Anastasia nodded as she took another drag. “Yes, Uncle Priest.” She passed it back to Billy.
“So, you didn't think of him as your father?”
“I suppose I did. We all did.” She had her arms crossed again as Billy took a new puff. “He's all any of us knew.”
Billy held out the cigarette as the smoke shot from his nostrils. He drew a circle with the flame in the darkness. “Did they all die?”
Anastasia took a few steps forward. Her hair fell off her shoulders as she walked and stared at the VA clinic. “In the fire, you mean? When I killed my Master?”
“Yeah. In the fire.”
“No, the Priest lived, obviously. He was my contact and go-between in relations with your Satanic Five.” She was scanning the parking lot for any signs of movement — or doing a good job at pretending to. “My sisters escaped.”
“He was so scary that day at the sawmill when we were kids.” Billy smiled, thinking of him and Anastasia as children. Their ride together on the train, and her biting him for the first time, thinking she'd be able to turn him into a vampire. He was surprised how much the memory brought him joy. It had been terrifying then, but it had become such a good slideshow in his present. Looking back on it, it seemed to him almost innocent. “You'll never have to worry about him chasing you again.”
“Billy, when you left…”
“Which time?”
“Wasn't her name Elizabeth? Your gas station love.”
“Yeah, Liz with the tattoos and the pink short hair.” Billy had smoked a lot with her; not necessarily cigarettes, but they'd sure smoked.
“They were all dead. I had murdered them all and I was going to start a new life.”
Billy crossed his arms. He only had a few puffs left, and then it would be time to cross the parking lot. “Why didn't you stay with it?”
“It was so hard.” She looked back at him. “It was hard being one of you.”
He kept his eyes locked on her and let the cigarette fall to the dirt. He pressed his boot into it and ground out the flame. “I'm glad it was hard.”
He grabbed his pack and slung it over his back as he moved past her and out of the comfort of the trees. She watched him walk away.
Billy Purgatory would be halfway across the parking lot before she decided to follow.
II.
Mudder Kelroy took up half the hallway. He looked just as imposing and menacing as he had when Billy had been a ten-year-old boy. The two men faced off with one another for what seemed like a long time. Mudder's gang was behind him and Billy had Anastasia behind him. The scar across Mudder's face the direct mirror image to the one sliced across Billy's face long ago.
“You grow'd up, Billy Purgatory.”
“Yeah, I know more than a few that'd disagree with you, Kelroy.”
Mudder had a cigar in his teeth that he chewed on and used like a compass needle to stare Billy down with. “You don't look like you've had an easy time since I left you on the side of that mountain.” He pointed to Billy's shoulder and smiled. “Still dragging that skateboard around everywhere you go, I see.”
Billy glanced over his shoulder at the crest of the deck strapped to his pack and nodded.
Anastasia was suddenly standing beside Billy.
Mudder pulled his cigar from his mouth and pointed it at her. “She think I'm gonna kill ya?”
“She thinks everybody is gonna kill me.”
The old biker laughed and then jammed the cigar back in his teeth. “Keep her around for more than just good looks, kid. Lots to be said for that kinda offensive thinkin'.”
Mudder opened his arms as he strode forward, and before Billy or Anastasia could stop him, he had his arms around him. Billy felt the air pushed out of his lungs; the hug was like a polar bear crushing a snow cone stand.
Billy felt the bikers knuckles rubbing into his hair, then Mudder shook him at the shoulders, turning him to the gang to be presented like royalty. “Ulysses' boy ain't done nothing stupid enough to get hisself kill't yet.”
The thirteen assembled riders all approached with fist bumps and pats on the back. Billy didn't know any of them, but these guys knew who he was.
Billy caught the eye roll from Anastasia, but was directed back to the gang. “I told y'all Uly's boy was tougher than a got'damn boot on a cobra.”
All the smacking and congratulating by the motorcycle club ended, and the boys made their way down the hallway, towards the waiting room Billy and Anastasia had crept past. They'd seen one nurse and had heard a doctor lecturing an old vet about his blood pressure pills from behind a curtain.
