Blackout

by Rob Thurman

  Fuck, yes, you would.

  I spread out the map. “So I’m not your brother … yet. But I will be. Stop tiptoeing around me. Smack my head when I deserve it. It’ll remind me.” I’d seen aborted twitches several times before he managed to pull back in time before he swatted me. “I had a setback last night. Big deal. The venom can’t last forever. I forgot part of one day. I’ll remember it all soon enough. Then it’ll be the good old days again.”

  He didn’t comment as he unfolded the map on his side. All that former optimism had disappeared, when he or Goodfellow was telling me every other minute on the trip back from South Carolina that I’d get it all back. Wait and see. I’d get it back. No time at all. She was coming round the mountain, riding six white horses and pulling my memory like a U-Haul. Now we were playing no comment on the subject.

  With the map laid out, he did find something to say. “I said something idiotic. I’m sorry. You are my brother, only without certain … memories.” Memories hadn’t been his first choice of words, but I didn’t know what he had almost said instead. “I think you’re happier as you are now,” he went on, weighting down his two corners of the map with two of his steel bead mala bracelets. I remembered those when he’d grabbed me to stop me from stabbing the puck with a fork. “Our childhood wasn’t the best, and there’s no escaping it made us who we are. If you can’t remember those things and you’re more content this way, perhaps it’s better if you stay like this. Maybe I’m being selfish to want you to be who you were before.”

  Ah, that was it. Guilt. Throwing himself under the bus. He certainly seemed the type from the bits and pieces floating around inside my skull. But, Jesus, how bad had our childhood been anyway? Slutty mom—I’d picked up on that, but to think I’d be better not remembering any of it? At all? That sounded much worse than a mom who screwed around a lot and liked to stay on the move. Goodfellow had said that, not Leandros. A puck, a trickster, but oddly more truthful than my own brother seemed now.

  I looked up from the map and raised my eyebrows at him. “Are you happier? The way I am now, you don’t know for sure anymore that I’m your brother. That’s what you said, idiotic or not.” Despite the conversation, he frowned at associating himself with that particular word although he’d been the one to first say it. That cracked me up. He was vain about his intellect. That I would have to remember, no matter what. It was mocking material too good to pass up. “I have amnesia, but I can still hear. Tell me, are you happier if I stay like this?”

  His forehead furrowed as if he weren’t used to me backing him in a corner. That was the great thing about control. You rarely lose a little. You usually lose it all. I smacked the side of his head just as he caught my wrist a fraction of a second too late. With his speed, “too late” meant a definite loss of control. I’d kicked the hell out of his toaster all right. “I didn’t think so,” I said, answering my own question. “I’m your brother all right, and one of us doesn’t get to be happy and one of us miserable. Now, get me a Magic Marker and I’ll make you glad your obviously not-that-bright other version of me isn’t totally back yet. I’ve got an idea while he’d probably be out hunting for offensive shirts. Take advantage of my usefulness. Soon I’ll be back scouring the city for the dirtiest T-shirt in existence.”

  He let go of my wrist, rubbed the side of his head, but got up and returned with a marker. Sitting back down, control already back in place, for the most part anyway, he flipped the marker like a knife, flipped it again, and at last got around to asking, “Do you think you could call me Niko? Or Nik? Leandros, every time you say it …” He handed me the marker without the rest of the words. But I still got them.

  It was like a kick in the gut for him, every time I said his name as if he were a stranger. I should’ve figured that out sooner. “Niko. Gotcha. Any nicknames? With your nose, I have to give you some sort of hell over that. Pinocchio? Never mind. I’ll figure something out. Now, show me where all the bodies were found or went missing.”

  That was another memory that unfortunately hadn’t disappeared this morning—all the details on Ammut and how we were going to find Ammut—and Ammut the goddess, but not a goddess, but she could suck your life force anyway. Between Leandr … Niko and Goodfellow, they somehow managed to make simple life-threatening killer monsters boring.

