DEAD HEROES
Once upon a time, I worked for an outfit called the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. The BPRD was an odd bunch with an even odder job. A man who used to run the BPRD - someone really important to me - used to say: "There are things that go bump in the night. We're the ones who bump back."
During my time with the BPRD, I did a lot of bumping. I fought strange critters and met strange people. Me and my friends learned a lot about how the invisible part of our world actually works. But here's something most people don't know. Not even most of the folks with the BPRD.
It's possible to drink with the dead.
I mean just what I said. There's one place in particular - a bar - where you can hoist a glass with some particularly interesting examples of those who've gone before. However, it's not exactly easy to find. Part of the problem is that the bar keeps moving. London, Paris, Moscow, Munich... I've run into it in all of those places. And more.
When you get down to it, I don't think you really find that particular watering hole. Instead, it finds you.
The bar has a name. It's called 'Dead Heroes'.
My name is Hellboy.
I was in San Francisco and one of those famous San Francisco fogs had rolled in from the Pacific. The streets, sidewalks, and alleyways of San Francisco were a white and wet blanket. Once night fell, streetlights and neon signs colored the fog different shades of fuzzy yellow, red, orange and blue. However, the spaces in between were dark and mysterious.
The streets were as empty as possible for a town as big as San Francisco. But it wasn't just the fog that was keeping everyone inside.
Everyone was scared. Bloodless bodies were turning up all over town. People don't like that when it happens.
I was hunting something, but I wasn't having a lot of luck. And people were going to keep dying until that changed.
That was when I stumbled across 'Dead Heroes'. It's a place that has a habit of popping up when you need it.
I didn't recognize it at first. I was marching through the fog when I suddenly found a doorway that looked vaguely familiar. There was an ancient sign on the door, advertising a brand of beer that hadn't been brewed in decades. More out of curiosity than anything else, I pushed the door open and stepped inside. It had been a frustrating few days and right about then a beer sounded pretty good.
I glanced at my wristwatch just before I entered. It was midnight.
Once I was inside, I suddenly knew where I was. The interior of 'Dead Heroes' changes just as often as its location, but the clientele gives the place away.
A fellow named Barfoot was behind the bar. Back in 1944, while he was serving with the U.S. Army in Italy, he went for a walk into German lines. In the process, he knocked out three machine-gun nests. After Barfoot and his fellow GIs dug into their new position, a trio of German tanks counter-attacked them. However, Barfoot happened to have a bazooka handy, and he pretty much put an end to that nonsense. Then Barfoot used a demolition charge to spike a German artillery piece. The part where he got two guys to an aid station without any other help was just the cap to a very long day.
The Army figured all of that was worth a Medal of Honor. I can see their point.
I gave Barfoot a nod as I bellied up to the bar. He stayed in the service after the war and eventually made it all the way to Colonel, but he's been dead since 2012. He was one of the BPRD's unofficial contacts in the Army, and I met him a couple of times back when he was still alive.
It was good to see him again.
"How's it going, HB?" Barfoot said with a wide grin as he poured a cold one and parked it on the bar in front of me. He had an accent that was a product of his home state of Mississippi.
"I've been busy," I said with a shrug.
A few chairs down from where I was standing was a short and morose-looking Vietnamese fellow named Toomb. Once, he'd haunted the skies above Vietnam, shooting down American jet fighters with cold efficiency. Then one day he ran into a hotshot U.S. Navy pilot, and that was it for him.
Off in the corner, a German fellow named Wittmer was talking with a red-headed man wearing hoplite armor. Most people figured the red-head was Achilles, but he's never introduced himself, and nobody seemed inclined to push the issue.
I traded a nod with maybe-Achilles. I don't have a lot of time for Toomb and especially Wittmer, so I ignored them.
At a nearby table, a gray-haired and scarred Roman centurion was chatting up Mata Hari. I silently wished the centurion luck. Mata can be something of a tease.
