Hellboy: Odd Jobs (14 page)

Mick leans forward, lowering his voice and winking at me. "I've even got a lead on
The Seven Books of
Hsan."

"Geez," I say.

He settles back in his chair. "What? You're not impressed?"

I shake my head. "All I wanted was my pistol."

Mick the Rat opens the drawer he whacked earlier and sets my gun on the desktop. I start to reach for it but he keeps his paw on the gun, looking at me intently.

"We got a deal?" he asks.

"What?"

"You know, you and me, we got a deal?"

"I just want

"

"Your pistol back, I know. But I went through all this trouble to get you here, to give you my pitch, and you're not even interested? You don't want to play ball here?"

"You ... "

Mick the Rat nods. "Yes, yes, I had my posse, you know, my rats, they grabbed your pistol, brought it here. I knew you'd come to get it."

I look at him and blink.

"Geez," I say again. "You coulda just sent me a note."

"What, from a giant rat? What would I have said? 'Dear Hellboy, please come visit me in Alphabet City. I have a large collection of occult items and am interested in striking a business arrangement with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. By the way, I am a giant, over-developed, talking rat. You think that woulda done it?"

"Yeah."

Mick the Rat raises both eyebrows in disbelief.

"Trust me," I say. "We've gotten stranger letters. What do you get out of this?"

"Me?"

"Yeah."

"In exchange for being the primary supplier of your occult and paranormal reference needs," Mick the Rat says, "I want part of the government package."

"The what?"

"The package, Hellboy. The benefits package. Insurance is killing me, here, and I got no way to protect my employees' futures. I want the full government package, disability, pension, the whole shebang."

I blink at him a couple times. "Insurance?"

"That's right."

"For your employees?"

"Exactly."

"Are you for real?"

"I'm a giant talking rat, Hellboy. Of course I'm for real."

I reach over and he moves his paw, so I pick up the pistol. It's been unloaded, but other than that looks fine.

Not a scratch on it that I didn't put there myself.

I put the gun in my holster.

"Throw in that copy of
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
and you've got a deal," I say.

Fifteen minutes later I manage to leave

Mick the Rat wants to show me everything, and it takes some

doing to explain that I've got somewhere, anywhere, to be

gun in my holster and book under my arm. I

head on out of Alphabet City and for the train, and as I'm passing a park, a bunch of kids point and stare and giggle at me. I wave and they wave and eventually I get to the subway stop, catch a ride to Grand Central.

I'm waiting for my train back to Connecticut, when the same damn rat the huge one from that day in

Central Park

climbs up on the platform beside me.

"Hey, buddy," I say to the rat.

And I swear to God, the rat winks.

Only in New York.

Folie A Deux

Nancy Holder

1967, Yokosuka Naval Base, Yokosuka, Japan. It was monsoon season. In Japan, the rain was like a steady stream of water escaping from an overhead boiler pipe. Vietnam, it was said, was raining blood, there was so much killing. The blood on the jungle floor made you slip and slide, and if you fell face down, you drowned in it. Rice was coming up pink, because the paddies were saturated with blood. As Hellboy strode through the hospital grounds, men in blue pajamas, blue-and-white-striped summer bathrobes, and rubber thongs of various colors turned to stare at him. He was used to it: His skin was crimson and cracked, as if someone had peeled the outer layers away, the new skin cross-hatched with blood vessels. He had no feet; but while some of the men who stared at him, slack jawed, were double amputees, Hellboy's legs ended in hooves. From beneath his trench coat, his tail alternately curled and bobbed against the tarmac. Hellboy was a double amputee in his own right

however, it was his thick, enormous horns that had been sheared off.

His right hand was made of stone, or of something like stone. Still, it was something to stare at in revolted fascination. Which these men did; these men who had been mutilated and deformed.

Not by design, as Hellboy had been, but by war.

It was 1967, and the conflict in Vietnam was raging. Yokosuka was one of the hospitals that received the US

military war wounded.

Physically wounded, and psychically wounded; despite the best efforts of the field hospitals to maintain a workable system of triage, dozens, if not hundreds, of the men sent to Yokosuka to be put back together were beyond repair.

