Unnatural Selection

by Tim Lebbon

  Abby moved on, leaving the light behind. She knew that it was there for her should she need it, and she had a very definite sense of being attached to her sleeping body, back in that ruined church in Baltimore. That was her physical side, and it was very important to her, a link to the world that she would never willingly break She might have been re-created for someone else's gain, but she was all herself once more. If ever a time came when she would be relegated back to the Memory ... then she would rather die. That way at least she would be remembered, rather than being sent back here so that everyone could forget.

  Out in the darkness little stirred. She felt intimations of presences around her, but none made themselves apparent, and she was surprised at how reduced this place felt, how empty. She drifted through the Memory, questioning the dark but receiving only blankness as an answer. Perhaps anything out there was keeping to itself, shy of her intrusion and unsure of how to respond to this presence, one of them and yet linked to a place beyond. She tried to project kinship, but in truth she felt none. This had once been her place, but that was no longer the case. She had a new home now.

  Help me, she thought, and the idea echoed in the dark. I was once here and always will be. The echo to this was smaller, as if the darkness itself could see the lie of her statement. A man took me out, and now I seek him.

  The man! something shouted. Its voice was loud and broken.

  The scientist, Abby thought. The magician.

  He pulled he hurt he tore!

  And did he not take you?

  He pulled he tried he broke he shouted he left me all alone!

  Where are you? Abby thought. She looked through the blackness but saw nothing, sensed nothing other than the vague outlines of things that once were. Echoes of presences, that was all. Most were the ghosts of memories made whole again by Blake, but some drifted, so faint as to be almost invisible even to her. Some were lost forever.

  I'm here, I'm lost, the echo said. I'm here forever.

  Why didn't Blake take you through?

  He tried, it hurt, he failed and moved on. Left me here with them.

  Them?

  The old ones, the oldest ones. The ones even he could not try to touch. And now that so many others have gone, their shapes become more apparent. Cant you see, stranger? Cant you taste them, invader?

  I'm no invader, Abby thought, but she knew that was not the case. She looked further, deeper, but saw only taints on the empty blackness. What were you?

  A god and a demon, and now barely a memory.

  And if I promise to remember? Will you help me then, will you tell me where the man is?

  I'm here hurting I'm here nowhere, and you want me to give you a place?

  An idea at least, Abby said. You'll become my memory, I promise.

  If there could be laughter in Memory, the thing uttered it now. It was a hollow sound, dry and empty and devoid of character. Don't offer what you can't deliver, it said. I'm way beyond Memory now. Too old, too faded ... too terrible.

  But you can tell me, cant you?

  The thing was quiet for a time, and at last Abby sensed something starting to drift closer. I could hold you here, it said. The pain would go, the hurt would go, because you would be my own memory ... my own waning dream ...

  I exist, Abby thought, and she suddenly had no fear. I'm a part of the world, no longer just faded history. I have friends.

  And I can never be a friend, the thing said.

  Darkness grew out of darkness, a bulk formed from void, and it was growing closer. Abby began to feel its weight, its gravity, and it was tremendous. She sensed age, eons of time, and an endless stretch of experience and knowledge. A god and a demon, the thing had called itself, and she shrank back at its approach. It was not only size and weight but import and presence. She began to think she had been fooled. If this were only an echo, the true source of this Memory must be terrible indeed.

  Yes, terrible, it said, and then it laughed for real.

  Abby fled, but as she drew herself back out of Memory and into reality again, the thing she had touched gave her something. Whether intentional or accidental, she fell back into her own body with an image, and a sense of place, and an idea in her mind that showed patterns and designs where there had previously been nothing.

  Abby cried out and sat up in the old church. It was fully dark now — the street lamps around the ruin had gone off — and rain pattered down through the open roof. For a few seconds the terrible weight of that thing was all around, pressing down on her body and squeezing breath from her lungs, blood from her veins. She felt the fire of her soul deep inside lessened by the presence, and she screamed against being snuffed out. But then she was alone in the church again, eyes blinking back Memory even as it faded away like an old dream, so complete and solid upon waking and little more than an echo once life and time took over once again.

  She was alone, and all that watched her now were the eyes of a ruined Christ.

  * * *

  She hurried from the church. The streets of Baltimore were all but deserted now, occupied only by shuffling nighttime people. A bum pushed a loaded cart down one street, pausing here and there to snatch up something from the gutter and stuff it into one of his already bulging bags. A police cruiser drifted by, wheel hissing along the wet concrete road. It slowed as it passed Abby, but she walked with purpose and confidence, and the cruiser moved on. Three women passed her going in the opposite direction, none of them looking at her or saying anything. They were well dressed and seemed intent on keeping themselves dry with oversized umbrellas. Abby paused and turned to watch them go, wiping rain from her eyes as though that would make her vision clearer.

  She was trying to make sense of what she had seen in the Memory. As she tumbled back out of that place, the huge presence had given her something, an image or a smell, a location or a direction. She was struggling to get hold of it and translate it before it faded away, a dream gone to shreds. Blake was somewhere in there, she was sure. If she could make sense of what she had been given, she was certain that it would tell her either where he had been or where he was now.

