Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Read online

  Billy had no idea where Pop was, though. He kept being fed a story that Pop was off working for his mother on some secret mission — but Billy knew Pop. “No matter how into Mom he is, there's no way that Pop is gonna do any business that stinks like evil business.”

  He was gonna have to come up with his own plan, and he was gonna have to do it largely alone, since his board never talked and was only good at rollin’ and smackin’. Billy checked the window and found that it was the kind of window that didn't open. He looked in the bathroom; the air vent would work, if Billy had been a raccoon. He opened the louvered doors to the closet. Aside from some pants and shirts hanging up that Billy wouldn't be caught dead in, there wasn't anything.

  “Well, smack a catfish's ass.” Billy slammed the closet doors shut. He had no idea what it meant to slap a catfish on the ass, but Pop said it when he was pissed off — and Billy was definitely pissed off.

  Billy watched the doors click shut, then felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up again. The flash from inside the closet was so bright through the louvers that Billy ducked, sure they were gonna come flying off their hinges.

  The light faded, but the hairs on the back of his neck didn't stand down as quick as they had before. Billy could hear the raspy crying coming from inside the closet. It was the saddest sounding thing the boy had ever heard. Low, meek, and totally devoid of any hope.

  Slowly, Billy crept back to the closet door with his board raised. What kind of pitiful science-trick was this?

  She was curled up in the corner of the closet when Billy found the courage to open the door. Her lab coat had been torn at her left shoulder, and there were dark splotches on it — they looked like blood, and Billy prayed that the blood wasn't hers. Her hair wasn't as cute, and was disheveled as wild as a pixie cut can go. The skin of her long legs was so pale, and there was a gash down her right one. Mira was missing a shoe.

  She looked up, tears in her eyes. Her face was ghost-white and her lips so devoid of color they looked blue. “Billy..?”

  “Mira? I thought that you got lost in time.”

  She stared at him, as if she didn't understand the words he was speaking. “I wasn't lost. I found something.”

  “Mira, you're back now. I mean, we're kinda locked in my room because it turns out my Mom is evil…”

  “You were there.” Tears ran down her face and those big eyes just stared. They weren't as pretty as they'd been across from the picnic table. They were bloodshot, sunken, losing color in the iris.

  “I haven't gone anywhere since I went to Africa.”

  “No, it was you. The same scar.” She traced the gash in her leg, which didn't make a lot of sense to Billy because his scar was on his face. “I know it was you. You didn't do a thing to stop them.”

  Mira raised her finger from the gash and pressed it to her lips. Then she licked the blood from it with a tongue that was white.

  Billy took a step back. “Mira, you're safe now…”

  “Safe!” She grabbed at the wall and her nails scratched at the wood. “The future is the most horrible place imaginable.”

  Billy kept backing up.

  Mira pulled herself up and out of the closet. “There are so many of them there. The whole world is them. They all call out your name.”

  Billy had his skateboard held out between him and the girl. “Mira, it was an accident. Dr. Luna is all into you, he'd never do anything to hurt you on purpose. He cried when you disappeared.”

  “Oh, he cried, did he?” Her head did a nervous twitch as she got to her feet and kicked off the remaining shoe. “He cried? None of you have ever cried. No matter what has happened to you in your whole life, nothing compares. They tear at one another and they scream your name.”

  “Mira, you need to stay in that closet.”

  “Purgatory.” She whispered it. “Purgatory.” Billy was more freaked out by the whispering. “Come out, Billy Purgatory. Come out.” She steadied herself, holding onto the closet door. “But you won't come out to them. You don't do anything. You didn't do a thing when I screamed your name along with them.” She pushed herself away from the doorway and into the room. “I saw you looking at me and I begged you to help me. You didn't do anything.”

  “Mira, that wasn't me. That was the old me. Mom has him locked up in the lab.”

  “It's going to be you — and from where I've been, and what I've seen that I can't forget — you're guilty.”

