Blackout can-6

by Rob Thurman

  I wiped the blood pouring from my nose, fought the skull-crushing headache, and let the sweat pour down my neck and face, soaking my hair. Once I’d made gates as I’d pleased, as Auphe did, and as often as I’d pleased. Rafferty, our long-gone healer that Delilah had tried and failed to kill, thanks to my gun muzzle behind her pretty ear, had “fixed” me. Limit the gates, everyone thought, and limit the Auphe genetic influence on me, because there hadn’t been a doubt that the more I “traveled,” the more Auphe I felt. Rafferty had done some chemical rewiring on my brain, though only a little, because he couldn’t break me down genetically and remove the Auphe half. That would leave half a human, and that, well, I guess that would be an unpleasant puddle of gore on the ground.

  He’d found a way around that. He’d given me something called serotonin syndrome. One gate, bad. It would trigger an uncontrollable flood of serotonin in my brain, which would cause my blood pressure and body temperature to go up radically. Gate two, worse—the same as what was behind door one, but doubled. Gate three would probably mean death from a burst aneurysm in my brain. Since the two I’d used on Ammut for her brain and heart had really been only one—in theory, this was technically number two. If Rafferty was right, I’d survive it.

  I guess I’d wait and see. It took me two days or so to “reset” the gates, which meant I’d be driving back to New York—again, thanks to Rafferty.

  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 Ra
lph 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.

  The porch was still standing with a dim light on, hard to believe, and with a man in a rocker. He looked up when I slammed the car door. He had short ginger-turning-white hair—snow on the mountain as they said here. His skin was dark and spotted from the sun and he had a wide yellow smile. It was the man whom I’d caught a glimpse of when working in the diner. He’d walked past, with pale orange hair and Miss Terrwyn’s stamp of wickedness on him. I hadn’t known Miss Terrwyn long, but in that time she had always been right. This one proved it. “Well, there you are, Mr. Caliban. They told me to wait for you, but I didn’t know it’d be so long.” He jerked his head back and forth hurriedly as if they could see him or hear him. He didn’t know then … about his masters. The Auphe were gone—the true Auphe… .

  “But I’d have waited. For as long as it took. I’m Jesse, but what few people I see call me Sidle, ‘cause I’m so good at sidling out of sight when I have to.” He put down the book he was reading, a Bible—no understanding that one unless he probably skipped to the smiting parts. Yeah, I could see that. Mmm. Got to love me some smiting, he’d say. Not righteous with the Lord—any Lord—but Keeper of the Flock.

  “They’re inside. Waiting for you. I kept them all alive. Can’t say they’re happy, but that wasn’t the point, was it? Keep them here, good and miserable, until you came and showed them what misery really is.” I saw a spark of red in his eyes flare then, buried behind the I’m-a-good-dog facade. Takes a thief to catch a thief, a killer to catch a killer, an Auphe to watch the Auphe. Here was another failure—an Auphe without teeth. Worse, an obedient, fawning one. They would’ve despised him even as they used him. “Go on. Go up and see for yourself. Taste that pain, ripe and juicy, and show ‘em worse.”

  Keeper of the Flock. Keeper of the Fucked.

  I did. I walked past him, not wasting words on him. What would you say to something like him? Inside, the first floor was empty except for rotting furniture and a kitchen with a huge humming refrigerator stocked to the gills with raw meat. It wouldn’t do to let the brothers and sisters starve while they were waiting for me to show up years later. My toys, the Auphe had said. My failed brothers and sisters. And what do you do with failures? The Auphe had told me that too. You “play.”

  Even monsters knew, all work and no play …

  Upstairs was one open area. I flicked on the lights to see a long-ago ballroom with boarded-up windows, boarded then banded with rebar. The room was lined with cages, although one was empty and long so from the lack of blood and the accumulation of dust. Good old Watch-me-Sidle had lied about keeping them all alive. One had apparently not survived his tender loving care. Considering what was up here, a lie was the least of his sins. Eight cages and that was where they were, the failures. The cage bars weren’t just vertical, but horizontal too. The guard downstairs didn’t trust them to do the job, though; the prisoners also had chains anchoring them to the wall. The manacles had been on their ankles so long that flesh had grown over them in spots. That was why they were failures. They couldn’t travel; they couldn’t make a gate out of this hell. My traveling was the only reason the Auphe had needed me. I’d been the first one capable of that. I was the first breeding program success—which meant they’d all been here longer than twenty-three years. God knew how long that was. There were seven of them—all naked. Some male, some female, but it wasn’t easy to tell. Some were more Auphe in appearance than human. None looked completely human, not close. Hair hung to the floor in a matted mass, some Auphe silver white; some ordinary human brown or black. Some had gnawed their hair off until it hung just long enough to cover their face. The stench was unbelievable, so god-awful that my sense of smell cut out immediately.