At the far end of the bar, two guys were looking at me. There were shots of whiskey in front of them. One was an Irish fellow named Cassidy. The other...
That was when I figured it out. The guy with Cassidy was the reason the bar had found me. Once I saw him, it was obvious.
Grabbing my beer, I moved down the bar and parked my ass into the barstool next to the Wolverine. My over-sized right-hand landed on the bar with a solid thud.
"Hey, Logan. How's it going?" I asked him.
Some people think Logan is just a story. The same for Cassidy. And, for that matter, more than a few of the other patrons in the bar - including me. In that particular establishment, the line between reality and myth can get a little hazy.
"Waddya want?" Logan growled. He's actually a pretty decent guy, but he's never been much for manners.
Of course, a lot of people might say the same about me.
"I gotta problem," I growled back.
"What?"
"Some kind of ninja-critter is killing people. It has to be stopped. I can use some help."
Logan's eyes narrowed.
Cassidy just chuckled and shook his head.
There's an old movie where someone says, "Only a ninja can kill a ninja," but that's not really true. About fifteen years ago, in Seattle, I found myself picking up after one of Logan's bloodier messes. A good two-dozen black-clad and very dead sword-slingers were scattered in pieces all over the alleys, rooftops, and sewers of the downtown. They'd been very distinctively sliced, hacked, chopped, and perforated.
I never did find out what they did to piss off Logan.
No man on Earth has killed more ninjas than Logan. Entire clans - some of which had existed longer than Christianity - have ended under his claws.
"So what's going on?" Logan asked thoughtfully. I guess I'd managed to catch his interest. Of course, every man likes to talk about the things he's good at doing.
"Something bad came into San Fran on a container ship," I said after I took a long sip from my beer. Then I made a gesture in Barfoot's direction. He grabbed a bottle and topped off Logan and Cassidy's glasses. Hey, fair is fair. It was only reasonable that I pay some sort of consultants fee.
Logan shrugged. "You said 'something', not 'someone'", he observed.
I nodded. "Yeah, it was once a ninja, but sometime back in the 16th century, it died. Now it's back. And as unlikely as it sounds, our monster-ninja has business here in the States."
Logan drained his shot. This time Barfoot refilled Logan's glass without anyone asking.
"That sounds like the Hand," Logan responded mildly. His body language was a lot more interested than his words. Every part of him was on edge.
The Hand is a ninja clan that specializes in undeath. They're the ninjas that other ninjas fear.
I nodded. "Back in the day, our little ninja-problem-child was one of the Hand. But there was an experiment of some kind; an attempt to come up with some kind of super-ninja. Instead, the Hand created something that spun way out of control. If you've read the 'Shadow Verities' by Suzuki..."
"There was a gap in Hand activity in the late 16th century," Logan interrupted thoughtfully. "For about a half-century, they fell off the map. Nobody knows why."
Cassidy smiled and shook his head. Logan doesn't exactly come across as a scholar, but sometimes he surprises you.
"I figure the Hand vanished because most of them had been destroyed, and the rest went to ground," I added. "It took them a while to rebuild."
"Impressive," Logan said with a slow nod. Which was an understatement.
"This critter is tracking down members of one particular family," I went on. "They're descended from a guy who immigrated here early in the twentieth century. His descendents have spread out all over the U.S. and Canada - and they're everything from doctors and lawyers to punk gangsters and drug addicts. But they all have one thing in common..."
"Something's killing them," Logan finished for me.
I nodded my head. "Right."
"Any idea why?"
I shook my head. "Nope."
"How are you going to find your monster-ninja?"
I looked Logan in the eye. "That's where you come in."
Logan's smile was hard and cold.
Logan and I walked out of the bar and into the fog-shrouded streets. Cassidy had opted to sit this one out. That was fine by me since his powers are kinda noisy.
As soon as we left the bar, Logan changed in a way that's tough to describe. He wasn't completely there. The fog seemed to drift through him. When he got between me and some kind of light, I could see it dimly shining through his body.
