Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  Ulysses heard the door bust down to the left of the intersection, and Mudder knew their enemies were breaking in from the right side of the building any second. The Lucifer's Circus was surrounded. Mudder grabbed Ulysses while yelling at the boys, “Right, down the hall and around the nurse station, only chance. They break in down there before we run we're cut off.”

  Ulysses had no issue with that plan because that was the direction where Emelia was and everyone moved. “We need shotguns,” Uly yelled. Mudder actually laughed. “I don't normally arm up to hit the baby ward.”

  Everyone started to run, and the dark made it worse, but not unbearable. “If I have another kid,” Ulysses suggested, “bring shotguns.”

  Mudder stepped up his boot falls on the hospital floor. “You have another kid, I'm sending a telegram.”

  All the men had entered the new hallway when they heard the glass breaking up ahead and could just make out the movement of what looked like a hundred more of whatever it was they were running from about to break in and cut them off.

  Mudder handed Uly a better pistol as both men stopped at the nurse's station. Behind them, the rest of the gang turned down the hallway and kept running. Both men raised a pistol in each hand to the new wave coming in the door and began to unload on them, doing their best to cut them down by the legs and jam up the side entrance, buying a minute or two maybe but not looking anywhere near hopeful.

  “This'll do for a pinch. Damn things'll probably eat their way through their amigos.” Mudder kept firing, and the pistols felt good in Uly's hands.

  “You saw that village just like me. You saw what we dropped on them over there.” Ulysses thought he'd never see anything like this ever again, not in Small Town USA, anyhow.

  Mudder just growled. “Payback come callin'”

  “We didn't drop the bomb, Mudder.”

  Mudder grabbed Uly again as all the pistols ran dry of lead. “Yeah, we didn't do nothing to stop it neither.”

  The lights came on again as they ran down the next hallway, which normally would have been a blessing, did it not show clearly the span all the way down the hospital to the other end, which had long since been breached and literally bled ancient undead soldiers armed with pitchforks and ditch-blades.

  The rest of the boys had a position up ahead. Of the fifteen that walked in with Mudder, seven remained standing. The rest were dragged into the hoard and with damnable precision were being hacked to death and pulled apart.

  Guns started to click, and ammo was getting dangerously light. They didn't have minutes; they had seconds.

  Uly saw the open door to where Emelia had been giving birth to his son and the infestation billowing at that door and charging in on his wife and baby boy, if they even still lived. His heart began to sink as the guns ran dry, and he heard the dead they'd snuck around now behind them, closing in.

  He would have lost all hope then and there of forever getting out of this alive, but he heard his wife cry out from down the hall and deep in her hospital room. It wasn't an anguished cry.

  The mother of baby Billy was pissed.

  Then, Ulysses watched three of the undead's heads come flying out her door and roll past their evil compatriots into the hallway.

  Uly smiled as his last gun let slip its last round. “Sword Witch.”

  X

  Emelia Purgatory pulled her sword out of the gullet of the one who'd gotten too close to her bed and then jammed the sword down towards the floor, crouching with it and feeling the tip slam into the lever that unlocked the wheels and allowed the bed to roll free.

  Pulling little Billy to her breast, she rose with him and dodged the swipe of a blade and then an axe. As she rose with her boy, she shifted the weight of her hips to the left and felt the bed roll just enough in the direction of her inertia.

  Swiping her sword, she took off an arm, a head and then one at the waist. Spinning she looked over the bed and met the scared eyes of the last living nurse at Piney Point Hospital who had been frozen, lying on her back under the bed. Half the girl's body was now exposed, and Emelia's cold eyes sent the command before her lips finished the job: “Don't you drop him.”

  Emelia let Billy slip from her hands and the nurse woke up just enough to raise her arms and catch the baby boy as he hurtled towards her. When Emelia saw that the girl pulled Billy to her chest, Emelia swung the sword right and carried her weight with it so that the nurse and her baby were now hidden under the bed.

