Hellboy kicked off the wriggling behemoth and tried to swim for the surface, but the shearing currents from the trapped giant spun him helplessly horns over heels in orbit around itself.
Shame he was trapped at the bottom of the sea, because the monster's predicament was worthy of a good belly laugh.
The pit was a big one, but not quite big enough. About a third of Typhon's ever-expanding mass could fit, but try as it might — thrashing like a salmon on the make — it could not squeeze into the hole.
Clearly, they'd fed it too much goat.
Finally, the rocket pack draped in grenades went off in the pit. Trapped between the walls and Typhon's thrusting bulk, the explosion was enough to collapse the pit and shear off a good third of the rogue tentacle's length, leaving it wedged in the ocean floor.
Thrashing in agony, rage, and frustration, Typhon went out of its mind. It had suffered through eons, waiting for this day, only to be blocked by a chunk of itself.
It slammed against the barrier, trying to beat its way through. When that didn't work, it whipped up a whirlpool of its own, like a drunken wife-beating worm screaming 'Stelllllla!' at the top of its lungless lungs.
That didn't work, either.
Meanwhile, Hellboy battled the rip current and stroked desperately for the surface. Wondering how his friends were faring.
In particular, Abe ...
Plummeting down the smokestack of Echidnas throat, Abe decided he'd had quite enough of being swallowed. He drew his knife and stabbed the wall.
The blade sank into soft, overripe tissue like the waterlogged lining of a coffin, barely slowing his descent until it snagged on something like bone.
He climbed into the door he'd made and slithered into a stagnant capillary swamp, clogged with the corroded shields and armor of forgotten heroes.
Turning upstream, Abe chased gruesome blind cavefish out of the glare of his flashlight, possessed by a maddening but unshakable calm. His seared gills greedily pulled oxygen out of the plasma flooding her ancient organs, syrupy tides stirred by the sluggish rhythm of Echidnas endless dreaming.
Lost in the empty avenues and alleys of an unfamiliar city in the dark of night, anonymous, unrecognized, Abe Sapien could always count on a kind of peace.
And Echidna was nothing, if not a city unto herself.
She had dense fortresses of muscle, cathedrals of bone, and silos of rancid fat and curdled milk; endless sewers, reservoirs, and canals, guttering furnaces, deserted avenues, and silent factories; the drowned harbors of her lungs, the skyscraping flesh-foundries of her womb, where the great work of the city was executed, and all of it animated by the volcanic throb of her heart.
When he strayed too near to the skin, Abe could look out through milky porthole lesions in Echidna's parboiled hide, and see her terrible shape.
She was not a city, and if she was not a goddess, she was much more than a monster.
A First Daughter of the Living Earth. She bore no resemblance to her mate, Typhon, mostly depicted as a winged giant with tentacles for legs, and sometimes a hundred heads. But none of her abominable brood resembled her, or each other, either.
The bride of Typhon mingled features of eel and anglerfish with the torso of a human hag whose lower half terminated in a serpentine tail longer than an aircraft carrier.
But Abe's fleeting glimpse of her eyes as she swallowed him told him how very wise this creature — this woman — was. She radiated hunger and hate as she ate him, but there had also been hope. The crudest of Pandoras curses ...
Abe only noticed the faint, echoing voices when he realized that he was following them.
Abe swam into a cavernous chapel filled with membranous towers like the facades of sagging tenements. If he had searched unconsciously for this place to plant his bombs, or to satisfy some grim curiosity, now it had been satisfied. Here was where the end of the world would begin.
The voices sang a curious, incomprehensible song. Bitterly old, yet innocent; grimly keen on death and destruction, yet so tenderly naive, that Abe wondered to hear it in such a haunted, hopeless place.
He approached the ovaries with extreme caution. If anything inside Echidna was guarded, it would be these.
Her eggs.
Like any female creature, Echidna had carried the same eggs all her life, and they had aged within her. Now, they sang in a vulgar mother root of Greek that some golden-age eavesdropper might have cribbed from the speech of the Olympians. But their tone was like that of children everywhere.
"Are you our father's seed?" cried one ovum in a shell. "Have you come to make us?"
"I will be a dragon," cried another, "with a hundred heads, like Typhon ..."
"Choose me! My shadow will drown the sun ... !"
"When I am hatched, I will devour you all... !"
"I want to be a dog, and play all day ... !"
"Be still!" Abe hissed, but his plea spread the alarm to the other ovary towers. Soon, the whole hatchery trembled with the demands of unborn monsters.
Abe kicked away for the duct from which he'd emerged, but the sphincter door puckered shut. Trapped. Perhaps, if he sang them a lullaby ...
"I am old, and not so terrible as I once was," said the walls of the womb. "And now, I must have forgotten how to chew my food ..."
Hellboy broke the surface with a throaty, deafening, "Damn it!" If the bubbles that preceded him could speak as they burst, he'd owe a fortune to the office swear jar.
He beat some sense back into his pressure-wracked ears, but he'd given himself a wicked case of the bends, going to the bottom and back so fast. Cramps wrung him out like a dishrag.
At least it was still a beautiful day ...
Suddenly, in the full view of that cloudless blue sky, Hellboy found himself surfing a wave in a cold, dark shadow.
Coming up, and up, and bam! Like getting hit by a subway train.
Typhon reacted like any jilted lover when it hit the surface. Its crude overtures had been foiled, and all it wanted now was to lash out hard.
The severed tentacle stump whipped up savagely, lofting Hellboy a hundred feet in the air. He hung on, helplessly along for the ride once again, watching the overeager Silent Summer choppers get closer by the second. Armed only with more goats, but bristling with cameras for the waking-of documentary.
One darted within reach, and the mammoth tentacle cracked at it like a bullwhip.
Hellboy knew that this was gonna hurt.
As usual, he was correct.
He slammed tail first through a laminated glass windshield, too fast to get more than a glimpse of the screaming pilots before the chopper's engine exploded, and the rotor blades shivered to shrapnel all around him.
Still, he hung on, squeezing until Typhon seemed to scream out loud, as if a real, live mouth had opened somewhere on its monstrous form.
Then he looked down, and wondered, Why am I always right about the bad stuff?