  “You know, pissing me off to force me to release a little tension, that is very much my brother all over. And you, too often, call me Cyrano.” Too often. That was what he said, but that wasn’t what he meant. I’d been right. Niko wasn’t a good liar, not when I was the one doing the listening. Another observation to push me a little closer to the old me.

  Too bad you don’t remember the mummy. Too bad for the mummy he did remember the old you.

  I didn’t bother to twitch at that one. The voices could kiss my ass. I was done with them. They were nothing but Muzak. “Cyrano. Ain’t I the educated one?” I snorted and kept my eyes on the map. In Nevah’s Landing, I thought a brother was something I could never get used to, but now I was more used to it than the brother himself. Those first few days in the Landing when I’d been lost and alone, I’d kept looking back over my shoulder. I hadn’t known for what … or for whom. Now I did. “Genetics and memories aren’t everything, you know,” I said, directly contradicting what I’d thought barely a few days ago. “Think of me as Sven, your adopted foreign exchange cousin, if it makes you feel better. Now, enough with the therapy. Pretend we hugged. Now, dead bodies. Go.”

  I’d gotten the rundown before last night’s relapse on the body count, but it didn’t hurt to double-check when at a moment’s notice I might forget how to wipe my own ass. The count stood at twenty vamps, Wolves, incubi, succubi, all found dead or reported missing by their pack or loved one … er … creature; their significant supernatural other. The dead bodies were found as little more than husks, autumn leaves ready to fly away on a fall breeze. They were dried up and drained of all life, still recognizable, but what had animated their body was gone. Creatures, supernatural or not, were basically batteries. It was that biological energy that got Ammut’s engines revving.

  Where they were found I marked with a circle with Xs for eyes and a frown with a tongue hanging out. “Okay, what about the missing ones?” For those I put question marks. We ended up with eight dead bodies and twelve missing ones. “Goodfellow said the spider’s venom would make whatever it bit forget everything, including how to breathe.” I’d gotten a reduced dose, he’d said. It bit something before me or I’d be dead now. “How does Ammut get life force out of dead things?”

  “That’s only with humans, which is why Ammut doesn’t eat humans,” Niko answered. “Their life force isn’t half as powerful as that of the supernatural. If the spiders bite the supernatural creatures, it paralyzes them, but they’re still alive to be wrapped up in cocoons and brought back to Ammut.”

  I turned the map from one side to the other and then upside down, Niko’s prayer beads tumbling to the mat. First, the dead, then the missing, and then over again. It was plain as day. “Huh. Look at that. Damn, we were five kinds of stupid.” I gave a small smile, thinking about how Miss Terrwyn said that at least ten times a day at the diner. Down-to-earth and smarter by a mile than we badass monster killers were. I was glad I hadn’t forgotten her when I woke up this morning. “Yeah, we were five kinds of stupid all right.”

  Niko frowned as if he’d never heard that particular insult aimed at him before. Intellectual vanity again. “What do you mean?”

  “Forget Ammut being at the canal. She was only there to wipe out the council. That was personal. Look at everything else.” I pointed at eight different spots. “I have amnesia, but I can read a map and I know if you live around Central Park, you’re rich. Ammut took those victims herself. Walked into some fancy building with fancy security, went right upstairs, and ate herself some dinner.” Next I pointed at the question marks. “And I know that these places aren’t near parks, aren’t fancy, and that last one is near a waste
treatment plant.” As I said, I could read a damn map. “Why does Ammut need her spiders when she can go where most people could never get in? Think about it. Why send them there when she can go anywhere?” I smirked, full of myself that I’d seen what everyone else had missed. I was hot shit all right. Amnesia boy takes the lead. “Because she’s a snob.”

