Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five

by Freeman, Jesse James

  “I told you to die.”

  She didn't remember forcing herself to look away, and she most certainly had no memory of pulling herself from the ground, her useless broken arm swinging wherever it may.

  All Anastasia would ever be able to recall about the ending of her standoff with Uncle Priest was that she did the only thing she knew to do — she did what she taught him to do.

  She ran.

  IX.

  Calvin had heard all the gunfire after he'd flipped the switch to cut all electricity just like Ana had told him to do. He didn't understand why that was so important, but she'd had that look in her eye like she'd have been the one he should worry about if he hadn't done what she'd told him to.

  When the shooting started in the front yard, he headed to the back door of the trailer home. Why in hell had he decided it was a good idea to stack all those boxes of army surplus ready-to-eat meals in the way? He began tossing boxes; then he heard Margot scream from the front yard and the gun that wouldn't stop firing.

  Calvin found an open window in Wanda's room that he began pressing himself through. He kept thinking about what that guy from the fire department had told his 4th grade class about how to escape when there was a fire.

  He was pretty sure if that fireman had been here now he'd have been shaking his head in disgust.

  Calvin was almost through, hanging down at his waist one arm out and one arm flailing at the ground. It was gonna be a drop however you did it, and headfirst was the only plan he'd figured out so far. Calvin pushed with his big tree trunk legs and felt like his belly was about to pop out of the window casement, just like when you whopped a can of biscuits on the counter to make it pop open.

  Then he jammed. Calvin tried his best to rotate his big head around and see what had him. What if it was the government? What if they had a hold of his britches?

  Calvin was able to turn just far enough that he saw the Desert Eagle pistol he had crammed into the back of his jeans was banging against the window. He struggled to make his body fit and bring the pistol out with him, but there was no way. He rotated hard left, swinging his hips like his second wife used to when she did that thing…

  “Focus, Calvin. You gotta focus.”

  He ran his fingers up with the hand that was still inside the window, and was able to put just enough pressure on the handle that it slipped up and out of his jeans. He heard it thud against Wanda's carpet.

  Then Calvin fell out of the window and made a much more grandiose thud. He figured it was about eight feet. He didn't have much time for doing higher math, though — he was going to have to stay focused.

  Calvin tried to stay low and creep along the ground. The gunfire had ceased and it was creepily quiet in the open desert. Realizing that he was in open desert, staying low seemed stupid, and just one more thing that might tax an already overworked heart. Calvin heard the unmistakable roar of the Hog-Bitch. Its engine fired up and he heard it slam into gear and the big tires tearing up the desert floor. He didn't see the headlights sweep under the trailer.

  “That bitch stole my bitch!”

  Springing up, he looked both ways first. He then began a limping run towards Shed #5. The panic shed.

  Calvin looked around the trailer and into the front yard. It was empty. Someone had tipped over the basin on the bird bath. The moon wasn't his friend that night, though, and the waning crescent didn't do quite enough for light. He looked back at the barn; damn truck was sure enough gone.

  “I got a surprise for you government bastards. You just wait.”

  Calvin trotted as fast as his tree trunks could move him towards Shed #5 — converted into a fully stocked fortress with enough food and ammo to last him through the end of days and the second coming. “Everyone thought I was full of shiitake.”

  Maybe for the first time ever, Calvin felt vindicated.

  All that was left to do was to run in there and close that big vault door. They'd need an army tank to blast him out of there — hell, two army tanks.

  “Rougher than a howitzer with bull nuts. That's what ol’ Calvin is.” The words to A Country Boy Can Survive by Hank Jr. was on an automatic loop in his head.

  Calvin had the open entrance to the shed dead straight ahead. His eyes focused on making that last sprint the twenty steps or so to freedom from government oppression.

  “Lock that door and spin that crank. Turn the generator on…”

  The lights inside the panic shed flipped on when the generator whirred to life. The only problem was that Calvin wasn't in there yet, and it wasn't him doing any of this flipping.

