Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (7 page)

Abby wiped away her tears and looked at her hand, but there was no change there. It was several days until full moon, but as always she wanted meat.

She had reported in to BPRD after killing the werewolf. He had reverted seconds after she put the bullet through his brain, but she knew that many of the bystanders had seen what she had seen, heard what she had heard. She knew also that the human mind had a way of ignoring such strangeness and relegating it to the stuff of nightmares. Most of those present would shake their heads, look down at their feet, assume that the shock of what had happened had conjured fanciful images in their minds. Those who doubted their eyesight less would still say nothing, through fear of ridicule. And if there had been one man there, or one woman, who truly believed what he or she had seen, that person would be called insane.

For all anyone cared, Abby had killed a man in cold blood and then walked away.

She had spoken to Tom Manning. He had told her to come in, she had agreed, then she had gone for a walk. And now she was still walking, and it felt good. It was good to be out from BPRD, free for a night. They were her family, but they were also her prison guards, keeping her locked away for her own protection and the protection of those around her. These people here, swaying along the pavement and paying homage to the alcohol in their blood. Those people there, sweating and grunting in a shadowy doorway. Innocents all of them, cattle going about their daily lives of eating and drinking and rutting without realizing that monsters lived among them.

"Monsters like me," she said, but she shook her head so hard that she cricked her neck. No, she was not a monster. She had shed that name the instant she escaped from Blake.

The man knew who I was talking about. Blake! He denied it, but in his eyes I saw that spark of understanding ... and something else. Something that could have been recognition.
And that was why Abby walked. Because of Benedict Blake, and what he had done, and the secret that she had carried from the second Abe Sapien set his strange hand on her arm in Paris and rescued her from the night.

She could remember few details of her life before Paris. There was Blake, the force in her mind and the physical presence that had nurtured her, and there was her escape from him. Plunging through the night into the ice-cold embrace of the ocean; the panicked swim; those massive things moving beneath her, deep down and yet so huge that they seemed to exert a fearful gravity, pulling her down with them. Something touched her legs more than once on that long swim, but it never held her back. Fear drove her on, fear of what Blake was and what he might one day do. Somehow she
could
fear him — the others did not — and that was another secret she had dwelled upon ever since. After that, there were only fleeting memories of Paris, none of them good. None, that is, until Abe Sapien touched her arm. His touch had seemed to welcome her to the world, unnatural thing that she was. And Abe had welcomed her into his life.
We have like minds,
he had said as she coughed the Seine water from her lungs.

But he did not know her. And deep down, she hoped that he was wrong.

She had plenty of guilt to walk off. She could pretend it was culpability at the killing of the werewolf, but that was not true. When she thought of that thing lying in the road as she put a bullet through its eye, she felt nothing. This was a deeper, sicker feeling, one that stank of betrayal. Betrayal of her friends. They had taken her in and cared for her, and she had told them nothing. She had lied. She found it strange that freedom only increased that sense of guilt.

She passed a burnt-out building and paused for a moment, wondering whether she should go inside and find somewhere to sit for the night. A man and a woman passed her and averted their eyes. She stared at them, hoping they would say something that would change her mind. But they walked on, wrapped up in their own small world. Sometimes Abby scoffed at such narrow-mindedness, but most of the time she wanted to be just like them.

Her satellite phone rang, and she sighed. That would be BPRD asking where she was. Tom, probably, the concern in his voice barely masking the worry he had about her being out on her own. She plucked the phone from her pocket.

"Hello."

"Abby? Tom. Where are you? I thought you were coming in."

"I ... I am, Tom. I'm still in Baltimore. Walking. Couple of things about the guy I killed I'm still trying to work through in my head."

"Hmm. Well, can you work them through back here? The shits really hitting the fan right now, and I could do with your help."

"What's happened?"

"Sightings," Tom said. "Lots of sightings."

"Sightings of what."