  Her hand grabbed her lab coat and pulled the collar off her neck. Billy saw the bite marks and the scratches. The wound that leaked blood that had turned black.

  “Mira, please — let me take you to Dr. Luna. He loves you and he'll fix you.”

  Mira stared down at the boy as the rest of the color left her eyes. “How could he love this? How could I ever be expected to love after what I've seen?”

  Billy swung at the bedroom door with his skateboard. “Hey, soldier jack-offs, we need a medic in here!”

  “The future is horrible.”

  Billy banged the door again.

  Mira opened her mouth and Billy tried not to look at that white tongue as her mouth struggled to form words — some of her last.

  “I'm gonna break open your skull. I'm going to eat your brain. I'm going to stop you…”

  Billy banged at the door again before she lunged. He was just able to dodge, but his board went flying and rolling across the rug, then under the bed. Mira sliced around with her hands and took out one of the wooden bed posters.

  Billy ran up the steps that led up to the high mattress and leapt across the bed. His skateboard hadn't rolled to the other side, so Billy rolled in after it. His eyes looked up wildly, lying on his back under the bed. He watched the mattress springs strain and could feel her weight upon the bed. He heard the ripping of fabric and then he heard it again and he strained to reach his skateboard as springs gave and Mira's wild hand punched through the mattress.

  When she laughed she made a gurgling sound, like her lungs were full of blood. She grabbed wildly with her hand punched through the mattress, then it vanished up the hole. Billy rolled into his board as Mira's hand punched a new hole into the mattress and through the springs. The twisted metal cut into her flesh and black blood and pus oozed onto the floor. It smelled like death as it pooled below her crazy grasping hand. Billy watched her fingernail slice into the rug, and he rolled the rest of the way out from under the bed.

  When Billy crashed into the telescope, knocking it over, he looked for Mira, but she wasn't on the bed any longer. Feathers were still dancing in the air and Billy didn't know where she'd gone as he looked around the room wildly.

  The door to Billy's room unlocked and then burst open. The two uniformed shock-troopers stepped into the room, guns drawn. “What the hell are you doing in here, kid?”

  Billy saw a shadow move, and he tried to warn them. “She's behind the door.”

  Mira grabbed the first one and snapped his neck. The other took a step back, but stopped just long enough to take in the horror of the once cute girl biting hard into the exposed neck of her dead captive. She pulled from the neck an enormous chunk of flesh and blood, then pushed the one she was eating into the other trooper. They all crashed to the floor and he found himself pinned beneath zombie-Mira and his dead companion. The guard let out a cry, and as Billy Purgatory took his run and jumped the pile, skateboard in hand, he watched Mira shove her fingers into the eye-sockets of the remaining guard.

  “Look, Billy.” She gurgled with her mouth full. “Look. All over fingers.”

  Billy landed with his feet on his board and he flew down the hallway towards the grand staircase. “Sorry, Mom — time-out just ended.”

  III.

  The fact that the front door was locked, like every other door that Billy pulled on, was way uncool. That the window he usually snuck out of was locked, and that banging his skateboard into it wouldn't break the shatter-proof glass, was just overkill. Billy heard an unhealthy scream drift through the
house from upstairs. It was too deep a voice to be Mira's, even though her voice wasn't near as singsong as he'd heard it to be in the past. Billy had stayed up late and seen all the movies — everyone she bit was turning into a zombie, and Billy was trapped in this place.

  Billy looked up the landing to see one of the troopers, sans helmet and half his face, had already turned. He was sniffing the air and trying to navigate down the steps. Billy ran down one of the thousand hallways in this joint, trying to get to the back of the house and hopefully an unlocked door.

  “You don't need to know the secrets hidden behind any locked doors in this house.” Billy mocked his mother's voice as he skated down the hallway. “Yeah, well put zombiepocalypse in your French press and smoke it, Mom.”

  Billy put the brakes on as he heard a ding to his left. He saw a lighted little button in the shape of an up arrow — they had an elevator. Billy kicked up his board, ready to run in when the doors opened and take this thing as high as it would go. He'd climb out a chimney if he had to.

