Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (46 page)

It was an election year after all, and this pervert looked like he come from California.

Sheriff Rupert looked him over. Seemed a normal enough fellow at first glance, wearing a black suit. The short white hair kinda gave
the pervertdom away, though. It wasn't long like a hippie's, but cut a little too prim and proper to pass mustard.

Sheriff had got the call over an hour ago: man was just standing out in front of the school staring at it. Blatantly disregarding the fact that there were signs posted everywhere to keep away. The Sheriff had found the front gates open and hadn't seen a car.

Idiot was just standing there, staring. He didn't even quit staring when Sheriff Rupert walked right off to the side of him. “Listen feller, I ain't sure how stuff happens off in Hollyweird or wherever you come from, but we don't take kindly to people we don't know trespassing and staring down a school ‘round here.”

The man looked at him. He didn't bear any sort of expression that anyone could easily pin down. Sheriff Rupert figured it was the dope. Which was always a good thing, made ‘em slow and easy to take down.

“So we can do this easy like, and you can just put your hands behind your back while I cuff ya, or we can do this the hard way. My arthritis ain't playing along today at all, so I can promise you that if you rile me, I'm gonna have to beat on ya.”

“You're the sheriff, then?” His voice was clean and his accent didn't sound like nobody the sheriff had ever heard. The man nodded towards the gold star Sheriff Rupert had pinned to his shirt.

“Did all that sparkle give me away so quick? Ain't like I'm undercover.”

“Sheriff, there are two very dangerous felons who are hiding in your school building, and the less you disrupt my investigation the better off we will all be.”

The Sheriff looked at the school and then pulled at his salt and pepper beard. “Dangerous felons? Like who?”

“Billy Purgatory and the girl he runs with, Anastasia.”

It took the sheriff a second, but he had surely pulled that fax from the FBI himself just a night ago. He and Hollis had laughed about the name — it was a hard handle to forget. “That ex-army fellah with the post-tragic stress complexities?”

The man in the black suit nodded. “The very same.”

Sheriff Rupert started to take a step towards the building, then looked back to his patrol wagon. He pulled his beard again, looking
at the man. “Hold on now, just who the hell are you, and how do you know any of this, and what business is it of yours?”

The man in the black suit kept staring at the building. “I'm Special Agent Brau Ahl'Drow of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Listen, that's all fine and honey baked ham, but what are you doing just standing out here if you got a couple a' dangerous perverts that's took my school hostage? Shouldn't there be tanks and dogs and helicopters swoopin' in?”

“We actually have already tried that tactic. Not as effective as you might think it would be. My force is here though, an entire legion. They had to make a stop in your picturesque town to gather the armor they'll need.”

“Shouldn't I be calling someone, official-like…” Sheriff Rupert looked back towards his car. Calling someone at the state police was probably a good idea; if this got out of hand it could turd float his whole election.

Then the Sheriff just stared. Every woman and child who was either old enough to walk good or not too old not to be able to was marching in through the gate. The women he went to church with and passed in the grocery store, and the kids he waved at from his patrol wagon, running around the farms and down at the lake. Face upon face that he'd known for years and saw every day.

Sheriff Rupert cussed under his breath and then held up his arms. “Hey folks, we got a situation here and I'm gonna need you all to step back and head home. Keep your doors locked…”

They ignored him, each and every last one of them. Marching lifelessly through the open gates and forming into lines in the courtyard silently. Sheriff Rupert turned and headed back to Special Agent Drow and found a woman he didn't recognize standing with him. She had hair pulled into leather braids down her back and eyes black as coal lumps.

“Oh, so I get the fat one?” She turned up her nose at the Sheriff.

“Yes, you'll be riding Sheriff here into battle. I hope he works out better for you than the blonde you chose before.”

“Billy Purgatory is no fire oracle.” She was sizing the Sheriff up and down like she was picking out a rump roast at the supermarket.

