Uroboros Saga Book 1

by Arthur Walker

  “You don’t remember anything. How do you know?”

  “My feet know.”

  “They’re tough and totally disposable.”

  “White? They’ll be dingy and awful walking around here.”

  “I am going to dye them for you, and they can be thrown in the laundry. That’s something you would never do with your Silverstein kicks.”

  “It’s as if all my apprehensions and fears about this footwear have evaporated.”

  Taylor smirked, then set about selecting several white pairs of the canvas slip-ons. I paid for them while she slipped them into her enormous bag, her eyes darted about like a hungry predator for more bargains. I swallowed nervously as I was dragged towards a cart of garish jackets. She seemed to enjoy my awkwardness a little too much as she made me try on a never-ending array of tasteless jackets, promising that they’d be perfect after a few alterations.

  “I like this one,” I said turning up the collars of a brown leather jacket.

  “Perfect, if you’re trying out for Captain Boring’s sidekick.”

  “Ouch.”

  “This one is the one.”

  She was right. While garish, it fit me perfectly. She promised to sew on some patches and such to make it more my style. I confessed having no recollection of what my style was. She assured me it would have pouches for my prostate pills and a built-in pocket protector. All things considered, I was relieved to have someone who could take what I’d lost seriously, but still have a sense of humor about it.

  “If there is anything I’m sure about, it’s that I had a righteous jacket before all this happened. It went everywhere with me. I even reached for it when I stood up from Joe’s desk out of habit.”

  “The jacket I’m going to make for you, will make you forget all about your old one. That is, if you hadn’t already forgotten about it.”

  She laughed. Not defensively, but a genuine laugh. I could tell it had been a while since she’d been really happy, or that anyone had made her feel important or appreciated. I was happy, too. Glad to just have a friend. I wondered if I had someone who was as good a companion in life as Taylor before I lost my memory. I paused to wonder if that person was looking for me.

  “Look at these shirts! Aren’t these great?!”

  “Those, yes. Those… um, no.”

  “You don’t know who you will be tomorrow. You should always have some color to spare just in case you stop being blue and start being red.”

  “Good point. Let’s get them all.”

  Taylor smiled as I forked over what little I had left for the shirts, a few pairs of pants, and more socks than I could possibly wear in a whole year. I gazed at the large bag she brought with her, which now bulged with clothing, slip-on shoes, and one special jacket. It would all become my identity for now, until I could figure out who I was. My slip-on identity, easily granted color, easily laundered.

  We wandered back through the Peddler’s District, taking turns carrying the bag full clothes. Having made several purchases, the vendors seemed to grant us some measure of respect. As we approached them, they wouldn’t target us specifically with their pitches and seemed to step aside to allow us passage; a barely audible showing of appreciation.

  The quiet dignity of the people who lived in and did business here was a stark contrast to one’s first impression. They were dirty, loud, but they knew how to treat the customer in the aftermath of an honest purchase. Even if I couldn’t respect their attention to hygiene, I could respect their reverence for others who worshipped the holy practice of commerce.

  As we reached the outskirts of the district I could see several men and women walking together. Each was dressed in a black rubbery suit and carrying a sidearm. They displayed no badge or tag of office, but they appeared to be collecting taxes from the vendors. They were like what I’d seen earlier as part of the mural.

  “Taylor, who are those people?”

  “Collectors. Everyone pays them for protection downtown.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “People who don’t pay get hurt.”

  “Do you pay?”

  “No, but I’m sure Joe does.”

  I paused to watch for a moment, taking in everything I could see about the collectors. Each had good computer skills, good teeth, and expressed a certain level of disdain for the vendors. They weren’t from the downtown area, which meant whoever they worked for wasn’t either. For all I had seen of these people, whatever flaws they may have, they didn’t deserve being extorted like this.

  For the first time I could recall, I was a little angry.

  I was glad to step into the open air at last. The rain coming down from what little sky shown through from above seemed to wash the grime of the Peddler’s Market off my face. It wasn’t to last as the bulwark between uptown and downtown got progressively more intrusive as we walked west. We were thirsty, so Taylor began leading us toward the only place she knew that sold bottled water.

  It was a crumbling building that managed to still have power at the edge of the strip where Joe’s club and a handful of other establishments were located. Taylor opened the door and promptly slipped backward into my arms. Between her and the weight of the bag I was carrying we went all the way to the ground.

  Somewhere in the process of untangling ourselves, I gazed into the corner store and saw what it was Taylor slipped on. Blood had pooled at the threshold, running across the floor from someone laying atop the sales counter. I grabbed Taylor and led her quickly to the other side of the street.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Taylor asked trying to look past me.

  “Wait here, I’ll get the water,” I said, setting the bag down on the curb beside her.

