The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  Meryll was not kidding.

  The Unnoticeables were different here. Back home they accepted a good beating with grace and tended to scatter. Here, they went and got reinforcements.

  I flung myself down onto the tracks headfirst. I hit my back on one of the rails, and the irrational fear grabbed me instantly.

  You’re paralyzed. Just gotta wait here for a train here to pop you like a goddamned sausage.

  But no. Gun beats knife. Rock beats scissors. Adrenaline beats pain. I got up. I stumbled a little when I first put weight on my bad hip, but it held, and I started running. Straight into the darkness of the westbound tunnel—which I now saw, too late, was moving.

  “Tar men!” I yelled.

  Randall pulled up short just this side of where the lights went out. But Meryll was already in there. I hobbled up beside Randall, and noticed he wasn’t staring at the wriggling dark. He was staring back over my shoulder.

  The Unnoticeables had made it through the crowd, and were just standing there in a line, toes at the edge of the train platform. Dozens of them, still and silent. Shoulder to shoulder. A shifting mass of blank faces. I couldn’t even tell you if they were watching us.

  They were waiting. They knew it. There was nowhere left for us to go.

  “A trap, then?” Randall spat. “Pretentious bullshit. What is this Sherlock Holmes crap? Who sets fucking traps?”

  “I don’t think it is,” I said.

  I stared at the shadows that Meryll had vanished into. She hadn’t shouted, hadn’t sworn or screamed. I couldn’t tell if that was a good sign, or a very bad one.

  “What do you mean?” Randall said. “If this isn’t a trap, then, what, there’s just so many of these things down here that you can wander into any random train station and trip over a small army of the bastards?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Oh. Shit. I liked it better when it was a trap.”

  “Me too.”

  “You uh … you think Marie’s dead?”

  “Meryll,” I corrected him. Again. “And, yeah, probably.”

  I was locked onto one of the Unnoticeables’ shoes. Hot pink with blue laces, like a little girl’s. It was giving me a migraine just to keep them in focus. I inched my gaze up, keeping all my focus on just this one small part of the crowd. I made it to the knees, knobby and thin. The hem of a black pencil skirt. White blouse with tiny intertwining flowers. My eyes crawled all the way up to her face, and got just an impression—plain, mousy, maybe part-Indian or something—before my peripheral vision got caught on a little piece of the faceless crowd around her, and the whole thing washed out like the tide coming in on a sand castle.

  “I think we have to go after her anyway,” I said.

  I turned to Randall. And he was gone.

  “No shit,” he yelled from somewhere in the dark. “What are you waiting for, a red carpet?”

  God dammit, Randall. Making me look like a pussy in front of the girl.

  It would be pretty generous to call what I did next “running.” I mostly just fell in a forward direction and did my level best not to eat shit on the train tracks. The tunnel was black. Black like velvet. Textures in there somewhere. Things moving. Then, light. Faint, intermittent flashes. Little sparks, drifting on cold, damp air. Then one stopped in its arc, pulsed, and went supernova. There was a sound like a jet engine exploding in a day care, and I went from night-blind to staring at the sun.

  The tar men were catching fire.

  Another spark. Then nothing. Another and another, nothing and nothing. Then, finally, that old tea kettle scream, followed by a flash and a wave of warm air pressure. In the spastic light, I saw Meryll crouching beside the rails. Those nasty brass knuckles of hers on each hand. She held one fist blindly in front of her, trying to ward off something she couldn’t see. The other was scraping along one of the rails, a hail of tiny sparks trailing after it. Most of them died out instantly—the dark ate them. Some survived for a crazy second or two, spiraling madly into the black before fading away. But if a spark got lucky, it perched itself on a solid, glistening patch of shadow, and it got to go out like a rock star: burning, screeching, putting its foot through the bass drum, shoving the guitar through the amps, hurling the mic stand out into the crowd, and just generally putting on a hell of a good show.

  The burning tar man gave off a flickering light, turning reality into stop-motion. I could see it coming. Meryll could take down a few more of them, but there were hundreds of the damn things down here. It was standing room only for tar men. Their brass gears turned slowly in their faces, like they were thinking.

