Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  The Brakeman just sighed. Although this was a new hobo trick, it was still just a hobo trick, and he wasn't falling for it.

  “Have it your way, kid. I warned ya.”

  Billy saw an ancient hound dog hoisted into the car entrance.

  “Corner him, Ol' Earl. I'm gonna get a rope.”

  The Brakeman vanished into the sun. Billy's eyes burned as true as his neck did and the hound sniffed at the air. Billy couldn't tell what Ol' Earl wanted to corner more, him or a crate of beans.

  Earl ran at Billy in the end and before the hobo kid could do much about it, Earl was on him.

  The sunshine hit Billy about the same time the dog's tongue found his face. Billy screamed, but the dog kept licking. Billy guessed he was deaf or just used to that guy with the hammer being so damn loud all the time. Billy didn't have much time to consider any of it and stared at his left hand, which was now completely drenched in sunshine.

  Three railroad men finally pulled Billy into the day. Billy Purgatory's face was drenched in dog slobber and his hair itched. Billy Purgatory was relieved to learn that he was not a vampire that morning.

  The only thing sucking any blood early this morning were the fleas off that old hound dog that had found their way into Billy's mop.

  Ol' Earl, vampire hunter.

  Chapter 6

  Anastasia

  I don't know where I came from, but I do know that I had a human mother and a vampire father. I sometimes like to imagine that they were actually in love with one another, but I've seen my father's side of the family hold court, and it's taken away any naïve notions that the woman who bore me for them was little more than a fleshy distraction.

  There has always existed that sense of privilege amongst the fanged when dealing with humans. Taking from the people-tree anything they desired until the very root of mankind was smothered from their slurping at the sap. Dead leaf storms always signal a change in the parasitic relations between my Father's and my Mother's kinds.

  From the work of the nastiest of Pharaohs to near genocide the human scholars falsely attributed to the medieval black plague, it's been a constant, badgering fester of a drug war; a feeding frenzy of bloodlust on one side versus the wringing of plotting hands by the craftiest beating hearts of Mother's people. Generals and Popes hoping there might be something to gain in the subjugation of the vampire race. Father's people suck it; Mother's people spill it on the fields for the flies – yet the constant that brings the circle ever spinning is the desire for it.

  Blood.

  There is a mirror place called the Black Garden. This is the part of the world that my Father's people came from. For them, there was never any question as to whether or not they would give in to the temptation and taste the fruit. Vampires hate themselves, that they (or we, as I identify more with them) even exist at all. Our thoughts are consumed with consuming. We are the most twisted capitalists the universe has ever known. We never learned to share. Why be alive at all, I've wondered? Why not let it all end?

  I learned this answer first hand, for suicide only leads to one place with our kind. To stop the blood magic consumption from being our perfect ambrosia, you whither not to dust like they show in the movies.

  You find yourself beginning ever slowly to more closely resemble your human side - resembling them. Only the very old are pure now; almost all of us are crossed with humans. We can only propagate as they do, by the physical union between vampire and man. But humans are regarded as worse than a dog or pack beast. Dirty, uncivilized man, who we resemble yet are not, and who we mimic and mirror in dress and speech so that we might move amongst them to feed upon. So, to stave off the lust, to stop taking the blood and allow your human nature to take over is to us a fate worse than turning to dust and bone. It's akin to cutting out your soul. It's becoming normal and nothing is more pathetic to the vampire race than normalcy.

  Those we turn now live only weeks, sometimes months. The unlucky ones are those who make it more than a year. Since the time when the disease infected our people, it is a torturous existence. Humans have theories that what makes a vampire is a virus. An infection that takes from our forms and minds our humanity and makes us into a monster. This has never been the case, yet we do find ourselves now suffering from a horrid affliction - this vampire disease, born of our own meddling, interbreeding and malicious lifestyle. Our own venereal outbreak transmitted from one to another via the blood. Once masters of death, we find ourselves now hunted - murdered by the tainted blood, our own food.

  Our only village well poisoned - tragic.

  The old ones, as my former Master was, now whither. Ever sicker on their thrones as the marble cracks and the silver tarnishes about them. My sisters, vicious bitches that they are, plot one last move against the humans - or so they've said. In reality they hold court at the last happy hour of our once fruitful race. Like children whose parents have been locked away in an asylum and are never coming home.

  I was raised with one goal in life; for whatever reason this was my task, and I feel I will never truly understand it. My former Master felt that a silly human boy was somehow the key to our survival. I was sent out to charm this one, to tempt him and bring him into our house. To love him, if that's what it took, and to give to him anything that he desired. I've spent my entire life coming in and out of contact with him. Finding him, beguiling him, telling him that I would make everything in his world alright if he would simply allow me. I've lied to him more than once in offering to take away his pain. The lie was so calculated and so intense that when I was a girl I even believed it myself. Yes, I went through phases where I believed that a perfect union could be made with us at its core. I've written his name in my diary next to mine

  Pretty cute for a monster, wouldn't you say?

