The Ice Wolves (22 page)

 
CHAPTER 23

—

Racing up the stone steps from the brick chamber with Brad in his arms, Hellboy came to a large wooden trapdoor that didn't look like it had been opened in centuries. It resisted all of William's and Lisa's desperate attempts to shift it, until Hellboy laid Brad on the steps and put his shoulder to the ancient wood. Straining, the trapdoor eventually burst open amid a shower of clods of turf.

Their breath billowing in clouds, they climbed out into the freezing night. Thick snow lay heavily across a flat area surrounded by clumps of trees and illuminated by a row of lamps. A frozen lake glittered nearby.

“Where the heck is this?” Hellboy barked. “The Common?”

“Next to the lagoon,” William said. All around the city's lights blazed, but Beacon Hill rose up ahead of them in complete darkness. “Massachusetts General is on the other side of the hill, across Cambridge Street.”

Lisa and William both looked at Brad, thinking the same thing. His blood splashed on the pristine snow.

“We'll get him there in time,” Hellboy growled.

The snow was more than two feet deep, and every lurching step seemed to take an age, but the roads were all blocked and no traffic moved anywhere. It felt strange to be out in the open after so long cooped up in the gloomy Grant Mansion. Although it was awash with light, the city was like a ghost town, and in its unbearable stillness it was easy to believe that everyone was dead, slaughtered by the wolves on their way to Beacon Hill. There probably hadn't been such quiet—no voices, no vehicle noises—in more than a century.

“This is taking too long!” Lisa's voice cracked with desperation.

William checked Brad's pulse. “Still hanging on,” he said flatly, before adjusting the torn shirt they had bound across the wound. It was now sodden, but it had staunched the flow a little. “But he's so cold. He's going to get hypothermia if we don't get him into the warm soon.”

“Brad's tough,” Hellboy said. “And the cold's actually helping to slow the blood flow—”

The words died on his lips as a loud, chilling howl rolled out across the rooftops of Beacon Hill.

“Jeez. I shoulda seen that coming,” Hellboy muttered.

Lisa looked fearfully toward the dark bulk of the hill. “Surely they're still at the house. They can't know we're here.”

“I've got a horrible feeling they can sense the Kiss of Winter. Or maybe there's some link with the Heart, I don't know,” Hellboy said.

“No, not now.” Lisa stifled a sob.

“They've got to find us first,” Hellboy replied, “an' if we keep moving—”

Another howl rose up, and then another, until Beacon Hill rang with the bestial rage of the wolves.

“Aw, hell. Let's go.” He tried to break into a run, cursing as the snow turned his attempts into a cartoon gait.

The going became easier once they'd made it off the common and onto Beacon Street, where the houses and shops had minimized the drifting on the north sidewalk.

“Okay, which way?” Hellboy asked anxiously.

“Unless you want to cut through Beacon Hill . . . ” William began.

“Which we don't.”

“The quickest way is probably along Storrow Drive by the river. It's a good, clear road. No dark alleys, or side streets, or doorways,
no rooftops where the wolves can drop on us. You're probably talking ten, fifteen minutes to Longfellow Bridge and then Mass. General is just a short hop from there.”

“What if they've evacuated the hospital because of the weather?” Lisa asked.

“Then we'll see which of us makes the best surgeon.” Hellboy felt a pang of guilt when he saw Lisa's face fall. “Sorry. Look, I figure the hospital is the last place they're going to evacuate. In this storm, there's got to be people in trouble all over the place. They'll be ready to help.”

As they rounded onto Storrow Drive, they turned straight into a furious, icy wind blasting across the river. The deserted road stretched out straight as a die, a dividing line between the brightly lit modern world and the ancient world of shadows that clustered over Beacon Hill. A trail of abandoned vehicles sloughed at different angles into the snow here and there.

Although their instincts wanted to drive them to the line of burning streetlights along the western edge of the road, next to the river, they would have been easily seen as the only objects moving on the brightly lit white background. Instead, Hellboy chose to hide in the dark that ran along the foot of Beacon Hill.

They fell silent. Only their labored breathing marked their passing. In contrast, the sound of the wolves scouring the sedate, historic streets of Beacon Hill echoed down to them. Hellboy could tell the army of wolves was moving methodically back and forth across the district, sensing their prey was near. It wouldn't be long before they reached the foot of the hill.

Nestling Brad in the crook of one arm, Hellboy drew his gun in anticipation.

“How much ammo have you got left?” Lisa whispered.

“Six slugs,” Hellboy replied. “And I'm gonna make every one count.” Still gripping the gun, he hooked Brad back over his arm and continued to run.

