“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?”
The trooper stopped on the step and looked down and across to Dr. Luna through his smoked-black face mask. “Huh?”
“Your job — I guess I'm curious. I wasn't aware that it was an actual profession until just recently.” Luna gave a nervous smile — he felt it was a convincing nervous smile…
“Yeah well, I don't really consider that what I do…”
“Is it called henching? Does it make one who henches a hencher?”
“It's private security para-military black-ops, if you want to get into the job specifics.”
“Oh goodness — I haven't used an offensive term by referring to you ignorantly as a hencher, have I?”
“Dr. Luna, you been drinking?” The trooper took several more steps. “You're acting weirder than normal.”
Dr. Luna stared at the trooper's feet taking steps ever closer to where this would all head in a very dangerous place. “I made some root beer.” The metal cap on Dr. Luna's head had an assortment of probes and points radiating into the air from it, and made him look rather insane. “There's nothing weird about a little fresh root beer, now is there?”
Dr. Luna jumped when he heard the crackle of one of the radios worn by the troopers who lorded down over him at the landing. Someone was speaking quickly and excitedly in Russian. “Ivar!” They yelled down to their friend on the steps. “The house is locked down. We have to go!”
Ivar the trooper hesitated on the steps. Dr. Luna called across the room. “I've made enough root beer for you and the man in the cage if you'd care to have a glass before you have to run off.”
He pointed back at Dr. Luna. “You are sure that he is secure and staying that way?”
“Those cages were built to keep apes at bay. If a silverback can't break free from them, I have little concern that the drugged man you tossed into them can.”
“Stay in the lab, doctor. The grounds aren't safe.” Ivar began running up the stairs in double-time.
Billy Purgatory walked out from behind the chalkboard, crunching potato chips right about the time the gunshots from across the estate began to be fired. “Not bad, Luna. I really thought he was gonna come down here and shoot you.”
“You'd have saved me, right?”
“I save everybody — except the ones that I don't. What's with the funny Pope hat?”
“It's a brainwave sensor cap that I use to control the robot I keep in the plutonium hot-room. I'm wiring it into the logic circuits of my time vest to give me more control of where and when I travel.”
“Is mine ready to go?”
“Yes, we shoul
d get you strapped in.”
“Yep, sounds like our boy is causing trouble up at the main house. I didn't look for that ‘go to your room’ bullshit to last long with him — or me — or him.”
Billy tossed his potato chip bag on the table and spread his arms out at his sides. Dr. Luna took the time-vest, carried it to him, and began to connect it to the man. Billy watched as Luna began to buckle it up and connect wires, running them down his arms and taping the trigger which would set the jump in motion into the palm of his left hand.
“You're a stand-up guy, Luna. You could just as easily have told me I was crazy, like everybody else always has, or just ignored me and let Broom do whatever it was he wanted to do with me.”
“Perhaps we both have a higher purpose than any of that, Billy.”
Luna duct-taped cabling to Billy's back and snaked wires towards the power core cylinder.
“If that house is locked down, I gotta figure out how to get past Broom's army and get in there to grab kid-me.”
“There's a service tunnel that leads from the storage rooms under the hill. You'll find an elevator that will take you up into the house.”
“That's the kind of secret plan I was looking for.”
“You seem an adequately trained sort. I'm sure you can hold your own. The problem will be retrieving the boy.” Dr. Luna switched on the power-pack. It made the hairs on the back of Billy's neck stand up. “I do hope you can find him. I've taken quite a shine to the younger you.”
“Oh, I'll find him easy enough. I'll just head towards the racket. Hey Luna…”
“Yes.”
“You're a smart guy. Any idea what a Devil Bird is?”
“Not a clue.”
“Dammit.”
Dr. Luna checked all the connections one last time and then stepped around to face Billy Purgatory, still wearing that goofy science hat. “You're ready to go.” Dr. Luna extended his hand and Billy shook it.
“Thanks, Luna. Maybe we'll run into one another again. Somewhere in time.”
“Maybe we will.”
Billy grabbed his pack from the table, which held everything he owned across two realities, plus his mother's sword scabbard and his old-Billy version of his skateboard.
Goodbyes were over and Billy Purgatory had a new mission. He broke from Dr. Luna and began to double time it through the doors at the back of the lab, across the storage room, towards the secret tunnel which would take him straight into the heart of whatever nonsense he had kicked up in Purgatory Manor when he was ten years old.
V.
Billy wasn't ready for the elevator doors to slide open and reveal all the blood, goo, and entrails he'd have to step over to enter it. It stunk in there, and a woman had lost a leg — at one end a bloody and black rotted stump, and at the other end a dainty feminine black shoe. “What the hell did I do at the topside of this elevator?”
Billy thought back to his younger days. He'd had a real knack for causing trouble, but whatever he'd done to set this into motion — and this had his younger self written in blood and guts all over it — he'd really outdone some of his best work. “I still got it.” Billy smiled as the elevator doors closed upon him, hitting the Level Five button. He tried not to think too hard on how backwards it was for him to be complimenting himself, much less his younger self, on causing mayhem and destruction that had resulted in a young woman losing a leg.
Judging from the shapeliness of the discarded leg, if there was anything left of her, she was still hot.
“Least she's got that going for her.”
Billy could hear the gunshots and the moaning before the doors to the elevator ever opened. “Zombies. That stupid kid set zombies loose.” Billy shook his head. He hated zombies — especially ones that traveled through time. “Those had better not be zombies shooting those guns, or I'm gonna kick kid-me's ass.”
