by Rob Thurman
A priest, a rabbi, and a killer walk into a bar… . No.
Four monsters and a killer walk into a bar… . That wasn’t right either.
A killer wakes up on a beach… . The monsters don’t wake up at all.
I was wearing a leather jacket, sodden and ruined. Something was weighing down the right pocket more heavily than the left. I put my hand in and closed it around something oval shaped. I was vaguely hoping it was a wayward clam that had climbed in while I was snoozing in the tide. That hope choked and fell, dead as the floating monsters. In the moonlight, I’d opened my fingers to see a grenade resting against my palm. There was a cheerful yellow smiley face on the side. The handpainted, slightly sloppy circle smirked at me.
Have a nice day!
I looked up at the sky, the beaming moon, and said my first words, the first words I could remember anyway. Baby’s first words in his brand-new life.
“What the fuck?”
A killer walked into a motel. Okay, that was getting old fast. I walked into the motel, still damp, but at least I wasn’t sloshing with every step anymore. It had been a twenty-minute walk from that beach. There had been houses that were closer, but they weren’t vacation houses abandoned in cold weather. People were living in them, which meant I couldn’t break in, my first instinct, and squat long enough to get dry and—shit—get dry. I wasn’t ready to think beyond that point right now. There were other things that needed to be done. Important things, and while they gnawed at me with tiny sharp teeth to do them, they weren’t willing to say what exactly they were. Do. Go. Run. Hide. Tell. But there was no “what” for the “do,” no “where” for the “go” or the “run,” and no “who” for the “tell.”
It was a thousand itches that couldn’t be scratched. Annoying didn’t begin to cover a fraction of how it felt. It did cover the no-tell motel clerk, however. Annoying covered him hunky-frigging-dory. Wide nose, big ears, enough acne to say puberty was going to last through his nineties, and frizzy blond hair that wanted to be long but ended up being wide instead. He was reading a porn mag with a hand covering his mouth and a finger jammed halfway up one nostril. That wasn’t where your hand should be when looking at porn, but whatever. How he got his rocks off was the least of my concerns.
“Room,” I said, slapping down four ten-dollar bills on the countertop. Fresh from a wet wallet, which was equally fresh from my wet jeans, the money quickly made a puddle around itself.
The finger descended from its perch and idly poked at the bills. “They’re wet.”
True that and not requiring a comment. “Room,” I repeated. “Now.”
He looked past me at the door. “I didn’t hear you come in. How come I didn’t hear you come in? We got a bell.”
Correction—they had a bell. Bells made noise and noise wasn’t good. Any cat sneaking around in the shadows would tell you that. It’d probably also tell you talking to a booger-picking brick wall was pointless. I reached past the clerk and grabbed a key hanging on the wall. Lucky number thirteen. I turned and walked back toward the door.
“ID,” the guy called after me. “Hey, dude, I need some ID.”
I gave him an extra ten. It was all the ID he needed. Zit cream is pretty cheap at any local drugstore, and he forgot about the ID. But it was the first thing on my mind when I opened the warped wooden door to room thirteen, walked through chips of peeling paint that had fallen on the cracked asphalt of the small parking lot, and went into my new home. Hell, it was the only home I’d known as of this moment as far as my brain cells were concerned. I pulled the blinds shut, flipped the light on the table beside the bed, and opened the wallet. The clerk might not need it, but ID would be helpful as shit to me right now. Let’s see what we had.
No, not we. There was no we… . I had to see what I had. Because it was me, only me. And I didn’t know my life was any different from that. The clerk hadn’t considered me too social, and I didn’t feel especially social, friendly, or full of love for my fellow fucking man. I had a sliver of feeling that it wasn’t entirely due to my current situation. If you forgot who you were, were you still who you were? I didn’t know, but I thought it might be safe to say that I usually didn’t have an entourage of partying friends in tow.
Other than the monsters, the abominations, from the beach.
So … time to see who exactly the nonexistent entourage wasn’t swarming around.