  Spark. Steam whistle. Strobe.

  A scene: Meryll with her teeth bared.

  Black.

  A scene: a glistening arm reaching for a young girl’s neck.

  Black.

  A scene: dark, greasy fingers embedded in soft pink flesh.

  Black.

  A scene: melted skin running down a pale neck, pooling in the space between collarbones.

  Black.

  “Meryll!” I tried to hobble toward where I’d last seen her.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there, but I could at least ruin somebody’s shirt with my liquidized flesh. I heard a thump, some swearing, another thump, and then a million-watt spotlight exploded to my left.

  “Train!” I screamed, and threw myself to the ground.

  “Get up, jackass!” Randall hollered. “Grab the girl, and let’s go!”

  No train. The million-watt spotlight was a waxy yellow bulb suspended from the ceiling of the maintenance stairwell, which Randall had just kicked open the door to. In the weak and wobbling light, I could see Meryll crouching there, a tar man standing over her, its fingers sinking into her throat. I got a good hobbling start, slid to my knees beside her in the gravel, and reached into my hip pocket.

  I would only have a second.

  I pulled out my battle-scarred bumblebee Zippo, said a silent prayer to the lighter gods—grant me fluid, though I have sinned and not bought any for weeks—and flicked it open. I hit the wheel, and a teardrop of flame hovered there.

  I made a mental note to come back down here after all this was over and see if I could find her again. You don’t leave a good soldier behind.

  I wrapped one arm around Meryll’s waist and whipped the Zippo up toward the tar man’s face. I dug my heels in. I heard the rumbling inhalation, felt the tar man’s hand slacken, and pushed us away. We rolled to the side just as the fucker went up like a tenement building.

  Don’t look at her. It’s not that bad. Just get her moving. Don’t look.

  I was dragging Meryll toward the stairwell. The tar man still burned, and by his light I could see the others, turning in slow motion, regarding us with those glinting gears.

  I’m an idiot. I looked.

  The burns looked more like they’d come from acid than flame. Raw, cauterized networks of pulp cut into her skin in the shape of a massive handprint. They were deep. The thumb crossed the artery in her neck on one side, sealing it shut. The pointer crossed the other.

  Don’t think about what that means. Just move.

  We were out of the gravel, but moving slow. The burning tar man had gone out. I couldn’t see the others, but I knew they were there. We made it to the raised concrete platform. Just a few feet from the door now. Every inch of black in that dark tunnel reaching for us. I crossed the threshold backwards, dragging Meryll in front of me.

  Okay, at least your ass is safe.

  I had her almost entirely in the stairwell. Just her ankles left out there—all right, those are in; now just get enough room for Randall to swing the door shut. Please don’t let there be a big black hand reaching in here at the last second like some goddamned B-movie horror—

  And we’re through.

  Randall slammed the door and slid to the floor beside me. We both let out deep breaths we didn’t know we’d been holding.

  …

  “Shit
,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Do tar men know how to work doors?”

  SEVEN

  2013. Highway 57, Mexico. Kaitlyn.

  I flexed my sixth finger. I curled it into my palm as tightly as I could. I contorted it. I wiggled it. I could not get it to hurt. It’s not like I missed the pain, but it had always been there for me. A constant. Something that would never leave me.

  My apartment was gone.

  I didn’t own it or anything. By now the landlords would have rented it out again. Somebody else would be in my bedroom, sleeping where I slept and never thinking about the life I’d lived there. They would put the couch in a stupid place, and everything would face the TV, and they’d put plants on the sidewalk out front, and it would not be my home anymore.

  All my stuff was gone.

  It’s not like we had time to pack a U-Haul. We left most of my things behind when we ran. My bed. My glorious, massive bed—so disproportionately huge that it literally filled every inch of the bedroom. You opened the door and had no choice but to crawl right into it. It was made entirely of foam, so it bent, but only under extreme duress. Jackie helped me move it in there. It took us two hours of wrestling. Toward the end, that got literal: Jackie slipped the last corner past the doorjamb with a flying elbow. We collapsed on the floor, laughing and covered in sweat.

