Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five

by Freeman, Jesse James

  “Broom!” Emelia screamed it in a shrill rage. Billy's older self was flying through the air towards Billy.

  The combat armor vest that Older Billy wore had glowing, blinking lights attached to it. Cables, wires, and contraptions that could have only come from Dr. Luna.

  “Hold up your board, kid!”

  Billy didn't take time to think as he watched the zombies tear Broom into pieces and blood fly up out of the center of the swarm.

  Billy held up his board as far as his arms would stretch.

  Older Billy dive-bombed towards his younger self and pressed some switch that was taped into his hand. Once again, the hairs on the back of Billy's neck stood on end, and he heard the whirr of the energy crank up and flow into the room. The machinery taped to the flying older version of Billy Purgatory lit up with that blue glow.

  Billy Purgatory was seconds from breaking every bone in his body if he slammed into the tile floor of the darkened sunroom — but the machine fired off and he was able to grab the outstretched skateboard that his younger self held aloft below.

  The energy overtook them both, and they left the world of locked doors and hidden secrets.

  ~6~

  ANASTASIA AND THE SALTON SEA

  “THIS IS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE DEAD.” That was her only thought as she sank into nothing. The salt burned every taste bud, then filled her lungs. “I am no more.”

  The stories her people told were true. It is very dark when you die. It is so cold and you're so numb that you can't even shiver. There was no convulsion, no death rattle declaration — only falling.

  There were no tears of remorse — she felt none. She felt nothing at all.

  She let loose one laugh in the dark — one last emotion not yet spent. She laughed because she knew that the stories the humans told had been wrong after all.

  There was no light welcoming her anywhere.

  There was no light to welcome anyone anywhere.

  “Or maybe it's just me,” she thought. “Maybe they just turned the lights out for me.”

  Wrapped tightly in the funerary offerings of liquid death, with no grave marker to announce her final repose to the world, she considered only the blood trail that had led to this tomb. How many of them had she taken thick essence from so that the muscle and skin could remain upon undead bones? How many smiles had she stolen from them with no thought of their final pain? Even now, she felt no shame for any of it. It was a math problem, something to keep her brain occupied as her mind grew frail and slow.

  “I cast their bodies into the ditch of the forgotten and their souls into darkness, but that doesn't make us kin.” And it didn't. Anastasia had torched the souls of her kin with much less regard than she had for the shivering she had drained of blood.

  Anastasia would lie on the bottom of the sea for a very long time. The light did eventually show, and it would mock her repeatedly as it made a lazy arc, barely visible through the murky black that caressed her.

  She would never move into it. Never.

  There had been that flash in the Time Zombie's grip, and then they were somewhere else. It smelled of burnt wood and sulfur. A mansion in flames. She heard a woman shriek in fear and curse Billy Purgatory's name. The Time Zombie unleashed a haunting roar in the smoke and ripped Billy's skateboard from Anastasia's grasp. Then another flash and the world changed once more.

  The monster released her and she fell until she splashed into the death of this shallow sea. She sank and she didn't care. There was no reason to care. Her life was already ended.

  She had no purpose. No mission.

  He was gone.

  She didn't even have that silly stolen skateboard to remember him by.

  II.

  Anastasia found herself alone in the library of the old school building. She sat amongst its wooden tables and burning candle. The electrics were off, as they were most nights when the vampire girls and boys she shared her adolescence with were scattered to their classes, or had snuck over the wall or into the tunnels to make trouble.

  She watched her legs swing back and forth, the old chair just high enough off the ground that her feet didn't touch the floor. Her legs were covered in the tights she was so fond of wearing when she was a girl. Tights covered in bands of black and white stripes, from her saddle shoes to the pleat of her skirt. It felt good to swing her legs, even though there was no purpose in the action at all.