I pulled out the driver’s license from the worn black wallet and scanned it. New York City. 355 Aviles Street. I was … Well, shit, I didn’t know what year it was exactly, so I didn’t know how old I was, but the picture that I checked against my reflection in the cracked mirror on the bureau across the room looked right. Early twenties probably. Black hair, gray eyes, flatly opaque expression—it would’ve been a mug shot through and through if there hadn’t been the tiniest curl to his … my mouth. One that said, I have a boot and I’m just looking for an ass to put it up. Okay, social was out the window. I focused on the important thing—my name, clearly and boldly printed beside the picture. My identity. Me.
“Calvin F. Krueger,” I said aloud. “Fuck me.”
Calvin? A monster-killing, walking goddamn armory with an attitude so bad, even the DMV captured it on film, and my name was Calvin?
Maybe the middle initial led to something more acceptable. F. Frank, Fred, Ferdi-fucking-nand. Shit. I laid the license aside and went back to the wallet. There was nothing. Yeah, a big wad of soaking cash, but no credit card, no ATM card, no video card. Nothing. I had the minimum ID required by law and that was it. That smelled as fishy as I did. I was going to have to get out of these clothes soon and wash them in the bathtub, or the reek of low tide would never come out of them. And right now they were the only clothes I had.
After spreading out the cash on the nightstand to dry, I tried to wring out the wallet. It was worn and cracked, on its last legs anyway, and I kicked those last legs out from under it. It split along the side seam and out spilled two more licenses. I picked them up from the frayed carpet to see the same picture, same address, and two different names. Calvert M. Myers and Calhoun J. Voorhees. That I had aliases didn’t bother me—I killed monsters, so what was a fake name?—but the aliases themselves did. How much did I hate myself?
Calvin F. Krueger, Calvert M. Myers, Calhoun J. Voorhees. Seriously, Calhoun?
Then it hit me. F. Krueger, M. Myers, J. Voorhees. Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees. Three monster-movie villains, and I, a monster killer, was carting around their names on my ID. Didn’t I have one helluva sense of humor? I thought about the grenade I’d tossed into the ocean, that cheerful yellow smile on a potentially lethal explosion. A dark sense of humor, I amended to myself, but, hey, wasn’t that better than none at all?
The rank smell hovering around me and my clothes was getting worse. The stink was incredible. Good sense of humor, good sense of smell, and neither one was doing anything productive for me right now. I left the ID and the money on the table and went to the bathroom. I toed off black leather boots that were scarred and worn, like the wallet. They’d been used hard. Well-worn, they would’ve been comfortable if they weren’t wet and full of sand. How they’d gotten worn, what crap they’d stomped through, I didn’t know. I dumped them in the tub that had once been white but was now a dull, aged yellow. It had been used hard too. I related. I felt that way myself—used hard and put up wet. I threw in my jeans, T-shirt, underwear, and even the leather jacket once I removed the knives.
As I did, a small bubble of panic began to rise. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing about myself. I didn’t remember putting those weapons in my jacket, although I knew exactly what they were for. Knives and guns and monsters; they were the things I was certain of, but when it came to me, I was certain of absolutely nothing.
Shit. Shit. Okay, I obviously knew how to stay alive; those monsters on the beach didn’t just kill themselves. People who knew how to stay alive also knew not to panic and I
was not panicking. By God, I wasn’t. I was sucking it up and moving on. I was surviving. With or without my memory, at least I seemed to be good at that. Calvin the survivor; watch me in action. I was alive to mock my fake names, and I planned on staying that way.
Turning on the shower, I waited until the water was lukewarm and I stood on top of the clothes. There were two small bottles of shampoo and an equally small bar of soap. I used them all, letting the lather run off me onto the cotton and leather around and under my feet.
I learned something about myself while scrubbing up. I killed monsters, and they tried to kill me back with a great deal of enthusiasm, but not just them. I had a scar from a bullet on my chest, another from what was probably a knife on my abdomen, and a fist-sized doozy on the other side of my chest. It looked as if something had taken a bite out of me and had been motivated when doing it. Man and monster; apparently they both disliked me or I them—could be a mutual feeling. It was just one more thing I didn’t know. I moved on to something I did know. Besides the scars, I was a little pale, but that could be from near hypothermia or I could be anemic. Maybe iron supplements were the answer to all my questions—iron and bigger, badder guns.