He had a plan: Find Broom and kill him again, because if there was ever anyone who deserved to die twice, it was that asshat. Avoid his mother, because that was just wrong and creepy. Grab the kid version of himself and jump out of this place without getting overrun by zombies.
When the elevator doors opened, Billy stepped out and headed towards the noise.
Somewhere, in the very back of what was left of her mind, the light coming from the opening elevator spoke much more enchantment to Mira than jumping from the shadows and latching onto the man who had just exited and was headed away from her down the hallway.
Dr. Luna had calculated what measurements he could from the read-out on the time-gun. The mannequin he had sent into the future with the clocks strapped to it had never returned, which was a bad, if not slightly exciting, sign. What adventures awaited him beyond the confines of the universe he had always known? There would be strange futures and stranger pasts surely, and if Billy Purgatory was to be believed, there were gateways to other realities. He would find many Earths, very similar to his own — and if he looked hard enough — places so dissimilar to where he now stood that they might resemble alien worlds.
He had run all of the numbers and set all of the dials. The cap of circuitry and probes he wore on his head was interpreting his brain patterns, and he was communicating with the computer-brain of the time-vest itself. His finger flipped the switch, and the many indicator lights cabled about his body burst to life. The strange power core which Broom had given him to use in his research promised to give him nearly limitless energy for his travels. He focused his thoughts on the future — he felt in his mind, and his heart, that he knew where his lost lab assistant had gone.
He hoped he was right.
“Mira, I'm so sorry that my recklessness put you in danger…”
He had been speaking the words aloud in the empty lab, hoping that wherever the girl was, she could hear him — maybe forgive him. He had let the words trail to a whisper when his gaze found her standing in the doorway which led from the storage room.
Her lab coat was missing the left sleeve. There was blood and she was injured. She took an uneasy step, her feet bloody and with no shoes. He could barely make out her face; she was standing in the dark spot before the bank of lights which hung down over the lab. Dr. Luna considered that she must surely be in shock.
Where had she gone and what had she seen?
“Mira, thank the heavens!” Dr. Luna felt as though he might be reduced to tears once again, yet this time they would be tears of joy. A joy he had never experienced before.
Dr. Luna heard the words of his young friend who had shared root beers with him in the lab. He vowed to never let things go unsaid between him and Mira. How could he? He'd been given the gift of her finding her way back to him.
“Mira, I was coming for you.” His hands indicated all the equipment he had strapped to his body from head to toe. “I was going to find you and rescue you from wherever my foolishness had caused you to vanish to.”
She took another step. Dr. Luna could see the beginnings of the short burst strands of wild red hair.
“I should have said these words long ago. I have always felt it, but I never had the courage to say them until you were taken from me — until I allowed you to be taken from me. Now that you're back, I never want to see you go again.”
Mira took another step, her eyes bloodshot and cold. There was blood on her cheek.
“Mira, you are more to me than any of this. You are more to me than science.”
Her mouth was opening as Dr. Luna took a step towards her and she began to slink out into the light.
“Mira, I love you.”
Her face was covered in streaks of blood, like war paint. Even her teeth were stained with it, a mixture of reds and blacks. It was mixed into her short red hair and spattered over the front of her lab coat. Dr. Luna's eyes grew wide at the horror of whatever injury had done this to her. Mira's eyes held no such horror or concern for her own well-being — they were lifeless and sunken, and the only color they contained were bursting capillaries near the surface of eyeballs. She pulled he
rself along on a leg which had a twisted foot and a gash running up it.
“Love…” Her voice was thick, as if sinking in blood and struggling to break the waves for one last gasp of air before it drowned.
Dr. Luna barely recognized the rotting facsimile of his lost love.
He spoke her name one last time as she sprang.
Dr. Luna tried to push the girl he loved off of him. There were too many wires and cables and too much tape for her to get wrapped up in or grab hold of, and the time-vest itself was heavy.
“Love…you…” She gurgled and hacked up black blood, which sprayed Dr. Luna's face. She pressed her cold lips to his as he cried out, and she sniffed him before she bit down hard on his lower lip.
When she finally pulled away, she had taken half of the skin around his mouth and part of his chin. He watched in terrified trauma as she greedily chewed at what she had stolen from his face.
Mira tore at him. Sliced at him. Bit him. Over and over again. There was so much blood.
He focused his thoughts on that other place, and ignored the sound of her frenzied feeding and all the pain it caused. Dr. Luna could feel his intellect slipping away, and the harder he tried to retain who he was, the faster it was leaving him.
He remembered that place though. He was focused on Mira's face. Not the thing which was successfully eating him alive, but the girl with the red hair that he loved so. He burned that memory into his thoughts, the smile she'd given him the first day she'd come into the lab.
He would focus always on that.
It was Dr. Luna who used the last bit of strength in his dying human body to pull Mira in even closer to him, wrapping his arms tightly around her. It was the Time Zombie who let out his first horrifying scream as what was left of Mira slammed into the glowing control orb at his chest, letting slip the science which sent the lab spinning from end to end as they vanished from what had been their world.
~11~
POISON IN THE WELL
THE CAPITAN OF THE POLICIA HAD HEARD the rain stop and pulled himself from a dream. In it, he'd been a farmer like his grandfather had been, and was standing in a field watching his children play in the sunshine. His wife smiled at him and waved, with the new baby cradled in her other arm. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the same old handkerchief his grandfather had used. The smile he wore on his face was one of a simple life and simple pleasures… the exact opposite of the frown which always came when he ran his hand over the empty side of the bed next to his. He remembered how warm it once was across that imaginary line, and the coldness of the space now burned his fingertips.
Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Page 16
