Hopefully later on this evening I will be posting the fourth chapter of my HellboyxSelf-insert fic. In the meantime please enjoy this little teaser of what goes down in chapter 4.
a little reference I doodled for myself to try and better describe the beastie HB will be up against:
@hellfireandcandybars I got inspired by your ask prompts for hellboy X Tall love interest. (Her names Nephilim and she’s half-elf half-giant, they share a sound cloud account they upload to and send each other cat pics during the day)
“This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was and will be: an ever-living fire” - Heraclitus, The Weeping Philosopher
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Chapter 1:
The worst thing about the American southeast in the summertime had to be the humidity. The air was the consistency of hot soup, causing his hair to plaster lank and limp against his sweat-drenched head. It really wasn’t even worth it to try and wind it up into a bun to get it off his neck, that just made it easier for the damn mosquitos to find someplace to land.
For the millionth time Hellboy swatted his massive stone hand at the high-pitched buzzing near his ear, even more annoyed by how useless it was. The little bitches would be back, the swamp was thick with them. On the upside he didn’t have long to think about the dozens of mosquito bites driving him nuts, because Alice went completely still as voices he could not hear whispered to her. She confirmed that they’d reached their destination, wincing slightly from the onslaught of emotion and horror brought on by whatever visions had barraged her mind.
Daimio cut the outboard and let them drift silently down the slow-moving blackwater river toward a small island studded with cypress trees, nestled in waist high weeds behind curtains of Spanish moss, prime real estate for a man-eating lizard monster.
Locals had told stories for years about the reptilian creature that lived in the miles of dense wetlands, reporting occasional sightings to drum up tourist interest in the town. Then the bodies had begun turning up. At first it was only animals, strays and missing pets found torn and shredded and showing definite signs of being partially eaten. Then remains of the town drunk were discovered in two different locations. The following day an old woman hanging laundry in her back yard was heard screaming and all that was found of her was bloodstained grass and drag marks.
Over the course of a couple weeks the attacks grew more brazen and more vicious. Two days ago a pair of kids walking home from their bus stop disappeared. One still hadn’t been found, the other was recovered wandering in a state of delirium, unresponsive and near catatonic. The town authorities, totally out of their depth, had reached out to the BPRD.
Tracking the reptilian beast had been something of a challenge, but Alice’s medium abilities had led them deep into the swamp where she made contact with at least two fishermen who’d also had an encounter with the monster. Despite their grim fate, the men had provided them with valuable intel on their quarry and as soon as the trio located its den they set about laying a trap. Hellboy was always pleasantly surprised when a trap went the way it was planned. But one thing he had learned in his time with the BPRD was that even when things when right, they could still go terribly, terribly wrong.
The creature, all of nine-feet of ugly muscle with a flat, alligator-like head and burning red eyes, was pissed as hell by their intrusion on its lair, but it also turned out that their bullets pinged right off its thick, scaly hide. Even the Samaritan failed to make a kill shot. Thinking about every episode of Swamp People he had ever seen, Hellboy realized they’d have to hit it at point-blank range, preferably in a spot with no armor. Physically stronger than his two teammates, Hellboy took the brunt of the creature’s fury in order to get close enough to restrain it. Daimio moved in for the coupe de grace, straight through the left eye.
They took samples of blood, tissue and scales for the BPRD scientists, and after a moment’s contemplation Hellboy lopped the monster’s head off for good measure. It was while they were loading up the boat and preparing to head back to town that shit decided to go even more sideways. A second creature exploded out of the shallow water by the bank, just as big as the other but possibly even more enraged. Its jaws had latched onto Hellboy’s stone arm, raised reflexively to shield his head, and forced him to the ground under its bulk. Before any of them had a chance to aim for its eyes, it had let go of his arm, seized him by the foot and dragged him into the swamp.
Unable to see in the brackish water, Hellboy wouldn’t have been able to shoot the thing even if he could spare a moment to grab his gun. Instead he grasped the creature’s snout with both hands, trying to pry the jaws open and free himself while it trashed its head, slinging, spinning, and tossing him through the churning water much like a regular alligator. It finally released his ankle after he slugged it in the side of the face with his stone hand, retreating while he clambered for the surface. Disoriented after getting the spin-cycle treatment, Hellboy staggered back up the bank and drew the Samaritan, spitting out foul swamp water while they all scanned the turbulent water for the creature.
