A/N : My delighted thanks to Joelle Hart for her constructive remarks and the very first reviews ever received. So..in striving to create a character and action driven mission story set on a Spanish island, I profess little knowledge of the language except for bits to establish mood and differences. Hellboy speaks in his usual laconic Jersey and the Spaniards' English speech is continental and mannered when it must be. Hope you enjoy!
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In a relatively private area of a BPRD transport helicopter, Hellboy adjusted himself into a close-fitting pair of drysuit shorts.
"All tucked in? Tail out?" Liz teased, keeping her tone light. She pressed in the sealing flap, tugging up the side zipper over Hellboy's rock hard hip. She watched him pull his leather pants up over the shorts, then took a seat by him as he reached for his boots.
.
Knowing he would regret her anxiety, Liz did it anyway - surrounded his burly shoulders with her loving arms.
"I hate that we're stretched so thin, you going without backup."
"Won't be the last time, Babe." He fixed her with a matter-of-fact expression, then drew her in close for a parting kiss. She helped put on his coat and trailed her fingertips briefly down the front of his shirt.
.
Resigned, she followed him to the waist of the helicopter where agent Diamond handed him an equipped deployment rucksack and a sheathed diver's ballistic knife.
"Red"... Liz needed to delay his departure just a little longer. "Really, just how big is this target?"
"Nothing but a fat sea slug. The necropsy will classify." He threw her a little grin as he prepared his rappelling gear. "And then I'm gonna name it after Manning."
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He hitched the pack's straps over his shoulders and leaned to look out the hatch to determine his landing locale, a hundred feet below. Lowering himself out, he took firm hold of the rope with his stone hand, flicked his eyes up to Liz and descended in the wash of the spotlight.
.
Touching down, he released the rope and watched the aircraft darken and gain altitude as it left him on his own. He stood on the edge of a rocky cliff above the rugged boulder-strewn Na Caretas shore, where a full moon reflected on this rising tide of the Mediterranean Sea. A fast thirty foot clamber down took him to the base of the cliff wall, where he stripped off his outer clothing and buckled the knife sheath around his thigh. Leaving his coat and all other non-vital equipment there, he took a walk to explore the cove's rough beach.
.
Only days before, actual witnesses had seen his giant aquatic quarry take a diver and a pleasure sailor to their deaths. It was no local legend, and the theories Abe had worked up from those accounts and applied mythology were all he had to go on. Between the cliff and the water's edge, he found a high mound of dug up beach aggregate as wide as the reach of his arms, and eighteen paces farther, an empty crater of the same size. He put his stone fist to work smashing apart the mound, and found the reason for the odd structure's existence. One tough-shelled globe was buried inside. He kept the strange cold egg, taking it to refuge in his rucksack.
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A staggered cluster of flat boulders was his chosen spot to hunker down to watch and wait. This tiny island called Majorca, he wished he could have seen drenched in sunshine. Three hours of lone boredom began to weigh on him as he listened to the regular, mesmerizing hush of the incoming and receding waves, but when his vigil was at last rewarded by the emergence of a gleaming hunched mass breaching from the depths, he hissed a cheer. Through curls of moonlit froth, a great catfish-like head broke surface; precursor to the tubular neck and widening of its sloping shoulders. Spray huffed from its capacious nostrils, and it lifted a squat front leg to clutch a claw hold on terra firma.
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Hellboy raised his night vision camcorder as the creature scuttled its ponderous body entirely into view and stopped still, apparently tasting the air with pairs of serpentine feelers extending from under its jaw. Basketball sized eyes, set far apart, proved to be in proportion to its cylindrical trunk – and he estimated the whole body as measuring up to the length of a city bus. It compared to descriptions given by the dead diver's scuba buddy and witnesses on a yacht; something along the lines of a salamander's physical structure. A laterally flat tail looking to make up half the thing's entire length, dragged behind its main mass. Here was a kind of gross amphibian, able to raise itself off the ground on four stout legs, and showing no signs of respiratory distress out in the open air.