  The jaws of the dead were hungry for blood, and their teeth showed it as their mouths opened like serpents going for a fat rat. Emelia ran to the end of the bed and let the sword cut the air before her and took off three of their heads, sending them flying out of the room to slam the wall beyond and roll onto the hallway floor.

  “You're all going to wish you'd stayed dead.”

  XI

  Mudder Kelroy had a fire-axe pulled off the wall and Ulysses Purgatory had the matching extinguisher. Uly found that the footing of the dead wasn't so precise that they could walk effectively through the liquid propellant of the fire extinguisher. He'd caused a major collision and bought time as their opponents were jammed up and trying to climb over one another to get at he and the five men left standing with him.

  Mudder was out front of the rest on the other side of the line, almost to the doorway of Emelia's room. Mudder swung the axe in a way that would make a lumberjack jealous and was sweeping his way down the hall. The other men of the gang were grabbing anything they could to defend themselves; whatever the dead dropped when they fell was scavenged and used against them.

  “Baby, we're coming for ya!” Uly knew she was alive in there, he could hear the sword whistling through the air now: they were so close.

  Emelia didn't answer her husband, but he did hear her tell someone with calm seriousness, “Stay under the bed if you don't want to die.”

  Then the ones blocking the doorway to the room fell, sliced in half and his wife walked out into the hallway. He'd never seen the look in her eyes before, even in times when her rage had turned her own weapons against him. Uly swung the spent fire extinguisher and cracked some skulls, then tossed it at one about to jump the line at him, knocking the undead thing down. He heard it crack to pieces hitting the floor.

  Emelia's sword was in her right hand, scabbard in her left, and little Billy was under the same arm. Uly stopped for the briefest moment to look at his son. He was proud of that boy, even though all the baby was doing now was going for a ride with his momma.

  “Billy.”

  Uly didn't get the chance to gaze longingly at either the boy or its mother. Emelia saw her husband was without a weapon and she tossed him the heavy wooden sword scabbard. Billy's Pop caught it and began swinging anew.

  Emelia turned, baby under arm, towards the crowd of the dead, back to the men who fought with her husband, her ass peeking out of the hospital gown, shoeless and blonde hair dancing. Such savage work had never been witnessed by the men. Even Mudder, who had never been impressed by anyone or anything couldn't help but stare.

  Emelia's sword was cutting ten down at a time, full swipes from one wall of the hallway to the opposite and then back. To consider that she had given birth twenty minutes or so ago made it all the more impressive.

  “That wife of yours… she got a sister?”

  Uly gave Mudder a look. “Yeah, but you don't want her.”

  There was a scream as the dead broke the line behind them, trampling over their undead companions fallen to the fire extinguisher goop. Carlton got grabbed and pulled into the dead and Mudder grabbed his leg, but it was too late for their friend. Mudder backed away from the line, poor Carlton's boot still in Mudder's hands.

  “Let's move,” the big biker yelled. “Follow the lady!”

  There were still hundreds of opponents, bottlenecking each side of the hallway. Emelia was making quick work of them, but they had become bolder, harder. Emelia had taken a cut to the leg, and then another across one of her arms.

/>   Ulysses begged his wife to throw him the baby, she didn't listen.

  Then one wave of chaos stopped, so another might begin.

  The dead were in the hall, maybe only twenty more of them lined up between Emelia and the men. Evil blocked the broken doorway which led outside and into the freedom of the rain.

  The dead froze though, and everyone got quiet. They could hear the rain suddenly stop it was that sort of quiet.

  Emelia looked back and then screamed her husband's name.

  The undead were no longer concerned with Ulysses, or Emelia, or Billy. Behind their ranks, choking into the hallway came the tentacles. The hall itself could scarcely contain their girth or the sheer number of them, millions of green suckers clamping onto the dead and not letting go. None could attest to whether the smell was from whatever hellish abomination was attached to the other end of these serpentine appendages or if it came from their acidic quality, grabbing the dead, tentacles splitting off and wrapping around the horrors that had once been Greece's heroes who were raised and sent by wrathful gods. Already rotten, undead flesh and bone burned and smoked, and the dead knew pain as all of the foes of Ulysses and his family were taken in firm grasp and pulled down the hallway into the direction from which the army of the dead had come.

