Rob Thurman: Grimrose path

The venom couldn't be too poisonous. I was alive and aside from my neck hurting and a massive headache from hell, I wasn't too impaired. I went on to prove it by wiping my hand on my jeans and going back for Harry's friends. Larry, Barry, and Gary-monsters that I took in stride as much as I did the moon up in the sky. Just part of the world. I'd forgotten myself, but the world didn't go that easily. The world I did know, it seemed, so I kept doing what kept you alive in this particular world. I towed all the bodies out into the freezing water-Christ, it couldn't have been more than fifty degrees-and sent them on their way. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen…

Goodbye.

I didn't wave.

When it was done, I slogged back to the beach and stood, shivering hard from the cold. I watched as the last body disappeared past the distant moon-spangled waves-they were nice, those waves. Scenic, too much so for monsters. After they were gone, I spun around slowly, taking in every foot, every inch of the beach and the empty dunes behind me with suspicion. Seeing nothing moving besides me, I holstered the gun… in a shoulder holster my hand knew very well was there. As I did, my skin brushed more metal. I pulled my jacket open wide to see three knives strapped to the inside, right and left, six total. I felt an itch and weight around my ankle, but I didn't bother to check for what kind of death-dealing device it was.

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 of it 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 hand-painted, 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 towards 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, 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… 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 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. 375 Hudson 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, printed clear and bold 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 my 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. What was a fake name?-but the aliases themselves. How much did I hate myself?

Calvin F. Krueger, Calvert M. Myers, Calhoun J. Voorhees. Seriously, Calhoun?