Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (16 page)

Still, it was a sight that made me stop just long enough.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

“Security camera monitors are all on the blitz.”

“It's fritz.”

“Yeah, just like that.” He tried his best to pull himself out of the space he'd shoved himself into that was barely big enough, under normal parameters, to contain his enormous knees.

“You need to go.”

He pulled himself up. “Go?”

“They're coming for me.”

His face went into panic. “Who? Why didn't you tell me? Who's onto you? Hell, who's onto us?”

“Grab some things and get in that truck and don't ever come back. Take Margot with you.”

“You know Margot isn't going anywhere with me. She says I smell.”

“You do smell. Knock her in the head and kidnap her.”

He only considered it for a half-second, “She'll have me sliced into bologna before I get anywhere close to her.”

“Use pepper spray, it worked on your sister. She overcompensates, so her right side is actually the weaker.”

“Is it sheriffs? Oh shit, it's the ATF.”

“It's neither.”

Calvin ran his fat fingers up his face and pulled on those big greasy sideburns. “I knew the government was coming after me. It ain't the metha'lizing that done me in. They know I know what they're planning for the end times.”

“It's not a conspiracy theory if it's real. You should have been gone five minutes ago.”

I yelled for Margot and got no answer. I was going to make her leave with this dullard that I should have drained for easy blood months ago.

“Margot!”

My answer came from outside.

“She's out here, pretty.” The voice of Uncle Priest. “Come and talk with us, Anastasia.”

A chill ran up the back of Calvin's spine — I watched him shudder. The Priest's voice was powerful in its creepiness. Even creepier when he wasn't trying to be that way.

“Get out of here, or die.” I tried to make the point clear as possible to Calvin.

I looked at the assault rifles leaning against the wall on the front door. I knew it pointless to grab one.

“Why am I so fat?” Calvin started to sob. “I'm way too big to shit myself out a window.”

VIII.

Anastasia's cowboy boots hit the trailer house steps at the exact second the lights went down across the compound. Calvin, in his mania, had at least gotten that order right. Her heightened vision kicked in without pause, and the night was as visible to her eyes as they would be to a human's eyes at high noon. She sailed off the steps and landed in a brisk and determined walk towards the bird bath at the center of the yard.

Uncle Priest was holding Margot in front of him like a shield. He had his arm locked around her neck. Margot struggled, but as bad news as the little pissed-off devil was to humans, she was no match for the strength of an aged and pure vampire like the Priest. Her kicking and screaming was a distraction that Anastasia didn't need right now.

The old vampire had a very quiet and stoic expression, so very unlike him. “Anastasia, I expected more from you and the hillbilly. You pulled the plug on all his electronic toys.”

“Like any of them matter.” She kept walking. “Let her go.”

“She gave up that chance.”

“She'll be happy to run now, I'm guessing.”

That's when the Priest finally got that twinkle in those black eyes of his. “You with a student, it's so endearing. She goes against what she's told with even more abandon than you.”

“She's not my student. She's just a blood bag.”

Margot kicked the vampire hard in the shins. It was like kicking a bulldozer.

“And I always did everything I was told,” Anastasia added.

“You were never told to murder one of our Masters.”

Anastasia was already boiling on the inside and starting to tip into dangerous territory. “He is responsible for that murder, not I.”

The Priest considered saying his name, but would hold onto that. Anastasia was becoming reckless and emotional just fine all on her own.

“No matter. You did nothing to stop him. You are as much to blame as he.”

Margot eked out Anastasia's name as best she could. The vampire's grip on her was like a vise. Anastasia had been in the grip of those gnarled fingers before.

“Why didn't you turn her, Anastasia? Why not take her all the way to proper student? If you're going to take the trouble to go through with it…”

Margot's eyes pled to Anastasia for release. The old bat need only twitch and he'd snap her neck.

“Because, she's nothing to me. She was a more than willing dinner.”

Margot's eyes ran with tears and there was blood trickling out of her nose.

“She was buffet.”

Uncle Priest held his ground — Anastasia was so close now.

