He tossed the cord into the wind, but the ghost of Plume Wallace continued to sit in the skiff another moment. He said, "God got you in His sights, son. He'll be comin' for you soon enough, devilspawn."
And then was gone.
But his words struck Jester as wonderfully amusing. Absurd even, considering his own damnation and who he now followed.
Devilspawn. He snickered as he shoved at the corpse beside him and threw it into the lake, watching it roll over behind them.
On the far shore two bull gators crawled down a hillock of mud and began to swim toward the body. Jester couldn't control himself and continued laughing until he was whooping.
The Ferris boys moved closer together in the bow of the skiff, staring at the madman. Brother Jester tossed his head back and howled, and the black clouds ushered in across a sky of pain.
Chapter 15
Sometimes you just had to prove to some giant monstrosity or another that survival of the fittest didn't have anything to do with size.
For some reason they all got it into their enormous heads or manifold forebrains or multifarious cranial casings that they could just mow over folks because they were bigger or faster or a little nastier than most everybody else.
That's why, when you got right down to it, Hellboy's function was knocking over the biggest creeps on the block and showing them there was something even worse around.
He reached underwater and filled his stone hand with several of the mother vines, secured his grip, and tugged hard, holding the women back from Lament.
This whole trip was starting to get on his nerves. Hellboy muttered, "That's enough of this crap," and with a powerful wrenching motion that made him bite into his tongue, he jerked until the tendrils connected to a half-dozen women started to rip loose.
Their limbs flailed, those luscious mouths opened as if to scream, but all they emitted was that same noise of the wind through the woods. He grimaced and pulled harder. Those catfish eyes gazed at him, incapable of sadness or any kind of honest pleading for mercy. That was something to be thankful for. He swallowed the taste of blood and roared, and with one powerful final twisting yank he separated the bodies from the vines and the rest of Mama.
The no longer animate husks fell into the muck and immediately began to sink, Lament came sputtering up from the mire.
Suddenly the remaining girlies hovering over the dying men were snapped back through the brush. They flew high into the trees and thickets and vanished.
A hush fell over the area broken only by the soft, lonely whimpers of the few emaciated men who hadn't yet perished. Soon even that stopped. Hellboy stood ready, checked behind himself, and watched the water.
Yeah, sure, like he was going to believe it was all over and drop his guard now.
He made his way to Lament, who floundered in the shallows choking and spitting out weeds and blooms. Hellboy got his arms around him, pulled him to his feet, and held him securely while Lament vomited.
It took him a while to clear his guts. When Lament was through he pressed himself to Hellboy's chest and stood there wide-eyed and shuddering.
"You all right?" Hellboy asked.
Okay, so it was a stupid question. Lament drew back and stared at him with little recognition, his gaze clouded. He rasped, "Asleep… feels like I'm still… dreamin'…"
"It's the flowers," Hellboy told him. "They're some kind of narcotic." He checked his belt, came up with a small first aid kit, and drew out some smelling salts. He shoved them under Lament's nostrils. "Here, this should help."
"What's that you say?"
"Come on, sniff these."
Lament did so and instantly revived. "Whew, lordy!"
As an afterthought Hellboy waved them under his own nose and was startled at how the acrid odor sobered him. He'd been a lot more out of it than he'd realized.
The atmosphere became palpable. They could both feel it, the afternoon darkening again with storm clouds moving in once more.
Every tap of branch against branch caused Hellboy to wheel, the wet mossbeards of cypress dripping and drawing his attention. The stink of death and rot flooded the area now that the women's alluring fragrance began to thin. He and Lament stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder, covering all directions.
"Feeling better?" he asked.
Nodding slowly, Lament said, "Greatly improved, thanks to your ministrations. My gratitude is stacking up to near chin-high right about now." He scanned the morass. "Watch yourself, there's still gators about."
"That's not the worst of our problems."
"Hardly ever is."
Lament stood with his arms out, hands open as if to make mystical gestures, in a stance Hellboy had seen sorcerers take many times before. He expected the hillbilly to start speaking in some unknowable language or hurl hexes from his fingertips.
But instead Lament simply shrugged out of his shirt and tore strips from the tail. He bound the deepest gash along his ribs, wincing as he knotted the rags around his chest. Hellboy still didn't understand what the guy was all about, but he had to let it slide. You could only cover so many things at once.
After tightening his bandage, Lament buttoned the remainder of his shirt back up, got his suspenders back on, and moved toward the paddies where the backwoods men lay in the watergrass.
"Them nasty critter-girls still nearby? Lord almighty, when they were on top of me I thought Sarah was among them. Saw her, even felt her… I could hear her voice deep inside me." The memory disturbed him and he shook his head to break free of it. "No wonder that crazy crippled ole coot didn't want us messin' with his dyin' comforts. I can understand it now."
"They're plants, grown over the remains of the dead," Hellboy explained, pointing to the remnants of the girlie whose head he'd crushed. "No, not plants, really… a single flora life-form that just appears to be many."
Lament kneeled and inspected the skeleton beneath the fibrous material. "Gator scratches and chew marks on the bone." He held the shredded tendril and examined the sap, which was pink from drawing blood from the men. Searching out Hellboy's eyes he said, "This whole area is a bad spot of swamp, but it's just as natural as any other. After the girlies have their supper, the gators come and clean the meat from the bones. Then, the plant life comes back and grows over the frame. A natural cycle. One hand washin' the other. It's beautiful in its own way."
"I'd call it a lot of things but 'beautiful' isn't one of them."
"You ain't from here," Lament said, moving to the men again. "People from here don't seem to last long," Hellboy said. "Granny Lewt near a hundred and sixteen." Lament stepped over some of the battered female husks. "Iffun these are just the buds… the leaves… the sweet meant to lure the prey… then where's the trunk of the thing?"
"Good question." Hellboy looked at the broken vines and followed them with his eyes as far as he could. Some had risen high over tree limbs and others went under the water, but they all ran into the deep scrub. He pointed. "That's where they went off, flying and dancing and floating." He cocked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing in the opposite direction. "So I guess we should go that way."
"'Ceptin' that's where we already come from."
"I was hoping you weren't going to tell me that." Lament continued climbing through the knee-high water and finally reached the nest where the captured men from town lay. One after the other he found them in their rows, dead but grinning, propped up in their little patches of mud.
"I wonder if their loved ones would he thankful these boys all died so happy."
"I'm guessing not," Hellboy said. "A few of them were still alive a couple minutes ago."
They searched among the aisles, checking throats for pulses, turning over bodies mostly face-down in the shallows, but all the men were now lifeless.