Hellboy: Odd Jobs (26 page)

The chief led the deputies to the ambulance, where they alerted the two EMS men who had been taking a break in the back. While they did, Hellboy saw Withers quickly brush away the ashes from over the skull.

Though the fire or some fatal magic had diminished the bones to human size, Hellboy could still see the protrusions in the skull from which the horns had grown.

Donald Withers saw them too. He reached out with his left hand, and with a strength beyond that of an old man, he pressed inward on the skull, so that it crumbled into irreparable shards of charred bone and ash. Then he looked up at Hellboy with a little smile.

"You knew," Hellboy said.

"As do you," Withers replied. "But who would ever believe you? In
my
country."

Hellboy looked at the bed of ashes that had been the Golgotha Tabernacle. The men had gone over it fairly well with rake and shovel, but there was no sign of any other body. Chambers' bones had been in the last area they had searched, having started at the edges and worked their way to the center. Jack Mooney's corpse was nowhere to be seen.

"I'm not the only one who knows," Hellboy whispered. "I'd strongly suggest that you give up the ministry.

Maybe you could enter the mission field." He walked away, across the ashes, without looking back.

Reports came to him later. They never found any other body in the ashes, and Donald Withers had not left the Carolinas. He was planning to open up three more Golgotha Tabernacles when he was found in his car at the side of a country road. The Chrysler was a burned-out hulk, as was Donald Withers. There was no explanation as to how the fire started. Some people said it was spontaneous human combustion, but others, people who were former, disgruntled members of Golgotha Tabernacles, said that it was the hand of God smiting a man who had been perverting His word.

Hellboy figured Nathaniel Watson had been right after all. The hand of God. Nothing less than the hand of God.

I Had Bigfoot's Baby!

Max Allan Collins

It started with the
National Inquisitor
, not exactly the normal course for a case to arrive at the BPRD. I was halfway through a sausage-and-pepperoni pizza when I saw the story. The newspaper, and I use the term loosely, featured another in a series of fuzzy photos of a purported Bigfoot roaming the woods of Iowa. Any other Bigfoot article wouldn't have caused a ripple around the offices of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense

after all, Bigfoot's not really our bag

but this story was different. Written by a

photographer, a guy named Louis Walker, the piece chronicled the year-long search for the reporter who'd been with him when he took his blurry pictures of the beast. Allegedly the female reporter had been carried off by the Bigfoot in question.

No matter what you've heard, a Bigfoot carrying off a lady reporter will always grab my interest, whether it's paranormal or not.

Accompanying the story and the blurry Bigfoot pix was a photo of the missing reporter. Cute, brunette, mid to late twenties, but her face, something about the eyes pulled my thoughts to Anastasia Bransfield. No matter how I tried to forget her she always seemed to pop back at the least likely moments. "Hellboy, what're you doin'?"

I turned to see Abe Sapien approaching my desk. "I found Bigfoot," I crowed. "The missing link is living in Iowa."

Sapien grabbed a piece of pizza and smirked. "Funny, I always figured that's where he'd turn up."

He took a bite of his slice. The missing link held little fascination for Abe, who was the next link an

icthyo-sapien. A gill man to those of us in the subspecies of nose-breathers. A science experiment gone wrong, Abe has been at the BPRD nearly as long as I. He was the world's oldest test-tube baby, having been conceived on April 14, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. His long incubation had left Abe with skin the color of wet newspaper, piercing blue, pupil-less eyes, and absolutely no body hair. At this moment he wasn't wearing the false beard, fedora, shades, and trench coat that allowed him to enter the so-called normal world and not create a stir.

Abe and I share a bond about looks. The fact that my skin is crimson I have horns, a tail, and one hand

made of stone, and am bigger than the average bear

seems to put some people off in the same way that

Abe's gills make them uneasy. Go figure.

"I think we should look into this," I said.

"Bigfoot?" he scoffed. "What's next, the Loch Ness monster?"

"A woman disappeared."

That slowed him down. "When?"

"Almost a year ago."

"And you want to go look for her now?"

"First I've heard of it," I said.

