His motherless children lay sleeping in the little room next to his. He closed the door after looking in on them. By the time he hit the bottom step of the casa, he already had his pistols strapped on.
The pipe was in his hand when he walked onto the porch. He looked down from the rise he lived upon into the woods and his town below. Capitan tapped the pipe against the post at the steps and watched his hand make the motions. He didn't feel like he had washed enough after touching the Wizard.
He refused to hold his children with those same hands before ordering them to bed. He wouldn't kiss them goodnight.
It had stormed so hard when they had shackled the old demon. The Padre could barely get out the holy word over the pounding of the rain. Now, there wasn't a cloud to be seen; the stars burned hot, as if it had never rained here before and never would again.
The ground was still muddy, still sloshed. He could hear the toads digging under the porch in the muck. Why the Wizard had chosen to come out of those caves by the ocean he had lived in since the Capitan was a boy was unclear. He had always strayed from the town and remained alone with his fish-wife, and none from the town bothered them there.
What had been done to him to make him curse this place?
Why had wives begun to fall ill and leave their children behind for the men to raise alone? Would his daughters fall victim to the same sickness, dying slowly if they found love and bore young from that union? Or would they live in fear of the curse and become filled with unclean thoughts, as those who had chosen not to marry to cheat death? Slowly rotting on the insides, like the two his deputies pretended to love.
He thought about the American in his jail with the old Wizard. He must be the most unlucky bastard to ever walk into Mexico. He was at least the unluckiest at picking towns to carouse within.
The Capitan didn't notice at first, blinded by the light of his own match ember as he lit his pipe. As the stroke of his hand extinguished the match, he saw them. Other fires springing up in the woods behind the jail.
Torchlights.
The rustle of horses.
Movement towards the Wizard.
The Capitan dropped his pipe into the mud and made for his saddle and horse just inside the barn. The many fires that surrounded his jail would guide his way.
II.
The Soldier saw the riders break the trees beyond the jail. He saw more torches than he did actual figures on horseback, but there were many of them keeping to shadow. There were six of them which came close enough to actually see. Their mounts were horses of darker shades. The clothing of the riders was deep navy blue, filled with patches, tears, and holes. They all had ratty cloaks, some with hoods that obscured their faces. Others didn't bother, or their uniforms were so old, the hoods had long since rotted away.
The Soldier had the most trouble making out their faces; he only got flashes of what made them abnormal. Heads were shaved and teeth were jagged. They were all heavily scarred across their faces and arms. One had an eye ripped out and did nothing to hide the open socket. Some were missing fingers. Nails were jagged and yellow, making them look like animals infected with diseases that gave them jaundice. For things so pale, they moved flawlessly within the night.
The Soldier came to reason that maybe he couldn't get good looks at them because he didn't want to get good looks at them. He found he would much rather look away from these men.
If they even were men.
Four of them lumbered forth, pulling heavy chains with hooks on the ends. The Wizard let go of his precious window bars and stepped back. He wasn't horrified as much as he was marveling in it all. “They've come for me. They've come to take me home.”
The metal against metal sound from the hooks was sickening, that scraping noise that makes your teeth ache. The Soldier wanted more than ever to leave this place. He closed his eyes for a moment and remembered how it had been the night she went away.
The Soldier had seen this happen before. It was happening again, and there was no ignoring the truth of that any longer.
“Wizard.” The Soldier had no idea why he said it so loudly. Perhaps he finally believed that the old man was what he claimed to be.
The Wizard turned to the Soldier as the tension was pulled on the chains. “Soldier.” He smiled now, imitating the man's call to him. The bars, then the window, and finally the entire wall began to groan and snap from the force applied to it.
“You're insane if you go anywhere with them,” the Soldier said.
The wall of the Wizard's cell gave way and the outside world beckoned to him. The horses and the dark men kept pulling the chains and the wall with it, heading back into the wood beyond.
“Soldier, now you can say with all certainty that you've seen something in this world that proves to you magic.”
The Soldier watched the Wizard's chains and cuffs and irons drop to the floor in a crash at his frail feet. The Wizard didn't hesitate to walk through the hole in the wall then.
“I lied!” The Solider wasn't sure why he tried to reason with the Wizard, but he did just the same. “I've seen magic before. The Devil took my love, the mother of my child. I didn't want to believe it, but I know now, seeing them out there with the torches. It was just the same the night she left.”
The Soldier watched him move out of the cell and into freedom. The wall of the Wizard's cell had crumpled mostly to dust where the boy had drawn the picture on it. Yet the Soldier found that, aside from a broken place at the bars which separated the two prisons, his part of the wall stood mostly sound. With some prying and kicking, he might too find escape, but the Soldier was uninterested now in following the Wizard towards the dark things riding at the wood line.
“I'll be sure to give regards to your woman when I see her, Soldier.”
The Soldier got a look at the lead rider, and this stopped any notion the tears might have had in helping him remember his lover and his boy, both long gone. He was speechless, face to face with a vision not of this world.
