Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  “They'll never stop coming,” Medusa whispered. “They'll never stop.”

  “And I'll never stop murdering them for you,” was Emelia's new promise to swear.

  At the same time Emelia closed one hand to the sword, she found Medusa's hand with the other and closed her fingers into those of the monster.

  Many nights passed, and Emelia learned the way of the sword.

  Many days passed, and Medusa prayed to anything listening for forgiveness.

  “Can't you see how ugly I am?”

  “There is not one blemish.” Emelia had long since given up lying.

  “I rot of gorgon stench.” Medusa could go on like this for hours. “I am death.”

  “You are the bringer of it, but in so a giver of life as well.”

  Medusa's face was as beautiful as Emelia remembered - perhaps more so, yet this was a truth that Emelia could not make Medusa believe.

  Her skin was not cracked. It was ghost white and in need of the sunlight, but lovely all the same. Her nails could use a trim and her hair was wilder than a Djinn as the stories claimed, but it did not contain writhing snakes. An enchanted brush might be needed to make it straight again; entangled with her tresses were the vine and bramble of the wood, animated by Medusa's own insanity.

  “Aren't I horrible to you?”

  Emelia reached for her, but Medusa slapped her hand away. “I feel a pain as I look upon you, yet it is not of you. It comes from within me.”

  “I am still very angry, sister.” Medusa looked down; she was ashamed of her actions. She was ashamed of the hate inside her.

  “As am I, sister.” Emelia reached for her shoulder again and this time Medusa didn't swipe at her.

  “Do you want me to take the pain away?”

  Emelia looked back to the mummified herds of the fallen men who had come to claim the monster. Not fit for the spiders chewing away their tongues or the scorpions that lay in the dust left of their bowels.

  Medusa knew what Emelia asked then. If Medusa wanted her to smash in her head with a stone or slice at her with a broken sword until she no longer felt anything at all.

  Medusa shook her head. “No.”

  “I will carry my own pain onward and living,” Emelia promised. “I will take on yours too when it gets too heavy.”

  Medusa turned from her, satisfied but hating to hear such a vow. Why would anyone ever be willing to go through this with her?

  “The goddess Artemis promised that with time, your pain would vanish.” Emelia tried to reassure her sister, but it was difficult when she herself could barely believe her own words.

  Medusa made her way into the pitch of the cave and the song of her bats.

  “The only promise I can make to you, Emelia is that the Gods have vanished. The only thing they left behind was pain.”

  Many more nights passed, and Emelia killed many heroes while Medusa hid silently in the caves. There were times the savage men didn't even make it off their war boats. Emelia could hear their songs of death for miles and met them at the beach. She found that she was accomplished at fighting and wondered if Artemis lived in her hands and drew out her steps.

  She would never forget the one who first called her by her new name. He spit it out along with a string of blood and tooth.

  “Sword Witch.”

  III

  Emelia sat sewing in the sunlight to the rhythm of the waves. Her back to the sea and oddly comfortable atop a stone, she had watched the movement down the slope from the caves for what seemed like hours. Definitely had been hours.

  Emelia hadn't been up to visit her sister in three days.

  Medusa had taken her time, slinking down - moving like a serpent that had sprung legs. She hid finally behind a tree, not having made the decision to leave the shade and find the pebbles and shells at her feet.

  Emelia hoped she would make the ocean today. Her sister was in dire need of a bath. Emelia considered as she ran a sharpened gull bone through the canvas in her lap that she herself would have formed an aversion to washing had it been she who had been wrapped and bound and tossed to the merciless ocean to die.

  She might never bathe again.

  Emelia didn't look up. “Have you come to say hello to the sun?”

  Medusa blended into the foliage about the base of the tree as a child would who had been attempting to sneak up on its mother and been caught.

  “It burns my eyes still. It is so quiet in the cave without you close. Even the bats have lost their voice.”

  Emelia continued with her darning. “Medusa, it has been a long time since a man has come looking for a fight with you. Have you not noticed?”

