They tittered, and it wasn't a human sound. More like wind blowing through boles in a tree, the scratchy noise of leaves brushing together.
"I don't suppose… you ladies… can talk…"
Several turned to face him and he got his first good look at those eyes-those awful catfish eyes. Jesus Christ, back to the catfish, always with the catfish. He didn't like them any better now than he had on his dinner plate. The girlies tickled him under the chin and kept making small wounds to sip from. They rubbed the flowers, wreathing them over his nose. They opened their mouths and he saw shards of yellowed, brown, and black teeth in there-mercury and gold fillings, bent bridge work.
One of the women pressed the side of her face to his stone hand, trying to bite into it. He pinched his fingers closed and grabbed her upper lip. She pulled away with a soft ripping sound and half of her face lifted easily and flapped free. The rest hung from a fractured skull that had been cracked decades ago.
Their flesh wasn't flesh at all, but a plant-life designed to appear as skin, grown over the skeletons of men who'd died out here in the swamps maybe a hundred years ago. The black hair was some kind of stringy, grass-like fiber.
Hellboy shrugged at the vines again, tightening the muscles in his throat to hopefully keep from strangling himself. They pulled taut as the women cavorted, lifting and leaping through the air, flying. At last he saw that the tendrils were actually attached to the girlies.
The vines moved the women about like marionettes. The girlies, they weren't separate creatures. They were all part of the same being…
A plant posing as dozens of beautiful human women, to bait and entrap men.
So they were all Mama-another living part of the bog, a single life-form that made use of the rotted dead on hand. Surviving and reproducing on living blood, always hungry and feeding on others.
One woman touched his mouth and crammed a finger down on his tongue. Then she did the same to herself, moving her lips to mimic speech as the air was driven through the… the what?… stalk?… stem of a blooming flower? The bellowed air produced a harsh whistling noise almost like laughter.
The noise was weird but lulling. Flower petals kept falling from above. Hellboy strained against the tendrils, pulling harder and harder, grunting and hauling forward. The women flinched and heaved around him, hoisted from the water. He kept tugging even though he couldn't breathe, a small surge of adrenaline limping through his veins.
There were a lot of unacceptable ways to die, but going out as plant food had to be damn near the top of the list.
His lungs began to burn and so did his mind, red and black flares rising at the edges of his vision. He opened his mouth to cry out but he didn't have enough air. Still he continued straining, pushing himself, the scream rising inside along with the fire until finally there was a deafening whip-crack blast, followed by another and another. Like tree bark being sheared by lightning strikes. The vines snapped away and the pressure eased.
It took him a while to catch his breath. Half a dozen of the girlies appeared to be dead in the water around him, floating face down and carried into the bull grass by the rippling waves his struggles had caused.
He reached for his gun but his holster was empty. He searched the rows of dying men until he spotted Lament, who was also weakly grappling with a girlie, his mouth twisted into a melancholy smile. She had scraped a particularly deep gouge along his ribs, and her palms and chin were covered with his blood.
Hellboy shrugged forward and moved to them. He stretched his arm down into the bog, got his stone hand on the creature's ankle, and pulled hard. The suck of sediment and slime resisted for a moment, and then with a great bubbling sputter she came loose. Free, her legs whipped against Hellboy with extraordinary force and he was nearly batted aside. One foot caught him solidly in the jaw as she slithered loose.
Lament groaned and reached into the air where she dangled with one long fleshy tendril snaking back down into the slough, connected to the center of her back. She smiled, still crooning, suspended in midair as the vine lifted higher and vaulted her across the area. Her left leg had snapped at the knee, bent backward at an awful angle. On display was all the long-dead bone, root, tubers, and moss that comprised her.
The woman lifted again and darted toward Hellboy, the tendril swinging her into flight. He caught her face in his right hand and crushed her head, the ancient skull beneath bursting into fragments.
Mama finally realized the threat.
A reflection caught his eye. He looked and it was gone. He set off for the spot in the grass where he'd seen it.
Another woman fell atop him and clung to Hellboy's back. She dug her fingernails in, and he realized they were actually thistles and barbs for easily rending flesh. She dug them in deeply, and he let out a cry, trying to tear her free. After whirling about, he managed to get a hand on her wrist and tug her arm loose from the shoulder.
She writhed in the cypress overhead, beckoning with her remaining fingers, and moved to him again.
Hellboy thought, What I wouldn't give for some industrial strength weed-killer.
There was still a loving expression on that lovely face, the catfish eyes empty of any humanity. He hit it again, and again, and once more until the woman's body tore free from the tendril. She dropped motionless beside one of the dying men laid out in his aisle. The guy lethargically propped himself in the mud and started wailing as his girlie sank into the slime.
The tittering grew louder until it was more like a scream in the underbrush. The cypress shook and rattled, more women gliding in and rising from the waters, joining the fray. He couldn't keep this up much longer the way he was feeling. His thoughts were still sluggish, his head stuffed with cotton and razors.
Hellboy called, "Lament! John Lament! Get your hillbilly butt up, I need some help here! All you other guys, if you want to live then come on, fight! Fight it!"
He slogged ahead and spotted the flash of metal again, near his feet. He stormed forward and found his pistol half-buried in weeds, caked with mud and slough. He quickly tried to clean it on his coat but nothing was helping much.
"Son of a-"
Another marionette dropped on him and he drew back his fist to pummel it, but its jaws cracked wide and its neck distended like a snake's to fit his stone hand down its throat.
He tried to pull free but the girlie tightened her hold and began gnawing her way up his arm.
Terrific.
He was already trying to figure out what he was going to put in his report and what he'd leave out. Some of this stuff was pretty embarrassing.
The girlie began moaning with hideously false noises. He pressed the gun to her forehead and saw the barrel ease into the flesh-like fibrous growth. He pulled the trigger and the barrel exploded.
Agony lanced through his left hand and he cried out. The force threw him backward into the shallows and the human skull in the girlie's head came along with him in a splash of bayou silt.
How do you kill a weed? You have to tear it out by the root.
Ml the girlies started rushing forward in unison, trying to drink the blood from his wounded hand. Lament raised his head and began to fight with the creatures too, like some kind of celebrity being mobbed by fans, sinking beneath their numbers. They dragged him away deeper into the ooze.
Chapter 14
After wetting a bandana and wrapping it around his neck, Duffy Ferris pointed to the inlet at the base of the dark lake and said, "I see they broke camp over that'a'way this mornin'. There's still a faint trail of smoke risin' from the last of their embers."
"I see it too,"Deeter said. "That's gator ground."
"Crossed over to the other side and goin' deeper into the morass. Notice where they tore up the twigs passin' through? All the mud they raked up and log litter they broke past? We comin' up to the marsh prairies. We're only two, three hours behind 'em."