The God Machine

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  Hellboy noticed that as the being spoke these words, his other hand had gone to the still-unhealed hole in his chest, fluttering around the wound.

  "Power that I will need if I am to cleanse the world," he said dreamily.

  Hellboy had an idea, a crazy one at best, but it was the best he could come up with at the moment.

  "You want it?" he asked, waving the dagger around to get the creature's attention. "You can have it, my gift to you." Hellboy held it out at arm's length.

  "This is a trick," Qemu'el growled, squeezing him tighter.

  Hellboy felt as though his head might just pop from his body if he didn't play this right.

  "Fine," he wheezed, having a difficult time breathing. "I'll just fling it in the ocean then." He made a move to do so, and Qemu'el reacted.

  "Wait!" he screamed. "It must be mine."

  The grip upon him lessened, and the Archon slowly--cautiously--brought him closer. One thing he could say about this particular ancient being, he wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the box.

  "Why would you give this to me?" Qemu'el asked suspiciously. "You are my enemy--the one that wishes to see me fail."

  Hellboy shrugged. "You yourself said that we were kindred spirits. Maybe I've come to realize that you're right."

  The angel of destruction thought about it for a moment, and Hellboy guessed it must have made sense.

  Too much sense. He hated that the Archon could believe it, and how reasonable it would've seemed to just about anyone else. Anyone who didn't have to live it.

  "Feed it to me," the creature commanded, then opened its cavernous maw, that horribly odd smell wafting out.

  Hellboy wriggled around in the angel's grip, making a good show of it. "I'm afraid I'll miss," he told him. "Loosen your grip so I can get it in."

  The Archon did as he suggested, allowing him just a little more freedom.

  "That's better," Hellboy said, making the motion to toss the knife.

  Instead, he sprang from Qemu'el's palm, hurling himself at the angel's surprised face. Hellboy plunged the dagger into the center of one of the angel's circular eyes, the metal being shrieking in surprise and pain.

  "Treacherous maggot!" the giant wailed, his arms and metal wings flailing.

  Hellboy found himself airborne and wishing he had a jet pack. He landed on his side, rolling across the hard, unyielding surface, every ounce of breath he had knocked from his lungs.

  Through a haze of injury and swirling snow, he saw Qemu'el attempting to remove the dagger from his eye. He couldn't be sure, but it looked as though the dagger might be working--the enchanted weapon actually allowing the trapped spirit entities to escape. Sparks flew from the stabbed eye, and strangely hued flames sprang up there.

  "You traitorous blight upon the land!" Qemu'el exclaimed, his metal hands tearing at his face, but it didn't seem to be doing the creature much good.

  Must've stuck it in good and deep, Hellboy thought, attempting to shrug off the shrieks of pain from his own body as he strained to stand.

  Then over the sound of his grunts and moans of discomfort, he heard something else, a strange rushing sound. He was just about to chalk it up to head trauma when he saw Spearz come running up from the edge of the island, dragging a woman behind him.

  "Get away from here," Hellboy screamed at the pair, glancing over his shoulder at the metal giant, who was still struggling to remove the Anyroda dagger from his eyeball. Spirits now leaked from the giant's damaged socket like smoke trailing from the end of a cigarette.

  But Spearz didn't listen, coming closer and yelling at the top of his lungs.

  "Something's coming!" he shrieked, pointing off in the distance.

  Shielding his eyes from the pelting flakes of snow, Hellboy looked out across the island to the ocean beyond it. The water looked to be boiling, movement beneath making the water froth and churn.

  "What now?" he muttered beneath his breath, fresh out of ideas on how to deal with this rapidly degenerating situation.

  Then it rose up out of the ocean, a thing as tall as the metal giant. It was in the shape of a man, its body huge and powerful, but the surface of its glistening flesh seemed to writhe and undulate. Clouds of shrieking seagulls flew circles around its oddly shaped head.

  Hellboy moved closer, just to be sure--just to see that what he had begun to suspect was indeed true. "You gotta be friggin' kidding me," he said, his mouth agape.