  I walked back over and stepped inside over the pool of blood. The place smelled like a musty store overwrought by terror tinged with iron. It was a horrific sight, arterial blood spatter arraying the wall in crimson beneath a slowly swaying fluorescent light. I looked down at the area immediately around the counter and could see two sets of foot prints.

  Squatting I looked at who I assumed was the shop keeper. One set of bloody prints were his, the set that was dragged across the counter while he bled profusely. The other set were unmistakable, almost one of a kind. I didn’t even have to put my own foot down beside one to know exactly what they were, Silverstein brand leather shoes, and same size as mine.

  I grabbed two bottles of water and turned toward the door. Taylor was standing there looking inside at me. She was pale with fright, eyes transfixed what little of the shopkeeper was visible from her vantage. At that moment it struck me how likely it was that the killer was still nearby.

  “Whoever did this could be close, we should get out of here,” I said grabbing her hand.

  She gripped my hand tightly and traded me the bag for a bottled water. We moved quickly for several minutes until she tugged at my hand. I stopped, already knowing what she was going to ask.

  “Where are we going?” Taylor asked. “My apartment is the other way.”

  “I want to go to the alley where that police officer found me.”

  “Do you think it will help you remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why now all of a sudden?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I’m pretty sure what happened at the corner store has something to do with me. The killer was wearing my shoes, or shoes like them,” I replied.

  “Someone must have bought them at the market after we sold them, and went there to rob the place. They aren’t cheap after all,” Taylor replied, still not understanding.

  “I don’t know anything about it, but it seemed too brutal for a robbery. Also, the register was untouched and it doesn’t look like anything was taken,” I replied.

  “You don’t think i
t’s a coincidence?” she asked.

  “How many people with shoes like mine or the money to buy them have you seen down here?” I retorted.

  “Just you. Fine,” she replied after a moment’s consideration. “Let’s go look at the alley.”

  We plodded along, the bag beginning to get heavy from the rain. We took turns carrying it until we arrived at the alleyway. Something seemed terribly wrong as I gazed into that narrow space between the buildings. It was dirty, but not quite dirty enough.

  “There should be some blood still here. I had a head wound.”

  “Unless this isn’t where you were attacked.”

  “Taylor, look at the walls, the dumpsters, and the ground.”

  “Everything looks scrubbed, or new. Even with a week’s worth of the falling soot from uptown, this is a relatively clean alley. This is a terrifying amount of cover up to keep a mugging off the radar.”

  Taylor stepped in front of me, delivering a savage poke to my belly. She then folded her arms and turned back toward the streets. I couldn’t blame her for being angry. It was as I feared, something from my forgotten past had followed me down here. I shifted the bag from one arm to the other as a new weight seemed to fall on my shoulders.

  Taylor looked back at me, her face streaked in black, her makeup ruined.

  “Silverstein, what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

  Taylor knelt down beside me holding the lit touchscreen from her mobile under my chin. Even in the rain its dim illumination was enough for her to see my face clearly. Her mouth parted someone surprised as she ran her hands through my hair.

  “What?”

  “Silverstein, your face…”

  I walked over to a wrecked commercial transport and stood in front of its one remaining side view mirror. The gray in my hair was slowly oozing down my face, which seemed suddenly devoid of wrinkles, the rain washing twenty years from my visage. My mind reeled for a moment as my fractured psyche did it’s best to piece together what I was seeing.

  “I need to get to the clinic,” I said.

  I broke into a run feeling a strange, almost youthful strength flooding my limbs. Even the rain-soaked bag of clothes did little so slow me down.

  “What? Wait up!” Taylor called out after me.

  Taylor plodded along effortlessly beside me as we navigated the underground labyrinth of streets toward where the transient population squatted. I was frantic to learn anything about myself at this point.

  We breathlessly turned the last corner toward the clinic spotting Dr. Helmet standing outside. He was just locking up, and turned to face me as I approached. His face filled with bewilderment when he saw me. I nodded to him in greeting raising my hand.

  “Dr. Helmet, I need your help.”

  “Let’s go inside,” he muttered, shakily unlocking the door.

  The doctor ushered me into a back room, where he snapped on the light and offered me a seat on a padded examination table. He wordlessly took a drop of saliva and ran some tests while Taylor gazed inside the ancient fashion magazines in the waiting room. After a few moments, he looked at the test results on his handheld and brought up the previous scans from the night I was attacked.

  “Mr. Silverstein, I take it you’re experiencing some memory loss?”

  “From the head wound? Yes, tell me something I don’t know. Please.”

  “Now that the swelling has gone down, I can see where you might have had some short term memory loss, but nothing like the amnesia you’re experiencing right now,” Dr. Helmet said, looking at the chart on his handheld.

  “Is it that obvious?” I asked.

