“Tell me you have a gun?” The Priest had his vampire stare locked onto her.
Anastasia hissed and showed her fangs.
The Priest laughed. “Fangs to a gunfight. I thought you had learned your lesson last time.” His hand flew and he struck her hard across the face. It sent her flying in the direction he had sent Billy.
As she pulled herself up from the ground, she looked to the tree. Billy was gone. She rose to her knees and swept her arms around; she could hear Margot and the humans she had with her, and they were close.
She sprung to her feet, but the half-second she took to scan for Billy once more was all the time the Priest needed to knock her back into the dirt again. “You should stay down. I am already bored with putting you back in your place.”
The Priest walked a circle around her; she could hear his pointed noise sniff the air. “The boy ran. I suppose you provided a decent enough distraction so he could get away. Odd, I didn't foresee him leaving you alone with me.”
Anastasia pushed herself from the ground with her palms as she heard the vampire schoolmaster call into the darkness the way they had come. “Go around the wood and up the trail to the street. The boy is on the run and I want him before daylight. Take the humans and acquire him.”
She could hear Margot calling back from the trail as she was pulling herself up. “You promised that I could cut her open!”
“Go quickly, we haven't much time.” The Priest put his shoe to Anastasia's back and pushed her back down to kiss the earth. “Normally, I would not let one so new torture one of my former students as she asks. But Anastasia, I'm prone to give in to her request, simply because I want the reminder of the failure you've become erased.”
“She gets anywhere near me with one of her knives we'll see who's the failure.”
He chuckled. “I am going to enjoy beating you into submission, so you will beg for her to slice out your heart and end your life.”
“It's not going to work. They're a lot angrier than you think, Priest. Handing my bones and Billy Purgatory over to them isn't going to buy back your life.” Anastasia pushed up against his shoe and the elder vampire pressed down with even more force.
“It's worth killing you just so word doesn't get around that I raised you. You've spent so much time chasing that human that you're thinking like one of them. Your disgrace is my disgrace, and the end of your existence will even your debt with me.”
Anastasia could feel the ground shake before she heard the noise. His foot pressing into the small of her back attuned her well to the vibration before it cut the air, and the Priest turned towards the noise. At first, he must have surely thought it was thunder.
She turned her head and could see it topping the hill perfectly well in the darkness Just as she was blinded when the tens of millions of candle watts of power burst forth light, she knew that her former schoolmaster was blinded as well. It left the ground and started down the path to which she was pressed against and the Priest stood, a thundering blur of too many decibels and too much light. She could hear the music over the sound of the ridiculous engine — Led Zeppelin.
Anastasia no longer fought Uncle Priest's foot pressing her into the ground, thankful that this is how he had chosen to pin her down as the solid plate steel front bumper of The Hog-Bitch slammed into the vampire master and rolled over her body, taking him with it.
The impact of the truck slamming into the oak tree was like two trains colliding.
She finally pulled herself from the ground that had held her prisoner. As the spots cleared out of her eyes, she saw the flailing and heard the screaming of the vampire, who had been the speck of undead flesh caught in the center of the collision.
His hands banged on the bumper and scratched at the hood. He was still blind from the lights that wrung the headache bar over the cab. Anastasia watched Billy lean over and send the passenger door swinging free for Anastasia to step up to. She pulled herself shakily into the truck; Billy had both hands on the wheel and was bobbing his head to the drum solo. He pressed his foot into the gas ever harder and the old tree tipped backward a little, with the Priest caught in Billy's trap.
“Hey, flip this lever for me.” Billy tapped on a knob by the gear shifter.
She spoke, coming out of her daze. “What is it?”
“It's the 4-wheel drive. I thought maybe you'd want to do the honors.”
Anastasia closed her fingers on the lever.
She stared into the face of Uncle Priest and took a moment to remember how he looked, wearing the mask of pain he had so loved to paint on others over the course of his wretched existence.
“He looks good like that.” Anastasia engaged it and all four tires dug into the forest floor as the tree began to tip with the screams.
V.
Margot almost didn't stick around, if only because of the smell. She was a lot more curious than horrified at what she was staring at. It didn't freak her out much at all — it was actually kinda cool. She had blood underneath her fingernails and she was doing what she could to clean them with her tongue. She hated getting goop all over her nails, especially when they were freshly manicured.
It was kind of why she had never liked eating barbecue.
Her teacher, the Priest, was tied to a really fat oak tree by chains and winch cable. They hadn't skimped on the chain or the cable; there was so much of it he looked like a metal mummy. His head was down, and he dripped a long sticky trail of blackened blood down his chin. The wraps of cabling stopped at his waist, and that's where the body of the Priest stopped too. He didn't have anything left of him below the belt.
The tree hadn't tipped all the way over and was still firmly rooted into the ground. A slight backward slant and a lot of scraped bark, this tree was ancient. In the hundreds of years it had been growing rings, it had probably seen some pretty freaky stuff and lived through it all. Margot figured it would make it through this a lot more effectively than her teacher had.
She knew that she shouldn't look much longer, but the whole scene was just so damned impressive. “No wonder she's all hot for that guy. Look'it what he did to you.” She could feel that pull to flee to the dark in her mind; it meant the sun would be coming up soon. She would creep into that tunnel below the bridge where she had seen Anastasia and the skateboarder standing. The Priest had told her that the tunnels beneath had belonged to the vampires — Margot figured they could again.
She had been close to moving and making her way to darkness when the head of her teacher rose slowly and his eyes opened to take her in. He must not have had the energy to struggle, because he didn't. Walking away from this one was definitely not going to be an option. He just looked at her.
“You don't have any legs.”
