Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (19 page)

“Ninjas?” Anastasia groaned. “Ninjas are real?”

She jumped the balcony railing to the sound of all those swords drawing behind her, men running up the stairs ready to slice her to ribbons.

The three in the courtyard were already fanned and in striking poses when she landed. She rose and swung the gun at one, all in one fluid motion, and he barely dodged — which caused her a momentary influx of pride. She snarled, and her fangs were set on intimidation, but they didn't break their line and seemed immune to the power of her attack.

She ran one, and decided afterwards that it'd been a bad idea, but she didn't have time to dwell as she was suddenly in a sword fight with a metal club. All of her sword training from vampire night school was paying off, but the rest of their brothers were already fanning across the balcony above and finding her engaged in the courtyard. It would take them no time to regroup, re-focus, and make their way to her.

She would be surrounded, again, in no time.

What would he do?

The woman who walked from the seaside, as Anastasia was blocking one sword strike after another, was in white. Anastasia wouldn't have even noticed her had the wind not been making such a big show of blowing the flowing folds of the woman's gown and hooded cloak so wildly. Anastasia dodged, went low, and swung the shotgun barrel at the knees of the lead swordsman. She struck hard and he found himself flipped backwards and crashing onto his back on the ground.

The woman in white moved like a ghost into the courtyard, her face obscured, save for her expressionless lips and the two long blonde braids which hung at either side of her face. They trailed down the front of her body to her waist. Her left hand held a sword, and it seemed to float along with her as she drew ever close to the men who swiped their own blades towards Anastasia. She rolled and dodged and then pushed herself backwards, still hugging the ground.

Anastasia flipped herself up and raised the shotgun towards the woman, just about to strike — but the hint of the smile slipping life into the woman's lips stopped her.

Anastasia took a step back as the woman spun, and all that white and blonde hair became an angry storm. The vampire girl watched as the thick blade of the woman's sword snapped metal armor, then flesh and bone, and the head of one of the swordsmen went flying off its neck. The head rolled, the body spasmed, and blood shot up from the wound before it collapsed.

The other standing swordsmen spun with the woman in white; when their motion was finished, their heads went flying too.

The rest of the men were running out of the hotel. The sword of the woman in white stabbed into the heart of the dark swordsman, springing up from the ground.

Pulling out of the wound and creating a wake of hot blood, the woman spun again and stopped her blade against Anastasia's own neck. Anastasia could feel how sharp the blade was; a simple flick of the woman's wrist, and she too would lose her head. The woman stared into Anastasia, sizing her up and down, and then advanced on her, drawing back her sword and replacing it with a forearm clad in a silver bracer. She pressed Anastasia into the garden wall, and bricks cracked at the vampire's back from the impact.

“Are you them? The Five? Why did you save me?”

The woman in white's expression again turned cold. “I am not here to save you. Those who hunt you are simply an annoyance to me in this moment.”

The woman pressed harder against Anastasia's neck with her armored forearm. “You will give a message to my son.”

“Your son?”

The woman pressed herself close, went straight for Anastasia's ear. “Tell him,
Don't try to find her. Leave her be.
”

When the woman was done with Anastasia, she spun away and began crossing the courtyard towards the hotel. The vampire slid down the wall. The swordsmen came at her all at once, at a run, with swords over their heads ready to slice down upon her.

Anastasia watched the cloak in the breeze off the dead sea and saw that the woman did have feet after all, only seemed to float. She was barefoot, and her legs were strong as the gown rustled against them. She watched the woman's grip tighten on the sword. Then the white began to spin and the blood began to fly and heads were orphaned.

Anastasia pulled herself up from the garden wall, and left the scene of many sacrifices as fast as she could run.

II.

Anastasia hiked hard into the desert night towards where she'd hidden the truck. Far down a dusty road, away from the sea, and obscured well enough behind a dune in a stand of tall cacti.

