Rob Thurman - Blackout

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.