Blackout

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, as 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.

If I ever found the fucker that came up with that bullshit, I would beat him until he would make weekold roadkill look like an adoptable and perfectly viable pet. It doesn’t work that way, and if anyone needs that spelled out to them, then they should find a coupon for a lobotomy, because why carry extra weight if you’re not using it?

Put down one gun. Eject the clip in the gun you’re holding. Get the new clip from wherever you were hiding it and slam it in. Put that gun down, pick up the other. Shampoo and repeat. It takes a few seconds more, but you don’t get hit in the head with a falling gun or trip over the clip you threw in the air that obeyed gravity instead of your dumb-ass wish upon a star. I was back up and ready to go, when I saw Niko had moved again, from the living room to stand between the kitchen area and me. The window above the kitchen was where the spiders were coming from. It wasn’t Niko blocking my way to a sandwich or some leftover pizza to save my twenty-some-year-old arteries—how old was I again? No, it was Niko doing the bus thing yet one more time. Hey, here comes an MTA bus and on time too. Pardon me while I throw myself under it.

If he was going to keep this up, I would’ve been better off convincing him that in that one-second slip of the tongue, he’d been right. I was totally not his brother. Not his family. Not his responsibility. And there was no reason in the world to keep trying to get himself killed in my place. Jesus, it was irritating. There might’ve been some sort of warm fuzzy feeling, a scrap of belonging, a tiny crumb of appreciation, but mainly it was just goddamn irritating. “Leandros!” I shouted. He didn’t turn as he faced ten more spiders coming down the walls. The name thing, right. Not only was he irritating, he was stubborn in the face of hideous death. I wasn’t impressed or happy about either quality. “Niko, you fucking kamikaze asshole! Why don’t you yell banzai and get it over with?”

That he acknowledged. “‘Banzai,’ contrary to popular belief, means ‘Long life to the emperor’ or ‘Ten thousand years of life to you.’ It wasn’t the Japanese version of ‘Eat hot lead, you sons of bitches.’ “

“And who says that?” I was to one side of him now, taking the heat too, while giving him enough room to swing his katana.

“You do. You talk in your sleep. I assume you picked up that saying in those pulp fiction books with the extremely large-breasted women on the front with a gun pointed at the protagonist.” His blade sliced another spider, three pieces this time. Now that did impress me—a horror movie combined with performing sushi chefs at intermission.

“He probably has a gun too,” I said. I knew I would. “If you both have guns, it’s not attempted homicide. It’s love. The kind that ends up with them naked on the second page.” Hopefully. That was the way I’d write it. “That’s a rare love. Don’t mock what you don’t understand.”

I fired three times and took out two spiders on the wall. The other one fell but dragged itself behind the refrigerator. Wasn’t that always the way? Off to the ultimate spider sanctuary. Fifty pounds and you wouldn’t think there was any way it would fit, but it proved me wrong. I shot again, at one up by the window nine feet above the cabinets. “Do I really read those kinds of books?” Good question. Then I asked an even better question. “Do I really talk in my sleep?”

“Endlessly on the second. Once or twice a year on the first. We wouldn’t want you to strain anything.”

There wasn’t much I could say about that as I didn’t know if it was true or not. But when the amnesia was gone and it turned out not to be true, I was kicking Niko’s ass—the very one I saved right then. While the last three spiders came swarming down the walls and simultaneously launched themselves toward us, I ignored them.

Instead, I slammed a boot into Niko’s ribs, throwing him off-balance for a second as that evil refrigerator spider popped its bloated body out, leaping as fast, injured or not, as the other spiders. Thanks to my kick, it barely missed Nik except for a furrowing of its claws at the end of one leg across the back of Niko’s thigh. I hoped there was no venom there, only repulsive spider cooties. As Niko lifted the katana to chop his attacker in several hundred parts, I shot the last three spiders, thinking that I was concentrating all right, but Niko wasn’t, not on what he should’ve been—himself. Brothers were supposed to watch each other’s backs. It sounded like something from that brother handbook I mentioned before. But besides watching his back, you had to watch yourself too or you wouldn’t be around to read the rest of the handbook. “Work on your concentration there, Leandros. I might have lost my mind, but the killing part of me works just fine.”

“It’s Niko, and, yes, that was fortunate, the venom affecting what you use the least,” Niko said with not much gratitude. If I found this elusive handbook, I might smack him in the head with it.

