Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Read online

  I was pale and skinny. I had expected to still be burnt; that was the last thing I remembered. Him vanishing with that monster, and the sunlight burning me to my boiling point. I turned to the side and stared. Maybe the salt in that awful dead sea had done something therapeutic. I couldn't find a blemish on me.

  My waist was so small, and my ribs were right there for anyone to count. I'd definitely lost a lot of curve. Calvin seemed to find me appealing, but I figured he was used to taking whatever he could get. I guessed too that in his line of work, he was used to the emaciated.

  I swiped the steam from the mirror with my palm and found my eyes staring back at me, more black than green. “He thinks I'm a drug slut.” I shook my head and let the reflection steam back up and hide me from myself.

  Calvin hadn't owned up to his profession yet to me, but I could smell the chemicals on him, even over the rancid fried chicken smell in his truck. It clung to him, to everything connected with him, and to me. He had plenty of locked-outbuildings on his little ranch.

  My kind has made use of drug dealers, and those addicted to said drugs, for centuries. They're always perfectly manipulated — it's far too easy when you want things so desperately.

  The water was burning hot and felt fantastic, nothing like the Salton Sea had. I was shocked, as I began to pull at my hair and untangle the knots it had tied itself into, that I wasn't more pulled by bloodlust than I was. Yes, Calvin was about to be a butchered pig, but I wanted to do it more because he was a low-life. And it would probably be much more humane, what I'd do to him, than whatever it was he was imagining doing to me.

  I would have to eat, or I'd just keep wasting away. I'd never let that happen again. I'd never let myself go beyond that tipping point where I start pretending I'm one of them. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt with her dead face on it.

  I wanted to feed more to get back in the game and get my head right than I did to satisfy some ancient and mystical mumbo-jumbo connection I had with all things bloody and warm. I felt like I needed to reprioritize: find out exactly where that monster had dropped me off, and what I was going to do about all of it. The where was not in question, this was undoubtedly the Inland Empire — but when was I?

  Everything seemed very familiar time-wise, but, what if the monster had dropped me off before any of that had even happened? What if there was another “me” running around, still searching for him? Was that even possible?

  What if he hadn't made that stupid mistake yet..?

  I focused on shampoo bubbles. My hair was beginning to smell like hair again. I felt clean — I had forgotten how that even felt. All that time running around the jungle killing villagers and washing up in a mountain spring…

  I scratched my scalp on accident and spit soap out of my mouth — my nails needed serious attention.

  I smelled my hair as I walked out of the shower. It smelled like shampoo and salt now — which, I suppose, was an improvement. I dug through mostly bare bathroom cupboards: feminine hygiene products, marijuana in plastic bags, tube upon tube of tacky lipstick.

  “Does this bitch not own a towel?”

  I walked into her room. The bed was turned down and there were three white towels stacked on top of the comforter. I stared in confusion for a minute, water running down my legs.

  “Son of a bitch.” I said it quietly, defeated, as I went for a towel.

  I'd put on a pair of exercise pants that were loose and comfortable and a white tank top. Pretty much everything Wanda owned was “stripper in training” wear — but this would do for now.

  Calvin snored, louder than his Hog-Bitch truck's tail pipes, sprawled out on an overstuffed, fake leather couch. His T-shirt rode up his hairy belly. The bucket of chicken was on the floor, and his left hand still trailed off the sofa and into its greasy depths. I could hear that overtaxed heart of his, struggling to beat.

  I watched him from a doorjamb, my arms folded as I leaned. Putting this piglet out of his misery would be doing him a favor. Thump! Pause. Thump! Murmur. Thump!

  I ran my tongue over my fangs.

  Turning, I said to no one, “Great Anastasia… you're a trailer whore now.”

  III.

