Rob Thurman: Blackout

He was a great healer, the best in the world as far as I knew, and he’d even said it himself—Auphe genes always won. Limit the gates, limit the gene’s effect on my mind and my control. He’d said it; I remembered every word, but I don’t think he got it, actually got it. Auphe genes always won. Maybe a hyped-up superhealer could slow them down by short-circuiting my traveling, but it wasn’t only gates and traveling that made an Auphe. We all wanted to forget that. We wanted to forget the truth. Traveling made an Auphe in the same way as walking made a human. It didn’t work that way. The truth never did.

But I had better things to do than think about the truth—better things to worry about than whether I was a pretty good guy fighting bad genes or a very bad guy resisting good genes, or whether I was a human with a little monster in him or a monster with a little human. I’d thought it through back in New York and I was done with the subject. It all depended on your point of view and the specimen didn’t get to make that call.

That was me … a specimen. Surprisingly, that didn’t bother me as much as it once would have.

Holding my arm to my nose, I let the cloth of my shirt soak up the blood while I looked for a car to steal. Even with that thought in my head, I was tempted to go see Miss Terryn, Lew, and the diner to remember what it was like to be that good guy; to be human and only human. I did know; however, that wasn’t what they’d see if they saw me again. They’d see the shadows. Everyone, including cameras, did. The shades that lived around me weren’t real to the eyes, but something in a person sensed them. That something was a long-lost survival instinct, a soul—if they existed. It was futile to wonder. Besides, those days were over. That was past. No more substantial than a dream, long gone. Dreams like that never stuck around. Those were the memories, unlike others, that didn’t last. And that …That was just life. In that way, I was the same as everyone else.

I found a car—unlocked. Southerners.

It was while I was at the gas station, one of three in Nevah’s Landing, that I went over another memory. I’d mixed it up for more than sixteen going on seventeen years with the story Nik had told me—flying children, pirate ships, princesses, waterfalls, and an albino crocodile. We’d been squatting in a shack at the Landing, a long-abandoned one, near saw grass that had taken over the water’s edge and most of the yard. Niko had been making me lunch out of moldy bread, carefully pinching away what green he could, and bologna when I went outside. Sophia was in town, doing whatever was best for ripping people off that day. I scrabbled around for a rock I could throw in the water. The grass was too tall to see it land, but I would hear the splash.

That was when I’d seen it. Stripes of white showing through the green, the bloodred eye, and a thousand needle-fine metal teeth—teeth no crocodile could ever claim. And though I’d known it wasn’t the ghost of the crocodile Niko had read about to me, I’d pretended it was, because if I hadn’t—Seven-year-old boys went crazy too, when they saw something like that, so wrong and so close—close enough I’d been able to smell the blood on its breath. It had whispered to me without bending a blade of that grass. It had told me not about Never Land, but about something else.

Caliban, baby boy.

I’d frozen, crouched in the grass with fingers still reaching for that stone .

We told your pathetic human ape-whore of a mother to bring you. We want you to know. Here you have brothers and sisters. Here we have left you presents. Play with them as you wish. When you wish. Destroy them and sharpen your skill on them. They deserve no better. They are worthless failures in an experiment that begins to weary us. There are so many, we grew bored of killing them, but for you, we left some alive.

Toys for you. Toys for our one success. A present so that you do not forget where you come from, what you are. Toys so that you do not forget we can turn you into a toy if we please.

And someday when you’re a big boy and bloodthirsty— the smile was hideous —you will come play, will you not?

Because you will not forget who you belong to, offspring of the Auphe. You will not forget who you are.

Never.

I had forgotten, though. Instantly. I went back inside, ate my bologna sandwich, and never thought of it again. I simply told Niko I saw a crocodile out in the grass. He automatically corrected it to alligator, and went looking himself. He didn’t find anything. No gators. What a relief.

What a goddamn relief.

And I hadn’t remembered any of it until the past week, thanks to the Nepenthe venom hitting that precise cluster of neurons when I’d gated out from Central Park, and thanks to Ammut demanding my brothers and sisters. Where were my brothers and sisters, a string of lives that could feed her for years? For one split second I’d remembered, before every memory, including that one, was swallowed by darkness. But even after the amnesia had taken hold, there had still been whispers. Ammut hadn’t given up and neither had that long-dead Auphe crocodile. Where are your brothers and sisters? Where are they? Where?

In Nevah’s Landing when I’d been there working at the diner, I’d feel a hand groping inside me, tugging, saying, Here. We’re here. Every day I’d felt the connection, but I hadn’t known what it meant. I obviously didn’t belong there, despite a human Cal wishing he did. I hadn’t known what it meant then, that pulling and presence, but I knew now.

All Auphe felt one another. I’d learned to travel years before I learned that skill. If an Auphe was around, I’d feel it. I’d know it. That was the biggest reason I hadn’t wanted to leave the Landing when Niko came for me. They were calling me, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t know what it was. I wouldn’t have thought there were any of them left to feel after Niko and I had destroyed the last, but a white crocodile reared its head, finally, in the back of my brain and told me differently. I’d forgotten a lot about the Auphe in my life, mostly on purpose. If you think seeing one in the grass sucked, try being raised by them for two years. At least I knew that was one memory that wouldn’t hop out and say hello. Or if it did, my sanity wouldn’t be around to say, Right back at you, buddy. I’d be catatonic or I’d be a killing machine with no memory of Cal Leandros at all.

Either way, I wouldn’t know about it. Smooth sailing into crazy world.

“Hey, boy, didn’t you work in Miss Terrwyn’s diner?”

“No.” I didn’t bother to look at the gas station guy as I continued with my business of pumping gas. Nevah’s Landing Cal would’ve said, Hey or Nice day. Caramel-apple-pie day at the diner. That Cal was gone, and, to me, this Cal in the here and now, this guy was just an annoyance.

“Ain’t that Ralph James’s car?” he persisted.

With vocabulary skills worse than mine.

“No,” I repeated without interest.

I finished up, paid him, and left. Whether he called the cops or not didn’t much matter. He might not. People here were so friendly that when faced with bad manners, and I could fucking dish out bad manners, they struggled over whether you were a dick or took what you said at face value. I’d said I was all about the manners on that building roof with Niko before I’d left; I simply hadn’t said what kind. Again, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be here long.

I drove with the lights on, piercing the night, and “felt” for my kind, truly my kind. I was Auphe, but only half, and so were those brothers and sisters I was looking for. It took about forty-five minutes of driving before the feeling grew strong enough to have me bouncing the car down a road that had never been paved and probably never would be. The house revealed in the headlights was nearly hidden by trees drowning in Spanish moss. I stopped the car in front of the place. It was old, two stories. If it had ever been painted, I don’t know what color it had been. It was gray now, the gray of termites, mice in the walls, and dead possums at the side of the road.