Logan was a ghost.
"How much time do you have?" I asked him. The dead can only exist in the mortal world for so long, but the exact amount of time varies between the different kinds of dead. Off hand, I wasn't sure how long a guy from 'Dead Heroes' could go AWOL.
Logan sniffed the air, his body tense with concentration.
"Nobody knows how much time they have," he said.
I shrugged that off. The dead tend to be short and cryptic. How much of that is because of their detachment from mortality, and how much of it is because a lot of them are jerks, is a good question.
With Logan, it was probably because he was being a jerk. He's always been kinda like that.
"I've got something," Logan added. He was staring off into the mist - damned if I could tell what he was looking at - and there was a dangerous smile on his face. In that fog, there was nothing much to see, but that didn't matter to Logan. He'd caught a scent. Logan has a nose like a bloodhound.
I think the smile was because he was remembering what it was like to be alive and hunting.
"What?" I asked.
"It's faint, but it's dead and alive at the same time."
"Can you track it?" I asked.
Logan didn't say anything as he drifted off into the fog. However, I did hear him chuckle.
Okay, maybe my question hadn't been all the bright.
I checked the draw on my pistol. It was smooth and sweet, flowing in and out of its holster with no problem.
Then I followed Logan into the mist.
San Francisco is the future. Increasingly, only the rich and the poor can live there. The rich because they have money, the poor because the government supports them. Meanwhile, the folks in the middle are being priced out of the game of life. Not everywhere is like that, but it's becoming more and more common on the East and West coasts, and it's beginning to pop up elsewhere. Wanna know why politics are so crazy lately? A lot of it is because of that.
On a less current note, let me tell you that tailing a ghostly Logan through a deep fog is really not easy.
Frankly, I wasn't sure where we were, but as near as I could tell we were in one of those warrens of streets just off of the sorta-east side of Market Street. We weren't that far from the downtown, and the hulking mass of the Bay Bridge occasionally loomed out of the fog and bulked over us; massive and somehow unworldly.
Logan was leading me in all directions, but I had the impression we were walking in a big spiral.
"There," he finally told me.
He was standing on a street corner, a streetlight fuzzily burning above him. He was staring up at the indistinct bulk of multi-story building. The building was old by San Francisco standards - the earthquake and fire forced a lot of unplanned urban renewal, but a lot of what had been built in the aftermath hadn't been too well-constructed. If you wander the town, you can still see pockets of buildings that are going to immediately collapse when the next big quake finally rolls through.
A car, visible only by its lights, passed us by. It was on the wrong side of the road, lost in the fog.
"Third floor," Logan said thoughtfully. "The other side of the building. There's blood - old and new. Lots of blood. And I can smell your guy."
Like I said, the guy has a hell of a nose.
"Any idea what it is?" I asked. The more you know about the badguys, the easier it is to kill them.
"It's not your usual Hand," Logan replied with a shrug. "Yeah, it's alive and dead. But I can also smell chemicals and electricity."
Then Logan paused for a second, before speaking again. "How sure are you that this thing dates back to the sixteenth century?"
"Pretty sure," I told him.
Logan's eyes met mine, "It smells like Frankenstein's monster."
I opened my mouth to ask Logan if he'd actually met Frankenstein's monster - then I shut it. Of course he'd met the monster. Their stories were too much alike for them not to meet. Fate demands certain things.
"You said it smells like Big Frank," I said slowly, "but is it him? This really doesn't fit his M.O."
Logan shook his head. "No. They have a lot in common, but this is different. The chemicals are... off. They aren't industrial. They smell more like something from Japanese alchemy."
I resisted the urge to ask Logan just how much he knew about Japanese alchemy. At the moment, it wasn't important.
"The formula to reanimate the dead has been invented more than once," I told him. "Two times in Europe. Three times in Asia. The first time was way back in ancient Egypt. It looks like the Hand tried to mess with the concept back in the 1500s. And it cost them."