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Then, the mer-demon showed Hellboy a hard pass. It made an abrupt high thrust of its tail, and slammed it down with huge force, creating a counter momentum that enabled the curving of its body to again face the open sea, and a scrabbling return to its wet world. It would leave no more eggs, tonight. The phase of most difficulty had begun. Hellboy tossed the camera away to a soft landing on his coat, and running up alongside, pumped four Samaritan rounds into the demon's dorsal ridge. Quickly reloading, he plunged in after it. Wounded and thrashing, it behaved with high awareness of the attacker entering the domain of its best advantage.
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Treading water, he gave it four more in the vicinity of its smooth-skinned neck. The sea bloomed black blood around them. Reload. It was all he could do to keep hold of his gun when he took a savage lash of its tail. Damn! That hurt! Then he knew the crushing power of its hard-boned jaws as it seized him across the midsection and dove deeper. His pelvis and thighs clamped tight, he was near to being swallowed if the creature could break him in half. He punched his stone arm all the way up into one nostril, and the hold steadied him to fire point-blank to shatter the nearest joint of the jaws. But he wasn't fast enough to escape the defensive attack of a giant foot's burning rake across his back.
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His own blood mingling with the black, Hellboy stroked to the surface. The creature appeared to be breathing its last, drifting with ever weaker limb and tail movements. Hellboy hauled himself out of the sea onto the broad back, to ensure its earthly death with as many shots fired as needed to finish it off. With that done, he fell back against the carcass to recover, staring up at that moon. He holstered the Samaritan and patted the stiff leather. "We did it!"
.
He felt his dead demon raft jerk slightly, then again and again - and raised himself to a kneel to discover sharks tearing chunks from the humungous floating feast of flesh. He dug into a pouch for the homing beacon and drove its arrowhead spike deeply into the demon's ridged back. A small fleet of approaching fins cleaved waves to join the frenzy.
"You guys don't need to die," he rasped. "Just eat up front and leave me alone!"
He dove off and hauled at the tail of his kill, towing it in until he'd beached most of the corpse's bulk.
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Returning to his stash, he dropped down and choked up the salt water he'd swallowed, jolting his body's new aches. He felt as sore as he'd ever been, but the win on his own in such a short time, was all worth it. With the snug dive shorts stripped off, he dressed in his familiar clothes and dropped the knife into a pocket of his duster. As he expected, the back of his shirt was soon slick with his seeping blood.
.
Enough of the cold, rolling waves, hard wet rock, and the stench of a gutted demon – at least he was dry again. Moving slower than he'd like, he climbed up the shallowest cliff slope he could find, and his powerful LED light showed him a ground level expanse of welcome grass and trees, not far away. Now, he just wanted to lean his weary body against a creature of the earth. He sank down at the base of a formidably wide tree trunk to open his rucksack. The foot-long egg was safe on top of the water bottles and meal containers, and he smiled to find that someone had thought to include a couple of cigars for him.
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There were a lot of hours to kill before the transport could return. In the meantime, he finished off the rations and figured he'd be healing at his usual rate, not sure of how severely his back was laid open. His firearm, ammo and camera, he loaded into the rucksack under the egg, and secreted all far back into a high branched fork of his tree. Stretching out his legs, he lounged against the trunk and placidly smoked.
. . .
A cold touch under his eye startled him out of a half-sleep, and he found himself face to face with an enormous dog, the nostrils of its wet black nose flaring and snuffling.
"Good boy," Hellboy murmured, as the dog stared him in the eyes.
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Trying to make nice incited the opposite effect. The long-legged mastiff skinned back its lips so tight that every meat-tearing fang and incisor was bared and thrust out front. Hellboy felt the jaws' spittle hit his face as the dog snarled warning with each tense outgoing breath. He opened his stone hand at its wide square muzzle, which drove the animal into a heightened slit-eyed fury. Seeing the dog backed up by two growling identical companions, Hellboy stood up.
He sighed to the stalwartly guarding dog, "I don't need you and your friends." Then froze to listen to the approach of vehicles, not far off.
"Aww, crap."