Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (14 page)

“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.

I was pale and skinny. I had expected to still be burnt; that was the last thing I remembered. Him vanishing with that monster, and the sunlight burning me to my boiling point. I turned to the side and stared. Maybe the salt in that awful dead sea had done something therapeutic. I couldn't find a blemish on me.

My waist was so small, and my ribs were right there for anyone to count. I'd definitely lost a lot of curve. Calvin seemed to find me appealing, but I figured he was used to taking whatever he could get. I guessed too that in his line of work, he was used to the emaciated.

I swiped the steam from the mirror with my palm and found my eyes staring back at me, more black than green. “He thinks I'm a drug slut.” I shook my head and let the reflection steam back up and hide me from myself.

Calvin hadn't owned up to his profession yet to me, but I could smell the chemicals on him, even over the rancid fried chicken smell in his truck. It clung to him, to everything connected with him, and to me. He had plenty of locked-outbuildings on his little ranch.

My kind has made use of drug dealers, and those addicted to said drugs, for centuries. They're always perfectly manipulated — it's far too easy when you want things so desperately.

The water was burning hot and felt fantastic, nothing like the Salton Sea had. I was shocked, as I began to pull at my hair and untangle the knots it had tied itself into, that I wasn't more pulled by bloodlust than I was. Yes, Calvin was about to be a butchered pig, but I wanted to do it more because he was a low-life. And it would probably be much more humane, what I'd do to him, than whatever it was he was imagining doing to me.

I would have to eat, or I'd just keep wasting away. I'd never let that happen again. I'd never let myself go beyond that tipping point
where I start pretending I'm one of them. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt with her dead face on it.

I wanted to feed more to get back in the game and get my head right than I did to satisfy some ancient and mystical mumbo-jumbo connection I had with all things bloody and warm. I felt like I needed to reprioritize: find out exactly where that monster had dropped me off, and what I was going to do about all of it. The
where
was not in question, this was undoubtedly the Inland Empire — but
when
was I?

Everything seemed very familiar time-wise, but, what if the monster had dropped me off before any of that had even happened? What if there was another “me” running around, still searching for him? Was that even possible?

What if he hadn't made that stupid mistake yet..?

I focused on shampoo bubbles. My hair was beginning to smell like hair again. I felt clean — I had forgotten how that even felt. All that time running around the jungle killing villagers and washing up in a mountain spring…

I scratched my scalp on accident and spit soap out of my mouth — my nails needed serious attention.

I smelled my hair as I walked out of the shower. It smelled like shampoo and salt now — which, I suppose, was an improvement. I dug through mostly bare bathroom cupboards: feminine hygiene products, marijuana in plastic bags, tube upon tube of tacky lipstick.

“Does this bitch not own a towel?”

I walked into her room. The bed was turned down and there were three white towels stacked on top of the comforter. I stared in confusion for a minute, water running down my legs.

“Son of a bitch.” I said it quietly, defeated, as I went for a towel.

I'd put on a pair of exercise pants that were loose and comfortable and a white tank top. Pretty much everything Wanda owned was “stripper in training” wear — but this would do for now.

Calvin snored, louder than his Hog-Bitch truck's tail pipes, sprawled out on an overstuffed, fake leather couch. His T-shirt rode up his hairy belly. The bucket of chicken was on the floor, and his left hand still trailed off the sofa and into its greasy depths. I could hear that overtaxed heart of his, struggling to beat.

I watched him from a doorjamb, my arms folded as I leaned. Putting this piglet out of his misery would be doing him a favor. Thump! Pause. Thump! Murmur. Thump!

I ran my tongue over my fangs.

Turning, I said to no one, “Great Anastasia… you're a trailer whore now.”

III.

“Bitch, I will cut you so deep, your mama's placenta will bleed.” Margot was a tiny little whirling dervish. Half-Mexican, all trash-talking, always spiked up out of her mind on something. She was into blades, had her own knife collection, and it was an impressive one. She liked to go for the army surplus, less flash/more functional variety. She also had an affinity for surgical steel and scalpels.

She had slipped the knife from her jacket sleeve and was on him before he, or his friends, had a chance to move. She was ready to climb right up the side of the guy, even though he was easily twice her size. Her blonde pigtails trailed down her back and jumped when she dug a boot heel into him and began her ascent.

“Sweetie, the placenta gets ejected after the baby comes out. So…”

“Then I'll slice it up and feed it to him.” Margot had the guy pushed into a brick wall. The back of his head was already bleeding from the impact of her pushing him into it. “Let me cut his throat.”

“Get her off me!” The two with him both had pistols stuffed into the back of their pants, but they were either too taken by surprise or too genuinely freaked out to think to pull them. The one Margot was climbing and threatening didn't seem to know where to grab her to push her off him. She had one hand on his lapel and the other twirled the blade.

She was only 5′3″.

“I'm gonna cut you up and then feed you to my pet alligator.”

Her eyes meant every word of it, although Margot didn't actually own an alligator.

I had taken to wearing jeans and a pair of rattlesnake cowboy boots. Black tank top and arms crossed in my leather jacket. My hair still smelled vaguely of salt, and overpoweringly of chemicals used to produce meth.

“Get these crazy chicks the money!”

