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Outside the Bellagio, fountains rise and fall to the strains of Debussy's "Claire du Lune." They refract the city's dazzling lights; the tremendous blinking signs, the lights of the hotels and the casinos and the nightclubs. With the final swell of music, a solitary jet in the fountain holds steady, steady, steady -- then tumbles down with a splash.
Thirty feet below the street, another geyser falls with a splash, but this one isn't water.
"This is officially," Liz punctuates the word with a burst of flame, "going on the list of the grossest things we've ever done." She throws up her hand and hurls fire at the towering stack of gelatinous eggs that has been adhered to the sewer tunnel wall. She stands in thick, slow-moving, brown liquid that nearly comes to the top of her hip waders. She was wearing a paper mask, but nobody thought to make those fireproof; she has replaced the mask with a strip torn from her T-shirt. It barely covers her nose and mouth, but affords some protection from the stench.
POW! Red sends the angry mama frog-creature slamming through a tunnel wall with one blow from his stone fist. "Johannesburg was worse," he says, pausing for thought. "So was the thing with the rotting pig intestines."
Liz shoots him a quizzical look over her shoulder, lit by the controlled, towering pyre that was once a pile of egg sacs.
"Guatemala," he says, starting to slog toward her. " '91? '92. How's it goin'?"
"Pretty good," she says. Her eyes have gone deep, flat blue; her face is intent with concentration. "I think this is the last one. Would you tell the geniuses in the van they need to come up with an earpiece that isn't going to melt the second I get above a hundred and fifty degrees?"
He grins; presses a finger to his own earpiece. "You guys hear that?"
As if in answer, something roars. Hellboy turns just in time to get pile-driven by something green, slimy, and really pissed off. They both go under with an enormous splash, which Liz instinctively throws an arm up against and turns away from. The wave hits her anyway, leaving her coughing and gagging, and, for a second, very glad of her makeshift face mask.
She clambers up out of the water, onto the ledge that the rapidly melting eggs rest on, and she watches the roiling sludge. "Son of a bitch," Liz snaps at the silent drip, drip, drip of the tunnel, and she takes a deep breath in preparation, fire flaring around her hands.
Hellboy breaks the surface, sewer water pouring off of him. "A guy comes to Vegas, he just wants to play a couple hands of poker; instead, I get your ugly mug," he roars, slapping his hands down against the surface, looking around wildly. "I didn't ask for your tongue all over me, pal. I got a girl!" Something powerful yanks him out of sight before he can say another word, but from his expression a split second before he goes under, Liz can guess what he was going to say: crap. Almost immediately, the frog-creature comes rocketing out of the sludge to slam into the tunnel wall.
Unfortunately, it is the near tunnel wall; Red's underwater aim apparently isn't great. Liz ducks as the creature hits the wall over her head and then crashes back into the water almost directly in front of her. That's how Liz finds herself standing between a mother and her blackened, smoldering eggs.
"Don't," says Liz to the pair of black, bottomless eyes staring at her (and at what's left of the eggs) out of the sludge. Its mouth is underwater but the frog-creature's terrible keening cry echoes all the way through the tunnel just the same.
"Don't," Liz warns again, her hands balled into fists and her own voice echoing through the flames wreathing her body. Hellboy pops up halfway down the tunnel. The frog's accusing eyes sink out of sight.
"Where'd Webby go?" Red calls, his growl audible even from a distance.
Something lunges out of the water right at Liz's face, and she explodes, white-hot and unthinking. It happens in an instant, in one split second, and then ashes are raining down on her face and her head.
She looks at Red, who's standing frozen with the Samaritan half-drawn. "Did I get it?" she asks.
"Yeah." He holsters the gun and wades down the tunnel, toward her. Standing on the ledge as she is, Liz is taller; he reaches up and brushes ash out of her hair. "You got it, alright. Damn."
The flames outlining her slowly extinguish; Liz's eyes fade to brown. Her shoulders droop. "Did you hear the sound she made when she saw her eggs? God."
"Yeah. But I heard the sounds she made when she tried to drown me and take your head off, too." He gently flicks ashes off her cheek. Liz smiles, tiny and reluctant. "You okay?" he asks.
"Fine. You?"
"Right as rain." He cracks his neck. "Nothin' we couldn't handle. You were right, though." Off her quizzical look: "This is one of the grosser ones we've been on." She laughs a little; tucks her makeshift mask up around her mouth. "Hey guys," Hellboy says. He frowns and lifts a finger to his ear -- there's nothing there. "Oh, for cryin' out loud."
"I told you I hate those things."
"Yeah, yeah." His eyes light up. "--Hey. The earpieces are gone, we're the only ones down here -- wanna check out the town?"
Liz, dripping with thick sewer water, looks at him.
He doesn't blanch, but he does reconsider. "Wanna get a hotel room, take a shower, then check out Vegas?"
'Well," she says slowly, "we don't have to get back to the plane til tomorrow."
"...Would you look at that." Hellboy flicks off the red light on his belt. "Locator's dead, too." He shrugs expansively, and grins that grin that has gotten him into so much trouble over the years.
"Technology is so unreliable these days," Liz deadpans, and she turns hers off, too. He grins broadly at her, sets his hands on either side of her hips, and swings her down into the muck.
"There's a big fight goin' on tonight; bet it's on pay-per-view."
She rolls her eyes tolerantly, slipping her right hand into his left and wading back through the tunnel at his side. "I did not come to Las Vegas to watch you watch two guys punch the crap out of each other."
He considers. "How about for room service?"
A pause -- and then Liz gives a curve of a smile. "I could have come to Las Vegas for room service."