Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (29 page)

Billy didn't say anything as he pushed up the door and then sat beside her to drive into the abandoned machine shop.

II.

BILLY HADN'T GOTTEN THE DOOR OF THE OLD GARAGE rolled back down into place yet before Anastasia was out of the truck and crossing the new environment. She saw a door, didn't know where it led, but she walked through it just the same. She pushed it lightly closed when she'd reached the other side and locked it. It had been an old office, with desks, antiquated computers, and stacks of yellowed papers. Moving further into the room, she crossed through another door and found a storage room of shelves with a cot against a wall.

She closed and locked that door too.

Pulling a painters' tarp over her body, she closed her eyes and found darkness.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been asleep, but she knew it had been longer than a day. The tarp made a crinkling that had corrupted perfect silence as she kicked it off herself.

She still had the taste of that sugar coated cherry in her mouth.

Loud music that spoke of death and heavy guitar echoed from every corner of the garage. The hood of the truck was up, and there were tools and rolling work carts everywhere about its perimeter. She found Billy by following the trail of sparks which sailed to the concrete floor from the undercarriage of the truck.

He was almost completely beneath it, using a welding torch. The acetylene rig which powered it was sitting atop his skateboard, which drifted lazily towards the vehicle as he took up the slack in the fuel lines that extended from it. The only part of Billy which was actually visible from Anastasia's vantage were his boots, toes pointing up towards the roof, sticking out from under the back bumper.

She crouched down and called to him beneath the truck. He wore a welder's cap and heavy goggles. “Billy, I need to talk to you.”

Billy was focused up on whatever it was he was applying heat to.

“Billy!”

Nothing.

Anastasia took hold of his ankles and pulled hard. Billy Purgatory came cursing and rolling into view as she crouched over him. He
shut off the torch and stared at her through those stupid goggles. “What the hell?”

Anastasia grabbed a wrench from the floor and threw it as hard as she could. It sailed across the garage and impacted the radio, which had provided unyielding and annoying soundtrack. The music ended as it crashed to the floor into a thousand plastic bits.

Billy rose up from the wooden rolling creeper he had been lying on. He took off his cap and ran fingers through his hair, which only made it worse, then raised his goggles off his eyes to his forehead.

“So, you finally woke up?”

Anastasia ignored his question. “Are we in this together?”

Billy gave her a confused look. “Are we in what together?”

Anastasia was on her knees and swept her arms out, the exaggerated motion meant to indicate much more than the interior of the garage they were within. “This. Whatever all of this is. Are we together in this?”

“Like, buddy-cop movie together?”

“However you rationalize it — yes. All of this!”

Billy set the welding torch on the floor and crossed his legs, still sitting atop the creeper. “I hadn't really thought about it like that.”

Anastasia pushed hair back from her face, annoyed. “Why not?”

Billy looked at her, and to his credit, seemed to really be trying not to annoy her on purpose. “I don't know, Anastasia. Maybe because all that's come out of your mouth since I picked you up in the desert was ‘Just drop me off at the next state line' or ‘I'm not camping'.”

“What if that's the wrong way to look at things?”

“Are you saying that you've been looking at things wrong?”

“I…” She wasn't going to let him make her angry. “Perhaps, yes.”

“What is it that you're saying, exactly?”

Anastasia decided to take, for her anyway, a really giant leap of faith towards Billy-logic. “What became of vampires, and whatever it is the Satanic Five ultimately want, that is the ‘it' — and for whatever reason, we seem to continue to be pulled into all of it. You and I.”

“And the Time Zombie.”

“Yes, and the Time Zombie.”

Billy only said it to make Anastasia say ‘Time Zombie'; he still liked making her do that. “See, my mission is real.”

Anastasia pointed at him. “No. That part is wrong. You've never had a mission.”

“I sure as Hoover Dam did too have a mission.”

“No, stupid, you had a desire. You had a fantasy.”

“Well, I called it a mission.”

“How'd that work out for you, Billy?”

