Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  He was growing concerned then as he considered the possibilities. The only thing worse than Anastasia showing up was her not showing up and him wondering what mischievous thing she might be up to. Maybe she was eating.

  The hairs on the back of Billy's neck stood up at the thought of it. Billy had never gotten into a discussion with her about her feeding habits and the more he thought about it the more curious he was getting. Was Anastasia tracking some pour soul hiding in the jungle from her right now, toying with them and waiting to pounce?

  Did she have to eat every night? Billy wasn't sure if vampires had to have at least a square bite a day or if they were like snakes and could feed and then take a few nights off.

  He was not going to let himself fixate on this, especially not at night when it was so quiet all around him.

  Except for the frogs.

  Billy turned from the trees. To hell with Anastasia; maybe she decided that she was done with him. Maybe, if he were lucky, he'd never see her again. He never would actually when his plan was enacted. He was finally headed one place that she'd never be able to follow.

  When Billy's eyes readjusted to the firelight, he almost jumped. There she was, sitting Indian style atop his sleeping bag. “You said for me to join you.”

  Billy walked towards the fire and her. “You think that's funny?”

  “Did I sneak up on you? Catch you with your pants down?”

  Billy stopped across the fire from her. Anastasia rose as she continued to talk. “What's the connotation of that expression anyway?”

  “You're asking me about connotations?”

  Anastasia nodded. “Oh yeah. Never mind.”

  Billy crossed his arms. Anastasia began slinking around the fire, coming up on his left. “So what did you want? I thought you were done talking to me.”

  “I thought I was too.”

  Anastasia let a smile creep up, as she herself crept ever closer. “It's going to be a long night if we don't talk.”

  Billy turned to her but found her gone. He turned then to the right and found her standing beside him. “I'm sorry, Billy Purgatory.”

  Billy raised an eyebrow. “What did you just say?”

  “I know it hasn't been easy. I haven't made it easy.” Anastasia looked up at him. “Us. We're not easy.”

  Billy looked away from her and towards the crackling fire at his feet. “Whatever trick you're trying to pull…”

  “It's not a trick.” Her voice trailed off into a whisper. “Whatever it is you're planning, you don't have to do it.”

  “I'm going to do it.” Billy was firm in his resolve.

  “Okay, whatever it is. Just know that there's another way.”

  Billy looked back over to her. “What other way?”

  “What if you and I just got lost?”

  He listened to her - didn't speak, just listened.

  “What if you forgot all about your mission and what if I stopped taking orders from them? We could find a place, somewhere even more forgotten than this one.”

  “And do what, Ana?”

  “Live.” Anastasia, looked over at him. “You've never just lived, you know?”

  Billy wanted to believe her, but she'd had all day to plan this conversation out and at her core and no matter what, Anastasia was a liar.

  “How can we just live?” Billy questioned it and pushed harder to catch her in her lies. “You're not even alive.”

  Anastasia backed from the fire and crossed her arms and squeezed herself tight. “You miserable bastard.”

  Billy looked to her in shock, knew that he'd pushed way too far. “Ana…”

  Her arms fell to her side and she clenched her fists, not enraged as Billy would have expected, but intensely sad. She had tears welling in her eyes. “Part of me is alive, Billy Purgatory. I'm not a precious human like such a fine piece of work as yourself, but I'm not completely dead.”

  Billy reached for her, but her nails slashed out and cut his hand and dared him to make another step towards her. “Anastasia, I didn't mean it like that.”

  “Oh!” She spoke through tears. “You didn't mean it like what, like you could never be with me because part of me isn't alive? You can't be with me because I'm not good enough for you because my father was a vampire and, you know, had a bad case of being dead?”

  “That has nothing to do with what I said, Anastasia. So you're not human…”

  “I can't help what I am, Billy. To my credit, I don't try to help it. I haven't run from my life like you have. I know that a huge part of who I am is fueled by desire and hunger. I haven't pretended in a long time to be something that I'm not around you.” Anastasia's eyes were hot with the reflection of the firelight, and she opened her mouth, and Billy saw her fangs glisten. “Can you say the same about yourself? Can you say that you haven't pretended that you are in a class above me and how I choose to live?”

  “I've tried to tell you…”

  She cut Billy off. “Oh tried to tell me what? That you have feelings for me? All that shit you tried to feed me on the trail last night?”

  “I did try to tell you.” Billy wanted to step into her space, to make her stop acting this way. He wanted the tears to stop. “You wouldn't listen.”

  “Such a wonderful human being you are, Billy. Such a perfect example.” Anastasia was backing towards the trees and with every step Billy took towards her now, she slashed the air going for his blood. “You lie with the best of your race.”

  Billy caught her hand in his and she hissed at him, showing her fangs and daring him not to let her go. Billy could see the lines of the tears running down her face in the firelight, little streaks of deep red. Her cheeks were flushed, and try as she might to be horrifying to him then, she could project only a deep despair.

  “I'm not lying, Anastasia.”

  Anastasia raised her free hand and her dark pupils locked on his face and Billy knew that she was about to scratch out his eyes. “Prove it,” she goaded.

