Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  Ulysses, reached over, trying to steer with his knees and using both hands to try and lift her pretty claw off him.

  “Who'll see?”

  Mrs. Scopas's snazzy convertible top couldn't take the wind anymore, and metal snapped and it sailed into the air before crashing onto the road behind them.

  “They all will. I stole time from the gods…” She didn't sound quite frantic enough for Ulysses's tastes then. She had the calm you get when you believe and have accepted that something terrible is real and unavoidable.

  He'd watched boys in the war get that calm when they knew they weren't making it out of this one. That they were never going to hug their grandmothers again on good old American soil.

  She released his shoulder and slipped her fingers down to the baby bag she had shoved in the back seat. Ulysses had half noticed her packing it, figured it was an umbrella she had lying atop the little blue just in case bag.

  Lightning lit up his eyes in the rearview mirror, and she was holding it up then, pointing it at the sky. It wasn't an umbrella.

  He growled to himself, the mahogany hilt and the gold inlay of flowers and moons.

  “Worse, what I stole this from…” Emelia's words were ice laden. Embarrassed at a tragic mistake.

  “Emelia, why do you have that sword?”

  “Who I stole this from is even worse than the gods.”

  “You brought the fucking sword? You don't bring a sword to a hospital.”

  “Then don't go to a hospital! I told you no!” He half-expected her to dive into the front seat and threaten to behead him - again.

  “Drive into the woods. Let me have him by a stream in the rain. It will be beautiful.”

  “You're bleeding and you're going to the hospital!”

  He watched her in the mirror pull the scabbard to her belly and lift a face filled with pain back to blackest night.

  “It's too late,” she said with much regret. “They've already seen us. Can't hide now.”

  Ulysses reached back for her, pushing the hair from her face. Her forehead was hot; she was sweating like he'd never seen her. Even in the jungle.

  “You're not making sense, baby.” It was all he could do to try and stay calm. Keep her calm. He'd done it in the war; he'd have to figure out how to do it now. “You've lost a lot of blood.”

  That's when she did grab him, pushing his hand off her and then leaning over the seat. Both of her hands clutching either side of his face and pulling his eyes off the road to meet hers.

  Emelia Purgatory was pale white. “You think you've seen blood today? You ain't seen nothing yet.”

  How they both didn't fly out of the car when they crashed into the lamp post in front of Piney Point Hospital is a mystery only the gods could answer.

  V

  Beauragard Goodfinger guessed they came out of the water.

  Something bad attached to that storm and stirred up the wrong sinkhole. For years to come, he stayed indoors when the wind whipped up like that. Rain didn't lull him off to sleep when it tap-tapped on the tin roof.

  They never came back to get him, but Beauregard died an old man in mortal fear of rain.

  Beau's daddy had only stumbled up one time that evening. Turning his nose up at supper, taking another pull off the jug teat and then falling back into his iron frame bed. Springs creaking under the girth of Goodfinger, Sr. always led quickly to the sound of sawing logs.

  That night was no exception.

  The storm had blown in good and hard and there was already water everywhere. The old roof leaked and Beau went about arranging pots and pans to catch the drip. Daddy would sleep clean through this one. Beau knew it and that was okay with him.

  He was used to being alone.

  The boy had sold a few this and thats under the table and ratholed the money. There was a stack of brand new comic books hidden under his bed, and that night was a perfect night for letting four-color pictures send him off to fantastic worlds. The adventures of Dr. Nubzz, Big Igbahl and Chico were waiting.

  There was so much dripping he didn't hear the big dogs going on from the front porch at first. Once his ears caught them though, he couldn't shake the sound. Those lazy hounds hadn't barked like that since they were new pups.

  Beauregard looked out the only window, the egg-shaped one over the Hardware Store sign, but he couldn't see a thing. He squinted at his own reflection in the glass and cursed under his breath, turning to switch off the light so he could see out.

  Then the electricity went ace deuce all on its own.