  “Bitch, I will cut you so deep, your mama's placenta will bleed.” Margot was a tiny little whirling dervish. Half-Mexican, all trash-talking, always spiked up out of her mind on something. She was into blades, had her own knife collection, and it was an impressive one. She liked to go for the army surplus, less flash/more functional variety. She also had an affinity for surgical steel and scalpels.

  She had slipped the knife from her jacket sleeve and was on him before he, or his friends, had a chance to move. She was ready to climb right up the side of the guy, even though he was easily twice her size. Her blonde pigtails trailed down her back and jumped when she dug a boot heel into him and began her ascent.

  “Sweetie, the placenta gets ejected after the baby comes out. So…”

  “Then I'll slice it up and feed it to him.” Margot had the guy pushed into a brick wall. The back of his head was already bleeding from the impact of her pushing him into it. “Let me cut his throat.”

  “Get her off me!” The two with him both had pistols stuffed into the back of their pants, but they were either too taken by surprise or too genuinely freaked out to think to pull them. The one Margot was climbing and threatening didn't seem to know where to grab her to push her off him. She had one hand on his lapel and the other twirled the blade.

  She was only 5′3″.

  “I'm gonna cut you up and then feed you to my pet alligator.”

  Her eyes meant every word of it, although Margot didn't actually own an alligator.

  I had taken to wearing jeans and a pair of rattlesnake cowboy boots. Black tank top and arms crossed in my leather jacket. My hair still smelled vaguely of salt, and overpoweringly of chemicals used to produce meth.

  “Get these crazy chicks the money!”

  Margot ran the tip of the blade into his left nostril. “I'm gonna cut you up nice and slow.” I could see her crazed expression reflected back to me from his pupils. Big dull eyes, full of fear.

  One of the others used a clicker and the trunk of a Lincoln popped open. He reached in, cautiously, with his other hand in the air. He tossed the purple gym bag at my feet.

  “It better be all there.” Margot was running the side of the blade over his left cheek.

  “It's all there,” I said without bothering to open it. “Margot, climb down.”

  She growled at him and then barked in his face like a hyena. I smelled urine.

  He straightened his jacket after Margot jumped down and backed away from him, twirling a knife in each hand.

  “Don't make me start throwing knives.”

  They ran. I kept my arms close to my chest and watched Town Car tail lights blur and turn into a memory as they sped away.

  “Bigger they are, the faster they cry.” Margot was proud of herself. She was a twenty-something cosmetology school dropout who'd been waitressing at a truck stop, buying meth from Calvin when I found her and decided to start training her. “I did good, right?” She laughed, knowing she was good at what she did.

  “They never see it coming with you.”

  Margot went for the bag. As I watched her, I suddenly felt cold. I knew that I'd been out too long, exerting myself too much, and wouldn't make it much longer until I was in a mumbling stupor.

  My legs were already shaky.

  She looked up from the bag and all that money, wrapped in plastic. “What's wrong, Ana?”

  I reached down for her and pulled her up. She stood with the bag of money between us. “You're hard to keep up with. I don't know if it's the sugar or the drugs.”

  “It's that I'm badass.”

  I smiled. Badass.

  My fingers pulled the black turtleneck from her skin, the one she wore to hide the bite marks when we were out in the night working — selling addicts their dreams and salvation, and collecting what w
as ours.

  “Here? Seriously? In the alley behind the feed store?”

  “Shut up, Margot.”

  I found the place I wanted. It was a good patch of skin, close enough to the vein. I'd been working the other side of her neck lately.

  “Can't you wait until we get back to Calvin's?”

  “I thought you were going to shut up.”

  My fangs sunk into her neck, and she didn't have a choice but to shut up. Her blood was warm and mixed with all her little killer-girl adrenaline — and the drugs. I'd learned to live with the drugs being mixed in.

  I held her up and took a lot, probably too much. It just tasted so good. Whatever she'd been on tonight to get her all hyped out of her gourd took a second for me to blend into my psyche and vampire senses. Sometimes they'd take a hit and be dulled by the opiates or amphetamines — but most times, my senses were heightened by them.

