The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  “You and yours have been tailing Husks in the south end, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Dick answered. He rubbed at his eyes, puffed out his cheeks, shook his head. I knew that dance. Trying to shake off a buzz that was right in the middle of melting into a hangover. “Husks? Yeah. I think…”

  “Up, Dicky boy!” Tub cried, swinging his length of rebar into the ground at Dick’s feet. He jumped and nearly fell over.

  “I’m up! I’m up!” Dick pleaded.

  “Husks. South end. Yeah? One of ’em was in a band, you said.”

  “Right,” Dick’s brain was finally starting to catch up to him. “In a band. The uh … The Talentless. Good name. Playing at the Marquee tomorrow. I hear they’re fucking crazy live. Strip naked and cut themselves and shit. Sounds cool.”

  The Talentless. Gus’s band.

  Tub was watching me. He saw the name register. Saw my face draw tight.

  “Well,” he said, “looks like we’re going fishing tomorrow.”

  TWELVE

  1986. Miami, Florida. Meryll.

  The boy is pretty, I’ll give him that. A bit too limp for me, but I see what the girls like in him. He’s got eyes like pond water, murky and deep, just a bit of glittering green in among the brown. Skin the color of creamy coffee. Cheekbones you could cut yourself on. He’s tall, and fit, and stylish—wearing a pristine white blazer with thick shoulder pads, no shirt, dark purple slacks, pink loafers with no socks. His hair is dark and thick, like a shampoo commercial. Lots of hairspray. Real, real pretty.

  If you’re into pretty boys.

  I like my men rough. Well, not too rough—but there’s nothing like a handsome bloke who looks like he’s been on the wrong end of a fight or two. I just can’t get behind the flawless, magazine-pretty boys that are all the rage these days. They don’t look like men to me. But this one is a man. I can see that through those tight gemstone slacks. He made sure everybody could see it.

  Looks like the boy’s saving a salami for later.

  I wonder if that’s just a pair of socks or something. I’m curious, so I slide through his personality like an oiled cobra and comb through his data. I’m lost in a sea of irrelevance. First dates and one night stands. Primping. Prepping. High fives and crying girls. These are his memories, and the vast majority of them revolve, in one way or another, around sex. Thinking about sex. Bragging about sex. Having sex. Avoiding the repercussions of sex.

  I slide into a memory that stands out from the rest. It glows hot and bright blue. A keystone. A bit of it plays out: He’s fifteen. His cousins are laughing and pointing at the bulge in his tight, bright-red shorts. He’s embarrassed, cringing away from them, but he doesn’t see the girl behind him. He bumps into her. In one smooth motion, she reaches out and yanks his shorts down.

  The girls gasp.

  They’re not laughing anymore.

  That’s the first time he realizes that what he has down there isn’t normal. It’s a weapon, of sorts. Power.

  Huge chunks of his persona branch out from this moment. His confidence comes from his cock. Nothing else. He knows he’s not smart, or funny, or kind. He learns to take advantage. He knows he intimidates the other boys—and the girls, too. But that’s okay. They’re curious. They come to him. Some of them love it. Some just think it hurts. He likes either way just fine.

  Weapons are supposed to hurt.

  It’s the smell of his cousin’s perfume: obnoxiously girl. Slathered on from a magazine. And a shade of red, textured like polyester. Bright, with a white stripe through it.

  Those two symbols will collapse all the branches that come after that memory, simplifying them back to just the one moment behind the shed, at a Labor Day barbeque with his giggling cousins.

  Huh. I guess he wasn’t stuffing after all. Good for him.

  I’ve solved a few people recently. Took an old lady just down the street from here this afternoon. I’m all good on energy. I don’t need to solve this boy. I just want to practice. I want to see what I can make from his pretty but vacant little body.

  I look into his code and try to track the simplifications. See if I can figure out what I’ll be left with if I take away certain portions of his life.

  I think if I solve the paths that branch out from the barbecue, and also that time he stood naked, coked out of his mind on the beach watching the sunrise, and that other time his mother bought him a Rocket Pop from a cart on the promenade, I can turn him into …

  Haha. Oh, shit.

