He actually began to speak.
No sound came out.
The medallion he had found on the sandy oasis lakeshore — the one with the jackal engraved on one side and odd glyphs like those on the tablet Hellboy had found — began to grow warm in his pocket. The pleasure of it spread through his body, and he wasn’t scared anymore. The medallion had exhibited these odd properties, the pleasure of which was becoming addictive, ever since Arun had found it. Even more so since they came underground.
With that warmth, that pleasure, came the overwhelming emotions he felt towards Anastasia. Lust. And homicidal mania.
Now he lay on top of her, close enough to inhale her sweet breath, and the medallion grew warmer still, nearly scalding his thigh through the fabric of his pocket. His fear melted, and he anticipated his own death, all of their deaths, with amusement. The thought of Anastasia’s demise was of particular interest. She deserved to die for having spurned him for so long. Still, he was exceedingly happy to have had this chance, this last chance, to be close to her.
As he thought of their impending destruction, and Anastasia squirmed beneath him, talking to Hellboy and refusing to meet his gaze, Arun grew hard. He knew she would feel his erection and pressed it against her to be certain. To let her know. It was important that she know, at the end, what she had lost.
A grimace of disgust contorted Anastasia’s face and she looked up at him. Arun smiled down at her, a smile that told her she was finally where he had always wanted her. Where he knew she secretly longed to be.
In fact, they were so close, if he tried hard enough, strained forward without getting himself even more entangled in the webbing, he might even be able to lick the salt and grime from her face. He nearly came at the mere thought of it.
With Hellboy otherwise distracted, Arun leaned forward; his tongue snaked out. He reached, strained, but could not quite make it. Anastasia was ignoring him, perhaps not even aware of his movements. He didn’t care. She would become aware momentarily.
His body felt like a furnace, the heat radiating outward from the medallion in his pocket. Arun wondered why the skein of webbing didn’t simply melt away.
As he strained to lick her, Arun became distinctly, overwhelmingly aware of Anastasia’s scents. As if his sense of smell had suddenly gone into overdrive, he caught the powerful aroma of her soap, her shampoo. Her sweat and body odor, and the damp visceral smell of her sex drove him wild. Arun’s heart thundered in his chest.
Never mind licking her face, suddenly he was driven mad with a desire to be inside her, filling her with the erection that was quickly becoming painful in its rigidity.
He wanted to tear her throat out with his teeth. And though his tongue could not reach her cheek, he suddenly wondered if somehow, there was a way he could surge forth and sink his gnashing teeth into her soft flesh, feel arterial spray paint his face. He yearned to open his mouth and taste her gushing blood.
Arun’s tongue darted out again. He surged forward, but still fell short.
“What the hell are you doing?” Anastasia asked, turning toward him.
And his tongue grew longer, just for a moment. It might have been his imagination, but suddenly, it felt as if his tongue stretched out from his mouth and licked Anastasia along her jawbone.
“Jesus!” she cried. “You disgusting pig! Get away from me! God, please, Hellboy, get him away from me!”
Hellboy looked up from the quivering, vomiting black man. Arun wanted to shout, to tell Hellboy to stay away. Anastasia was his, despite that she’d been defiled by the monstrous thing in the past. His to ravish or to eviscerate. He looked at Anastasia, mouth open in anticipation of his words, of what he might do to her given the chance.
“You’re vile,” she snarled, glaring at him.
Then she head-butted him with a resounding crack. The medallion’s warmth dissipated. Arun blinked several times, wondering what he had done to deserve his friend’s attack. He felt disoriented, and nauseous.
“I think I’m going to be sick, Stacie,” he announced.
“You puke on me, you filthy little runt, I’ll tear out your fucking eyeballs with a grapefruit spoon!” she shouted in his face.
“Ssssssh!” Hellboy said.
Arun and Anastasia both looked up. Arun saw the dark hole on the far side of the web and vaguely remembered wanting to tell them all about it. Too late, though. They all knew about it now. They couldn’t miss it.
