by Rob Thurman
The tense lines of his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You don’t have to say that. In fact, it could start a precedent that would have you apologizing every minute of every day, and your time-management skills aren’t that impressive to begin with. Only know that you’re not alone. That’s enough.”
I was off the hook for being an ass, but more than that, I knew I wasn’t alone in the world. Not too many people could say that. It was humbling to know someone always had your back. It honestly was. I sat and “humbled” for a while before asking one more time. “I hate to bring it up again, but after cutting up that spider and flushing the pieces down the toilet, I didn’t get a chance to finish my breakf—”
A candy bar hit me in the forehead. Not particularly offended, I ate it and then napped. Concussions, evil Egyptian spiders, a brother whose code of honor was so deep he’d consider the Knights of the Round Table drunken and corrupt frat boys; it’d been an eventful day. Amnesia-man needed his rest.
When I woke up, we were in New York City, and Leandros and Goodfellow had switched positions. I straightened for a better look. Cars were bumper-to-bumper on all sides, a mighty herd of rush-hour bison headed for the cliff’s edge, too tightly packed to know their fate. I looked past them at the people on the sidewalks. People rushed along, streams of them, crabby and impatient cockroaches muttering and pushing. Late, late, for a very important date. Rude and obnoxious and everywhere.
This was a good place to hide—if you had to.
The Landing would always have a part of me for some indefinable reason, but this—this was home. I knew this city. I knew its heart and its whole, if not the details. I knew Central Park and the subway. I knew the rich places and the less than; the places you could walk alone and the places you shouldn’t. I knew graffiti and garbage-filled stairwells. I didn’t know any specific club or bagel shop, but I highly doubted I ate bagels anyway. I was hot dogs and relish down to my bones. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where to go to get that hot dog yet. I took it all in.
“Home.”
I couldn’t stop myself from agreeing with Leandros on that one. “Yeah, it is.”
Finally we reached a smaller street and Goodfellow pulled the car halfway up on the curb. “Welcome to the Lower East Side, if you don’t recall, a very exclusive part.”
Leandros was already out of the car as I opened my door. “What’s so exclusive about it?” It wasn’t as nice as some of the other streets we’d gone down. The buildings here were more “old garage” than nice converted apartments.
He nodded for me to get out as well. He didn’t touch me, which was considerate of him. I was trying to go with the flow, but having space to think and time to do it in helped. “The privacy element,” he answered for the puck. “Promise has a deceased husband or two… .”
“Five,” Goodfellow corrected in a manner he didn’t try to pass off as remotely helpful.
“Regardless of the number,” said Leandros, able to grind his teeth with the best of them, “one owned a good deal of real estate. We moved from our last place a few months ago when it became difficult to smuggle out the bodies and more difficult to explain why the “thieves” that kept breaking into our apartment through the window did it by scaling four stories. Here it’s considerably easier to go about the business of our business, and Promise keeps the rent reasonable.”
Goodfellow opened his mouth, noted Leandros’s blanker-than-blank face, then addressed me instead. “See you soon, kid,” he called through the open window. “I’d slap you on the shoulder and say something witty and movingly eloquent, but as you’d only stab me with a fork, I’ll save it for another time.” He raised a hand and the car bounced off the curb and back into the street almost before Leandros finished closing the trunk after retrieving his duffel bag. The shirt I was wearing had come out of that bag. From the heft and clank of it, that shirt was the only nonlethal thing in there.
“I live here?” I asked. The building we stood by had a definite old-garage feel. There were flyers on the metal advertising a hundred different things. There were no garbage-filled stairwells or a homeless guy pissing on a potted bush, but that was probably because there was no potted bush. It was inside living, though, which meant monster killing paid, because I knew that no part-time bartender could afford anything but a cardboard box with wall-to-wall scrap carpeting.
