by Rob Thurman
I went.
I took off my jacket, put that apron on, and hoped that when I did get my memories back, I’d lose this one in the process. But I hustled, as told, and found out I wasn’t a half-bad server—there wasn’t any way I was going to say or think “waitress.” I wouldn’t win any contests, but I dropped only two plates and threw only one guy through the window, all while wearing a red-and-white apron with a goddamn ruffle on the bottom. All in all, I considered that pretty successful.
Or so I thought almost seven hours later as I stood watching the son of a bitch I’d tossed through the glass roll around in the short shrubs outside the window, moaning for an ambulance. Now that … that had a smile on my face. He had it coming. He’d been leering at some teenage girls who were eating a whole lot of pie and giggling whenever I refilled their Cokes, which were actually Sprites, but I’d soon picked up that any kind of soda here was called Coke. It could be a Barney the Dinosaur-purple Grape Crush and it was still called a Coke. It was kind of intriguing, far more so than spider monsters, and that made me think Lew and my intuition were right. Either I’d been born a big-city guy or had lived long enough in a big city to have forgotten that backwater factoid. It also made me think what the hell kind of life did I lead that I found the Coke issue more interesting and exotic than monsters?
“You threw Luther Van Johnson through my window?” Miss Terrwyn’s voice said at my shoulder; she wasn’t much taller than that. “You threw that boy through my window? On your very first day?”
That boy weighed two-thirty easy, with the thirty being his gut. He was also at least forty. He’d been a full-grown man and full-grown pervert for a long time now.
I put the smile away and tried to look contrite. But since I barely knew what the word contrite meant and I in no way was feeling it, pulling that off wasn’t easy. “He had it coming?” I tried, saying aloud the same excuse I’d given myself internally when I’d first considered tossing Luther’s ass like a ball for a golden retriever. Of course I hadn’t been at all difficult to convince, so that excuse might have been somewhat lacking. “Ma’am,” I added hastily.
The high school girls, however, were quick to back me up. “He was looking at us and making these pervy gestures.” One of the girls demonstrated, and it was indeed damn fucking pervy with two fingers and a tongue.
Miss Terrwyn had passed me to lean and look out what was left of the window at good old Luther, who’d stopped flopping around. “Good Lord, I can smell the whiskey on him from here. And, Rachel Kaysha Marie, you could’ve described that. You didn’t have to show us. You girls should be home now anyway. Not sitting around eating pie and mooning over the help. He could be as perverted as Luther out there for all you know. Now get on home.”
The girls went as ordered. One of them had red hair, curly, a cloud of it, bright as fire. I watched her until the door shut behind her. She looked almost familiar, but I couldn’t pin the feeling down, so I let it go as I moved my eyes back to those of my new boss. “You aren’t, are you?” she demanded. “A pervert? With lust in your heart and nothing in your soul but wicked desire, because I have a butcher’s knife behind the counter that’ll do just the trick if you are. We don’t serve that kind of sausage here, no sir. Well? Are you?”
Pervert, lust, wicked desire. None of that rang a bell … Eh, maybe lust. But appropriate lust for the appropriate age group. “No, ma’am,” I replied, and began to bus the table of the pie plates and glasses the girls had left behind. “No butcher knife needed, ma’am.”
“Good. You keep it that way. I have no tolerance for the wicked. Like Luther. If I hadn’t been in back making sure Joseph didn’t set all the food afire, I never would’ve let that man sit down in my diner.” She took another look at him and sighed. “I have to say, it needed doing. But the door is only about fifteen feet away and windows cost.”
That made sense. Windows did cost, but throwing someone out a door just didn’t have the same bang for your buck. But she was my boss and I wanted to fit in here temporarily to find out where I actually fit in when it came to the world. Keeping my boss happy would help me out. I dropped my towel on the table, moved to Luther’s former booth, and stepped over that metal frame that had held the glass. Landing in the bushes with my victim, I took Luther’s wallet out of his pocket and stripped it of money.
“He still alive?” Miss Terrwyn demanded.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. You want me to change that for you?” I wasn’t serious—entirely.