Billy thought about it,
really
thought about it, and finally nodded. “It wasn't worth a kiss on a pole-cat's ass when it all went down.”

She wished she had something to tie her hair out of her face — and clean clothes after a shower. Anastasia refocused. “Are we partners?”

Billy leaned forward. “Like what kind of partners?”

“Like the kind in those cop movies you were just talking about. The kind who, under no circumstances, ever have sex with one another. Ever.”

“Oh.” Billy leaned back against the bumper of the truck. “Well, if you put it like that, then that sounds a lot like what we've got going on, yeah.”

“Then if we're partners, I'm proposing we drop the word ‘mission' from our vocabularies.” Anastasia pulled the hair out of her face and clutched it in her hand behind her neck as she spoke, using her grasp as a temporary ponytail holder.

Billy looked her over from his reclined position, her in her tight jeans. With her leaned back, struggling to control her dark hair with her hands, her top was pulled up just enough that the tiniest hint of her stomach came into view. She had a pretty bellybutton.

Billy blinked and shook his head. Who looks at bellybuttons?

“Are we good with that? No more missions?” Anastasia took her hands from her hair and waved them in the air before Billy's eyes. Her shirt fell and the bellybutton went back into witness protection. “Billy?”

“Present!” He rose back up. “Okay, whatever you say.”

Anastasia smiled, proud of herself. She might have actually gotten through to that rusting junkyard which existed where his brain should have been. “What we need, is a plan.”

Billy looked up at her. “New word:
plan
. I'm in.”

She drummed her hands on his boots and then rose from the floor to stand. “Now, you finish whatever it is you're doing, and I'm going to start thinking about ‘the plan'.”

Billy watched her walking away — swaying away. She moved in the most interesting ways when she was happy. Billy was starting to think Happy Anastasia was even hotter than Evil Anastasia. The concept confused his brain a little — okay — a lot.

She was pulling her hair into a knot as she crossed the garage. There was no reason he could fathom that the simplest things she did could speak to his brain like they were speaking to it now.

“Hey, Anastasia, just to be clear and stuff.”

“Yeah?” She didn't look back, which from his current perspective was just dandy.

“What if, hypnotizingly — or whatever — those two cops had already had sex?”

“If that happened, you better hope they enjoyed it more than a bag full of cocaine and donuts, because they're never gonna frisk each other again.”

~24~

A
DJACENT

THEY BLINDFOLDED THE SOLDIER at the entrance to the mine and didn't bother leading him in — they just pulled him. In the dark and bound, it didn't take much force at all for him to slam hard to his knees and then dragged along the gravel floor. It took even less for him to fall down and be pulled like a sled. How that boy had loved that thing. The Soldier had saved what he could from his other job during the summer to buy it.

The richest boy in town didn't have such a fine sled as his boy did when winter came. The Soldier would smoke his pipe and watch the boy run up the hill out behind the homestead with it. It'd been his daddy's place, before the pox had taken him away faster than it had seemed justified for it to do so. The Soldier knew enough about farming to get himself in trouble, but she knew a lot about tending the grounds when the snow all melted away.

Aside from the corn and beans and potatoes, she kept a big herb garden. Everyone came to her for sprigs of mint and thyme and oregano. The woman who cooked at the hotel said it made the dinners she made fancy, and it was worth the cost. Word got around, and the older women would always come out on Saturdays and walk the herb garden with her. Dirt on her hands and her red hair tied up in a tight bun atop her head…

“They sure love what you grow,” he had said to her one night, when he found her out looking at the stars after the boy had gone to sleep.

“It's not what I grow they love. It's why I grow it.”

The Soldier hadn't known then what any of that meant. He'd just kissed her and wrapped his arms around her. “I love you with such intensity that sometimes I feel like I might choke.” He pulled her hair free and let it fall down her shoulders, under the stars. “Why won't you marry me?”

“I can't marry you.” She kissed his lips to quiet him. “I was promised to another when I was just a girl.”