He and Daimio took up forward positions, keeping Alice behind them while they waited for the next attack. When it came, the creature lunging out of hiding in the murky water with its mouth agape and a snarl rumbling in its throat, Hellboy stepped up to meet it. With a roar of his own he jammed the muzzle of the Samaritan into the open maw and squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times. With most of its head now a pulpy mash of blood, bone fragments and gray matter, the creature toppled over backwards into the water and sank out of sight. Cautiously they all re-holstered their weapons, adrenaline still pumping as Daimio posited out loud, “You don’t suppose that was a female, do you?”
Another twenty minutes of searching the small island and they found the nest with half a dozen small ivory eggs in the mud. These they carefully collected to be stored in the BPRD where they couldn’t do any harm. By the time they made it back to the boat landing dawn had lit the tops of the trees. Waiting in a makeshift landing pad nearby was their chopper, with a half dozen anxious looking townies gathered around it waiting for news. Several of them gasped, murmuring amongst themselves and pointing to the beast’s severed head Hellyboy carried in one hand as he and Alice strode toward the chopper. While Daimio approached the locals to advise them of the situation, Alice opened the large rear cargo door and ascended the ramp. Hellboy went behind her, his feet squelching in his wet boots. Even though it was still early morning, the humidity was already horrible and his hair and clothes hadn’t dried a bit, hanging heavy on him. Once out of sight of the gawkers he reached down to adjust the crotch of his pants. Was there anything more miserable than soggy britches?
He dropped the reptilian head carelessly onto a metal bench mounted to the wall, settling there himself with a long harsh sigh as he began undoing the laces on his boots. Alice slid open a pressurized drawer with a hiss and a puff of condensation, carefully placing the samples and the bag of eggs inside where they could be kept in a temperature-controlled environment until they made it back to HQ. “Ugh, don’t just leave it there,” Alice chided, pulling a face as blackish blood and other fluids began seeping from the stump of the neck, dripping through the grillwork of the bench and onto the floor. With one foot she slid a plastic bin across to him and he reached over and knocked the head inside, where it landed with a muted, wet thud.
He pulled off one boot, tipping it upside down and grumpily watched muddy water spill out in a thin drizzle. “Purgatory’s hot, but damn, at least it’s dry,” he grumbled, wrestling to pull off the other boot. Finally he stripped off the sodden socks, letting out a contented sigh when his hoofed feet met the floor just as Daimio came up the ramp, closing it behind him. “You’re really going to make us smell swamp-water and hoof sweat all the way back to Colorado?” he japed, perfectly deadpan and expressionless. “Kiss my ass, Snagglepuss,” Hellboy shot back without missing a beat as he shrugged off his heavy overcoat.
Daimio scoffed but said nothing, heading for the cockpit and calling over his shoulder. “Wheels up in five.” After spreading his coat out on the bench to dry, Hellboy propped his ankle across the opposite knee to get a better look at the half dozen small punctures from the lizard monster’s teeth. Alice looked on from the row of bucket seats across from him, wincing sympathetically as he prodded around the wounds with his flesh fingers. “Does it hurt?” she asked. He gave a shrug and noncommittal grunt. “Not too bad. I’ve had way worse,” he replied. “Make sure you flush it with disinfectant. You heal fast, but they found some really nasty bacteria on the bodies they examined. Best not to chance it.” He hummed an affirmative, flexing his hoof back and forth and turning his ankle in a slow circle to test for any more pain or discomfort.
The floor began to thrum beneath them as Daimio fired up the engines, the propellers whining as they began to spin. Stretching his arms over his head, feeling vertebrae popping one after another, Hellboy spun in his seat and reclined back along the bench with his left arm draped over his face. “Wake me when we get there, will ya?” he called to Alice. He was already thinking fondly of his large shower and an equally large breakfast…
A few hours later and they were touching down on the landing pad outside the BPRD’s headquarters in the Colorado Rockies. He handed off the reptilian head to the first person he saw in a lab coat, the man cringing slightly, while Alice bequeathed the eggs to the BPRD lab manager. Hellboy moved quicker than he might have normally, eyes sweeping the personnel swarming around him. If he hurried, maybe he’d be able to avoid – “Agent Hellboy,” called a tinny voice with a crisp, pronounced German accent. Hellboy froze on the spot, cringing, cursing quietly. “Did you forget the debriefing? You seem to do that quite a lot.” Not bothering to try and stifle his exasperated sigh, Hellboy turned to face the speaker.