“You have a mouth on you, don’t you? I was thinking you were the quiet sort, but maybe I was only thinking you should be the quiet sort,” she warned.
I handed her the money. “Here. That should cover the window. And I’ll take it under advisement, ma’am.”
“You do that. Now get back inside while I call the sheriff. We’ll say perverted old Luther there was so drunk, and on the Lord’s day too, the heathen, that he fell through the window. He’s so liquored up, he won’t remember if it’s the truth or not. Maybe this time they’ll lock him up for a while like he deserves.” She stashed the money away in her own red-and-white apron, then clapped her hands. “Well, come on. We’ve got to close the place up for the night and board up the window. You playing Superman doesn’t change that. Hurry. Hurry.”
That was the beginning of the end of my first day working at the Oleander Diner, the Ole Diner, as everyone who came in called it. I’d worked my ass off, was paid a little better than nothing plus tips, and not one person had recognized me. Or if they had, they hadn’t mentioned it to me.
I had seen one guy walk by outside. I just caught a glimpse of ginger hair and a rangy male frame through the window before he disappeared from sight. He seemed familiar, but not the kind of familiar where you think you know a person. It was more the kind of familiar of recognizing one snake as being poisonous and one as being not. If he was a snake, I’d say he was dead-on poisonous. But that was a weird, freaky thought, so I shrugged and did what I was starting to get good at—I let it go.
Miss Terrwyn caught me watching. “Pshhh. Jesse. Ignore that one. He slinks into town once a week to buy raw meat. He must have some mighty big, hungry dogs, but he’s like Luther. He doesn’t smell righteous.”
I wasn’t surprised she could smell righteous. I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything Miss Terrwyn could do. Before I left for the day, I filled out my paperwork for the job using the Calvin fake ID, and promised Miss Terrwyn I’d be back bright and early. Her bright and early turned out to be different from my bright and early, and there was nothing but a storm of bitching and swats to the back of my head when I did show up at nine a.m. The bitching and swatting was strangely comforting in a way. Maybe I was a monster killer and a masochist, and out there somewhere was a person with a leash and spiked collar with my name on it.
I hadn’t spent the time before nine sleeping, although my body would’ve preferred it. My body would’ve preferred I slept until noon from the way it and my brain complained when I rolled out of bed at seven. I showered, dressed in the same clothes that I’d washed again in more soap the housekeeper had left—I desperately needed to buy more clothes—and spent an hour and a half roaming the streets of the Landing looking for a car that seemed familiar. I’d lost my keys on the beach as well as my phone. Whatever I’d driven into town was a mystery. There was no key to give me a clue to make or model. I walked the town proper’s twelve streets—two more streets than I’d guessed the day before. I owed someone’s ass a kissing. There were only a few cars parked on the streets and none looked familiar or had a New York tag or anything but the standard South Carolina one.
When I reached the diner, I sat on the freshly painted green bench in front and let my hands dangle between my knees as I stared at the Victorian/plantation/some kind of big-ass old Southern house across the street. I wasn’t actually looking at it; it just happened to be in the way of my “What the hell do I do now?” gaze. The house, I didn’t really notice, and the house had the
good manners not to notice me either. But the dog on the wraparound porch? It noticed me right off the bat.
As I heard the growl, I blinked and stopped my thoughts running through my brain in the panicked what? where? who? that was my life now. The dog was a German shepherd, big and mostly black with some russet on its legs and the same russet-colored eyes. It’d been curled up by a rocker, but now it was looking at me, its head up and lip peeled back to show its teeth. As far as I knew, I didn’t have anything against dogs. Why would I? Man’s best friend. “Woof,” I said, low and friendly.
The shepherd disagreed with me on the friendly part. It was up in a split second, hitting the large dog flap in the front door to disappear from sight. It left behind a trail of yellow urine on the white board porch. I could see it, just barely, but I could smell it, strong and acrid as if the dog had pissed on my shoe. I might not have a problem with dogs, but this one had a problem with me. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing here, where I lived, what I did outside the monster thing, and other than keep hoping someone would volunteer that, sure, they’d seen me drive into town in a black 1964 Mustang convertible affectionately known as Fang, license plate XYZ-123, which was parked at the Old Goddamn Mill, I didn’t have any way of finding out. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything—oh yeah, except that the dog across the street didn’t like strangers.
