The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  The unnoticeable girl slid through the heavy glass doors. They let a brief howling wind into the lobby, then clipped it off short so I could once again hear muffled drums, twangy guitars, and that girl’s teeth scraping on dick.

  “Jesus Christ, woman, it’s not corn on the cob,” I said, as I stepped over the pair and made for the door.

  “A-fucking-men,” the guy agreed in a pained voice.

  He raised his bottle to me as I heaved open the double doors and stepped out into the wet, cold piss of a British night in winter. I blinked the rain away from my eyes, only to find it immediately replaced by more rain. I held my hand up to block the downpour—had to make a little gutter with my fingers to redirect the torrent—and looked around the street. If this had been New York, I’d have seen little pockets of punks huddling on every corner. No matter how great the show was, or how cold the night was, there would be just as many kids hanging around outside as there were watching the band. If you really pressed most punks, they’d admit that drugs and the privacy to do them are every bit as important as the music. Not here, though. There were people on the street—it was New Year’s Eve, after all, people had places to be and pints to pound—but I didn’t see any smoky clusters orbiting the venue like junkie moons. The rain changed the story. Whatever the kids here needed to do, they did it inside, and if you walked in on it, well, you were welcome to either join in or fuck off. Nobody wanted to be out in this mess. A big red bus kicked half of a puddle in my face, and I blew oily water out of my sinuses. When my vision came back, I saw the chubby girl’s face backlit by the wan yellow light of the bus’s interior, as it pulled past me and disappeared around the corner. I did my best to peer into the other windows.

  Pay attention pay attention pay attention—

  Nothing. Too far away, too much rain, going too fast. I couldn’t tell if the Unnoticeable had followed her onto the bus or not.

  Shit.

  She was probably fine.

  Shit.

  She’d take the bus home, trudge into her house or flat or whatever all wet and track mud everywhere and her mother would scream—

  Shit.

  —and she’d flip her mom the bird and storm upstairs to play Never Mind the Bollocks too loud—

  Shit.

  —and I could go back inside with a clear conscience and fuck the holy hell out of the green-haired girl in a bathroom stall like God intended because—

  Shit.

  —she was probably completely okay. Right?

  Shit shit shit. Even I don’t believe me.

  I looked for a cab. Nothing. I looked for another bus. Nothing. I looked for anything—a bicycle, a helicopter, an uppity horse with digestive problems—literally any vehicle that was not a cute little red-and-white scooter covered in obnoxious punk rock bumper stickers. But there it was, propped up against one of those old-timey-looking British lampposts. Taunting me.

  No keys in it, but no chain around it either.

  Shit.

  I flipped my switchblade open and jammed it into the ignition. I grabbed the opposite handlebar and yanked, while kicking the front tire. The steering lock broke. I mounted the torn pink seat and twisted the switchblade hard. It snapped clean at the hilt, nicking my thumb. Oh well, I tried—

  Shit.

  The little headlight flickered. The ignition was on. I held my breath and kicked the starter once. I gritted my teeth and prayed it wouldn’t turn over. It sputtered politely to life with a sound like somebody clearing their throat in an elevator.

  I sighed.

  God hates me. Small wonder, with all the shit I’ve said to the guy over the years.

  I pushed off of the curb and twisted the throttle, for the first time noticing the multicolored ribbons jutting out of either handlebar that danced merrily in the wind as I picked up speed. Well, what the scooter hilariously thought passed for speed, anyway. Between my weight, roads that were more water than asphalt, and an engine roughly the same size and ferocity as a fairy fart, it was slow going. I managed to keep the double-decker bus in sight, but just barely. I would twist the grip and wait for the subtle signs of acceleration (basically just those dorky little streamers twisting about a bit harder), but by the time I got up to speed there was a corner, or a pedestrian, or a roundabout full of psychotic cabdrivers weaving in and out of lanes like Ali dodging punches—and I was back on the brakes again. Luckily, the bus was making regular stops. Unluckily, since I was tailing it, I had to ride right past the disembarking passengers. I kept thinking one of those oblivious, probably drunk, and certainly deranged London cabbies was going to run me over before I’d catch the damn thing.…

  But no such luck. I just kept right on puttering by, wholly intact, while people pointed and laughed.

