Hellboy: Odd Jobs (15 page)

"What happened?" Hellboy asked him.

"People make houses out of crushed beer cans. It smells bad. The sewers are open. There's this beach

"

"What happened?"

Clancy wrapped both hands around the bottle of Fanta. "Do you know," he asked shrilly, "that in the incinerator they burn up all the pieces they cut off us?"

Hellboy remained silent.

"It came up out of the sea!" Clancy shouted. "It came up and it ate them! It ate them!"

He threw his bottle against the wall. It shattered. Grape soda flew everywhere.

Two corpsmen rushed in with a strait jacket and a hypo. Clancy shrieked and struggled. Nothing he screamed made any sense.

But the screaming made sense.

Hellboy had to give him that.

Hellboy was escorted back to Broderman's office. The doctor wasn't there, and Hellboy spent the time reading both the patients' accounts in their charts. Which may or may not have been Broderman's intention.

When the man came back in, he said, "We had to sedate Clancy. Grant too. He became uncontrollable when he realized we wanted him to tell you about what happened. If you want to wait a while, he'll come around.

I'll sit in." He looked tired and frustrated. "I should have done that with Clancy."

Hellboy shook his head. "I've got a plane to catch."

Two weeks later:

The jungle reeked of death.

Layers of rotting foliage covered decomposition far more repellent, like an American flag on a coffin at Arlington. The government was shipping home boxes of teeth, because that was all the jungle left behind.

It ate the dead.

So maybe those guys weren't so crazy after all.

Maybe they were fit for duty.

Hellboy grunted at the gross stupidity of his mission

two weeks and counting, with nothing to show for it,

not even jungle rot

and slogged through the soaking wet undergrowth. The trees dripped with moisture.

Insects by the hundreds tried to penetrate his skin, to no avail.

There were some advantages to being inhuman.

He crushed vines and other things as his hooves struggled for purchase in the slimy, congealed earth. He couldn't imagine a worse arena for battle. The heat and the mud, the insects, and the terror of men who can't see the forest for the destruction.

About an hour later, he came to a clearing.

A man-made clearing.

It had been a village. Now it was a patch of charred ruins and bodies. A woman in traditional dress had obviously been shot in the back. Another, half-clothed, in the head. Men. Children.

Violent death was everywhere.

It had been a massacre.

Not the first he had seen in two weeks, and he was certain it wasn't the last.

In a perimeter around the village, Hellboy found American weapons on the burn site. That didn't signify much; the South Vietnamese troops

the ARVNs

were supplied by the US, and with better stuff than the

Americans carried

M-16s to the Army's Brownings. The North Vietnamese were also well equipped, also with American material, lifted from convoys and on the black market.

But here, there were no bodies. No sign of soldiers.

That was new.

Maybe this whole deal wasn't so stupid after all.

Hellboy continued to survey the area as the sun set. It was as hot at dusk as it had been at noon.

He barely noticed.

He didn't care.

In the dark, he sat, listening to the creeping through the bushes. It was human, of that he was certain. Also, alone.

It was sneaking toward the village ruins. All he had to do was wait, and it would come to him.

Someone began whispering. In Vietnamese.

Hellboy waited.

Five minutes later, the moon glowed down on an old man in a white shirt and black trousers. He was stooped with age, and he was weeping. Hellboy remained in the thick, moist shadows, observing. The man fell to his knees and covered his face. Hellboy thought of Spec-4 Paul R. Clancy, back in Japan.

Then suddenly, as if he had fallen asleep, Hellboy became aware of advancing footfalls from dozens of pairs of boots. Rifles clacked. A radio crackled.

"Stay where you are!
Arrete
!" shouted an American voice. Hellboy assumed it was the platoon's sergeant unless these troops actually took orders from their Officer in Charge.

The old man looked stricken. He raised his arms and murmured,
"S'il vous plaites, messieurs."
The French had occupied Vietnam before the Americans had come in. French was still the language of choice among the older educated locals.

"Let's shoot 'im, Sarge," one of the soldiers said. "We'll have to drag him all the way back to base to interrogate him."

