Rob Thurman: Blackout

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 disappear 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… .

I tilted my head down and read my T-shirt slogan again. It was likely I dished out more emotional trauma than I took in. As a matter of fact … I took off the shirt, turned it inside out, and put it back on. If I had to mingle with the locals—and I didn’t see much way around it, since someone had to know me or have seen me come into town—then I’d better be on my best behavior. Which meant instead of carrying arms, I’d have to make do with charm. Places this small had little law enforcement, but what they did have tended to be bored law enforcement. I didn’t need a retired city cop working as sheriff in his spare time taking one look at me and knowing I was carrying just by the way my jacket fit.

That meant I ended up hiding all the weapons under the mattress. The day this roach motel flipped those suckers, I wouldn’t have to worry about being found out. I’d be eating snow cones in Hell with Satan. It made sense. It also made sense if I could handle what I had on the beach last night, I could deal with any normal townie. I was human like them, not a spider knit from shadows and death, but I was also a human who had the skills to use knives in addition to guns. Chances were I had enough of a different set of skills to take someone down unarmed as well or use what was at hand. I could impale a nosy son of a bitch on a Norman Rockwell picket fence if I had to. MacGyver had nothing on me.

Not that I would impale a person. A monster spider from Hell, yes—a person, no. I had faith that a spirited debate between my foot and their ass would get the job done for most people. I was a killer, but I wasn’t that kind of killer.

Was I?

No. I wasn’t. I hadn’t been as sure of that last night, but I was pretty sure now.

Although … I frowned down at the letters I could no longer see—EAT ME. Thoughts of impaling and kicking ass before I even left the motel room—I hoped anyone I ran across got my particular sense of humor, because it might be an acquired taste.

Leaving the room was harder than I thought it’d be. I knew browsing through the phone book wasn’t going to help me. I had to get out of the yellow pages and into Nevah’s Landing for real if I hoped to accomplish anything. But the room was the only haven I had; the only port in a memory-gobbling sea. That had me ducking my head as I walked out into the gray morning. The desire to twitch came from leaving the weapons. I didn’t want to. No matter what my brain said, my gut said it was wrong in all the ways there were to be wrong. From the fit my stomach was pitching, there were a whole lot of fucking ways.

I went with my head. As far as I knew, there were only people out there, not monsters. Be smart. Be smart and then you’d have less cause to be psychotically homicidal or rashly suicidal. It was good advice, and damn firmly ingrained, so I followed it. And if I twitched once or twice, I told myself it was low blood sugar and let’s get some food already. More good advice, and I was on my way to follow it when I encountered the first local. I’d left the motel, set among scrubby grass and a cracked asphalt parking lot, and started down the street. Begonia Avenue. There were two stores past the motel, an antique store and a junk store masquerading as an antique store. Both were closed. Across the street with the occasional car parked on it was a drugstore, closed, and a clothing store with lots of fancy sweaters in the window, also closed. All that meant that it was Sunday morning in a town so small that if it had ten streets, I would kiss … someone’s ass. Whoever’s. Right now the only person I knew was the porn-loving, walking zit party of a motel clerk.

I wasn’t kissing that ass. If the town had ten streets, I’d be surprised. I was currently being unsurprised when I turned off Begonia to Magnolia and met the second person of my brand-new, blank-slate life. A black guy was leaning with arms folded in the doorway of the only business I’d seen open so far. It was a barbershop, which was more useful than antiques or sweaters on the Sabbath. People had to look nice when they went to church, neat hair and dress clothes—no sweaters, and the place probably already had all the chairs it needed. No antique ones necessary.

The man shook his head the second he spotted me. He was about forty, with dreads pulled back into a ponytail, a dark green button-down shirt, jeans, and a black barber’s smock. “Mmm, damn.” He clucked his tongue in disgust. “Boy, you cannot walk around looking like that. Let me even it up for you.”

I ran a hand through my DIY haircut and shrugged. “Nah, that’s okay. I’m fine with it.” It was the one thing I was fine with. When you’d lost most of your mind, you didn’t worry about your lack of style offending the local hair-care professional.

“Come on,” he said with obvious good nature. You automatically had to suspect anyone that upbeat. It was unnatural. That opinion definitely cemented the conclusion that I didn’t live in a small town. “I’ll do it for free.”