Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (41 page)

“They sent us back down the mountain so we could drink and fornicate and fight and eat and kill and lust, and without the fire we grew cold, yet detested ourselves and all others to such a high fashion that we could no longer cling to one another to stay warm.

“Pass us back the Promethean torch. It's too hot for you to touch. We have FIVE pits to set ablaze in a kinder and gentler Hell.”

~33~

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BILLY PURGATORY REALLY WANTED A CIGARETTE, even though he didn't technically smoke. He'd grabbed the half pack of coffin nails off the kitchen table in Pop's cabin and still wasn't sure why he had. He always carried a lighter in his pack, a Zippo he'd picked up in the army. It just made sense to always have fire somewhere close by, or that's what he'd always told himself.

You never knew when it was gonna come in handy, especially in a world that grew darker by the day. It seemed a reasonable enough ally. The flame, and what it could bring forth, had played heavily into many of the episodes of Billy's past, and there was no reason to believe that it wouldn't intercede on his behalf more and more. Fire, after all, was the devil's only friend.

He stood at the edge of the woods at the base of the mountain and stared through the cool night air. He looked across the cracked cement parking lot behind the Veteran's Administration clinic. The bikes belonging to the Lucifer's Circus Motorcycle Club were lined up in front of the loading dock. Mudder Kelroy and his gang were here, and they were, at least partially, trying to not draw attention to their presence.

The clouds were heavy and there wasn't a moon to speak of; aside from one flickering halogen light on the north corner of the building, it was a near blackout. The place wasn't huge, and looked forgotten and run down. The windows along the sheet metal walls in the back of the structure didn't offer any hint of light from the inside.

Billy knew that Anastasia was scanning the darkness with her vampire eyes. He bent at his knees and spun one of his skateboard wheels as he fished into the pocket of his military issued backpack. He rose with the lighter in his hands, leaving the pack at his feet.

“Those things smell disgusting, and you haven't even lit one of them yet.”

Billy disregarded Anastasia's words. “Sometimes when you're…” He stopped himself as he flicked open the Zippo. “Sometimes you want things and you don't know why you do.” He watched the flame dance up as his thumb turned the flint wheel. “Most times you don't want things, and you know exactly why you don't.”

“You're not him.”

Billy had the cigarette in his mouth. “I don't need you telling me that.”

She was further back in the woods, higher, and leaned against a tall pine. “Nostalgia has never served you well, Billy.”

“Yeah, Ana.” He watched the tip of the cigarette burn into light. “We can't all be lucky enough to hate where we came from and to be so easy with forgetting it.”

“What makes you think I hate where I came from?”

Smoke filed his lungs. It burned hot, but it felt good too. “You never talk about it.”

“I don't need to. It's the past, and I have separated that from my present. I don't need to smoke my father's cigarettes to have a remembrance.”

Billy wasn't looking at her, but he just knew that she had pushed her ass away from that tree and was crossing her arms. “You never stole your father's vampire cigarettes and smoked one out in the woods pretending you were him?”

“I couldn't imagine my father smoking those things. He was a pure vampire, a knight in the court of a vampire lord. What would he or I have to gain from human poison?”

Billy was quiet as he took a long drag. “Nothing.” He held the cigarette out as he extended his arm and then reached back in her direction with it. He let it dangle between his fingertips.

Anastasia appeared at his side and regarded the smoking roll of tobacco and paper.

“For our Pops,” he said.

She closed her fingers on it. Billy let his arm fall as she brought it to her lips, and he watched as the end lit bright. “I didn't know my father.” The words left her mouth wrapped in smoke. “My mother was chosen from your people. When I was born, I was handed off to the nursery, and then raised by the schoolmaster.”

“The ugly one we just chained to a tree?”

Anastasia nodded as she took another drag. “Yes, Uncle Priest.” She passed it back to Billy.

“So, you didn't think of him as your father?”

“I suppose I did. We all did.” She had her arms crossed again as Billy took a new puff. “He's all any of us knew.”

Billy held out the cigarette as the smoke shot from his nostrils. He drew a circle with the flame in the darkness. “Did they all die?”