  I slung Margot over my left shoulder. She'd be out for awhile and wake with a nasty hangover, but she was a trooper and considered it fair trade. That was the thing about Margot — she didn't complain much about being dinner.

  I went for the bag of money with my other hand. Little drops of her blood had fallen onto the plastic bags the bills were stacked in. I watched the blood swirl and pool over the plastic, and it seemed to take on a life of its own.

  The tiny faces of little green presidential profiles began opening and closing their mouths and blinking their eyes.

  I zipped the bag closed with Margot still hoisted over my shoulder then grabbed it up.

  “You're lucky I bite you and suck that stuff out of you, baby-cakes. There's no telling how many times I've pulled a one-woman intervention on an overdose.”

  IV.

  I didn't sleep with them in the trailer. It turned out that Wanda was doing a good seven month stretch in county, if she was lucky. Calvin had also relayed that she was thinking about shanking some girl who supposedly stole cigarettes from her — and if that happened I might never get to meet Wanda.

  Margot had taken over Wanda's room.

  I had taken what I wanted of Wanda's things. I told Calvin that I only worked at night, and that I'd be sleeping during the day, and for him not to come looking for me.

  He thought it was really clever when he nicknamed me “Vampire Girl”.

  Margot was near comatose during the day too, either sleeping something drug-related off or sleeping me off. The sunlight streaming in through the blinds was no concern to her as she slept. She'd just put a pillow over her face.

  Barn #4 had a root cellar beneath it that hadn't been used in years. You'd have thought that a drug dealer would find something useful to do with a cellar hidden under a barn. It was really something to ponder — how stupid Calvin was normally, yet this loser who'd never made it past the 10th grade could mix all those chemicals together just so and make very high quality product. Not perfect, but perfect enough for the middle of nowhere.

  It was very comfortable down there, the cold earth of that cellar. Nothing disturbed me and the spiders were afraid of me. I had my clothing hanging in perfect little rows under the stairs.

  I'd only been there a day or so, and used the stars to judge when I was. The monster had dropped me back into reality with a three day variance from where I'd left South East Asia.

  It had happened. He was gone. The monster too.

  “Time Zombieeeeeeeeeeeee…”

  Calvin was clueless to my true nature. He just found me enterprising and, I'm sure, sexually attractive. I made it very clear early on that us coupling was not part of the equation. He accepted that in a more gentlemanly way than I'd been prepared for.

  He seemed much more interested in me wanting to do all the grunt work that goes along with being a drug dealer. I didn't sell his garbage per se, he had others for that. I was his enforcer.

  The locals were skeptical at first, and I can't blame them. I had to break a few arms, and a couple of overdue accounts were terminated indefinitely by me draining them dry and dumping them into a hole in the desert.

  Those first few weeks saw me really get my strength back. There was more than enough reason to make some of the shady types who had issues with Calvin's business enterprise disappear. And while I was at it — there was all that blood.

  I had seen Margot around, working her job at that truck stop and spending all her tips on one drug or another. The night I first interacted with her, true to form, she was in a knife fight with a trucker who'd decided to take advantage. She'd been having a really bad week. Behind on all her bills, evicted from her tiny apartment, lost as far as life path and career choices went.

  The wrong trucker had picked the wrong tiny girl to try to take advantage of that night. I stopped her from stabbing him; I'm not sure why, it just seemed like a desperate act from a desperate girl. I felt it was all so avoidable.

  She didn't see me bear my fangs at him and growl for him to climb into his rig and start driving. The speed in which the truck came to life and headed towards the highway ramp proved that he had seen me just fine — and it had scared the life out of him.

  I had dropped a lot of bodies in the county and those neighboring it. Those who I had sent into the ground were drug dealers and general miscreants who the Sheriff's department wasn't too keen on wasting the resources to look for, much less solve their murders.