Every time they came to a street, they paused and peered around the corner to check they wouldn't be seen before dashing across. At Chestnut, no movement was visible up the long, dark stretch. At Mount Vernon Street, they could just glimpse flitting gray shapes moving across the junction with River Street further up the slope. But when they reached Pinckney Street, the wolves were close enough to see them.

“Now what?” William asked.

“We're gonna have to take our chances,” Hellboy replied. “Watch the rhythms of their search, and then get set to run.”

They waited as the wolves darted in and out of doorways, the vast mass of the beasts roaming further up Beacon Hill, drawing nearer all the time. When William signaled, they raced across the street and into the shadows beyond.

“That was lucky,” Hellboy said.

As the words left his lips, they saw movement ahead. A lone figure wandered out of Revere Street and turned to face them. It was Carnifex. His red eyes glowed like hot coals as he raised one hand above his head. In it was the Heart of Winter, glowing with the same white light they had experienced in the brick chamber. Hellboy felt a deep chill growing in his side, next to where the Kiss of Winter was stored, and within a second, the snow began to fall, slowly at first, but then with increasing intensity as the wind grew stronger. Within a minute, a blizzard raged across the area and visibility dropped. Carnifex put his head back and released a long howl that had a disturbing note of triumph.

Up in the dark on their right there came the sound of thunder, as the wolves moved as one down Beacon Hill toward Storrow Drive.

As they struggled against the wind and the thick snow, all around the streets began to warp, the buildings shifting between their ancient past and their modern incarnations. Ghostly figures in historic dress took on substance before becoming smoky and indistinct once more. Horses and carts left track marks in the snow that disappeared suddenly as they faded into the blizzard. The time twisting of the Heart and the Kiss united left them feeling queasy and unable to tell what was real and what was not.

Carnifex stood his ground. He knew it was already too late for them.

As they raced out into the middle of the road, the wolves began to emerge from the dark of Beacon Hill behind them, howling with uncontrollable blood lust.

“Can't you just shoot the bastard?” Lisa said fiercely as they closed on Carnifex.

“Good idea.” Hellboy fired once and hit Carnifex directly in the center of the chest. He went down hard, but picked himself up a second later and stood defiantly once more. Hellboy repeated three more times with the same effect. He cursed loudly. “That isn't getting us anywhere.”

Surging closer, the wolves snapped at their heels, while ahead one loped out of Charles River Square, attempting to head them off. Hellboy waited until it got close and then fired straight into its face. The skull exploded and the beast flipped backward to crash onto an abandoned car.

“One bullet left,” William said breathlessly.

“You've been counting.”

Carnifex waited, still holding the Heart of Winter aloft. There was a hint of dark glee in his bestial face.

“When I give the word, dive down behind that car up ahead,” Hellboy said.

Lisa and William exchanged a brief, puzzled glance, but didn't question Hellboy's request. Behind them, the wolves were only feet away, the meaty smell of them heavy in the air.

“Now!” Hellboy shouted.

As Lisa and William dived beneath the rear of the sedan, Hellboy whirled and fired at a gas tanker slued half onto the sidewalk. It went up like a bomb, a wave of flame washing across the street where the wolves ran. Hellboy and Brad landed in the snow next to Lisa and William, who were transfixed by the conflagration.

Thick black smoke swirled along the street in the gale, engulfing the burning wolves and Carnifex, but they could hear other wolves sweeping down from Beacon Hill to take the place of the fallen.

“Get behind me,” Hellboy said, as he kept low on the other side of the stream of abandoned vehicles. Once he had confirmed that Brad was still breathing, he broke into a run under cover of the smoke.

They could hear the frustrated roars of Carnifex as they left Storrow Drive behind them and dived into the underpass, heading toward Charles Street and the hospital.

“I guess that's one way of making your last bullet count,” Lisa said.

William's attention was drawn by Brad. Frantically, he grasped Brad's hand as they ran and checked for a pulse. Hellboy saw the result on William's face.

“We've lost him,” he said.

 
CHAPTER 24

—

The wolves had started to close in again as they raced along Fruit Street toward the entrance to the emergency room. The snow banked up in high walls on either side where it had been repeatedly cleared, but the ambulances were all backed up, unable to get out into the city at large.

“What's the point? He's dead,” William said hopelessly. Tears streamed down his face.

“There's still a chance. I'm not giving up yet,” Hellboy said.

“Neither am I,” Lisa said defiantly, though her eyes had a hollow, fearful expression. She glanced back into the face of the blizzard and caught sight of the advance guards of the pack loping into the entrance to the street.

Under the covered walkway, they ran, through the electronic doors into reception, where only a couple of people waited in chairs and a doctor and nurse chatted in quiet, troubled tones at the reception desk. A security guard looked out into the snow, shock lighting on his face as he saw Hellboy and the others arrive.

