Blackout

  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, aimed 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.

  My hand—the hand of something new and something old and something unlike anything on this earth.

  That was what the healer who’d tried to fix me had said I was. I never forgot that. Who would? In a fog of amnesia, I’d thought all monsters were an abomination, because there was some part of me that thought I was an abomination. I’d been called that more times than I could count—by the supernatural, by my mother. Why should there not be a piece of me that thought the same?

  But I was wrong.

  I’d always been wrong about that. It was time to retire that word, because I wasn’t an abomination. I was the Wolf I’d killed my second day back in New York. She’d evolved to be what she was. She had choices, but some of those choices were defined and limited by her genes. It was the same for me. I was what I was. That little boy who’d learned about death by grieving for a dead blackbird was long gone; he’d evolved. And the Cal from the past week …

  The Cal that could’ve been, should’ve been, but never was—he was gone as well. It was as if he’d never existed, and in actuality he never had. He hadn’t been a reality, only a possibility—more like an impossibility, a dream. A good dream, but only a dream … as genuine as he’d felt, as real and right as the choices he had made—for Nik and me. You can fight the world, but you can’t fight yourself. You can’t deny yourself. Not forever. It didn’t stop me from cutting another lock of hair to let fly, for him this time—for the better Cal, the one who couldn’t exist for more than a moment in our world.

  He’d been more than the good guy he’d obsessed about. He’d been a hero. He was worth mourning. That was something I couldn’t say about myself, but I could say this:

  I was Caliban Leandros of the Clan Vayash.

  I was Caliban, Auphe.

  I was something new and something old and something unlike anything on this earth. I was the only one. I sat in the car as the house burned eight others like me to less than blackened bone.

  The only one …

  Now.

  I heard a voice again, tickling at the base of my brain. It wasn’t the one that had warned me about monsters and abominations, the one that had warned me most of all about myself. This one was still me, though, but it was the other half of me … or more than half. Souls … How to divide them up? Who knew? Listening, I heard the voice whisper sly and satisfied as I watched the fire rage on:

  So much for the competition.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rob Thurman lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys. Rob is the author of the Cal Leandros Novels: Nightlife, Moonshine, Madhouse, Deathwish , and Roadkill; the Trickster Novels: Trick of the Light and The Grimrose Path; and the novel Chimera and its sequel (to be released later in 2011), Basilisk.

  Besides wild, ravenous turkeys, Rob has three rescue dogs (If you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one of which is a Great Dane-Lab mix who barks at strangers like Cujo times ten, then runs to hide under the kitchen table and pee on herself. Robbers tend to find this a mixed message. However, the other two dogs are more invested in keeping their food source alive. All were adopted from the pound (one on his last day on death row). They were all fully grown, already housetrained, and grateful as hell. Think about it the next time you’re looking for a Rover or a Fluffy.

  For updates, teasers, music videos, deleted scenes, social networking (the time-suck of an author’s life), and various other extras, visit the author at www.robthurman.net.

  Read on for an exciting excerpt from Rob Thurman’s new science fiction thriller,

  BASILISK

  Coming in August 2011 from Roc.

  On the day a ten-year-old girl killed Stefan, he didn’t see his life flash before his eyes.

  It’s what they say you’ll see, but not him. Cliches, who needed them?

  That this was the second time in his life that he’d thought the same exact thing would’ve been worth mentioning … if it wasn’t for the actual process of dying. That tended to be distracting from pithy observations. He was aware that he was lacking in the last thoughts, much less last words department. He knew … but what could a guy do?

  Life is like that. Sooner or later, it boils down to, What the hell can you do?

  His brother, Michael, had once told him that when he had no hope, he dreamed of sun, wind, and horses. It was part of his past—in a way—the best part. Every night he dreamed of them. Sun, wind, and horses. When Stefan had no hope, because dying doesn’t leave a person much, he saw the same.

  Sun, wind, and horses.

  Stefan felt his heart stutter and skip. He wouldn’t have thought that one or two missed beats would hurt that much, but they did. Invisible fingers of agony fastened around that beating hunk of muscle and squeezed once, twice as his lungs staggered in sync—then red, as scarlet as a field of poppies, bloomed behind his eyes, and he was on the beach. There was pale sand, pounding waves, and a sky so blue it couldn’t be real. It was a child’s painting, carefully covering every bit of the paper. Blue and dense enough that you could probably scrape a thick peeling of color away with a thumbnail. He could smell the salt that stung his nose, feel the water that soaked his legs and the warmth of the horse beneath them, the coarse mane he hung on to as he galloped through the surf. There was a wind in his face that made him feel that he could fly. It was one of those moments no one forgets. The exhilaration, the sensation of wind, water, and sun branded forever in the mind of the fourteen-year-old kid.

  He couldn’t see his brother, but he could hear him laughing. Behind Stefan, he was on his own horse, sharing the adventure. It was a great memory, there, then—before the blood. Before the red coated the rock and sand, it was better than great, it was the perfect memory. The strippers in his old Mafiya haunts didn’t beat that. Even the first time he fell in love didn’t beat that. Didn’t come close.

  The next flash was when he’d saved his brother ten years after his abduction on that same beach. Stefan didn’t see him through his own eyes this time. He wasn’t Stefan anymore. He was his brother. He saw himself from his brother’s point of view—a stranger all in black standing in the
doorway of his prison, then pulling him out of a place of horror. He felt his confusion, his lack of trust, but years of brainwashed obedience had him allowing the grip on his arm and the tug and run to freedom. The gravel and glass under his bare feet, the pain of the cuts, the ear-ripping explosions of firing guns, and the stars, Stefan felt and saw it all. Pain, blood, and flying bullets, he’d thought that would be what would stick with the kid—Michael—but it was the stars he remembered the most. The students … the prisoners … of the facility weren’t allowed to wander the ground at night and they didn’t have windows in the small cell-like rooms. Death behind him, and, for all he knew, death in front of him, but it was the stars that he saw. Far from any city, deep in the Everglades, the sky might be the color of a Reaper’s cloak, but Death’s robe made the ideal background for a hundred stars.

  Brilliant light that shone down on you and could almost make you believe in miracles.

  A light that could almost make you believe escape could be real and life was more than being trained to kill, turned into a weapon with no will of your own.

  A light that was worth dying to see.

  Only Michael had it in him to think that, which was unbelievable, too. A wonder. He was a good kid. A damn good kid. The best. Even dying, Stefan knew that as well as he knew anything in the goddamn world.

  Michael left the bullets and the stars behind. The next was a string of emotions: fear, confusion, exasperation, more confusion, bewilderment, denial, annoyance, finally a reluctant acceptance and a sense of belonging. All those emotions had been caused by Stefan, and while he wished the ones at the beginning could’ve been avoided, he was damn proud of the ones he felt … that his brother felt at the end.

  Aside from emotions, there was also life in the world outside a concrete/razor-wire wall. Movies, TV, books, people that weren’t instructors or torturers, restaurants, pizza, girls, a smelly ferret, making his own decisions—a life. A real life, something he’d thought impossible. And family, something he thought a fairy tale. Michael had been stunned by that. Amazed. He had family, a concept that even a genius like him could barely comprehend and never have imagined applied to him. Someone cared about him. Someone told him he belonged. Someone would give up everything for him. Someone would give up their life for him. He wasn’t alone.