  Let’s make something clear: I don’t give a lackluster fuck what people think about me driving a girly scooter. I’d put on a dress and pretty bows just to spite the people who’d laugh at an ugly mug like me dolled up in a dress and pretty bows. But these goddamned bumper stickers were killing me.

  PUNK AS FUCK, one read.

  PUNK OR BUST, said another.

  PUNK ROCK FOREVER, one insisted; POP MUSIC NEVER.

  I knew the girl who owned this scooter. Or girls like her. They went to maybe one show a month, but drew Xs on the backs of their hands with markers to make it look like they went every night. They collected empty beer cans after parties and put them in their bedrooms for their parents to find. They practiced flipping people off in the mirror. For them, punk rock was an easy way to fake a temporary personality. Which is fine.

  Normally.

  Normally you listen to how much they hate their dad, maybe slip them a Schlitz or two, and they might show you their tits later. That’s the way the drunken punk rock economy works.

  But there’s nothing saying I have to ride their poser scooters around in public and like it.

  Luckily, salvation was at hand: The bus stopped at the next corner, letting an old man with a cane and a buzz I could smell from a block away wobble off it. I hit the brakes, but the scooter took that to be a friendly suggestion and chose to ignore it.

  Fuck it. Not like I was setting any land speed records anyway.

  I put both hands on the seat and reverse-leapfrogged right off the moving bike.

  I did not plan this well.

  Neither one of my worn-smooth ancient Chucks found purchase on the slick asphalt. I started to slide, fell over, slid some more, then managed to get my feet, only to find I was still sliding, and finally had the good fortune to slam headfirst into a mailbox. I stood, feeling about as wobbly as the old guy a few feet away looked, and stumbled up beside him. Shoulder to shoulder, we watched my riderless scooter disappear into the night.

  “Godspeed,” I said, and gave it a mocking salute.

  After a short, confused moment, the old guy raised a hesitant hand and saluted with me.

  I was still laughing as the bus pulled away.

  I plunked fistfuls of those silly British coins into the slot until the driver finally nodded at me to stop, then headed down the aisle. I only made it a few steps before he buried a foot in the gas pedal, sending me stumbling sidelong into one passenger, then rebounding into another. I pinballed my way down the bus until I found my prey: Chubby English Girl.

  She was staring out the window in an aggressively apathetic way. I could hear her thoughts, and they were all screaming: “Please don’t sit next to me, please don’t sit next to me, there are like twenty open seats why are you sitting next to me oh god.”

  I gave her my widest, most obnoxious smile, then flopped wetly onto the seat beside her.

  “Hi!” I waved. “I’m Carey. I’m drunk and American. Let’s have a long and detailed conversation!”

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out over a span of about two minutes.

  “Not in a place tonight, yeah?” she finally said, when it became apparent that her prolonged groan wouldn’t actually make me magically wit
her and die.

  “What kind of place is that?” I said, working to keep my tone casual. Friendly.

  The driver. A passenger.

  “A friendly place,” she answered. “Mate, I’m knackered. I’ve got a headache. I’m not the least bit interested.”

  She nervously tucked her hair behind her ears, and reached down to paw through her purse. Her fingers found something in there and wrapped around it. Keys, if she was a smart girl. Something bigger and sharper if she was a fucking genius.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to be in a friendly place. I’m in a place friendly enough for the both of us. All you have to do is keep talking to me all casual-like until I figure out a game plan.”

  Her eyes went dark when I said it. I don’t know what she thought I meant, but hell, if an asshole that looked like me sat across from me and said something like that, I’d be worried, too. She shifted the purse over a bit, getting ready to whip out whatever was in there.

  “See,” I continued—super big smile, hushed, friendly tone, all buds here—“you’re worried about me, and that’s fine. I’m downright worrisome. That’s what my mom always said. But you and me share a bigger problem right now.”