  The new giant was made up of ocean life--countless fish and other marine animals coming together to form its massive body: dolphin, haddock, skate, octopus, starfish and horseshoe crab. There were sharks, and even a right whale that composed the majority of its undulating torso.

  Hellboy stared in awe. Every time he'd thought he'd seen it all, something more bizarre would come along to prove him wrong.

  He wasn't sure if there was anything to top this, and really didn't care to see it if there was.

  There was only so much a guy could take.

  The angel of destruction felt his newfound strength gradually waning. Frantically he clawed at his face, trying to dislodge the offending blade protruding from his eye. The spirit energies were leaving him, escaping from his body where they had been contained, reducing his power source.

  The god swatted at his face yet again, and suddenly the pain was gone. He scanned the snow-covered ground at his feet, searching for the offending dagger, then found it.

  Such a dangerous tool, he thought, still drawn to the supernatural energies inherent in the black metal of the knife, energies that could surely restore him to the level of power required to achieve his purpose.

  Folding the metal wings upon his broad back, the god squatted, eyeing the tiny item lying in the accumulating snow. Carefully he reached for it, his large, segmented metal fingers surprisingly dexterous as he picked up the dagger. Upon touching the black metal blade, Qemu'el could see the knife's history, see how it had been worshipped throughout the ages as a tool that could vanquish evil on some grand, cosmic scale.

  The Archon chuckled, studying the tiny object that could have very easily thwarted his designs. Would the ancient race that forged this knife view me as evil, or see me in the light of savior? he wondered.

  In the distance he heard a commotion and attempted through his one good eye to see beyond the whipping snow.

  What is the red-skinned abomination up to now?

  The angel opened his hinged metal jaws and dropped the dagger down into his gullet, where it joined the remaining items of power. Qemu'el immediately felt his strength increase. The Archon gazed down at the hole through his chest, watching with two good eyes again as his metal skin flowed like water, the wound healing over as his power was again on the rise.

  The angel then reached out with his mind, dancing around the weapons of mass destruction that would soon bring cleansing fire to the world. He had admired them from his stygian prison, coming to know each and every one of the atomic devices intimately.

  Nothing can stop me now, Qemu'el thought. He would show the Almighty the perfection of his creation, and how he was able to achieve this most sacred task alone, and he would be looked upon with adoring eyes.

  The angel of destruction smiled, gazing up to the heavy clouds, swollen with storm, and beyond to Heaven.

  "Are you watching, oh Lord?" Qemu'el asked, ready to commence.

  But before beginning, Qemu'el gazed down to see his red-skinned bane come running out of the swirling storm, followed by two who had been his disciples upon the Earth. He tensed, preparing for their onslaught.

  "You are too late, worms!" he proclaimed, his newfound strength crackling around him. "In a moment's time, it will all be brought to a close, paving the way for the next age, and all that exists upon this blighted planet will be but a sliver of memory, so easily forgotten by me, and eventually the Creator."

  But something was not right. They did not attack him, they did not attempt to thwart what there was no hope of averting. Something was amiss.


  Qemu'el swiveled his head briefly, watching perplexed as they continued to flee past him. He turned back in time to see a gigantic shape emerge from the mist and storm, its body glistening colorfully in the muted light that shone down from the cloud-filled skies.

  Every inch of its body was moving--its entirety composed of individual life--and from this writhing mass, Qemu'el sensed something strangely familiar.

  "What are you?" he asked.

  "Do you not know us, brother?" the creature asked, its voice like the squeals and shrieks of millions of life-forms attempting to communicate all at once.

  And Qemu'el knew what had happened. His brothers had awakened and found him missing.

  "We are your end."

  Hellboy turned to see that Spearz and the woman had started to lag behind. The surface of the island was slippery with snow, and the two held on to each other as they tried to keep up.

