just enough to turn the immediate area into a saucepan."

"I'll make sure they focus on me. I may look like a lobster, but I don't cook up like one."

She pinched the scruff of his chin between her thumb and forefinger. "Level with me, okay? If these things went blasting through the Vatican, of all places, what's to stop them from coming after us whenever and wherever they want?"

"They have their limitations. They're not all-seeing."

Now Abe stepped in: "It seems they do what they're summoned to do. No more and, judging by the other night's failure, sometimes less. As long as the men who arranged for the attack on the Archives don't know our travel route, the farther away we get, the better off we should be."

"So why not just get away from Rome and catch a flight someplace where they wouldn't know about it?"

"Because what if I'm wrong?" Hellboy said. "I'd rather be just plain wrong than wrong and stupid."

Then his mood lightened. He didn't smile, exactly, and in fact rarely did--truth be told, whenever he tried to smile like a normal person the effect was fairly ghastly--but he had this way of cocking his head to the side that was downright endearing.

"Make you a bet," he said. "If we make it as far as the yacht and shove off without trouble, then it's smooth sailing the rest of the way. A leisurely cruise. And if I'm wrong, then I owe you one."

"What are we betting here?" she asked, wary.

"Loser gives the winner backrubs for a week."

Liz barked a derisive laugh. "Some incentive. Your back's three times as wide as mine. And let's not even talk about the difference in hand size."

Hellboy looked at Abe with a stage-managed sigh. "Well, I tried bribery..."

As the ride went on, Liz tried to judge how far they'd gone. Not easy to do, with no windows to look out and the frequent start-and-stops of city traffic. They must have at least gotten far enough south to clear the main congestion of central Rome, because they seemed to be rolling more smoothly now.

Then she noticed Abe, and the way he seemed to be tensing with the realization that something was wrong, pins and needles growing under the skin. His gills suddenly fanned out and rippled.

"Abe?" she said, and now Hellboy had snapped to as well. "What is it?"

"We're going the wrong way," he said. "That last turn...we're going east."

"Yeah, so?" Hellboy said. "The streets here have to work around the Tiber. It's the most screwed-up street layout I've ever seen."

Except Abe wasn't having it, shaking his head no, no, no. "We're going the wrong way now..."

And when Abe started talking navigation, you tended to believe him. It was more than a knack, like her father's keen directional sense when childhood vacations took the family to unfamiliar towns in which he hardly ever got lost. No, with Abe it seemed to go much deeper...a fundamental part of him, maybe on some level aware of polarities and magnetic fields. Something to do with the
Icthyo
part of his makeup, she suspected, rather than the
Sapien
. Like the way salmon could abandon the ocean to return to the same river where they'd been spawned.

"We're heading
away
from the sea."

And that's when Hellboy and Abe's radio beepers started to go off.

H
e'd hardly used it at all this trip, but it was sure squawking now: standard bureau issue, a cross between a walkie-talkie and a mobile phone. Everybody carried them on investigations for occasions when they might separate on-site. Sync up on frequency and encryption code before arrival, and they'd be good to wander apart. Transmissions could be sent to an entire group or to just one agent. Hellboy's unit had spent most of the time in Rome being ignored.

He plucked it from its leather sleeve on his belt, Abe slower on the draw.

"Yeah?" he said, but even before he heard her voice, he knew it could only be Kate.

Except she wasn't coming through clearly. He didn't know how many miles they'd ridden, and could never remember the effective range of these things, but they must have been on the ragged edge of it right now. The thick steel walls of the armored car probably weren't helping, either.

"You're breaking up," he said. "Make it quick."

Choppy, frazzing into bursts of static, whatever Kate was trying to tell him was coming in as though her words were being run through a broken fan. She must've realized it, though. Sounded like she'd boiled her message down to its essence and was repeating it over and over...

Bodies,
he picked out.

--guard--

--found--

--street--

Under the circumstances, that was about all anyone needed to hear. He switched the radio on standby again and stuffed it back into its sleeve.

"I think we've been hijacked and didn't even know it," he whispered, and with Liz and Abe looking at him, he touched a finger to his lips:
Shhhh.

He stood, moved to the front of the compartment. Undid the lock on the sliding metal plate that, when opened, would reveal a small grilled window into the driver's cab. He gave it three jaunty taps, then slid it aside. Couldn't see much. There was the back of someone's head directly in front of the window. A beret over mouse-brown hair that looked like it could use a good washing. Didn't look like it was the same guard with the machine gun who had opened the back door for them--the skin at the neck was too pale, too...sallow. It wasn't the driver, either; he was too close to the middle for that. Whoever it was, he wasn't moving.