  “More will come one day.”

  Emelia looked up then, and Medusa moved out into the light only a step. The wind from the water blew about her fierce hair.

  “I don't think that's true. The world has surely changed. The foreboding of being hunted is not so heavy any longer. We have been here a long time, sister.”

  Medusa looked back up to the caves. “You mean to say we are done with this place?”

  “It's time for me to leave this rock, Medusa. Leave behind all this death.”

  Medusa clutched the tree, but her feet did lightly touch the sand border to the beach. Emelia watched Medusa's toes curl into it.

  “I cannot live among them ever again, Emelia.”

  Emelia moved the canvas across her lap and began her sewing motion once more. “Then we can find a quiet place, somewhere they tread lightly but where there is much green.”

  Medusa took her first shaken steps onto the beach, her fingers not wanting to leave the tree bark and trailing behind her body.

  “Life?”

  Emelia nodded, looking up to her and her eyes pleading for Medusa to keep walking. “It's time to feel life again. Sunlight and warm rain.”

  Medusa stopped in the sand, not out of the tree shadow yet. “I don't know if I can leave this place.”

  Emelia looked back to her work. “I will miss you, Medusa.”

  It was a long time of both Emelia and Medusa in their own minds then. Hours perhaps – yes, it must have been hours.

  Finally, Emelia felt her sister take a seat on the same stone she sat upon and felt Medusa's back rest against her own.

  “Do you remember how we used to sew, Medusa?”

  She took with Emelia the cloth then, fashioning her own bone needle and clutching the thread.

  “You have chosen a ship?” Medusa's voice was raspy; Emelia knew that it would be hard for her to breathe, hard for her to see. It would take a long time for her sister to feel normal again and take to anything natural in the open world.

  But Emelia felt in her heart that one day she would.

  Emelia pointed across the beach. “That one is most sea worthy.”

  Emelia and Medusa went about their sewing as the corpses of a thousand forgotten hero ships rocked with the tide.

  Medusa considered the ship Emelia pointed out. Her sister had filled it with all the weapons and armor left behind by so many. Spirits sailing now only with Charon.

  “It's an impressive ship,” Medusa finally said.

  “We came as paupers, but we sail as queens.”

  Medusa's fingers did remember how to sew.

  “What about my bats?”

  Emelia wanted to laugh at her, but didn't. “Where we go there will always be bats. They can't take all the darkness from us.”

  Chapter 30

  Ulysses Purgatory in Trophies of the Sword Witch

  He was an exceptional soldier, no matter how bad his father wanted him to be a baseball player. He was a good baseball player too, maybe even could have been great. Nothing about America's pastime ever grabbed him to the extent that America's other pastime did.

  War.

  Ulysses S. Purgatory didn't meet his CIA superiors face-to-face until he was between tours in Vietnam. He'd been recruited, trained, and sent out on his missions in the field. When Uly did finally meet the man in
the dark blue suit who occupied that Spartan office in the State Department, it was just long enough to get a handshake and new orders to get on a plane and fly to Texas.

  Five hours later, the black-ops soldier found himself outside of Austin and riding in a Cadillac limousine with little American flags flying up front. Billy's one-day-Pop drank the Commander-in-Chief's whiskey on the ride from the airport out into the Hill Country.

  Well off the highway, he barreled down a dirt road, just him and the guy driving the car; maybe Secret Service, who could say? The man had the haircut for the job, and the disposition. He answered none of the few questions that Ulysses threw his way and didn't deviate from mindless driving until he pulled up to a big iron gate with cattle guard and cow skull hanging over the road. Flanked by twenty Marines and two army tanks, there was no need for a sign saying KEEP OUT.

  The only sign was the one up by the cow skull high over the driveway:

  ATLANTIS RANCH

  It did in fact reveal itself to be a ranch. Long Horn cattle grazed, and there was a Spanish style manor house surrounded by the usual bunkhouses and outbuildings. The Presidential motorcar pulled into a big red barn, and Uly took note of the concrete ramp the outside hid from the world which the car began to glide down.

