“What are you . . . ,” Shapiro began, bewildered.
“They’re dead, Colonel! They’re already dead! They have to be obliterated!” Creaghan screamed. “Now prepare your men! We have a few minutes, no more than that!”
Hellboy couldn’t move. While one of Hazred’s goons held a knife to Anastasia’s throat, the sorceror had ordered his followers to secure Hellboy to the stone altar at the foot of the steps to the citadel. With Anastasia screaming for him to fight, not to worry about her — yeah, right — Hellboy had allowed them to chain him down with heavy iron fetters. All the while, he had assumed he could break them easily if necessary.
The moment Hazred turned his attention away, Hellboy had tested the chains. Not intending to escape, he merely wanted to get a feel for their strength. But he couldn’t move at all. No mere chains could hold him, but Hazred had obviously added a little something, a sorcerous recipe of his own.
“Damn,” Hellboy grumbled, and lifted his head slightly, scanning the cavern, trying to figure how he was going to get them out of this one.
The altar stood on a stone platform between the glowing pool and the citadel. Around the pool and the altar, and massed around the steps up to the citadel itself, which he guessed was some kind of religious cathedral, as well as Hazred’s twisted little hacienda, the sorceror’s followers gathered. There were hundreds of what Hellboy could only think of as normal humans. Not because they were normal, really. Not hardly. They were odd looking, pale as Atlanteans, and brutally strong.
Quiet, too. But then, they were all quiet. As if they didn’t dare speak, at least not in the presence of their great leader.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” Hellboy whispered to himself. But there was no man behind the curtain, no charlatan in wizard robes. Hazred was the real deal, and the magician he worshipped, Mar-Ti-Ku, obviously far more so. A god, a demon, whatever he was, Mar-Ti-Ku wasn’t human anymore. Hadn’t been for thousands of years.
Hazred wanted to bring the ancient, evil bastard back to Earth. Hellboy had an idea it might be better for everyone if he could keep that from happening. But with Anastasia at knifepoint and himself trapped with enchanted bonds, it didn’t look very promising.
A group of gangly mutant under-dwellers stood beyond the humans gathered around the altar and pool. Seven feet or taller, awkwardly thin, ugly with white, almost blind-looking eyes, there were perhaps a hundred of these. No more. They didn’t seem to be much of a threat, so he paid them little attention.
Not like the others. The dwarves, or whatever they were, protecting their “King under the Mountain.” The little troll-like men and women were descended from humans, Hazred had made that clear. But they were the product of centuries of inbreeding, and Hellboy had to wonder how bright they actually were. He expected their brains to be as stunted as their bodies, but thus far, had no proof of anything except that they were vicious.
“My people!” Hazred cried, and if Hellboy thought those gathered around the altar had been silent before, the new hush proved him wrong. Hazred was speaking in that guttural language, and as far as Hellboy knew, the sorceror was still unaware that he could understand those words.
“We have arrived at a momentous occasion! The time has come to join our spirits and to summon, as one, our great leader and father from the wasteland where he has been exiled all these long millennia. In a few moments, the spell will begin.
“Mar-Ti-Ku will come to inhabit the extraordinary body of the mighty demon before you. He will lead us to a new age of dominance over the Earthly plane. Coupling with the women of our tribe, Mar-Ti-Ku will father a new generation of immortal warriors who will enslave the world! And he will begin with this one!” Hazred shouted, and pointed at Anastasia.
Though she could not understand his words, Anastasia shrieked, her face contorted with horror, and struggled with her captors. Hellboy realized she must have assumed that the order had just been given to kill her. It occurred to him that such an order would have upset her far less than Hazred’s actual words. He had to get them out. But he still couldn’t see a way to do so without getting ’Stasia killed.
The sorceror dipped his hands into a large bucket by Hellboy’s head on the altar, and then began to smear it across his chest. The concoction was obviously blood, but there was something more to it. Something Hellboy recognized but could not put a name to. It smelled disgusting, whatever it was.