“Shut the security doors!” Hellboy barked as he skidded into the reception. The security guard began to protest until Hellboy rounded on him. “Just do it! This is an emergency!”

Baffled, the security guard pressed the green panic button behind the desk and the electronic doors slid shut and sealed just as the first wolves loped up to the entrance. “They should have had blast shutters fitted after 9/11,” Hellboy shouted to William. “Make sure he seals off as much of the hospital as he can. If he has to keep everyone locked in the ER, then that's what he'll have to do. Go!”

William ran to the security guard, who recoiled from the doors in horror as the wolves threw themselves at the reinforced doors repeatedly. The other people in reception fled, shrieking. As William tried to communicate with the guard, Hellboy placed Brad on a gurney and turned to the doctor in his green scrubs, who was already rushing to check Brad's vitals. He was in his late twenties, with sandy hair and freckles. His badge said his name was Cooper.

“He's lost a lot of blood from that chest wound. Now his heart's given out,” Hellboy said.

As white as the snow, Lisa looked on, her hands clasped in front of her.

“Crash cart room three!” the doctor barked to the nurse. “How long's he been down?”

“A few minutes, that's all.”

“That helps.” He eyed the wolves crashing against the glass. “What the hell—?”

“You concentrate on saving Brad's life. I'll deal with them.”

Dr. Cooper climbed astride Brad and gave him heart massage while two paramedics raced the gurney toward the ER surgical rooms. Hellboy called Lisa over and said calmly, “Go with the nurse. They'll want Brad's details. If they need any consent forms signed, get William. Otherwise, just give them all the support they need.”

Pleased to have something to do, she smiled wanly. “Hellboy
. . . thanks,” she said, and then glanced toward the swinging doors through which the gurney had just crashed. “I spent the last few years trying to convince myself we were just friends. Now I'm terrified I'm going to lose him.

“When I was a kid, my stepdad treated me pretty badly. It made me tough. It also made me pretty crap with relationships. When you've been locked in a bedroom for days on end, you don't trust people very easily. Now . . . I don't know. Do you believe
in redemption, Hellboy, or is that just something you get in books? Do people get saved? Get a second chance?”

Hellboy shrugged. “The way I figure it, every day's another second chance.”

She gave his arm a squeeze, then headed off with the nurse toward the surgical rooms.

Once she had gone, Hellboy allowed his grim expression to surface as he turned back toward the security doors. The floodlit square outside the entrance was filled with wolves. They pressed against the reinforced glass, lashing out in impotent rage with their talons, and he knew that by now the rest of their army would be swarming all around the hospital.

Dazed and exhausted, William returned with the terrified security guard. “All the departments have been sealed off with internal security doors,” William said. “There's not a lot of people still in the hospital, but there's enough. Critical patients, the long-term ill, essential staff—they're all being moved down to the ground floor so we can keep an eye on them easily on the monitors. We've closed off the ER too. We're stuck here.”

“You sure the wolves can't get in?”

William glanced back at the security guard. “If he's right. It's hard to get anything out of him.”

“Yeah. Stuff like this isn't easy to swallow.” Hellboy searched the ranks of wolves for Carnifex, but there was no sign. That worried him.

“Now what? I thought all this would come to an end once you had the Kiss of Winter.”

“Yeah. I suppose I should start thinking about stage two of the mission.”

“Left it a bit late, maybe?”

“A little pressure keeps your mind on the job.”

Hellboy took out the Kiss of Winter and examined it. The white light washed out across the reception area; it was almost too cold to touch.

“I figure the power of the Kiss has already started building again, just like that shaman said it would. You see what happened when it got close to the Heart of Winter on the way here? That time slipping was more extreme than anything we'd seen before. Those wolves must be getting desperate. They know they're close to getting locked back in their box again.” There was still no sign of Carnifex in the seething mass beyond the security door. “And that's when they're most dangerous.”

“Look,” William said.

In the corner of the reception, a man in a stovepipe hat and a silver-topped cane ambled. He was there only between blinks, but there was more substance to him than the flickering images Hellboy had witnessed on Storrow Drive. Two slaves with worn clothes and humble demeanors appeared near one of the examination rooms. Fright lit up their faces as they looked around, but they were gone just as quickly.

“It's getting worse,” Hellboy said. “Just as long as it doesn't start screwing with things here too much.”

Once he was sure the doors would hold against the onslaught, Hellboy and William went to the surgical rooms. Chewing a nail anxiously, Lisa looked through the window at the activity within.

“They've started Brad's heart, but there's a danger it might give out again,” she said gravely. “They're giving him blood now, while they stitch up the wound.”