I had a tattoo around my upper arm, a band of black and red with something written in Latin woven in it. Funny how I knew it was Latin, but I didn’t know what it said. Yeah, funny, I thought, despite the lurch of loss in my stomach. There was my sense of humor again.
The rest of me was standard issue. I wasn’t a porn star, too bad, but I had proof of a Y chromosome. That was all a guy needed. That and some memories. Were a dick and a mind too much to ask for? That was something every guy had to ask himself at some point, even if I couldn’t remember the first time I’d asked it. This time the question bounced back and forth inside my skull, hitting nothing on its way. I guessed that proved it was too much … at least for now.
My head still hurt and trying to remember made it worse. I gave up, closed my eyes, and scrubbed at my hair. I shook from the lingering cold of the ocean, but the warm water helped. It didn’t do the same for my damn hair, though. It had been in a ponytail, shoulder length. I’d pulled the tie free, but there was something in it … sticky and stubborn as gum or tar. It could be the blood of one of those supernatural spider monkeys from Hell. It could actually be gum. Maybe I fought bubble-gum-smacking preteens from Hell too. I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. You didn’t have to know the question to be the solution.
The answer ended up being one of those knives I’d taken out of the jacket. The shit wouldn’t come out of my hair for love or money, and I finally stood naked in front of the cloudy bathroom mirror, took a handful of my hair, and sawed through it. I let the clump, matted together with a green-gray crap, fall into the sink. The remaining wet hair fell raggedly about two inches past my jaw. I didn’t try to even it up with the blade, slender and sharp as it was. I could have, some at least, but …
I turned away from the mirror.
Looking at my picture was okay; not recognizing myself less okay; studying myself in the mirror, not okay at all. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t. A quick glance was fine, a long look was a trip someplace and, from the acid sloshing around my stomach, that place wasn’t Wonderland. I had guns and knives, scars, and dead things; maybe I wasn’t a nice guy. If I didn’t like looking in the mirror, it could be I didn’t like what I saw. Pictures were only echoes. The guy in the mirror was real.
But it didn’t matter why I didn’t like it, because I didn’t have to look. Problem solved. I spent the next fifteen minutes drying off and doing my best to hand-wash the funk out of my clothes before draping them over the shower rod to dry. By then I was weaving, had the next best thing to double-vision, and a wet towel in my hand that I used to cover up the bureau mirror. I didn’t ask myself why. I was only half conscious and barely made it to the bed anyway. So to hell with whys. I pulled the stale, musty-smelling covers over me with one hand and slapped the lamp off the table to crash to the floor. I was too clumsy with exhaustion to switch it off. This worked the same. The bulb shattered with a pop and it was lights-out.
I didn’t think about it then, but the next day I did, when I had more than pain and drowsiness rolling around in my head. I’d woken up with monsters. I was alone, and I was lost. I didn’t know where I was; I didn’t know who I was. It doesn’t get more lost than that. Wouldn’t you leave a light on? Knowing what I knew and not knowing anything else at all, why would I want the darkness where monsters hide?
Because killers hide there too.
2
Phone.
That was my first thought when I woke up. The second was that I was glad I was in a bed and not sleeping, too damn literally, with the fishes. The third, nope, still no clue who I was. Fourth … Fourth was a situation a lot of guys faced in the morning. I dealt with it, which, considering I couldn’t remember the faces or details of any woman I knew personally from my past, was pretty noteworthy. Unless I was on speaking terms with Angelina Jolie and then that was more than noteworthy. Either way, I worked with what I had.
Nothing keeps a good man down, but you can get him down for a while if you work at it.