Anastasia gave Billy and Mudder Kelroy space. Billy looked back to her, then into the eyes of the biker. “Where's my Pop?”
Mudder's laughing and temporary good cheer faded as he tossed the stub of the cigar into a laundry hamper in the hallway. “Your Pop…”
“Look, I know it's not good. We went up to the cabin and saw all the crazy stuff he'd been writing and how he was living. I saw what he'd built up the mountaintop.”
“Don't get all riled, I ain't gonna lie to you. Ulysses, he ain't good.”
“But he's alive?”
“Just barely.” Mudder looked down. “How'd you know to come here?”
“I saw Pop's wooden leg up in a tree.”
Mudder laughed. “You should'a heard him. He wanted me to climb that tree and get it down.”
Billy half-smiled. Sounded like Pop through and through. “I looked for a hospital.”
“Well, this is just barely one. There ain't been a good hospital around these parts for years.”
“Since they closed the one I was born in?”
Mudder's eyes narrowed and he stared down the boy “So, you've been digging up your past?”
“More like knocking it down with sledgehammers.”
Mudder looked back down the hallway, towards a group of little rooms at the far end. “There ain't nothing you can do for him, and you shouldn't a'come here. It's dangerous.”
“Dangerous? I can't remember a time in my whole damn life that wasn't dangerous. I'm gonna see my Pop.”
Mudder grabbed his shoulder again and clamped down on it hard. “You listen to me, Billy, and you listen up good. Ulysses is give out, he pushed hisself too hard. He tried to open up a gate, and I'm betting he at least partial like succeeded. He's been struck by lightning, and his kidneys are gone, and that ain't even going into how bad he's tore up his lungs with smoke and his liver with shine.”
“What the hell was Pop trying to do up there?”
“He was looking for what happened to you, boy. Didn't nobody know what you done or where you went.”
“It's a long story…”
“Only damn part of the story that matters is that you're here now, and still breathin'. Ulysses ain't said a word since I got him here, and far as the college boy doctor can figure, he's in a coma he ain't never waking up from. He's hooked up to a dialysis machine, and he ain't never gonna be in a place where he's gonna be off it.”
Billy looked back to Anastasia. She was listening to all that Mudder was saying, but her face was expressionless. “I gotta say goodbye.”
“No, you don't,” Mudder said. “Every second you stay here, or anywhere for too long, puts you in more danger. I don't know if you've been keeping up with the current events, but you're wanted by the FBI, and every other law enforcement jack off that wants to impress ‘em.”
Billy shook his head — what the hell? “I haven't done a damn thing to be wanted by anybody? This is bullshit, Mudder.”
“You're right, finally — it's all bullshit, and it ain't really the FBI that's chasing ya. It's The Five. They've infiltrated and turned every swinging dick and convenience store camera in America against ya.”
“What's really after me then?”
“They released what they call The Hounds out of a prison they was being kept in called Atlantis Ranch.”
“Hounds?” Billy remembered the map of Texas Pop had dra
wn on the back of the photograph of him and LBJ from the war. The star outside Austin, written in Pop's ballpoint scrawl.
“Demons, Billy. You gotta git.”
Anastasia was walking towards them, Billy could hear her cowboy boots on the clinic's linoleum. “Demons? There are demons?”
“Sure as Cougar Brown'll take a drink'a corn there are demons — and you don't want no part of them catching ya.”
Anastasia stayed a couple of steps back and didn't engage, but she listened intently.
“So, where the hell do I go? If the whole country is looking for me and the chase is being led by demons?”
“You get your ass right on out of here, Billy boy. You get off the grid and pretend it's the war all over again, because it is. It's worse than the war ever thought about being.”
“You want me to run and hide?” He looked at Anastasia, and her face still betrayed nothing.
Run.
“You go find a hole and you stay in it. When the time is right, you'll have to come out and fight. Until then, you're a ghost.”