  It was so unlike her. Normally she was quiet, and as still as the statues which decorated the hallway that connected the school building to the dorms where the children lived. They had been carved by a great vampire artist many nighttimes ago. They depicted the images of great thinkers, writers, poets, and warriors of the vampire race. The statues were so old that the inscriptions of who the dark visages actually represented had worn away.

  Uncle Priest had told the children that he knew their names, but it was not any concern of the children's what those names had been. The only duty the students had to these forgotten citizens was to remain silent and reverent to their memories as they passed them.

  Anastasia had never believed the lies of The Priest in regards to the statuary. If he had known the answers as to who these vampires had been, and what they had added to their once great hidden civilization, the old vampire schoolmaster would have surely made a big show of letting his students know. Everything to the grownups was always show, and pomp, and trying to impress others.

  Anastasia had made up names for some of them. A strapping, dark warrior who carried a trident and had oversized, drooping fangs she called “Corporal Gaggle-Jaw.” He tried his best to be menacing as he leered down at her from atop his stone column, dressed in a ridiculous oversized cape and a loincloth.

  Anastasia's eyes would always cut across from him as she passed to take in the fair maiden of stone who forever poured the carved representation of liquid from the vessel she carried in her hands. Anastasia knew it must be blood that the artist had tried to represent, spilling upon the field at her naked feet. The vampire girl imagined that this maiden, “Katarina Clumsy-Slush”, was married to the guy with the trident, and that the woman carved of stone was spilling her bowl because she couldn't stop laughing at him.

  The big trident was amusing to Anastasia too, and the girl would always share a smile with the poor wife, imagining the hilarity of having a husband who fiercely brandished such a weapon to lure her gaze away from such a tiny loincloth.

  The statues of the lying schoolmaster didn't intrigue her currently, though. She could feel the stolen blood in her veins coursing through her legs. Her toes tingled, as did her fingers, as if she was just waking up from a long sleep.

  Anastasia flexed her fingers to cast the pins and needles from them, and looking up she saw her sister, Augusta, dressed in the same schoolgirl's uniform, minus the tights, and long ringlets of white bobbing on her head. Augusta smiled at Anastasia. She had such an innocent smile; Augusta never showed her fangs.

  “What does the sunshine look like?” Augusta asked calmly, and the question only caught Anastasia slightly off guard. Augusta was prone to asking the strangest questions. It was whispered by some of the adults that the girl was half-mad.

  Anastasia continued shaking out her fingers and swinging her legs, she couldn't make the needles stop. “How would I know what that cursed fire-ring looks like, Augusta?”

  “You've been praying to it for many days.”

  “Praying?” Anastasia crossed her arms, but still didn't have all the feeling back in her limbs. The more she moved around and shifted, though, the better she seemed to feel. “I pray to nothing. And besides, if I ever were to cast my gaze at such a thing, I would burn like the head of a struck match.”

  Augusta stood stoic and still; only her lips moved, and they always rested in that bizarre smile. “I always thought, sister, that when I died, it would be the first mystery I'd be allowed.”

  “There's no mystery held in that light, Augusta.”

  “Only death.” Augus
ta was quiet once she'd said it.

  “You've been reading their fairytales again haven't you? The Egyptian one about death?” Anastasia shifted in her seat once more. She wasn't sure if she had ever felt as she did then — she felt disconnected from everything but Augusta's lonely eyes.

  “There is no revelation at death. You know, the sunshine isn't what killed you.” Augusta pointed to her own heart. “It's the lie that you can't exist sharing your soul with the light rays.”

  “Augusta, I didn't die.”

  Augusta then pointed her fingers at Anastasia. “Then stop acting like you did.”

  Anastasia felt the water in her hair, the tiny yet heavy drop of it fall from her own forehead and land at the tip of her nose. She ran her fingers into her hair; it was soaked.

  “There is no place at any table for our kind in death. You have to have truly lived to move beyond this. Here is all you will ever have, Anastasia. Do not make the mistake that I did and believe that any will be waiting in welcome to embrace your bones in a paradise beyond.”