  That can’t be right. But what if it is…?

  I have to know.

  I pull out the perfume, the shade of red, the feel of wet sand, the body-buzz of a good coke high just starting to fade, the texture of cheap wood pressed against the tongue, and a stabbing, frozen headache. I weave them together. I have a solution.

  I show him the secret moments that have dictated so much of his life, and I laugh as he starts coughing. Blood from his nostrils, eyes, ears. His legs collapse, too weak to hold him. He drops to his knees and tries to grab at his crotch, but his arms are withering now, too. All of his muscle mass is retreating, migrating elsewhere. His skin goes pale, parts of it already atrophying. His face is gaunt and skeletal.

  But his cock. His cock is the size of a boa constrictor, and growing.

  I am losing it. I can’t stop laughing.

  His purple slacks explode, and it flops onto the ground. It twitches, and starts moving. It’s prehensile!

  Oh lord, this is too much. I haven’t laughed like this in ages.

  Then the fucking thing grows spikes, and I pee myself a little.

  THIRTEEN

  2013. Highway 57 Mexico. Jackie.

  The pickup truck looked like it wasn’t going to stop. It slowed down to a crawl, then began daintily maneuvering around the shattered plastic and spilled oil. Like it was just going to mosey right on by the horrific wreck of my Jetta, still smoldering on the side of the highway. The driver is an old Mexican guy with a face like cracked mud—sun-damaged, deep lines networked together tightly over a perpetual squint. He didn’t even pause to gawk. Eyes on the road, hand working the wheel. Like he sees this kind of thing all the time.

  He sure looked surprised when I came sprinting out of the desert and leapt on his hood, though.

  The driver slammed on his brakes and I slid off onto the asphalt, still cool from the chilly desert night. I landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. I rolled once or twice, bumping my bony elbows painfully, and lay there, working my mouth like a fish out of water. The driver opened his door slowly and scanned the horizon for a long time before stepping out. I was looking right at his feet, visible just beneath the open door. He was wearing cowboy boots with little points on the toe, like elf shoes.

  He said something to me in Spanish.

  “Donde,” I said, still trying to catch my breath.

  He leaned closer.

  “Donde esta,” I panted, “la biblioteca.”

  It was the only Spanish I could remember.

  His crumpled-paper face pulled into itself.

  “You want the … library?” he asked, his English slow, clear, and careful.

  “Hola!” Carey yelled from beside the boulder, dragging a limp wad of roughly Kaitlyn-shaped flesh toward us.

  She was, like, Marilyn Manson white. Sort of blue. She looked deflated. No wonder, since she must have lost a bucket of blood on those rocks over the last few hours. Carey insisted that it looked worse than it was. He was sure she’d be fine. But I cut my wrist open scooping ice cream once and—

  You’re going to ask, aren’t you?

  Fine. I used to wait tables. Every girl in LA has, at one point. Restaurants use these gigantic Costco-sized tubs of ice cream. The less popular flavors sit in the freezer for so long that, by the time they get low and you have to reach way down in them to scoop, the leftover ice cream higher up on the sides has iced over. Nobody likes tutti frutti. Some of that ice is razor sharp. Boom, slashed wrist. I spilled maybe a fifth
of what Kaitlyn had left on that boulder, and I passed out. Had to get a transfusion at the hospital. I’m still paying off those fucking medical bills.

  The point is, I know how much blood you have to lose to be “not okay.” And Kaitlyn lost way, way more than that. I was trying not to think about it, but it wasn’t easy, after watching Carey manhandle her maybe-corpse across the highway. He eyeballed the driver, and, after a minute of careful consideration, he slowly and loudly said, “LADY … NEED … RIDE.”

  The old Mexican guy stared at the pair of them warily.

  “SENORITA,” Carey tried again, “Uh … ME GUSTA.… RIDE. EL RIDE-O.”

  Then polished it all off with a big smile and a thumbs-up.

  The old guy closed his eyes and breathed in half the desert.

  “Fuck you gringos,” he said, finally. “That girl better not die in my truck.”