"Well ... things. Dragons. Sea serpents. Other weird stuff."

"Where?" Abby already felt a chill, the sweat on her brow cooling.

"Everywhere," Tom said. "Abby, come home. Abe's on his way back, and I'm hoping to hear from Hellboy and Liz soon. I think we're in for a busy couple of days."

Abby cut the connection and pocketed the phone without agreeing to return, hoping that Tom would take that as a yes.
Dragons ... sea serpents ... other weird stuff.
She closed her eyes and allowed in the memory of her dreams, and they were filled with bad things.

Blake.

And she suddenly knew that she would not be returning home.

Abby Paris remembered her dreams, and she knew that the dreams were memories in disguise. In those memories she was nameless, because she had yet to be named; she was empty, waiting to be filled with history; and she was unsettled.

Yet still she remembered herself as Abby, because to remember herself with no name was like being nothing.

She walks through the
New Ark
a young girl in a world she does not understand, and yet she regards it as normal. She knows nothing else. She is a teenager, but she can remember nothing of her childhood. She knows the reasons for this — the evidence is all around her — though she does not understand that, either. Understanding is for Blake; her job is simply being. That is what she had been told.
You exist, creature, because I give you my will to exist,
Blake told her.
You are here because I brought you, you breathe air because I allow it, and in your creation there was a pledge of faith to me. Wander the ship, but do not wonder. See what is happening but do not question. Your time in the Memory is over, and now you have a new home in reality. Accept that, accept me, and your future is one of triumph.

That was the only time Blake ever spoke to her. She has seen him many times since then, working at a vat or wandering through the ship. But although he always offers her a smile and a nod, he never speaks. He is a tall, thin, ghostly figure, and for some reason he always reminds Abby of her time before memory began. That is a dark time, and Blake carries darkness with him. It is also a deep, hollow time, filled with nothing but space, and when she looks into the tall man's eyes — past the light of passion, past the shades of madness — she can see the hollowness that lies at his core.

The hollowness of her own mind has its ghosts as well. They are knowledge and intelligence, things that she was born with but that are not exactly hers. Her first memory is of Blake staring down at her, smiling as he uses a rough old cloth to wipe fluids from her eyes, clearing them, ensuring that he is the very first thing she ever focuses on. Even then she has a strange awareness, and yet everything this awareness brings up feels as though it has been left behind in her mind by someone or something else. Her life is new, her mind old. She screams. Blake steps back, still smiling, and she thinks her first true thought:
He's more than used to this.

Experience with no history; life with no true birth; knowledge without a past. She accepts them all and yet yearns for something more: understanding.

The hollowness inside her, haunted though it is, needs filling. And this is when she first perceives her need for escape.

On the day she leaves, there is one goodbye to make.

Few of Blake's creations speak any sort of language that Abby can understand. They fly or crawl, walk or slither, sleep or scream, but there is only one other creature whom Abby has any sort of communication with, and she never sees him. He — she assumes it is a he, simply because of his voice — is contained behind a heavy steel door, and the only space through which he can talk is a narrow grille at its base. Abby first noticed him soon after her birthing, when she wandered naked through the ship trying to find who she was, and since then she has been back at regular intervals to talk with him.

Her voice feels like an alien in her throat, the thoughts that conjure it strangers in her mind It is the hidden creature — Voice, as she has come to know him — who helps her come to terms with herself. His words are few, but their meaning is always deep. He has built her from nothing to something, and years later she realizes that it was Voice who made her something more than Blake ever intended. He gave her the thirst to fill her potential. And he made her free.

On that final night, she sits on the floor and leans back against the door. She can hear him breathing on the other side, and she likes to think that the metal is warmed by his breath. Some contact, at least. Some affection. Without really understanding or knowing why, that is something she has always missed.

"It's so dark in here," she says.

"It's made that way."

"You told me years ago that he locked you away because of what you think, and what you know. Why doesn't he lock me away as well?"

