Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (28 page)

It was as if the place was haunted by the ghosts of conspiracy theories past.

They seemed to be making a relatively straight shot down the center of the structure. Lissandra looked back to see that the stories-high crack of the big doors illuminated by half a moon seemed small now, and ever further away.

The flashlights stopped up ahead and focused together on a railing of rust and chipping yellow paint. Lissandra heard a lot of banging, and then the muzzle flash from several pistols illuminated the haunted barn, like lightning on a dark and stormy night. The sound of the gunfire echoed around the vast empty room like thunder.

“What are they shooting at?”

Moon looked back to Lissandra; reflections from the gunfire lit her face. “They're just impatient. They want to have everything ready when we come walking up.”

Blam! Blam!

“Have what ready?”

Lissandra heard one of the soldiers call back. “Mistress, we've accessed the control circuits.”

“Mistress?” Lissandra rolled her eyes and knew that Moon could see her do it, even in such low light.

“It has a more menacing ring to it than Commandress.”

“I have never met another person who was so full of themselves.”

Moon grinned to Lissandra as they were about to join the soldiers at the railing. “Lissandra, we both know that's not true.”

And Moon was right, it wasn't true.

The yellow metal railing made a rectangle around three sides of a vast metal plate in the floor. Lissandra tried to rationalize the size; four eighteen-wheelers could park on the plate side by side and still have room to spare. The metal railing fence did not extend across the side of the plate where Lissandra and all her captors now stood. Several of the soldiers had a control box open — the locking mechanism of the door which was lifted up off the control box had taken all the gunfire.

Moon gave a nod and one of the soldiers reached into the box and pulled a lever. There began a rumbling noise beneath the floor. The sound of machinery which hadn't been set into motion for many years groaned reluctantly to life. Lissandra watched as Moon stepped onto the ridiculously large metal plate in the floor and the soldiers began following her onto it. With a soldier on either side of
her, Lissandra was lifted up and set onto the section which was slowly sinking beneath the rest of the barn's floor.

Soldiers began to break up and take positions around the perimeter of the enormous descending lift. Moon walked towards the center, and Lissandra's new bodyguards coaxed her to follow. Moon turned to Lissandra with a slightly excited look on her face. “Isn't it fantastic?”

“Isn't it an elevator?”

“No, not this.” Moon drew circles in the air with her hands, pointing down at the lowering metal plate they rode on. Then her hands went straight out to her sides and her fingers pointed as she did a little spin like a ballerina. “This!”

“I don't mean to sound all unimpressed…” Lissandra didn't finish her sentence as she took note that pockets of the soldiers which had taken forward points were assembling really big guns — like rocket launcher big guns. “What are they…?”

Moon had stopped her spin and followed Lissandra's outstretched arm to the soldiers arming themselves for war. “Oh, don't worry about them. We're just not really sure what we're going to find down here.”

Lissandra looked up; the plate had sunk about forty feet into the ground. The walls that it slipped past were plain, smooth, reinforced concrete. “How deep does this thing go down?”

“Deep.”

“How deep?”

“Really, really, really deep.”

Lissandra gave up asking. “What might be down here that merits bazookas?”

“Dinosaurs.”

“Bullshit.”

“You're starting to talk more and more like a Texan every minute — and yeah, you got me, there aren't any dinosaurs. We wouldn't need such heavy artillery for that.”

Lissandra crossed her arms and looked back up again. She couldn't make out the hole they had stepped into any longer. All she could see were the concrete walls seeming to rise out of the floor in the flashlight beams — even though she knew just the opposite was happening.

“I don't mean to be a buzz-kill…”

“Then don't be.” Moon was gleeful, and would have been completely at ease and unfazed had she not been so excited to be doing whatever really wrong thing it was that they were doing. “Can't you just enjoy it? When you woke up in the woods behind that bar this morning, reeking of squirrel droppings and unanswered prayers, could you ever have imagined that tonight you'd be in Texas about to embark on the adventure of your life?”

