Muscle Memory Read online

  Muscle Memory

  STYLO FANTÔME

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION..................................................................................................................................4

  1........................................................................................................................................................6

  Before...........................................................................................................................................10

  2.....................................................................................................................................................12

  Before...........................................................................................................................................16

  3.....................................................................................................................................................18

  Before...........................................................................................................................................22

  4.....................................................................................................................................................28

  Before...........................................................................................................................................31

  5.....................................................................................................................................................33

  Before...........................................................................................................................................36

  6.....................................................................................................................................................41

  Before...........................................................................................................................................51

  7.....................................................................................................................................................57

  Before...........................................................................................................................................62

  8.....................................................................................................................................................65

  Before...........................................................................................................................................68

  9.....................................................................................................................................................71

  10...................................................................................................................................................74

  11...................................................................................................................................................79

  12...................................................................................................................................................84

  13...................................................................................................................................................87

  14...................................................................................................................................................92

  15...................................................................................................................................................95

  16................................................................................................................................................106

  17................................................................................................................................................113

  18................................................................................................................................................116

  19................................................................................................................................................119

  20................................................................................................................................................123

  21................................................................................................................................................125

  22................................................................................................................................................130

  23................................................................................................................................................134

  24................................................................................................................................................138

  Epilogue.....................................................................................................................................142

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..........................................................................................................151

  SOUNDTRACK...........................................................................................................................152

  MORE FROM THE AUTHOR....................................................................................................153

  The Kane Series Excerpt.......................................................................................................154

  The Bad Ones Excerpt...........................................................................................................158

  Published by BattleAxe Productions

  Copyright © 2017

  Stylo Fantôme

  Critique Partner:

  Ratula Roy

  Editing Aides:

  Barbara Shane Hoover

  Cover Design:

  Najla Qamber Designs

  http://najlaqamberdesigns.com

  Copyright © 2017

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  It is the copyrighted property of the author,

  and may not be reproduced, copied, re-sold, or re-distributed.

  If you're reading this ebook and did not purchase it,

  or it was not purchased for your use only,

  then this copy must be destroyed.

  Please purchase a copy for yourself from a licensed seller.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DEDICATION

  To strange thoughts while driving on lonely stretches of highway, and to sometimes even remembering them.

  MUSCLE MEMORY

  1

  He couldn't remember.

  He was left handed and he could speak pretty tolerable Spanish. He knew how to shave properly and he could prattle off most of the New York Yankees' batting averages. He knew his favorite food in the whole world was authentic Mexican and he was positive he'd been to Prague at some point.

  I don't remember.

  He could remember his first day in the hospital. It had been very sunny out, and the blinds had been up. He'd blinked his eyes rapidly in the glaring light, then looked around the empty room. It was a shared room, but the curtains were pulled back, exposing a vacant bed next to him. A TV was on up in the corner, and next to him lay a remote attached to the bed. He found the button for the nurses station and pressed it. A moment later, a young woman in well worn scrubs came into the room.

  “Hi,” he said in a
shaky voice. Her face was full of shock, but he took a deep breath and carried on. “I'm sorry, but I was hoping you could tell me what I'm doing here, and ...”

  “I'll get the doctor, right away,” she said, backing out of the room. She was already running down the hall when he finally finished his sentence.

  “... who I am?”

  *

  The first week was rough. And not like first day of school, or bad day at work, rough. More like “I want to scream until my soul starts bleeding” rough.

  He couldn't remember his name. He couldn't remember how he'd wound up in the hospital, or even where he'd been before – he couldn't remember where he'd grown up, his parents, his home, his friends, nothing. It was an impenetrable fog.

  So of course it was a mystery to him how he'd fractured his skull and broken his humerus.

  “I what!?” he exclaimed. A large nurse was sitting in the chair next to his bed, cutting coupons out of a newspaper. She was on her break, but she'd taken a shine to him for some reason, and she often came in to keep him company.

  Because she knows how scared I am when I'm alone.