Afterward I stared at the ceiling, as yellowed and cracked as the tub, and went back to my first thought. Where was my phone? I had ID, even if it was fake. I had money. I should’ve had a phone. Hell, three-year-olds had cell phones these days—whatever days these were. There was a bright spot. I was a little fuzzy on the year, absolutely blank on me, but everything else appeared to be in place in my gray matter. Sun in the sky, bacon in the skillet, and a cell phone for everyone past the first stage of mitosis.
So … where the hell was my phone? That could tell me a whole damn sight more than fake licenses. The names were fake, the address was fake … common sense. You didn’t put a real address on a falsified ID. But a phone would have the numbers of people I’d called. Or, on the other hand, it might just have numbers of AA, Guns-R-Us, and a dating service, because where do you find the time to meet women when you’re gutting the spawn of evil for profit or simply as one rocking hobby?
I needed that damn phone.
Rolling out of bed, I padded into the bathroom, hoping I’d overlooked it when I’d been stripping my clothes of six knives, two guns, and something that resembled brass knuckles without finger holes but with spikes—a Tekko. It was Japanese and old, but it worked just fine despite its age. My own name I didn’t know, but that I knew. There were extra clips of ammunition and all six knives were different types with different names and functions. I knew those too. Good old Calvin F. Krueger knew that, but fuck all about himself.
Frustrating.
I poked through the clothes, now dry except for the jacket. The lining was still damp, but they all smelled like soap and not dead squid. Score one for amnesia boy. But nowhere in the clothes or the pile of weapons was there a phone. Take one away from amnesia boy. I must’ve lost it at the beach and, just as the tide had taken the spider creatures, it had no doubt taken the phone as well. Nature, what a bitch.
Okay. I’d do this the hard way, although, considering where I’d ended up and with what, the easy way didn’t seem my style. I fingered the puncture wounds on my neck. They’d scabbed over nicely and my headache was gone. That was something. I dressed in the wrinkled long-sleeve black T-shirt. I noticed only now that it said EAT ME in dark red letters on the front, and, below that, in parentheses, before i eat you. A stash of weapons a gangbanger would drool over, monsters trying to kill me, and a shirt that advertised my dickitude to the world. I was turning out to be one subtle guy.
I finished dressing, down to the roach-stomping boots that didn’t fit quite the same after their double-dipping. I dumped the jacket on the one wobbly chair, shoved the destroyed lamp under the bed to mope with the dust bunnies, and sat while I studied the phone book from the drawer of the bedside table. It was about as thick as a comic book. Wherever I was, it wasn’t anyplace big enough that I could d
isappear into an anonymous mass of people. In places this small, anyone who lived here would know you didn’t belong. And if anyone came looking for you, they’d be quick to point you out.
Nobody trusted a gadje, I thought absently as I scanned the cover. Ocean waves, a lighthouse, and a breezy script that read Nevah’s Landing, South Carolina . Good for Nevah, whoever she was. She had her own landing. Now let’s see if she had anything else to offer.
Crocodile. They had a crocodile, ticking like a time bomb.
An albino one, pale as a dead soul, with a voice of broken glass and red eyes that saw you, no matter how deep the water.
And it knew my name.
I blinked and dropped the phone book back in the drawer. I didn’t know my name and I was pretty sure a sun-loving, tourist-eating lizard didn’t either. Amnesia was one thing. Small bursts of psychosis were another. I didn’t even know if there were crocodiles or alligators in South Carolina. I suspected that wasn’t amnesia, but more like ignorance. I didn’t mind. I’d take ignorance over the first any day. The ignorant can learn … theoretically. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to get my memories back or why they were gone in the first place. My head had been killing me last night, but I hadn’t found any bumps or contusions—only the remnants of a bloody nose. I didn’t think I’d hit my head, although a spider might’ve smacked me a good one in the face. As for being bitten, why would that give you amnesia? Kill you or paralyze you, that I could see. Again, nature is a bitch and an efficient one. Paralyzing your enemy is good stuff. Making him forget who he is will only freak him out all the more and possibly make him run even faster, if he’s the running type. What else could cause amnesia? There was emotional trauma… .