“Pull me down.” He said it with the same ambition and force that Margot had found in the interactions with drug abusers from her former life. Bedazzled, unable to focus, and in slow motion. “I need the blood.”
“This is probably as good a time to have this talk as any. I've been doing some thinking, teacher, and I've decided to go out on my own.”
“I am your master.”
“Yeah…” Margot made a sweep with her eyes over the dead leaves of the forest floor and wondered just where his legs had gotten off to. “I never was any good at school, and I don't think I'm gonna be any better at it now.”
He could barely speak. “I command you.”
“I think I'm just gonna head off on my own and get my vampire GED.”
“The sun.” The Priest looked through the trees at the sky as it began to turn from black to purple. “Soon it will rise.”
“I've gotta be going now. That sunshine thing and all.”
“Send the humans back for me.”
“I ate those guys.” Margot slung her purse of knives back over her shoulder and winked. “Hang in there.” She hit the trail towards darkness as the purple above began to grow orange. “Don't worry about the vampire race. New blood is gonna turn things around.�
�
“I made you.” He was crying, she could hear him as she picked up the pace to beat the sunshine. It made her want to throw up blood, all his boo-hooing.
“Much appreciated, you old goat.” His cries echoed through the forest after Margot as the rays of the sun struck the tree. “Now that I'm made, just die.”
~32~
MEMOIRS AREN'T…
Anastasia had been following Billy Purgatory up the side of a mountain for hours, sore from her showdown with Uncle Priest, but alive. The truck had only made it halfway before the trail got too steep and narrow to accommodate it. Billy had pulled it well off the road and into the woods and camouflaged it to the best of his ability — which Anastasia had to admit was not bad.
She still felt it was a bad plan to go looking for Billy's father, but after what he had done the night before to save her, Anastasia kept most of her objections to herself. Perhaps she owed him this? Some type of closure.
That they were forced to travel at night due to her vampire limitations made it slightly annoying, even to her. She could see just fine in the dark, but Billy had his moments where traversing the narrow passes got tricky. At points, she could tell that he was lost.
“I thought you said you'd been here before?”
“I said that I knew the general direction.”
“No, you said you'd been here before, and you obviously don't know the general direction.”
Billy pointed towards the peak. “The general direction is up, Anastasia. I'm just trying to find the best way to get there.”
“How long has it been since you've seen your father?”
“A long time.”
“How can you even be sure he's up there?”
“I'm not sure, that's why I'm climbing.”
Anastasia pointed towards a trail obscured by several boulders. “It's that way.” She started walking and didn't wait for Billy to comeback with any arguments. He eventually followed and stayed quiet.
The cabin was not quite the highest point, but it was close to it. Anastasia had been atop mountains before and didn't bother with the view. She enjoyed the cool wind in this place, and found that odd as she generally wasn't a fan of the cold. She noticed the occasional boot track, they seemed fresh enough — two distinct pairs. The more relevant and recent left a very large print. “You and your father are about the same size from what I remember.”
“Yeah.”
“He's had company, someone big.”
Billy shined a flashlight beam into the bootprint. “Gotta be Kelroy.” He then aimed the beam at the front door to the cabin and made his way.
Anastasia put her own boot into the print. “Or a yeti.”
He was knocking on the door and calling out for his Pop when Anastasia reached the door and brushed past Billy to turn the knob and let herself in. “I thought you had to be invited?”
“Yeah, and I thought you were smarter than a B-Movie.”
Anastasia looked around the place. It was basically a single room. Billy flipped some light switches, which offered no illumination, and then she saw him striking a match at the kitchen table and lighting a railroad lantern. Broken furnishings and an idle woodstove. A kitchen filled with jars of homemade liquor and a tiny bed shoved into a corner. “This is pretty much as I imagined it would be, except…”
Anastasia brushed her fingertips over the typewriter on the kitchen table and then began walking amongst the boxes of typed manuscript, which were everywhere. “You never told me that your father was a writer.”
Billy followed her, holding the lantern. “That's because I had no idea.”
“Well, he's definitely prolific. He also seems to have the drinking part down.”
Billy sniffed the air and caught the odor of tobacco. “Pop's been smoking again, too. That's never a good sign.”
Anastasia made a slow circle around the room, navigating the boxes of typewritten pages. There were thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands. “What does it all mean?”
Billy sat at the kitchen table next to the typewriter and reached into one of the boxes. Anastasia watched him come up with a ream of pages. Billy looked them over, flipping through a few, then brought them closer to the lantern and began to read out loud as she listened:
“The Last Manifesto of Ulysses S. Purgatory
“This is the first and last thing I will ever write. I am not a scholarly man. I spent most of my life as a soldier, then an anarchist, and finally a father.
“I would like to write here that I was a good father. I can't really say that to be true. I was not a good father. I tried to try and I somehow got him raised, but I'm not sure that I imparted any real wisdom or values on my boy. For this I can honestly say that I am not sorry.”
Billy paused for a moment, lost in thought to the words, and then began anew:
“There are very few men in our age who know the truths that I know. Billy doesn't need to know them.
“And you don't want to know them.
“You'll all be a lot happier when the few of us left are dead. Then nobody will ever know about the deal we made. You still won't even know about it when it's done and has come to pass.
“The war is over. The good guys lost.
“I think maybe it all started in the name of balance and fairness. Best intentions.
“What it became turned out to be the total and absolute death of the human spirit.
“We passed the fire back which Prometheus stole for us. There were no gods left to hand it back to, though.
“They had long ago fled.
“Mankind passed the holy matchstick back to FIVE greedy and wanting hands. They assured us with their crooked tongues that they would take care of everything.
“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~
IF YA GOT ‘EM
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?”
Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Page 31