The “man”, in the loosest sense of the word, stood straight backed with his arms clasped loosely behind him. Though there was no facial expression to read, there was a definite if mild tone of rebuke in the disembodied voice emanating from the clear glass helmet atop his shoulders. From what he’d heard around HQ over the last month, Johann Kraus had had a body once, but in the course of some paranormal accident he’d lost it and was now confined to a semi-gaseous ectoplasmic form which he sustained by means of a specialized containment suit. Personally, Hellboy thought it made him look something like a cross between a deep-sea diver out of a Jules Verne novel and an astronaut, but he was hardly in a position to judge someone based on their appearance.
Not when his personality was so much more grating.
After the loss of Professor Bruttenholm, a thought that still made his breath clench painfully in his chest, there had been a bit of a shake up in the upper echelons of the BPRD. General operations were now headed up by Tom Manning, a former FBI director, which worked out all right since there was a bit of overlap between the two agencies’ work. The science/research division and field work, meanwhile, had been taken over by Johann Kraus. Hellboy hadn’t had much to do with Manning yet, but Kraus’s bureaucratic, cross-the-Ts-and-dot-the-Is approach was in stark contrast to the way Bruttenholm had run things. Pedantic was the word that came to mind to describe Kraus, though Hellboy had no trouble coming up with other descriptors just as fitting if less professional.
“Agents Monaghan and Daimio are already on their way to the conference room to give their reports,” Kraus stated, somehow managing to be polite and authoritative at the same time. Hellboy ground his teeth and let a long, slow exhale out through his nose. “Well we were all on the same mission,” he pointed out, trying his best not to sound too insubordinate. “Do you really need three reports on the same case? I thought the lizard head was pretty self-explanatory.” Kraus didn’t have lungs, so he couldn’t actually give a long-suffering sigh, but there was a pregnant pause before he spoke again. “That is beside the point, Agent Hellboy,” he replied, but sensing that a lecture was forthcoming Hellboy cut across him.
“At least let me change clothes and dry off first. I kinda went swimming in the swamp, probably got algae growin’ in my asscrack by now.” He walked off without waiting for Kraus to respond. It was around twenty minutes later that he shouldered his way through the conference room double doors, a towel slung around his neck and steam still rising from the crown of his head. “Glad you could join us,” Daimio sniped, seated near the head of the long table. “Did you wash behind your ears?” Alice chimed in with a teasing smirk. “Hardy-har-har,” he drawled sardonically, settling himself in the seat next to her. “Let’s get on with it. There’s a short stack in the mess with my name on it.”
Kraus, positioned at the front of the room where he could face all three of them, turned his attention to Hellboy. “It’s my understanding that you were injured?” he said. Hellboy shrugged casually. “ ‘S nothing,” he replied. “Love bite.” “Regardless, report to sick bay for an examination. We don’t want to take any chances.” Hellboy rolled his eyes, ignoring Alice punching his knee under the table. It took less than five minutes for them to relate all the details of the case to Kraus, but just when Hellboy was sure they’d be dismissed Kraus produced a file folder. “I’m afraid there’s another matter which requires our attention,” he told them. “I have here a number of reports that seem to indicate a possible wyrm infestation in Centralia, Pennsylvania.”
Hellboy frowned, Kraus’s words enough to snap him back to the conversation and away from the thought of a late breakfast in the commissary. “Centralia? Isn’t that the town that’s been on fire for fifty years?” Alice’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Like the burning mountain in Germany?” “Quite correct, agents,” Kraus responded. “In 1962, a former strip mine in the town was repurposed as a landfill. Later that year, the town council met to determine how to clean up the area. No official records exist to describe the plan they decided upon, but they later hired several local volunteer firefighters to conduct a controlled burn at the landfill, which was illegal in the state at that time. However the landfill fire started, it quickly spread through an unsealed opening in the pit floor and into the coal mines beneath the town. It has been burning ever since.”