That seems to be a rule of reanimation - it always rebounds on you in a bad way. I suppose spitting in the face of God has a price.
"So why is this thing killing people from one particular family?" Logan asked reasonably.
I just shook my head.
Then Logan stiffened and turned his attention back to the building. He'd sensed something new.
"There's someone with it," he said quietly.
I looked at Logan.
"It's a kid," he finished.
Without another word, we ran across the street.
Logan and I... well, we're not exactly subtle. If we see a problem, we go straight at it. If the problem is dangerous, then we do ugly things to it until it's not a problem any more. Some people might say that we're the poster boys for toxic masculinity.
But we really don't like it when kids are in danger.
It turned that the building was condemned. I hit the front double-doors with my shoulder and they immediately popped open. I turned my head from side to side - taking a quick look around - as Logan slipped past me and dashed for the stairs.
Back in the day, the building had been a hotel. There was an elevator, but there was no way it still worked, and besides, we were in a hurry. There was a pair of dead bodies - an old man and a young woman - stacked on top of the reception counter. They were obviously Asian, but I'd say the girl had some Caucasian blood. Their wrists and ankles were zip-tied together, and from the paleness of their faces and hands it was obvious that they'd been drained of blood. The throats gaped open; neatly slit.
I followed Logan up the stairs, barely keeping up. For such a short guy, he can really move.
Once we got to the third floor, Logan didn't hesitate. He took a left and kept going. I was right behind him.
This time, Logan took care of opening the door. By the time we got to room 307, he had his claws out and he removed the doorknob and latch with a single slash. The door flew wide.
Yeah, Logan was fully solid. When it's really important, some ghosts can do that.
Our monster wasn't even five foot tall. She was a Japanese woman - a girl really - dressed in 21st century badass black-leather. Her hair was short and she'd dyed it red and purple. And she was kinda pretty as long as you ignored her flat, dead, eyes. They were eyes that had seen too much, but intended to see a lot more.
A bound-and-gagged kid was sitting in the far corner, whimpering in fear.
In the center of the room, there was an old-fashioned washtub. Just above the tub, chains were suspended from the ceiling. There was also a hunting knife embedded point-first in the closest wall. I'd seen that kind of setup before. You string someone up by their feet over a container of some kind, then cut their throat and collect their blood.
Dried and semi-dried blood was splattered everywhere. That kind of butchering is not a neat process.
I guess I expected our monster to pull out a ninja-to and begin waving it at us. That seemed thematically correct.
Instead, our sixteenth-century monster opened up on us with an automatic shotgun.
When I say "automatic shotgun" I don't mean a semi-automatic weapon that fires once with each trigger pull. Instead, she had real, honest-to-God, automatic shotgun. The kind where you pull the trigger and the gun fires until you either take your finger off the trigger, or you run out of ammo. Usually those things are hard to control because of recoil, but if the shooter is strong enough - say, inhumanly strong - they can control it just fine.
I hate it when ancient monsters keep current with the modern world.
Logan took the first blast to his lower chest and stomach. Something ethereal, but still wet, splattered over me. The force of the impact spun Logan partially around, but he just went with it and kept spinning until he was off to the side.
I drew my pistol with my left hand - it's a massive weapon that was given to me long ago by one of the greatest men I'd ever known. As buck-shot pellets tore into me, I somehow managed to aim and return fire. However, I could only barely see my target since there was now blood in my eyes.
I heard the boom, felt the jump of my weapon, but luck was with me. My shot hit her and she simply wasn't big enough to absorb that kind of impact. She tripped backwards and smashed against the wall behind her. My ears were ringing from all of the noise, but I could still tell that she had growled in response, rather than scream.
Then Logan cut off one of her hands. The shotgun - now in two pieces - went flying. Her severed hand was still on the trigger. This time, she did scream.
I lunged forward and pile-drived into her. The wall behind her splintered open and we both tumbled into the next room, landing together in a heap. Dust and debris from the wall created a cloud around us. My gun went flying.