He wished fervently that he could wash it off.
The stuff dripped across his chains and the deep crimson of his chest. The dark stubble on his chest bent with the spread of the liquid, and it felt sticky. Hazred picked up a canvas bag that Hellboy recognized immediately.
“I was wondering what you’d done with her,” he commented dryly.
The sorceror reached into the bag and removed Lady Catherine’s severed head. He stared at her in silence, at her eyes. He held the head by the hair on top, and the stub of spine on the bottom, and shook it, trying to elicit some response.
“You must really be lonely,” Hellboy said, and smiled. In the silence, his words sounded hollow, reaching out to bounce off the distant cavern walls and ceiling but not quite loud enough to make it, to echo in return.
Hazred ignored him. Instead, he concentrated on Lady Catherine’s head.
“Foolish woman,” he said, again in that ancient, ugly tongue. “Rather than avenge yourself you have only succeeded in supplying me with precisely what we needed to resurrect our God.”
Lady Catherine didn’t respond.
“Hey, pal,” Hellboy observed in a conspiratorial tone. “I don’t want to upset you or anything, but has it occurred to you that’s a head? The lady’s dead, in case you weren’t sure.”
She is still here, demon. Be certain of it.
Hazred placed Lady Catherine’s head just next to Hellboy’s, and smiled down at him. His idea of a joke, maybe, Hellboy thought. It wasn’t funny. Lady Catherine had done her best to warn them to leave the area. She tried to tell them about the spiders, and about Arun’s succumbing to the jackal medallion.
But she’d done a damned half-assed job as far as Hellboy was concerned. Not that it was really her fault. The dead were confused, as a rule. Death did that. The lure of the afterlife and the need to complete unfinished business was pretty stressful, from all accounts. So as an oracle, Lady Catherine had been less than perfect.
“I tried,” she whispered in his ear, startling Hellboy.
He waited a moment to see if his small grunt of surprise would draw Hazred’s attention. When it didn’t he turned as far as he could to get a look at Lady Catherine. Her eyes were open, but bleary and unfocused. It was the look of someone who’d had far too much to drink and was near to passing out.
“You did great,” Hellboy replied. For all her vagueness, Lady Catherine tried hard. That had to count for something.
“How do I get out of these chains?” he whispered.
“The soldiers need your help, Hellboy,” she mumbled in a dazed, distant monotone, like a radio with the batteries nearly worn out. “Your friend Creaghan needs your help, at the oasis.”
Hellboy knew immediately what had happened. They’d been told, hadn’t they? Hazred had raised the lost army.
“That’s all well and good,” he said, a little too harsh on a woman who’d lost everything, her life first and foremost. “But I’m a prisoner right now myself. I can’t even break these bonds. How the hell can I help those guys if I’m trapped here? And I’m not going anywhere without Anastasia.”
Lady Catherine’s eyes closed and she exhaled noisily through her nose. Her eyes fluttered open, as if she were falling asleep, or in the throes of passion. But it was best not to think that way of a supernaturally animated severed head.
“Hazred is powerful but not omnipotent,” she said. “Calling his master will require great focus. Remember, you will need the tablet.”
“What?” Hellboy asked anxiously. “But it’s in the water. It fell wh
en . . .”
The ravaged features of Lady Catherine Lambert’s face went slack. Her eyes remained open this time, but they were vacant, staring. Dead. Just as Hellboy began to get the idea that she might be gone for good this time, the head began to decay rapidly. It hadn’t occurred to Hellboy that, beyond the injuries she had received previous to her death, Lady Catherine’s features had not changed. But now, her face went through rapid color transitions and the flesh began to sag as if rotting.
It smelled, too.
Hellboy held his breath, and tried to figure out how he was going to get his hands on that tablet. And what he needed it for. Or even if Lady Catherine’s words made any sense at all.
“My people!” Hazred shouted suddenly in that guttural tongue, startling Hellboy. “It is time.”