Anastasia took a few steps forward. Her hair fell off her shoulders as she walked and stared at the VA clinic. “In the fire, you mean? When I killed my Master?”

“Yeah. In the fire.”

“No, the Priest lived, obviously. He was my contact and go-between in relations with your Satanic Five.” She was scanning the parking lot for any signs of movement — or doing a good job at pretending to. “My sisters escaped.”

“He was so scary that day at the sawmill when we were kids.” Billy smiled, thinking of him and Anastasia as children. Their ride together on the train, and her biting him for the first time, thinking she'd be able to turn him into a vampire. He was surprised how much the memory brought him joy. It had been terrifying then, but it had become such a good slideshow in his present. Looking back on it, it seemed to him almost innocent. “You'll never have to worry about him chasing you again.”

“Billy, when you left…”

“Which time?”

“Wasn't her name Elizabeth? Your gas station love.”

“Yeah, Liz with the tattoos and the pink short hair.” Billy had smoked a lot with her; not necessarily cigarettes, but they'd sure smoked.

“They were all dead. I had murdered them all and I was going to start a new life.”

Billy crossed his arms. He only had a few puffs left, and then it would be time to cross the parking lot. “Why didn't you stay with it?”

“It was so hard.” She looked back at him. “It was hard being one of you.”

He kept his eyes locked on her and let the cigarette fall to the dirt. He pressed his boot into it and ground out the flame. “I'm glad it was hard.”

He grabbed his pack and slung it over his back as he moved past her and out of the comfort of the trees. She watched him walk away.

Billy Purgatory would be halfway across the parking lot before she decided to follow.

II.

Mudder Kelroy took up half the hallway. He looked just as imposing and menacing as he had when Billy had been a ten-year-old boy. The two men faced off with one another for what seemed like a long time. Mudder's gang was behind him and Billy had Anastasia behind him. The scar across Mudder's face the direct mirror image to the one sliced across Billy's face long ago.

“You grow'd up, Billy Purgatory.”

“Yeah, I know more than a few that'd disagree with you, Kelroy.”

Mudder had a cigar in his teeth that he chewed on and used like a compass needle to stare Billy down with. “You don't look like you've had an easy time since I left you on the side of that mountain.” He pointed to Billy's shoulder and smiled. “Still dragging that skateboard around everywhere you go, I see.”

Billy glanced over his shoulder at the crest of the deck strapped to his pack and nodded.

Anastasia was suddenly standing beside Billy.

Mudder pulled his cigar from his mouth and pointed it at her. “She think I'm gonna kill ya?”

“She thinks everybody is gonna kill me.”

The old biker laughed and then jammed the cigar back in his teeth. “Keep her around for more than just good looks, kid. Lots to be said for that kinda offensive thinkin'.”

Mudder opened his arms as he strode forward, and before Billy or Anastasia could stop him, he had his arms around him. Billy felt the air pushed out of his lungs; the hug was like a polar bear crushing a snow cone stand.

Billy felt the bikers knuckles rubbing into his hair, then Mudder shook him at the shoulders, turning him to the gang to be presented like royalty. “Ulysses' boy ain't done nothing stupid enough to get hisself kill't yet.”

The thirteen assembled riders all approached with fist bumps and pats on the back. Billy didn't know any of them, but these guys knew who he was.

Billy caught the eye roll from Anastasia, but was directed back to the gang. “I told y'all Uly's boy was tougher than a got'damn boot on a cobra.”

All the smacking and congratulating by the motorcycle club ended, and the boys made their way down the hallway, towards the waiting room Billy and Anastasia had crept past. They'd seen one nurse and had heard a doctor lecturing an old vet about his blood pressure pills from behind a curtain.

Anastasia gave Billy and Mudder Kelroy space. Billy looked back to her, then into the eyes of the biker. “Where's my Pop?”

Mudder's laughing and temporary good cheer faded as he tossed the stub of the cigar into a laundry hamper in the hallway. “Your Pop…”

“Look, I know it's not good. We went up to the cabin and saw all the crazy stuff he'd been writing and how he was living. I saw what he'd built up the mountaintop.”