Or what was crawling out of it.
“Hellboy!” Agent Carruthers screamed. “Get me the fuck out of here so I can help you, dammit! I’ve got to get my gun!”
But Hellboy had already looked for Carruthers’ gun and couldn’t find it anywhere. He didn’t know what to do first. Meaney needed medical attention, immediately. He was getting breath, but less and less of it as the awful green bile flowed from his throat. If he continued to choke, Hellboy could only assume that he would die quite soon.
Anastasia and Arun were thrashing against one another, helpless. Carruthers was closest to the slowly advancing arachnid, and he screamed at Hellboy, his eyes bulging from their sockets, veins pulsing in his forehead. Hellboy couldn’t take it anymore.
“Would you shut up!” he snapped.
Carruthers stared at him in horror.
“Another word and I’ll leave you there,” Hellboy continued. “You’re an arrogant, obnoxious pain in the ass. And you’re damned lucky I don’t hold a grudge.”
He scrambled across the web, past Anastasia and Arun, past Carruthers, until he was some twenty feet from the spider. Meaney, the poor bastard, would have to wait, Hellboy thought. As quickly as he could, he surveyed the contents of his belt pouches, trying to find something, anything, that might be of use.
The spider stopped and seemed to regard him from its eight many-faceted eyes. Its eight spindly legs were matted with dark, coarse hair and its body had a kind of fur on it as well. The mandibles at its mouth twitched in silent conversation with itself, or perhaps, he thought, the spider was merely salivating at the thought of the five-course meal that awaited it.
Those prism eyes stared at him. Hellboy continued to search the pouches of his belt. When the spider did not advance any further, he began to get angry.
“What?” Hellboy shouted at it. “What are you waiting for, an invitation?”
The spider crept forward once more, slowly.
“Oh, well done, Hellboy,” Carruthers snarled from behind him. “Taunt the giant spider-monster into coming a little closer. You might as well ring the bloody dinner bell!”
“Shut up!” Hellboy growled.
“Look, I don’t expect you’ve got a big can of Raid in those mule packs you wear on your hips, but haven’t you got a gun?” Carruthers sneered, his distress transforming his fear into anger.
“Yes, I have a gun,” Hellboy answered. “But it’s not much use against something like this!”
“Well, you can bloody well shoot it anyway, can’t you?” Anastasia asked.
The spider moved forward again. Hellboy pulled out his gun and shot the spider from a range of fifteen feet, obliterating one of its eyes. It rocked back a moment, then took another eight-legged step forward. Ten feet away now.
“There, you happy now?” Hellboy asked, holstering his gun. “That didn’t do a damn . . .”
The spider faltered, one leg slid into a hole in the web and it crashed onto its belly.
“ . . . thing.”
Hellboy took a tentative step toward the spider, its remaining eyes shining in the green light, but it didn’t move. Another step, and he was a little more than five feet from the huge creature. His friends were silent, all of them awaiting some kind of attack or movement.
“You think it’s dead?” Hellboy asked, just as the massive arachnid lofted itself up once more. Using the five legs with which it had stable footing, the spider lurched forward, towering over Hellboy. On his knees, he was at a terrible disadvantage, but he didn’t dare stand for fear of falling th
rough.
The spider surged upward on its forelegs, and the back part of its abdomen seemed to bend under its body. A thick strand of silver shining web erupted from its rear section. It fell across Hellboy’s shoulder and where it fell it burned just a little as it dried. Hellboy went to tear it off, but at first it held fast.
Then the spider ducked its head down and darted forward, trying to snap Hellboy up in its gaping maw. Anastasia screamed and Arun began to laugh hysterically. He’d gone way over the edge, Hellboy thought, and he’d been riding right on it for a long time.
At that proximity, the spider was sure to get him eventually. Unless Hellboy changed the rules, and the odds, pretty drastically. He tore the webbing from his arm, ducked down to get some momentum, and threw himself under the spider.