Mudder slapped Billy on the shoulder again and strode past him towards the waiting room and his crew. “Promise me, Billy. I know you're too much like your damn hard-headed Pop, but you listen this time.”
“Mudder!” Billy yelled it down the hallway after the biker lord, and then lowered his voice when he realized just what a desperate boom he had made in the world. “You know I can't do that. It's not the Purgatory way.”
Mudder stopped and looked back to Billy. His eyes were cold, and had his body not been so strong and determined, he would have been crushed under the seriousness of his own tone.
“Billy, you'll be a ghost one way or another. Hurts a lot less choosin' to be one than having someone else make the call.”
III.
Billy Purgatory had almost taken Mudder's orders to heart and left immediately. It wouldn't be until he thought about it later that it would strike him as to why. Billy wasn't afraid of demons — just sounded like another monster to him. If every cop in the lower forty-eight and Scotland Yard all had APB's out for him, so be that too. Billy Purgatory wasn't scared of much that anyone could speak of.
The only thing that terrified him was sitting in that chair at his father's bedside.
There were tubes and wires everywhere. There didn't seem to be a part of Ulysses Purgatory that didn't have something connected to it that ran into one big machine or other that Billy didn't understand the use for. Pop wouldn't have liked this at all had he been awake, and he'd have told Billy to pull all those tubes out of him and pour a beer down his throat.
He had grabbed his skateboard and it sat in his lap as his fingers ran over the lines and grooves in the deck.
Billy's eyes drifted over the tubes that carried Pop's blood out of his body and into a dialysis machine. Billy could hear it whir and saw it turn, just like a strawberry slush machine at a soda fountain.
He let his eyes drift back to his skateboard deck and picked at the grip tape. “Pop, I don't guess you can hear me.”
Billy cast his eyes up for a moment. Pop's own eyes were closed, and he had a mask over his nose and mouth that was helping him to breathe. Ulysses didn't move beyond a slow rise and fall of his chest.
“I went up to the cabin looking for you. I should have come looking for you sooner…I guess none of this would have happened.”
Slow rise and slow fall.
“I read some of the pages out of your book. I guess that's what a manifesto is, huh — a book? I can't really say that I understood a lot of what you were trying to warn the world about.” Billy leaned back in the chair. He found it much easier to keep his eyes focused on the skateboard and not on the quiet face of his old man. “I think I know what you're feeling though, and why you wrote all that stuff. I feel it too. I've felt it for a long time.”
Billy really wanted Pop to say something, but he and Pop hadn't had a real conversation about anything since he had been a boy.
“Pop, I made a big mistake. I took you for granted. You said in your book that you had tried your best to raise me and you didn't think you'd done a good job.”
Billy found it hard to focus on the wood grain and tape that he stared at. His eyes twitched, and he watched the tear fall from his face and impact the skateboard deck in a splash like slow motion.
“I always thought that you were the smartest man in the whole world, but you shouldn't have said that, Pop. You shouldn't have said that you weren't a good father to me, because you were. You were the best father that any kid could ever have.”
He looked up and wiped the back of his arm across his eyes. “You shouldn't have said that, Pop. You should know better, because thinking like that doesn't make you smart at all. It makes you pretty dumb.”
Billy crossed his arms and looked into his father's lifeless face. “Talking like that makes you just as dumb as I was. I thought that I was supposed to go back and fix things, but they weren't broken. I thought that you and I needed Mom around, but you did just fine without her, and I did just fine too.”
Red blood flowed through tubes at Billy's feet. Back and forth.
“If you could wake up for a second — if we only had a few words we could say to one another before…”
Billy reached over his skateboard, and he closed his hand over his father's hand.
“I'd beg you to take that back.”
Billy stood from the chair, and held his board by the wheels as he leaned over his father's body and kissed the old man on his forehead. “I'm sorry that I wasn't a good son.” Billy whispered and kept his face close to Pop's ear. “I'm sorry that I ran off and broke what wasn't broken in the first place. I'm sorry that you were looking for me and that you got yourself in this shape.”