  Billy pulled with all his might, and she fell into him, and he wrapped his arms around her and at that moment, when she looked much more like a monster than she did a pretty girl, Billy would let nothing stop him from allowing his lips to close on hers.

  And Billy Purgatory kissed her.

  Her body was not cold, as he'd somehow always imagined it might be. Anastasia was very warm. The hand she had raised in the air to slash him came delicately down as they continued to kiss and found its way to his back. Billy's arms were wrapped around her body, and as they continued to let their lips find one another's, they both seemed to be pushing against the other, trying desperately to get as close as they possibly could.

  Billy Purgatory had of course thought about this before, but it turned out to be nothing like he had imagined. The connection the two of them made atop Billy's sleeping bag in a forgotten stretch of jungle was intensely physical, but it was also mentally straining from the onset. Billy had plenty of baggage, and Anastasia didn't necessarily pack light either.

  There was a point during the night when they both decided to let go, and in doing so, a switch was flipped somewhere in the dusty control room of Billy's head for the first time in a long time. He felt something beyond heartache, angst, and that driving voice in his head that seemed to never stop repeating the same word over and over:

  Mission.

  There finally came a quiet time when Billy held her under the canopy of trees and listened to the frogs. Things had been silent between Billy and Anastasia for hours, and Billy felt guilty that he had said that awful thing to Anastasia in a time that seemed ages ago but still very relevant.

  Billy started to say he was sorry for saying to her that she wasn't really alive, because the girl he was holding in the jungle currently was many things, but dead was not one of them.

  Thankfully for Billy, Anastasia broke the silence between them first before Billy could say something stupid and begin another war of words.

  “Oh,” said Anastasia softly. “I get i
t now.”

  Billy froze, wondering what terrible revelation she'd come to about the nature of their relationship, or even worse, what they'd just done with one another that would be over his head and too much for him to handle.

  Billy, reluctantly and quietly, inquired, “You get what now?”

  “Pants down,” she said.

  Billy and Anastasia began to laugh and drown out the calls of the frogs.

  VII

  “I'm not skating. I'm just walking. It's a busy sidewalk and the weather is nice for once. It's not springtime though, it's more like Fall. The weather is only throwing us a bone before Old Man Winter bites our asses. I don't know what color the leaves are. I never notice trees. There are skinny shafts of grass that stick up from holes in the sidewalk.”

  Anastasia quietly listened, as Billy Purgatory began to tell her about the same dream he had most every night.

  “All the people there – and there's every type. I mean, everything from tall and long to short and dumpy. People are old, young – kids like I am in the dream. Not really horror show ugly, but homely. Normal. Some are completely beautiful but I don't make eye contact with any of them. I know they're beautiful because they won't look me in the eye.

  “Nobody is arguing and everybody is smiling and saying 'Hi' to each other as they pass.

  “At the end of the street I finally really look at somebody, and it's a pretty girl in a ponytail tied up with a green ribbon. She smiles at me after a long time and says, ‘Hello.’ That never happened then and it never happens now. Nobody ever smiles at me and says ‘Hello.’

  “My skateboard is under my arm. I get to my place, Pop's house, when the sun's gone down. It's gotten late and I'm very tired.

  “I guess I'm in my bedroom – but it's not a room I've ever actually been in awake. In the dream it is familiar to me. It feels like home. I drift off feeling comfortable and peaceful and it feels strange because neither of those feelings have ever gone with me into sleep.

  “The clock is really all I can see well. I can make out the outline of stuff but nothing else in the room keeps my attention like the hands of that clock. They glow in the dark but it isn't that green color that you get when you see something glow in the dark.

  “The hands of the clock glows red. It is 3AM.

  “I sit up on the side of the bed and feel even more exhausted than when I was walking. Even though I've slept I found myself awake and too tired to sleep anymore.

  “I stare at the wall and the outline of the curtains over the windows go red. It is so dark in that room, and cold.

  “Even with the curtains closed, the flash is so bright that it turns the whole room white. The whole world turns into white hot light, all at once, and I can feel every bomb drop just like they were falling down my throat and landing in the pit of my stomach. I can see it all happening locked away in that little room.

  “The world dies while I sit on the edge of my bed and I can't save any of them. I don't get to be the hero.”

  Anastasia kept her eyes fixed on the break in the trees above their heads as she lay beside Billy Purgatory on the damp floor of rainforest jungle. The tiny cut in the canopy top high above the afterglow of reckless kissing, clawing and scratching that had blended with and ultimately become sex.

  She was happy it was dark, hoped nothing stared down at her now through that hole in the trees.

  “Because you're not a hero.” She was as surprised to hear the words slip from her lips into the world as Billy was. Not because she was unsure of them, more so when she realized that she had actually been listening to him whisper to her about his dream.

  Her words re-directed the words of his little story from anywhere in herself that might even pretend to care about how he was trying to glue his soul to hers through empathy and sent it all straight into a brick wall.

  “What do you mean I'm not a hero? Like I can't be a hero?”

  “You perhaps could be, but you're not one.”

  Billy pushed his back off the ground so that he was sitting up. “Then what am I? I have a mission.”