  "C'mon, move it!" he yelled, knowing that Captain Fishsticks's charging the giant, winged metal guy wasn't going to amount to anything but big-time trouble. He stopped to grab hold of them, pulling them along, and found himself mesmerized by the sight in the distance.

  At first it looked like the pair of giants were about to have a nice little chat, as if they knew each other, but that all changed when Qemu'el spread his metal wings, crouched and sprang into the air, attempting to escape.

  Fishsticks moved like a blur--pretty amazing for something that big--its body almost fluid as it reached up to grab hold of the fleeing angel's ankles, pulling him back to down to Earth.

  Qemu'el landed with a horrific crash that Hellboy could feel through the solid ground of Egg Rock.

  "You might want to think about running like hell," a familiar voice said nearby, and Hellboy jumped, looking around to see the ghostly shape of Manning's uncle Steve, the scorched specter of Sally floating nearby. He hadn't felt their approach as he normally would have, probably because of the storm.

  He looked back to see that the entity from the sea had thrown itself atop the thrashing Qemu'el, fists made up of a variety of marine life, raining powerful blows down upon the body of the metal giant.

  The ocean creature engulfed Qemu'el, its living body flowing over the struggling entity, covering him completely.

  Hellboy turned back to the ghosts, but they were gone.

  "Oh, crap," he said, starting to run.

  There came a clap of thunder that shook the sky, then a tremendous flash of searing white light followed by a brief second of eerie silence. The quiet broke with a torrent of noise that sounded an awful lot like Niagara Falls.

  Hellboy managed to clear away the spots dancing before his eyes just in time to see the wall of water, teeming with aquatic life, rushing across Egg Rock toward him. He braced for the inevitable.

  Should've listened to the spooks, he thought, just before being hit by the tidal wave as it rushed to flow back into the sea.

  Absolom Spearz hugged the woman tightly to him, his back pressed against the small outcropping of stone. The ocean waters rushed over them, trying to rip them away from the land and drag them both into the sea.

  A moment after the water came it receded, washing away most of the accumulated snow and leaving behind hundreds of thrashing fish and crabs and other sea life in its wake.

  The woman shook in his arms, her clothing, as well as his own, sopping wet. In a moment of compassion, he pulled her closer to him in an awkward attempt to warm her body with his own. For a moment she allowed herself to be held, before her body stiffened, and she pulled herself away.

  Bethany Thomas stared at him with eyes that swam with a mixture of emotions; he saw fear there, as well as confusion and anger. She had been through much these past weeks.

  Absolom felt a pang of something that could very well have been love for the woman, some residual aspect of emotion leaking from the true owner of the body he wore. It felt wrong for him to be experiencing it, for it did not belong to him.

  "You're not my husband," she said through trembling lips that had started to turn a soft blue.

  He climbed to his feet, leaving her sitting on the ground, and surveyed their surroundings. The landscape was littered with dying fish of all shapes and sizes, as well as other forms of ocean life he barely recognized, but the god he had summoned, as well as the behemoth that had emerged from the sea, were nowhere to be found. The storm was practically finished, residual flakes drifting gently from a gradually lightening sky.

  Absolom held out his hand, catching a single flake of snow upon his outstretched palm before it melted away. He would miss being alive, he thought, closing his hand into a fist and turning to the trembling woman.

  "No, I'm not," he said to her. "And it's time that I gave him back to you."

  With those words, Absolom Spearz let go of his mortal host, withdrawing his ghostly essence and allowing its rightful owner to assert himself.

  The man screamed out for his family, responding to his frightful last recollection. Stanley Thomas fell to his knees, trembling first from the trauma of what had happened to him, and finally from the cold.

  "Stan?" Bethany whispered, crawling across wet stone and the remains of dying fish to take her husband into her arms.

  The spirit of Absolom Spearz watched them for a moment, envying them for the life they had. Absolom wondered about the others--his Electricizers--curious if they still haunted this world or had gone on to the afterlife.

  The visage of a horribly burned woman materialized in front of him, and he found himself recoiling from the gruesome sight. Slowly he came to recognize the spirit as kindred, another restless entity, but there was something more about this one.