“Utukk Xul!” he shouted. “The accounts of the generations of the ancient ones here rendered, here remembered. Cold and rain that erode all things, they are the evil spirits in the creation of Anu spawned.
“Plague Gods. Pazuzu and the beloved offspring of Eng, the offspring of Ninnkigal, rending in pieces on high. Bringing destruction below. They are the Children of the Underworld, as are we. Loudly roaring on high, gibbering loathsomely below, they are the bitter venom of the Gods, the great storms directed from heaven.”
Hazred reached within his robes and produced a long, gleaming dagger whose blade curved back and forth like a still, unmoving snake. Wordlessly, he sliced the blade across the palm of his left hand and then held the hand above Hellboy’s face.
“Hey!” Hellboy cried. “Cut the crap, will ya!”
But he couldn’t avoid the blood dripping onto his forehead, onto the stumps of his horns.
There was an electric crackle off to his right, between the altar and the cathedral, yet still on the platform. He glanced over and saw a hole in the world. In reality. A dimensional tear whose outer edges swirled like heat mirage sweltering above pavement in August. The center was pure darkness, but not flat. It had depth, and a fetid breeze seemed to flow from that opening.
The limbo realm where Mar-Ti-Ku had been imprisoned for millennia had been breached. And Hellboy was to be his host on Earth.
“I don’t think so!” Hellboy said, and tugged against his chains.
Nothing happened. They didn’t slit Anastasia’s throat, and the chains didn’t give. He guessed they were all entranced by Hazred’s sorcery. He tried the chains again and maybe, just maybe, they gave a little bit.
“The highest walls, the thickest walls, the strongest walls,” Hazred intoned, slicing his other palm. “Like a flood they pass from house to house, they ravage. No door can shut them out. No bolt can turn them back. Through the door like snakes they slide. Through the bolts like winds they blow.
“Pulling the wife from the embrace of her husband. Snatching the child from the loins of man. Banishing the man from his home, his land. They are the burning pain that presses itself upon the back of man.
“They are the ghouls. The spirit of the harlot that died in the streets. The spirit of the woman that died in childbirth. The spirit of the woman that died, weeping, with a babe at the breast. The spirit of an evil man. One that haunts the streets. One that haunts the bed. One that haunts the desert.
“Mar-Ti-Ku!” Hazred screamed.
All of his silent followers finally opened their mouths, and chanted that name. “Mar-Ti-Ku!” Then silence descended again. Or ought to have. For in that absence of voice, Hellboy heard another sound. A buzzing, or chittering noise, like locusts or crickets or ten million ball bearings shaken together, tossed against one another.
He stared at the dimensional rift as it began to grow wider.
Hellboy blinked in surprise when the first scarab beetle flew from that hole. It fluttered straight for him and landed on the stump of one horn. Then another followed, flying out into the cavern. Several more. Several dozen. Several hundred.
Thousands of them. And the noise was deafening.
“There!” Agent Rickman shouted.
Creaghan and Shapiro were together, several feet away, and they heard him at the same time. Creaghan knew what to expect, but Shapiro obviously still didn’t believe what they were up against. He knew there was something terribly odd, had no real answers to the questions whirling in his mind, but dead men?
He knew what Hellboy did, sure. Just like Creaghan had said. But to accept it as reality was another story entirely. Now he didn’t have any choice.
The first dead soldiers, Persian warriors dead twenty-five hundred years according to Creaghan, began to shuffle through the trees toward them. They were immediately visible, as Shapiro had expected, along the path the vehicles had used to get into the clearing. And now they were here. Flesh hanging in strips indistinguishable from their linen rags, they advanced upon the living, breathing soldiers under his command.
He scanned the woods, squinting against the driving sand. Which, gratefully, did seem to be lessening somewhat. There were so many of them. Fifty thousand was hard to believe, but thousands nevertheless, just as Major Dawson had said.
There was no denying what they were once he had seen them. Instead of thinking about it, trying to deal with something so irrational in a rational manner, Colonel Shapiro did the only thing left for him to do.