  Anastasia turned from the patch of night sky and she too sat up with him and crossed her legs. “You say you have this mission but is it necessarily heroic?”

  Billy was fingering his father's dog tags, which he'd stopped from swinging pendulum style across his chest on their leather cord. “Well, what's your mission, Ana?”

  “We've been over this,” she said. “I don't actually have one.”

  “Right, chasing after me your whole life because you're following orders…”

  “That's a job.” She couldn't stand that smug bastard fog that was re-inflating his ego like a poison. “It's not some divine plan.”

  “You've never felt your life had some greater purpose?” It was becoming harder for her to bear then because he actually seemed to believe in the questions he was hurling at her.

  “Feeding, fighting, fuc--”

  “Liar.” He was suddenly that ten-year old boy again. Arguing with her on a freight train and cutting her off when she was about to say what he wasn't able to hear.

  “Billy, why should we attach any more to this than what it is?”

  Billy stood and turned away from her, and she hated the back of him suddenly more than she hated the front of him. The only thing worse than that pious, simple face was having it taken away from her eyes.

  “You are a restless boy, Billy Purgatory. You can't have a mission unless you've been called to one. In the ancient times the gods were in charge of that sort of nonsense.”

  “Yeah?” He gave her his profile then, just enough for her to see that it was he who was smiling now. “I did in fact speak with a goddess.”

  “Alright.” She played along. “What did this goddess command of you?”

  He turned back and cocked that eyebrow the scar on his face ran through and handed her a look as if she were the one who was sounding completely insane in this conversation. “Nothing.”

  “My point exactly,” Anastasia shot back. “You see, Billy, gods don't hand down divine instructions any longer. Their race is as dead and insignificant as mine now. If the gods want something of humans now it's simply demanding for demanding's sake. They long for relevance, those of them who still exist anyway.”

  Billy didn't like this at all, so of course Anastasia felt it her duty to push the knife in deeper. “Humans have always been the toys of the mythical. Pieces moved about a board. To my kind you were lower than herd animals.”

  All the way in now, Anastasia twisted the blade.

  “The gods pushed you into wars so they could bet on the outcomes. If a god or goddess took note of a human, it was because they were fans. You were their favorite player. My kind helped them in their endeavors so we could pick what was left of the loser clean.”

  “It's all such a game to you, Anastasia.”

  “And it should be to you. We err when we write too much into purpose and destiny. It makes us one dimensional in our thinking.”

  “Is it a game to The Five?” Billy's mouth still held a smile but his eyes had turned cold.

  “I care little of their ultimate motives.”

  “You don't care about anything then?”

  “I punch a time-clock. That's all it is.”

  “What if my mission is them?” Billy stared down at her. “What if I have to stop The Satanic Five?”

  “Then you'd be at war with the whole world, Billy Purgatory. Mankind put what my masters were selling on lay-away a long time ago.”

  Billy stood over Anastasia and blocked that hole in the trees where the sky looked down. Anastasia took that as a sign that nobody could see her as she sank back down to the ground and pulled him down with her.

  VIII

  Anastasia knew it would be morning soon as she opened her eyes and saw Billy pull the book from the knot of the tree that stood sentry to the path. The brown leather was as unassuming as a pauper's Sunday bible.

  It was a book with a missing
front cover.

  Her eyes narrowed and her palms pressed the ground. Ana's form felt heavy to her suddenly just before she sprang. But spring with purpose she most definitely did.

  This time he wasn't getting away from her. This was the last part of their love boats passing in the night horror story. This was the final act.

  It wasn't until she was in motion, sailing through the air that she felt the cuff he had slipped around her ankle. The whiz of the cable and the extreme force of the logs at the other end that tilted and the boulder that rolled from them. The mid-air trapeze jerk as her motion of cartoon physics stopped her razor laced embrace just short of his throat.

  Billy Purgatory had played her perfectly, anticipating every action and reaction. Showing her he had the real book just to push her and make her show her true nature. He stared at her now, helplessly pulled and suspended. Suddenly upside down as if she were a broken marionette. She slashed the air, and the birds scattered from the jungle canopy above. Anastasia snapped at nothing, her fangs angry as she jerked and kicked. Gone was the girl who Billy had stopped crying and shared with the night before, replaced by a phantom of pure terror.

  This is what Billy had wanted to see so this was what she was going to show him. She spun as a top hanging from that iron ring on her ankle and the son of a bitch didn't even have the decency to give her a smug smile. Wouldn't show any pride or emotion at how he had trapped her.

  He just stared.

  “Bastard! I hate you!” She sounded like a spoiled princess not getting her way and she knew that she did and hated that she had given the air those words for him to catch on seemingly deafened ears. She would do most anything if she could only be as calm as Billy Purgatory was at this moment. She didn't know how to go to that place any longer, though. Maybe she didn't want to remember how to.

  “Don't follow me, Ana,” is what he finally said. “Leave me be.”

  “I want that book. I'll find you, Billy Purgatory, and when I do…”

  “What?”

  “You're a dead man.”

  He put the book into his pack, with that silly skateboard hanging off it. “You won't kill me, Anastasia. You can't kill me.”