  Reading comics by flashlight was suddenly on the agenda, but before that he decided he better look down into the yard.

  He heard the dogs yelp and as he crept to the window saw them dragging their chains and scurrying under the front porch. When the chains stopped clinking they never made another sound that night.

  Beau could just make the men out in the yard. There were lots of them. Tall and skinny, or more like gangly really. They weren't doing much of anything, just standing in the yard.

  The lighting flash was quick, but it was enough to send Beauregard flying away from the window and under the kitchen table.

  Those things in the yard weren't men.

  He fought the urge to wake his daddy up that night. What would the old man have done? Pissed his own leg and been one more thing the boy had to worry about?

  Beau decided the best course was to shut his daddy's bedroom door. Stifle the sound. Looking across the apartment built over the hardware store in the dark, Beauregard felt his way along the floor. Almost too scared to move.

  Almost, but he moved anyway.

  He heard them on the porch as he slipped past and closed the door, shutting the freight train that was his daddy off from the rest of the world. It at the very least quieted the old man down; maybe they wouldn't hear.

  “Go away.” He didn't say that out loud, but it kept spinning around between his ears. “Please go away. We're closed.”

  He smelled them first. They didn't make a lot of noise, mostly sloshing. Squishing. But by God, they stunk.

  They smelled like when something dead washes up on the beach. Rotted flesh mixed with salt water.

  Beauregard could see them moving around below him as he peered through the cracks of the second level's floorboards. There might have been a hundred of them, could have been more. They had a way of blending in with the shadows.

  The store was never this packed, even on Saturdays. Goodfinger Hardware was bringing lots of traffic through the door this night.

  The rusty shotgun by the stairwell was not an option. That thing hadn't been fired since Beauregard was in diapers. What was he gonna do with a gun anyhow? Slide down the banister, gun blazing like the Rough Snuff Kid?

  The rain wouldn't shut up banging the tin roof but that turned out to be a quiet nocturne compared with the clacking and metal on metal that started up below.

  They were digging through everything.

  A couple of them banged into the old soda machine. He heard a huffing noise, like a copperhead hissing. They were snorting air.

  Smelling at the lifeless drink cooler, clinking the bottles together. Some were on their knees sniffing at the floor, like the dogs looking for a rabbit that had run through the yard.

  Then they went for the shelves. Scythe blades and hammers, spikes and picks and shovels. Every one of them grabbed something. They didn't choose careful like, but they did choose, one grabbed a feather duster then reconsidered as feathers were tossed aside and replaced with an axe.

  The sound they made after the lightning strike haunted Beauregard Goodfinger until the very last breath he took. It was a haunted and pained cross between an animal caught in a spring-trap and a pure sure curse upon the universe for ever being born.

  All Beau could think about was how cold it suddenly was.

  They all formed two lines like in an old fighting movie and began marching back out into the weather.

  Beauregard would never be entirely sure b
ut he swore and swore to anyone who'd ever listen to his stories when he'd gotten too deep into the jug, just like his daddy, that one of them had seen him peering down through the floor crack and had locked a socket-less stare back at the boy.

  What had been left of the soldier's face had grinned up at Beauregard as if to say, “Tonight's your lucky night, kid. I'm way too busy to climb the stairs.”

  VI

  There were three nurses, an orderly, and a night janitor at Piney Point Hospital, and that's exactly how many people it took to wrestle Emelia Purgatory down. Ulysses had a busted lip and shards of glass embedded over his left eye from slamming into the windshield of the Cadillac, but he wouldn't let anyone baby him or give him so much as a bandage.

  This was all complicated by the fact that Emelia waved her sword at anyone who tried to help her. Forget about coming at her with a hypodermic. Ulysses finally calmed her down and he knew that she wasn't in any way making a deal with him or listening to his reason. She did it for the baby. He could see it in her face. How maternal she got with every subsequent contraction.