  Emelia screamed again as those left before her were taken into the same death-grip, tentacles slinking into the hall from both directions now as this thing from hell let fly its arms through the doors that Emelia had rushed Billy toward for escape.

  Surrounded on all sides by the reach of a squid with no head.

  Billy's mother didn't scream because the dead were taken by something bigger and exponentially more evil; she screamed as she watched one of the green probing snakes wrap around Ulysses leg, and husband and wife met one another's gaze in fear as the tentacle jerked and pulled Uly off his feet, slamming him into the ground and dragging him to what surely would be his death.

  Emelia ran then, with the remaining four bikers and Mudder on her heels. Billy bobbed up and down, her grip so tight on him.

  Abandoning the new invading thing at their backs, they chased the burning, rotting flesh as it was pulled down the halls and back into the heart of the building.

  She watched as her husband let out a painful cry, his jeans burning and the tentacle getting ever tighter on his leg as it pulled him and the fallen dead soldiers down the hallway. The floor smoked and turned to a hot mush that burned Emelia's feet, yet this only made her run that much faster to save her husband.

  Then it pulled Ulysses and the last of the chain of smoldering meat around the corner and out of her sight.

  Emelia heard Ulysses scream from around the corner, “Run Emelia, take the baby. Run!”

  The exits were broken but unblocked now. All the dead had been gathered, gripped, and pulled, and as Emelia turned the corner at the nurse's station, she grabbed the skateboard that she'd watched Mudder make for her boy, discarded by him when he and Uly had made their first four-pistoled stand down the hall behind the counter.

  The dead were being pulled by the tentacled thing into a doorway across the triage, down into darkness. The basement.

  “Emelia, get our baby out of here while you can! Go!”

  Tears welled in Emelia's eyes as she placed the baby, lying on his back onto the board and setting its wheels onto the floor, she used her foot to push him away from danger and down the now open hall towards the emergency room doors. She watched Billy roll away as she turned towards her husband. He was the only one left as the last of the dead were pulled into the dark and down the stairs.

  New serpentine appendages flew from the doorway, over Uly's head, and went for the sword, wrapping around it and dripping acid from suckers to burn Emelia's arms. Uly's leg was nearly gone, eaten away in the grip of the tentacles, and he pounded his fists at the floor after failing to grab anything to stop him being pulled into Hell's new dark mouth.

  “You can't get to me. Please, I'm begging you.”

  “No!” She wouldn't hear of it.

  Mudder swung his axe. The rest of the gang swung anything they had. Mudder was going for the basement's steel door, which lay broken but still on two of its hinges.

  “I won't leave you,” Emelia vowed.

  Emelia pulled with all her might, and the sword sliced through the meat of the tentacle and broke free.

  “If you don't leave me, you're leaving Billy all alone.”

  Then, Emelia heard the baby cry behind her and she took two steps back towards her newborn son.

  “You fight, Ulysses Purgatory. You fight to the end.”

  “I will. Now go! Please.”

  Mudder grabbed the steel door, but a tentacle pushed him back, then thumped him across the room.

  Emelia walked backwards, the fire leaving her eyes. The color was gone from her skin. She looked like a ghost.

  “Turn and run!”

  Billy cried for his mother, lying on his back at the end of the hall, so close to the doors and escape.

  “I love you.” Ulysses words were pain.

  “You fight that thing, baby.” Emelia spun then, and ran away from her husband and the monster that pulled ever harder. Uly stared into the darkness. He didn't even try to grab the steel door to stop himself from sliding in and then down.

  His good foot slipped down into the hole, hitting the first step. One more big push and that would be his end.

  Emelia snatched Billy up, skateboard and all, and pulled him to her breast as she fled.

  Ulysses felt the thing contract and knew the last pull was coming - it would all be over soon. He hoped.

  He heard Mudder yell to the boys, “Push, you bastards!”

  Uly watched the steel door close on the tentacle and all four of Mudder's companions left standing pushed with everything they had, jamming the tentacle between the heavy door and what was left of its frame.