Margot ran the tip of the blade into his left nostril. “I'm gonna cut you up nice and slow.” I could see her crazed expression reflected back to me from his pupils. Big dull eyes, full of fear.

One of the others used a clicker and the trunk of a Lincoln popped open. He reached in, cautiously, with his other hand in the air. He tossed the purple gym bag at my feet.

“It better be all there.” Margot was running the side of the blade over his left cheek.

“It's all there,” I said without bothering to open it. “Margot, climb down.”

She growled at him and then barked in his face like a hyena. I smelled urine.

He straightened his jacket after Margot jumped down and backed away from him, twirling a knife in each hand.

“Don't make me start throwing knives.”

They ran. I kept my arms close to my chest and watched Town Car tail lights blur and turn into a memory as they sped away.

“Bigger they are, the faster they cry.” Margot was proud of herself. She was a twenty-something cosmetology school dropout who'd been waitressing at a truck stop, buying meth from Calvin when I found her and decided to start training her. “I did good, right?” She laughed, knowing she was good at what she did.

“They never see it coming with you.”

Margot went for the bag. As I watched her, I suddenly felt cold. I knew that I'd been out too long, exerting myself too much, and wouldn't make it much longer until I was in a mumbling stupor.

My legs were already shaky.

She looked up from the bag and all that money, wrapped in plastic. “What's wrong, Ana?”

I reached down for her and pulled her up. She stood with the bag of money between us. “You're hard to keep up with. I don't know if it's the sugar or the drugs.”

“It's that I'm badass.”

I smiled. Badass.

My fingers pulled the black turtleneck from her skin, the one she wore to hide the bite marks when we were out in the night working — selling addicts their dreams and salvation, and collecting what was ours.

“Here? Seriously? In the alley behind the feed store?”

“Shut up, Margot.”

I found the place I wanted. It was a good patch of skin, close enough to the vein. I'd been working the other side of her neck lately.

“Can't you wait until we get back to Calvin's?”

“I thought you were going to shut up.”

My fangs sunk into her neck, and she didn't have a choice but to shut up. Her blood was warm and mixed with all her little killer-girl adrenaline — and the drugs. I'd learned to live with the drugs being mixed in.

I held her up and took a lot, probably too much. It just tasted so good. Whatever she'd been on tonight to get her all hyped out of her gourd took a second for me to blend into my psyche and vampire senses. Sometimes they'd take a hit and be dulled by the opiates or amphetamines — but most times, my senses were heightened by them.

I slung Margot over my left shoulder. She'd be out for awhile and wake with a nasty hangover, but she was a trooper and considered it fair trade. That was the thing about Margot — she didn't complain much about being dinner.

I went for the bag of money with my other hand. Little drops of her blood had fallen onto the plastic bags the bills were stacked in. I watched the blood swirl and pool over the plastic, and it seemed to take on a life of its own.

The tiny faces of little green presidential profiles began opening and closing their mouths and blinking their eyes.

I zipped the bag closed with Margot still hoisted over my shoulder then grabbed it up.

“You're lucky I bite you and suck that stuff out of you, baby-cakes. There's no telling how many times I've pulled a one-woman intervention on an overdose.”

IV.

I didn't sleep with them in the trailer. It turned out that Wanda was doing a good seven month stretch in county, if she was lucky. Calvin had also relayed that she was thinking about shanking some girl who supposedly stole cigarettes from her — and if that happened I might never get to meet Wanda.

Margot had taken over Wanda's room.

I had taken what I wanted of Wanda's things. I told Calvin that I only worked at night, and that I'd be sleeping during the day, and for him not to come looking for me.

He thought it was really clever when he nicknamed me “Vampire Girl”.

Margot was near comatose during the day too, either sleeping something drug-related off or sleeping me off. The sunlight streaming in through the blinds was no concern to her as she slept. She'd just put a pillow over her face.

Barn #4 had a root cellar beneath it that hadn't been used in years. You'd have thought that a drug dealer would find something useful to do with a cellar hidden under a barn. It was really something to ponder — how stupid Calvin was normally, yet this loser who'd never made it past the 10th grade could mix all those chemicals together just so and make very high quality product. Not perfect, but perfect enough for the middle of nowhere.

It was very comfortable down there, the cold earth of that cellar. Nothing disturbed me and the spiders were afraid of me. I had my clothing hanging in perfect little rows under the stairs.

I'd only been there a day or so, and used the stars to judge
when
I was. The monster had dropped me back into reality with a three day variance from where I'd left South East Asia.

It had happened. He was gone. The monster too.

“Time Zombieeeeeeeeeeeee…”

Calvin was clueless to my true nature. He just found me enterprising and, I'm sure, sexually attractive. I made it very clear early on that us coupling was not part of the equation. He accepted that in a more gentlemanly way than I'd been prepared for.

He seemed much more interested in me wanting to do all the grunt work that goes along with being a drug dealer. I didn't sell his garbage per se, he had others for that. I was his enforcer.

The locals were skeptical at first, and I can't blame them. I had to break a few arms, and a couple of overdue accounts were terminated indefinitely by me draining them dry and dumping them into a hole in the desert.

Those first few weeks saw me really get my strength back. There was more than enough reason to make some of the shady types who had issues with Calvin's business enterprise disappear. And while I was at it — there was all that blood.