He screamed, “Fire!” as loud as he could.
The men lay across the roofs and hoods of vehicles, sat inside jeeps and troop carriers with their weapons pointing outward, lay along the tops of tanks. Hundreds of them, crowded in together in an incredible defensive effort. When they discharged their weapons, all in such a small space, the noise was deafening. Louder, even, than the storm.
The tanks fired almost simultaneously, and on the other side of the clearing from Colonel Shapiro, a tree went down.
The first wave of dead warriors fell to the ground, limbs and weapons tumbling to the sand and grass. Obliterated. Harmless.
But there were oh-so-many more where that came from.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
—
The bodies piled up fast. Some were little more than skeletons. Dead Persian soldiers, on their feet and trudging through the oasis forest, climbing on the backs of their broken, unmoving fellows in a mindless quest, bent on stealing life almost as if they believed they could claim it once again for themselves.
Creaghan’s ears rang with weapons fire, and every time one of the tanks fired, its blast seemed to echo around the inside of his chest. But still the dead kept on coming. There seemed to be an endless supply of them.
Shapiro had accepted the truth faster than Creaghan had expected. There was nothing more convincing than physical evidence. They had tens of thousands of savage dead men wielding razor-sharp weapons, trying to take their lives, to prove that the impossible was possible. The dead could walk.
Could kill.
Fortunately, they hadn’t been doing much killing thus far. Quite the other way around actually. Though it was still growing darker as the evening began to encroach upon the clearing, though the storm still raged about them, their wagon-train circle defense, while coincidental, almost seemed providential as well.
Or at least, that was how it had seemed to Creaghan early on. His feelings were changing rapidly, for several reasons. For starters, night really was coming on. As he watched, some of the dead men slipped from behind one tree to another, their stealth in direct contradiction to the actions of the rest. Perhaps that was the plan, for some to sacrifice their un-life, lull the living into a false sense of protection, of superiority, and then attack.
The other thing that disturbed Creaghan was the sheer number of Cambyses’ dead soldiers. When the first round had been eliminated, and the rest began to move in, Creaghan had been ebullient. But when the second wave of soldiers died on top of their comrades they effectively created a buffer, a bunker of bone and sand and cloth for the others to take cover behind.
The dead Persians climbed over their fellow soldiers and made it several additional yards before
they, themselves, were obliterated. Skulls and chests exploded in showers of bone and metal shrapnel. But they had come that much closer and created a second tier of bunkers for the others that came behind.
Night inched ever closer, the dead fell under the torrent of gunfire. But there was a limit to their ammunition supply. Certainly they wouldn’t have enough to kill fifty thousand men, even if the tanks did a good portion of the work. Morale slipped. Light drained from the sky
And a third tier of defensive shielding was built from the bodies of the undead.
Fifty thousand.
“It’s not going to work,” Creaghan whispered to himself.
Beside him, Shapiro didn’t seem to even be aware Creaghan had spoken. The man was maniacal, spittle flying from his mouth as he barked orders that were immediately stolen by the gale force winds and carried away. Still, the weapons fire went on. Shelling from the tanks brought down trees and blasted holes in the corpse barriers the enemy were using as shields.
None of it mattered. Through the madness, the certainty had descended upon Creaghan mercilessly. They couldn’t win. He felt the eyes of the storm above him, though he couldn’t see them. Whatever was up there in the savage winds controlled the army. At least partially. He was certain of that. And they were as unstoppable as the storm itself.
“Captain!” Agent Rickman cried, off to his right.
Creaghan looked up to see that a new corpse mound had formed half a dozen yards from the circle of vehicles.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
The military men watched as knobby-knuckled hands, bone jutting through withered flesh, grabbed hold of the top of the pile of corpses. One of the dead men launched himself, with surprising strength, over the hill and into the trench between cadavers and vehicles. His nose was gone and his jaw hung loosely by a few strands of dried muscle.
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