Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(38)

Hellboy knew what had happened there, how Abe had rescued her from suicide, and he did not like the tone of dread in his friends voice. But there was little he could say that would be of comfort. "You go," he said. "Find Abby. Hell, we need her now more than ever."

"Tom — "

"Tom will live with it!" Hellboy said. "And if he's got a problem, he can talk to me."

Abe smiled. "Yeah, I can see that. But things are really kicking off, and my place is here."

Hellboy squeezed his friends arm. "Abe, after what we saw in there, I'm not sure where our place is anymore. That dragon wiped the floor with me in Rio, and that damn kraken ... you really see yourself being any good up against that?"

Abe shook his head. "It's all so much," he said. "What are we going to do? What if all this gets worse?"

"Guns," Hellboy said. "Lots of very big guns." The front doors opened, and Liz walked in. "Oh crap. She looks worse than I feel."

"HB, Abe," Liz Sherman said. "I really need a drink."



* * *



They took one of the Bureau's Humvees. Liz drove. For the first few minutes she had been annoyed at not being able to stop, freshen up, and take that drink she so craved. "There's a bottle of Jamesons with my name on it in my room, dammit!" she had said. But then Hellboy had filled her in on their chat and what they had seen, and Liz had fallen silent.

"Made me sick to the stomach just watching it," Hellboy said. "It wasn't the size of that thing, though that was bad enough. It wasn't even the dread we all felt when we watched it happening. It was the specks of color in the sea, the splashes of red on the deck. The people, all of them dying. There are a lot of grieving people in the world tonight."

"I met up with a policeman in Zakynthos," Liz said. "He was a nice guy. I think he wanted to buy me a meal, you know? When the phoenix set itself aflame, it took him with it. It melted him, and now I'll never know what his favorite childhood memory is, or whether he has a scar, or what meal he wanted to buy me that evening. Every death matters so much, HB. We've got to do our best to make sure the grieving doesn't spread."

"You all right, Liz?"

She nodded, and in the dusky light he saw her break a smile. "I'll be fine. Now tell me where the hell we're going and what we're going to do there. I've already assumed that this will end up with you beating the crap out of something."

"Don't prejudge," Hellboy said, affecting a wounded tone. "It is my intention to drive to New York, capture the banshee in Central Park, and have a friendly chat with it."

"Yeah, right, a chat. And if it doesn't want to chat?"

"Then I beat the crap out of it."

Liz turned up a ramp onto the freeway and took the Humvee up to ninety.



* * *





New York, New York — 1997



NEW YORK IS THE CITY that never sleeps, and Hellboy had never felt so awake. There was so much going on that his thoughts were darting all over. He wished he could have just one problem to dwell on, not a million. He wished he had a better idea of what was happening in the world tonight. He wished he could hit something.

They went south and drove in over the Queensboro Bridge, and New York slapped Hellboy in the face as hard as ever. He knew of no other city that was just so damn visible. It was a great wall of civilization, reaching up for the sky and peppering the night with lights. Darkness never truly fell here, not completely, and the city itself never went to sleep. It did have its dark areas, that was for sure, places down narrow alleys that were haunted by death, and deeper mysteries beneath the city: abandoned subway stations, collapsed drains, the guts of the old city, still grinding and churning but blocked with effluent, human and otherwise. Hellboy had visited a few times over the years, the episode with those giant insects that mimicked humans being the most recent. That was bad. But he'd been able to hit something, at least.

"Damn, this place gets to me," he said. "So many people."

"Behind every light is a person," Liz said.

"And for every person there's a hundred rats."

"Charming."

"I'm in a mood. I feel like I need to punch in every direction at once, but I won't hit anything."

"Take it in steps, HB. Just think about this job for now. Don't worry about things you can't do anything about."