I gave him an extra ten. It was all the ID he needed. Zit cream is pretty cheap at any local drugstore, and he forgot about the ID. But it was the first thing on my mind when I opened the warped wooden door to room thirteen, walked through chips of peeling paint that had fallen on the cracked asphalt of the small parking lot, and went into my new home. Hell, the only home I’d known as of this moment as far as my brain cells were concerned. I pulled the blinds shut, flipped the light on the table beside the bed, and opened the wallet. The clerk might not need it, but ID would be helpful as shit to me right now. Let’s see what we had.
No, not we. There was no we . . . what I had. Because it was me, only me. And I didn’t know my life was any different from that. The clerk hadn’t considered me too social, and I didn’t feel especially social, friendly, or full of love for my fellow fucking man. I had a sliver of feeling that it wasn’t entirely due to my current situation. If you forgot who you were, were you still who you were? I didn’t know, but I thought it might be safe to say that I usually didn’t have an entourage of partying friends in tow.
Other than the monsters from the beach.
So . . . time to see who exactly the nonexistent entourage wasn’t swarming around.
I pulled out the driver’s license from the worn black wallet and scanned it. New York City. 375 Hudson Street. I was . . . well, shit—I didn’t know what year it was exactly, so I didn’t know how old I was, but the picture that I checked against my reflection in the cracked mirror on the bureau across the room looked right. Early twenties probably. Black hair, gray eyes, flatly opaque expression—it would’ve been a mug shot through and through if there hadn’t been the tiniest curl to his . . . my mouth. One that said “I have a boot, and I’m just looking for an ass to put it up.” Okay, social was out the window. I focused on the important thing—my name, printed clear and bold beside the picture. My identity. Me.
“Calvin F. Krueger,” I said aloud. “Fuck me.”
Calvin? A monster killing, walking goddamn armory with an attitude so bad even the DMV captured it on film and my name was Calvin?
Maybe my middle initial led to something more acceptable. F. Frank, Fred, Ferdi-fucking-nand. Shit. I laid the license aside and went back to the wallet. There was nothing. Yeah, a big wad of soaking cash, but no credit card, no ATM card, no video card. Nothing. I had the minimum ID required by law and that was it. That smelled as fishy as I did. I was going to have to get out of these clothes soon and wash them in the bathtub or the reek of low tide would never come out of them. And right now they were the only clothes I had.
After spreading out the cash on the nightstand to dry, I tried to wring out the wallet. It was worn and cracked, on its last legs anyway, and I kicked those last legs out from under it. It split along the side seam and out spilled two more licenses. I picked them up from the frayed carpet to see the same picture, same address, and two different names: Calvert M. Myers and Calhoun J. Voorhees. That I had aliases didn’t bother me—I killed monsters. What was a fake name?—but the aliases themselves. How much did I hate myself?
Calvin F. Krueger, Calvert M. Myers, Calhoun J. Voorhees. Seriously, Calhoun?
Then it hit me. F. Krueger, M. Myers, J. Voorhees. Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees. Three monster movie villains, and I—a monster killer—was carting around their names on my ID. Didn’t I have one helluva sense of humor? I thought about the grenade I’d tossed into the ocean, that cheerful yellow smile on a potentially lethal explosion. A dark sense of humor, I amended to myself, but, hey, wasn’t that better than none at all?
The rank smell hovering around me and my clothes was getting worse. The stink was incredible. Good sense of humor, good sense of smell, and neither one was doing anything productive for me right now. I left the ID and the money on the table and went to the bathroom. I toed off black leather boots that were scarred and worn, like the wallet. They’d been used hard. Well-worn, they would’ve been comfortable if they weren’t wet and full of sand. How they’d gotten worn, what crap they’d stomped through, I didn’t know. I dumped them in the tub that had once been white but was now a dull, aged yellow. It had been used hard, too. I related. I felt that way myself: used hard and put up wet. I threw in my jeans, T-shirt, underwear, and even the leather jacket once I removed the knives.
As I did, a small bubble of panic began to rise. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing about myself. I didn’t remember putting those weapons in my jacket, although I knew exactly what they were for. Knives and guns and monsters, they were the things that I was certain of, but when it came to me, I was certain of absolutely fucking nothing.
Shit. Shit. Okay, I obviously knew how to stay alive; those monsters on the beach hadn’t just killed themselves. People who knew how to stay alive also knew not to panic and I was not panicking. By God. I wasn’t. I was sucking it up and moving on. I was surviving. With or without my memory, at least I seemed to be good at that. Calvin the survivor—watch me in action. I was alive to mock my fake names, and I planned on staying that way.