  Margot had her hand on the switch, and had her face buried in the chest of a tall, ugly bastard dressed like a crow-priest. He watched Calvin stop running at the entryway. His eyes were blacker than the bottom of a septic tank, and they didn't seem to care if Calvin was here or not. The man stared at Calvin like he was so much better than him, like Calvin was a bug and he didn't feel like he needed to expend the time or energy to worry about him.

  Calvin felt tiny for the first time ever.

  “Margot!” Calvin strained to yell to her, his ticker was jumping and the wind had been beaten out of him. “Where's Ana and who the hell…”

  Calvin saw the bullet holes scattered all over the priest-man, spilling slow drips of black blood. Thick molasses-looking goo. Margot had holes all in her too, but she was standing there just fine. She had her back to Calvin, and she made an unnerving sucking noise as she moved hungrily from one hole in the man's chest to another. Lapping at the blood like a hound.

  The meth dealer stared across the panic room at all those supplies against the far wall. The racks of guns and boxes of ammunition were all over there too.

  “Margot, who shot you? Where did Anastasia go?”

  Margot stopped her blood-sucking just long enough to answer, “She ran.” There was blood all over them, it was pooling on the floor. It was dripping out of her and dripping out of him. Her blonde hair swung across her back, matted and bloody.

  Calvin grabbed his chest. The man's eyes were not human. Unholy. Calvin reached for a pistol that wasn't there. He cursed the government and whoever had installed that trailer house window for stepping all over his 2nd Amendment rights.

  “Darling, we have a visitor.” The Priest brushed Margot's hair out of her face and smiled lovingly to her. He looked her over like he was God himself and he had built her from scratch.

  That smile kept twisting up his face — whatever he'd done, Calvin could see he was sure proud of it.

  “That's right.” Margot's voice was distant — or confused — or just cold. “Calvin…”

  The tall man in the priest suit took her shoulders and helped Margot spin around to face Calvin. Calvin took a step back and considered running past them and going for broke. Grabbing a shotgun off the wall and going to town. Ram ‘em both as he went by and get the upper hand.

  When he saw all the bullet holes in Margot, he sent that plan straight into the ditch. “Girl, how are you alive and you took all them bullets?”

  Margot sort of woke up then; the fire came back into her dark little Spanish eyes. “Alive?”

  Calvin reared up to his full height and pointed the finger at the tall man in black. “Space alien possessing son'a'bitch!” He had it all figured out now, this thing was from outer space and had taken Margot's soul and turned her into a robot or something.

  “You give her back her soul!”

  Margot took an unsure step towards Calvin. Looked down at all the blood, and then made her black Doc Marten take another step. She looked up, grinning.

  “Soul? I went thrift store on that thing.”

  She laughed like a toddler, and made much more noise than one with every step she took towards Calvin. She started to get good at it too — and fast. For every one he took backwards, she took three forwards.

  “Come here, Calvin. Sweet ol’ country-fried Calvin.”

  She raised her arms, and her fingers opened and closed and sw
iped the air. This made her laugh even more.

  “Look at me, Calvin. I'm walking. Baby's growing up fast.”

  Calvin kept backing out of the entryway of the shed. “Margot, stay back. You got body-snatched. You ain't in your right mind.”

  Just as the good ol’ boy was about to turn tail and run, he tripped over the threshold of the vault door. One more big thud as he hit the dry ground and kicked up dust.

  Margot swiped and grabbed his pants leg. “Where you roaming, buffalo? You always said we should spend more time together. Well, I'm ready to get to know you a lot better.”

  He kicked with his free leg; it was physically impossible for him to hit her. Both her arms extended fully and her hands clamped down tighter than a pit's jaws. She pulled and Calvin's eyes got wide when he began to slide towards her — that this tiny gal had the strength to pull all three hundred pounds and some change across the floor.

  “Please, let me go. You're a space mutation gone wrong, girl.”