I waited cautiously, but there were no more spiders. I relaxed enough to wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. It was over, and through it all, the worst thing that could’ve happened didn’t happen. Not one of those bastards touched the TV on the wall—that damn magnificent TV. Now that was luck.

Fifteen minutes later I wasn’t feeling as lucky.

Niko was lying on his stomach on his bed. His pants were off, his underwear was … you know; let’s not go there. Who cares? Underwear is underwear. Boxers versus briefs? Did we need commercials here? No, we did not. Beside him on the bed was our first-aid kit/hospital-in-a-box. “You seriously want me to bandage that?” I asked warily. There hadn’t been any venom, but the gash from the claw was four inches across the back of his upper thigh, ragged, not deep, yet a breeding ground for all sorts of killer monster spider germs. What did you put on killer monster spider germs? Hydrogen peroxide? Acid? Cut off the leg?

“It’ll be difficult to reach myself.” Niko was doing his best to see over his shoulder as there was no mirror in his room to catch the reflection. Because I didn’t like mirrors very much and when he wasn’t lunging under the nearest form of public transportation under the delusion it would save my life, he also kept his room reflection free in deference to my delicate psyche. First there was Doctors without Borders and now we had Brothers without Brains. Self-preservation meant nothing to him, when it came to me at any rate.

My hands were already opening a bottle of Betadine and a packaged brush. Good for them. If they knew what to do, I’d sit back and let them drive. “Yeah,” I commented dubiously, “but you’re … you know … a guy.”

“I’m your brother. We discussed this so thoroughly before the spiders attacked that even my attention span was challenged,” he semi-snapped. At the loss of temper, which some part of me recognized as a sign of a good deal of pain on his part, I automatically reached for a bottle of pain pills, prescription strength and illegally obtained—go team. I’d seen both our scars. Tylenol didn’t cover that level of boo-boo.

“True, and brothers are guys,” I pointed out. A thirteen-hour car ride with that horny-ass puck would spook anyone. If I could’ve picked the day I forgot, that one would’ve been it, but no. Goodfellow said he was monogamous—yeah, he said, but that didn’t keep him from telling tales of the nonmonogamy days. That and his great love of a challenge—there was no mountain he couldn’t climb and no dick he couldn’t get to do the same. That was when I tried to kick out the back window of the car. In a perfect world, I would’ve made it out. No such luck.

“Buddha, I wish the spider had killed me instead. Never mind. I’ll manage it myself.” He started to push himself up, sounding tired and in pain, with a massive desire to smack me in the head. He also sounded resigned. It wasn’t a good mix, not to mention so complicated that I was surprised I could pick up on that many emotions. Could be I was one of those sensitive guys all the women wanted. Then I thought about that first T-shirt, EAT ME (BEFORE I EAT YOU). Nope. That didn’t sound sensitive.

Well, fuck. Whatever I was, sensitive or an ass, he was family, and it seemed family trumped T-shirts.

“No. Wait. I’ll do it. It’s what brothers do and that means I do it.” I might not have sounded fully confident, but he settled back down on the bed after a glance to see if I meant it.

“It’s hardly that big a deal,” he said, laying his head on folded arms. “Especially considering I changed your diapers when you were a baby.”

“Jesus Christ!” I dropped the bottle of pills to roll in a circular pattern on the floor. “Don’t say that! That took this to the weirdest place ever. What the hell’s wrong with you?” I bent down to pick up the bottle and thought about winging it at his head to see if that helped his pain any, but I didn’t. I pushed diaper images to the farthest corner of my mind—weirdest fucking place ever—and did my best to get on with the task at hand.

Eventually pills were passed out; one was accepted and one sent back. You can’t nobly overcome suffering if you’re not suffering to begin with. I didn’t see myself falling in that category. If it had been me, I thought, I’d have wolfed both down. Inflicted pain was one thing much better to give than receive. I cleaned the wound thoroughly with a brush, then peroxide, applied an antibacterial ointment, bandaged it, and gave two shots—one of Benadryl in case of a mild allergic reaction, with epinephrine on hand in case of a more severe one, and an antibiotic shot. I didn’t know where that spider claw had been, but soaking in a footbath full of rose petals was not my first guess.

I did all that. It would’ve been impressive if my brain had been more involved on the conscious level, but my body and my subconscious weren’t waiting for me to catch up. This came from the kind of practice of something you do more than once.

Time and time again.