"Everything's burned," another voice said. "Look. The people were burned."

"Where are our guys?"

"Napalm?"

"That would still leave something. You know that."

A few of the soldiers chuckled.

"The old guy's got nice ears," someone drawled. "If we kill him, I got dibs."

The old man continued to plead. No one was listening to him.

No one but Hellboy, who caught it the moment the old man switched from French to some other language, something that was not Vietnamese, was not Asian, was not anything spoken anywhere.

Once a Baptist preacher had tried to kill him, because he claimed Hellboy could hear 'the voice of evil'. It was true that on occasion, Hellboy understood languages no one else could decipher.

This was one of those occasions.

While the soldiers theorized about what had happened to the village and the troops, Hellboy heard every word the old man uttered as if it were in heavily accented English:

"
I call you, Xin Loi.

Xin Loi, which is what they say when they kill our women.

When they rape our school girls.

When they dismember our sons and grandfathers.

I call you, avenging demon!"

A hot, wet wind rolled through the forest undergrowth. It was like being slapped with a boiled towel. The soldiers felt it through their cammies. They turned on their heels, spooked, startled. A few aimed into the darkness.

"Hold your fire!" the sergeant shouted. "Damn it, what if there's Cong out there?"

"Xin Loi!" the old man keened. "Xin Loi!"

"What's he going on about?" someone demanded.

"Nothing. Let's shoot him and move out." There was fear in the voice.

The forest shook.

The earth trembled.

Hellboy watched the old man, who was sobbing. He cried, "Xin Loi!
Allez-y
!"

And the sky turned red.

From one side of the horizon to the other, it blazed scarlet. It was searingly hot; the winds blew; the old man covered his face as the crimson glow made his skin translucent and lit up his bones.

Hellboy remained hidden.

Remained silent.

"What the hell?" one of the soldiers cried. "Look at the sky!"

Above the horizon, where there should have been stars and black night sky, an immense shape rose up. It was vaguely humanoid, but its features were hideously contorted. Horns sprouted from its head. Its eyes were glowing red slits, and its mouth a cavernous bad dream of fangs and flame.

It threw its long, taloned arms over its head and raised its face to the sky.

The soldiers were shouting, scrambling, tumbling over one another to get the hell out of there. A small, dark man went down; a heavier man ran right over him in his haste to escape.

The demon shrieked. Lightning crashed around it. Clouds gathered.

It began to rain.

To rain blood.

Heavy, thick droplets of pungent blood, which sizzled and burned where they landed. As Hellboy watched, three soldiers burst into flame. Staggering, the living columns of fire collided, fell, tried to pick themselves up.

The demon lowered one hand, and picked the fiery bundle up. As the men burned and died, it popped them into its mouth.

It wasn't raining after all. Far from it.

The demon was crying.

The blood was its teardrops.

It kept sobbing; the soldiers kept burning and dying.

The old man chanted, urging the demon to kill all their enemies, to destroy them utterly.

Then Hellboy stepped from the shadows.

"Bon soir,"
he said. Good evening.

The old man stared at him. He fell to his knees and said in French which Hellboy understood

"We are

lost. The Americans have a demon, too."

Hellboy raised a hand and said in French, "Stop this, grandfather. Now."

"
I
?" The old man looked shocked. "Why should I?"

Hellboy had no answer.

"We destroy both sides," he informed Hellboy. "All we want is peace, my avenging angel and I. That is all.

We kill the killers. That is all."

"And these villagers?" Hellboy asked.

He shook his head. "Your people did that. We came after."

"Stop," Hellboy said again.

But the old man shouted to the demon, and the demon opened its mouth to rain fire down on Hellboy.

Hellboy successfully dodged the gout of flame. Then, as the demon grabbed for him, Hellboy swung his right, stone fist like a pile driver into the demon's forearm. The creature howled in fury and pain. Hellboy was relieved. He'd thought the thing was more like a ghost, something he might not be able to fight.