  Margot looked back at the Priest and pulled harder. “So much blood.” She made a bonafide cackle noise of glee.

  “Blood?” Calvin was confused.

  Margot looked back at him as she dragged him across the panic room floor. “I'm a vampire now. Did I forget to mention that?”

  “Vampire? There ain't no such thing.” Calvin began to sob. “They ain't real.”

  Calvin heard the booming voice of the Priest, “How many times have I heard that one?”

  “Margot, please, gal. I don't know what's got into you, but remember… just please remember — I was always good to you.” He cried big greasy tears.

  “Baby, you're gonna be even better to me now. You're gonna be pass the cranberry, back away from the table, and greasy napkin in your lap delicious!”

  The Priest flipped the wall switch; the generator went silent and the lights went out. Margot dropped his leg and Calvin lay crying in the dark. He craned his neck to the open door leading to his only salvation, and cried more when he watched it swing closed and heard the big wheel lock him in the panic shed with them.

  “Use your senses. Seek the blood. Make it come to you.”

  Calvin heard Margot's voice one last time before he never heard anything ever again. Margot was shushing him quietly and cooing to him like he was a big fat baby.

  “It's okay. Don't be nervous. We'll leave the lights off.”

  ~8~

  A SOLDIER BET AGAINST THE 19TH CENTURY

  THE SOLDIER COULDN'T HAVE BEEN HAPPIER when the rain began in the afternoon. The singing of many drops drowned out the single drop he had been listening to for seventeen long days. The hand pump in the wall across from the two cells in the tiny jail had a ruptured gasket, the break in it being just enough to cause the painful rhythm.

  Drip. A sad lifetime.

  Drip. A flash of regret.

  Drip. The memory that lacerated.

  Drip. The same story begins again.

  There had been little else to fixate upon. The few goats that mingled outside. The woman and her stone that condemned the flour. The cry of a bird destined for the pot. Short cries always, because even though it is inevitable, we never let ourselves believe we are about to lose our heads until the axe swings.

  There should have been the sounds of the living in this place. The work groans of honest labor. The laughter of children called to lesson at the church bell.

  The bell never rang once during those seventeen days. That was perhaps a blessing, for the raised voices of the innocent would be far worse than that damnable drip.

  This place seemed near death, and this suited the Soldier to an extent. At the very least, his life remained consistent in its giving of agony.

  It was a curious vision that night, when the sounds of the doors to the outside opened and made more prevalent the continuing rain. It brought to the Soldier the sight of the old man. Framed on each side of his frail form were two deputies and the stoic face of the Capitan, whose charge was this outpost in Nowhere, Mexico. Their expressions were all of the utmost seriousness. All save the old man. He held a crooked grin with the same resolve which the irons upon his limbs held him.

  Curious, yes, in that it was a display that made little sense. When the Soldier had been deposited into this place, it had only taken one stout jailer to push him behind the bars and forget about him. True, the Soldier had been completely off his jug drunk, and just beaten down by the jealous men who had jumped him outside the gambling hall. The Soldier was a large man, though, and the old man had perhaps a good thirty-five years of age on him.

  All this trouble had not been taken with the Soldier, this binding in a methodical and surely exhausting manner. It couldn't be the normal procedure. Surely the old man could barely walk even if free of the leggings and cuffs, much less steal away from all of them. The Soldier, had he not been in the state they had brought their justice upon him, could have fought back and done a hell of a fine job at it.

  The old man was locked and chained like they had just trapped a timber wolf, and they avoided that grin on his face just as you would stay clear of its fangs. They avoided anything connected to the old man's gaze.

  The only struggle he gave was against the irons as he shuffled quietly into the cell beside the Soldier's own tiny cage. The clatter of the rust colored hinges overtook the rain for an instant. Then the noise of the keys and the locks, and then the silver chain they looped around the bars and the lock they affixed to that, as some extra measure of security. They not only felt it was prudent, but more like they needed this so they would be able to get a good night's sleep.