What a crazy fucking business, but we were in it and, from the number of scars we both had, we had been for a while. Saving the innocent and killing the wicked, the evil, and the big-ass vermin; it was more entertaining than working at the diner, despite what I’d said back then. For supernatural cops, as for normal cops, getting hurt was going to be a possibility—or in our case, a sure thing. We’d survived so far or I wouldn’t be standing here still trying not to think about the diaper thing.

Talk about evil—as it turned out, Niko could pull his weight there if he had to. I knew he’d said that on purpose, knowing what my reaction would be. Knew it.

I started to give him crap over it, but his noble suffering had turned into sleep. Eh, I’d get him later then. I wasn’t about to let him one-up me. Hmm. That must be a brother thing too. I gathered together all the supplies. I took a blanket from the end of his bed, covered him and left his door open. When things were slithering into your home on a regular basis, it was best to hear them coming.

In the kitchen I could see where the spiders had gotten in. There was a circular hole in the top window, about two feet across. It was perfectly cut, as if with a diamond-tipped tool instead of a sharp spider claw. They must have used their web to prevent the glass from falling and then they had their doggy door.

Well, no fixing that tonight, unless there was a twostory ladder hiding under a futon I didn’t know about. I double-checked all the spiders to make sure they were dead—deader than dead; the leftovers of an exterminator’s worst nightmare. They were. It didn’t matter. More could come—or one of these sons of bitches … or just plain bitches could pop and out could wriggle ten thousand baby spiders. It wasn’t quite as bad as the diaper image, but it was enough that I spent the next few hours with all the lights on, fighting the storm’s gloom in case I saw a baby eight-legs looking for its bassinet. I watched TV with the sound muted. I scanned the bookcase for those books Niko said I read. They were there. I touched a finger to one and grinned. Big breasts and guns—it was like peanut butter and jelly; green eggs and ham; salt and pepper. They went together.

I found a picture I hadn’t noticed before taped to the side of the otherwise-unadorned refrigerator. I almost didn’t look. I didn’t want to see another picture that could be like the one I’d seen before my relapse. I couldn’t remember it, but I knew it was bad news regardless—how? No idea. Isn’t brain damage fun? But at the last second I manned up for this one. The photo was of a little kid, maybe four or five, jumping up and down on Santa Claus’s nut sack. A cheap picture taken by an elf in a cheap costume; that was the way those things went, and that was me going apeshit on Santa’s equipment. The kid had black hair like mine, but that wasn’t the giveaway. It was the attitude. I wondered what Santa had done to piss me off so much.

The rest of the day I spent wiping up spider goop and putting those suckers in Hefty trash bags. I was lazy, but I had no desire to live in a place that was going to have spider stink embedded in it for the rest of eternity. It was dirty work but easy enough. The biggest one that had me thinking about carrying extra underwear was no problem either. Once it was dead, no more arachnophobia. Mirrors and monsters were still bad; dead spiders big enough to play in the Super Bowl were no big deal. Did that make me strange?

Compared to what? Against the last six days, the only six days of my life? No, I didn’t think it did. And that in itself was far stranger.

After the cleanup and piling the bagged spiders in the workout area, I took another run through the place. I’d done it before. That I did remember. That hadn’t fallen into one of the holes that swiss-cheesed yesterday. But as with the other memories I’d kept, some were blurry, such as a fish shimmering under the water, looking twice its true size one second, then half the size the next; others were clear. A refresher course wouldn’t hurt me regardless, as long as I stayed away from the picture in Niko’s room. I wandered around, peering into drawers and cabinets, and the fridge. The top two shelves were pure sugar and grease, obviously mine. There was a board mounted on the wall by the door that led outside. It was divided in half, the right side labeled Niko; the left labeled Cal. In dry-erase marker, Niko’s side had precise and perfect handwriting spelling out appointments and chores, some of which were labeled in red, more for me than him, I was sure. Check GPS programming on Cal’s phone. That was curious. GPS was a good thing for keeping track of brothers who were attacked by a nest of spiders and managed to get amnesia; I could see that. But this sounded more specific, as if it weren’t something the phone already did.

Keep Cal from starving. I didn’t think it would actually come to starvation before I hauled my ass to the grocery store, but the following one was painted a biblical red kick in the ass.

Reassure neighbors the smell of Cal’s laundry is not a decomposing body. I snorted. There was more in that general category about sparring and running and making sure I was capable of fighting off a Pomeranian if the need ever arose. On my side of the board, in handwriting so sloppy I should’ve gone to med school, it read 1) Sit on ass 2) Kill things. And that was it. That covered my day every day of the week, three hundred and sixty-five a year.