The Soldier pulled back from her warm lips and studied her face. He could barely see the freckles that began at the edge of her cheeks in the starlight. “If you love someone else, then why are you with me?”

She placed her fingertip to his lips. “I never said I loved him.”

The Soldier was hoisted from the hard ground and the knots of the rope were cut. The pain let up a little as his hands were freed, but it didn't last —he was thrown into a stone wall. He sank down it and could feel the blood seeping from the many cuts he had been given by the sharp rocks. He heard the iron hinges creak, and when he pulled away the blindfold, the dark cloaked men were already gone.

There was torchlight burning, mounted on the stone wall of the shaft beyond the door of iron bars that had sealed shut. The cell had been carved from the rock and all, save the wall to his left, were hard mountain stone. He was separated from a similar chamber by the iron bars that made up the left wall. His ears only took a moment to adjust and pick up the sound of the grizzled weeping which came from that cell.

The Soldier went to his knees, and he fought against the pain in them to grip the bars that separated the chambers. There was the Wizard, sitting against the far stone wall of his own cell, huddled up like a dog that had been beaten for no good reason. Broken and with his tail between his legs.

“I don't know if it's good luck or bad luck that I'm locked up next to you again.” The Soldier's words didn't stop the old man from crying. “See what you done to us with your schemes, Wizard?”

“You should have run, soldier.” His voice cracked through his bawling. “The promises of the dark lord are nothing but lies.”

“I ain't gonna cry with you, old man. You should'a known better than to trust in Satan.”

“You don't know what you're talking about. What could you know of the ways of the lying master of this place?”

“I know plenty about lies that sound too good to be true. I know lots more about people that trust in them and think they ain't got no choice in the matter.”

The Wizard looked up; they'd cut his face good. He had two fresh scars that ran in diagonals across it and marked him with an “X”. He didn't care about the blood that ran from the wounds, or the tears that mixed with it.

“You're not here for me, are you, Soldier?”

“I ain't here for whatever bad deal you made, no. I'm here because of a deal someone else made that I didn't do nothing about.”

“It was a woman, wasn't it?” The Wizard leaned forward. “A woman betrayed me too.”

“Yeah, well, look at you. What woman wouldn't betray an old buzzard like you?”

“Mine was married to the sea.” He ran his fingers through the gravel he sat upon. “I should have never let her talk me into bringing her onto the earth. Her tongue was salt.”

The Soldier pulled himself to his feet. “The war took our boy.” He moved to the rust colored iron door that held him too close to the wizard. “She ran off to marry another so she'd forget.”

The Soldier pulled on the door. The bars were old, but sound. “She said I reminded her of him. My face looked too much like his face.”

“Faces can be changed.” The Wizard ran his fingertips over the scars that had been cut into his own face.

“She found something to marry that didn't have a face.”

The Wizard laughed. The Soldier was beginning to hate the sound of laughter. “Your woman was a witch and she married the devil.”

“I didn't used to even think there was one.”

“The red haired woman told me that the devil didn't exist.” The Wizard was still hacking and coughing. “She has a face, and when you stare into it, you know she is not speaking lies.”

The Soldier gripped the bars as the dark woman with the burn marked face stepped out of the darkness. Her black eyes stared into him. He wouldn't let himself focus on her eyes, and kept watch over her broken pale lips as they moved.

“She likes your horse.”

Two of the men followed the woman out of shadow and one of them turned a key in the lock.

“Your path is not to wait here with the old magician while we stoke the fire to roast him over.”

The Soldier could hear the wizard's insane laughter. “Burn these bones for the glory of the father you've all forgotten. Truth will singe me, and I will wait for you all to join me in Hell. We will mock you as you come clambering off Charon's ferry.”

The hand of the burnt-faced woman tried its best to caress the Soldier's face. “Do not listen to his insanity, he knows nothing of Hell.”

The men pulled the Soldier from the cell into the mine shaft. “If he did, he would see that he's already in Hell, and there is no boat ride beyond this place.”