Abe shook his head. "What's Liz say?"

"Haven't asked her yet."

The click of high heels on the office floor announced the entry of the third member of our team, Liz Sherman.

She'd been with the BPRD ever since her pyrokinetic gift got out of control and torched her whole neighborhood back when she was twelve. Tall, raven-haired, with deep-set brown eyes, Liz had ceased looking like a child a long time ago.

"Haven't asked me what?" she said as she strode up to the desk.

Abe cocked a thumb toward me. "Hellboy wants to go tromping through the woods to find Bigfoot."

One of Liz's dark, rich eyebrows arched. "Really?"

"There's more to it than that."

"Isn't that enough?"

"Probably, but there's more, anyway."

"You gonna tell me what?"

She studied me as I laid out the story for her. When I finished she asked, "That's not really our area, is it?"

Standing just behind her, Abe grinned but said nothing.

"Probably not, but ... "

As Liz turned to face Abe, his grin disappeared.

"And what about you?" she asked.

"I ... I'm on your side."

Liz shook her head. "I'm not sure we should even get involved in something like this."

I kept my eyes steady on hers.

"Tell you what, Hellboy. You go and if you need us we'll come."

I nodded.

"But try and wrap this up quick, willya?"

My plane landed in Chicago just after noon. From there a cab dropped me at the
Inquisitor
office and after sweet-talking the secretary, I found myself chatting with the cigar-chomping managing editor, a fiftyish bald man named Goorwitz.

"We'll help you out on one condition," he said.

"I thought I was helping
you
out."

"Either way, it's gonna cost you."

"Cost me what?"

"Sitting still for a photo and an interview. Boy, you're
Inquisitor
material if I ever saw it!"

He hooked me up with photographer Louis Walker and a reporter named Stephanie Keenan. The three of us jumped into a rental car with the rail-thin, rawboned Walker driving, and were on our way to Iowa before sunset.

Stephanie occupied the seat next to her partner while I stretched out in the back. She wore jeans and a green Dartmouth sweatshirt over a white polo shirt with just the collar peeking out. Her blond hair, pulled into a loose ponytail, lay between her shoulders. Turning to face me, she folded one leg under her.

"Why 'Hellboy'?" she asked.

I stared at her for a moment. "Did you really go to Dartmouth?"

She laughed at that. It was an easy, free laugh that sounded like water bubbling. "I meant why not something a little less ... obvious?"

"Like Bob maybe?"

She just looked at me, but her smile remained in place.

"Bob Hellboy," I said. "Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?"

"Kinda like it," Walker said without turning.

"My father, or the man I called my father, gave me my name." My eyes caught hers and held. "I like it."

"I ... I'm sorry," she blurted. "I didn't mean

"

I waved her off. "No harm, no foul." I changed the subject. "Lou, what can you tell me about the missing reporter?"

"Her name was Pam Cervantes. She'd been with the paper for about six months when we caught the story about the Bigfoot. I thought it was probably just another asshole in a gorilla suit until I saw him carry Pam into the woods."

"So, you're a believer now?"

Walker shrugged as he passed a semi. "Sure as hell wasn't like anything I've ever seen before."

"Anything else about Pam?"

"Nice kid, right out of journalism school, went to Iowa State."

"Married?"

Walker shook his head.

"Anybody special in her life?"

Again the head shake. "She kept her personal column pretty much to herself."

Stephanie piped in, "Do you think there's a Bigfoot running loose in a state park in Iowa?"

I shrugged as noncommittally as possible and saw Walker watching me in the rearview.

"You think I'm nuts?" His voice was steady but the eyes were hard.

"No."

"Then you think I made up the whole thing," he said, his voice rising in anger.

Shaking my head, I said, "I don't know if you made it up; you don't seem to be nuts, but I don't know what the hell is going on, so that's why I'm here

to find out."