  She ducked into a doorway and pulled a small notebook from her pocket. There was the nub of a pencil in there too, and she bent forward, shielding the paper from the rain as she started jotting, doodling, letting her mind run off at whatever tangents it chose.

  The moon tugged at her. She glanced up and saw its pale image behind the rain clouds. If only clouds would hide her from the moon in a couple of nights' time. She worried about that — what she would do and to whom — but it was also a fascinating prospect. Back at Bureau HQ it had been deer, and before that on the New Ark there was nothing she could remember, and she was happy keeping it that way. But now she was faced with true freedom for the first time, and though she was terrified of what she would do, she was fascinated as well. Will I be a murderer? she thought. She hoped not. But if that was her destiny, then she would embrace it, become who she really was, be herself for the very first time — free of Blake, free of the Bureau, liberated and unbound.

  Abe had tried to help her create a history, when in reality she was the only one with the power to do that.

  She glanced down at the paper and saw that while she had been thinking, her hands had been doing their own thing. There were words and phrases jotted there, smudged lines that could have been something else. She turned the page and carried on, trying to make sense of what that huge presence had left her.

  She thought of Blake and her time in the New Ark and what might have come before. She had little memory of being birthed, though there was a sense of time beginning, a point at which life had started. Blake had created her from the Memory, and it had been a pure creation, not a resurrection. Abby was not a werewolf that had lived before but rather a creature constructed from the faded memories of all of humanity. She was born of old superstitions, given life where before there had been only potential. She was like a never-ending dream brought into reality. And inste
ad of fading away as time took hold, she had taken on true form.

  Blake was the nearest thing she had to a father, but she had no love for him. She had seen his mind and known its madness, understood what he was capable of. She had always known that this day would come. She should have told Abe ...

  "No!" she said. "Dammit, no!" Her dilemma was growing, because she was aware of what would be happening around the world by now. She knew what was aboard the New Ark, and her brief visit to the Memory had shown her how much had been taken from there, how empty that place of myth and legend now seemed. The world was full of monsters tonight, and she had spent her life swearing that she would not be one of them. She could tell Abe and Hellboy what she knew, but that would draw them in deep and fast. They would die. She had no doubts about that. She would not consider other possibilities. Betray them, yes, but she would not kill her friends.

  She looked back at the paper, and whatever the Memory presence had given her had been channeled through her hand. While she was distracted by her own deep thoughts, information had risen from the depths. She had written of intent, though she had an idea of that already. She had sketched ideas of vengeance and intervention, an image of the world gathered under a pair of spread wings, Blake taking the world under his own control. That, too, she had suspected. What she had never known was how and where, and here was a rough map, drawn in her own hand, of a place she could not yet recognize.

  But she would find out.

  She had gone to the Memory seeking Blake, and something he had left behind had given her a map. She should have been pleased, but she knew what was to come. This information only took her one quick step closer to her doom.

  * * *

  Abby left Baltimore in the dark, rain still sheeting down, and as she sat in the back of the taxi, the world opened up to her. At the airport she would buy a map and sit drinking coffee until she could figure out where her sketch would lead her. Then she would fly, and during the flight she would prepare herself for whatever was to come.

  She looked out the rain-smeared window and saw the moon peering from behind the thinning clouds. Her nemesis and her hope, her devil and her comfort. Her breathing was shallow, and she was terribly aware of the taxi driver's hot blood coursing through his veins.

  She could hear the beating of his heart.

  Time was running out.

  * * *

  Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Headquarters, Fairfield, Connecticut — 1997

  HELLBOY AND LIZ returned to HQ at daybreak. They stood in the parking lot and watched the sun rise, sharing a silent moment.

  As they entered the building and signed in, Tom Manning hurried across the lobby, coffee cup in one hand and sheaf of papers in the other. "We think we know!" he said. "It's flimsy, but it seems to tie in with what's been happening. Come on, Kate's waiting."

  "Have you told Abe?" Hellboy asked.

  Tom paused and glared at Hellboy. "Considering he's gone off on his own, I'm not sure that's relevant."

  Hellboy reared up, rising onto the tips of his hooves, tail swishing at the floor. "Of course it's relevant," he whispered. "Tom, don't piss me off on this one. You know where Abe's gone, and you know why. And it's not as if he's avoiding anything. Do you really think he'd want to be dropped into the Caribbean to fight a kraken the size of Iceland?"

  "It's not right," Tom said. He stood his ground without averting his eyes, and Hellboy was quietly impressed.

  "It is right, it just doesn't follow your rules."

  "Rules are what make us — "

  "Don't screw with me, Tom. Kate's classy cryptid word can apply to anyone here, you know that. Even you, Tom. Honorary cryptid. Like that?"

  Tom shook his head, but he smiled tightly, and it did something to drag the exhaustion from his face for a while. "I'll call Abe and fill him in. Of course I will. But you're wrong, Hellboy."