There was some graffiti on the sidewalk, less graffiti maybe than long scratches scraped with something hard like metal. It read, Where are your brothers and sisters? A religious nut had been by recently, it appeared, as the scratches looked fresh. It was along the same line as “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” only more gender friendly. Gotta watch out for the sisters too.
“You live here,” Leandros confirmed. I walked across the letters to the door that had been placed off center into the corrugated metal that fronted the building. Battleship gray, the door opened without a key. You didn’t need a key when someone had taken a crowbar to the lock sometime in the past.
“Okay, that’s not right. I don’t need a memory to know that,” I said. “Great. I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better.”
“Hmm. It happens. It is New York.” Niko went in first and I followed, seeing that I had no neighbors. The entire building was one big space with the metal ceiling two stories high. There were windows up there to see the daylight beginning to dim. To the right was an area devoted to living. I noted a coffee table that looked cheap but brand-new, a couch that was about fifteen years past its prime with only prayer and duct tape holding it together, and beside it a small kitchen area with a bar separating the two spaces. You could eat there too and still swivel to see the TV hanging on the wall … and it was a great TV—big and flat with what I knew had to be one frigging amazing picture. I was in love with that TV.
So I hadn’t been robbed. No one would’ve left that TV. More and more weird.
The other half of the room was devoted to living in another way—keeping yourself alive. There were weights, a punching bag, mats on the floor, and untouched targets on the walls. Fresh paper, black silhouettes of human bodies intact. I liked that too. If you plan on surviving giant spiders, it’s nice to have a home gym to train in. Only one thing was off.
It was pristine, despite the couch carcass. Immaculate with a place for everything and everything in its place. The new targets were the worst, like hotels that fold your toilet paper into a neat point. Who wants their toilet paper practically folded into an airplane? I didn’t know me, not all of me, only five going on six days of me if you wanted to count, but I compared the condition of my motel room on my last day in the Landing with this. “This isn’t right,” I said, walking to the coffee table and nudging the remote control out of its perfectly parallel alignment with the table’s edge. Leandros reached past me and nudged it right back, then started to give me a similar nudge toward a six-foot-long hall. Whoever had converted this place had put up a wall that stopped about nine feet up. You had the open space above you, but you had privacy as well. The hall was dead center of that wall. This time Niko moved past me to lead the way and open the door on the right. I followed him and peered into the room.
There was no floor; only piles of clothes. Chances were that Einstein in his day could’ve theorized there was a floor under all that dirty laundry, but I wouldn’t bet a Nobel Prize on it. The bed was unmade with dark blue sheets and a cover so tangled they were almost one giant complex knot, the kind kids who go to Boy Scout camp learn to make. One pillow was at the head of the bed and one at the foot with a petrified piece of pizza resting on it. The wall you would face while you were in that bed was scarred with hundreds of slashes. The knife that had made them was still embedded in the plasterboard. A black marker had been used to connect all the marks to spell out Screw you. Under the bed I could see the gleam of metal and lots of it. If the bogeyman showed up under there, good luck finding a place to wedge itself amidst that arsenal. It was
a disaster area. You could get federal funds to airlift people out of this biohazard nightmare.
I grinned. I didn’t mean to, but this was right. This was the room of a guy who didn’t know what the word pristine meant. “Now this I get.”
Leandros snorted, and the guy had plenty of nose to snort with. “There are some places men aren’t meant to go. This room is five steps above the Bermuda Triangle on that list. I pretend it doesn’t exist and you do what you can to confine your chaos here lest it escape the apartment and gobble up the neighbors. That is the bathroom.” He pointed to the closed door across from my room and then indicated the last room, the one at the end of the hall. “And that is my room.”
His room. His room? “We live together?” Hell, no. Family, brothers, sacred oaths sealed with a bar of chocolate smacking you in the face; I was doing all I could to accept that. But living together? “What if you want to bring your vamp over and do … I don’t know … whatever you do? Bite each other, talk about how sexy losing a pint of blood is, and how iron deficiency is so hot? Do you leave a blood bank brochure taped to the door to warn me? What did I do when I brought over Lassie? Hang a chew toy on the doorknob? Aren’t we a little old to be bunking together as if this were sleep-away camp?”