A snort comes from behind the door. "Because I made no secret of my doubt. I've told you before, you're unique here. You're a bright mind among stupidity. You're
human.
The fact that Blake didn't take that into account shows just how mad he has become. He has these things he has brought out of the Memory — you and me included — and because of that, he has begun to doubt the facility of humanity. He's committed the very crime that put everything in this
New Ark
into the Memory in the first place, except that he's committed it against humans. He doubts them, looks down upon them, and that has made him underestimate them."

"And
I'm
human?" Abby doubts that, because there is something else deep down that drives her. Like a blazing fire behind a locked door, it surges for release at frequent intervals.

"As human as anything aboard this ship, Blake included. "

"And you, Voice?"

Voice is quiet for a long time, and Abby begins to think he has fallen asleep. But then she feels movement at her back, a subtle vibration transmitted through the metal of the door, and when he speaks it sounds as though he is crying. "Abby, it's time for you to leave. Escape. You're looking for a life, and you'll never find it in here. Here, there's only death waiting for the right time to visit."

"Voice?" Abby is shocked, but it is more at the way he seems to be reading her mind than anything else.
Escape,
she has been thinking for weeks.
Escape is the only way.
Perhaps seeking Voice's approval is the impetus she really needs.

"Go," he says, and that is the last she hears.

Abby stands. She has been planning this for some time, never really believing that it would happen; it was a fancy, a daydream, a glimpse of a future that would never be. Now that she is actually going through with it, she finds herself calmer and more composed than she has any right to be. She is leaving home for the first time, with only the good wishes of someone or something locked away from the world to see her on her way.

The stern will be the best place for her to jump from. Even if she is seen, it will take hours for the
New Ark
to halt and come back to look for her. And it seems fitting that, at the moment of her plunging into the sea, she and Blake will be parting company at the greatest speed possible.

"Goodbye," she whispers at the metal door. But it will be years before she knows whether or not Voice even hears.

On this, her final walk through the other world that is the
New Ark
, she takes in everything and commits it to memory.
One day,
she is thinking,
it may all be useful
She never intends to return to Blake's realm, yet she knows that a part of her will never be able to leave.

She heads through the maze of rooms and cells at the bow of the great ship. It is dark in here, occasional lights flickering and blinking as the troubled generator soldiers on. A drone passes her, and she pauses to watch it go. She has never discovered the source of these things, and Voice claims not to know. Of one fact she is certain: they are not born out of the vats. Blake has created these creatures, not dragged them out of the Memory, and to Abby's mind that makes them more of a travesty. Gray, short, sallow, strong of muscle but weak of mind, the drones run the ship and do all the work that is necessary in keeping Blake's creatures alive and well. She has never seen them when they are not working. She has never seen a drone resting. She has never even seen a dead drone, though there are plenty of places where corpses can be disposed of inside the
New Ark
.

"Hey!" she says. The drone stops and turns, pointing its doglike face her way and averting its eyes. They
never
meet her eyes. Blake has made them less than the other things aboard the huge ship, and they seem to know their place. "What do you do to rest?" she asks.

"Huh," the drone says.

She has never been able to make any sense in the noise, and even now she is still unsure whether there is any intelligence behind it at all.

"What do you eat?"

"Huh."

"What do you like to do?"

"Huh."

"Touch your toes." The creature bends and fingers its toes. "Stand up." It stands. "Why are you here?"

"Huh."

Abby feels tears blurring her vision, and she wipes at them angrily. She knows nothing other than what she has been born with, yet this thing pains her,
offends
her. It is nothing so shallow as mourning the creature's rights or feeling upset at the abuse; it is more as though she senses the fallacy of the drones existence. Everything else on this ship — all the creatures she is about to pass by for the very last time — has risen out of rightness. Cast as they have been into the Memory, still they had their time, and they take up a space in the world that was once meant for them. These drones that Blake made are simply wrong.