Sergeant Whitman balled his fist and swung his head around, staring down at the Nazis. There was a knot of dread in his gut. “We don’t have forty minutes.”
2
SAFE BEHIND HIS MASK, KARL KROENEN GAVE A WIDE, dark grin, then wrapped one dry-skinned hand around a lever in front of him. He ran his tongue over the inside of his teeth for good measure, then threw the stiff switch on the huge machine.
An untold number of gears churned to life and steam pistons thrust bright copper rails upright. As two metal rings were lifted high into the air and gyroscoped outward, Kroenen signaled excitedly for more lights.
Illumination flooded the expanse of an ancient sacristy lined with eroded stone saints. Their dark, eyeless faces gazed blankly at a tall, gaunt, and nearly naked man with his arms fully extended who was standing in the center of the room. He stared hard at a woman coming toward him, and when he spoke, his voice was stern and his breath plumed outward in a freezing temperature that seemed to have no effect on him.
“No matter what happens to me, Ilsa, you must carry on with the work.”
Beneath tightly drawn blond hair, there was no smile on Ilsa’s coldly beautiful face, no warmth in her ageless, Aryan expression. “I will not leave you, Grigori,” she said matter-of-factly. In a rare show of emotion, the look on her face changed, turning to near-reverence as she draped a richly embroidered robe over Grigori’s shoulders, hiding his jutting collarbones beneath the scarlet fabric.
Grigori scowled. “Yes, you will,” he said harshly. “Leave me. Deny me.”
She shook her head, her face melting back into a perfect picture of detachment. “Never.”
He sighed, then reached into a hidden pocket within the robe’s folds and pulled out a small, leather-bound book. He flipped through the pages quickly, checking to see that the notes and hand-drawn illustrations were still complete and free from damage. He held it out to her. “This will guide you back to me.”
She nodded and accepted the book, then he pulled her close to him. Face-to-face, the clouds of their breath mingled on the chill drafts easing through the underground church. Her stubborn, icy countenance finally gave way and twin tracks of tears slowly made their way down her flawless cheeks. He inhaled, using Ilsa’s own breath to speak. “I grant you everlasting life,” he said quietly. “And youth, and the power to serve me.”
Next to him was a small table. Grigori reached to the side and dipped his fingers into a wooden bowl filled with blood, and Ilsa didn’t pull away as half in ritual, half in consolation, he wiped her tears away with a crimson-covered thumb.
“It’s time.”
The moment broken, both of them glanced at the speaker. Von Krupt was an acrid German general who liked to hide his eyes behind lenses the color of dried blood. He pulled a pocket watch out with a meaty, leather-gloved hand and held it up to show them the time; it spun in his grip, flashing first the clock face, then a gold swastika, then the clock face again. After a long, last glance, Ilsa and Grigori nodded and stepped apart.
With his thin back ramrod straight and his head held high, Grigori walked toward the colossal machine. Ilsa followed closely behind him, holding an umbrella over his head to protect him from the rain now pouring through the open ceiling. The machine’s steel and copper clockworks gleamed in the flood-lights, and a hundred metal tubes twisted and shimmered amid countless wires.
As if he couldn’t resist it, Von Krupt strode alongside them, like a mother haranguing a wayward child. “Five years of research and construction, Grigori! Five years!” His voice was climbing toward strident. “The Führer doesn’t look kindly on failure!”
Grigori didn’t bother to glance at him. “There will be no failure, General. I promised Herr Hitler a miracle. I’ll deliver one.”
Kroenen, decked out in a full Nazi officer’s uniform, was waiting for Grigori, already muttering excitedly behind his mask and nearly twitching with anticipation. He ran a tightly gloved hand over a polished oak box on a panel in front of him, then opened it to reveal a massive gold and copper mecha-glove, a monstrously sized thing from which trailed half a dozen cables and hoses. He picked it up with meticulous care and gazed at it reverently before turning to Grigori. The nearly naked man extended one hand as if making a great sacrifice, and Kroenen carefully fit the mecha-glove over it.
