Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(83)

But still alive in her dreams of that time onboard the New Ark — and always there as a memory after every full moon, whatever she had been fed, however satisfied she convinced herself she was with the deer and other cattle — was that tangy taste of warm flesh and rich blood, so peculiar, so distinctive of human meat.

Abby glanced across at the driver of a car she was passing. He looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back. As she passed he must have accelerated, because he remained alongside her for a few more seconds. Abby did not look again.

I could lead him off the road, climb into the back of his car, tear out his throat —

"No!" she screamed. She pressed down on the horn, leaning hard on the center of the steering wheel and lifting herself from the seat. Her car swerved across the motorway, cutting in front of the man and passing several feet from the nose of a bus filled with schoolchildren. Other horns blared, and she wanted to stop, run them off the road, watch the bloody red mess of the accidents —

"Oh, Abe," she said. "Abe, I'm sorry, I'm so damn sorry ... "

Abby drove on, trying to ignore the thoughts instead of cutting them out altogether, but they were there always, like the echo of a meal waiting to be tasted again.

And there was something else. Intruding into her thoughts, then out again. Touching her from somewhere much farther back than she was prepared to go ever again. Intruding from the Memory, marking her and then withdrawing once more.

"Get out of my head," she said. In the distance came a rumble like distant thunder, or laughter.



* * *



Abe Sapien followed Abby's car. He watched it swerve across the highway and then straighten again. At one point he drew close enough behind to see her thumping the steering wheel, shaking her head, and shouting at herself in the mirror, as if her reflection were someone else. Several times he almost flashed and tried to pull her over, but he was afraid that to do so would only make her go faster, increase the chance of her crashing and burning away.

And besides, she obviously had a destination in mind. Unless something terrible happened, the best he could do was follow.



* * *





London Docklands — 1997



THEY FLEW ABOVE London, sun slanting in from the southwest and warming their skin. They were losing altitude, heading down toward the conference hotel, and they had yet to be challenged.

"Thought you said security was tight," Hellboy shouted above the roar of the rotors.

"This is an official chopper," Jim replied.

"On unofficial business." Liz was smoking her third cigarette of the journey. She was doing her best not to look out the windows, but the sun came in and made interesting shapes of her exhalations. She stirred them with her hand and tried to make sense of them. She wondered whether this was the sort of thing Jim had seen to begin with, before he could see ghosts for real.

Liz kept thinking about the ghost standing behind that woman at the bus stop. She had not wanted to see it, but she had, and she was not grateful to Jim Sugg for that experience. Not grateful at all.

"We're about a mile away now," the pilot said in their headphones.

Hellboy nudged Liz. "You OK?"

She nodded, then smiled at him for added reassurance. His expression said that he could read her smile so well. OK? Yeah, sure, apart from the fact that she'd just seen a ghost, they were hanging above a city in a machine that should never fly, approaching what could become the most momentous and important battle this country had ever seen. Yeah, fine, just dandy.

"They're only animals," Hellboy said.

"Say that to the people melted into the tarmac at Heathrow."

"Liz, they're only animals. I shot those dragons, and they didn't rise again."

"You didn't see the phoenix."

"Animal. Not understood as real anymore, but it's a creature. It's not something from beyond death, a demon or a monster conjured up by Rasputin. We're dealing with animals that've been brought back from a place they should have been left. We've fought their like before, but only singly. They've never ganged up on us before. And they were in the Memory for a reason: they'd had their time. Their influence on this world was over, apart from appearing in stories and movies and tucked away in the backs of people's minds at night. Dreams, that's what they should have been, because dreams are important. But Blake has brought them back and made them mad, given them his own agenda. And that's what we've got to keep in mind. The supernatural in this is balanced by the science he used. He's a scientist who knows magic. The bringing back, that was magic. The things we're about to see, all science."