by Brian Hodge
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 f
or 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.
The final burst of rounds popped off with nowhere to go. The top of the gun blew apart in the hijacker's hand, the chamber and the rear of the barrel turning into pieces of whizzing shrapnel. Hellboy felt one crack off the stump of one horn, another clip through the sleeve of his coat to hack a shallow chunk out of his arm.
But the stricken guard caught the worst of it, ragged debris tearing into him in half a dozen places to finish the job the bullets had started. Hellboy gritted his teeth with a groan, hating it all...having just watched men die, having been forced into a situation to cause them to die, because someone or something had decided they were expendable.
The armored car was out of control now, off the road and shearing through a wooded area, uprooting bushes and clipping small trees off at the bumper-line.
He wrenched at the hole he'd torn, widening it enough to squeeze the rest of himself into the cab, yanking the bodies out of the way so he could fit into the driver's seat. Grappling with the wheel and stabbing for the brakes, until he finally brought the armored car slaloming to a halt.
In relief, he sat for a moment, staring out at the headlight beams as they pierced the night. A few dozen more yards and they would've met up with trees big enough to stop the vehicle dead. A few beats of silence, nothing but the rumbling of the engine, but after the past minutes, it seemed quiet as a whisper.
He took a look back through the hole, saw Liz and Abe picking themselves up off the floor.
"You two okay?" he called. "Anything worse than bumps and bruises?"
"I'm good," Liz said.
Abe nodded. "How are things up front?"
"No survivors," he said softly.
A moment later, Liz was at the hole, looking in, looking down. "God," she said. "Was all this really...necessary?"
He gripped the wheel with his left hand. There wasn't much in this world or any other that pained him, but hearing doubt from Liz? That was one of them. He knew he was rash sometimes, rushing headlong where angels feared to tread. It was one fault he tried to be honest about, trying even harder not to let it get the better of his judgment. But he didn't think he ever gambled needlessly with lives.
Although if he had to make the choice, he supposed he would rather gamble with the lives of strangers than the lives of those he loved. She had to know that. But she would never want the responsibility of it. The possibility that she would come out on the winning side of a judgment call, because it meant someone else had to lose.
"I'm not sure what happened here," he told her. "But I think there's a good chance these men would've been dead soon either way."
"It doesn't help," Liz said.
"I know."
"A few pieces of paper, basically. That's all we're carrying. Pieces of old paper."
"I know."
He'd just ripped through an armored car and still, right now he wanted to tear something, anything, apart in the worst way. But the best thing to do, the smart thing to do, would be to find a map and get back to the coast. Before they found themselves waylaid by the convergence of police cars that were sure to be minutes away.
He turned away from Liz and stared through the windshield again.
Something was moving out there, a couple of there-and-gone flickers amid the trees.
He'd opened the door before he could stop himself, leaping from the cab and hitting the ground with his revolver drawn again, sprinting in front of the armored car so its headlights burned past him, making him harder to spot while he could see everything in their beams.
He could hear them out there...slow, stealthy footfalls snapping twigs and crunching fallen leaves. Gut instinct told him that the armored car had traveled about as far as it was supposed to. Maybe a wilder arrival than someone had counted on, but this was the place.
Strangely enough, though, there didn't seem to be much here. The headlights burned through the thicket, until they were swallowed by the darkness that held fast between the trees. Overhead, a break in the branches, thinning out with autumn, showed the suggestion of hills just beyond the trees, stark black curves set against the starry sky.
So what was supposed to happen here, anyway? Lose the scroll--that seemed obvious enough. If destroying it were the objective, someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble to bring it to a specific location, rather than just getting the job done. So yeah, lose the scroll, that had to be the general idea...but into whose hands?
The trees stared back, divulging nothing. Whoever watched from the darkness, they had evidently seen enough to rethink what was supposed to have happened here.
"Hellboy." Abe's voice, behind him, from the door of the armored car. "I found three of these in the cab. I think they were meant for us."
"Three of what?"
Something thumped onto the ground beside his foot. Hellboy stooped to pick it up, brought it into the light. Found that he was holding a stun grenade. A flash-bang, commandos sometimes called them. Throw one into a confined space like a room--or the back of an armored car--and the burst of light and shock wave would scramble the circuits of whoever was close by.
"Or maybe all three were meant for you," Abe said.
Facing the darkness, knowing they were there and afraid, every muscle tensing to spring forward and catch one of them, find out what was going on here--
"Hellboy." Abe again, his voice sharper, more insistent. "Some other time. We need to go now."
No arguments there. Just a lot of thwarted impulse and the need for self-control. He gave the trees and their secrets one last baleful glare, then turned bac
k toward the armored car.
Chapter 9
When dawn came, it came at their backs, and far from the sight of land.
Underfoot, the teakwood deck of the Calista rolled against the horizon line with slow, gentle undulations. She was a two-mast schooner, a vintage seventy-eight-foot motor sailer built more than four decades ago and immaculately maintained ever since. From her foredeck Hellboy watched the sun come up in a spreading stain of rose and orange. It set fire to the shimmering surface of the sea, a tranquil inferno whose only sound was the slapping of waves against the hull, the snap of sails filled by a tailwind steady enough that they no longer needed to run the engines.
If dawn was the only fire from above, he would count this day among the good ones.
It had been a quiet night since shoving off from the docks at Ostia, abandoning the ruined armored car and its bloody cargo. They had established a radio link from the yacht to Kate Corrigan's mobile phone, letting her know they'd made it to the coast and filling her in on what had happened...or as much as they could explain. She wished them a safe rest of the journey, said she would spend an extra couple of days in Rome to help sort out the mess, but that she should still be there to meet them in Cornwall.
With the cuff and case reattached to his wrist--for the duration of the trip, he vowed, tolerating no risk, however small, that it could be lost overboard--he had taken up a vigil in an extra-sturdy deck chair near the bow, ahead of the cockpit and the rotating crew of four who manned the wheel through the night. From here he watched the sky, hours spent scanning the blackened heavens for a glimpse of shapes that might betray their presence by blotting out stars. But they had never come.