  “Brother.” The one in the closest cage looked up. His eyes were light blue, not far from my own gray, shining through the tangled black hair that hung in his face. He was pale too. He had black hair like me, pale like me, eyes close to mine. And then he grinned. The hundreds of sliver thin metal teeth were brighter than his eyes. And the eyes were no party when you looked into their depths. They were the eyes of something rabid. There was someone home in there, but you didn’t want to know who it was, what it was, or what it would do to you given the chance. “You have come. Let us go. All of us. We are family. We will hunt and rip and tear and kill.”

  We didn’t share the same mother and most likely not the same father. There had been hundreds of Auphe when I was young. Plenty of sires to be had. We weren’t family … but when you were the last of a race, albeit a created perversely, twisted hybrid race, were they that wrong to say we were?

  The others echoed him, a murmuring bloody wind. “Hunt, rip, tear, kill.” Claws, Auphe black or torn human nails, clutched at the bars. I guess the Auphe hadn’t told them that all the hunting and killing was the kind I was supposed to do to them. No, that wouldn’t be right. That wasn’t the Auphe way. They’d have told them all right—wanting them to suffer, but sometimes you forget what you don’t want to know. I had. So had they. All they wanted was freedom—the freedom to kill until they didn’t have the energy to kill anymore. Rest and then kill again until they could find nothing left to kill. Then worse—they would breed. The Auphe would live again … in a way—distorted and less, but killers all the same.

  The Auphe had been wrong. These offspring were far more the success than I was.

  Yet more than twenty-three years of living hell. It was hard to blame them. I looked at them all, every face. Red eyes and dark skin. Blue eyes and jagged metal teeth. Silver eyes, silver hair, blackened teeth and nails, and every yearning, murderous face was the same—as Auphe as the Auphe themselves had been; murder given life; homicide given a host.

  Some things done can’t be undone. Some things made can’t be unmade.

  Monsters who had been tortured would’ve been monsters who would have tortured if things had ended up with me the failure behind the bars and them loose on a world full of human sheep. “Kill, brother.” The first one wore a crust of dried blood over his mouth. “So tired. We are so tired of dead flesh fed to us. We want the real prey. We want to bury our teeth into the living and tear it away and bathe in the blood. Let us out, brother.”

  Some things once done can’t be undone.

  More echoes: “Brother, brother, brother, set us free. Brother, brother, brother, brother.”

  Some things made can’t be unmade.

  “Brother, brother …”

  Shit happens.

  “Brother …”

  “I have only one brother,” I said as I shot the first one in the head.

  The others were harder. They were thrashing, trying to climb the walls, the ceiling, but in the end they were only fish in a barrel in their tiny cells. There was another good, down-to-earth country saying: shooting fish in a barrel. I was patient, a
imed at the spaces between the bars, and in ten minutes they were dead, every last one. I made sure. When they were lying on the floor unmoving, I double-tapped them all. Triple-tapped, I guessed—the first one that had put them down, followed by the two in the head just in case. I ejected the mostly empty clips and filled the Eagle and Glock with fresh ones.

  They wanted freedom. Now they were free in the only way they could be. It was the best I could do for them. The only thing I could.

  I went back down the stairs, thinking who was the lucky one? The failures or the success? Those upstairs or me? At the moment I didn’t have an answer. It could’ve easily gone the other way. Very easily.

  Out on the porch, Warden Sidle was shifting from foot to foot, nervousness showing in the speed of the movement. I didn’t see it—the back and forth shuffle, because I didn’t bother to look at the worthless shit, but I could hear him. That was fine, because I had no particular desire to see him at all. “That was quick, Mr. Caliban. Did you enjoy yourself? The masters said it was important you enjoy yourself, so I kept them for you. A long time. A real long time. And when they screamed, and they screamed up one helluva commotion, I taught’em better. Splash of acid. Hot poker through the bars. I kept them safe for you. I kept your playthings safe.”

  Playthings.

  I put a round through his head, still without turning—I have great peripheral vision.

  His body fell hard onto the porch. I heard the splatter of brains and blood hitting the weathered wood as I kept walking. He hadn’t been worth words before. He wasn’t even worth a glance now. At the car I pulled out the full plastic gas cans I’d bought at the gas station—because I’d known how this would turn out. I’d known from the very beginning. I spread the gas around the base of the house. It wasn’t long before it was in flames, the entire structure. It was how Vikings had gone out, given up the flame to the gods—usually in a boat, but I didn’t have a boat, so a house of nightmares would have to do.

  I got back in the car and I watched it burn, lighting up the night. I watched my family burn. Until I heard the sirens, I would stay and continue to watch. Better safe than sorry. I didn’t have as much hair to offer now, but I took one of my knives and sawed through a four-inchlong lock. When friends die … when family dies, you cut your hair and you mourn. So I’d been told and so I now remembered. I held the dark strands outside the window to be swept away in a bonfire-heated drift of air, my hand soon empty.