“Never in my wildest hopes and dreams.”

Moon held up her fingertip and Lissandra imagined biting it off and blood shooting up so high it'd squirt God right in the eye. “This, mind you, is only the first of many adventures to come.”

The flashlight beams of the soldiers were suddenly re-directed front and center at the forward concrete wall. Lissandra watched as a yellow circle began coming into view, and then as the elevator plate moved down, it was revealed that it was the numeral 1 inscribed in a circle.

Then a metal framework began, and the top of a vault door as big as the elevator began to form.

“We've reached Level 1, Mistress,” the soldier at the forward apex called back to her.

“Yes, I can see that, thank you.”

“Finally.” Lissandra began to walk forward; dinosaurs or not, she couldn't wait to get off this thing. Moon put out her hand and stopped Lissandra's forward motion.

“We're not stopping. We keep going down.”

“But Mom, I have to pee.”

“Hold it. I am.”

Lissandra crossed her arms again. “How far?”

“We're going all the way down. Level 5.”

“Moon, whatever is down here had better be pretty damn awe-inspiring.”

Moon just smiled. “Would I have brought you all this way just to disappoint you?”

“I don't even know where all this way
is
— beyond a dead president's ranch in Nowhere, Texas.”

“Lissandra, you're at one of the most magical places on the planet Earth. This is where secrets that even you can't see in those cards of yours all go to die.”

“We really are going into Hell, aren't we?”

Moon drew one of her swords as the big yellow 2 began to roll into view.

“We're definitely going into Hell-adjacent. LBJ called it Atlantis Ranch.”

~23~

L
OCK
B
UMPING

BILLY PURGATORY FIGURED OUT that the army base he'd been stationed at in Colorado had been closed down. He'd spent the rest of the forty-five minutes and a roll of quarters calling everyone he could remember he had once known there. People had moved on, and he and Anastasia took the truck away from the highway again and down out-of-the-way roads. The place where they'd finally stopped was an old wrecker yard with a combination foreclosure and smiling real estate agent sign nailed onto a fence post.

Rusting old cars and a locked metal building, down a drive and through a small stand of trees, all sitting and waiting for the Hog-Bitch to rumble past them, and rumble past it did. It was cold in Colorado, and Anastasia didn't like it here. Too many fir trees and bad roads. The whole place smelled like camping, and she hated camping.

“I'm not camping.”

Billy sighed as he stopped the truck in front of a high metal roll-up door. “I already told you, we're not camping.”

“Good, because I'm not camping.”

Billy climbed out of the truck and belched loudly. Anastasia was still disgusted at just how many onion rings he had gorged himself on. She followed his motions through the windshield and watched him bend down, then vanish, in front of the door the headlights beamed into. Anastasia heard chains rattling and watched a long minute be recorded by the digital clock on the stereo display. She
almost made it another minute before sighing loudly and opening her door to step out.

“I hate it here, it's cold.”

“Will you get back in the truck? I can't concentrate on what I'm doing with all your complaining.”

“Why can't we just drive and get out of Colorado? Maybe head south a bit. I liked the desert, it was warm.”

“Because it's almost daylight, Anastasia, and one of us, for liking warmer climes so much, doesn't tan well.”

Anastasia closed her arms to her chest and stared down at what he was doing. “You are seriously trying to pick that lock?”

“If you'll shut up for thirty seconds, I am going to pick this lock.” He had some piece of metal he'd either found, or crudely fashioned, jammed into the padlock. “This is a very delicate operation, and it requires a steady hand. Stand back for finesse.”

“Because you're so good with things that require what is implied of that word — which I'm sure you don't even know what you're saying, and you just heard it somewhere.”

“Anastasia, get back in the truck.”

“What? And miss Billy Purgatory teaching me how to pick a lock?”

“I am an expert lock-picker.”

“I see that, and I'm rapt to learn all your secrets. Consider, what would poor defenseless me do if I were ever trapped and had a padlock to contend with if I were ever to be allowed to escape?”