  The doors to the elevator slid open. Four of the maids where busy ripping cutlets off one of the butlers. The motion of the opening doors turned all eyes and bloody chewing faces to Billy.

  Billy swung his board at the one closest to the door; he clocked her right in her undead face and broke her undead nose. She tumbled back into her companions, who confused her for the butler and started tearing into her. Billy was into the air and again landing on his wheels faster than you could say, “A funny thing happened to me on an elevator ride with a bunch of zombie maids.”

  He knew that this was not going well for him. The outbreak was spreading faster than he had imagined. He figured every member of the household staff on the second floor was already playing for team meat. Now, if those ever climbed out of that elevator — and if what was left of black-ops ever made it to the bottom of the stairs — it wouldn't be long before anyone on this floor had the chewed-on sickness too.

  Billy tried to calculate just how large the household staff was and gave up after eleven — he'd never seen the same one of them twice that he could remember. “There's gotta be a hundred of them,” Billy guessed. A hundred hungry mouths to feed versus one lonely skateboarder were not good odds for the boy.

  He rolled off the wood floors of the hallway and found himself skating across the fine marble of the grand ballroom at the center of the house. It was an open area, largely empty beyond stacks of chairs on the south wall and high columns which rose beyond the second floor. The noise of his wheels echoing in the empty, largely unlit place seemed ever so loud. Billy watched zombie butlers and maids spill out onto the balconies from the second floor that looked down into the room. Damn, there was a staircase that led down from reception area up there. Billy was out in the open, and a rolling duck.

  Zombies slashed at the air in the general direction of the first floor. One of the maids didn't get the concept that she was a story up and went right over the balcony, crashing to the ballroom floor and snapping her neck. Her zombie head broke open like a melon right before he almost rolled into her. He jumped her twitching corpse and the black ooze that spilled out over the expensive floor.

  Billy kicked off harder, trying to clear the room as fast as he could. Zombies flooded the balconies over the archway he was skating for, and if another one of them decided to jump and landed just right, Billy would be done for.

  He flinched and almost came off his board when he heard the gunshots start on the second floor. “Oh crap, they know how to use guns?” Billy was nine ways screwed on this zombie attack deal.

  “Undead monsters!” He heard the voice of Broom from somewhere on the second floor. “You are of no consequence to me.” Bam! Bam! Bam! “I am your lord and master.”

  “That Russian's a dick.” At the last minute, Billy decided to veer off a straight line headed towards the archway, and was glad he did as one of the butlers took a dive for him. Billy heard bones break when he hit, but he was a fatty, and that had absorbed most of the fall. Billy dodged a hungry swipe and flew under the archway and out of zombie-bombardier range for the moment.

  He jumped off his board and grabbed it. He peered around the entryway to the service stairs; they were thankfully clear. Billy made his way into the kitchen. He ran past all the glass doors of refrigerated goods and his stomach was rumbling for a sammich — but stopping to make one now is what got stupid people killed in monster movies. Well, that and making out with girls.

  “Girls are nothing but bad news.” Billy made a vow that after the girl from the baseball field, and all the vampires, and now Dr. Luna's sweetheart with the zombie-rot, that he was officially done with girls. “Lone wolf, baby.”

  Billy ran through the dining room. He could hear more gunfire, and the murmuring chant of the living dead got louder and more menacing all the time. Billy was running out of options, and he was running out of house as he ran into the sunroom.

  All glass and again balconies to the second floor, the vast atrium and plant room was an indoor breakfast favorite of his mother's when the weather wasn't cooperative. Billy looked out all those windows at the grounds beyond. He didn't waste any time grabbing an indoor metal patio chair and flinging it with all his might against one of the forty foot windows. Billy kicked himself to a stop as he watched the chair fly through the air and impact the glass — and then, sadly, bounce off to crash down to the floor.