The monster actually stabbed me in the face with the stump of her right arm. The fluid spurting out of her wound smelled like formaldehyde and rotten blood - something I never want to smell again. She was trying to blind me again. Meanwhile, her other hand grabbed the shoulder of my coat as she kicked up at me. That heaved all five-hundred pounds of me up and over her in a long arc. I smashed into the floor again, boards cracking under me, as I spat out her strange internal fluids.
The monster was scrambling to her feet when Logan cut one of her legs off just below the knee. She looked almost comically surprised as she collapsed.
My big right hand descended in a massive and very final blow. Her head splintered and went flat.
There were brains and other crap all over me. It was going to be hell to get my coat clean.
By the time I got to my feet, Logan was gone.
After I retrieved my gun, I checked on the kid. She was okay, but scared. Somebody had already cut her loose.
I pulled my over-sized cell-phone out of a coat pocket and called the cops.
The hunt was over.
Kate runs things at the BPRD and she's one of the smartest people I know. Before she got into management, she made a career out of studying monsters and the supernatural.
At heart, Kate's still a scholar instead of a boss. The thing in San Francisco was sufficiently weird that she decided to look into it personally.
"Yes, the creature you killed was a reanimation," she told me. We were in a conference room back in BPRD headquarters. I didn't really work for the BPRD anymore, but nobody was making a big deal about that.
"A Japanese alchemist apparently experimented with one of the Chinese reanimation techniques," Kate continued. "However, he must have misunderstood something. He used his own blood in the formula."
I winced. "Let me guess. The creature needed a blood fix to survive. A special blood fix."
Kate nodded. "Once she killed her original creator, the monster must have discovered that a relative's blood was good enough to keep her going. Over the centuries, she eventually exterminated her creator's entire lineage in Japan. Then she tracked the bloodline across the Pacific. Before she ended up in San Francisco, we think she made a stop in Hawaii and spent a few years wiping out an extended family there."
I sighed and shook my head. "How's the little girl doing? The one we managed to save?"
Kate gave me a long look. "We?" she repeated.
"Yeah," I said. I let the tone of my voice let Kate know that I really didn't want to go any further.
Kate took the hint - she's good like that. "We have a hypnotist working with girl - trying to suppress her memories of what she saw. Hopefully, she won't have nightmares for the rest of her life."
I nodded. That was good.
"She keeps saying that two men saved her," Kate added. "She describes them as a big red man and a little pointy man."
I smiled. Logan was going to love that.
One way or another, I was pretty sure I'd see him again.
A few years later, I happened to be in Marseilles. It was around midnight - in fact, I'm pretty sure exactly midnight - when I saw a door that made me suspicious.
I walked inside.
This time, 'Dead Heroes' was set up like a classy, mid-twentieth century strip-club. When I entered, a pair of blonde dancers were onstage, swaying to Joe Cocker's classic 'You Can Leave Your Hat On'. One dancer was naked except for some exaggerated Indian warpaint. She was also carrying a bow and arrow. The other dancer was wearing a white Stetson, a gun-belt complete with Colt Peacemaker, a pair of cowboy boots - and nothing else.
It made sense if you actually saw the two of them onstage, but by early twenty-first century standards it was pretty politically incorrect.
Back during the Second World War, the two blondes were part of the French Resistance. They would pump German officers for information about the Atlantic Wall defenses, and then send what they'd learned on to British intelligence. Eventually, the Gestapo tumbled onto their operation. The girls died in a Paris torture chamber - and a bunch of GIs and Tommies got to live when they hit the beaches at Normandy. It was a rough balance, but it was a balance.
I scanned the crowd. I knew some of the faces, but not all of them.
Mata Hari caught my eye and nodded at me. She was wearing a set of long and transparent veils - seven of them if I had to guess. I assumed she would be onstage eventually. I wondered if she and the French girls got along. Sometimes the dead carry grudges with them from the mortal world. Sometimes they let the past slide. There's really no telling.