Flat on his back, Hellboy pulled his gun a second time and fired four rounds into the leathery underside of the beast. Green-black ichor poured from the wounds down onto his face. The stench and the taste made him turn to one side and retch uncontrollably. The spider wobbled slightly, and then began to scuttle sideways, lowering its dripping maw toward where he lay.
“This isn’t working!” he shouted, though in a sense it was. He was keeping the spider away from Anastasia and the others. But if they couldn’t find a way to free themselves, his efforts would be useless. As long as the spider lived!
The arachnid dipped its head for him again. Hellboy grabbed hold of its mandibles with his right hand and pulled it down, holding the spider’s mouth away from his head. Its breath stank of putrescent meat, and it began to make a keening, chittering noise which might have been a scream of pain or a cry of attack.
Any second the webs would fly, and this close he didn’t know what he could do. Hellboy stumbled, one hoof slipping through the webbing. He lost his grip, and the spider’s mandibles closed on his left hand, slicing through his tough skin just barely. His thunderous roar of pain and frustration caused the web to tremble beneath him, but he did not fall through. The spider, unwittingly, was doing him a favor by holding him up.
But it didn’t feel much like a favor.
The spider yanked his left arm and Hellboy went with it. He let the spider’s strength carry him to it, lifted his massive right hand, and brought the stone fist down on top of the spider’s head, among its many kaleidoscopic eyes. Again and again and again and again.
“You’re. Really. Starting. To. Piss. Me. Off!” he bellowed, one word for each blow.
On the last, the spider’s skull gave way beneath his assault. Its head cracked open and a sickly yellow pus began to leak out. Hellboy stopped hitting it, but when he pulled his hand away, a little of the fluid was smeared across his stone knuckles.
“Now that’s pest control!” he said triumphantly.
Behind him, the others began to scream anew.
“Jeez!” he huffed. “What is it with you people?”
He turned, prepared to calm the others, to think of a way to free them and escape. “Look, we’ve got to get out of here now, before more of this guy’s family shows up looking for revenge,” he said. “I’m sure I’ve got something to cut . . .”
Hellboy stared past Carruthers. Past Anastasia and Arun, who had stopped struggling against one another and were together straining away from Agent Meaney.
Or what had been Agent Meaney.
Carruthers began to pray softly, and Hellboy suddenly felt sorry for having yelled at him earlier, no matter how much of a weenie he’d been. You couldn’t blame him for his fear now, or for the way the rest of them were screaming in a hellish chorus.
Mandibles protruded from either side of Meaney’s mouth, stretching and ripping his flesh. A chittering noise came from within him and he bucked and thrashed on the gluelike webs.
Increasingly, though, Meaney wasn’t sticking to the web.
“Come on, man, do something!” Carruthers pleaded.
Hellboy hesitated. Moments earlier, Meaney had been their comrade, perhaps the most competent and brightest of Creaghan’s MI5 squad.
Then the skin and clothing at Meaney’s side began to bulge. Something strained against the flesh and fabric . . . and it exploded outward. Four legs burst from either side of Agent Meaney’s quaking form.
The quaking subsided, and then slowly, purposefully, Meaney turned to regard them. His eyes bulged impossibly. Then they exploded in a splash of viscous fluid and behind them, huge multifaceted spider’s eyes grew. Other new eyes began to tear open in the skin of his face.
The Meaney-spider hissed, still on its back, and reached for Hellboy with its human arms. His body burst open at the pelvis, just above where the man’s genitals would have been, and webbing shot from the ragged holes, whipping around Hellboy’s neck and chest like bolos. Hellboy began to tear it painfully free, when another hiss came from behind him. The first spider, despite the bullets he’d put in it, lumbered unsteadily to its feet and hissed, spraying him with even more webbing.
In seconds, he was nearly fully cocooned. As hard as he strained against his bonds, Hellboy could not snap them. He was trapped. As helpless as the others. Vulnerable.