“The town itself is now condemned and almost entirely abandoned,” Kraus went on. “The fire is located primarily in the southern end of the borough, and sinkholes are common, as well as poisonous carbon monoxide. Investigation of recent seismic activity has revealed a number of collapsed tunnels as well as the presence of new tunnels. Judging by the circumference of the newly dug tunnels we believe a wyrm may be burrowing in the mine, possibly a female in search of a place to lay a clutch of eggs. It would be attracted by the burning coal and the noxious fumes.” Hellboy sighed, slumping low in the seat. “Of course it would,” he said heavily, taking the towel in both hands and draping it over his face, letting his arms fall lax to either side of his chair. “Wyrms lay twelve eggs or more at a time,” added Daimio. “They’ll be nearly five feet long at birth. A dozen hatchlings digging in a burning coal mine could be a disaster.”
“With the mines already unstable from the coal fire, further excavations by even one wyrm could allow the fire to spread even further and endanger nearby towns,” Kraus concurred. “Which is why we need to find the wyrm and remove it as soon as possible.” He turned to face Hellboy. “You will need to take point on this mission. Neither of your teammates are impervious to fire and heat, but you are. Surface temperatures have been recorded in excess of 200 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Hellboy swiped the towel off his face and into his lap, sitting up and fixing his golden eyes on Kraus’s inscrutable transparent head. “What about the carbon monoxide?” he demanded. “I may be fireproof, but I still need to be able to breathe.” Kraus nodded impatiently, gathering the papers back together into the file. “Yes, yes, of course, you’ll have an external breathing apparatus. And Agent Monaghan and Agent Daimio will still accompany you as reinforcements. I realize you’ve all just returned from a mission, but this is rather dire, so you will be departing at twelve-hundred hours.”
Kraus stood and they followed suit. “Dismissed, agents. And best of luck.” Daimio led the way out of the conference room and down the corridor outside, Hellboy and Alice trailing along behind him. “So much for breakfast,” the half-demon grumbled. “Maybe we can talk Daimio into stopping for drive thru,” Alice offered. “Worked before.” Hellboy chuckled, rolling his shoulders as they prepared to separate at fork in the hallway. “After three days sloggin’ through a God-forsaken blackwater swamp, a burning coal mine might be nice.”
I’m hoping that if I keep the chapters relatively short, maybe it’ll help me churn them out faster! Review appreciated!
Whatever he had been expecting of a town that had been on fire for half a century, the reality was underwhelming.
As they neared the airspace over the derelict Mid-Atlantic town, all Hellboy could see out the chopper windows was a patchwork of trees spread over the hills and a grid of old roads and powerlines. Here and there open pit mines yawned wide like chasms, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. “Centralia, dead ahead,” Daimio informed them through their headsets. “I’ll circle us around, find someplace to set her down.” Hellboy thought maybe they’d at least see some smoke trails, after all there was a raging inferno below the tranquil landscape, but he couldn’t spot anything from around a thousand feet up.
Daimio cut them in a wide arc around the once-and-former-town, which was now little more than old, deserted streets leading nowhere and empty lots reclaimed by trees and underbrush and grass. “Hard to believe this used to be a town,” said Alice over the comms, thumbing through a photo gallery she’d looked up on her phone. “There’s only about five people living here now.” Hellboy chuckled slightly. “Hard to believe anybody thought it’d be a good idea to light a garbage pit on fire. But here we are.”
They were coming around the western edge of the town when something caught his eye. “What’s that?” “We’re about to find out,” Daimio replied
, maneuvering the chopper lower towards a small clearing off of a dirt access road. The fuselage gave a little shudder as the landing skids met the ground, brown scrub grass dancing in the downdraft. While Daimio switched off the engine, Alice and Hellboy were making last checks on their equipment. “I got something,” said Alice, scrutinizing the LCD monitor of an infrared thermometer. “There’s a spot less than a klick from here that’s reading significantly warmer than the area around it. Could be one of those new tunnels Kraus mentioned.” Hellboy fiddled with the fit of his radio’s earpiece, clipping the transceiver to his belt next to a handheld gas detector.
He then drew the Samaritan, snapped open the cylinder with a flick of his wrist to double check each chamber before snapping it back into place and returning it to the holster. “We don’t know for sure if it’s underground,” he said as Daimio exited the cockpit to join them, checking over his own weapon and earpiece. “If it’s a wyrm, and if it’s a female with eggs, she ain’t gonna be happy to see us, so watch your backs.” Alice passed him an IR thermometer and his respirator with a half grin. “Don’t worry about us, we’ve got the easy job. You just make sure you don’t fall down a sinkhole or something.”