Mata was sitting with a tall and hard-looking English fellow who was dressed in a full tuxedo. They were drinking martinis that I'm sure were shaken, not stirred.
At another table, a Chinese girl dressed in a sparse scatter of feathers was talking to a Korean girl who was dressed in what looked like a net. They were holding hands affectionately. In different centuries, the two of them had lured Japanese soldiers up into their rooms and murdered them. The Korean girl used a knife. The Chinese girl used poison.
It was apparently exotic dancer-hero night. I really had to learn more about the entertainment schedule at 'Dead Heroes'.
I don't claim to understand how 'Dead Heroes' decides who's a member, but politics and causes didn't seem to be the deciding factor. However, I've noticed that not too many politicians seem to make the final cut. I did once see Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill drink each other under a table. Then an Egyptian temple-prostitute who'd died defending her temple's innermost shrine from Roman looters stole their wallets.
I bumped into Churchill a few years later and he laughed the whole thing off. I haven't seen Teddy since, but I suspect he feels the same way.
Logan was at a table in the back of the room. There were two beautiful women with him. One was a Japanese lady in a full formal kimono. The other was a red-head in a long and elegant evening gown. Cassidy was up at the bar and chatting up a darkly pretty girl with a modern Middle Eastern look about her. Whether the girl was an Israeli who'd fought Arabs, or an Arab who'd fought Israelis wasn't clear, but I guessed it was one or the other.
Logan nodded at me. I walked over and sat down. I'd never met either of the two women who were with him, but I could guess who they were.
"Ladies," I said with a polite nod. Jean and Mariko smiled at me. For a second, I was dazzled by the experience. It occurred to me that Logan was a really weird combination of lucky and unlucky.
"How's the little girl?" Logan asked.
I knew who he was talking about.
"She's okay," I answered. "The BPRD had a hypnotist clean up some of the rougher spots in her memory. She's now in the sixth grade, thinks boys are stupid, likes math, and got to ride a pony last summer."
Logan raised an eyebrow.
"I get a letter from her every Christmas," I explained. "The BPRD forwards it to me."
Logan nodded.
"Oh, and she keeps telling me to say hello to the pointy man," I added.
That took a moment to sink in. With no restraint, Jean roared with laughter. Mariko - more formally and gently raised - tried to hide her amusement behind a finely manicured hand.
"Okay," Logan told me with a grin. "I've never heard that one before."
"We've both been called worse," I replied with a broad shrug.
"I kinda like it," Logan admitted.
"It was good to see you again, Logan," I said as I got to my feet. Then I politely nodded to his ladies.
I don't like to overstay my welcome.
Then Jean suddenly spoke up. "Before you go, there's someone you might want to see."
I gave Jean a blank look and she nodded towards the other side of the room. There were a set of alcoves back there - little rooms with a small table and a pair of chairs. A curtain could be shut if the people inside wanted some privacy.
Only one alcove was occupied. A tall lady with dark hair and solid red eyes was inside, sipping from a flute of champagne. She was wearing a long red dress that - except for the color - resembled the stola of a Roman lady. It looked good on her.
I didn't know her, but I knew of her. Her name was Azirene. During the Fall, she took up with Lucifer. Then she gave up everything she'd learned about Lucifer's plans to Michael. Azirene became a demon so she could serve Heaven. Lucifer tore her to pieces when he realized what she had done to him.
"She's probably with someone," I said hesitantly.
"She's not," Jean said calmly.
"Maybe she wants to be left alone," I added.
"She's been alone for a long time," Jean suggested. "There's not a lot of people that she can talk to."
I still hesitated. I'm really not good with the ladies...
"Give it a try," Logan told me quietly.
It wasn't quite an order.
I took a deep breath and started walking towards Azirene's table.
Her eyes flickered towards me as I came closer. Then she went back to watching the show, but now it seemed to me that there was a little bit of a smile on her lips.
"Hi," I said to her.
Her smile got wider.