Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (20 page)

“Her name was Lucinda. She was blonde.”

“What are you talking about, and what point are you trying to make about Mira?”

“The point is that she was stolen from me and dragged off into some other time and place by a monster. A monster who travels through time and space.”

Dr. Luna leaned forward. “Horrifying.”

“That it was. So, you're not the only one of us who's lost a girlfriend to a quantum mistake. The difference between my situation and yours is that, in my case, the mistake was that a monster was allowed to have such powers in the first place.”

“A monster? What do you mean by monster?”

“I mean a grade-A psychotic, undead creature, who is strapped down with cables and circuits and is able to move at will through time and space.”

“I wasn't aware that animation of the dead was possible — it's most definitely not practical.”

“Yeah well, I know a Russian who'd disagree with you, Luna.”

Dr. Luna considered the words of the grownup version of Billy for a long moment. He again felt, that he should end this conversation before it got any more out of hand.

“Why are you telling me any of this?”

“I'm telling you this because I'm pretty sure that Broom is using you to create the monster that I'm talking about.”

“I don't work for Mr. Broom. I'm employed by your mother — and what sort of person does it make you that you'd believe your own mother capable of creating such a horrible creature?”

“It makes me definitely practical.”

Dr. Luna stood. “This is madness.” He paced left, then realized the door was right and changed course.

“Luna, before you write me off, answer me this: was that big giant time-shotgun that sent your girlfriend off to Neverland your idea or Broom's?”

“His idea was something more compact and integrated to the actual time-naught. Regardless, I will not have any more of this discussion. I'm sorry…”

“Was it a time-vest?”

Dr. Luna stopped in his tracks. “How could you know that?”

“How do you think that I got here?”

“You arrived here because we had an accident with the old prototype — the Time-Mirror machine.”

“Nope, I kidnapped the Time Zombie and came here. You know how a zombie travels through time and space?”

Luna turned, cautiously. “No, I can't say that I do.”

“He wears a time-vest, Luna. Now, do you think you can pull your head out of your Bunsen long enough to really listen?”

“What you're speaking of is not possible. You were pulled here when the boy tampered with the mirror.”

“He ever actually
say
that he tampered with the mirror?”

“No.”

“Yeah, because that kid's a great liar and an even greater avoider. I should know better than anybody.”

“Even if this is all true…”

“You ever meet your boss's kid before Broom brought him back?”

“I had not. I don't leave the stables much.”

“And the kid with the skateboard never left that house?”

“I knew she had a son, and I just assumed.”

“Since munchkin-Billy has been back, has a day gone by when he hasn't been down here bugging you?”

“He likes root beer.”

“Climb off your fluffy cloud, Luna. That woman didn't give birth to either one of us. He's from the same place that I am, just a different time.”

Luna began walking down the hallway, the wheels in his head moving a lot faster than his loafers. “So the vest works?”

“Better than you know. Tell me you've already made one.”

“I've made two, actually — neither one is fully operational.”

Dr. Luna stood at the cage and regarded heavily the ring of keys in his hands as Billy kept questioning. “What does ‘fully operational' mean?”

“Well, the power core on one is unstable — it might be good for one test. I don't fully trust the logic circuitry on the other — it lends a sense of randomness to areas of science which beg for precision.”

“Sounds a lot like me. Now, for the love of all things right — let me out of this cage.”

Dr. Luna slipped the key into the lock and turned. He offered a hand to hoist Billy Purgatory out of his prison.

Billy and Dr. Luna remained in a handshake for a moment. Billy nodded to the scientist before he broke their grip and began to stride down the hallway. Luna looked over the man that his innocent and slightly daft young friend would one day grow into. Dressed in military garb, and possessing a body which seemed to have had no choice but to grow strong, the man's form was a collection of scratches, knots, and scars. Whatever lay ahead for the boy who was Dr. Luna's only friend, it would certainly be a journey of sacrifice and pain.

“Billy.” Luna spoke as he followed Billy out of the storage room. “The blonde, Lucinda. She's lost to you with no hope of ever recovering her?”

“She's gone, Luna. Never coming back.”

“With what you've seen about life, time, reality? How can you be so sure?”

“It's not being sure — it's a prayer.”

“You'd never want to see her again?”

“Not how she'd come back.”

Dr. Luna had already shed far too many tears for Mira that night, but the pain in his heart flared up again. He feared that Billy might be right, but what if he wasn't? What if he could help this strange man from another place to rig the time-vests to work so that they might both be able to search for things they had lost?

“Luna, that's not saying that my story is your story. It's not saying that you'll never see the redhead again.”

III.

“It could drop you anywhere. When the energy overtakes you both, it will, in theory, recognize that you do not belong here and send you back to the right reality. I can't promise geographically where that might occur — or if it would even be on Earth.”

Dr. Luna and Billy were pushing open the big vault door that the scientist had just typed in the key code for. “I mean, we'll set the controls to their limited capacity to correspond with this location. They aren't precise, though, and they haven't been tested. It could dump you both into the middle of an ocean, or straight into a volcano.”

Billy grunted; the door was heavy as a school bus. “We're gonna have to take our chances. I need to get the kid back, hopefully to his own time, and then I'll make sure he's taken care of.”

Dr. Luna stopped and wheezed before speaking. “Oh, you won't be together. You weren't planning on being together, were you?”

“What do you mean, we won't be together?” Luna had stopped pushing so Billy did too; he figured the door must be cracked open enough.

“If you do end up back in that place you came from, the universe should right itself. Recognizing that you don't belong at the same point in time together, it should deposit you back to the point of origin from which you left.”

“So, this whole trip was one huge mistake and waste of time?”