  “I don’t get very many folks from uptown who hit me up for treatment. This is just a guess, but you may have been subjected to several chemical treatments that would be extremely difficult to detect with a cursory medical examination. I can’t seem to detect any of the usual chemicals one uses to accomplish this however, but I’m somewhat limited down here.”

  “Accomplish what? You mean something to make me look old, like the temporary treatments to my hair.”

  “All would have been permanent in death and virtually undetectable. It would have made identifying your body difficult.”

  “So someone did this to me to make me look old so they could kill me and my body would be unidentifiable?”

  “Unlikely. There are better ways to make a body unidentifiable and you would have had to be subjected to these chemicals over a period of time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you did this to yourself, the chemical cocktail would have painfully pinched the nerves in your muscles, granting you the appearance of someone much older. Did you experience any pain?”

  “Other than the head wound, not at all. How old am I really?”

  “From your bone structure, only four or five years older than the young lady in the waiting room. This is just a cursory examination and--”

  “How can I discover who I am?” I interrupted.

  “There is no legal way to find that out, the CGG voraciously protects the privacy of the citizenry. Only you can access or give permission to access government held medical or personal records, which requires you knowing who you are, or finding someone who does.”

  “There are people down here that could get me that information illegally?”

  “Indeed. These aren’t people to be trifled with, Mr. Silverstein. Hacking a government database looking for personal information with only a face and a fingerprint to work with might be pretty difficult.”

  “What kind of people, Dr. Helmet?”

  “Uptown people, like the ones who collect from, provide protection for, the various vendors and businesses downtown.”

  “Had a few things I been wanting to ask them anyway.”

  “You sure you want to find out who you are?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’ve a host of things I’d prefer to have forgotten. Whatever you left behind, Mr. Silverstein, it might be best forgotten,” the doctor replied with some certitude.

  He had a point. I slid off the examination table and back into my new shoes. I buttoned up my shirt and donned my, as yet unaltered, jacket and stepped into the waiting room. Taylor stuffed the magazines beneath her own jacket and looked at the time on her mobile.

  “Can we please go home?”

  “Home?”

  “My apartment.”

  “Right.”

  She looked at me impatiently. I nodded grabbing up the wet bag of clothes putting it up to my shoulder. We walked back outside into the dingy street as people began filtering back out, the rain slowing to a trickle.

  Taylor walked along in front of me, her arms folded. “Gonna be hard to pose as my dad now.”

  “You don’t like the new me?” I said, flashing a cheesy smile.

  “I don’t understand something. You come to me, an old man, you even felt old and sounded old.”

  “None of which can I explain, except to say I genuinely thought I was old,” I stated while briefly considering the impact our personal appearance really has on our identity. “I’m sorry. I never meant to deceive you, and I meant what I said.”

  “About what?” Taylor replied, gazing back at me with tired eyes.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Taylor’s anger melted away quickly as she looked back over her shoulder at me. I could see she was genuinely concerned about all this, and the fact I’d gone to such great lengths to conceal my identity did nothing to assuage my own anxiety, either. Who I was could seriously mess with who I was trying to be.

  Regardless, looking at Taylor made me want to be a good person. I had already resolved to be one of the good guys. It didn�
�t matter who I was before, I would make this right to Taylor somehow. In spite of everything going on downtown, she had made a life for herself here and shared the best parts of it with me. I felt a reverence for anything that managed to thrive in that sort of adversity.

  The walk back was quiet until we reached the lobby. The landlord awaited us with folded arms. He was a large middle-aged man, with gray working its way through his straight hair. His blue bib overalls were oily, and his gloved hands clenching a wrench.

  “Taylor, I understand you’ve got an unreported roomie.”

  “Mr. Swenson, this is my da...um, cousin. He’s just visiting.”

  “Yeah, right,” the superintendent said casting his gaze in my direction.

  I stepped forward and cleared my throat. The old landlord gave me the up and down look, then sneered, obviously not buying the cover story. I swallowed and smiled weakly.

  “Mr. Swenson, my name is Silverstein.”

  The big man only glared at my outstretched hand.

  “I’m doing the books over at Joe’s Strip and Waffle, is there something along those lines I could for you?”

  “I got books, but they don’t need keeping. What I need is someone who is willing to get dirty and maybe even hurt going down to fix the furnace. You want your pretty young friend’s apartment to stay heated? I need someone willing to help me turn a wrench in the tunnels below.”

  “Two man job?” I asked.

  “Two and a half. You and what little you’ll likely bring to the table ought to be enough,” Mr. Swenson said glowering downward like he could see through the floor to the misbehaving furnace below.

  He shoved a tool box into my arms and beckoned for me to follow. I nodded quietly looking over at Taylor. She took the bag of clothes from me and smiled broadly.

  “I’ll get these clothes dried up and prepped to be altered while you’re down getting your hands all dirty.”

  “Should I be bothered that you seem to delight in my suffering?” I said, tired enough now that I was just running on adrenaline.