  Anastasia ran her fingers down the tops of her legs to her knees and found that her stockings were as wet and heavy as her hair. Her fingertips pressed into the white and black which covered her legs. Water wrung from them and began dripping on the floor of the library. The wooden floorboards would not soak in the seawater; it began to pool at her feet and rise up.

  Anastasia looked up at her sister as the water began to rise in the room. “Augusta, you died? We're all dead?”

  Augusta shook her head. “We never lived, sister. We are ghosts of changing forms, but you are not beyond their sunshine yet.”

  Anastasia watched the tables and chairs begin to rise in the dark library. They bobbed about in the surf. “What do I do? Augusta?”

  The water was at Anastasia's neck now, and it splashed her face as she looked for her sister. Augusta still stood calmly in the sea as the waves reached ever higher.

  “Stop praying to gods that hate you. Don't drown.”

  III.

  The water dripped from my face. I was emaciated and naked. Cold and alone. I had nothing left to me in the world. My fingers closed into the mud of the shore, mud mixed with salt. Dead fish, dried and rotted, nothing left of them but scale and bone. Their ribs were as mine, skin pulled taught against them.

  I opened my mouth and let the water spill from it. It swirled against the sand and sent spirals of white crystals, turning and twisting like mating serpents.

  I was empty then. I near lamented that — purging the only thing which had kept me full. My skin tightened even more in the night air. My hair was tangled and twisted and pulled at my scalp.

  Had I a razor, I would have sliced it all free.

  I was hungry. I was consumed. Something would die soon. Something would trade its life for mine. That the air was so heavy with life on the bank of a dead sea was at first a mystery.

  It was everywhere. As dead as I felt that night, there was so much life, and it was so close. I could hear the many movements long before I would look up to seek it out with my night vision. I could smell them. They cast a filthy, gamey, frightened scent into the world around me.

  The many deer.

  There were hundreds of them, far too many for even I to count. My vision was not as sharp as it had once been; their forms drifted and blurred into one another. I saw double and triplicate as they faded and merged, only to split image, like something underneath a microscope swims and swirls then dances into many.

  I didn't need to see them well. The smell was overpowering; they were too tightly packed and too close to one another. I could latch on to one and take it down.

  Such desperate savagery was the only longing that I was allowed. Anything with a pulse was calling to the deepest part of the primitive hunter my kind had begun as. Arguably, that part of the vampire had never evolved much further than was necessary to strike and take what it desired.

  It was all swirling red. Splitting into many rivers to drown within and wash the salt from my skin and take its taste from my mouth by drowning it in iron.

  I sprang. The herd jumped with me and began to run. I had him though, my fingers were clutched tightly at his antlers. He did not rear or sling me.

  He froze.

  His heart was quick in its thump. I was close to his side and I could feel it — hear it. I had forgotten what warm felt like. It was a burning — my body tingled as it came alive again from being in the water. Needles jammed into my skin; the pain was the only thing which let me know that I was alive.

  No — I was not alive. I don't get to be alive. That's what he'd told me. That's what this thing, this creature, was telling me now.

  You are not alive.

  My fangs were already in place and they were heavy in my mouth. They seemed huge, swollen. I had never been so very aware of them before.

  They wanted this.

  Its neck was so soft. I brushed the side of my face against it and the fur soothed the pain. Why hadn't it run?

  Didn't the rest of them tell it that I was dangerous? That I was a monster?

  I reared back and it lowered its head. It knew. How could it know? It was giving itself to me. It was teasing me with its neck.

  And all that blood.

  My lips were in its ear and my hand smacked it hard on the hind quarters.

  “Run.”

  I whispered it to myself as it broke away from me and kicked up sand and salt. It sprang over a broken fence and was gone.

  “Run.”

  IV.

  The place was called The Salton Sea. Humans had abandoned it, for the most part, long ago. Walking naked up the shore of its disgusting cauldron of death made me see why.