  But he, of course, is just as much a bastard as I am or as my sisters are, or any of my race. He's about as special as anything else in this world is, which is to say not special whatsoever. It was his mother who was the special one, who never truly understood or fully grasped that concept of humanity. Her people were as disdainful as mine towards man, who is cattle to them and cattle to us. Everything born off the beaten path -- whether it be the high places or the dark crevices -- hates and envies man, those simple breather-breeder children of apes.

  So, he could not be turned, yet I told few of my failures to do so. Not only could he not be tempted fully, physically it was impossible to make him less like his nature and more like mine. His neck still holds the puncture wounds from his weaker moments. When he felt so alone and lost in this big, terrible world. When he made the mistake of letting me get too close. I told no one any of these things and kept it as my secret. It perhaps kept me alive. I carried on the mission far past the point of my Master's sanity, far beyond the time when they kept the watchers in shadow behind me reporting back about my task. I kept it going far past the point where anyone cared at all.

  I carry it on still. Why, I cannot say, and if you guess now that it's because I truly love this one, you are mistaken. I love nothing.

  Sad, yes?

  Before they were too insane to care any longer, I guess they gave up hope on me. With far larger issues looming regarding this cancer their own blood lust had wrought upon them (and me one day), I can only assume they felt that I just wasn't pretty enough, beguiling enough, tempting enough. Not a desirable and perfect enough representation of what they had plotted would capture his interest to lead him away from his own foolish mission.

  A thing, that's what I am, a plot device. A lying hooker given everything right to say to make him forget the world around him for eternity, or so long as he was useful to us. At the street corner of Babylon, they propped me by the lamppost.

  Chapter 7

  Walking in the Woods Sucks

  The Brakeman had called the cops for sure, and the fuzz wasn't Billy Purgatory's scene, so he left the train yard and its tracks behind him and headed into the woods. He knew he was far from the coast now, but he was
n't sure what town he was in. Riding the rails to find Pop had turned into a really bad plan.

  Like most times Billy now considered that he hadn't really thought any of this through. He was impulsive and just a kid and yesterday it had seemed like the greatest idea he had ever had. It was now dawning on Billy that he probably just wanted to ride a train. In fact, that made perfect sense. Maybe that Brakeman and every other person he ever met was right about him. Maybe he really was just a dumb kid.

  Riding on the train had been awesome though. “I got that part right,” Billy thought to himself. “Trains are badass.”

  Walking in the woods was not awesome though. He kept slapping bugs and his head still itched and his neck felt like he'd been kissed by the business end of a cobra. For all practical comparisons, it had been.

  Billy still hadn't gotten a good look at himself and something made him not want to touch the wound she had left on him. At least there wasn't a lot of blood leaking out of his neck. He wondered if vampire girls were poisonous and decided that they were but she hadn't gotten him good enough to worry about that.

  “Gotta be fast to do mortal damage to a Purgatory.” Billy enjoyed the revelation.

  In places where the trees broke Billy would let his arm float into the sun just to make sure. If he was a vampire now, he was too fast even for the sunshine.

  What wasn't fast was all the walking. The woods sucked hard and there was no place to skate in all the dirt and dead leaves. He wondered why nobody made a sidewalk through the woods and decided that dudes that were supposed to be getting paid to make sidewalks were screwing him and everybody else stuck in the woods. Which at that time was Billy and Billy alone.

  Billy started to blame all this on the Time Zombie and vampires. He blamed a lot of this on vampire girls and their bamboozling ways, too. Billy was gonna make a list when he got back to school of stuff that sucked and that he was gonna go to war with it when he got older like Pop.

  “I can't believe she lied to me.”

  He really wished Pop was there. Billy didn't know how to survive in the woods. He knew that Pop would though, which is why he had to keep walking until he found him.

  II

  It was nighttime again when Billy found the ruins. His hopes were high from a distance, but the closer he got to what was left of the mammoth concrete building, the more he came to know he hadn't found a town after all. What he discovered was vacant, deserted and dead.

  Billy was tired, though, and had to stop for the night. The sun was crashed out and it was cold again and he could hear stuff in the woods moving around. There might have been mountain lions or hippos, and he wasn't in the mood to board-smack the wildlife.

  Billy made a promise that as soon as he found a town again, he was staying put and never leaving. Billy Purgatory wasn't built for all this camping.

  Inside, his tired feet found four concrete walls and half a roof. The door had been taken down, and the window glass was busted and cracked in the frames. Rusting saw blades were piled up in one corner, and there were trash piles in the others. Billy figured this was the old sawmill he'd heard the older kids talking about.

  People said that it was haunted and that it was where devil worshippers hung out. Kids brought girls out here to scare them and drink beers. The floor was littered with empty beer cans. Where you can find the Devil, Billy also figured you could always find the reminders of a party he'd thrown.

  The walls were covered in graffiti, but none of it was impressive. Billy was a snob when it came to graffiti.

  “Amateurs.”

  Billy dug around in the trash looking for a can of spray paint. He really needed a beer too. Not that Billy drank beer, but Pop sure liked it and Billy was thirsty. His stomach ached worse than his neck now, and his lips were chapped.

  “I sure could use a ham sandwich.” Billy's belly howled at the thought.