  Something familiar.

  The woman drifted closer to him, her eyes never leaving his, and slowly, ever so slowly, she reached a charred hand out to him, to touch his face, and it was then that Absolom knew.

  "Sally," he said, the fetid memories of the guilt he carried over her sacrifice bubbling to the surface as she allowed her ghostly essence to mingle with his own.

  He felt her love of him, as well as the pain and rage she had experienced upon her death. Absolom's ghostly form shuddered, threatening to dissipate and drift away upon the ocean breeze, but she held him together, refusing to let him go.

  Another spectral image had materialized, not too far from where they stood, a normal-looking soul, except for the expression of sadness he wore.

  Sally looked away from Absolom to gaze at the man, and something seemed to pass between them.

  "Go ahead, girl," the other ghost said, shoving his transparent hands into his pockets. "I'll catch up to you later."

  Sally turned her blackened features back to her husband, and he knew then that his time upon the plane of the living had come to an end.

  "I...I'm afraid," he whispered, as she pulled his head toward hers.

  Though they were both merely phantoms now, he felt the roughness of her charred and blackened lips as they pressed against his, their ethereal bodies mingling as they at last responded to the pull of the world beyond this one and slipped into the ether.

  Together.

  Hellboy's cloven hooves clattered across the rocky surface as he pushed upon the deadweight, grunting with exertion.

  Steve's ghost watched the BPRD agent struggle to push the whale back toward the water. He wished he could help, but he had no substance, no flesh. His spirit was melancholy.

  "Is it still even alive?" the ghost asked, gazing around the island, which was littered with flopping sea life.

  Hellboy looked over his shoulder. "I think it's just stunned," he said. "If I can get it back into the water, it should be all right."

  He placed his back against the whale and pushed again. Its bulk slid across the rocky ground. They came to a slight incline, where the whale caught on an outcrop of rock.

  It didn't look like the whale was going anywhere, when it suddenly started to thrash excitedly, as though it sensed the nearness of the ocean. The movement jarred it l
oose from the rocks. Hellboy continued to push, grunting with exertion as the animal began to slide down the incline at the island's edge.

  Finally, the whale was back in the water, and with the continued help of Hellboy, was soon swimming away.

  "Don't forget to write," Hellboy called after it with a wave.

  Steve clapped, his spectral hands making no noise as they came together.

  Hellboy paused to bow as he came out of the water.

  "That pretty much does it for me today," he said, placing his hands at the small of his back and stretching. "I'm beat."

  He straightened and looked around. "Where's Sally?"

  "Left with her husband," Steve said.

  "Voluntarily?" Hellboy asked, seeming surprised.

  The ghost nodded. "Think the boy knew that he screwed up big-time, decided to get while the getting was good."

  "Excellent," Hellboy said, looking around at the ground. "Don't have a clue what ended up happening with the Anyroda Dagger," he muttered. "Baxter's gonna be really pissed."

  They heard the sound of an approaching helicopter, and both searched the sky to see the Chinook coming toward them over the misty horizon.

  "Here comes the cleanup crew," Hellboy said. He started to walk around, checking the bodies of the fish, throwing the ones that were still alive back into the sea.

  The chopper was almost there, and Steve had made up his mind.

  "Think I'm gonna get going," the ghost said.

  Hellboy looked up, a dead octopus draped over his hands. "Get going where?"

  "Y'know," Steve said. He pointed up into the sky. "I'm kinda curious to find out what's next."

  "Don't you want to say good-bye to Tom?"

  He shook his head. "Naw, think I've caused enough problems for him, still being around and all. He's probably had more than enough of me. It sure was a blast though," he said with a smile.

  "Anything you want me to tell him?" Hellboy asked.

  Uncle Steve shoved his hands deep into his pockets. "Yeah, tell him that I'm proud of him."

  "Will do," Hellboy replied, dropping the octopus and wiping his hands on his shorts. "You take care."