“If that ever happened to you, you'd be wishing you'd shut up so you could concentrate on your work. Lock-picking is a skill, but you wouldn't understand anything about that.”

“Oh, so I have no skills now?”

“You got plenty of skills, sizzle-britches.”

Anastasia could feel her nails extend. She considered how much Billy's open neck would look like one of Mrs. Suzanne's pie fillings were it to spill out.

“I don't know what you're implying, but if it has anything to do with sex, and you're equating such to my only skill set, then you are sadly mistaken.”

Billy jammed the pick into the lock harder and pulled against the chains as he tried to hit the internals just right. “I was not
implying anything. I just called you an annoying name because you were annoying me.”

Anastasia took a step back and tried not to listen to the voices in her head. The ones telling her to just kill him and take the truck off to a quiet paradise which would be all her own.

“Besides, for me to be implying something like you're accusing me of implying, it would have meant something that ain't true.”

Anastasia stared down at him in wonder. Had he just, in his own strange way, agreed with her? Had he given her a compliment?

“Honestly, you weren't that good.”

Of
course
he hadn't given her a compliment. She knew her eyes were glowing rings of amber fire now. Anastasia was becoming so angry she'd soon be glowing in the dark.

“Oh, which part wasn't good for you? The spooning afterwards, where you went on about your dreams and talked about your feelings?”

Billy punched the steel door with his fist and yanked at the lock. “That is not what happened.”

“You were a scared little boy before we did any of that, and you're a scared little boy now. Now, you're even worse though. At least then you thought you actually wanted something.”

“I hope you don't think that all this had anything to do with me wanting that! Because I got plenty of that before, and I'll get plenty of it after.”

Anastasia raked her fingernails over the hood of the truck and watched the paint peel off it in slow, lazy curls. “Well, I'm glad you've figured out that much of the plan anyway, because I can assure you of one place that is definitely closed for business.”

Billy laughed. “As if I'd even want to shop there again.”

Anastasia looked back at the frost hanging off the trees, blanketing the rust and wrecked cars. All she had to do was to start walking. “It's much more high class than you're used to, I'm sure. Plus, there's a strict No Spooning return policy.”

Billy jumped up and got in her face. Anastasia wore an evil smile and let out a more evil laugh.

“Just because we had an actual conversation after we had sex,” Billy said, “doesn't mean that anyone did any spooning — you don't
even know what that means. Because we faced each other the entire time, and you seemed pretty damned interested in share time. You didn't look away until you tried to double-cross me.”

He was so close — and so angry.

“Who double-crossed who? You left me hanging upside down in the jungle like bait.”

Billy banged his fist into the hood of the truck, denting where Anastasia had just scratched up all the paint. “Did you mean it?!”

“Which part? Go ahead and accuse me of being a liar, and seducing you so I could use you for some nefarious plot. Do what you always do and call me a lying harlot.” Anastasia's fangs slid into place as she screamed at the top of her lungs, “I dare you!”

Billy pulled his fist from the hood of the truck. His fingers opened and he ran them into his hair as he looked down. “Did you mean what you said? That you'd kill my parents?”

Anastasia could hear his heart beating; it was a hot and frantic thump, and to her ears, it was running faster than all the belts turning and the pistons firing under the hood of the running truck. She closed her mouth and turned away from him. She stared again at the path they'd wandered from the road, and there again was that pull.

She wasn't sure if she had meant it or not.

She heard Billy pulling on the chains and the padlock again. In all the noises he'd ever made, and he made a lot of noise…all of the stupid things he'd said to her, and there had been so many stupid things…

In all of it…

Anastasia bent down to crouch beside Billy at the lock. She didn't look at him, she just put her hand in his and pulled it from him. She twisted her wrist, and the lock went from something which kept things secure and safe to useless pieces of nothing which no longer served any purpose in the world.

She let them slip from her hands as she rose to her feet and walked back to the truck. “It's almost daylight.”