  Uly had a long talk with the charge nurse over the unorthodox nature of it all and how under normal circumstances they would have been forced to call the law. They'd sent the orderly down the street in the rain to wake Doc Mitchum. The hospital was all on its own in that weather, phone lines were down from the storm and the place was running on back-up power.

  The Doc had brought tons of babies into this world, including the charge nurse herself. “Births are never a problem in this hospital.” Or they hadn't been until that night.

  The deal that was finally made with Emelia was that she got to keep her sword in the hospital bed with her and that she would be given no drugs. She was going to have her baby boy on her own terms. To the extent she could control those terms anyway.

  “So sure it's going to be a boy?” the nurse asked Emelia when she had finally been allowed to approach.

  Emelia gave the woman the evil eye. “I know it's going to be, so do the stars.”

  “Well, I've seen that kind of sureness toppled by surprises before.”

  “Oh, there'll be surprises alright.” Emelia stared blankly into the faded wallpaper of the maternity room when she said it. The charge nurse suddenly felt the chill of the storm.

  The Doctor came in from the rain. He was approximately one thousand years old and shared a barber with Santa Claus. “You bring all that riff-raff with you?” he mumbled to Ulysses as he passed the soon to be father in the hallway.

  Uly watched the doctor move towards Emelia's personal space and saw her fingers tighten around her sword. Then he looked away and down the hall. Ulysses saw them all in the rain, crossing the hospital parking lot. The shadow-forms playing tricks as they strode with sure steps, images distorted by the rain on the glass doors of the hospital entrance.

  The hairs on the back of the soldier's neck stood straight as he watched the mob make it to the doors. Ulysses was listening to Emelia already arguing with the doctor when the doors to the E.R. pushed open.

  Mudder Kelroy and the Lucifer's Circus biker gang, Ulysses' brothers, fifteen strong, dripped rain and tracked sludge down what had been the night janitor's clean masterpiece of a floor-shine.

  Mudder had the skateboard he'd made for the boy in one big hand and a box of Cubans in the other. “Baby shower done started without us?” Mudder was chewing on one of the cigars already.

  VII

  “Push. Push.” Doc Mitchum showed little respect for the miracle of childbirth he had reluctantly begun ringmastering. Overtly, he was as good as any country doctor who'd done this move ten thousand times in the past. The most important event in the history of the mother's life mattered very little to the doctor; to him it was just something that needed to happen so he could walk back up the road to his house and go back to sleep.

  Nurses screamed as they held pressure against the door of the delivery room. The big orderly was curled up into a fetal position in the corner of said room. It was a fitting expression of fear considering the event and place they found themselves within.

  Doc Mitchum sat on a stool at the foot of the bed. “He's got a big head.”

  “I feel that.” Emelia grunted the words out with more pain than sarcasm.

  “Let me give you something for the…”

  Emelia raised the sword off the bed, and the doctor lifted his arms in defeat and would offer no more suggestions. Even though the sword was not drawn, it wasn't often that Doc Mitchum had ever had a woman bring a weapon into labor before. It seemed to send just the right message; that the Doctor was another observer in all this and forces beyond his control were in charge.

  “I can use a nurse over here,” the Doc said to frightened women who wore the uniform but were unable to perform the job. Mortal fear has a way of trumping the oaths of service.

  Something banged hard against the door the nurses pressed their hysterical bodies and a chair against. Hospital shoes digging into the linoleum floor for dear life.

  “The hospital is being overrun.” This screamed from the mouth of the charge nurse. She had quickly become a believer in the spooky double-talk that the blonde woman giving birth had said. The charge nurse would give anything if it would just stop raining right now, would gladly cut off a finger if the sun would just come out, and was never, ever forgetting to say her prayers ever again after that night.

  “Damn hippies.” The Doctor looked to Emelia when he said this and made a lazy hand motion in the air that she supposed through the pain and tears meant she should push again. Emelia pushed harder every time.

  “Keep on the door!” Emelia hadn't offered this as a suggestion; it was an order and the nurses nodded their heads in unison, their backs against it and all their weight sent towards whatever was on the other side of that door that was so intent on getting in and having a look (or worse).