Billy rose as he ran his hand over his father's cheek. “Get some rest, Pop. Don't worry, I'm gonna fix all the wrong stuff that I did.”
He turned from his father's bedside, carefully walking over all the tubes and wires that were doing their best to keep Billy's Pop alive.
“I have to say I'm sorry one last time for one last thing before I go, Pop.” Billy stood at the halfway point, but didn't look back.
“Even though you're not talking, I know what you'd say — and I'm sorry in advance for not listening to you.”
Billy wiped the last tear from the corner of his eye.
“Because I'm gonna hunt down and kill those last four Satanic sons'a'bitches that put you in that bed.”
IV.
Billy had tried to walk past Anastasia when he left his father's hospital room, but she grabbed him by the arm. He looked at her, but he wasn't in there. Anastasia had never seen him look so sad, yet so determined.
“I just…”
She wouldn't let go of his arm. “Billy…”
“I just need to be alone, okay?”
“Then we go?” She considered loosening her grip and letting him get away from her.
“Then we go, yeah.”
Anastasia let him loose. “I'll sit with him.”
Billy didn't say anything, and Anastasia had no idea where exactly the suggestion had come from. He dropped the skateboard to the ground before him and sailed down the hallway on it.
She watched him skate towards the way they'd come. Anastasia wasn't sure if riding that thing was the only way he could think, or if it was the only way he could effectively shut off his brain so as not to.
She decided it was a bit of both and turned into Ulysses Purgatory's room. She was immediately disgusted by how the humans pretended to understand anything about the true inner workings of their bodies and by their definition of living and dying.
“What are they hoping to accomplish with all of this?”
She sank into the chair at his bedside and looked over him. She could hear his heartbeat and breathing perfectly well without the use of the readouts of their machines. It was strong, and had a steady rhythm. She found that curious and wondered why exactly he needed all of these machines?
Looking over her left shoulder, Anastasia regarded the dialysis machine with some interest. One of these machines would have done her sisters and their dirty followers well in cleaning up the mess of their own blood.
She decided not to stare at it much more, as it would just make her hungrier than she already was. She was going to have to find some time to hunt tonight, and missed having a familiar.
“Margot definitely had her uses, little blood-ba…”
Anastasia found herself staring at Ulysses Purgatory's open eyes. Her own eyes widened a bit, and she started to push herself out of the chair and go after Billy. Ulysses raised his finger to her, and with his other hand pulled the oxygen mask off his face.
“Don't.”
Anastasia let her arms relax and sank back into the chair. “He thinks you're dead.”
“Dying.” Ulysses let the mask rest on his chest. “He doesn't need to know I'm not as dead as he thinks I am.”
Anastasia leaned forward. “Dirty trick, old man. Why?”
“He won't ever leave if he thinks that I might make it.”
“But, you won't make it.”
Ulysses exerted some effort to sit up just a bit and turn his face to Anastasia's. He looked deep into her, like his eyes weren't searching her outsides, but were looking within.
“So.” He strained to speak. “You're her?”
“Her?” Anastasia found his gaze uncomfortable — devoid of malice, but uncomfortable just the same.
The old man smiled. “You're the one.”
“I…”
“I always figured she'd have dark hair. I liked dark hair too, but somehow ended up with a blonde.”
Anastasia looked over the machines. The old man, filled with more life than Billy had thought he had in him, was not long for this world.
What use would it be explaining the nature of her relationship to his son be to him?
Anastasia just nodded.
Ulysses closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps thinking about Billy's mother. Definitely so, Anastasia thought, if he held the same nostalgic streak that his son did.
“I'm happy that he found someone. I'm sorry that he's such a dumbass hellbat. I only had so much influence.”
Anastasia placed her hands on her knees and looked down to the floor. Yards of tubes filled with Billy's father's blood.
Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Page 32