  He found a can of black spray paint and figured he might as well tag his name on the wall to let the world know that the art of defacing other people's property was alive and well even though its strongest proponent was currently lost to civilization.

  “One day, somebody will see it,” Billy told himself. “They'll be all like, 'Hey! I know that, dude. He's badass. What was he doing out here in the woods?'”

  Billy headed towards an old wooden tool chest on the far wall, figuring if he stood on it he could get at that empty space on the wall. A giant PURGATORY was in that wall's desecrated future.

  Billy made it halfway when he saw what was already written above the old wood box. Someone hadn't painted but had scratched a message with a white rock in the spot he'd had his eyes on. A message inscribed in a heart:

  BILLY & ANASTASIA

  He stared in disgust. “That broad has issues.”

  He let his words trail out in whispers though as he noted the claw marks on the chest above the stenciled word: TOOLS. Sharp scratch marks that had sliced the wood and torn off the lock, allowing entry through the lid that was now closed.

  She'd not only been here, but that box was where she'd waited out the daylight.

  Anastasia was probably still in there.

  Billy kept one eye on the toolbox and quit making such a racket as he dug through the trash. Elaborate plans dangled in his head of taking one of the hefty saw blades from the stack and…

  …and what?

  Cutting off her head while she slept?

  To Billy that just didn't seem right. Truly he had thought the night before that she was just another girl - a really weird psychopath girl, but a girl all the same. She had shown her true nature since then and nothing was going to make up for her biting him and attacking him while he was in a trance. She had taken advantage of him and sucker-jumped him good while he was tired and confused.

  By saying she was just a girl in trouble and pretending to be something she was not, Anastasia had gotten the jump on him. What she had turned out to be was something she should have explained a little more clearly. What she was wasn't a little white lie kind of something you go into after you've already exchanged candy hearts.

  She had faked being human.

  Billy, of course, knew a lot of humans. Most of them lied about who they really were too. They went about lives pretending to be nice, honest, decent folks and that they cared about all the other nice decent folks. Billy really paid attention to them lately and the more he quietly watched how they grouped up, he really couldn't see that anyone actually cared about anyone else in this world.

  Everyone seemed extremely interested in themselves. People ran with other people who looked like them and thought like them and at best they ignored anyone who didn't. At their worst, they were cruel and heartless to anyone who didn't fit their molds.

  Billy, at least, knew this to be true in his case. The scar across his face, the way he dressed. People saw him as a hooligan or a deadbeat or a thief…

  …well, he was some of that stuff.

  None of that was the point. If she was really a vampire then maybe that's just how they were and they couldn't help themselves. Kinda how Artie helped himself to cupcakes or how Pop helped himself to beer and explosives.

  Like how Ol' Earl had tried to lick Billy's face off in the train car - he was just doing dog stuff.

  Maybe she did really dig Billy and she was just doing her vampire girl stuff.

  Besides, Billy was ten years old and far as he could tell so was she. Was it really right for a ten year old kid to be rummaging through a pile of trash looking for something sharp to stab another ten year old kid in the heart with? Regardless of what his favorite horror hostess, Ms. Monster, said one should do when encountering the living dead right before she started playing another scary movie on late night TV.

  Technically, it was wrong to murder…

  …even if who you were thinking about murdering has fangs and tried to kill you first on a freight train.

  If she was in there asleep, then he'd be pulling the same dirty trick on her while her guard was down
that she had pulled on him.

  Billy dropped the big metal spike he'd had in his hand.

  He replaced it with the shiny metal Zippo with the skull on it he'd found on the floor, because burning her was a much better plan.

  Fast, efficient - she'd never know what hit her. Pop would be proud.

  He crept closer.

  There was a moment of hesitation in Billy Purgatory as he kicked up the lid of the wooden tool chest and used the propellant spray of the paint can to marry the Zippo into a flame thrower.

  Well, he didn't hesitate much, but he did turn his head as the box lid flew up. To hear him tell the story now, Billy would say the old spray paint can was near out of juice before he ever hit the trigger. The reality was that he had at that moment a near fatal change of heart. Setting someone on fire was most definitely wrong.

  He kept the can aloft and the Zip' burning though as he took a step back and looked down and into the box.

  Something was definitely on fire in there, but it wasn't Anastasia. Billy had succeeded in sending a pair of grease stained coveralls on their voyage to cremation. They were folded into a place to rest her head at one end of the otherwise empty.

  Billy watched the flames and kind of felt sorry for Anastasia that this box had been her resting place. Billy and Pop didn't have much of anything, but they had a house and they had beds.

  Though they were much too quiet for him to hear, Billy felt THEM behind him. It was that feeling bad kids can get so passionately when they've been had and then caught. Like every teacher he'd ever had was assembled just inside the doorway behind him from where he had entered the building. Every grown-up who he had ever disappointed and made to shake their heads at him in disgust.

  Billy didn't even bother whipping around. He just slow turned, defeated.

  There were ten of them - the tall ones - the ‘grown-ups’. A few faces he recognized from the baseball field, especially the one who stood at the forward point of their triangle formation. The bald one with the stringy side hair, the Priest vampire.