  I bet they threw it away. Those new tenants. Those invaders.

  They probably chopped it up into little pieces to get it out, shoved it alongside the Dumpster with the broken box fans and old TVs.

  My job was gone.

  Fuck that job, anyway. It was just waiting tables, mostly for wannabe or has-been Hollywood types who tipped really well, but always made sure everybody at the table knew it. I wouldn’t miss the job itself, but Carl, my boss—he was a great guy. He really wanted to be something like a vulgar father figure to me. To all of the waitresses, actually. Some guys are into that. Some girls, too. I was not. My dad was amazing. He died when I was a teenager, but he was there for me my whole life. I didn’t need or want another dad, but Carl needed as many daughters as he could get. We didn’t know if he actually had kids, or what. The other waitresses and I, we made up stories about sterility, tragic deaths, kidnappings gone wrong—romantic tales that justified his compulsive need to dote over young girls in his gruff, harrumphing way. I never played the role for him, but he was still nice to me.

  My other job—my real job—was that gone too?

  It was only ever freelance. That’s the nature of stunt work. To be honest, I wasn’t making much headway. I did my gigs well, better than most, but I was crap at networking. I can jump a flaming motorcycle into a helicopter on cue, but I can’t schmooze. I never made enough connections to get anything regular. I could probably pick it back up when I got back home.

  …

  When?

  If.

  I spent the first few hours of the car ride pretending to sleep. I didn’t feel tired, but I felt like I should feel tired. Back when I pulled doubles at the restaurant and had to be on set later the same night, I’d survive on adrenaline and caffeine, trying to sync the crashes with my downtime. No matter how tired you were, there were always moments when you could ride a wave of alertness. Up there at the crest, skimming along and feeling great, but always with the knowledge that exhaustion lurked just below you. Eventually, the wave would hit a break and send you hurtling into sleep.

  I felt like that right now. Like I was up on that wave. But it wasn’t crashing. It hadn’t crashed for weeks.

  I gave up even pretending to rest. I was holding my left hand out the passenger window as we drove, catching patterns in the wind, using my fingers like a sail to make rolling arcs through the air. Jackie was driving. She had been since we left the motel this morning. She’d driven through two countries today. We crossed the border into Mexico late this afternoon. I freaked out a little about passports.

  We didn’t have any. That’s a big deal, right?

  But the guard just looked in the car, made sure we were all white, and waved us through. Getting back would probably be another matter.

  Jackie had to be getting tired by now. “Driver calls the music” was her rule. We’d been listening to her iPod all day. Real yelpy indie stuff. High distortion and quavering falsettos. Carey rode shotgun, rolling his eyes so hard you could hear it from the backseat, over the guitars.

  “I’m changing it,” he said, poking at the iPod. “How do I work this thing?”

  “You know the rules,” Jackie said.

  Carey prodded and swore, but it made no difference. Jackie had locked it. It was just a simple swipe-to-unlock deal, but that was apparently like a child-safety cap to the elderly.

  “Fine! Then just let me fuckin’ drive already!” he said. “If I have to listen to one more of these pussies compare a girl to the ocean, I’ll grab the wheel and swerve us into traffic.”

  Jackie beamed at him. The track changed.

  “Is that a fucking harp?” Carey screeched. “Is that a fucking harp?! No, pull over. I’m serious!”

  Jackie laughed. I knew her. I knew she was tired hours ago, but she wouldn’t stop until she broke Carey.

  Anything for the joke.

  She finally tapped the blinker and guided her sun-faded white Jetta onto the shoulder. The tires crunched rocks against the pavement beneath us. Jackie opened her door and spilled out the side in an avalanche of empty Red Bull cans. She’d bought two cases before we left, and they had been smoldering in the trunk ever since, the afternoon Mexican sun slow-cooking them in that enclosed space. It hurt just to hold them, they were so hot, but Jackie didn’t care.

  “Sure, it tastes like somebody-spit-in-your-cough-syrup soup, but it’s better than drifting into a ditch,” she’d said, before downing her fourth of the day.