  Steel and concrete bunker doors began their slow slide open, each time allowing the car to get deeper down the corkscrew road built under the Ranch. Uly had no idea how deep they were when the car finally stopped in a parking area filled with military vehicles and more limos like the one he sat within.

  The driver got out, ditching his chauffer's cap and matching jacket, and opened the door for his passenger; the man sported a shoulder holster and the badge indicating he was in fact part of the President's very own security detail.

  “Come on, he's waiting.” The man began to walk through the concrete underground, and Ulysses followed in his best dress uniform, pressed to perfection. He hadn't known at the start of the day he was about to meet the head-honcho, but that's the beauty of military dress code: you're always prepared for whoever you might meet if you put enough elbow into the shoe-shine.

  Ulysses had no idea what this place was, and the big steel doors and corridors that led to bigger steel doors weren't marked and didn't offer any clues. Whatever this bunker was, it was big and important.

  That much concrete always tells the tale.

  Meeting the President is a big deal, that's a fact, especially in that day and age when the office still held much of its nostalgic admiration: the world hadn't yet been privy to things like Watergate.

  But when Uly and the Secret Service man walked into that big hanger, it wasn't the President standing there that inspired the brunt of the awe. It was the shining silver craft the hanger had been designed to keep secret that did all the awe inspiring.

  Ulysses S. Purgatory's first words in front of the President of the United States were, “Son of a bitch. It's real.”

  LBJ cut Uly off with a handshake before the soldier could even salute the man. The salute came, though, to both the leader of the free-world and his shiniest toy.

  “She's a beaut', ain't she?” LBJ popped open a Fresca and handed it to Ulysses, then reached down into a cooler with the Presidential Seal emblazoned on it and retrieved his own soda-pop from the ice. “Bet you thought like everyone else that it was all bullshit, huh?”

  LBJ couldn't stop snickering with that funny leer that was prone to decorate his face.

  “Sir, I don't understand.” It's all full-time soldier and part-time secret CIA man Ulysses could get out of his mouth.

  “You don't have to understand, son. The Air Force boys got that block of salt licked. I need you to be my eyes and ears on the ground.” LBJ toasted his cold Fresca to the side of the craft.

  “Are we gonna attack villages with that thing?” It seemed like so much overkill to Ulysses.

  “Hell no, we got that part all squared too. You're going into Laos and catch me a monster.”

  “What kind of monster, sir?”

  “The hell and damnation kind, a monster so evil and so legendary that it'd scare the britches right off a Pentecostal. Have 'em crying for the Holy Ghost to come whoop 'em right up to Heaven's Gates.” LBJ projected insane pride that monsters existed and that America was ingenious enough to be plotting to catch one. “Then, we're gonna swoosh her ass back to the lab and the same Krauts that put this thing back together are gonna take her apart and find out how she ticks.”

  “A real monster?” Ulysses was still stunned by it all.

  “That's just what the Commies are gonna be saying when I figure out how to load monster juice into one of them missiles and drop it right on their vodka swillin' asses.”

  The Commander-in-Chief saluted, and Ulysses saluted back. “This is Top Shit Secret, you get me, son? Your country is counting on you. Get me a monster before Red China gets one, or worse, before one's got its feet propped up in the Kremlin eating fish eggs.”

  Ulysses backed out of the room with the Secret Service man in tow.

  LBJ leaned into the cold spot on the side of the saucer where he'd had his Fresca resting and gave the thing a kiss like it was a baby.

  II

  Ulysses Purgatory faced the native guides, citizens of Laos, by default only. Their place was in the jungle and their only issue with the war was the noise and fire it caused.

  They had accepted the bag he gave them, happy to have the contents of the extra pack he had lugged from DS-Gamma, just on the other side of the imaginary line that stitched the border. This imaginary line was only of any importance in the dogma of Charlie and LBJ.