  “Humphrey! Come help us!” The charge nurse was screaming to the orderly who cried, again in perfectly themed fashion, like a baby in the far corner of the delivery room.

  “What's all the commotion?” asked the Doctor. He checked his arm and realized he'd forgotten to put on his wristwatch.

  “End times, Doctor!” Humphrey screamed and sounded like one of his little sisters when he used to scare them on Halloween. Karma had never met the big teddy-bear of a man in any situation where it was rooting for Humphrey. “Dead moved out of the graveyard.”

  Emelia drew the sword as the doctor readjusted his ass on the stool. Doc Mitchum didn't seem at all fazed by the prospect of the end of days, or didn't hear, or was too pre-occupied by the idea of having a sandwich if this baby could ever be squirmed out. “One more big push. Really try this time. I know it's hard for your generation to get excited about anything without rock music blaring.”

  The doctor watched little Billy Purgatory making his entrance into the world: mother and son were really trying, as if they were as anxious as the Doc to move on to the next act.

  “Come on out, bucket-head,” Doc Mitchum coaxed in his goo-goo voice. “You got a worthless hippie's life to lead.”

  VIII

  Little Billy Purgatory lay in the big hospital bed, one of his mother's feet on either side of his tiny body. Emelia was standing up in the bed, her offspring barely separated from her womb. He was still wet and covered in slime that had come from her birth canal but was still slime no matter how you rationalized the wonders of life.

  The Doc had gotten to slap Billy on the ass and make him cry but Emelia had to cut the cord herself with the blade she now brandished against the onslaught of the living dead. Billy had only cried out once and then, satisfied that it had been a mighty enough thunderclap to announce his arrival, had shut up. Humphrey the orderly had continued enough crying for everyone in the room, that is, until a crowbar was jammed into his right eye-socket and then a shovel took off most of the terrified man's head.

  As close as Emelia could tell, one of the nurses was still alive, having crawled und
er the bed, too beside herself and 100 proof full of shell-shock to make another peep. The other nurses had been ripped and sundered by one farm implement after another.

  Doc Mitchum had taken a ball-peen hammer to the skullcap, and that had done the trick of sending him falling backward off his stool. He never saw it coming and realistically (and to his credit) remained calm while the door finally gave and the hoard overran the room.

  An undead Greek warrior, unsatisfied with the hammer-work of his companion, was currently trying to take Doc Mitchum's face apart with a leaf rake. Surveying the room, Emelia counted eleven, and twice that many more clamoring to get into the room from the dark hallway beyond. She put thoughts of her husband, somewhere out there amongst all this horror, out of her mind. Ulysses was smart and scrappy and probably had a plan.

  The blonde woman with the sword in a hospital gown had a newborn to worry about.

  As for the dead raised to come kill everyone with a heartbeat, Emelia recognized them all in one way or another. Some she had sent to their deaths, some her sister, but all had a score to settle with the former inhabitants of Medusa Island. They came at Emelia and her baby with screwdrivers and sledgehammers and log chains.

  The last fuck you from Athena, or Poseidon, or both. Medusa's curse lived on, Emelia realized as horror played out all around her. She would never get to escape it no matter how she distanced herself from it, or what sort of good life she tried to lead. When the old gods hate you, the debt never gets wiped off the books. They've got nothing but time.

  IX

  When the lights went out in the hallway and the dead rushed in from the rainstorm, the commotion made every living man think back to the war. Everyone, except Ulysses, drew a gun and began the firefight in earnest. Someone pressed a pistol into Billy's Pop's hand and he wasted no time catching up with his companions.

  At first they found themselves trapped in the center of a 'T' where the hallways intersected. The only light, save for a flimsy battery-operated security lamp that flickered on and off, was from the muzzle flares of the pistol work. These men were hard - they'd seen things in Vietnam that made you tough quick - but nobody seemed ready for how truly heart-stopping the sight of the dead marching towards you in flashes was.