Anastasia spread her arms like a bat and plummeted towards certain death. She knew that she had no choice but to follow him. She had to see for herself what light bulbs were flicking in his head after all these years of silent brooding, tangled emotional-unavailability and bad wiring.
Billy Purgatory finally had a plan, and there was no way Anastasia wasn't going to read the Cliffs-Notes.
Birds scattered from their perches all about the valley. The sad lament of a goat Anastasia had not noticed below until she had her eyes firmly pointed towards chaos overtook the crackling pop-noise of the DYI eldritch fires and electrical hiss. The goat was still a speck below her in the slim light, but her senses where sharp in darkness and sharper still when what accounted for even slimmer life within her threatened to be snuffed in moments. She could make out that it was tied to a rock just outside the fire line, and its baying echoed the mechanical clicking alarms of the Geiger counter it had fastened to the collar around its goat neck.
Anastasia sailed down like a toy airplane with a rock attached to its nose-cone, and she could already smell it. For the briefest of moments, she thought it was the goat, but the stench was overpowering and unmistakable. Nothing alive or dead in neither Heaven nor Hell smelled like it did – that roasting of perished flesh over a methane fire basted in angel tears. Then she could hear the Monster scream from far below.
She would have thought it impossible for the hairs to stand up on the back of one's neck while the wind had hold of your hair in flight, but it was possible, for it happened to her. Jumping off a cliff had been nothing in comparison on the fear scale to what she was suddenly jumping to. What she followed the fabulous flying skateboarder towards.
It had appeared below them out of thin air as it always did and suddenly Anastasia was no longer so excited at the plan. Billy had actually read the Navigator's Book and comprehended what he had read; he'd figured out a way to summon The Time Zombie and even worse than figuring out how to do it, Billy had followed through. Anastasia had worked this all out in her head in the jungle; actually watching it unfold before her eyes was something altogether different.
Anastasia could hear it scream.
She heard Billy Purgatory laugh.
He had truly done it: the one thing Billy shouldn't have wished for, he had. He'd begged the universe itself for it.
The screaming undead machination was a monster beyond all unholy visions of a monster, and because of this, it was the nightmare that all other monsters fear in their dreams. It feared nothing and had no cause to be alarmed even in the odd place it found itself called suddenly into creation.
Yes, because it had no fear and had never found itself off-guard or lured into a springing trap, the Time Zombie didn't bother to look up.
All of Billy Purgatory's weight and hatred and insanity came crashing down onto the monster's head in the form of the hard plank and spinning wheels of an unbreakable children's toy.
For the first time in the creature's evil history, the Time Zombie took a real blow to the head, and it crumbled along with Billy. They rolled together and punched and kicked and screamed and lashed at one another and neither was prepared for the impact, the viciousness or the dirty pummeling that began the altercation.
Then they both stumbled to their feet from their corners of the magic-laced ring of salt and fire. Anastasia landed like a cat next to a confused goat with a spinning atomic warning box swinging where a bell should be. Both Billy and Time Zombie ran for one another and locked up.
Anastasia steadied herself, grasping a goat's horn as the world about them began fading in and out of existence.
“Take me where you took her, you son-of-a-bitch!” Billy's voice was hard, pained. “I dare you.”
Reality no longer had hold of itself. The universe was opening a pit in its own stomach. Anastasia could barely stand and she wanted to call out to him, but how would that be fair?
Billy had made his choice, hadn't he? To distract Billy now would be to deal him his own death, or worse.
Billy had the monster: its neck was slime-coated rubber, and black teeth snapped at Billy's face. It bent in ways things should not.
You have to stop this, Anastasia! You have to help him! He's not that strong.
She leapt then from the goat and the rock, sailing into the ever-spinning wind of smoke, pulled into realities intertwining as random coils of what was not and never could be about them all.
Billy's face was cold and determined. He had the Time Zombie by the neck still. Billy's fingers pushed into dead green flesh, and glowing orange puss seeped from the wound to burn his fingertips. He didn't show the pain, though. He wouldn't let go.
The world began to rip. Mirror dimensions all running opposite to the others. Anastasia found herself amongst Billy and the Time Zombie…
…and above them.
…outside of them.
She watched herself stare at herself staring at the two of them.
Anastasia reached desperately for Billy but was also reaching through him and back into herself. The monster's mouth closed on her hand. Her fingers went into it but were too far away to touch the snapping mouth. Nothing she saw made sense to her any longer. One minute it had her firmly in its clawing fingers, but the more it twisted on one part of her the rest of her would be far away. Distance was nothing that factored into that relationship of time and space failing all at once and never all about her body.
Billy was before her, holding the struggle steady somehow as the dials twisted on their own upon the monster's chest and the glowing orb of its heart flickered in colors that Anastasia had never seen before because they had never existed before.
Flora grew backwards about them in rapid succession and the fires burned out and restarted all in instants that lasted days yet never came to pass. The Earth itself night, then day, but it could be ordered into no pattern and changed with such unexpected fluidity that it never changed at all until it did.
Time burned with each tick, extinguishing anything would ever know in a heart-rending rip, and she tried to take smoke ridden air into her lungs just to prove that there was any order left to anything at all, but gasping for breath only brought enchanting death ever at odds with horrible bliss. Anastasia's mind could no longer comprehend anything she saw, and she hoped then that whoever Anastasia was would realize that she knew everything, and she searched for her mind to tell the girl so.