  The acid burned and the monster struggled, yet still it would not release Ulysses' leg. Ulysses stabbed at the tentacle with the sword scabbard still in his hand.

  Mudder stood over Uly with the fire-axe. “I'm sorry, buddyro.” With Mudder's words, the big man brought the axe down hard on Ulysses' captured right leg, just above the knee.

  Ulysses body convulsed as his smoldering dead leg separated from his body. The monster wriggled its prize into the basement, and as Mudder pulled Uly free the other men got the door closed.

  Ulysses watched the stump shoot blood onto the closed steel door, and then his eyes closed.

  Chapter 35

  The End

  She would not let herself remain trapped, and the pain she knew in freeing herself was frantic and deep. She gnawed into the steel cable like a rat. She ripped at her own flesh and drew her own blood.

  She cursed that she had ever had the misfortune of hearing the very name of Billy Purgatory.

  Anastasia dropped to the ground, her leg bleeding where the cable had snatched her into the air. She looked up through that hole in the trees towards the sky. She had taken too long to break free of Billy's trickery.

  He'd gotten too much of a head start on her. Worse yet, the stars were fading, and the sun was rising.

  Time was not on Anastasia's side, but she pulled herself up and ran through the trees, following his scent – a smell she now found revolting…

  When Anastasia made it to the cliff side ramp that Billy Purgatory had just launched himself from, she found him to be already in the air with his skateboard somehow magic tricked and mid-flight spinning from his feet towards his hands. Grabbing hold, Billy gripped the trucks and pressed the board down to lead the ascent. He had contorted his body into an ill-advised combination of Army Ranger repelling from a hovering chopper mixed with Olympic high-diver on acid. Billy was missing crucial parts of the equation: no rope, no parachute, no airsickness bag.

  Anastasia's naked toes gripped the cliff's edge several feet to the left of the make-shift, yet well-constructed skateboard ramp that Billy had built on the mount
ainside and tried to keep hidden from her. As she peered down the drop off, Billy was halfway down a hundred and fifty foot expanse that ended in an open field connected to the valley below. Beyond that was thick jungle running all the way to a narrow sandy beachhead. The natives of the Tiger peninsula had snuck out of the jungle the night before, and in mass exodus by boat, raft, bathtub and anything that could float towards the open sea, were leaving their ancestral home behind. Probably not for good, but at least until Billy Purgatory was finished with it.

  She could make most of this out here in the morning haze through the smoke coming thick and black from the valley floor below. Yes, Billy Purgatory was headed straight for what resembled the fires of Hades, as if to add napalm-flavored icing to the cake atop what was becoming his greatest skateboard trick ever. The flames burned hot, fueled by kerosene strategically poured into trenches that drew out a symbol cut into the ground of a seven-pointed star. The glyph was interrupted by three concentric rings of sulfur mixed with sea salt, all crisscrossed by electrical wires that met ultimately within a sparking bulls-eye that was Billy's target.

  The fact that Billy would soon be impacting the ground and breaking every bone save the hump of lead that occupied where his brain should have been within his fool's head was the only thing that made sense, and from somewhere in her head Anastasia remembered a story she'd once heard about a make-out spot where doomed lovers jumped to their deaths in the rash over-dramatization that made up the ways of the star crossed, the emotionally blinded and the weeping hearted unrealistic.

  Had lying with her in the jungle and the subsequent and predictable fight they'd shared afterward really pushed him over the edge, and was all this showmanship really necessary?

  There was no way down other than diving after Billy, and Anastasia realized her lungs were full of smoke even though she had no need to breath. The insanity of the episode caused her to gasp and as she leapt after him, she considered that surely he was going somewhere and all this grandeur playing out on the tiny apocalyptic peninsula in South Asia must have a purpose – he was opening a doorway to somewhere. It's why he coveted that book that Anastasia wanted so badly herself; it had pointed Billy down a do-or-die pathway into the great adventure that was the mission he talked so intricately and heartfelt about on so many occasions before.