She hadn't wanted to draw attention to herself coming up on the old hotel; that truck was loud, and obnoxious, and who in their right mind would purposely possess such a vehicle? She would be acquiring a less intimidating and ridiculous method of transportation at her earliest convenience. But it would have to do until tomorrow night. She had a two hour window, maximum, before the sun would rise and she'd have to dig herself into the sand to sleep.

The idea of it, encased in a blanket of desert, was unthinkable but necessary. She felt so alive after her many brushes with extinction this night. She was filled with wild blood, and drunk on her own charmed and accomplished existence.

Sleeping under a sand dune seemed a defeated ending to an otherwise honorable and exciting night.

She was barely halfway down the dirt path when she heard the vast engine of the truck crank to life and the enormous tailpipes roar. Someone was not only stealing her ride, but was letting the accelerator alternate from purring to straining.

Surely, Calvin hadn't escaped — she hoped not. Anastasia would have killed him herself for leaving an unloaded shotgun in his backseat. She blamed him, and herself; she should have checked beforehand. Calvin had always been so cautious and seemingly prepared when it came to firearms, yet the only preparation he'd taken with that weapon was leaving the stench of his chicken grease all over it.

“Margot and Uncle Priest have sucked him dry by now.” Anastasia wasn't sure about a lot of things then. She had no idea where she was going, other than out of California, and she didn't know what it was she was supposed to do with her life.

She was, however, sure that Calvin had been reduced to a pile of bloody bone and yards of punctured skin.

And Margot. Was the Priest insane? Apprentice? There was no way that was going to work out. Margot was much too headstrong to take his direction, and there'd be no way that he could control her. She would argue every point, do the opposite of what was commanded of her, and could never follow the most basic responsibilities of what it would mean to be one of the last vampires in existence.

She heard Calvin's stereo begin to blast and the headlights come to life, and the great behemoth began to roll over the dune, taking out half of the cacti with it.

Anastasia shook her head and adjusted her hair, then adjusted her shirt to show a little cleavage and a little more midriff. She'd wait for the truck to roll up to her with her thumb out and give a story, just like she gave Calvin right before she took the first ride in that big truck.

She took in the blood all over her clothing and decided that either it wouldn't turn off one of the locals or she'd add a car crash to the story.

The truck rumbled forward and kicked up a lot of dust into the night. Hopefully there wasn't another hit squad looking to parachute in on her. Her vision was obscured with the bright headlamps of the truck bearing down on her. She could tell there was a man driving, but with all the exhaust and wake she couldn't smell him — she hoped that the cab of the truck no longer smelled like fried chicken.

The vehicle rumbled to a stop as Anastasia stood on the side of the long desert trail.

The smoked black tinted window lowered. The first thing she made out was the crown of the scar that ran across his face.

~10~

“
T
IME
S
HALL
U
NFOLD
W
HAT
P
LIGHTED
S
KATEBOARDERS
H
IDE
.
”

(W
HAT
S
HAKESPEARE WOULD' A SAID IF HE'D HAVE KNOWN ANY PLIGHTED SKATEBOARDERS
)

BILLY PURGATORY OPENED HIS EYES and found himself in a stainless steel cage. He was sitting with his back to the bars, and when he tried to stand up, he banged his aching head against the roof of his enclosure.

He was in an industrial type storeroom area, with sporadic overhead lights which beamed from compact fluorescent globes. Looking left and then right, he found more cages just like the one he was within on either side of him against the wall of the room — designed for animals and not people, although it was working well to keep him contained. Billy rubbed the back of his neck; it was mostly numb, and the parts of it that weren't numb stung like he'd been cuddling with a scorpion.

He wasn't sure where he was, other than in the past, but it wasn't the past that he remembered. He'd done something wrong, gotten some little something in the preparations he'd made following the instructions in the book he'd stolen from Broom's corpse on the island. The only part of any of this that had worked out right was that this was a time when there was an aspect of himself living who was still a boy — but with the environment that the boy and he were in currently, he couldn't be sure that either of them would have the opportunity to grow into happier lives.

