“Oh no. No. No. What the hell? Seriously, what the hell is all of this?”
There were no answers. There was no one but him in the room, and that meant there was no one to help him figure it all out.
He stood up again, slowly, carefully, just in case his legs got away from him a second time. He could feel his pulse speeding up, and his breaths were coming too fast.
“Okay, okay… Just… I dunno, just try to relax. Call home, get hold of Mom and Dad and then we can see what’s happening.”
He reached for the phone and his finger took careful aim at the buttons, ready to dial home, but there was a small problem: he couldn’t remember his number.
He blinked back tears and bit back a laugh that felt completely wrong. “Oh, come on. This is getting stupid now.” His fingers searched the keypad for the right sequence-hell, even the right first digit would have been nice- but nothing came to him.
He clenched his hands together and made himself take a deep, slow breath.
“Okay, come on, numbers… numbers. There’s got to be a way to remember this. It’s my damned home phone number.”
He closed his eyes. His mom, she’d always drilled it into him. If he was lost, he was supposed to tell people his name, his phone number and his address, in that order. She’d gone over it so many times.
“So, what do we tell people when we’re lost? My name is…” And there he stopped. One more obstacle, a little thing really, but there it was. And this time when the tears threatened, he couldn’t stop them.
“What’s my stupid name?” His voice wheezed out of his chest, squeezing past a constriction that felt like a brick wall. “Come on, damn it all, who the hell am I?”
Three hours later, he was only a little closer to finding the answer to that question. A look around the room revealed a suitcase full of clothes, fifty-seven dollars and eighty-seven cents in cash and a wallet that held nothing but a learner’s permit for Boston, Massachusetts, in the name of Hunter Harrison. The picture on the ID looked a little like the face he saw in the mirror, but only vaguely. The face was too young, and he guessed he was at least a few inches taller than the five feet, seven inches that Hunter Harrison was supposed to stand in height.
There was an address, and that was a starting point. He figured he could find out where the address was in Boston and go there. Maybe it was his home and he’d get lucky and something about the place would help him remember who he was and what was missing from his life.
There was another problem, of course, and this one was a doozy. The address on the license said Boston, but as he discovered by checking out the local news, he was in Baltimore, Maryland. He couldn’t remember his name without help, or much of the past, but his geography was just fine. A few hundred miles stood between him and his destination.
He paced the room like a caged tiger for a while, doing his best to solve the puzzle of his existence, but it wasn’t going well.
He stood in front of the mirror, studying himself. The body was muscular, with broad shoulders, a solid chest and the sort of build that only came from years of hard workouts. Brown hair, tan skin, blue eyes. The face was a puzzle. He didn’t know why, but he somehow knew that his face was… older than it should have been. There was a small scar over his left eyebrow, like he’d run into something once upon a time. There were no other distinguishing marks.
How could he remember anything if he couldn’t remember his own face?
His stomach growled, and Hunter stood up, stretched and gave thought to eating something.
“Whatever. I need to get out of here. I don’t even know if the room is paid for.”
He reached for the jeans draped over the back of the cheap chair that went with the cheap desk in the cheap room and The car horn startled him out of his thoughts, and Hunter stepped back from the noise just in time to avoid getting creamed by the milk truck rumbling down the street. The air was hotter than he expected, and his skin was stippled with a thin sheen of sweat.
Not two feet away from him, the road was baking in the bright sunlight and a bum was sprawled on the ground, either sleeping off a bender or knocked unconscious.
The bum turned over and groaned. Hunter looked toward the man and took in the bruises and bloodied nose, the busted lips and the eyes swollen almost completely shut. His clothes were clean but wrinkled. Not a bum after all. Somebody’d just beat the crap out of him.
Hunter turned to get a closer look, but then It was dark and he was lying in a new bed.
He heard a noise and looked to his left. The shape next to him muttered and snored lightly. There was a girl in his bed with long red hair and a tattoo of a unicorn across her shoulder. She looked a few years older and she had one arm stretched toward him. Neither of them was wearing clothes. Hunter sat up in the bed and looked around, his heart hammering hard.
There was a girl in his bed. A naked girl. What the hell had he been Daylight again and a different hotel.
For a moment he tried to suppress the panic blooming in his chest and then he changed his mind. He shoved the fear aside and went straight for the anger that made his body twitch.
“Enough!” He came out of bed furious, hating this. “What the hell is this?” He couldn’t get a decent breath no matter how hard he tried. He didn’t know if hours had passed or days or even months, and the confusion hit him like a hurricane. His chest felt like someone was crushing him in arms as thick as a gorilla’s.
None of it made sense! He swung at the air, just in case there might be someone behind him, but struck nothing.
“What’s happening to me?” His voice cracked and his eyes stung with the need to cry.
And then he noticed the note on the window, taped in place. It said: PLAY ME, and an arrow was drawn pointing toward the pressboard desk below the sign.
Below the sign was a cheap tape recorder.
His head ached and his eyes burned a bit, but he nodded and took a deep breath. If there was a song on the thing, he’d throw it out the window. If it was someone talking, maybe he’d finally learn something.
Hunter pulled out the desk chair and sat down. A moment after that he hit the play button.
The voice that came out was tinny and distorted, and not one he recognized.
“Bet you want answers, don’t you? Bet you’re tired of blacking out again and again, aren’t you?” The voice sounded almost amused, but there was an undercurrent of anger, of hatred, that he couldn’t ignore.
“Tough. Your life is officially shit. I own you. Get used to it.”
“What?” The voice was recorded, but if he could have, he’d have strangled it into silence.
“You’re having troubles, loser. You’re in deeper than you know and the only way you’re going to get any answers is to listen to me. The only reason you’re alive is because I need you. If I didn’t, you’d be dead and buried where no one would ever find you.”
There were a few seconds of silence and then the voice started again. “You don’t know where your family is. You don’t know where you are. You might not even remember anything about yourself, and that’s okay. It’s all stuff we can fix if you work with me. But if you piss me off, if you cross me, I can ruin you.”
Hunter reached for the recorder, ready to shut it off.
“This is a first-time run. You want to answer me, you turn the tape over and you go ahead and say what’s on your mind. We’ll have a nice little talk. In the meantime, don’t get too stupid.”
That was all the tape said. He listened for several minutes to the static and silence of the blank tape before he turned it off.
Then he flipped the tape over and started talking.
Chapter Three
Subject Seven
“Hunter Harrison’s” voice grated on his nerves. The Other was a whiny little piss pot, and that much hadn’t changed at all. He thought he’d been freed of him forever. But now? Now the Other was back.
But things were different. The Other seemed… confused. He was lacking. He was missing most of his