Hellboy led the way out of the clearing, following the downward sloping dirt path into the trees. In between the trunks he kept catching glimpses of what he saw from the air, and in just a couple minutes they found themselves standing on the remnants of an asphalt highway. Deep cracks and fissures full of dirt and weeds split the road, and every inch of pavement was covered in graffiti. Words and designs, pictures and names in every color imaginable, most of it faded, all layered over top of one another over the decades, sprawling up and down the highway all the way to its end on their left and as far as they could see to the right. “Wicked!” Alice breathed, grinning as she turned in place to take it all in. “Looks like they closed this section of road off,” said Daimio, checking the temperature on his IR thermometer. “According to the burn map one of the fronts is right below us.”
They trekked to the end of the graffiti highway, and Hellboy chuckled to himself at the large words spray painted in white: “End of the road!” Up ahead down a narrow dirt path he could see the real road, apparently empty. He went still as he emerged from the dirt path, catching the sound of movement close by. “Company,” he called low over his shoulder to Daimio and Alice, reaching to brush aside his coat and laying his hand on the grip of the Samaritan while the others moved to either side of him. They all stood frozen, listening, waiting, as the sounds grew louder. Hellboy tensed and then immediately relaxed as three college-age young men came into view, talking and laughing together. Each of them carried a plastic shopping bag that clattered and clinked in such a way that he felt sure they were full of aerosol paint cans.
One of them spotted the three agents and went still and quiet, alerting the other two. Both parties stood a short distance apart, awkwardly gaping at one another. Well, the three young men mostly just stared at Hellboy with wide, round eyes and slightly open mouths. Daimio recovered first, all business as he called to the three taggers, “Official BPRD business, return to your vehicles and vacate the premises. This area isn’t safe.” He didn’t deign to repeat himself and continued forward, followed by Alice and Hellboy.
The taggers hadn’t moved other than to turn and keep them in sight as they passed by. “Hey!” one of them exclaimed, snapping abruptly out of his stupor, pointing to them and beaming excitedly at his friends. “You’re Hellboy!” “Nah, I’m Cliff Burton,” he joked. “I’m not actually dead, but don’t tell anybody.”
Using the IR thermometers, they followed the temperature irregularities in search of the tunnel entrance. Hellboy began to notice dead vegetation, more and more of it as they went on. Killed by the underground fire, he knew. “There it is,” said Alice, looking up from her screen. Twenty or so yards ahead at the top of the hill was a flat, square patch of grass surrounded by a wrought iron fence. Inside were rows of headstones, the granite and marble markers glinting in the sun. At the back of the graveyard, just outside the iron fence, a large black hole opened up in the earth. The trio shared a knowing look and approached it with caution.
It looked as though the hole had occurred naturally, probably started out as a sinkhole like the others in town. As the fire burned its way through underground coal pillars, the unsupported ground above it would collapse; a large part of the reason why the town had been abandoned. The hole might have been a result of normal mine subversion, but around the edges Hellboy could see where something had dug it out into a larger opening. “Guess this is the way in,” he grunted unenthusiastically, taking a small flashlight from his belt and shining the beam into the blackness. Alice wrinkled her nose and pressed the cuff of her sleeve against the lower half of her face. “Smells like matches and spoiled eggs.” Daimio was studying the gas detector, a furrow between his brows. “That’ll be the sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide,” he said grimly. “CO1 and CO2, methane, all in small quantities. If those gases are escaping through this hole, it must connect to a mine tunnel.”
Hellboy jerked around to face Daimio. “Methane?” he repeated. “What, like what comes out of the sewer? Doesn’t that stuff explode?” “Yes, quite” Daimio replied sardonically, fixing him with a smirk. “If I were you, I’d go easy with the peashooter down there.” He nodded meaningfully at the Samaritan on Hellboy’s hip. Hellboy sighed again, stretching the headband of the respirator around his head and over his horns before placing it snuggly over his nose and mouth. “If I blow myself up, Alice, delete my browser history,” he joked, edging closer to the hole and peering down to try and see how deep the drop would be. Alice didn’t laugh at his jape, looking rather concerned. He glanced momentarily toward the cemetery only a few yards behind them, wondering what she might be picking up. “Just be careful,” she said, smiling tightly. He grinned at her before remembering that his mouth was now covered and she couldn’t see it, making a mocking, dramatic salute instead. “Relax, it’ll be fine,” he assured her, sitting on the edge of the hole and carefully lowering himself into the earth. “Flushing out a bunch of wyrms? Easy-peasy, SHIT!”