  * * *

  The old Mexican guy said his name was Gerardo, and I laughed.

  “‘Rico Suave,’” I explained. He just glared at me.

  I shouldn’t be cracking jokes in the passenger seat when my best friend is probably lying dead in the bed of the truck, but I can’t help it. It’s automatic. I wasn’t even really paying attention, just letting my mouth operate on cruise control. I was wrapped up in my head, thinking about what the hell we were going to do.

  I said hospital. Obviously I said hospital. Gerardo said hospital, too, because that’s what sane people say in this situation. But Carey said no. I slapped him right in his busted mouth, but he was insistent.

  “She doesn’t need a hospital,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty of shit like this before, and you just gotta trust me. A hospital would be bad.”

  I went to slap him again, but he caught my wrist and said, “I don’t trust doctors, you know. Bunch of soulless bastards. They’re totally empty inside.”

  Carey shot a meaningful look at Gerardo, who clearly didn’t give a shit what we said, because he had already decided that we were all escaped mental patients.

  Would the Unnoticeables really come for her in a hospital? In public like that? Even worse, would Marco come himself? We must be close enough by now—just a short drive for him.…

  A series of still images flashed through my brain: Marco’s limbs bent at wrong angles, flailing as he danced amid the monsters in a crowded chapel.

  These are things you do not think about, Jackie.

  I decided to drop the issue, at least until we got to a phone. My cell was busted, spider-cracks across the whole screen. I couldn’t find Kaitlyn’s. Carey and Gerardo said they didn’t have cell phones—didn’t believe in them—then issued those little nods of approval that old guys give each other when they’re being totally fucking unreasonable.

  The highway was empty, had been all night. Gerardo’s faded blue-and-white Chevy was the only vehicle we’d seen in hours of waiting. He was going to take us to civilization, and I would find a damn phone, and God help Carey’s crusty ass if he tried to get between me and it.

  We hit a nasty pothole, and the suspension on the pickup could have generously been described as “a rusty memory.” I checked the back, and saw Carey sitting cross-legged in the bed of the truck, holding Kaitlyn’s head on his lap.

  Maybe I’m hysterical. In shock, or PTSD’d, or something.

  She didn’t look so bad anymore. Ragged and beat-up, sure, but at least her skin wasn’t the color of old eggshells. Carey saw me looking through the open half-window at the rear of the cab.

  “She’s breathing,” he said, sounding relieved.

  Holy crap. Was she not, at some point?

  I started to say something, but the truck swayed wildly and seemed about to tip over, which I knew from experience meant we were making a gentle turn. I turned around. We were pulling up to a squat concrete bunker, the kind of place where one would buy stale chips after the apocalypse. Dingy walls stained black with exhaust fumes. Old-timey gas pumps straight out of a Rockwell painting that somebody had dropped in the sewer—pockmarked with rust, parts held together with bailing wire. A pile of busted crates holding nothing decomposed beside the door, which was a fancy wooden thing clearly pilfered from a much nicer abandoned ruin. No windows. No pavement, just rutted dust clotted with oil. And spanning one entire wall of the building was a giant, seriously ancient, but otherwise impeccable Coca-Cola sign.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Gerardo. “Why are we pulling in here? Dude, this is like, so obviously a trap laid by radioactive cannibals. We are not stopping here. My friend is fucking hurt; you need to get us to a hospital.”

  “But for that, we need gasoline. Besides, only the cartel lays traps out here. And they’re not for tourists. Anyway, they don’t eat them. Only chop off their arms and legs.”

  Comforting.

  Then I saw something that shut me right up.

  My brain wasn’t running right. I’d been awake all night: first driving, wired to the gills on Red Bull; then fighting, hiding, and huddling on top of a rock in the middle of the desert, kept awake by the cold and the residual adrenaline. Now I had nothing. The Red Bull had gored me and left me bleeding exhaustion. The adrenaline had bored through me, leaving shaky and nauseous trails through my guts. I was rapidly zombifying.

  But even so, I had the presence of mind to spot those big wooden poles on the side of the highway shooting a wad of thick black wires into the gas station.