  Her eyebrows knit together. She was actually kind of pretty when she was preoccupied like this, trying to decide between confusion and rage.

  “Which is?” she asked.

  “When I got onto this bus, I paid the driver and bumped into a passenger. That’s exactly how I thought of them: The driver, a passenger. Now, I’m a few beers deep into what I call ‘a working drunk,’ and I’m not the sharpest knife in the rack on my best days, but I’ve learned to be pretty good with faces. I’m sitting here, trying to figure out—why did I think of them like that? I didn’t see a fat lady, or a black guy, just ‘a driver,’ and ‘a passenger.’ I’m looking for them right now, hard as I can, and I can’t seem to find them.”

  “I think you’re a bit past ‘working drunk,’ mate.”

  “Just do me a favor. Real quick. Do this one thing for me and I’ll get up, stumble up front and fall out at the next stop.”

  “What’s this favor, then?” she said, clearly expecting me to suggest some lewd sexual act.

  “Take a good look around at our fellow passengers, and tell me anything about any one of them. Something specific—what color their hair is, their race, if they got stuff stuck in their teeth—anything at all.”

  She looked around dutifully. Her hair slipped from behind her ears and fell about her rapidly widening eyes.

  “No? Nothing?” I said, “Well, let’s try something easier—tell me how many of them there are.…”

  She was silent.

  “I can’t count them, either, but it looks like a hell of a lot, to me.”

  The cheesy smile was starting to hurt my face, and I guess I don’t have a lot of practice at faking small talk, because we were starting to gather some unwanted attention. I couldn’t pick out details on their faces, but I could tell they were all pointing at us now.

  “I know this is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but I think we’re the only people on this bus.”

  “Bollocks,” she said.

  “No, it’s true—” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Bollocks! I just had to go and get on a bloody bus full of Faceless, didn’t I?”

  “Wha—You know about them?”

  She shoved me out of my chair and stood up, pulling her hands out of her purse. I saw what she’d been holding onto in there: two sets of viciously spiked brass knuckles, one wrapped around each fist.

  She was a fucking genius!

  FIVE

  2013. Tucson, Arizona. Kaitlyn.

  Sometime around 4:00 A.M., I slipped into a sort of hypnotic state. The channel I’d left the TV on started playing back-to-back infomercials around two in the morning, and the easy cadence of the host’s pitch-voice mesmerized me. I watched the light around me change from the diffused harsh white of a parking lot streetlamp, to the hazy crimson of sunrise, to the muffled clarity of day. Whatever the source, the light always felt suppressed. Probably because it had to filter through two sets of thick, scratchy motel curtains, and had an even harder time squirming past my itchy, burning eyes and into my muddled brain.

  I was pretty rough on my body back home, doing grunt-level stunt work on whatever B-movie was willing to hire me. I had shattered elbows, broken teeth, twisted fingers, and sprained knees. But I always came home to my bed, which had a truly excessive California King memory foam mattress. It filled every inch of my room, which was my sleeping space, and only my sleeping space. I adored my sleep. I could come home limping, picking sugar-glass out of my hair, covered in fake, caked-on blood, and it just didn’t matter. Because I knew I could always swing open my bedroom door and fall facefirst into a deep syrupy slumber, my body utterly absorbed by that gorgeous hedonistic slab of heaven. Down comforters. Big fluffy pillows. It was the one thing I had.

  Now I slept in musty hotel beds with springs poking through the fabric, dried blood—not mine—on the jagged ends. Probably some sort of exotic mite infestation in the fabric. A whole alphabet of hepatitis just waiting for me to snuggle on up.

  Wait, no, I’m being unfair: I didn’t sleep in them at all.

  Another night gone. How long can a human being function without sleep?

  I thought I heard somewhere that a person can only take a week of sleeplessness before insanity sets in. That’s probably a rumor or something, right? Yeah, it’s like “mixing Pop Rocks and Coke will kill you.” Just stuff kids say to each other because school is boring and lies are fun.

  It has to be.

