Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(26)

The smiling fisherman and his friends were starting to get on his nerves, too. They may have pulled him from the sea, but that gave them only a certain amount of license to gape. That license was rapidly running out. Hellboy stood, walked to the bow without glancing at the men, and tried to make out who'd be waiting for him at the harbor. Whoever it was, they'd know that he had messed up.

Something nudged his hand. He spun around, and the man cringed but still offered up a small wooden box. Hellboy smiled, nodded, and the man gave him a toothless smile in return. "Sorry," Hellboy said. "Hasn't been a good day. But thank you." He took the box, opened it, selected a cigarette, and presented the open box back. The man raised his eyebrows and took a cigarette as well. "Got a light?"

The fisherman nodded. He lit Hellboy's cigarette and his own, and the two men sat and smoked contentedly as the little trawler edged in toward the dock.



* * *



The harbor was a riot of activity. Hundreds of boats of all shapes, sizes, and colors bobbed against jetties and docks, and the sound of rubber rings squealing against timber bumpers provided a constant background to the hubbub. They sailed past a selection of yachts that probably cost more than Hellboy could even imagine. Scantily clad women lounged picturesquely on recliners, while muscled men swam and dived and strutted their stuff. Hellboy would have laughed, had his ribs not ached so much.

They docked in the fishing harbor, a place filled with the smell of the sea and the sound of forklifts transporting cooler boxes to and fro. Trawlers sat two or three abreast against the dock, and fishermen bustled about, repairing nets, loading provisions, and washing down guts-strewn decks. Others sat in their boats, smoking, drinking, laughing together, or staring sadly out to sea, as if they had left a part of themselves out there.

Hellboy thanked his rescuers again and accepted another cigarette from them for later. They seemed much more animated now that he was about to leave. He touched his horn stumps in an unconscious salute and turned quickly away as the men's eyes strayed there, and stayed.

Along the stone dock, just before it hit the mainland in a chaos of warehouses and fish markets, he found two men rooting through a spread of containers set out across the ground. At first he thought they were sorting their catch by size or grade, but on closer inspection he realized that they were weeding out bad fish and throwing them back into the sea. Hellboy paused to watch. The two men had not yet noticed him, and he waited until one of the discarded fish was close enough for him to grab from the air.

"What's this?" In the palm of his big right hand lay the discarded fish. It had two heads. "What the hell is this?"

One of the two men looked up. His brief surprise at seeing Hellboy faded quickly, countered by the sadness that tainted his voice when he spoke. "Bad fish."

"Damn right its bad," Hellboy said. "Jeez!" He looked closer, but suddenly the smell hit him. Not only was it mutated, it stank. "Why?"

The man looked up, waved his hands at the air, and for a second Hellboy thought he was blaming God. But then the man crossed himself and shrugged. "Filthy air," he said.

"Pollution?"

"Yes." He turned from Hellboy and carried on with his task.

Hellboy walked away, listening to the intermittent splash, splash, splash from behind him as bad fish were returned to the harbor to rot. As human as he tried to be, he had never been able to understand the streak of self-destruction that seemed to pass through most of humanity like a seam of crap in a gold mine. They had it all, and they were slowly but surely throwing it all away. He glanced back at the posh yachts moored farther out and thought how such riches should really lead to better things, not worse. The women preened while the men posed. The more money they had, the more inward-looking they became. He shook his head, but much as he tried to believe he was just like them, he knew that he was not. It was not superiority or moral egotism. It was a simple fact. However human he made himself inside, Hellboy knew that there was so much more to be.

"Hellboy!"

He stopped and scanned the bustle of the harbor front, and there, waving like a mother welcoming her son home from the sea, stood Amelia Francis. Hellboy was immensely grateful that it was she rather than anyone else. She knew how hard dragons were, and his beating by the giant worm would give her no cause to gloat. He hoped.

He worked his way along the dock. People mostly got out of his way. He liked that. The satellite phone went off again, and he cursed, taking it from his pocket, popping its back, and ripping out the battery. It would have been simple to turn it off, but that would not have the same therapeutic value. In moments such as this, symbolism said a lot.