Turning away from Kroenen and the panel, Grigori walked regally to the top of the waiting altar. He paid no mind to the cables trailing behind him, trusting that Kroenen or someone else would keep them from tangling. His gaze was misty and faraway. “Tonight,” he said in a hollow voice that still carried easily to everyone in the room, “we will open a portal and awaken the Ogdru Jahad—the Seven Gods of Chaos.” His inky gaze cleared for a moment as he surveyed the men listening to him. They could see the pride etched into Grigori’s face. “Our enemies will be destroyed. In an instant, all impurity in this world will be razed and from the ashes a new Eden will arise!”
With a dark smile, Grigori refocused his gaze on the machine in front of him. “Ragnarok,” he whispered. “Anung Ia Anung.”
A flex of his fingers, ever so slight. And in response—
The two huge metal rings overhead swung to life around the machine’s central axis.
TCHINK!
WHIRRR!
Steam shot from tens of pipes and ducts as an invisible blast of energy doused Grigori with enough strength to make him sway.
Ilsa grinned almost maniacally and signaled sharply at two of the Führer’s scientists who were positioned at one of the numerous control panels. This was the moment! “More power!” she shrieked. “Don’t let the power drop!”
The one closest to her gave a curt nod, then fought to heft a twenty-inch, solid-gold cylinder from a holder above the console. There were three openings directly in front of him, and the man grunted with the effort of inserting the cylinder into the first of them.
As soon as the round chunk of metal dropped into place, a beam of light cut through the air above Grigori. On each side of it, strange symbols began flickering in and out of view, twisting around and dripping red like living fire writing on an invisible surface. Then the beam of light widened, spreading until it was a growing slash in the very fabric of the universe. The edges of the split sizzled with color, and something…alien, otherworldly, unknown, sparkled on the other side. The slash widened again and the wind in the sacristy rose to a howl, tearing free one of the six-foot work lights. Before anyone could blink, the strand of heavy lights flew through the air and went into the cosmic split.
The people below craned their necks to see, then gasped. Something moved within the gash in the air—the massive being Grigori had called Ogdru Jahad, the seven egglike monoliths of unholy origin. As they stared, trying to see more, wondering if they should believe what their own eyes declared was true, the egg shapes began to pulse. Whatever horrible creatures had been slumbering within the translucent walls of the elongated shapes started to awaken as the light swept past; one by one, the giant creatures opened their filmy eyes and began to move lazy, fleshy tentacles within their crystalline prisons.
Beyond the altar’s control panel, Grigori screamed as his body began to rise. Veins swelled in his neck as his face contorted with ecstasy…or was it pain? It was probably a combination of both.
Somehow, below all the screaming and the wind and the impossible that was happening right before his disbelieving eyes, Sergeant Whitman heard it.
Click.
He whirled and glared at Matlin. The photographer had forgotten himself, where he was, his sanity. He was not only standing in full view of anyone who might turn around, he had one of his camera view pieces pressed against his eye and was snapping pictures as fast as he could. Furious, Whitman yanked the younger man down, hard, then pulled out a long bayonet. “Listen to me, you moron,” he hissed as the bruised Matlin blinked at him. “You do that again, I’ll carve you a new—”
Too late.
The second of the Nazi scientists
at the control panel suddenly stood up straight and stared right at the part of the rise that was concealing them, then scowled as he realized what he’d heard had to be intruders. Whitman cursed under his breath, but before he could do anything more, Broom crab-walked next to him on the ground and clutched at his sleeve. “Listen to me!” he whispered fiercely. Despite the chilly temperature, Broom’s youthful face shone with fear sweat. “The portal is open! You have to stop them!”
Whitman yanked his arm free and peered over the rise, but the scientist had apparently dismissed them as unimportant in the grander scheme of the game. That was both a blessing and a curse; had the man raised an alarm, Whitman and his men would have been knee-deep in trouble…but at least it would have stopped—maybe—their ritual from going any further. Instead, they were going to have to take action. And they were also going to have to be quick about it.
The guy now had a matching gold cylinder in his hand; without being told to, he turned it upright and positioned it so that he could shove it home into the next compartment in the control panel.