“If you had no need for a new pupil…” That's when he smiled. “I soon will.”

“You would never.” Anastasia's heart was thumping quickly. She was ever angrier; she had not fed, and she fought against the feral nature which was storming fang-first into her mind.

He laughed, deep and cold. “When you're dead, someone will have to chase Bil…”

The pistol was pulled from the back of Anastasia's jeans with supreme efficiency. The issue wasn't how fast she could draw this night though — it was what she could hit.

Right through Margot's shoulder. The girl screamed and convulsed and would soon black out. Anastasia knew she'd missed the Priest's heart. Anastasia watched the second bullet fly and graze his old neck. Blood sprayed.

“Their bullets are no consequence to me, brave stupid girl.”

“I have thirteen more.”

Margot's abdomen began to cascade blood as number thirteen tore into her and then into him as she counted down.

Her body went bright with fountains of warm blood as Anastasia made the gun barrel hot and let the bullets fly one after another. The Priest kept hold of Margot and the blood shot from Margot and flew in spirals of bright red neon to Anastasia's eyes.

“I won't let you have her.”

Margot screamed and said Anastasia's name.

Anastasia let fly the last three slugs.

Margot's right arm.

Margot's right thigh.

Margot's third left rib.

Anastasia kept clicking the trigger — and realized too late that she had stepped too close. The slice from the claws of the ancient vampire teacher cut her face and took with it the top of her left ear and half the hair on that side.

She reared back with her own nails, but the Priest had dropped the body of the girl and his claws were already in motion.

She was falling again, and when she landed this time, the impact would give her a much better understanding of what it feels like to be dead.

Anastasia blinked. She was staring across the dirt lawn at Margot. Blood poured from the girl. The most beautiful colors imaginable as the many rivers pooled at the desert floor, soon to be hungrily sucked into the parched ground.

“You killed me.” Anastasia thought she heard that. Her head rang and she wanted blood — needed blood — more than ever before.

“You killed me.”

“Margot…” Anastasia had a goofy smile on her face, a delirious one, like a simpleton who had just found something shiny to play with. “Shut up and die.”

All those pretty colors wasted to the earth. Anastasia had never been more ravenously hungry in her life. She had never been more undeserving of the comfort of the relief of pain and hunger in her life.

“Die.”

The Priest fell to his knees behind Margot. He was holding himself up by the bird bath. Anastasia counted eleven holes in him — but she had to count twice.

Margot quivered and convulsed. It wouldn't be long now.

“You are the greatest disappointment the vampire race has ever known.” The Priest said it slow and let the words burn.

Then he grabbed Margot by the hair and pulled her body up to his lips. “There's still plenty in her you haven't wasted.”

Anastasia tried to pull herself up as Uncle Priest's fangs sunk into Margot's neck. He would only need a little, and then he would be just as strong as he was before all the gunfire. She reared up and let out a cry of intensity which matched the pain.

The vampire girl's left arm was twisted and immobile. There was the bone, and it was in the wrong place, and the tip of it threatened to puncture her own skin.

The Priest looked up from Margot's neck and detached to speak. “You've only one option now. Do what you always do. Do what he taught you.”

“I taught him.” Anastasia didn't know what she was talking about or even who she was talking about. “I told him to run.”

The Priest was back at Margot's neck. Her eyes were open and she was still caught in a death rattle. The noise the vampire made at her neck was more revolting to Anastasia than Calvin had been with his never-ending buckets of chicken. The old vampire's wounds were closing and he was pulling all the blood that Margot had left inside her into him. Drawing it to his lips, and Anastasia knew he wasn't going to stop until she was dry as a forgotten flower pressed into an old book.

Margot's mouth opened slowly and she tried to scream. Her pupils had lost all color. She twisted her face like a dead thing disturbed at its own wake.

Anastasia convulsed with Margot and sprayed blood from her own mouth. Hacking and coughing at the horror of it all.

“Why didn't you die?” Anastasia licked her lips to retrieve any of the life essence left on them from her emotions betraying her and causing her body to spit and eject from her precious and fleeting life.

“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.