  The old man walked to the tiny bar-laced window of his new prison and stared into the rain. The Soldier only looked over at him for a second before his attentions were drawn back to the men outside the bars, and the Padre who was revealed at the back of the line when the jailers fanned out. The cross was lifted and began to be tapped on the bars as the blessings flowed from the holy mouth — a mixture of Latin and Spanish, neither of which the Soldier fully understood beyond the recognition that those were the languages cast forth.

  Then they all filed out of the jail and back to the rainstorm with little thought to waiting it out. Thunder and lightning and flood were obviously the right choices for them, any of them, if the other choice was remaining here with their new prisoner.

  Then the Soldier, feeling he had seen it all now, pulled his dirty hat back down over his eyes and began to let the rain sing him a lullaby.

  “Locos.”

  The Soldier didn't bother raising the hat at the measured single utterance from the old man at the window. “I don't speak Spanish. No Mexican. Sorry.”

  It was another pause filled of raindrop static until, “Of course you don't. You're an American.” There was no accent involved with the new words from the old man's mouth. The English was flawless.

  The Soldier raised his hat. “You're not gonna talk all night, are ya?”

  “Perhaps, but not with you. I won't be here long.”

  “I figure not. Surely such a dangerous rogue like yourself is headed straight to the rope once the sun comes out.” The Soldiers words held sarcasm, truly, but in spite of himself, he was more than a little interested in what this grinning possum had done to merit the theatrics.

  The old man got a chuckle out of it all. If the lawmen had meant to strike any fear into him by the way they had gone about his incarceration, it had been a complete and sad failure.

  “You don't seem afraid, gringo. Why should I be?”

  “I'm overjoyed, pappy. Now that they caught the real bandit ‘round these parts, maybe they'll forget all about me and turn me loose.”

  “What are you doing here, Americano?”

  “Well, I'm a soldier, hence the fancy uniform. There's a little border tension; don't know how close you ever get to the Rio Grande.”

  “You're far from your army. You let the Mexican Policia catch you?”

  “I never said nothin’ about me being a very capab
le soldier.”

  “There's no war yet. You must not have been spending money.”

  “Maybe I was spending too much.”

  The Old Man chuckled again.

  “Seems like my brand of earning a wage to make it through the territory didn't fit in with the sensibilities of them two brothers that's deputies that brung you in.”

  The Old Man nodded, “You're not the first to make their wives have impure thoughts.”

  The Soldier almost smiled at this; this old fellah knew the game around here. “Seems like I might have been the first to let them act on them impurities.”

  “I heard about you, American. Fighting, drinking, gambling. Word of your profession made its way through the woods and to the caves by the sea.”

  The Soldier sat up a little on the slab that pretended to be a bed. “However famous I am, looks like you trump that. What's your story? Surely you're the most dangerous Mexican I ever met.”

  “I'm not Mexican. I'm Arabian.”

  The old man put his hand on one of the window bars and ran his thumb through the water which clung to it. “And I'm in here now, because I'm a wizard.”

  Now it was the Soldier's turn to laugh. “You had me going with the Arab part, but I get it now. You're just crazy. Or, excuse me, loco.”

  “You don't believe like they do?”

  “I've seen strangeness, but I ain't never seen a wizard.”

  The Old Man closed his hand around the bar.

  “Here I am. Now you can believe in magic.”

  “I've seen some of the beginnings of magic. I got away quick, though. I was a steam engineer by trade. Case you haven't got word down here, we're in the age of science.”

  “Same ideas with different names,” said the Wizard.

  The Soldier leaned back and was about to tip his hat down again. “Magic or science, neither one didn't seem to help you much from getting tossed in here.”

  The Old Man gripped the bar tightly. “I was tricked. Betrayed.”

  “Tea leaves didn't give you no warning?”

  “Woman magic. Most dangerous.”

  The Soldier looked the old man over as he stretched out his legs, “Well, you got all night to figure women out. Magic probably ain't gonna help with that. If it does though, wake me up.”