Then he fell into a sulky silence, his eyes darting between the road and the glares he threw my way in the mirror. We pretty much observed those rules for the rest of the drive to Palisades State Park, just east of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

With the late afternoon sun sprinting for the horizon, Walker pulled our rental car through the gate and eased to a stop in front of the ranger's cabin next to a brown Ford Bronco with the words 'Park Ranger' emblazoned on the door in gold. The ranger, a tall, broad man whose gut had long since turned to Jell-O, stepped out onto the porch as we climbed out of our car.

Adjusting a dirt-brown-colored campaign hat low on his brow, he puffed out his chest. "What the hell are you?" he asked, looking in my direction. Even at this distance, he smelled like he'd been dipped in Brut cologne.

"I'm an investigator for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense."

That did not seem to be the answer he sought. He continued to stare at me. I stared back and noticed a pin over his shirt pocket with the name Holliman engraved on it.

"Name's Hellboy."

He nodded slightly. "Seems about right."

I told myself that I was not going to let this backwoods yahoo piss me off.

He glanced at the stubs on my head. "Them horns?"

I ignored the question. "I'm here because ... "

"Bigfoot and this ... photo-journalist over here," Holliman said jerking a thumb toward Walker.

I nodded.

Placing his hands on his hips, curiously close to the pistol he wore on his left hip I noted, the ranger studied each of us in turn. "Ain't no Bigfoot around here. Never has been, never will."

"You're sure," I said.

"Look ... " Walker began tightly, but I caught his eye with a cold look, and he clammed up.

"You've never seen a Bigfoot, or footprints, or

"

"I ain't seen shit," the ranger said impatiently. "Bigfoot shit or otherwise."

"Doesn't surprise me," I said evenly.

His eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out if I had insulted him. Finally, he said, "Park's gonna close. You oughta be on your way 'bout now."

"Yes, sir," I said. "Thanks for your time."

Walker took a step forward. "Are you just going to ... ?"

"Yes, I am," I said, stepping between him and Ranger Holliman. "Come on, we're going."

The ranger's eyes stayed on us as we piled back into the car and left the park, turning east on Highway 30.

"Walker, can you find the place where Pam disappeared?"

"Sure, we were there for almost a week before she got abducted."

"Can you find it on foot? In the dark?"

At the first gravel road past the edge of the wooded park, Walker turned right and drove nearly a mile before pulling the car as close to the edge of the road as he could. Stephanie and I looked at him.

"This feels about right," he said. "I think we were just about a mile deep in the park when Pam disappeared."

Walker jumped out of the car and we followed. He opened the trunk and began rummaging through the bags of camera equipment looking for the correct night-shooting stuff. I checked the clip in my .45 and Stephanie's eyes widened even more than when she'd first seen me.

"You're not going to shoot him are you?"

"Which him?" I asked as I turned to glance at Walker.

"Bigfoot."

I jammed the pistol back in its holster. "I just like to be ready. I'm not gonna gun down any missing links unless absolutely necessary."

As night descended around us, Walker adjusted the last of three bags over his shoulder. "Ready," he said.

Stephanie said, "Geez, Walker, how many cameras do you need?"

He just grunted.

"Which way?" I asked.

Walker looked into the darkened recesses of the woods. "Mile, maybe two. There's a rise. I'll know it when I see it, even in the dark."

I nodded. "Better get goin' then."

We fell into a single-file line, Walker in the lead, Stephanie in the middle, me bringing up the rear. The uneven terrain and unrelenting darkness made for slow going. Walker convinced us flashlights would just drive our quarry deeper into the woods, so we picked our way over fallen branches, exposed roots, and the dense underbrush by only the light of the moon that barely filtered through the branches and leaves of the tall trees.

"How far have we gone?" Stephanie asked breathlessly.

Walker shushed her, then dropped to one knee and gazed through the night vision lens of his Nikon. After a moment, he faced her in the blackness. "Keep your voice down. It carries at night and we don't want to spook him."

Stephanie whispered, "How far?"

"Maybe a half-mile, maybe a little less," I said.

"Shit, this is going to take forever!"

Walker shushed her again and she waved him off.

"It's not much further," Walker said as he turned back and moved ahead.

"Fuck this," she said. "Even a Pulitzer wouldn't make up for crawling around in these godforsaken hills in the middle of the night."