She heard Billy from far away, “We don't exist!” He was happy about this revelation, and she needed to tell Anastasia what Billy had told Anastasia so Anastasia could tell her.
Anything and everything, of course, didn't matter then.
She had no idea if she'd said that out loud. There was nothing she was not connected in that moment which never existed, but she'd never allowed herself to touch anything in order to connect to it.
Never anything, except Billy.
The Tiger Peninsula began folding into itself, and the bigger it got, the smaller it got because expanding into a single point was the contraction she had been searching for all the days of her life. Anastasia could hear herself screaming at him, “Grab my hand!”
One of Anastasia's hands extended to one of Billy's hands – that stupid skateboard between them. Anastasia watched herself reach for it. Billy pressed his other hand through the control orb on the Time Zombie's chest while he reached with the board to touch Ana with the other. Another of his arm's still twisted towards the monster's neck and another of Billy's hands brushed fingertips into Anastasia's hair.
Billy's other hand reached into an 8MM film frame and grasped for his mother, Emelia.
“Choose! Goddamn you, Billy Purgatory.” Anastasia heard Anastasia screaming ever louder at Billy.
Billy Purgatory didn't know who to grab in order to pull himself out of this and onward towards his life plan.
Anastasia grasped for the other end of the skateboard.
“Choose.” She could see that glimmer in his eyes she hadn't seen in so long
. That innocent look he'd done so well to hide with his care-for-nothing attitude when they were children riding a freight train. Innocence that she had destroyed that night in a lesson about trust gifted to him by her fangs. “Please Billy, you have to choose.”
Then Billy Purgatory smiled, understanding her words, as the Time Zombie's chest erupted in white-hot light, and the only world Billy and Anastasia had ever known ended.
Epilogue
I watched Anastasia crying, big red tears that would not stop, and the sun was shining high above her head and drying the mud she crouched in, her knees and toes pressed into the wet earth. The fires he had started in the valley of the Tiger Peninsula had burned themselves out. Her skin was beginning to scorch and redden to the same color as the blood streaking her face.
Goddesses know things, and it wouldn't be long until the sun consumed her. Anastasia seemed to know this too.
She was focused fully on her own fingers, her hands resting on her legs. She gripped tightly the hardwood of the skateboard.
This silly thing and teardrops were all she thought she'd have to remember Billy Purgatory by. The Time Zombie had vanished, and the world around her had just begun to resemble a place that she could remember and find familiar.
I cannot say why I took notice of Anastasia then. Perhaps the feeling of desperation that was consuming her faster than the sunlight was enough of a surge of energy to turn my gaze to her. I have felt this sort of longing in women before, and it can be said that I have given in to the call of those who are viewed as monsters.
It cannot be said that I felt pity for her, though. At this point, when she felt at her lowest, she was still quite unredeemable in my eyes. Yet she was only at her low from her perspective. I knew that she had much further to fall, and in the maddening tumble that awaited her she might still have a chance.
Anastasia didn't have long to be alone there in the aftermath of Billy's ill-thought plans. Just as quickly and without warning the monster that had taken Billy had reappeared before Anastasia again.
The Time Zombie had come alone with no passenger; Anastasia knew that Billy Purgatory must be lost in time.
“Where did you take him?” she whispered at the abomination that raised sharpened claws towards her face. Anastasia knew that it would give her no answer. It was incapable of speech and long ago had it given up the distractions of human emotions.
The sun-scorched vampire woman, Anastasia, smiled through the pain, remembering that she too had long ago given up similar distractions.
“We are monsters,” she told the Time Zombie. “We have no answers for my silly questions.”
Anastasia considered, for the brief moment that the monster who giveth and taketh away time allowed her, that this was the end of her mission. The monster before her was more than powerful enough to tear her pretty sun drying skin and bone to shreds. Fling her across this valley, or scatter her throughout time and space, let the sun or a thousand alternate suns just like it burn what was left of her to ash.
It's what she would have done had it been her standing over it. The stench was unbearable; soon anything left of the vile thing that had called herself Anastasia would join that stench everlasting.
Had there ever been hope that the end would play out any differently? Anastasia had much to answer for, and there was no tipping the scales of karma in a direction opposite where they had come to rest.
As I watched, I cried for Anastasia.
The Time Zombie closed its hands around her head, and as the sunlight beamed judgment down on her so harshly that even her long dark hair threatened to burst into flames, Anastasia took her own advice and chose.
She turned her face - cradled in the monster's hands - upwards and shot daggers from her eyes, and her mouth opened to bare fangs, her lips cracking and bleeding.
A monster…
“Emotionally unavailable,” she hissed at it.
Then her arms raised Billy's skateboard and lashed towards the Time Zombie. The tip of the board opposite her grasp pressed into the control orb at the monster's chest.
There was a flash of energy all around Anastasia and the Time Zombie that took up the burning work started by the sunshine. Anastasia continued on the only path she had ever known: forever hunting, stalking, following.
I would go with her. For whether she knew it or not, this was not her end, and she would have Artemis watching over her. Whether she liked it or not.
The adventures will continue in Book Two
Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five
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