  Niko grabbed the map and scrutinized it. “But if that’s true, then that means—”

  “It means she doesn’t want to get her Manolo what-chamacallits dirty. It means she probably gets her hair and nails done at whatever expensive champagne-swilling place your vampire lady friend does. She can look human when she wants, same as most of your … our friends out there. Hell, Promise and she might even know each other.” Ammut wasn’t some lion-headed, alligator-jawed, hippopotamus-assed Egyptian goddess she’d been in the picture Goodfellow had drawn on a bar napkin. She was a rich Park Avenue bitch who could afford a personal trainer to make sure her ass stayed well below hippo size.

  And occasionally she turned into a giant slithery snake creature in a canal, but we all had bad hair days. At least chicks did, right? I hadn’t been that upset with my hair even with spider goop in it.

  “We thought she sent the spiders to the easier locations because they’re not particularly intelligent and that she kept the more difficult locations for herself,” Niko murmured, shaking his head in self-recrimination.

  “Nope. Stuck-up bitch.” I’d seen one or two come through the diner in the Landing when I’d been there. Passing through to Charleston and damn near horrified that the diner was the only place to eat in town. Here I might not get up close and personal with those kinds of people, and Niko’s friend Promise didn’t rub her wealth in anyone’s face. Those at the diner, though, were bitches through and through. They’d sent the silverware back four times, the tea twice, the food once—not that they ate more than a bite of the second serving, and left a dollar tip. I heard one say as she left with her party that she could feel the grease in the air clogging up her fucking immaculate pores. It’d made my day that I’d washed in the toilet the last two forks I’d given them. I hoped they’d tasted Comet all the way to Charleston.

  That made me think. The relapse definitely only went back a day, because those things were perfectly clear. A small relapse, which was good. It meant Niko would get back what he needed, and I’d get back who I was.

  “With this, we don’t need to visit Mickey, and that is a huge plus as he lives in a garbage dump.” Niko began to fold the map up with a brisk decisive emotion. “Cal, that’s something. I’m proud of you.”

  “What? Was I that stupid when I had all of my memory?” I demanded, folding my arms and trying to look offended, but I couldn’t lose the grin. Hell, I was proud of myself, and who didn’t like feeling smug? If they said they didn’t, they were big, fat liars.

  “No, You’ve always been smart. However, when it comes to laziness, you’re a genius, Nobel league. You prefer to wait for Goodfellow or me to do the boring research. Then you turn off the cartoons and shoot at whatever we find,” he said dryly.

  I had no desire to clean up my room, so, nope, the laziness hadn’t changed. I was about to point that out when Niko whipped his head around and looked up.

  Like he hadn’t last time … in the mummy’s lair. Sheep being sheep. But even sheep can learn.

  “Get your weapons. Now.”

  He was good. I could barely see the motion in the shadows where the outer wall met the ceiling two stories up when I knew to look for it. But I could smell them now that I knew they were there and bothered to take a whiff. “Seriously?” I groaned. “Again? Christ, the goddamn Hatfields and McCoys didn’t hold grudges this long.”

  But apparently spiders did.

  9

  It was storming outside and had been all morning, at least the two hours of it that it had taken me to drive Niko nuts; otherwise they probably would’ve waited until night. Ammut didn’t want the neighbors calling 911 and every exterminator in the city on her pets. The spiders scuttled down the walls; all of them were bigger than the beagle-sized one from the previous night. I grabbed for my holster I’d hung on the wall in the training area. Yanking the Eagle from one side and the Glock from the other, I fired as one jumped from the wall to the breakfast bar. Flung to the floor, it spasmed, legs curling in, flailing out, and then curling back in as greenish black slime pooled around it. That part of it didn’t look much different from what I’d seen Niko drink yesterday for supper. “If they keep coming after me to avenge their spider buddies, then I have to keep killing more of them, and if I kill more of them, then even fucking more will come. I’ll have every goddamn spider in the world after my ass.”

  I shot another one that bounded from the wall to the top of the refrigerator and then down to the floor, twenty feet closer to us in less than two seconds. Along with the muffled clap from the gun’s silencer, the spider flipped onto its back, leaking blood by the gallons and squirting web silk by whatever you used to measure web silk. Bundles? Haystacks? A whole shitload of it. If you took every one of Spider-Man’s wet dreams, added them together, then multiplied by ten, that was what you’d get. Not that I wanted anything to do with Spider-Man’s wet dreams, but for measurement purposes, that was about right.