Some of the faces that stared at him as he walked past the hospital incinerator a small, dark tower that

reeked of cooking meat

were definitely beyond repair. Eyes missing, noses, jaws, the spark of life missing.

There were men in wheelchairs and men on crutches and men walking along very slowly in the extreme humidity, shuffling in their rubber sandals like mummies from a horror film.

War, what is it good for?

Absolutely ... nothin'.

Only, Hellboy didn't believe that. There were causes worth going to hell for, and back. And if he wasn't so goddamned indestructible, he'd have been in one of those wheelchairs or in the incinerator, in pieces

long ago.

But that was as far as philosophy took him. He was here on assignment from the Bureau. He planned to carry out his mission and get the hell out of Japan. The humidity was miserable.

The atmosphere, worse.

The MPs were edgy today. Though alerted

warned

of Hellboy's visit, briefed and debriefed about his

appearance, the guards had tightened their grips on their M-16s when he had been escorted onto the base. To make matters worse, the Japanese Communist Party was holding a demonstration later in the day; soon the streets outside the insular world of the base would be congested with men, women, and children who were being paid 360 yen

one US dollar

plus lunch, to scream, "Yankee, go home!"

As Hellboy neared the door to A-22, the lockup ward, he caught the movement of an armed Marine an

MP

the man's hand slipping toward the side-arm in his holster. Hellboy looked at him simply looked

and the man paled and dropped his hand to his side. He gave Hellboy a nod of his head, as if to grant him permission to proceed.

Not that Hellboy needed any.

The office of the Chief of Psychiatry was just inside the door, giving the doctor immediate access to the inmates. Hellboy was surprised: in his experience, shrinks usually sealed themselves away, and it was the patients who came to them.

A corpsman looked up from a desk in the outer office and executed a shocked double take. Then he rose, sharply saluted, and said, "Mr. Boy, sir. Capt. Broderman's expecting you."

Hellboy said nothing. The corpsman

who couldn't have been older than twenty-two, and that was being generous

crossed the room and rapped on a door.

"Yes." The voice was gentle.

"Dr. Broderman, Mr. Boy is here."

There was a chuckle. "Please ask him to come in."

Hellboy crossed the office, his hooves making noise on the government-issue tile floor. The hospital had been taken over after the defeat of Japan in 1945, and he had no idea when it had been built. It felt old.

Today, Hellboy felt old.

Back at BPRD headquarters, Dr. Tom Manning had briefed Hellboy on his assignment. As a result, Dr.

Broderman was precisely what he'd been expecting. Tall, rugged, with precise military bearing. Not your most compassionate psychiatrist, according to his dossier.

"Hellboy," the good doctor said, rising from behind his desk.

Hellboy inclined his head. "Capt. Broderman."

"Thanks for coming. I appreciate it." He gestured for Hellboy to be seated while he looked past his shoulder at the corpsman. "Coffee for two. Both black."

So. Broderman had been briefed on him, too.

"Yes, sir," the corpsman said, and withdrew, shutting the door behind himself.

As soon as the knob stopped turning, the mask came off. Broderman slumped and wiped his hand over his face. He seemed to age twenty years in fewer seconds.

"Christ," he said. "Do you drink?"

Hellboy shrugged. "Sure."

Broderman pulled open a drawer and pulled out a bottle of Scotch. Also, two glasses. He poured a couple of shots and passed one to Hellboy. They both slugged it back.

Broderman leaned and folded his hand over his chest. "I don't know what you read about me, but most of the information you have is obsolete."

"Your job is to weed out the nutcases," Hellboy said.

Broderman sighed. "Kids shot all to hell. Legs riddled with shrapnel. Faces that look like melted wax. A lot of them are farm kids. A lot of them are ... kids." His voice was strained and hushed.

"And yes, it is my official duty to decide which of them is sane enough to stay in the service, get patched back together, and sent back to fight. And which of them is too crazy to trust with a weapon. Who's honestly shell-shocked and traumatized, and who's trying to fake me out so he can escape back to the world."