Through the window, Cooper's face was taut with a troubling note of concern. He had one eye constantly fixed on the heart monitor.

There was another shimmer. For a split second, Hellboy was convinced he was standing in a corridor with gas lamps along the walls.

“Whoa. This is getting weird,” he said. “You saw that?”

Nodding, William tried the door of a storage room opposite. It opened onto the deck of a frigate on a storm-tossed sea. It was night, and lightning lit up the faces of sailors in two-hundred-year-old dress as they battled to keep their posts in the face of driving rain. William slammed the door quickly and looked to Hellboy. “That wasn't a vision,” he said.

“We need to get all the people here together so they're not accidentally wandering into the past.” Concerned, Hellboy could feel events start to slip away from him. “You can do that?”

William nodded. “You know the Kiss of Winter might be more of a danger to us in here than it is out there. Keeping it around might not be an option.”

“You have an idea?”

His shoulders sagged; his years were catching up with him quickly and he now looked more world weary than Hellboy had seen him. “Maybe. I need to think . . . ” He cast one eye toward Cooper and his team at work on Brad, fighting back a pang of sadness that flared briefly in his worn features, and then moved away to find the security guard.

The insistent whine of the heart monitor pierced the air. Lisa jumped, clutched onto the door jamb. Inside the room, the screen showed a flat line. Tense, determined faces matched rapid activity, as Cooper called for the defibrillator. The nurse charged it; Cooper grabbed the paddles and watched the needle rise.

“Oh, God, please,” Lisa whispered. Hellboy gave her shoulder a supportive squeeze.

“Stand back,” Cooper ordered. He drove the paddles toward Brad's chest, and in that instant, the entire hospital shifted in time. Hellboy and Lisa stood in the corridor of what appeared to be a hotel, looking into a room where Cooper and his team gathered around Brad on the bed. Blankly, Cooper stared at his hands, where the paddles had just been, and then quickly came to himself and started CPR.

Everything skewed again and the hospital was back again, with a concerned William running toward them. In the surgical room, Cooper cursed loudly, demanding to know what was going on as he continued with CPR while the nurse recharged the defibrillator.

“This is going to kill him!” Lisa said.

“We've got to do something,” William began. In that instant the power went out and the hospital was plunged into darkness. It only lasted a split second before the hospital's backup generator kicked in.

“The Kiss of Winter's screwing everything up,” Hellboy said. “If the power goes for good . . . ” His voice trailed off as he watched the medics at work on Brad. The screen still showed a flat line.

William began to say something urgent, but they were interrupted by a cry from the security guard. Behind the desk, he was watching the screen showing feeds from the security cameras around the building and grounds.

“When the power went out, the security door on the roof blew. It's reset now, but . . . ” The guard indicated the screen, which showed wolves loping along empty corridors.

“How many got in?” Hellboy asked.

“Hard to tell. Ten?” His hand shook as he switched to another camera; more wolves darted by. “If they get down to this level, there'll be carnage.” He wavered. “I ought to—”

“Leave it to me. You make sure everybody down here stays safe. Keep them together.”

Nodding, the security guard's eyes flickered toward the ranks of wolves beyond the ER entrance. No longer tearing at the doors, once again they watched, unmoving, with malignant stares that made the blood run cold.

“Why've they stopped?” the security guard said. “It was bad enough when they were like wild animals, but this is worse. It's like they're—”

“Waiting?”

He nodded. “What would they be waiting for?”

“If the power goes off again. Because then those doors will fail, and they'll be inside.”

The guard blanched.

Hellboy leaned over the desk to peer at the screen. “Where are those wolves?”

“Three different locations.” He indicated on a map on the wall. “Here, here and here.”

“Can we keep 'em locked up there?”

“If you manually reset internal security doors. Otherwise, they'll be down here in no time.”

“Once I've reset them, how do I get back?”

“You can't until the doors have been released.”

“So I'll be trapped up there. Great.” Hellboy took the details from the guard and ran for the stairwell. He paused at the surgical-room door, where William and Lisa were transfixed by the battle for Brad's life.

“How's he doing?” Hellboy asked.

“They've got his heart started again, but he can't go through much more of this punishment,” Lisa replied, blinking away tears. “You need to get the Kiss of Winter away from here. Give Brad a chance.”

“The wolves are in. If they get down here to the ER, it's all over for Brad too. And all of you.”

Lisa covered her face. Unable to say anything that would make her feel better, Hellboy headed for the stairwell, relieved the upper levels were clear of potential victims.

The moment he stepped through the door he could hear the sound of the wolves echoing across the floors above. Against his side, the Kiss of Winter had begun to throb, the cold reaching into the very heart of him. Its power was growing and spreading.

Time was running out.