  The dress I found was in an abandoned hotel. It was cheap, functional, and black. It had been intended for housekeeping. Still wrapped in a plastic bag and forgotten in a supply closet. Construction had never been completed on the hotel, and it was barely held together by peeling stucco and graffiti.

  My hair still smelled like salt, and I feared then it always would. One of the comforts the hotel did not possess was running water.

  There was no way I was going back into that dirty saltwater pit. My unwilling bath in it that had caused my state of hygiene disarray and I cleaned up as best I could with what I found in the forgotten place. Then, just as the developers and the tourists had, I found a road and began walking away from that horrid ghost.

  ~7~

  TALES OF THE HOG-BITCH

  CALVIN WAS A METH DEALER. Well, he cooked it too, so I suppose he was more of an entrepreneur. I met him on the highway. He drove what should have been a very shiny black truck, had it not been covered in road dust and bug splatters. He rolled down the window and said, “Girl, you lost?”

  I assured him, that yes, I was lost. His eyes strained in the dark to take me in — his features glowed from the blue lights of his stereo. I could see him just fine in the dark.

  He had a receding hairline that he seemed to be compensating for by growing enormous mutton-chop sideburns. He was a big guy. There was some muscle there, but a lot of fat too. He smiled; there was a gold tooth involved in all that.

  “What the hell you doing out here in the middle of night alone in the desert?”

  “There was this rave…” He was staring at my bare feet. “…and I lost my shoes.” I smiled.

  “Well ain't this some Walton's Mountain shit, right here?”

  I didn't know what that meant, so I just lied with that helpless girl laugh. The tee hee one.

  “I got a whole bucket a'chicken.”

  He did, in fact, have a bucket of chicken sitting on the center console. “Chicken's not really my thing.”

  “Mashed ‘taters?” He held up a greasy bag.

  “Oh… Well, yum.”

  He reached over and his belly rolled with him. Then the door swung open for me. “I'm Calvin. What's your handle?”

  I had to pull myself up to the ridiculous height of the doorway. “Anasta
sia.”

  “That was my first baby mama's stripper name.” He grinned like we suddenly had some deep and meaningful connection with one another.

  “It's actually Anastasia, after the daughter from the Romanov family. My mother and her Russian literature fixation.” I swung myself in next to the bucket of chicken.

  “To me, it'll always make me think'a glittery underpants.”

  “I can see how it might be hard for you to cut loose that connotation.” I matched his grin with my lips and thought, “Oh yeah, this hillbilly is going to die.”

  “Hold on, Anastasia. The Hog-Bitch is loud and fast.”

  With a chicken wing in his teeth, Calvin stepped on the gas pedal. I leaned into my seat, nice and calm. There was no way this ride was going to be any rougher or faster than the ones I'd been on lately.

  II.

  Calvin's sister was named Wanda. Though I didn't get to meet her, I felt I knew a lot about her by going through her room. Wanda wouldn't be joining us at the compound that Calvin lived on because she'd been picked up on a warrant for failing to appear before a judge. She had that appointment with the judge for getting into a fight with a police officer at a bar down the highway. Wanda had gotten hold of the cop's TASER and had taken three deputies down before they pepper sprayed her, got her zip tied, and tossed into the backseat of a cruiser.

  “Wanda ain't coming back for at least a month, and that's if she stays on good behavior. And there ain't nothing about that bitch that's good at behaviorin’.”

  He graciously invited me to make use of Wanda's room and borrow some of her clothes. I gave her personal space a cursory glance as I passed through. I only had one thing on my mind. Well, one thing aside from slow draining every last drop of blood from her brother.

  I let the shower warm up as I stared at myself in the steaming mirror. I was a mess. I pulled a strand of seaweed from my hair that I'd missed. It just kept coming and coming; I couldn't fathom how it had gotten so tangled and hidden in there. I dropped it into the sink in disgust.