  They had walked together, mostly silent, for two days and had only stopped when the Elder who knew the way wouldn't walk anymore. For one with so many miles on him already, the journey hadn't amounted to much stopping.

  The native train had hit the end of the tracks though, and they were arguing with the Elder now. It was like if they took that one more step they'd fall off the face of God's mud and go skidding into outer space.

  Uly ran through the words he knew, what he'd picked up from their chatter and what he'd been briefed on before they pushed him out of the back of an airplane. The Elder was silent as all the arguing went on, with Uly butting in and the natives ignoring anything he tried to hack into language. Uly made the motion to continue with his hands and still none would move.

  The Elder knelt, touching the ground and feeling deep into it. He let his fingers get muddy and then began to paint on the side of the canteen that had been part of the stash LBJ sent with Uly to bribe native guides into the shade lands. The Elder began to paint a frowning face onto the side of the canteen and then he held it up, raising it so that the facsimile head was at shoulder level to Uly, the proud Army Ranger.

  The old one made the universal motion of a throat being cut and pointed it Uly's way then let the sad canteen fall to the ground at the soldier's boots.

  “No more walk,” said the Elder. “Sword Witch.”

  All of the natives made the same throat slicing motion and emitted a guttural hiss. They all turned from Ulysses then, save the Elder.

  “Sword Witch.” The Elder said, “You America die.”

  Ulysses stared at the old fellah, the only one of them still brave enough to look down the path Uly had sworn an oath to God and country to walk. The Elder was truly brave, but not brave enough that he was going to lead Ulysses any further.

  “She very angry.”

  Uly nodded to his resigning guide and then turned to brush into the jungle without them all.

  “Angry?” Uly barked. “She ain't never seen angry.”

  Beyond the safety of the trees, the path ended and there was no longer any clear way to the river and what would become Extraction Site - Epsilon.

  There was, however, the makings of a new terrible border he would have to cross in order to meet up with soldiers waiting for him on the other side. The bleached bone skulls high on the bamboo pikes that ringed the forbidden pa
tch of the jungle.

  The trophies of the Sword Witch.

  III

  Ulysses Purgatory was a bit paranoid breaking the tree line: he'd been cut off from the boys they'd dropped to aid him ferret the bitch out of hiding, and the only communication he'd had with any of them for near two hours was the occasional scream one let out when she got them.

  These boys were savages. They'd sucked up all the filth they could be given on Parris Island and had asked respectfully for more. They were killers of the highest order, over here because they were too dangerous to put in prison and too mean to die in a gas chamber.

  One after the other Ulysses had heard them scream like little girls.

  Captain Purgatory swung on his left heel and had his stolen Chinese assault rifle pointed at something that looked like it had lately been a soldier, but now more resembled a ghost.

  Uly dropped the weapon from where it was pointed at the kid's head. Uly could see right through him with the jungle recognizable beyond the grey smoke goo which now made somewhat of a representation of the body the young soldier had inhabited only an hour before.

  “Maplethorpe?” Uly watched the kid walking on shaky ghost-legs: could this be his soul wandering the jungles?

  “I gotta piss real bad, Chief,” answered the ghost of Maplethorpe. “I don't have a body no more. What do I do?”

  The boy waved to his commanding officer, and Ulysses tried his best not to wince at what was quickly becoming a most unimaginable day.

  “Maplethorpe, pull it together.” Ulysses might have chosen better words. “What happened to you and the rest of the men?”

  “I seen them wandering, Chief, just like me. We're all hurt real awful and don't know what to do.” Maplethorpe spoke like he was trying his best to see the silver lining. “You look good though.”

  The boy-soldier - couldn't have been more than eighteen - took another step towards Ulysses, and his commander raised his weapon again.

  “Lemme go with you, Cap'n. I want my body back.”

  “I'll do my best to get her for what she's done to you, son. You stay out of my way though, hear?” Uly began to back away.