  “Mmm hmmm,” she replied, twisting the scissors around in her hand. “You could've died. You were waiting for the L at Bedford Avenue when you fell off the platform, went down almost four feet straight onto your head. Cracked your skull open on the tracks and broke your arm. You're lucky a train wasn't coming, either. Caused quite a problem, shut down the lines for a couple hours.”

  “I just ... fell?” he asked, feeling around at the back of his skull. Stretching from just above his neck and arching up towards his right ear was a wicked feeling scar. She shrugged.

  “You were probably high. You're almost lucky in a way, I bet you didn't feel a thing.”

  Another thing he'd forgotten – he was a drug addict. Or at least, that's what they told him. He couldn't remember. He did have a mark on the inside of one arm. It had started out small, he'd been told, and under normal circumstances would've healed right up and he'd never have known it was even there. While he'd been unconscious, an infection had caused it to open and become sore, ugly, and red. It was now a permanent scar, and apparently it was from a needle.

  “I don't get it. How can I not remember doing drugs? Shouldn't I be jonesing or something?” he asked, scratching at the scar.

  “You were unconscious for over two weeks, honey. You detoxed while you were out, which trust me, makes you one of the lucky ones.”

  “Do you know what drugs I did?”

  “That's something you should talk to your doctors about.”

  But he didn't like talking to his doctors. It was already weird enough not knowing his own name, but being treated like a case file, a number, just made it worse. Most of them just strolled into his room and looked at a chart and prattled things off to him he didn't really understand.

  “Don't worry,” the kindly nurse said as she climbed to her feet. “It'll all come back to you, Jon.”

  Jon. It wasn't his name. Well, he supposed it could be, Jon was a pretty popular name in the United States. He preferred it without the H, though, so he spelled it that way when he needed to sign off on anything. In all honesty, Jon wouldn't have been his first choice, if he'd had any say in it. But he hadn't – he'd had no identification on him when they'd brought him to the hospital, not even a wallet. So during the two weeks he'd been unconscious, everyone had referred to him as John because it was the name on all his medical charts.

  John Doe, case number 438643.

  He smiled goodbye as the nurse walked out of the room. Then he fidgeted around in bed. Turned on the television. Scratched the area around the scar on his head, then hissed when he bumped a staple. He had to use his right hand to itch – his left arm was in a collar and cuff, stabilizing the break. The doctors told him he only had to wear it for a couple more weeks, but it was driving him nuts.

  A couple more weeks, where will I be then? Where do you send someone like me?

  He asked that question to one of his doctors later in the day when, he was wheeled up several floors for a check up.

  “I mean, I don't know if I even have an apartment. And even if I do, I don't know where it would be,” he said while the neurologist looked at x-rays. “The cops took my fingerprints, but nothing turned up. No DNA sample matches, either. I guess that means I wasn't a criminal, which is good. But I almost wish I was, because not knowing anything sucks. Where am I supposed to go when you guys kick me out?”

  “We don't 'kick people out', Mr. Doe,” the doctor replied, turning around to face him. She was a very small woman, and surprisingly young. “Your case worker, the one from social services, will help with your transition. You can call them at any time and ask these kinds of questions.”

  His social worker couldn't answer all his questions, though. He thought back to the nurse he'd spoken with earlier in the day.

  “Hey, I've been meaning to ask. What kind of drugs was I on?” he blurted on. Dr. Anand's eyebrows went up.

  “Well, you were on morphine for the pain, but they stopped that, I'm pretty sure. You're on co-codamol now, a range of antibiotics, also some -”

  “Not what I'm on now, I know those ones. I was told I was a drug addict before I came here, but I can't remember. My lab work should say what I was taking, right?” he asked. She glanced around her, then spotted his file and picked it up. After flipping through a few pages, she glanced at him.

  “When you were admitted to the emergency room, you were well over the legal limit for alcohol. You also had THC in your system, oxycodone, cocaine, ecstasy, and speed,” she prattled off in a fast voice. Jon's jaw dropped.