Her mare was black as pitch, and nearly indistinguishable from the trees beyond it. Her clothing was more sound than those of her companions; they resembled a type of armor made of a thick, deep maroon leather. Her beauty in the torchlight was unmistakable to the Soldier's eye. Long red hair spilled about her face, and even from so far away, he could see the emerald points of her fierce pupils.
She was a spook story. A witch. Maybe another sad man's lost wife, now sent on the errands of el Diablo. The motion of her arms and the call she let slip from her lips called her riders to her, and the night.
The Soldier's love had red hair that burned with the same fire under starry nights, like that one.
Just before they scooped up the Wizard and vanished into the forest, he heard the old man call back, “You're welcome, Soldier. Quite welcome.
~12~
RED DYE JOB
MARGOT AND THE PRIEST HAD SPENT THE NIGHT in the panic room with what was left of good ol’ Calvin. He'd screamed for the longest time and it started out fun, but the crying just got more and more annoying to Margot.
“Just shut up and die.”
The moonrise had given Margot a chance to get away from her creepy new teacher. He'd commanded her to prepare herself for travel, then mumbled something which she guessed was supposed to make him sound smart — something about moving out into the desert to conjure with the soil and note the alignment of the stars.
Margot wondered what his sign was.
It gave her a chance to hit Wanda's shower and get all the blood off of her. She could smell everything better now — the shampoo was almost powerful enough to knock her down. She moved more gracefully, and everything she touched felt alive in her hands. Blood was new and like nothing she had ever tasted before, but her taste buds sent signals to her brain of its delicious nature, which surpassed even chocolate.
Margot packed a bag of all of Wanda's best stuff. She grabbed her best pair of jeans and a rhinestone-emblazoned, kitty-face adorned, spaghetti-st
rap top.
“Damn.” She filled out Wanda's clothing great. She felt taller and she gauged her improved height from her perspective staring at herself in the mirror. It seemed like she was looking down on the old her. She'd always thought she'd heard that vampires couldn't see their own reflection in mirrors. Anastasia had told her that was just a story.
“I look good.”
She tousled her drying hair; the blonde was fading and her dark roots were showing. She didn't like this at all, because now, more than ever, she didn't want to look anything like her old self.
“I'm gonna have to work a dye-job somewhere into this vampire adventure.”
Margot admired herself more as the thought about her first boyfriend, back in Arizona when she'd been only sixteen. She'd thought she wanted a nice boy then and she'd found one. He tried his best to convince her he was tough in his black hoodies and combat boots. He had big talk of starting a band and becoming a famous rock star. He was a nice boy though, and was probably still a nice boy, and would never be anything other than a nice boy. She imagined him as a vampire with his hood pulled up and his fangs dripping with blood, like out of some old black and white monster movie.
“Poor Joe, he'd have never made the cut.” Margot smiled, glad she'd run away from him and her family and fled to the Salton Sea. “I was built for fang business.”
Margot took Wanda's charm bracelets, and her diamond stud earrings (or, they sure looked like diamonds), and as many gold chains as she felt fit the outfit. She stuffed the rest of the jewelry into the bag.
She wondered how far Anastasia had gotten. Margot figured that was the plan, to finish what they'd started. She waited on the front porch steps for the Priest to get back. She didn't last five minutes; she was just too wired, and intoxicated on life.
She wondered what would happen if she tried to get high? Anastasia used to say that the drugs passed from Margot to her through the blood. She was happy she didn't have to feed Anastasia anymore, even though it had been kinda nice to be so close to someone and have a friend who depended on her for something.
She couldn't really remember anyone ever depending on her for anything before that.
She left her bag of clothes on the steps, took her big purse full of knives, and decided to walk into town. She was wearing her big, black walking boots. The Priest dude hadn't said anything about her staying there all night on the steps waiting for him.
The streetlights were so pretty, even prettier than the stars. They glowed, and the light seemed to dance in big lazy lollipop swirls around the globes. Margot could smell beer and pizza dough, and even though the flower shop was all closed down and locked up, she could smell all those fresh blooms too. There wasn't much that was open this time of night in the little one-horse desert town. It was too far off the highway, and more of it was abandoned and boarded up than alive and vibrant.
When she turned the corner of Main and onto Olivares, she could smell the chemicals. The stench had been bad enough when she had been human, but now — phewww! Fancy perfumed conditioners and bleach-bottle blonde mix.
It took her the length of the street to force herself to focus on other things and filter the smells out. Though she couldn't control it well yet, she knew that one of the new things she would be able to master would be to train her senses on what was important and what was not. Letting what she didn't want fade into the background of her mind, and letting what she was after take center stage.
Then it happened. It was more delicious to her nose than the Mexican bakery had been when she was a little girl. It was fresh and hot and zipping through miles and miles of tiny pathways in the bodies it fed life to.
All that blood.