The ground gave suddenly under him and he lost his grip on the crumbling edge before he could find a secure foothold. He heard Alice shout his name in alarm as he dropped out of sight, skidding down the side of the tunnel while his fingers scrabbled against the damp earth, trying to catch himself. Luckily the bottom was only about twelve feet down. He staggered upon landing on the uneven floor that sloped sharply further downward, his heart thumping a little after the surprise. “I’m okay!” he called back up to the others, hearing them sigh in unison. His front and head and palms were covered in dark, loamy soil and he shook himself, clapping his hands against his legs to knock some of it off. As he brushed dirt off his shirt and shoulders he squinted in the near darkness, trying to get a look at what was around him. “Can’t see worth a crap!” he said. “Got just the thing!” came Alice’s voice from above, followed by the sounds of her rummaging in her bag. “Heads up!” Craning his head back he watched her drop a relatively small object down the hole, catching it easily and bringing it closer to his face to see what it was: an LED camping lantern.
He pressed the power button and the tunnel was awash in white light, a second press of the button dimmed it to a more comfortable brightness level. “Thanks!” he called up to her. “If you run into trouble, we won’t be much help other than to call in for back up,” Daimio called back. “Keep your tracker on, stay in radio contact, and try not to run into trouble.” Hellboy laughed humorlessly to himself, “Yeah, yeah,” holding the lantern aloft to get a better look at what lay ahead.
The earthen tunnel was roughly six feet wide and high enough that he wouldn’t have to walk stooped over. It was also noticeably warmer here, even with the above ground world only twelve feet away. Before him the floor of the entrance tunnel sloped downward, beyond the reach of the lantern’s light. He wasn’t going to find anything just standing here… With one last look up at the circle of light over his head, Hellboy cracked his neck and set off down the tunnel. “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go,” he mumbled to himself, giving a snort of derisive laughter that seemed abnormally loud and faded unusually fast.
In no time at all it fell completely silent save for the sound of his own footsteps and breathing. It pressed stiflingly against his ears. The darkness outside the lantern light seemed almost tangible, as though it were watching and waiting for a chance to reach out and grab him. Hellboy began to tense at the creeping sensation of foreboding but didn’t slow his pace. He had a job to do here in Hell’s basement, and the sooner he got it over with the sooner they’d be out of here.
As he delved deeper and the oppressive silence persisted, Hellboy found himself wishing that Alice or Daimio would say something over the radio, anything to break up the God-awful quiet. It was leaving him far too much time to think. Hellboy prided himself on his ability to simply get on with it and not dwell on the myriad of horrifying aspects that came along with his job. In all the time he’d worked with the BPRD he’d shaken off more than his fair share of terrible experiences, but he was having a hard time moving on from his most recent venture in Britain.
How were you supposed to come back from finding out that you were destined to usher in the end of the world?
His eyes were on the ground, on the toes of his boots as he plodded along down the tunnel, but he wasn’t seeing that. He was back in the church, the hilt of an ancient sword grasped in his flesh hand while flames licked up and down the blade, dazzling him, stirring something inside him that he’d always been a least a little aware of but was buried so deep down he barely noticed it. It was almost like anger but different, sharper, deeper and more focused. It felt like power, and, worst of all, it felt damn good. All his life, Hellboy had been acutely conscious of just how different he was from the humans around him. Sometimes it bothered him, sometimes it didn’t so much, but in that moment with the sword in hand and the crown of fire on his head it was the furthest thing from his mind, inconsequential. The Blood Queen had said this was what he was meant to be, it was his truest self: Anung un Rama. The Osiris Club assholes, Ruiz, hell, even his own father had made various efforts to kill him before he could light the whole damn world on fire and wipe out humanity. With the flaming Excalibur, the crown, with Nimue the Blood Queen kneeling at his feet, offering him the world, offering him herself, for one horrible moment he accepted her words as truth.