When he'd fallen into this place, struggling with the Time Zombie through some wormhole of the in-between, he'd still had a lot of hope left in him. They had landed together in this world, and come to rest on the stones of the bridge in the woods he had tagged with his last name when he had been a boy.

He had rolled over the stones of the top of the bridge, and the Time Zombie had let loose one of the haunting screams of agony and angst that he was so prone to doing. Then, in a flash, he had vanished.

The stones were cold and the forest quiet. Everything around him was surely spooked by the unwelcome commotion he and a monster had just been engaged in. Billy kept his eyes closed and didn't think about the aches, the cuts, the blood. How dizzy he was. All he could focus on is how there might still be hope.

What if it had actually worked?

He opened his eyes just in time to see the flash above that was too bright and was not a star, yet it was falling towards him. Moving was hard, but he moved just enough. Billy's eyes focused on what had nearly sliced his head from his neck. It was straight up and the front of the deck was jammed into the rocks of the bridge on which he lay.

The skateboard had fallen from the sky. Ice crystals slid from it as they would off the wing of a plane. Frost laced tendril wisps rose lazily from it to join with the forest wind.

Billy knew where he was; he'd tried to skate off that old runoff tunnel bridge a thousand times. He pulled himself up to his knees and tried to focus in on the world. When his eyes suddenly became clear, there she was, standing and cautiously staring.

When he lifted himself the rest of the journey towards standing, he pulled his trusty skateboard from the center of the spider-webbed cracks it had dealt to the rocks.

Little Lissandra, and by little he meant as she'd been when he had been a ten-year-old boy. He smiled at her and laughed and muttered something to her which had certainly sounded insane. Something about how it had worked.

It hadn't worked at all, though. He had coaxed Lissandra into trusting him enough to talk. She said that she did know who Billy Purgatory was, that her Grandmother read the cards for his mother and a creepy Russian. That they had machines which had picked up on bursts of energy, a kind which was not native to our world. This had happened almost a week ago, and Billy knew that the girl couldn't be speaking of the energy he and the Time Zombie had kicked up less than an hour ago.

The Time Zombie had appeared in this new place already, and what he had been doing here, or who he had brought with him, was suddenly of a deep concern to Billy Purgatory. His concern grew more when the little spying girl told him that she had seen the Russian bring a boy back — a boy with a skateboard.

“There'll be men coming, mister. The woods aren't going to be safe for me or you.” Lissandra's eyes scanned, and Billy knew her well enough to know she was already planning her escape route back to Grandma's. “I gotta go.”

“So the woman, with the Russian,” he asked Lissandra. “What's she like?”

“Emelia Purgatory?” The girl crossed her arms and made a face. “She's evil.”

He had already known that he would have to be on the move, especially if Broom had some machine which could sense that he had just fallen into this world with the Time Zombie. “How are you so sure she's evil?”

Lissandra backed away from him a few steps, looked out into the trees, and then cautiously back. “Because she's one of the Satanic Five.”

II.

Dr. Luna sat in a chair across from Billy Purgatory's cage. Billy didn't know this guy, but by the out-of-place hair, the smoke smudges on his cheeks, and eyes red as if they still might pour tears, he had surely had better nights. “I look at you, and I know that you are him. It's still hard for me to contemplate.”

“Unlock this cage, maybe a closer look at me will help.”

“You're in there for your own safety. You're not of this reality, and having you wander around freely might have drastic effects on us all.”

“Yeah, what kind of effects?”

“You could change things.”

Billy stretched out his legs and folded his hands behind his head. “Maybe that's just what this place needs.”

“Trust me, Billy.” It was so strange for Luna to call this man by the name of his young friend. “This world has seen plenty of quantum screw-ups already tonight.”

“The redhead?”

Dr. Luna looked away for a moment. “Let's not…”

“Mine was blonde.”

The doctor felt he might better stand and end the conversation now, but he didn't. “Excuse me?”