And that blood-threaded gobbet on the back of his collar? Hellboy swore it was brain matter.

He leaned to the side, enough of an angle on the slot that he could see past the back of the middle guy's head and get a profile on the driver. The man was keeping his eyes on the road like his life depended on it.

"Scusatemi,"
Hellboy said. About the only Italian he knew. "How much longer before we get to the docks?"

And wouldn't you think that the driver of an armored car, especially with two other guys in the cab with him, had better things to do than answer his own questions? A thick-jowled man with a blue sheen of beard, he looked back over his shoulder.

"Twenty minutes, about," he said.

Three words, three seconds--you can communicate a lot with that, if you're frightened half out of your mind. Very subtle...the driver didn't betray so much as a tic or flinch, but he held his gaze just long enough to convey everything he could not say aloud. Hellboy had seen plenty of fear in people's eyes. Sometimes fear of him, but more often, fear of something beyond their control. He'd encountered enough of both to tell the difference.

"Thanks," he said, keeping his voice light. He pointed at the guy sitting in front of the grill and gave a suspicious look.

The driver dipped his chin with an almost imperceptible nod, then turned back to the road. Hellboy waited a beat to see if he tried to communicate anything more.

"Yeah, a shame about the beach at Ostia," Hellboy went on, just to have something chatty to say, and angled his view enough to watch the driver's hands. "I hear they've got a real sewage problem. Not just their own crap, but all the crap washing down the Tiber out of Rome..."

He prattled on as the driver's left hand drifted toward the door, to the joystick that controlled the outside mirror on the other side of the bulletproof glass. Hellboy shifted again for a better perspective, watching as the mirror angled inward with a changing view of traffic, then the side length of the armored car, and finally the inside of the cab. He caught a reflection of the driver's face, eyes darting, and then he had it: a look at the guard in the middle. No wonder he hadn't turned, hadn't wanted to be seen.

Because this was no guard. He may have been wearing the uniform, but that bit of brain tissue on the collar said he'd taken it by force. And the face--cut with deep lines, the flesh tight against the skull--a junkie's face, or worse. In a sweep of headlights from oncoming traffic, the eyes gave a malevolent flash like quicksilver.

This may have been a man once, but the man had been gone a long time. The body was a shell for something else now. And it didn't belong
here
.

"See you guys at the docks," Hellboy said, and slid the metal plate closed again.

For a moment he stood unmoving, leaning against the wall, his eyes closed and the flat fronts of his stunted horns pressed into the steel. You just knew that the poor guy behind the wheel had a family...a big one, everybody waiting for him to come home after this late job. He'd always come home before.

"H.B.?" Liz said, her voice almost as soft as the touch of her hand on his arm.

"Something's wrong up there. The driver's in as much trouble as we're supposed to be."

He dug into another of the pouches on his belt for the key to the enormous cuff on his wrist.

"Get back, away from the front," he told her as he unlatched the cuff. Not exactly the plan, taking it off only minutes after this journey had gotten underway, but he didn't want to be flailing the thing around for the next few minutes.

"You too," he told Abe, with a nod toward the back, then gave him the case. "And hang onto this."

"H.B.?" Liz said again, with more alarm. "We're still moving. Shouldn't you wait until...?"

"Until they get us where they want us? I don't like the sound of that."

As the armored car wove through the curving streets of south Rome, Hellboy braced into a wide stance before the sliding metal plate. He drew his revolver, one of several custom .50-caliber handguns the BPRD made for him, big-bored things that could drop a rhino.

"Cover your ears," he whispered over his shoulder. "This is gonna be loud."

With his right hand he slammed the metal plate aside, and with his left jammed the muzzle of the revolver against the grill, hesitating a fraction of a second to ascertain that it was still the same head before pulling the trigger. And it
was
loud, a thunderclap in an oil drum, numbing even his ears for a moment, but he still fared better than the thing in front of him. The head snapped forward, and through the slot Hellboy saw a cascade of meat and bone and blood slap the inside of the windshield after ejecting from the exit wound that had been the face.

And to his credit, the driver held it steady.

Hellboy waited a moment, let the remaining two up front decide what happened next. He had no doubts about the driver's legitimacy. The third one--who'd helped load them into the back outside the North Gate--he wasn't sure about. Gut instinct told him something wasn't right there either. After all, the man had been armed. But maybe he'd been coerced. Family held hostage, something like--

Jesus!
As sudden as a cobra strike, the snout of the guard's machine pistol thrust into the hole in the grill left by Hellboy's bullet. One squeeze of the trigger and their compartment back here would turn into a bloody whirlwind of ricochets.