Things were looking bleak, my investigative skills even bleaker, and my dog-whispering skills nonexistent. For one brief second I thought about going to the cops and admitting I didn’t know who I was. They could plaster my face on their database to see if anyone was missing me. But there was the arsenal under my mattress, the fact I knew about monsters, and that I knew that the people living their lives in Nevah’s Landing were cocooned in ignorant bliss. I didn’t belong here. I knew that, but in a world full of houses, dogs, diner food, department stores, condos, sushi, cars, trains, subways, ordinary people doing ordinary things, could I belong anywhere? Or was I like a rat, sticking to the shadows; part of the world, but outside it too?
Did rats have friends? Colleagues? Competitors? Were you born into the rat business or did you just fall into it?
Did anyone give a shit I was gone?
I did. A big one. I felt … a lack, to use a better word. There was a gaping hole in my life and it wasn’t only my memory. Every time I looked over my shoulder, I expected someone or something to be there. It never was, and until I found out who I was, I wouldn’t find out who or what I thought … I knew should be there. And I wouldn’t feel right until it was there.
Of course my brain was scrambled and good, so what the hell did I know?
A hand slapped me briskly on the back of my head, and Miss Terrwyn snapped, “Are you deaf, boy, or mentally challenged? Did you not hear me say be back bright and early?”
I rubbed the back of my head and quickly pushed down the knee-jerk growl. “It is bright and early.”
“Lord help me, a lazy one. Bright and early was three hours ago. Get up and get in there and start slinging the hash. And don’t you have anything but black to wear? You look like the Grim Reaper himself moping around. You think anyone wants Death serving him up pancakes? No, for a fact they don’t.”
I was through the still-swinging doors as she kept dressing me down from behind. She could bitch like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t have to take it, even though, as I’d thought earlier, it was in a bizarre way comforting. I could turn around, walk out of here, and get a bus ticket to New York City—land of my fake IDs. But my brain twisted in a knot trying to avoid that reasoning. There was still no way to find out anything there; it was too goddamn big, and there was no denying there was something about this place. There was something about the Landing that gripped me, a hand around my wrist. I couldn’t deny something was here for me—a clue to who I was. A feeling of safety. A feeling of responsibility. A feeling of belonging, even though I knew there was no way that I did. It didn’t fill that hole in me, but it knew me, somehow, even if I didn’t know it.
The confusion didn’t clear, but it did get shoved to the back of my mind at a particularly hard pinch over my ribs, and my day at the diner began all over again. It wasn’t bad. I didn’t get breakfast as I was late and too busy serving it, but I did get lunch. Joe, a big bald guy working the grill, made me a cheeseburger almost too big to fit on the plate. I had a separate plate for the thick-cut fries and a big glass of tea. That was another thing I learned about the South. The tea came already sweet, the kind of sweet where they tossed a tea bag in a pitcher of sugar and there you go. They called it sweet tea—a nice innocent name for something I would’ve called a glass of diabetic death. But it was good and the food was great. The grease was thick, the cheese hot and melting, the meat pink in the middle, and those were apparently things I liked quite a bit. I wiped at my chin with a napkin, gave Joe a thumbs-up, and he grunted.
The same happened at supper—hot chili with a huge wedge of cheddar. A thumbs-up and a grunt. Four days later I was sitting at a table in the corner. It was Reuben-and-fries day, and I was trying to eat without getting it on the blue shirt Miss Terrwyn had given me, saying she couldn’t look at my silly vampire-wannabe white-boy self anymore. She must’ve gotten it from her brother, Lew. It was the same button-down look and it was patriotic as hell with the red-and-white checkered apron.
Joy.