  Carey opened his door and carefully stretched. It looked painful, and sounded worse. Even his hips cracked. I tried to remind myself that he was only in his late fifties. He looked twenty years older, and acted forty years younger. He spat onto the ground and the pavement swallowed it right up. He squinted up at the sun. Directly at it.

  “You’re not supposed to do that,” I said. “You’ll go blind.”

  “That’s what they told me about jerking off,” he said, “and if they were right about that, I’d have gone blind twice this morning.”

  “Bullshit.” Jackie laughed, kicking her Red Bull cans under the car like a little boy kicking errant toys under the bed instead of cleaning his room. “We’ve been with you the whole time.”

  “Not in the men’s room at the gas station.” Carey smiled. It looked like a catcher’s mitt splitting open.

  “Grooooss,” Jackie sang, and pushed past him into the passenger seat.

  I sighed, opened my door, got down onto my hands and knees, and started scooping the cans out from under the car. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Carey standing in the middle of the empty highway. We were surrounded on all sides by a western movie. Literal cactuses out here—for some reason I always thought that was just in cartoons. It was a beautiful, dangerous, and lonely place. Striated foothills loomed over squat green trees—the only spot of color in a world of dusty browns. Sagging power lines and the cracked pavement of Highway 57 South were the only man-made things around. It was like walking on another planet.

  Yet Carey had eyes only for my ass, stuck up in the air as I scooped Red Bull cans out from underneath a busted-up 2001 Volkswagen Jetta.

  I whipped one at his head, and tucked the rest under the front seat.

  “You’re picking that up,” I said, slamming my door.

  After another series of painful stretches, he picked up the can, then threw it as hard as he could out into the desert. He sat down in the driver’s seat and started fumbling with the adjustment levers.

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” I told him.

  “Stop the presses,” he replied.

  Carey spent a moment carefully tweaking the
mirrors, checked his blind spot, then stomped on the accelerator. We went nowhere. The Jetta screamed like a castrated robot.

  “It’s in neutral!” Jackie yelled, slapping his arm.

  “Oh right, and that’s … bad?” Carey asked, wiggling the shifter.

  “You need to push the clutch and—holy shit, you don’t know how to drive!”

  “Never stopped me before,” Carey said. He jammed the knob into second gear and we took off with a massive lurch.

  Jackie spent the next ten minutes desperately trying to convince Carey that he needed to shift out of second at highway speeds. He reluctantly agreed, but only on two conditions. One, that she show him “where the highway gear was,” and two, that she work the “music dealy” for him. Jackie spent the next thirty minutes explaining to Carey that the Music Dealy did not contain all of the world’s music. Just the stuff she put on it. She did not have any Stiff Little Fingers. She did not know who The Stranglers were. She did, however, have some Gang of Four. A compromise was reached, and Carey agreed not to shift out of fifth without permission so long as we listened to Entertainment! on repeat for the next five hours.

  We ate miles.

  We passed through small towns now and again. “Towns” is probably the wrong word.

  Settlements? Outposts? Is that racist, if I don’t call them towns?

  Mobile homes with tarps for roofs. Cinder-block structures whose only adornments were a propane tank and a massive Coca-Cola sign. The occasional wooden church, rotted dry and peeled clean by the sun. But mostly, it was desert. Desert that blew in through the gaps in the windows, even if you had them closed. The dull green of the sagebrush melted into a solid band of color that ran alongside us as we drove. I watched the hills on the horizon swell and dip like massive waves, and the sky slowly dim from burning pale blue into a gemstone sunset. The world outside the window flowed by, broken only by telephone poles and cactuses that acted as vertical barriers, forming the edges of the frames as they flickered, like a film reel played at half-speed. The constant drone of the tires on pavement became static, merged with the guitars as they burped and squealed. A British man’s voice, deep and apathetic, droned tunelessly across backing vocals that emoted for him. The songs repeated. Blurred together. I watched a painting of the desert slowly dissolve into faded blues to a soundtrack of cosmic radiation. The monotone voice assured me of something, and it didn’t matter what, just that it was something, and it was assured.