  Niko moved off to the side in the living area and cut a spider in half with his sword as it leaped through the air. Right in half. Did you want to know what the inside of a Nepenthe spider looked like? Me neither, but I found out. If the Incredible Hulk ate a spaghetti dinner, then puked it up …

  “I think this may be Ammut, not spider vengeance. Now concentrate,” Niko said sharply. “You might’ve gotten lucky with one bite, but ten will guarantee you won’t be that lucky again.”

  “I am concentrating,” I shot back as I ducked one spider that went over my head. Spider vengeance? Did I live in a world where spider vengeance was an actual concept? I had so fucked up in my former life.

  “On what?” The next one he impaled, flung it off the blade, and cut the spider chimp’s head off by a third.

  “The bodily fluids of superheroes, but it’s relevant to the situation.” I whirled as I felt a tug on my boot. The bastard that had gone over the top of me had snagged me with a line of webbing and yanked me off my feet the moment I turned. This was no beagle or the seventy-five-pound Charlotte from the motel bathroom. This bad boy was huge, a hundred and fifty pounds easy. I wasn’t afraid of spiders. When you woke up with four giant dead ones and killed another one with a fork, you’d find out whether or not you had a phobia. All those legs, their impossible speed, fat abdomens full of God knew what; they weren’t pretty, but I wasn’t arachnophobic. That was before I discovered there was a line between nonphobic and holy-fucking-shit-I-think-I-wet-my-pants—and that line sat firmly on one hundred and fifty pounds of a big black, venom-dripping, six-eyed demon from Hell. And not the biblical Hell either, but some alien, unknowable hell from a distant dimension that would drive you insane with one glimpse.

  One hundred and forty-nine pounds and maybe I would’ve been fine. But one hundred and fifty pounds equaled full-blown arachnophobia right out of nowhere. It filled my guts with a cold worse than the searing burn of dry ice. My brain did its best to curl in on itself, a frightened child seeking the fetal position. All the air was sucked from the room and if I’d tried to say anything, it wouldn’t have passed paralyzed vocal cords. In my life, almost six days now, best guess, I’d never been so fucking terrified. If my heart had exploded I wouldn’t have been surprised—relieved, but not surprised.

  Not, of course, that any of that stopped me from pulling the triggers on both guns and emptying the clips. Fear is fear. It only kills you if you let it. If I felt the need to seek a support group, I’d do it later. Blowing away the motherfucking, disgusting tarantula big enough that you could ride its hairy ass across the plains to settle the West was more pertinent at the moment.

  “Cal?”

  I waved a gun at Niko, who was behind me, a
s I put down the other gun to tear at the webbing around my ankle as I kept my eyes on the giant spider riddled with bullet holes lying limp in front of me. “Just throwing up in my mouth. Doing fucking great. No problems here.”

  “Good. In that case I’m sending you a present.”

  I snatched a glance over my shoulder to see Niko kick a spider in my direction as he took on three more. I jammed the muzzle of the Glock into its pulpy underabdomen and blew it away as its legs scrambled for purchase on my arm. You always keep a last one in the chamber. Just in case … for them or for yourself. The thought swam in and out so quickly, I almost didn’t have time to think what a high-class job it was that had that particular rule carved into the neurons so deeply that even amnesia couldn’t erase it. College grads everywhere were praying to get an internship here.

  I had a new respect for exterminators now. These creepy-crawly bastards did not give up. I knelt, dumped the empty clips, reached into my pocket for a full one, rammed it home, and then did the same for the other. Ever see those movies? The ones where people are running, empty their clips, drop them, toss the guns up in the air, throw new clips out, and the guns flip back down with the downward pull of gravity combined with the upward motion of the clip to meet together in perfect harmony and, damn, you’re reloaded in half a second flat.