Rob Thurman: Blackout

Things were looking bleak, my investigative skills even bleaker, and my dog-whispering skills nonexistent. For one brief second I thought about going to the cops and admitting I didn’t know who I was. They could plaster my face on their database to see if anyone was missing me. But there was the arsenal under my mattress, the fact I knew about monsters, and that I knew that the people living their lives in Nevah’s Landing were cocooned in ignorant bliss. I didn’t belong here. I knew that, but in a world full of houses, dogs, diner food, department stores, condos, sushi, cars, trains, subways, ordinary people doing ordinary things, could I belong anywhere? Or was I like a rat, sticking to the shadows; part of the world, but outside it too?

Did rats have friends? Colleagues? Competitors? Were you born into the rat business or did you just fall into it?

Did anyone give a shit I was gone?

I did. A big one. I felt … a lack, to use a better word. There was a gaping hole in my life and it wasn’t only my memory. Every time I looked over my shoulder, I expected someone or something to be there. It never was, and until I found out who I was, I wouldn’t find out who or what I thought … I knew should be there. And I wouldn’t feel right until it was there.

Of course my brain was scrambled and good, so what the hell did I know?

A hand slapped me briskly on the back of my head, and Miss Terrwyn snapped, “Are you deaf, boy, or mentally challenged? Did you not hear me say be back bright and early?”

I rubbed the back of my head and quickly pushed down the knee-jerk growl. “It is bright and early.”

“Lord help me, a lazy one. Bright and early was three hours ago. Get up and get in there and start slinging the hash. And don’t you have anything but black to wear? You look like the Grim Reaper himself moping around. You think anyone wants Death serving him up pancakes? No, for a fact they don’t.”

I was through the still-swinging doors as she kept dressing me down from behind. She could bitch like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t have to take it, even though, as I’d thought earlier, it was in a bizarre way comforting. I could turn around, walk out of here, and get a bus ticket to New York City—land of my fake IDs. But my brain twisted in a knot trying to avoid that reasoning. There was still no way to find out anything there; it was too goddamn big, and there was no denying there was something about this place. There was something about the Landing that gripped me, a hand around my wrist. I couldn’t deny something was here for me—a clue to who I was. A feeling of safety. A feeling of responsibility. A feeling of belonging, even though I knew there was no way that I did. It didn’t fill that hole in me, but it knew me, somehow, even if I didn’t know it.

The confusion didn’t clear, but it did get shoved to the back of my mind at a particularly hard pinch over my ribs, and my day at the diner began all over again. It wasn’t bad. I didn’t get breakfast as I was late and too busy serving it, but I did get lunch. Joe, a big bald guy working the grill, made me a cheeseburger almost too big to fit on the plate. I had a separate plate for the thick-cut fries and a big glass of tea. That was another thing I learned about the South. The tea came already sweet, the kind of sweet where they tossed a tea bag in a pitcher of sugar and there you go. They called it sweet tea—a nice innocent name for something I would’ve called a glass of diabetic death. But it was good and the food was great. The grease was thick, the cheese hot and melting, the meat pink in the middle, and those were apparently things I liked quite a bit. I wiped at my chin with a napkin, gave Joe a thumbs-up, and he grunted.

The same happened at supper—hot chili with a huge wedge of cheddar. A thumbs-up and a grunt. Four days later I was sitting at a table in the corner. It was Reuben-and-fries day, and I was trying to eat without getting it on the blue shirt Miss Terrwyn had given me, saying she couldn’t look at my silly vampire-wannabe white-boy self anymore. She must’ve gotten it from her brother, Lew. It was the same button-down look and it was patriotic as hell with the red-and-white checkered apron.

Joy.

But I wore it, because my boss wasn’t that bad. She had a soft spot for strays like her brother, whether she’d admit it or not. She’d acted as if the shirt were nothing, but she’d pushed my hands aside to button up the last three buttons for me and spun me around for a look to make sure I was all tucked in—like I were a kid off to his first day of school. She also hadn’t threatened to cut my dick off since that first day with Luther of the sinful desire, which meant her sharp eyes had seen no wickedness in my soul. That meant something. When all you know is that you have snarky tastes in T-shirts and you’re a killer of monsters and you pass Miss Terrwyn’s good-character test, you had to think maybe you weren’t too bad. If I’d killed monsters, then I’d saved innocent people. I defended the honor of teen girls from perverts, even if I overreacted somewhat. I wasn’t such a bad guy. When you had amnesia, finding out something that seemed simple was actually pretty damn huge. Cal Whoever-the-hell wasn’t a bad guy.

Not a bad guy. Not a bad guy.

That I repeated it silently to myself almost hourly was a little weird, but I didn’t hold it against myself. Shit, what hadn’t been weird since I’d woken up on that beach, except for working at the diner? I didn’t mind it. It was peaceful in a way. The customers were all regulars and not one of them was ever in a hurry. Although I didn’t smile as much as Miss Terrwyn told me I should, they still tipped big for the effort, which was good because Miss Terrwyn hadn’t been lying about the pay being for crap. And everyone in town passed through here. None of them had mentioned knowing me, not yet. But it had only been a few days. I hadn’t come across everyone in the Landing yet, but I would. There wasn’t any hurry to take off.

There was one big goddamn hurry.

I didn’t stop eating at the internal shout. I had them frequently, every day, but countering them was the inescapable, annoying feeling I was here for a reason. I tended to take the middle path and ignore both bickering sides of my brain. It wasn’t as if either side was reliable. All I could do was all I could do, and right now that happened to be dipping a French fry bigger around than my thumb into ketchup. The door of the diner opened. I didn’t hear it open, but I saw the light change on the tile floor. I saw someone’s shadow—someone very quiet because that door creaked like a weather vane in a high wind. I’d noted that the first time I walked through it. I’d also noticed there wasn’t any place where I didn’t instantly determine the back way out or notice who was coming through the front way in.

This guy, the quiet one, was tall, dark blond hair pulled back in either a ponytail or a braid, olive skin. He was dressed in a black shirt, black pants, and a long gray duster that moved in the way my jacket had moved when I’d been armed. Everyone else who walked through that door was a happy and harmless goldfish, splashing obliviously along. This one was a shark, a dorsal fin slicing smoothly through the water with not a sound to give him away. My silverware—fork, steak knife, and spoon—had been wrapped in a napkin when I’d sat down to eat. The napkin was wadded up beside the plate. In a split second the steak knife was in my hand under the table; a second later I was back to slathering the fry with ketchup. This guy didn’t belong here, and he didn’t belong here in exactly the same way I didn’t.

Wasn’t that a coincidence?

I was chewing my French fry when a fist slammed down on the table, rattling my plate. “Where in the unholy hell have you been?” a voice demanded, sounding furious. There were other emotions behind the fury, but as that was the one most relevant when you were armed with diner silverware, that was the one I concentrated on.