  If I was going to stay in one place for too long, I'd have to find a source of blood that was renewable, willing, and I could talk into giving it up.

  Margot was oh so very high the first time. I think she thought I was coming onto her sexually at first. She's a smart girl, in her own way — she knew there was something much deeper to it. She figured it out all on her own, and quickly, while as high as a doped up cloud.

  We never had the discussion — the “you're a vampire” discussion. To her credit, she just ran with it. We didn't completely gloss over the issue, but we could be free about it just because it just wasn't an issue. We did our jobs, ran into the night with one another; she'd get high on adrenaline and life, and I'd tell her when I needed her neck.

  And she always gave it over to me.

  The old ones called humans like her “familiars”. I called her my student. I taught her about stealth, tactical planning, and the element of surprise. How to overpower humans and how to take from them whatever you need — or, sometimes, just what you want.

  She'd gotten so good that I forgot at times she was human. I think at times, she'd forgotten she was human too.

  V.

  I'd never fired a gun before. What cause had I ever had to do such a thing? It was a knockoff of a Russian AK-47, which had been outfitted with a barrel drum filled with ammo. It was like a gangster movie.

  Firing it was like sex.

  That's what Margot and I did on our off nights. We'd go out in the desert with a pick-up load of guns and ammo and shoot them. It was supposed to make us proficient in firearms, which was important to Calvin. Aside from being a meth dealer, he was also a tried and true survivalist nutso.

  He had become convinced after taking too many bong hits and flipping to the science channel on his television that we were due for another Ice Age. I didn't have the heart to tell him what had caused the last Ice Age, and that we were in no danger of a repeat performance.

  Margot was better with the pistols; she could just handle them better, and they were a better fit for her tiny frame. I liked the big guns, like riot shotguns, machine guns, anything that tossed out lots of ammo in the least amount of time imaginable. We were two girls, all dressed in black, making a lot of noise so far out in the middle of nothing that nobody could hear or care.

  “I'm in love with you.” That's what Margot said to me while loading more bullets into the clip of her Ruger.

  “What did you say?”

  “I'm in love with you and I want to be with you. I want to be just like you.” She just kept pressing bullets into the clip.

  “You don't want to be anything like me.”
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br />   “Yes, I do.”

  I set my own gun down on the tailgate and watched her finish loading the clip and then slide it into the handle of the pistol.

  “You want to be a vampire?”

  “That, too.”

  “That is not happening.”

  Margot abandoned the gun and leaned against the tailgate.

  “I'm not good enough to be a vampire?”

  “You're already a fine vampire. Better than some of the best I've ever known.”

  “I'm not one, though. I'm human…”

  “Hardly.” I pulled myself up onto the tailgate and let my legs swing down. “You just think you're human.”

  “Physically, my body is human.”

  “Maybe that's true. You are in no way human though.”

  “Then what am I? You tell me.” She looked up at me with those eyes. She was persistent and bossy and hard to ignore.

  “You take from humans, do you not?”

  “I take what's mine, yeah.”

  “You are stronger, and faster, and always have the upper hand in a fight, don't you?”

  She nodded.

  “The only thing that separates us is what we take in to keep us alive.”

  “Blood?”

  “Right. I need blood, you need other things.”

  “I'd be off the drugs. If I were a vampire….”

  “You'd only be replacing one drug with another. We're both addicts, Margot. We both crave.”

  She crossed her arms and looked down. “I don't feel like I'm good enough for you.”

  “Neither of us are any good for the other beyond what we already share. We are parasitic in our relationship.”

  She pushed off the truck and went walking with her back to me. “Has anyone ever been good enough for you? Anyone ever kept up with you?”

  She looked back to me and continued, “Has there ever been anyone that you couldn't just manipulate and overpower and who you felt equal with? Has anyone ever been good enough to love you?”

  “No.” I stared her down when I said it. “I love no one.”