He could’ve given me reasons. It took two to pay the rent, especially on a place this huge, even with a good deal on that rent. It was also convenient if your roommate was in the same business as you so you didn’t have to explain the spider guts on your clothes and the knives in the dishwasher—the kind of knives you aren’t using on toast unless you planned to gut and field-dress it. The stalest toast didn’t deserve that treatment.
But there were things on his mind other than explaining our living arrangement. “Do you know how very hard I’m trying not to smack your thick skull right now?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Open the bathroom door.”
I didn’t see how that was going to affect his wanting to inflict bodily injury due to my runaway mouth and a weariness that still deepened the creases beside his mouth. Four and a half days searching while not knowing if your brother was dead or alive, I’d have wanted to pop me and my smart-ass self one too. “Is there aspirin in there? You look like you could use it.” I put my hand out and turned the knob. “I think we need to get the landlord over here. It smells like the toilet’s been backed up for a month or you have a body decomposing in the bathtub.”
Holy shit.
There was a decomposing body, and more surprising than that was how fast it moved. I’d have thought the death and putrefaction would’ve slowed it down some, but nope. It was hell on wheels, a graveyard on wheels, whatever you wanted to call it. It snarled in my direction, showing me yellow teeth stained with fluids I didn’t want to think about. The eyes were white and clouded, but it could see. They were fixed on me with unmistakable greed as its mottled tongue swiped at the dead gray of its lips. The slime of its flesh wasn’t nearly covered up enough by the shabby clothes of a bum, and there was nothing at all that could cover up the stench of it out in the open. It saw me, it wanted me, but it didn’t have a chance to reach for me. Its head had already landed on the floor with the sound of a rotten melon splitting apart.
Niko’s sword wasn’t like Goodfellow’s. While Goodfellow went for a more traditional broadsword, Leandros carried a katana he’d pulled from a sheath strapped to his back and hidden by his coat. What had been a fan of silver slicing through the air was now held before him, as ready as it had been before chopping through the zombie’s neck.
“What the fuck? What’s with you people?” I demanded, “First giant spiders, now zombies. Can’t you take a piss without running into a monster? Just goddamn once?”
It did explain the broken lock, though. As zombies were always wanting to eat brains, they couldn’t have enough of their own left to pick a lock. It had smashed it instead.
“Don’t be so dramatic. I wanted you to see how you need to always be prepared, even when you’re home, especially when you’re home. Revenants have always hated us and they work for the Kin, who aren’t particularly fond of us either. And this is not a zombie. There are no such things as zombies.”
The torso on the floor twitched, convulsed, and for a gruesome and nearly pants-wetting moment, I was positive it was going to get to its feet and keep going, decapitated or not. Head? Who needed that? I was damn grateful Goodfellow wasn’t here to answer that question for me.
“No zombies. Thanks for clearing that up for me. With it rotting and smelling like roadkill, I let myself jump to conclusions.” Dramatic, my ass. I stepped over its splayed arm and worked further on the urine-suppression issue when a hand with thick twisted nails grabbed my ankle. Even badass monster killers had freaked-out moments and this was one of them.
“Always cut their head off, and even then it takes a minute of two for them to die,” Leandros advised. “Don’t bother with their arms or legs. They’ll only pick them up and do their best to bludgeon you to death with them.”
“The head. No arms or legs. I’ll write it down. Just let me get my notebook.” I kicked the hand off my ankle and went into my room, then immediately under the bed. When I returned, I had two things with me I didn’t need memories to know that I loved with all the passion of an alcoholic for his next drink. In one hand I had a matte black Desert Eagle .50 and in the other, a knife, also matte black. She was a Ka-Bar serrated combat knife, and if she was good enough for the United States Marine Corps, she might let me survive taking a leak in peace. It wasn’t that peculiar that I could remember things like that, weapons down to the last detail, but I couldn’t remember a brother. That could be blamed on the fact that he and my whole life up until a week ago would take up a much bigger chunk of my gray matter than the best weapons to use to clear a path to the toilet paper.