“Well, if you look at it from that perspective, then yes, quite literally.”

Billy made that face that he made when he was annoyed with the universe — which is pretty much the face he wore at all times, just more animated. He and Dr. Luna stared into the vault at the two mannequin torsos which stood from one of the metal work tables. Each wore a vest that was all too familiar to Billy — the heavy buckles and straps which held the control orbs onto the front. The heavy cables and junctions of circuits.

As Billy walked into the room and took a stroll around the table, he looked at the metal cylinder which ran up the spine of the vest — one on each. Billy considered that he'd never really had the luxury of being behind the Time Zombie to notice them before — it was always coming at him with mouth snapping and claws swiping.

“What's this tube up the back, Luna?”

“That's where the power rod is placed. I have an experimental core to place into one of them, the limits of which I've never tested.”

“You sure it'll work?”

“Again, I haven't tested it and I didn't create it.”

“Who did?”

“It was given to me by your friend, the Russian.”

Billy sneered; he hated that dick. The most uncool part of this whole world — and there were tons of uncool parts about it — was that he wasn't dead over here.

Dr. Luna decided to move the conversation along. “The vest we're going to outfit for you is a much more conventional nuclear power supply.”

“Oh joy.”

“I can't promise its continued reliability. In fact, I can almost assure that it will only be good for one trip.”

“So if we screw this up?”

Dr. Luna began unfastening one of the vests from the plastic torso. “Wherever you and the boy land, unfortunately, is where you land.”

Billy went to work on the straps on the other vest. “Well, just do your best to set this thing to get us back to our reality, will ya? I'll take care of the rest. I've got even more to do now that I know the things I know.”

“You know, Billy. If the younger version of you is actually the younger version of you from over there, it means that you jumped over here as a boy.”

“Yeah, I've been thinking about that. The Time Zombie snatched me up the first night I ever saw the thing, and I could never remember what happened to me. I'm pretty sure what's playing out right now is all that.”

“What you said is important to consider. You didn't remember where this monster took you. You had no recollection of it, and you're only now learning about it in a secondhand fashion by you being here to witness it.”

“What are you getting at, Luna?”

“Well, if the younger version of you returns to where he's supposed to, we already know that he will not remember being here, or anything that has happened to him here. He will not perceive any time or memories lost. Not until it's pointed out to him, and you just stated that you never remembered and are only just now realizing.”

“Yeah?”

“You are subject to the same phenomenon when you return. Even if the universe puts you back into place, there is a high danger that you will not have any memory of being in this place as well.”

“Dam up a skunk's ass. Seriously? Then how the hell am I supposed to warn my Pop? What if my mother is just as evil and Satanic Five-y over there as she is over here? What good is it knowing any of this stuff if I'm likely to not remember any of it?”

Dr. Luna carefully lowered the vest onto the table. “You might remember. You are older and have a much keener grasp on your
world. You're cognizant that time and space travel is possible. You did come here with purpose, and you took steps in your world to make the journey.”

“But it's not one hundred percent that I'm gonna remember, even considering all that stuff you claim I've got going for me.”

Luna took the other time-vest out of Billy's hands before he got too hot under the collar and inadvertently dropped an unstable mini-nuclear reactor onto the concrete floor. “I do have a suggestion.”

“What is your suggestion, science-boy?”

“Right before you press the button and make your jump, focus your mind as intensely as you possibly can on someone who has made an impact on you over there. Someone that you are likely to seek out — or one who is likely to seek you out. Use the image of their face and what they represent and let that imprint itself on the memories of this place and what you've learned.”

Billy saw her face, smiling at him in his mind's eye.

“So, you thought of someone…?” Dr. Luna looked to Billy, took in the look of disgust on his face, and let his words trail off.

“Yeah, I got her.”

“Well, she seems a good candidate. By your expression this person obviously left an impression.”

“You have no idea.”

Dr. Luna had both the vests folded into his arms and began the move to the vault door. He seemed full of purpose again, and Billy was slightly comforted that he seemed to be focusing all his energies on the science behind all of this.

“Luna, what're you going to do with the time-vest I don't take — the tricked out one?”

“I'm going to get it as far away from here and Broom as I can. Hopefully, the monster which has plagued you and the boy can never come to pass.”

“No, what are you really going to do with it?”

“You might not want to find your lost blonde, Billy Purgatory, but I desperately want to find my lost redhead.”

IV.

Three of Broom's black armored shock-troops stood at the railing, machineguns in hand, and stared down at Dr. Luna, who had a metal helmet of his own strapped to the top of his head as he sat at the root beer bar and worked a soldering iron on a circuitry board. Luna raised his gaze to them as they called down to him for the second time.

“Doctor, we need to come down into the lab.”

“It's not really safe right now, these chemicals…”

“There's been a situation at the main house. We just need to check and make sure the prisoner is still a prisoner.”

Dr. Luna looked over his shoulder absentmindedly. “Oh him? He's fine. I just gave him a bag of potato chips.”

It was true that Billy Purgatory had just been given a bag of potato chips, which he was keeping very still, as he was the rest of his body, hiding in the shadows behind the chalkboard full of the equations that Luna had drawn to figure out how to get him home.

Dr. Luna watched the trooper being making his way down the steps. “It's just standard procedure, doctor. We're not entirely sure what is going on just yet.”

“Oh, I completely understand. Last thing you need is that guy getting out.” Dr. Luna produced a nervous laugh — he felt it was a convincing nervous laugh — but it was still pretty nervous.

“Exactly. Not to intrude on your work or any of that.”

Dr. Luna scanned his work table, looking for anything to defend himself in case this went really bad very quickly.

“So, how is that whole henchman thing?”