Hellboy slapped his right hand over the slot, knocking the muzzle back out of the hole just as the guard opened fire. He felt a burst of rounds pound into his palm, but they didn't penetrate,
couldn't
penetrate. That was the wonder of his mysterious hand. It was flexible and he sacrificed nothing in dexterity, but it felt no pain and was seemingly indestructible. Bullets? They might as well have been bees, and went spraying back into the cab.

He waited until the guard quit firing, then slammed the panel into place and locked it. Could feel the armored car swerving now, impacts jolting through as it sideswiped whatever had the misfortune to be nearby.

And he
had
to get up front.

He started for the back doors, but quickly thought better of it. Sure, he could open them, swing onto the roof, go up and over to the cab...or try, at least. The trouble was, he hadn't seen any handholds when they were running toward it at the North Gate. Slick surface, nothing to grab onto. And with the erratic way this thing was moving now, he stood a good chance of getting thrown to the pavement. It wasn't the impact that worried him, but whether or not he could chase the vehicle down on foot. Not likely. He was built more for durability than raw speed.

If you couldn't go
over
an obstacle, that left going
through
it.

He looked at Abe and Liz, both taking cover on the floor.

"Hang on," he said. "This is gonna get a lot bumpier before it's over."

Hellboy returned to the slot and ripped the panel away, let it clang to the floor. The hole made a natural weak spot--maybe not for human hands, but it definitely gave
his
a place to start. He let the battering ram of his right fist fly, punching directly into the slot. The edges curled away, into the cab.

Again he punched it, and again, and again...all along, careful to keep his body in line with the widening hole. If there was more shooting, he would weather the bullets that got through better than Liz and Abe.

He rained blows around the gap, like wielding a fistful of sledgehammers. He had to pause a couple of times and swat the roving gun barrel out of the way; tried to get his hand around it, but no luck. Soon enough, though.
He was going through that hole,
wasn't going to stop until it was big enough to let him. He'd made rubble of plenty of architecture this way. An armored car should only take a little longer...and after a few more poundings the entire reinforced partition started to buckle.

With the hole as wide as a serving platter now, he could see what he couldn't before: through the bloodied windshield, a backseat view of the street, pavement pouring under the front end, headlights sweeping from side to side as the armored car careened along, mowing down signs one moment, crossing lanes the next. He recognized where they were, enough sights and landmarks--there, an exit for the Catacombs, and there, the Basilica of Saint Sebastian--to tell him that they were on the Via Appia Antica, the Old Appian Way, the ancient road that served Rome even today.

And right in front of his eyes, the cab was a charnel house in miniature. The body of the first hijacker was slumped forward with half of his ruined head across the windshield, the other half dripping onto the floor. The driver was dead or dying; it looked as though he'd caught several rounds, probably from that first thwarted salvo that had sprayed back into the cab. The gunman too had been hit by his own fire, but his wounds clearly hadn't been fatal. He'd attempted to yank the driver away from the wheel and take control but was only half successful, all three of them up front now a tangle of limbs and blood, the living and the dead, trying to keep the vehicle on the road.

Hellboy seized the edge of the hole and gave a bellow, as much frustration as fury, and wrenched at the ragged metal. It groaned, then gave, inch by tortured inch, like ripping his way out of a giant can, and he was almost there, almost there...

The surviving guard abandoned the wheel to snatch up his machine pistol again. He tried to aim but the grip was slippery with his blood, or the blood of the driver, maybe both, and the one fumble was all Hellboy needed. He'd already begun to squirm through the hole, his head and his right shoulder--far enough to put a stop to this attack once and for all.

A frozen moment as he came face to face with the guard: Under his beret and a flawless brown forehead, the man's face was distinctly African, cheekbones high and round, so sculpted he could have modeled for statues. And something more. Again the eyes were the giveaway, although not the same as with the guard he'd shot. Hellboy could still see the
man
in these eyes, and the fear that came from someplace deep, as though he were watching Hellboy from the bottom of a pool, with something else between the two of them. His actions seemed not to be his own, the man trapped on the inside, helplessly watching his hands betray him.

A part of him seemed to plead even as the rest of him tried to aim.

"Fight it," Hellboy told him. "Whatever's in you,
fight it."

Maybe he tried. But he lost all the same. Hellboy caught the barrel of the gun as it tracked into his face. He gave it a twist, crumpling the stubby barrel out of commission an instant before the man's finger tightened on the trigger.

Too slow, half a second too slow--in a fair world, he would have been able to wrest the gun away before that last flex of the man's finger.