  “If I ever get out of this house…”

  Billy didn't have time to finish his vow. The zombies were filling the hallways behind him. Soon the enclosed iron and glass room would be overrun, and the moon and stars which looked down through the glass roof would watch him get ripped to shreds and his brain be some snooty butler's midnight snack.

  Zombies swarmed into the room, arms outstretched and mouths agape. The household staff had gotten really ugly really quick. Some of them weren't even in one piece and were dragging themselves into the room. Others were a lot more spry and motivated, climbing over the slower ones to get at Billy first. Torn, ragged, nothing but hungry mouths and blood and leaking black goo. Now he understood why he and Pop hadn't had a maid.

  “Pop.” Billy said his name and he wished as hard as he could wish that Pop was there — but he wasn't. Billy felt really sad suddenly that he'd never see Pop again, but he was happy that the old man wouldn't have to see his boy go out like this. “I tried my best, Pop. There was just too damn many of them.”

  The zombies were closing in now. All that was left between them and Billy was the breakfast table, and they'd crawl over and dance around that thing like hookers to a jukebox. The boy could feel the seconds of his life ticking away. He could truly say that aside from not getting to say goodbye to Pop, he didn't have any regrets.

  “I was as badass as a badass could be.” The only thing that'd make right now any better is if he'd have been sitting on a keg of TNT and had a book of matches. “That'd be an awesome way to go out. It'd look like Drunk Joe's meat market in here.”

  There was the loudest ping noise imaginable — high-pitched and unyielding — like a tuning fork. Billy covered his ears and every zombie in the place froze and turned from Billy and towards the noise. Billy's mother and Broom stood on the balcony above. Emelia Purgatory held in her hands a golden sword, which she had slammed hard into the balcony railing.

  Billy watched her hold the sword in her hands and could barely make out the blade — it vibrated at such a high frequency. The zombies were entranced and slowly began to shuffle in the direction of the balcony, away from young Billy.

  “Mom!” Billy had almost been afraid to speak, that he'd turn the horde back to his direction if he did — but he yelled to his mother just the same. “Throw me the key and let me get out of this place. They want to eat me.”

  Emelia and Broom both got a chuckle out of Billy using the word key. “I'm sorry, darling. Their fascination with the blade is unfortunately temporary. It won't last near long enough for you to escape.”

  “Throw
me a rope or something then. When they turn back around…”

  “It'll be messy, yes. But we do thank you for herding them all into one place. It will make the clean-up much more efficient.”

  “I'm your son. Why won't you help me?”

  “My son is in boarding school in Switzerland. Although you are his near spitting image, aside from that horrendous scar down your face, you are nowhere near the boy he is — nor can you even fathom the man he is to become.”

  “But I'm Billy Purgatory!”

  “You are a Billy Purgatory, but you are not my Billy Purgatory — or William, as he is properly known. We don't go for backwoods abominations of given names atop this hill.”

  Billy couldn't wrap his ten-year-old brain, thankfully currently still in his skull, around her words. But he tried. “So, there's more than one of me as a kid? Kinda like my old-dude double you shot in the neck?”

  “He is you, just older, and will prove more useful to us in learning what we can pillage and rape from that fresh reality of yours than a hundred doctors doing research like Luna. I don't know exactly where you came from yet, or what it will ultimately mean for The Five, but I do know that you and that older version of you stumbled into the wrong reality.”

  Billy was again backing towards the glass. “Reality sucks ass.”

  Emelia pressed her vibrating sword against the balcony rail, and it stopped its motion and sound. Billy watched as the zombies left their confusion, and they all turned. Billy meant to give one last defiant look up at the woman who had pretended to be his mother before he was overrun — but what he focused on atop the balcony was the older version of himself coming into view. Older Billy was at full run and he slammed into Broom, running up the Russian's back and then leaping off the balcony and into the air. The force of older Billy's actions was more than enough to send Broom careening over the balcony and falling helplessly to land right in the center of the zombie mob. Having fresh meat dropped amongst them turned all mouths towards the Russian in their midst.