He sounded disgusted. He raised the bottle with a question mark on his face and Hellboy nodded. Men you drank with told you more than men you embarrassed by refusing their booze.

"I've got two cases. Clancy and Grant. They don't know each other. They've never met, from what I can tell.

But they're both on A-22, and they're both telling me the same story."

He opened a brown cardboard chart. " 'A hideous demon burst out of the sea and killed all my buddies'."

He closed that one, laid it aside, and opened another. " 'A monster tore out of the jungle and massacred everyone except me'."

"Do you think they fragged their own men?"

The psychiatrist shrugged. "No bodies were ever found. No trace of a struggle, or combat. Just ... no soldiers.

Except one lone survivor. Or so they both claim."

Hellboy took that in. He said, "So I'm here."

"So you're here." Broderman wiped his face. The air conditioner was rattling in the window, but the room was stifling. "It's so hot in the officers' mess that the butter melts on your plate," he said.

He closed the file. "Of course, in Vietnam, no one's eating butter."

There was a knock on the door. It was the corpsman, with the coffee. Broderman said to him, "Bring Clancy in first."

Hellboy picked up his coffee cup with his left hand. Anything that didn't need smashing or maiming, he did with his left. His right hand

the stone one

was for everything else.

Death, mostly.

In silence, the two men sat, each with his thoughts. Hellboy figured Broderman was thinking about the Scotch.

He himself was thinking that it was too hot to be drinking coffee.

After about ten minutes, there was a jingle and a shuffle in the hallway. Broderman looked up. Hellboy kept trying to read the opened medical chart upside down. It contained the records of Clancy, Paul R. There was his social security number, and there his date of birth.

He was nineteen.

"Paul," Dr. Broderman said. Hellboy was surprised by the warmth in his voice. Professional, or genuine?

"This is Hellboy, Paul. Remember?"

"Y-yes," Clancy stuttered.

Hellboy turned. A kid. Pale blond hair, nearly colorless blue eyes. There was a scar running from his temple across his nose to the opposite earlobe. His legs were chained. He was cuffed.

Hellboy looked at Dr. Broderman and said, "I want to take him to get a Coke. Just him and me."

Broderman thought a moment. Hellboy gazed at him.

The doctor made his decision. "Spec-4 Clancy, do I have your word you'll cooperate with this civilian?"

"Yes, sir," Clancy said. There were tears in his eyes. His mouth trembled.

Hellboy stood.

"There's a small room off the ward," Broderman said. "My corpsman will show you."

The corpsman's name was Shiflett. Hellboy saw it on his name tag.

Got shipped out to Vietnam a few weeks later.

No one ever saw him again.

But for now, he was alive, and he escorted Hellboy and Clancy out of the office and onto the ward. What struck Hellboy was the silence. Maybe because of him being there, but maybe not.

They went into the little room. There were a couple of gray overstuffed chairs, and Clancy sank into one of them. Tears slid down his face.

Shiflett left.

As soon as they were alone, Hellboy said, "I'm one of the good guys."

"It's not you," Clancy whispered. "I was stationed in Qui Nhon. It's a port city. On the South China Sea.

Supply ships come in. The stuff gets unloaded, and then we convoy the supplies to the troops inland. There are only two roads into and out of town. Easy for the bad guys to attack our convoys. Impossible for us to sneak past them. Like a turkey shoot."

"They've got Fanta in this machine," Hellboy said. "Grape or orange. Root beer. That's it."

"Fanta grape, please," Clancy said. He let out a harsh sob, which he immediately stifled. "On the ward, we get soda if we're quiet."

Hellboy put in some coins and pressed the buttons with his left hand. The first bottle clattered down the chute. He pulled it out and used the built-in bottle opener. Got the same for himself.

Guys you drank the same stuff with usually told you more than guys you didn't.

Hellboy handed the soda to the inmate. Clancy took a swig. He leaned his head on the back of the chair and the tears flowed like a river.

"It's not a big city," he said. "The tallest building's probably eight stories. The people smell weird. Not bad. It's all the fish they eat. The hookers tell all the guys that we smell different. It's our diet. They wear baggy black pants, even the hookers."