But now, knowing he could harm it, he lunged for its hands and arms, smashing both fists into its strangely pliant flesh. While it reared back up into the sky, he felt in all the pouches of his belt. There were talismans and wards against evil in all of Hellboy's pockets, but he couldn't fathom how to use them against this thing.

A grenade? Possibly.

Browning? Not hardly.

Then it was grabbing at him, tears flowing freely. As the droplets hit the earth, they sizzled and burned, exactly like napalm.

Through his own tears, the old man smiled fiercely.

"Xin Loi will kill all of you!" he shouted. "And our country will rise from the ashes without soldiers!"

"Wrong, old man," Hellboy said. "Your guy's going down."

The demon came in for another round, grabbing at Hellboy as if to hold him still and burn him to cinders, like a hot dog on a coat hanger at a camp-fire. The fire flared across Hellboy's back, but he arched, hard, and spared himself.

Then he doubled into a ball, yanking the demon's arms with him, and threw an uppercut beneath his left forearm with his huge stone hand.

The demon wailed again. But although it was in pain, it appeared to be unhurt.

"You see?" the old man exulted. "You cannot kill Xin Loi. And I will create more. An army of them! My country will be free of you all! There will be no more fighting."

"And very few people," Hellboy drawled.

The sorcerer's eyes gleamed as tears slid down his cheeks. "Our women are fertile."

And it was the way he said it

as if individual lives didn't matter; and all that mattered was ending the war that chilled Hellboy to the bone.

He thought of American generals, and admirals, and shrinks, and guys walking around like zombies.

He darted forward before the old man realized what was happening, and broke his neck. For a second, the man registered shock. Then rage. And finally, the most intense grief Hellboy had ever seen.

With a shriek, the demon blew fire over the jungle. Within seconds, the dense foliage was fully ablaze.

Hidden inside it, men began to scream. Some in Vietnamese, some in French, and some in English. The forest was crawling with dying men from both sides. All sides.

Then the demon soared straight up into the burning sky, screaming like a bomb, shooting as fast as a grenade launcher, shrieking and babbling and sobbing.

Amid the crackling, Hellboy stood, a lone survivor.

The night blackened.

Ash mixed with blood and earth, and covered the body of the dead old sorcerer.

Dawn finally came.

The jungle was hotter than the firestorm.

It was hot as hell.

Two weeks later, Hellboy sat in Broderman's office. Only, Broderman was gone. He had resigned his commission and gone back to the States.

Larousse

a French name

the new Chief of Psychiatry, was an officious little man. He folded his hands on top of his spotless desk and said, "I really don't understand what this is about."

"Clancy and Grant," Hellboy said. "On the lockup ward."

"Oh." The man sat back. "Clancy returned to duty last week."

"In Vietnam," Hellboy said flatly.

"In Vietnam," the doctor confirmed.

"Grant."

"Grant." He sighed. "He told Dr. Broderman he massacred his entire platoon. Then he found a way to commit suicide."

Or was helped, Hellboy thought. They did it with guys like that.

He stood.

He went out onto the ward. In a bed against the wall, a young man a very young man

was rocking and

sobbing.

"Somebody's gotta stop this madness," he said.

Hellboy grunted. "Yeah."

Then he left.

Demon Politics

Craig Shaw Gardner

Cigar smoke hung in the room like a slightly sour-smelling fog, draining the color from the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and deep mahogany furnishings, making the whole place look a bit like an old-fashioned, tinted photograph. Hellboy studied Senator Lipton, so small against the dark green, overstuffed chair in which he sat. Well into his eighties, the once vigorous Lipton had seemed to shrink back into himself. The senator had stopped mid-sentence to stare off in the distance, perhaps at some pattern in the hanging smoke, or maybe at something in his past.

Hellboy had known Lipton for over half a century, since the senator, under another name, had with a

group of others, including Hellboy's pseudo-adoptive 'father', Professor Trevor Bruttenholm taken in the

small, strangely formed youngster during the height of World War II. More than fifty years, and every year seemed to have added an extra line to the senator's face.