  They had a telephone.

  I was jogging for the station before the truck even stopped. I grabbed the handle of the inappropriately lovely door—a cast iron number, twisting around itself in intricate flowery patterns—and thumbed the tab.

  I braced myself for mutants.

  Half-broken fluorescents cast a sick greenish light over a few sad racks of snack food. There was a massive chest freezer with what looked like bullet holes in the side and a dirty white counter with an old, broken-looking cash register on top of it and an old, broken-looking attendant behind it. She put down her novel—a trashy romance, judging by the half-naked pirate on the front—looked me in the eyes for a second, then looked back down at her book and pointed to a bright red Coca-Cola machine humming quietly in the corner.

  “Telephone,” I said.

  No response.

  “Telephone,” I said, louder.

  No response.

  “Telephono?” I tried, cringing at myself.

  Maybe Carey was rubbing off on me. Probably not in the way that he’d like.

  Still no response. The door clattered behind me and the empty soda cans tied to the back of it with fishing line sounded an alert chime.

  Gerardo squinted into the corpse-light of the fluorescents.

  “How do you say telephone in Spanish?” I asked him.

  “Telefono,” he answered.

  Holy shit, I was right.

  “Then why isn’t this lady telling me where one is?” I huffed.

  “Because you didn’t say ‘please,’” the woman answered. “Telephone is for customers only.”

  “We’re filling up out there,” Gerardo said.

  “You have to buy something from in here.”

  Gerardo scanned the store like a pioneer surveying the prairie horizon. He finally settled on the chest freezer. He hauled open the lid, rummaged around, and came back up with some kind of ice cream cone. Had a spaceman on the side of it, surrounded by a bunch of bright letters and cartoon explosions. He slowly walked a circuit of the rest of the store’s meager selection. He paused at the Coke machine, stared at it like it had just asked to marry his daughter, then thought better of it, and finally moseyed back up to the counter. He set down his ice cream.

  The old woman sighed and lifted a heavy beige telephone from beneath the counter. I grabbed the receiver and stared down at the base. There were no buttons. Just a big round thing with holes in it. I’d seen such things in cartoons and old sitcoms, but never in real life.

  “How do I…?” I said, miming the poking of buttons.

  Gerar
do and the attendant shared a complicated look that probably said a lot of things about race, culture, youth, and many other ills of the world. Then he reached over and hooked a bony finger through one of the holes.

  “What number do you—” The clatter of the cans cut him off.

  “Carey, God damn it, if you try to stop me from calling for help I will kick you in the balls so hard you’ll know what they taste like.”

  A laugh.

  “Trust me,” said a girl with an English accent, “he probably already knows.”

  I turned. She was young. Seventeen. Eighteen, maybe. Pretty, if a little chubby. Big lips, big eyes made bigger with liberal use of mascara. Her hair was cut into a severe bob and dyed bright orange. She wore a miniskirt over torn fishnets, combat boots so old the leather was cracking, and a too-tight T-shirt from a band whose logo had gotten so faded over too many washes it was impossible to read. Each wrist was weighed down with a few dozen bracelets.

  “Hi there.” She gave us a little wave. “I’m Meryll.”

  I returned her tiny wave by reflex. During the drive, I’d started subconsciously thinking we were the last people alive in the world. The attendant didn’t count. She was, if anything, a part of the store. She was landscape. It shouldn’t have thrown me quite so much, that another customer would walk into the station just then. But I couldn’t figure out how to make my mouth make words. There was a knot in my stomach. I was holding my breath.

  The girl walked over to Gerardo, casual as could be, like they were good friends just seeing each other for the first time in years. She put a hand on his arm, and he grunted disapprovingly.

  “You’re an interesting one,” she said. Her tone was ominous. Lust, or hunger—some sort of veiled threat I couldn’t figure out.

  The door clattered again. Carey entered, tunelessly yelling lyrics to himself. “‘Sex and drugs and rock and roll, is all my brain and body need—’”

  He stopped when he saw the girl. His face went slack, then white, then twisted up in rage.