We didn’t have a lot of family-type things around. Goodfellow had said something about a fire and Niko had added that our mother had died in a fire. That would tend to wipe out a good deal of when-we-were-little-and-cute mementos. I was surprised the Santa photo had made it. Mementos didn’t make a family, though. They made a convincing TV commercial if enough were plastered through a fake house with fake people, but real life wasn’t TV.

And didn’t I have something more convincing than solid, tangible souvenirs of the past? I had a brother who’d been half dead on his feet from no sleep when he found me after a four-day disappearance. From all the hints I’d gotten, including the horrific diaper one, I gathered that he, rather than our mom, had raised me. His patience was unreal when anyone else would’ve been looking for a baseball bat to beat me to death. I also had the battle that had happened barely an hour ago. If I was going down, this guy was bound and determined to beat me to the grave by a mile.

What did I do in return? Bagged spiders and told him, no worries, he’d get all of his brother back. He wanted it all too. For all he said I might be happier to be only part of Cal, one that had been born less than a week ago, he wanted me back—the entire package. My past was his past. Before Promise and Goodfellow, it had been him and me alone for a long time. You didn’t live with fake IDs and find lying easier than telling the truth if you were surrounded by a caring circle of family and friends. That was easy enough to figure out. It had been him and me, and now he’d lost half of me. If I didn’t get the rest back, I wouldn’t be whole and neither would Niko.

Oddly enough, I cared more about his being whole than about me.

Softy. Goddamn softy. I didn’t even know him. I mean, I knew what he told me and what he showed me and what I felt, what I’d almost remembered… .

Because I had almost remembered earlier, and that other picture had been a nudge that had speeded up the boulder already rolling down the hill. The venom had been wearing off. I’d seen the picture and then we’d gone to the museum to talk to that mummy informant and … shit … something had happened. I didn’t know what, but something had happened—something that, like the picture, I didn’t want to remember. At the same time, though, it had felt … good. It was a bizarre combination of “Don’t look, don’t see” and the feeling of riding a roller coaster when you’re a kid. That adrenaline rush. I’d remembered part of me; I’d been coming home and bringing my past with me. Niko said my past had baggage. That meant his did too. What kind of fucking brother would let some bad memories stop him from being the family his own brother needed him to be?

Not the kind of brother I had. He’d shown me that. He deserved better, and my chickenshit ass was going to give it to him. I was a good guy and good guys didn’t leave their brothers twisting in the wind. I was going to start the ball rolling again, no matter how much I didn’t want to do the one thing that had started it. It was a picture, for God’s sake. I was standing in a mass monster graveyard partially of my making and I didn’t want to look at a picture.

Fuck that cowardly shit.

Hours later when Niko woke up, it was six p.m. He came out into the hall, pants on—thank you, God, and just give me a little time on the naked-guy thing—to take in the place. “You cleaned up.” It was said as skeptically as if I’d called in a maid service and passed it off as my own work.

“The smell.” I shrugged. “Apparently that’s the one motivation my laziness can’t beat back down. How’s the leg?”

“Sore but bearable.” He was limping, but not too badly, which was good as we had a lot of dead spider ass to haul. “I’m going to take a shower.” There was a towel half in the bathroom and half in the hall. “My keen observational skills tell me you already have. Did you brush your teeth?”

“What are you?” I took another bite of a peanut butter and jelly bagel. We were out of bread. I chewed and propped my elbows on the breakfast bar. “The damn Tooth Fairy? My diaper days are over. Go on already.”

He gave me a look, a now easily recognizable “brother look,” picked up the towel off the floor, and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. I waited until I heard the water running, gave it several seconds, then put the bagel down and went into his room. I hadn’t forgotten which drawer the picture was in, but I hesitated before the dresser as if I had. “Suck it up,” I muttered under my breath. “It’s just a goddamn picture. It’s probably of Niko potty-training you. Suck it the hell up.” Suck it up I did and opened the drawer with a resolute hand. That same rock-steady hand reached inside and brought the picture out. I stared at it. I saw what I’d seen before. There was no flood of memories or the trickle of a single one, not yet, but I saw. I saw what I’d wanted to deny and never remember and embrace all in one.

I saw everything.

Destiny was easy. Choice was difficult and free will was for the fucked.

I was well and truly fucked.