Something bumped against the side of his foot, and he automatically looked down. It took one puzzled moment too long for him to register exactly what it was—
Grenade!
—and then the explosion blew his leg into bloody pieces.
“Go!” screamed Sergeant Whitman, and the Allied soldiers stormed the ancient stone chapel.
The gunfire was deafening, the firepower deadly in all directions. In the onslaught, a dozen Nazis fell immediately; others took longer, stubbornly returning the fight, determined to hold their little piece of the underground so that they could continue whatever diabolical ceremony this had been. As the Nazis’ machine-gun nest fell beneath a fusillade of bullets, Von Krupt snatched up one of his fallen soldier’s rifles and began firing wildly; the young Professor Broom paid for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a bullet in the leg. As he went down, clutching at the wound and nearly breathless with the intensity of the pain, Whitman retaliated by sending a volley of bullets straight into the old Nazi’s chest.
A half dozen grim-faced Allied soldiers had managed to back Kroenen into a corner. Instead of surrendering, the masked Nazi went into a crouch, then snapped his arms forward—
Tchkkk!!!
Two gleaming metal blades slid free from twin steel bands hidden below the cuffs of his uniform. Guns were not always the answer to everything, and the soldiers’ overconfidence in their weapons exacted a heavy price; as they moved toward Kroenen, certain that the Nazi would give up his knives in the face of their rifles, he went through them like the four-bladed propeller of a P-51-D. Incredibly, his steel cut right through their weapons with barely a hitch each time, then continued through flesh and bone like it wasn’t even there. Blood and water ran together and tinted the muddy ground a dirty brownish pink.
The hand-to-hand fight was one thing, but they couldn’t forget the bigger picture, the bigger danger. Wheezing with agony, Broom dragged himself along the ground until he made it to the body of a dead GI. He yanked one of the man’s grenades from his belt, pulled the pin out with his teeth, then threw it as hard as he could, straight at the generator. Broom grinned wildly through the pain as he saw the grenade wedge between two moving tie rods. Now it would only be a matter of seconds.
At the end of his wet work, Kroenen must have glimpsed the small missile sailing over his head. The Nazi shrieked and retracted his blades, soaking his jacket cuffs with blood as he lunged after the grenade. The gyrating rails of the machine sliced into his jacket, but Kroenen didn’t notice. Just as his fingers reached the grenade—
BAAAAMMMM!
—it exploded.
Kroenen didn’t even have time to scream, and the blast deadened his eardrums instantly. The concussion sent him soaring through the air and slammed him into a jagged stone wall; before he could slide down to the ground, dual pieces of shrapnel, ends sharp and long yet strong enough to puncture stone, pinned the Nazi in place like an insect.
Still crouched on the other side of the rise, praying first that his cameras wouldn’t get damaged and second that he wouldn’t get shot, Matlin moved to the left to try to get a better view, then nearly screamed when a third piece of shrapnel, javelin-long and thin, plunged into the ground—
Fffffffft!
—precisely where he’d just been hunkered down.
Ilsa’s panicked shriek rose above everything else in the chamber.
“Grigoooooori!”
He was still hanging overhead, floating in front of the maw of the open portal. His screaming had stopped but his face was distorted, pulled and stretched like ectoplasmic taffy; his body was bending in places it shouldn’t, contorting and breaking in others, twisting in still more. Before Ilsa could scream again, before even the next burst of gunfire—
The portal imploded.
Nothing was left behind but a few burned rails and Grigori’s strange metal glove, empty and sending a plume of smoke into the mist-soaked air.
Matlin looked around frantically, but Ilsa and Grigori were gone. Sucked into the portal? There was no way to tell for sure. Even Kroenen had managed to escape, the only mark of his exit two blood-covered shards of metal embedded firmly in the stone wall. Behind him, backup had finally arrived and another flood of Allied soldiers was pouring into the abbey ruins; certain of the impending victory, Matlin scuttled over the rise and made his way to where Broom lay clutching his bleeding leg. The photographer grabbed a strap off the weapon of a fallen Nazi and quickly fastened a tourniquet. “It’s almost over!” His voice was a shout, but he could still barely hear himself above all the noise.
