Hellboy: The God Machine by Thomas E. Sniegoski Page A

face. "Need some help with that?" he called to Hellboy.
    "I got it," Hellboy snapped, again throwing the zombie to the floor. It tried to get away again, but he brought his hoof down upon its ankle, pinning it. "Not so fast, Stinky."
    It clawed at the ground with its single hand. Hellboy grabbed an office chair out from beneath the desk and used it like a club, bringing it down upon the thrashing corpse, once, twice. When he hit the struggling creature for the third time a flash of emerald radiance temporarily blinded him. Hellboy stumbled away from the clockwork zombie, letting the chair fall from his grasp.
    "What the hell did you do?" Larry asked, as they all rubbed at their eyes.
    "Guess I broke him," Hellboy replied, shielding his eyes from the steadily increasing flow of energy from within the corpse. "Actually, I think I broke the battery."
    Strange, almost human shapes began to form in the crackling discharge, many of them dissipating like so much smoke, while others seemed to look around, examining their surroundings before suddenly departing in a blink, as if drawn away by some silent siren call.
    Abe came to stand beside him, a clinical spectator. "Ghosts?"
    "Yeah," Hellboy replied. "I guess our robot zombies run on spook power. Didn't see that one coming."
    Most of the ghosts simply vanished, sucked off into the ether. But the last of the spectral residue lingered, hanging in the air above the corpse. It expanded and began to take on shape.
    "Come on! What now?" Hellboy muttered, and grabbed for his chair again.
    Like an amoeba, the ghostly energy divided, splitting into two separate forms, each of them gradually becoming more and more defined. One of the shapes became a woman clothed in a pretty, high-collared dress from an earlier era. Her flesh was charred and blackened, making the cause of her death obvious. The second of the amorphous energies coalesced into an older man with thick, black-framed glasses and a balding head. Strands of ghostly hair wafted in the air where they had been placed in a pathetic attempt at a comb-over. The ghost wore a button-down shirt, oversize cardigan sweater, and sagging wool trousers.
    The ghostly old man brought a hand up, adjusted the glasses on his face and smiled.
    "Hey, Sally, look who it is," he said to the horribly burned woman floating by his side. "It's Hellboy."
    The ghost rubbed his hands together as if in anticipation.
    "I always wanted to meet this guy."

Chapter 6
    A bsolom Spearz was not happy.
    Eight of his mechanical agents had been sent to Maine to retrieve the latest item from his list, but only one had returned. It stood before him now, swaying on its reinforced legs of metal and wood, the ornate Indian medicine bag clutched tightly in one of its spindly hands.
    "Give it to me," he ordered, and the drone held the bag out to him.
    Absolom carefully pried the Indian artifact from its rigid fingers, and brought it to his workstation. He felt his followers' eyes upon him. They were a nervous lot, and could he blame them? The last time they had attempted this task the result had been the demise of their corporeal forms. Now that they were once again flesh and blood, they did not want to risk losing their coveted physical shapes.
    He took the bag and placed it inside the framework of a pyramid-shaped device constructed from strips of copper. A bank of machines nearby immediately began to click and chatter. Colored lights flashed wildly as a black needle on a gauge gradually began to move from right to left, measuring the degree of residual power stored within the medicine bag.
    "Excellent," he stated, anger abating as he watched the needle fluctuate very close to the maximum level.
    Absolom then took the medicine bag from within the pyramid, walking across the subterranean room to store it with the other items they had obtained over the last few days. The pallet was overflowing with objects collected by his clockwork drones--religious statuary, rare limited-edition