  “All of those? How am I alive?”

  “The human body can surprisingly handle a lot. It's not a good mixture, though – alcohol is a depressant, and that quantity of it mixing with so many stimulants, well ... it 's almost a good thing you fell, it probably saved your life.”

  “That's ... good?”

  No, it wasn't. It was fucking depressing. He was a drug addict who'd fallen onto the train tracks. He was also clearly a loser, because no one seemed to be looking for him. No one had shown up at the hospital asking about him. A local news crew had even interviewed him, but nada.

  Maybe I threw myself onto those tracks, hoping for a train to come along.

  Dr. Anand seemed to read his mind and she closed his file with a snap, then smiled at him.

  “Maybe you had been to a wild party,” she offered, moving around so she was behind his wheelchair. He could walk perfectly fine, but because of his head injury, the hospital staff was insisting on using the chair. Normally, an orderly or a nurse wheeled him to and from places, so he was surprised when the doctor grabbed the handles and started pushing him.

  “I don't think so. One of the cops showed me a picture of myself, from when I was first brought in.”

  Based on the photo, Jon had been a wild party all by himself. The man in the picture was foreign to him. He'd had thick, coarse brown hair, which had all been twisted into long, neat dreadlocks. Very bohemian, he supposed. He'd been unshaven and he'd looked dirty. His clothes had certainly been filthy. They were still hanging up in the closet in his hospital room, he avoided touching them. Based on the way he looked in the picture and the state of those clothes, he almost thought maybe he'd been homeless.

  The person he saw in the mirror – Jon – looked completely different. They'd shaved his head, as well as his face, before he'd gone into surgery to deal with the nasty skull fracture, and in the three weeks that had passed since then, he'd grown a thick stubble all across his scalp. He'd also been thoroughly cleaned while unconscious, and with the aid of a chair and a plastic bag for his arm, he showered regularly, and he continued shaving his face. He had gray-green eyes which stood out starkly against his olive toned skin and dark hair. All of it combined gave him a very striking look, he supposed.

  Jesus, I don't even know what nationality I am. Puerto Rican? Maybe some African American? Italian
? Greek?

  “Then think of this as a fresh start, Jon,” Dr. Anand urged as they rode down a couple levels on an elevator. “The man they brought into me three weeks ago had looked like a train wreck. But the man sitting in front of me right now, he seems pretty smart. Do something with this, make sure not to go down the same path.”

  He thought about her words long after she'd deposited him in his room. Of course she was right. He was lucky in a way, he knew. He'd gotten to detox without being conscious for any of the withdrawal symptoms, and if he had been homeless, he now got to sleep in a warm bed every night.

  He also knew that after his little spot on the news, someone had set up a crowd-funding page for him. Complete strangers were donating money to the John Doe Fund and he already had almost ten thousand dollars to his made-up-name. The news spot was a double bonus, actually. The TV station offered to pay most of his medical bills. He'd refused to do any TV spots at first, the idea of being on camera had made him nervous. But when one network finally said they would pay his bills in exchange for an exclusive, he didn't see how he could possibly turn them down. Sixty minutes of sweating through an interview was worth it to have the pressure of bills taken off his back.

  Life was still scary, though. Not knowing who you are or where you came from or what you were going to do with yourself, it was awful. It woke him up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. He would find himself reaching out for someone – but who? Someone who'd apparently lain on his left side, but he couldn't remember them. A woman? A man? Jon Doe found quite a few of the female nurses rather attractive, but who knew about Dude X, the hobo he used to be in a past life.

  But Dr. Anand was right. He would take the donated money and he would do something good with it. Get himself an apartment. Get a real job. Get a life.

  It will be scary, but it's got to be better than whatever I was doing before.

  Before

  “Hey!”

  Whoever was yelling, they repeated themselves a couple times before he realized they were yelling at him. He turned around and finished lighting his cigarette, then squinted through the smoke.