But Broom only shook his head. “No, it’s not.” As Sergeant Whitman staggered up to them, Broom stretched until he reached the outer rings of the smoking machine. He dug his fingers into a puddle of white, viscous goo and held them up, then shook his hand to make sure they turned their attention on him. “Cordon off the area,” he told Whitman. “Something came through.”
Whitman stared at him, incredulous. “From where?”
Broom glanced at the wall fifteen feet away, his gaze raking the thirteenth-century fresco depicting Heaven and Hell. Whitman followed his gaze, then looked back at him questioningly…
…but Broom simply didn’t have an answer for him.
It was strange to be inside an ancient chapel, yet still have the cold rain pouring through what little was left of the roof, drenching the uniforms until they hung uncomfortably against the soldiers’ skin and sunk the cold into their joints. Now that all the men had pulled their flashlights out, watery halos bobbed through the downpour like disconnected headlights at night, lighting the way for the heavy rifles the men held at the ready. A rosary had been tied to each dark barrel and the beaded strands swung in front of the flashlights, making little flickers of unpleasant black shadows.
Grinding his teeth, Broom rummaged through the med kit someone had thrown at him until he found a clean roll of gauze. Like everything else, it was soaked with rain the instant he brought it out, but at least he could use it to wrap his leg in place of Matlin’s tourniquet and, hopefully, stop the bleeding. The pain was bad, but less than he’d expected; strong enough to be dangerously distracting, not so much that he was debilitated. More of a danger was blood loss and all the complications that could arise, but he didn’t have time to worry about that right now. A few feet away, the photographer, Matlin, and Sergeant Whitman roamed through the debris, poking at bodies to make sure they were dead and peering into the more shadowy places. Neither was sure what they were looking for, but both were certain they’d know it when they found it.
Matlin wandered over to where Broom was tying off his hastily constructed bandage. The gauze was already full of dirt and water, an open invitation to infection. He watched for a long moment, then asked, “Do you believe in Hell?”
Broom didn’t answer right away, but he finally looked up and sighed. “There is a place…a dark place where evil slumbe
rs and awaits to return. From there it infects our dreams. Our thoughts. Grigori gave us a glance at it tonight.”
Matlin chewed his lip thoughtfully. “ ‘Grigori.’ That’s Russian, right?” When Broom nodded, he said, “I thought they were on our side.”
“Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin,” Broom said, very softly.
Matlin’s eyes widened. “Come on—Rasputin?”
“Spiritual adviser to the Romanovs.” The professor struggled to his feet, wincing as he put weight on his injured leg but stubbornly doing it anyway. The bullet was still in there, grinding away at his flesh and making the muscle burn like it was on fire, but getting it out would have to wait until they got back on the sub. “In 1916, at a dinner in his honor, he was poisoned, shot, stabbed, clubbed, drowned, and castrated.”
Matlin snorted in disbelief. “Nineteen-sixteen? That would make him more than seventy—”
A sound cut off his words, a sort of rustling from somewhere in the shadows against the far wall. Matlin spun and pulled his pistol as Broom brought up his flashlight and played the beam over the dark, dripping stones. The light was weak and ineffective at this distance, but they still thought they saw something move in the darkness. Matlin swallowed and snapped off the gun’s safety; with Broom’s words about Hell nibbling at the edge of his mind, he tried not to shake as he crept toward the closest of the crumbling statues.
Something small and red screeched and leaped into the air. Matlin nearly screamed himself as he brought the pistol up and instinctively fired at it. The thing leaped again, going from arch to arch, trying to flee as more soldiers ran forward and joined in trying to bring it down. In a matter of seconds the chapel was filled with the roar of gunfire and bullet holes pocked the already crumbling stonework as they tracked the creature’s overhead hops.
Out of ammunition, Matlin lowered his pistol. “What the hell was that?” he demanded amid the gunshots. “An ape?”
Broom squinted overhead, struggling to see past the muzzle flashes. “No—it was red. Bright red.”
Hellboy Page 2