But I wore it, because my boss wasn’t that bad. She had a soft spot for strays like her brother, whether she’d admit it or not. She’d acted as if the shirt were nothing, but she’d pushed my hands aside to button up the last three buttons for me and spun me around for a look to make sure I was all tucked in—like I were a kid off to his first day of school. She also hadn’t threatened to cut my dick off since that first day with Luther of the sinful desire, which meant her sharp eyes had seen no wickedness in my soul. That meant something. When all you know is that you have snarky tastes in T-shirts and you’re a killer of monsters and you pass Miss Terrwyn’s good-character test, you had to think maybe you weren’t too bad. If I’d killed monsters, then I’d saved innocent people. I defended the honor of teen girls from perverts, even if I overreacted somewhat. I wasn’t such a bad guy. When you had amnesia, finding out something that seemed simple was actually pretty damn huge. Cal Whoever-the-hell wasn’t a bad guy.
Not a bad guy. Not a bad guy.
That I repeated it silently to myself almost hourly was a little weird, but I didn’t hold it against myself. Shit, what hadn’t been weird since I’d woken up on that beach, except for working at the diner? I didn’t mind it. It was peaceful in a way. The customers were all regulars and not one of them was ever in a hurry. Although I didn’t smile as much as Miss Terrwyn told me I should, they still tipped big for the effort, which was good because Miss Terrwyn hadn’t been lying about the pay being for crap. And everyone in town passed through here. None of them had mentioned knowing me, not yet. But it had only been a few days. I hadn’t come across everyone in the Landing yet, but I would. There wasn’t any hurry to take off.
There was one big goddamn hurry.
I didn’t stop eating at the internal shout. I had them frequently, every day, but countering them was the inescapable, annoying feeling I was here for a reason. I tended to take the middle path and ignore both bickering sides of my brain. It wasn’t as if either side was reliable. All I could do was all I could do, and right now that happened to be dipping a French fry bigger around than my thumb into ketchup. The door of the diner opened. I didn’t hear it open, but I saw the light change on the tile floor. I saw someone’s shadow—someone very quiet because that door creaked like a weather vane in a high wind. I’d noted that the first time I walked through it. I’d also noticed there wasn’t any place where I didn’t instantly determine the back way out or notice who was coming through the front way in.
This guy, the quiet one, was tall, dark blond hair pulled back in either a ponytail or a braid, olive skin. He was dressed in a black shirt, black pants, and a long
gray duster that moved in the way my jacket had moved when I’d been armed. Everyone else who walked through that door was a happy and harmless goldfish, splashing obliviously along. This one was a shark, a dorsal fin slicing smoothly through the water with not a sound to give him away. My silverware—fork, steak knife, and spoon—had been wrapped in a napkin when I’d sat down to eat. The napkin was wadded up beside the plate. In a split second the steak knife was in my hand under the table; a second later I was back to slathering the fry with ketchup. This guy didn’t belong here, and he didn’t belong here in exactly the same way I didn’t.
Wasn’t that a coincidence?
I was chewing my French fry when a fist slammed down on the table, rattling my plate. “Where in the unholy hell have you been?” a voice demanded, sounding furious. There were other emotions behind the fury, but as that was the one most relevant when you were armed with diner silverware, that was the one I concentrated on.
“Who wants to know?” I countered placidly, dipping another fry and tightening my grip on the knife. I wasn’t a bad guy, I’d figured that out, but I didn’t know the same about him.
“Who?” The anger was overridden by another emotion, one that made me doubt that the fury had been completely real. This one was, though, as real as they came and easy to read: dread. “Your brother, Cal. I’m your brother.”
Well, fuck me running.
I hadn’t seen that coming.
3
I deserted the rest of my food and walked out of the diner, with more than my arm up my sleeve. I waved an “I’ll be back” at Miss Terrwyn, then ducked her scowl before hitting the door. She had a soft spot all right, but no tolerance for slackers. Outside, I considered standing but decided, whatever this guy had to say, I’d prefer to hear it sitting down. And with a knife, I thought, I could hurt someone standing or sitting. Was I that confident? I took stock in myself and four dead spider monsters and decided that, yeah, I was. This guy could be as quiet and armed as he wanted. I was armed too, and had a T-shirt whose EAT ME message no one had yet been able to take me up on. I might not be a bad guy, but nobody had said I couldn’t take care of myself.