Margot smiled at her own fanged reflection in the window of Ms. Jo Nell's Hair Academy, then put that reflection into the back of her mind to focus on the eighteen sacks of blood who practiced advanced hair care techniques… and would be generally unprepared for just how difficult their walk-in dye-job was about to be.
~13~
17 BARROW & 26 PARKER
BILLY PURGATORY SAT IN THE CAB of the truck he'd found, and then technically stolen, from the desert. She had told him that the owner of the truck was dead now, so Billy guessed that he was sitting in his own truck, then. She had also explained to Billy that it was registered to a farm in Arizona that didn't realize they owned it, as their identity had somehow been stolen and cloned. The name on the faked title belonged to a gold miner named Micah T. Crenshaw, a gold miner who had died back in 1897.
Billy ran his fingertips over the dash like he was trying to calm a rampaging bull. “Yeah baby, you belong to me now.”
The truck was parked under a highway overpass in Nevada. Billy hadn't seen another vehicle for about four hours. He tilted his electric seat back just a little more, found a Tejano station on the radio, and decided to leave it there. The music was fun and he didn't understand much of what they were saying, so it was easy to tune out the heartache they were trying to spin.
“First class.”
He could see Anastasia's body lying across the backseat. She was covered in a coat the size of a blanket. What little light of day made its way under the bridge, filtered by the limo-tint windows, didn't seem to be bothering her a bit. She was sleeping like she'd had one big party last night. He watched the fabric of the big coat hiding her face from his view. It didn't move — she didn't move. There was no twisting, turning, or breathing. She just was.
The way she slept, she might as well have been laid out in a funeral parlor.
Billy refocused on the steering wheel. Anastasia hadn't asked him where he'd been or what had happened in the aftermath of their adventure with the Time Zombie, and she had related little information his way. She climbed into the backseat after they'd stared at one another for ten minutes and said, “I don't want to be a meth dealer anymore. Drive.”
She'd been quiet as a church bat ever since.
He'd crossed the desert alone for four days before he'd found Anastasia. He had landed back in the right world and the right time due to the science of Luna's time vest. The vest was as dead as a burned up Hoover when he crashed into the desert sand. It didn't make another blink, pop, or zap. Billy hadn't even bothered to move from the spot; he used his bag as a pillow and fell almost immediately to sleep. He had dreamed of zombies, and his mother, and kept seeing the face of the ten-year-old him flying through time and space. The kid had hold of Billy's skateboard in one of his hands and its identical twin in his other as the cosmos spun backwards around them.
Then, at one point, Billy Jr. just wasn't there anymore. He had worried in the dream that the kid version of himself hadn't made it back to his own time. But upon waking in the desert, pulling the wires and cabling of the inert time vest off himself that Dr. Luna had meticulously taped to his arms, he knew exactly where kid-Billy had landed.
It had to be that way, because that's how it had been for him in the past. He was climbing out of bed and wondering where his Pop had gone off to. He'd meet the ghost of a fortuneteller that night, and then Lissandra. The first time he'd remember meeting Lissandra, anyway.
Then he and…
He put her out of his mind as he began digging. He wouldn't even let himself think about trains.
When he was satisfied that the hole was deep enough, he buried the time vest. By the time he had the grave filled back up, the sun was high in the sky and the desert was scorching. He'd been in much worse places, in much more dire circumstances. He'd tied his T-shirt over his head like a turban and pointed himself towards the merest hint of the outline of civilization in the distance.
Then, he once again walked across a world that he had cheated science to return to, even though it still didn't want him around.
~14~
A TASTE OF TEQUILA
WHEN THE CAPITAN AND THE DEPUTIES burst into the jail, the Wizard and those who had spirited him away were long gone. They found the Soldier kicking at the crack in the wall on his side of the jail
's far wall.
The doors were unlocked to what had been the Wizard's cell. The Padre stepped in first, and it was very apparent he didn't want to. He let his wooden cross lead the way and mumbled in Spanish. The Soldier knew that it was complete and utter nonsense which sprang from the mouth of the priest this time. No one knew what to say.
None of the rifles trained on the Soldier, so he kept kicking at the wall. He had made the decision that this place, the jail and the town — maybe all of Mexico —was cursed. If they decided to shoot him or hang him for attempted jailbreak, that would be fine. They'd have to shoot him to stop his current actions though, because he wasn't going to stop kicking until he was free of this place.
The Capitan said something in Spanish, quiet but forceful. The deputies backed down and the padre exited out the cell door, just as he had entered. He didn't lower the cross and didn't turn his back on the hole in the wall.
Everyone cleared out save the Capitan, who went calmly for the lock on the Soldier's door with his ring of keys.
“I'd rather you just shoot me and get it over with. My sentence here is done, amigo.”
The Capitan opened the cell door. “Who took him?”
The Soldier paused. In seventeen days, the Capitan had not once let a word of English leave his mouth in the Soldier's presence. “Anyone in Mexico actually talk Mexican?”
“You can stop attacking my wall. It's the only one I have left.”
Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Page 17
