Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(67)

"You want me to act as bait for four dragons."

"Yes!" She won't mind, Hellboy thought. She'll do it. This is Liz. She'll do it.

"Did one of those bullets get you in the brain?" she asked, aghast.

"Hellboy!" the sergeant called.

"Wait up!" Hellboy roared, and several loosened ceiling tiles tumbled from their grid. The policemen fell silent, waiting out of sight.

"You're mad."

"I'm red." He raised his eyebrows. "And cute."

"You are not cute. Intriguing, interesting, distracting, but never cute. A bunny rabbit is cute. A * cat is cute."

"Yeah, but they're not as suave as me."

"Are you trying to wisecrack me into submission?"

"Has it worked yet?"

"No."

"Right. OK. I'll tell those guys to run to their deaths, then."

Liz growled. Just like a tiger having its tail pulled, Hellboy thought. Not that he'd ever pulled a tigers tail.

"That's not fair!" she said.

"Liz, listen to me. No more joking. No more gallows humor. We've seen a lot of people die today, and if we leave this to the military, a lot more will die. We've dealt with crap like this before, and we won't let amazement or disbelief cloud our judgment, not like them. So here's what I thought: you call up some fire and send it out; the dragons see it, and they're intrigued; they come; those two cops and I kill their scaly asses."

"You think that'll work? Its too easy."

"That's why it'll work."

"You're a terrible shot."

Hellboy shrugged, glanced along the concourse at the smoldering lizard. "I'll concentrate."

Liz bit her lip and looked from the window. She walked to the opening and looked down at the policemen below, smiled, turned back to Hellboy. "Where do you want me?" she said.

Hellboy smiled. "That's my girl."



* * *



How did I let him talk me into this? Liz thought. This is insane. This is suicide. But at the same time she thought of the phoenix in Zakynthos, and the way it had reacted to her display of fire making. At first it had appeared bewitched, as if fascinated or enamored of someone with its own talents. That had all changed later. But perhaps the dragons would act the same to begin with, long enough for Hellboy and the policemen to get off a few clear shots.

Failing that, she'd just curl up into a ball and jump.

Liz was standing on top of a mobile staircase, staring out over the airport. The crashed aircraft burned on the runway, emergency vehicles still gushed flames here and there, and scattered across the wide flat expanse were smaller shapes, some colorful, mostly just black and scorched. Each shape had a million stories attached to it and dozens of people who would spend the rest of their lives grieving. Liz saw each one as a dead person, and the tears that came unbeckoned were for every one of them. She imagined people at home listening to the radio or watching events unfold on TV — there were certainly press cameras focused on this from many distant angles — and she could not conceive of the worry and heartache being felt across the country right now. Mothers would be watching for missing sons, husbands for absent wives, and children would be huddled against babysitters and wondering whether Mummy and Daddy would be coming home tonight.

Liz closed her eyes, and the tears that squeezed out were hot.

The sound of another explosion came from across the airport, and she saw a dragon setting upon a parked jumbo jet. The worm slithered under the body of the aircraft, unleashed a burst of fire against a wing, and was engulfed in another, more massive explosion as the fuel tanks erupted. The tail flew backward, the wings thumped across the concrete, and wreckage rose high and wide on the expanding ball of flame. The fire roared skyward into a mushroom cloud, edges folding down and drifting back to the ground as ash and smoke.

"I hope that was empty," Liz whispered. All this fire ... all this destruction ... if she closed her eyes she was somewhere a long time ago and a long way away. She hated to think on that, yet she concentrated her thoughts and wallowed in those terrible memories. They fed the rage. They fueled the thing inside her, the fire that was cool to her but so deadly to others. And when she opened her eyes again, she viewed everything through a wavering curtain of heat.

She held her arms straight out from her sides, breathed deeply, and then forced her breath out like a rampaging dragon. A burst of fire poured from her, and she caught it in both hands, working it, twisting the ball of flame, and making it bigger with every touch. Go, she thought. Go higher, grow bigger. Call the bastards in.