Then the very next moment he had thought to himself “Screw that!” and taken her head off with one swing of the burning sword. As quickly as it had come that feeling, that other self, had receded back where it came from, vanished with the crown of fire and his broken off horns. He still felt it, though. And like a missing tooth he kept catching himself poking tentatively at it, hoping it was gone for good while also ominously certain that it was not.
“Come in, HB, do you copy?”
He jumped a little, startled out of his brooding by Alice’s voice crackling over the comms. “I gotcha, Alice,” he replied, his voice steady as he forcibly pulled himself back to the task at hand. “We’re picking up some underground movement ahead of you,” Alice informed him. “And the locals are getting tetchy.” Given the fact that all but five of the locals were dead and buried, Hellboy took that to mean that she was feeling some unsettling vibes from the nearby cemetery. “What’s it looking like down there? Any sign of our target?” asked Daimio. “Nothin’ yet,” he answered, consulting his IR thermometer. “Must be near the fire, though, this thing’s really heating up.”
Up ahead, something was different. He could feel a shifting in the air and he proceeded with caution. “Ah crap,” he sighed. The tunnel had come to a sort of hub, a large relatively circular space with a higher ceiling and four new passageways facing him that seemed to branch out into four different directions. “What is it?” Alice asked. “Intersection,” he grunted back. “And the GPS don’t exactly work down here.”
“Movement detected to the northwest of your position,” said Daimio. “Take the left-most passage, keep a sharp eye.” “The sharpest,” Hellboy shot back lowly. “And remember not to fire your gun in the gas-filled tunnel or you’ll blast us all to kingdom come,” Alice added brightly. He chuckled. “Right. Just for future reference: what exactly am I supposed to do when I find this thing?” “Teach it to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ for all I care,” growled Daimio. “Just get it the hell out of there without blowing anything up.”
Smirking to himself at the impatient snarl in Daimio’s voice, Hellboy started down the tunnel to the far left. The temperature was slowly rising, he could feel that much, but it wasn’t uncomfortable yet. He checked the gas detector, which was reading higher concentrations of the noxious cocktail of gases Daimio had registered up top. As the heat rose and the air grew fouler, there was an increasing likelihood of finding the wyrm. With any luck at all, she hadn’t laid her eggs yet, and just his presence in her chosen den ought to be enough to run her off. She wouldn’t want to leave her clutch in a place she didn’t feel safe.
But then, considering his so-called “luck”, she’d come and gone and there were a half dozen five foot long hatchlings slithering around underground. Like certain species of snakes, newly hatched wyrms had extremely venomous bites as a defensive compensation for their smaller size and vulnerability. The venom wouldn’t kill him, he knew, but it would hurt like hell.
Hellboy felt a sort of tingle that made the hair on his forearms and the back of his neck prickle, like a static charge. He slowed, stopped, listening hard. Nothing looked amiss in the circle of light given off by the lantern and it was quiet as the grave, but he was certain that he was not alone. Ahead of him the passageway disappeared around a long curve. Studying it carefully, Hellboy switched off his lantern and moved to stand against the wall. There was no residual light for his eyes to adjust to, so he simply waited and listened.
Unlike him, the wyrm(s) were suited for life underground. They were perfectly capable of navigating in total darkness, but a sudden blast of bright LED light might buy him time to subdue it. He could hear something moving in the dark, growing closer and closer. Hellboy shut his eyes so he wouldn’t blind himself when he switched the lantern back on. He tensed, his finger on the power button as the movement drew nearer. When it was only feet away Hellboy stepped away from the wall, held the lantern out in front of him and pressed the button.
The loud, surprisingly un-monstery cry of shock and pain was enough to make him open his eyes, wincing against the sudden luminance and squinting through watering eyes at the silhouetted form.
Tall, though shorter than him, two-legged and distinctly not a serpentine dragon-like creature, with an arm raised against the brilliant light. Hellboy lowered the lantern and dimmed it, blinking owlishly at what was now very clearly a human in tennis shoes, jeans and a beat-up moto-jacket, with a handkerchief tied around their mouth and nose. “What the hell….?” he muttered. “You find something?” asked Daimio over the comms. Now that his eyes had adjusted, Hellboy realized it was a woman standing there and that she looked as surprised to see him and he was to see her.
“You could say that…”
Sorry it took so long! Work has been crazy and lunch breaks are about the only time I get to write.