Painfully, the huge spider began to close in. The spider-thing that had once been Agent Meaney hissed and clawed out at him with a human hand.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
—
Though at first he had argued, Captain Creaghan finally allowed Agent Rickman to talk him into taking a nap. He had barely slept in three days, and had begun to question his own judgment. Several hours after Dr. Bransfield’s small team left to investigate the oasis cliff caves, Creaghan had given in to Rickman’s suggestion and the urgings of his own body.
And slept.
When he woke, it was far darker than he expected. He had given Rickman specific instructions to wake him in two hours, but inside his tent, it seemed the day had ended. It was dusk, or past that. Perhaps five hours after he had closed his eyes.
“Damn it!” he growled.
Creaghan stood and strode angrily from his tent, prepared to shout at whomever was nearby. But as soon as he stepped outside, a hard wind and gritty sand blasted his face and eyes. He cursed loudly, and sand flew into his mouth, crackling between his teeth as he tried to spit it out.
Squinting and shielding his eyes, Creaghan looked up at the sky. The sun was still there, a dim radiance barely visible past a curtain of brown gauze that seemed to hang across the western sky.
“What the hell . . . ,” Creaghan mumbled.
“Sandstorm, sir.”
“What?” he asked, and turned to see that Rickman had come up behind him.
“Sandstorm,” Rickman repeated. “It will be here in twenty or thirty minutes, according to the Bedouins. They recommend hiding in our tents, zipping everything up, and praying that it won’t be strong enough to tear the tents off the ground with us inside.”
Creaghan stared at Rickman, searching for some sign of sarcasm. He found none.
“Get the men to pack up anything vital they can in the next ten minutes,” Creaghan ordered. “And send someone over to tell Colonel Shapiro that they might want to do the same.”
“What?” Rickman asked. “Why?”
Creaghan stared at him.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, sir,” Rickman retreated. “I know we’re not to question you. I apologize.”
“Fine,” Creaghan allowed. “But to save time when you pass the order along, I’ll tell you why. We’ve established that something supernatural is at work here. Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, fifty thousand men were erased from existence by a gale-force sandstorm.
“If that’s the kind of storm whatever paranormal force is at work here has in store for us, we’ll fare much better in those caves in the oasis basin than we will out here in the open desert. On the other hand, Shapiro and his men will never fit in the caves. They’ll have to take what cover they can in the oasis itself. The trees and the height of the basin walls should take the brunt of the storm off them,” Creaghan explained.
&nb
sp; “But sir,” Rickman paused, “how do I explain that to Colonel Shapiro?”
“Lie, Rickman! Tell the stupid American bastard that the Bedouins say it’s going to be a killing storm and the only place to hide is the oasis. Now move!” he barked.
Rickman tore off across the sand and Creaghan looked up at the darkening sky, at the sun hiding away as if turning its back on their plight. Nervously, almost unconsciously, Creaghan touched a hand to the leather holster within which rested his sidearm. It was something he often did, something which gave him an odd sense of comfort.
This time, the weapon’s presence failed to reassure him. What good were bullets against the desert itself?
Unbidden, tears began to well up in Anastasia’s eyes. She had been this close to death several times before, and each time, Hellboy had found a way to win, to bludgeon the reaper into submission. But Hellboy couldn’t help her now. Only his head was visible above the cocoon of webbing the spiders, one of which had once been human, were spinning.
Ever since they had fallen over the edge, she had felt helpless. Useless. But now there was little choice. Something had to be done. They didn’t have knives, not even Carruthers, which surprised her. She would have thought MI5 agents would be armed better.
Frantically, she glanced around, squinting to see in the dim, verdant light. The tunnel entrance from which the huge spider had come was cast in deep shadows, but Anastasia didn’t think there were any other spiders coming that way. Staring into the darkness far above them in the chasm, she thought she could make out movement. Without doubt, there were further web networks up there, and probably more spiders.
“What are you doing?” Arun asked, his rank breath filling her nostrils.
“Shut up, you disgusting man,” she snapped. Whatever had driven him to . . . to lick her face, she didn’t want to know about it. About what perverse thoughts might lurk in his brain.
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