“Cover me,” I said, stepping over the body this time … after giving it a solid kick in the ribs. He wanted me to be prepared, he’d said. I was prepared, but no one was going to pass up pausing to sightsee at what he thought was a zombie. “I’m going in. I’ll flush twice if I need reinforcements.”
It’d been a long drive and all the new information—new to me at any rate—in the world couldn’t change one of life’s most basic facts: When you gotta go, you gotta go.
5
“Who am I?”
Leandros was fishing a feather out of his soy milk with an irritated sigh when the question registered. Discarding the feather on the table, he looked at me, and it was strange. It had been strange, weird, and just fucking bizarre from the moment he’d walked into the Oleander Diner—seeing my eyes gazing back at me, not that I spent a lot of time looking at my own in mirrors. But that didn’t matter. There was someone who was literally part of me walking around in the world. We shared blood, flesh, DNA. We were joined, chained together, in a way only nature could pull off. It shouldn’t have felt that odd. How many people didn’t have blood relatives? None. How many people didn’t have brothers or sisters? It was so normal to have siblings that not having a brother or sister would’ve been more statistically off than having one—or that was what I guessed. I didn’t much care about accuracy and statistics. It didn’t change the fact that looking at part of myself was stranger than bathroom-loving spiders and nonzombies by far and away, and I had no idea why.
Maybe because you don’t deserve it.
Bullshit. I did too deserve it. Hard worker, monster killer, protector of the weak, kicker of the alcoholic and perverted ass. Why wouldn’t I deserve family?
“Who are you?” He distracted me from my inner pep talk/argument with myself. “As in you are Caliban Leandros of the Vayash Clan? That you work in this bar that cannot serve one drink in three years that hasn’t had at least one feather in it? That you hunt monsters if they warrant it?” Resigned to the feather issue, he sipped the milk before finishing. “Or who are you, starting from birth until now? Then there’s that most basically raw level, the psychological one. Goodfellow would probably rather tell
you that—if you want to be on a ledge without the will to live within five minutes. He drove Freud into a phallic-obsessed psychosis. He could drive you into an early grave. He’s that persuasive.” He fished out another feather. “Besides, we need to return to work on finding Ammut. Her killing won’t have stopped while we were gone looking for you.”
I took a swallow of my own drink. Beer. I deserved it after what Leandros had inflicted on me since eight a.m. We’d run. For no reason. That was the baffling part. No one was chasing us; yet we’d run miles and miles. I’d discovered I goddamn hated running or anything remotely exercise related … even if it was, again, “for my own good.” That kind of epic discovery merited a beer. That we routinely ran every single day, rain or shine, called for a pitcher of beer, but I stuck with the bottle. If we ran again later, it would mean less to puke up. The lunch we’d had a few hours ago had made its own attempt without any alcoholic help. Leandros’s favorite place had turned out not to be vegetarian, but vegan, which was for people who preferred their suicide slow. Starving yourself to death via bean curd took commitment.
“Huh. That’s the most I’ve heard you say since I met you. It’s been only two days, but damn. I didn’t know you had it in you,” I said. “And considering how well we’ve apparently not done against Ammut so far, maybe we should leave her spider-loving ass alone.”
“At least you aren’t saying kidnapped any longer, and you’re the one who does most of the talking. My role is usually trying to keep you from talking as it tends to annoy our clients and our enemies. You do like your”—he searched for the right word—”hobby. And your hobby involves irritating nearly everyone you can. As for Ammut, we can handle her. We’ve handled worse.”
I had a hobby, one I was probably born with, but still it was another piece of me confirmed. I grinned and took another swallow. “Who doesn’t love sarcasm?”