“Hey, listen here. I don't know what all these kids and lady folk is doing here, but this is dangerous. I'm gonna call up my deputies and get them rounded out and sent home.”

Special Agent Brau Ahl'Drow put his arm around Sheriff Rupert and turned him towards the crowd of women and children. “Billy Purgatory is not a monster, Sheriff. He has very human weaknesses. While this is a man that's been in combat and is used to man versus man, he doesn't have the stomach to murder women and children.”

“I don't like this. I don't like the FBI. Tell my people to go home.” Sheriff Rupert looked into Special Agent Drow's eyes and found them to be just as black as the eyes of the woman, who was moving ever closer towards him.

“If I tell them to go home, our dear fluffy-scruffy bear, then who exactly will my legion use as puppets to storm the castle?”

Sheriff Rupert ran his eyes over the faces of his neighbors' wives and children. Their eyes were black.

Sheriff Rupert tried to pull away, but Brau Ahl'Drow's pervert grip was far too tight on him. He tried to call out, but the woman took hold of his face and then grabbed his jowls and forced his mouth open wider than he would have ever imagined was possible. “Wider, you fat sow. Pretend I'm something delicious and fried in lard.”

Brau Ahl'Drow had the back of the Sheriff's neck in his grasp. The woman pressed her hand into Sheriff Rupert's mouth as he squealed. Then she forced her arm down his throat as he hacked and gagged. “What's the matter? Don't you like the way I taste?” She smiled devilishly as the Sheriff's knees gave and slammed into the ground.

She forced her other hand into his mouth; his jaw cracked and threatened to snap. “You're turning blue and I haven't even gotten the other arm down your throat yet.” She pressed in and his eyes welled shut with tears. He could feel her hands in his stomach.

The woman with the black eyes touched her nose to his. “The worst part is the head.” He felt her hair press into his upper lip and he screamed to himself. “This is what your whore mother would have felt, had you been born the gargantuan, lazy waste of blood and piss you so predictably blossomed into.”

Sheriff Rupert swallowed the demon woman's head whole in spite of himself. The demon pulled herself all the way into him like a snake swallowing its own soul.

~39~

T
HE
M
ISSION
O
R
T
HE
P
LAN
O
R
W
HATEVER
S
HE'S
C
ALLING
I
T

HE REACHED INTO THE VENDING MACHINE with the broken glass and plucked out a bag of hot fries. He ripped open the bag as his boots crunched the glass that littered the floor. His mind was flooded with possibilities, and possibilities weren't normally the things that flooded his mind. As he crunched on the fried whatever-it-was sprinkled with Cajun spices, he moved into the hallway to take the long way back to the library.

He thought about all that he had seen. He and Anastasia had come to some sort of weird realization in a jungle in South Asia, and they'd ended up not killing one another and instead had sexy times. He knew he couldn't trust her then, and she tried to pull the double cross on him before he had gotten his pants good and zipped. He wondered if he could have been happy just running off with her and not calling up the Time Zombie to search for his mother.

He wondered now, that sexy times had happened again, if that wasn't still the best plan. She liked that word,
plan;
he had never really given too much thought to planning anything. Anastasia was a big fan of planning though, and she seemed to be actually pretty good at it. The only plan that Billy had ever come up with was going
back in time to try to find his mother, hoping that he could change the way he grew up.

Technically, that had been a bad plan from the get-go. He hadn't really factored in that it wouldn't be him growing up again, but the back-in-the-past him. So what would have happened to the him-him that was him all grown up who went back into the past? Luckily for him-him, he had not really gone into his past, but an alternate universe that was sort of his past that his younger self had gotten pulled into also, when he had first met the Time Zombie on the baseball field. If he hadn't have gone into that alternate reality thingy, then he might have erased him-him from the back-there-him timeline.

Or, the back-there-him that was really kind of the over-there-back-there him.

Billy crunched hot fries and savored the salty-cayenne clarity. “Time travel is way too confusing.”