  I mean, look at me. I wasn’t crazy. And I hadn’t slept for a second since that night three weeks ago, when I dive-tackled the angel—when I leapt headfirst into a ball of sentient light that was burning my best friend’s brain from the inside out. I don’t remember much of what happened to me in there, just a few vague notions. A feeling of misplaced nostalgia, like re-watching a show you loved as a kid only to realize, as an adult, that it’s total garbage. A void. Whiteness. The number six?

  And then I woke up in my apartment, and heard Carey and Jackie laughing in the living room. I thought we beat them. We won. I forgot about Marco for one beautiful, simple afternoon.

  Then he started sending the Unnoticeables after us. A guy from the gas company knocked on my door, all bureaucratic smiles and shrugged apologies. I let him into my apartment—he had the paperwork. I didn’t read it, but it was paperwork. You don’t have that stuff unless you mean business. He needed to do an inspection. There was a leak. He made it all the way to my bedroom before Carey flushed the toilet, came out of my bathroom, spotted the guy, and stomped his head into pieces all over my hallway.

  We ran, after that.

  We’d been running ever since. We holed up at a friend of Jackie’s house at first, until her friend went to the kitchen to make dinner and Carey asked Jackie what her good friend looked like. She couldn’t remember.

  We burned the place down to cover our tracks. It was shitty motels and sleeping in the car ever since.

  Haha. Sleeping.

  It was me, staring at the clock on the dashboard, watching the glowing green digits tick over one by one while Carey snored in the passenger seat and Jackie kicked my chair, trying to get comfortable in the back.

  It was nighttime TV. Watching until the channels ran out of programming and just started playing terrible orchestral music and pictures of waving flags. It was flipping to deep cable, and rewatching cheap action flicks.

  I watched every Van Damme movie ever made. They were all on TBS. He did the splits in every single one. Even if it wasn’t appropriate, even if he was just standing in the kitchen in his underwear, a bad guy would run in with a Taser and they would find a way to make Van Damme do the splits.

  I saw it so many times, I could write a thesis on it: The lateral extension of Belgian appendages in male power fantasies and its greate
r impact on archetypal roles in society.

  That was where we were now. But that didn’t answer the question: Where did it go wrong? It started with Marco, but did it end there? Thinking back, I’m pretty sure it was Jackie who first asked him to take me home. I don’t think it was his idea. What if she had never asked? Would we still be here? What if I had said no? What if … God, I shouldn’t even think it—what if I hadn’t gone looking for Jackie? What if I’d taken the hint at the police station and let it drop? What if I hadn’t chased Marco when he showed up at my apartment that night? What if … what if I’d seen Jackie being hollowed out, and I didn’t help her? What if I had just run?

  Nobody could have blamed me. Most people, I think, would have bolted. It’s too much to handle: caustic monsters; immortal, soulless things that only look like people; girls being mashed into jelly by giant gears; angels that rearrange people’s souls, getting rid of the pesky inefficiencies like humanity and morality and personality, and burning everything human away, like fuel. That’s enough. That’s enough to break somebody’s mind and send them running for the hills, no matter who might die because of it.

  I should have run. But I didn’t. I turned, and I jumped headfirst into the burning ball of light.

  Why the hell did I do that?

  But here’s the really disturbing question, the one I really don’t want to ask, the one that keeps me up at night, desperately trying not to answer it:

  How did they know I was going to do that?

  The Empty Ones, the other things like Marco standing around in the church that night—they were all waiting for me to do it. They celebrated when it happened. That’s what Jackie and Carey said. They flipped out. They clapped with their bloody hands and cheered with their broken mouths. They wanted me to do it. No, they didn’t just want it: They knew it would happen.

  But it was such a stupid thing for me to do. How could they possibly count on it?

  I knew the answer. I could feel it creeping up on me like some big, unseen predator. I couldn’t fend it off forever. I sat there running down recent history, night after night, like I could have found the answer in those events. But that wasn’t right, because it didn’t start with Marco. It started a long time ago. It started the night of the fire. The night my sister died, and I saw—