  "About you being — "

  "No, that's good. I like that. But you're wrong to lump yourself in with the things screwing up the world today. I'm a human being. So was Hitler. See?"

  Hellboy growled at the name and everything it conjured, but he knew why Tom had used that analogy. And yes, he saw.

  "So let's work out what we can do about all this. If what Kate's come up with is right, you and Liz will be jetting off again very soon."

  "London?"

  "London. But we wanted to talk it through with you first, show you some more pictures that have just come in. If you and Liz agree we're on the right track, I've got lots of phone calls to make while you're en route."

  "Selling your shares?"

  "I wish. No, I'll be speaking to the president and to the prime minister of the U.K., asking them to mobilize their armed forces."

  "What'd I tell you?" Hellboy said to Liz. "Lots of very big guns."

  Liz lit a cigarette and offered Hellboy a light. "Why do I feel we're going to have a busy few days?" she said. "Damn, all I want to do is sleep."

  Tom waved them on with his handful of papers. "No rest for the wicked," he said. "Let's go."

  * * *

  Kate Corrigan had changed her clothes since their meeting the day before, but her eyes held the same tiredness. If she had slept, Hellboy thought, it had been a rest troubled by dreams and images that would haunt her for a long time.

  The footage of that ocean liner being taken apart was enough to disturb anyone's sleep.

  "Hellboy, Liz," she said in greeting. "Have a coffee."

  "Caffeine," Liz said. She stood at the coffee machine in the corner of the conference room, poured and drank a cup, then prepared another one.

  "Are you all right?" Kate asked. She had evidently seen the scratches and scrapes across Liz's face and forearms, evidence of her scuffle with the New York banshee.

  "Just dandy."

  "How was the banshee?" Kate asked.

  "Old, ugly, and pissed," Hellboy said. "And smelly."

  Kate frowned, Tom walked in, and Liz took a seat beside Hellboy. He leaned toward her and sniffed, then smiled. "But you'll be pleased to know that its scent doesn't linger."

  "London," Tom said. "You sure that's what it was saying?"

  Hellboy looked steadily at Tom. "Well, it had my fist down its throat at the time, but yeah, I think that's what it said."

  "Sorry," Tom said, shaking his head. "Look at these." He slid some photographs across the table to Liz and Hellboy and sat back with his hands on his head and his eyes closed. Hellboy thought he looked exhausted. There was only so much stress a man could take.

  "So what new delights do we have here?" Hellboy said. He separated the pictures on the table and leaned over them. "Oh, nice."

  The first picture showed a sea of bodies bobbing against a boat's hull. They were broken, ruptured, and leaking. Hellboy guessed there were more than a hundred dead people there, bloated and pathetic. "Another kraken?"

  "Sea serpent, off the coast of Gibraltar," Kate said. "A sergeant from the Gibraltar police contacted us, but we've had to put him on standby. He's not happy. The serpent has sunk several pleasure boats and a police launch. It seems to kill people for pleasure, no reports of any eating yet."

  "Charming," Liz said. She was scanning the picture closely, as if looking for someone familiar. Hellboy knew she took this all so seriously, making herself a part of each tragedy instead of just coming in from the outside. She claimed that being able to empathize gave her an edge. He thought that sometimes it just gave her a head full of grief.

  "It capsizes boats and thrashes around until all the passengers are dead, either drowned or ... "

  "Torn up," Tom said. He leaned across the table. "This one was taken in the Egyptian desert: fire dogs, scorching everything they come across. Dozens dead so far, but the death toll's probably a lot higher because of all the Bedouin settlements that haven't been reached yet."

  "Fire dogs," Hellboy said. "Damn!"

  "There's lots more," Kate said. She nodded at the pictures. "Lots more cryptids, so many more dea
d people. Hundreds. Thousands. You can look at them all if you want, but it all amounts to the same thing."

  "Were under attack," Hellboy said.

  The room fell silent. Liz was still studying the photographs, but Hellboy knew she was still listening, waiting for someone to speak.

  "What?" Hellboy said. "You don't agree with me?"

  "I'm not sure what I think," Kate said. "We've been asked for help from more than forty places across the globe, and most of them we've put on hold. The military of several countries have had contact with cryptids, and mostly they've come out worse. Jets weren't designed to fight dragons; machine guns can't harm wraiths. This is technology versus mythology, and the unknown has always been stronger."

  "Well, dammit, let's go! Liz and I can leave right now, and I'm in the mood for a fight. That banshee pissed me off."

  "London," Tom said. "Don't you want to hear about that?"

  "So what's tearing up London?"

  "Nothing." Tom flicked through the papers he still clasped in his hand. "Nothing yet. But there's a meeting being held there day after tomorrow, a conference of world leaders spending a week talking about environmental issues. The plan is, at the end of the week they'd have come up with an action plan to save our planet." He smiled grimly.

  "Yeah, right," Hellboy said. "So long as it doesn't cost too much, eh?"

  Tom shrugged. "Not our problem right now. What is our problem is that if the banshee was right and Blake is targeting London, it could be he's planning to take them out."

  Hellboy frowned. "So ... everything else is a distraction?"