He decided he dodged a bazooka round where time travel was concerned. Aside from him setting all kinds of screwy things into motion, like his mother being evil and a member of the Satanic Five over there, and now the Satanic Five here being after him.

That goddess chick, Artemis, seemed pretty pissed off about what he had done too.

“At least I got to kill that mouthy Russian again.” Billy crunched once more and thought about what a dick Broom had been.

Now, he had a cassette tape of some guy named Hoof Scratch Hatchett who had secret codes in the lyrics, and he was supposed to be hiding out and waiting for the Devil Bird to find him.

Anastasia was mad at him for wanting to find Lissandra on the way to try and sneak into Mexico, but he couldn't help that. Lissandra was the only person who ever made any sense out of the instructions the goddess handed out. Billy knew that he didn't understand a word that antler-wearing broad said. Anastasia, as smart as she was, hadn't seemed to really tune in on the transmission either.

“Pop's dying alone in some clinic, and Mom is still on the run, and I don't know if she's good or evil.” Billy dunked the rest of the bag of hot fries into a trash can in the hallway. “Yeah, you really fixed things up good.”

Billy rounded the corner and froze when he saw all the kids standing at the other end of the hallway. There was a whole tribe of them, breathing heavy and staring up at him. Farm hicks, cool kids, three skateboard punks, popular looking kinda girls with their arms crossed: it hadn't mattered what clique they were from, as they all smiled at him.

Those smiles and the black eyes were the school colors that tied the unlikely mob together. Girls pointed and the three boys hit their skateboards and pushed down the hall towards Billy with their mouths opening wide.

Billy held up his arms. “Hey you kids, what're you doing in school? It's summer, you nerds.”

The skateboard kids were fast and swarmed around him. He couldn't believe his eyes as they all kicked their boards up into their hands and commenced to beating on him with them. The strikes were hard, harder than a bunch of punk kids should have been able to hand out, and they were targeted for maximum effect.

Billy took one to the knee, then one to the jewel-factory, and finally one right across the chin. He fell back, and it was everything he could do to not completely go down. He rolled back up to face them off again.

“Okay! What you just did, them's my moves and I don't like amateu—”

Smacked right across the face with a wooden deck. He heard the girls scream out an advance marching order, and the whole mob was headed his way. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the blood fly from his busted lip.

Billy dodged the next strike to the side of his head, but still took a jab in the ribs. That one had hurt; these kids were playing for keeps. Billy pushed himself up in a leap and barely dodged three strikes to the legs. When he landed, he grabbed the trash can and swept the line with it, sending the kids bouncing into one another and falling like bowling pins as the rest of the group barreled down on him.

He tossed the trash can at them, making it bounce off the ground and go rolling. The mob ran right into it, and it sent the lead girls down to the floor hard as the skateboarders pulled themselves up.

Billy stared the closest skateboard kid down. He couldn't have been more than fifteen. The words that came from the kid's mouth were not those of a typical skateboard punk. “We are going to tear your soul from your body and defile it as your dead eyes watch.”

He pushed away from them. Kids didn't talk like that, and he wasn't into having anything on him defiled — especially his soul.

“Black eyes…” Billy was in a full run and locomotive'ing himself towards the library. “Demons.”

“Run away, Purgatory! It only makes it that much sweeter when we catch you. Blood sautéed in fear is most delicious.”

II.

Anastasia was standing outside the doors to the library and deciding whether she had calmed down enough to go back in. Billy Purgatory had made her angry yet again. Every time he made her angry it was more intense than it had been the previous time.

Or maybe she was angry at herself?

“I can't believe I let him touch me.” She pulled at her hair as she tied it back and decided to take a stroll up and down the hallway to think before she gave him a piece of her mind. “That's what I should have given him a piece of in the first place.”

She had told herself that remaining with him was a bad idea — the worst idea. There had been plenty of chances to sneak away. He was in far over his inflated head, and this was not her war. She could have easily snuck away and forgotten that he existed, living in happy obscurity for the rest of her days while the world of the humans went to dust.