“Don't get all riled, I ain't gonna lie to you. Ulysses, he ain't good.”

“But he's alive?”

“Just barely.” Mudder looked down. “How'd you know to come here?”

“I saw Pop's wooden leg up in a tree.”

Mudder laughed. “You should'a heard him. He wanted me to climb that tree and get it down.”

Billy half-smiled. Sounded like Pop through and through. “I looked for a hospital.”

“Well, this is just barely one. There ain't been a good hospital around these parts for years.”

“Since they closed the one I was born in?”

Mudder's eyes narrowed and he stared down the boy “So, you've been digging up your past?”

“More like knocking it down with sledgehammers.”

Mudder looked back down the hallway, towards a group of little rooms at the far end. “There ain't nothing you can do for him, and you shouldn't a'come here. It's dangerous.”

“Dangerous? I can't remember a time in my whole damn life that wasn't dangerous. I'm gonna see my Pop.”

Mudder grabbed his shoulder again and clamped down on it hard. “You listen to me, Billy, and you listen up good. Ulysses is give out, he pushed hisself too hard. He tried to open up a gate, and I'm betting he at least partial like succeeded. He's been struck by lightning, and his kidneys are gone, and that ain't even going into how bad he's tore up his lungs with smoke and his liver with shine.”

“What the hell was Pop trying to do up there?”

“He was looking for what happened to you, boy. Didn't nobody know what you done or where you went.”

“It's a long story…”

“Only damn part of the story that matters is that you're here now, and still breathin'. Ulysses ain't said a word since I got him here, and far as the college boy doctor can figure, he's in a coma he ain't never waking up from. He's hooked up to a dialysis machine, and he ain't never gonna be in a place where he's gonna be off it.”

Billy looked back to Anastasia. She was listening to all that Mudder was saying, but her face was expressionless. “I gotta say goodbye.”

“No, you don't,” Mudder said. “Every second you stay here, or anywhere for too long, puts you in more danger. I don't know if you've been keeping up with the current events, but you're wanted by the FBI, and every other law enforcement jack off that wants to impress ‘em.”

Billy shook his head — what the hell? “I haven't done a damn thing to be wanted by anybody? This is bullshit, Mudder.”

“You're right, finally — it's all bullshit, and it ain't really the FBI that's chasing ya. It's The Five. They've infiltrated and turned every swinging dick and convenience store camera in America against ya.”

“What's really after me then?”

“They released what they call The Hounds out of a prison they was being kept in called Atlantis Ranch.”

“Hounds?” Billy remembered the map of Texas Pop had drawn on the back of the photograph of him and LBJ from the war. The star outside Austin, written in Pop's ballpoint scrawl.

“Demons, Billy. You gotta git.”

Anastasia was walking towards them, Billy could hear her cowboy boots on the clinic's linoleum. “Demons? There are demons?”

“Sure as Cougar Brown'll take a drink'a corn there are demons — and you don't want no part of them catching ya.”

Anastasia stayed a couple of steps back and didn't engage, but she listened intently.

“So, where the hell do I go? If the whole country is looking for me and the chase is being led by demons?”

“You get your ass right on out of here, Billy boy. You get off the grid and pretend it's the war all over again, because it is. It's worse than the war ever thought about being.”

“You want me to run and hide?” He looked at Anastasia, and her face still betrayed nothing.

Run.

“You go find a hole and you stay in it. When the time is right, you'll have to come out and fight. Until then, you're a ghost.”

Mudder slapped Billy on the shoulder again and strode past him towards the waiting room and his crew. “Promise me, Billy. I know you're too much like your damn hard-headed Pop, but you listen this time.”

“Mudder!” Billy yelled it down the hallway after the biker lord, and then lowered his voice when he realized just what a desperate boom he had made in the world. “You know I can't do that. It's not the Purgatory way.”

Mudder stopped and looked back to Billy. His eyes were cold, and had his body not been so strong and determined, he would have been crushed under the seriousness of his own tone.