“Yeah, I guess. It’s—”
“It’s gotten worse,” he finished for me.
“Yes. I think my—”
“Friend went missing. Gotcha.”
“Is this like your shtick? You’re the psychic punk-rock hobo?”
Carey laughed.
“No, there’s just a pattern to this. Always seems to go down the same way. Do you want to talk out here or…?”
He surveyed my apartment like a lonely old mutt. My heart tightened a little bit, to see somebody that desperate for shelter … then I remembered it was about seventy-three degrees outside and I’d given him free whiskey the last time I invited him in.
Ah, well, not like I’m drinking much of it myself these days.
I motioned to my door with my free hand and followed him a few steps back. I wasn’t being as subtle as I hoped—remember, I’m a terrible actress—but Carey didn’t seem to mind that I was wary.
I locked the door behind us, never taking my eyes off of him. He may have looked the part in his duct-tape-patched leather jacket, torn and faded T-shirt, oil-stained jeans, and combat boots—but he didn’t carry himself like a potential murderer. He stood in the dead center of my living room, hands politely in his pockets, looking like an excited kid waiting for permission to go play.
“Do you want a drink?” I asked.
His eyes lit up like Christmas.
I waved him over to the dining room table and grabbed a dull green bottle from atop the fridge. I poured myself a glass of water. I didn’t bother with a mug for Carey; there was only about a third of a bottle left. He was probably going to enjoy it more than me, anyway.
I was right: He took a long swig of the Jameson, swished it about like mouthwash, and then swallowed it slowly and with an exaggerated “Ahh!”
“So…” I prompted him, seeing him about to go back in for another gulp.
“Right.” He set the bottle aside with some noticeable difficulty and put on his serious face. “Where should I start?”
“What the hell is Marco?” I blurted out.
I meant to play it cool and skeptical, but I was gripping the sides of the table with both hands, and my feet were frantically tapping of their own accord. The Cobra was jammed between my thighs. Even if he did turn out to be a nut job, I doubted Carey would try to hurt me—but I was done making assumptions.
“Marco? That the guy in the car?”
I bit my lip and nodded quickly.
“He’s an Empty One.” Carey answered the question and took a slug from the bottle as his reward.
“I don’t know what that is!”
“He’s … Shit, this is going to get complicated, scary, and crazier than a bag of wet cats in a big fuckin’ hurry. So if we’re going to do this, I want you to hold off on calling bullshit until we’re finished, okay? When we’re done talking, if you think I’m a wacko, I’ll leave and you’re only out part of a bottle of fine liquor and a half hour of your time. Deal?”
I closed my eyes for a second. Tried to push the logical part of my brain aside.
Fat lot of good it had been doing me lately, anyway.
I took a sip of my water. I nodded.
“Marco … Well, things like Marco, they started out human, but something got a hold of them. It emptied out all the parts you and I think of as making a person—nerves, emotions, empathy—hell, I think even their actual insides. The Empty Ones bleed like you or me, but you can stab ’em where the heart should be with a broken mic stand and they won’t go down. That one’s from personal experience: I’ve impaled the bastards with fence posts, hit them with Gokarts, thrown them into trash compactors, and drowned them in gasoline then lit it on fire and burned ’em from the inside. I’ve never killed one.”
I exhaled a little. I wasn’t sure if I believed it, but it sure as hell wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Jesus Christ…” I started, but he held up a hand to stop me.
Carey swallowed another bulging mouthful of liquor and continued.
“The Empty Ones aren’t the only things you have to worry about. Marco is just one half of the shit tornado. The other half is something we call the ‘tar men.’ I don’t know if you’ve seen them yet, but they’re exactly what they sound like: giants sculpted out of used motor oil. Like the sludge that congeals in sewer gutters next to the highway. Only they smell worse. It burns like crazy when they touch you.” Carey turned and showed me a vicious, cigar-shaped scar on the back of his neck. “It’s like being grabbed by pure acid. They’ve melted some good friends of mine down to a nasty pink fluid. And near as I can tell? There’s no reason for it. They don’t eat you, or drink you, or do anything with any part of you. They just wander around dissolving your friends into puddles because they’re giant supernatural assholes with nothing better to do.”
“That’s fucking crazy,” I snapped.
I couldn’t help myself. I was in too high of a gear. I was laying so much of my hope on this guy making sense of things for me, and to find out he was just off his meds would be too much of a disappointment.
“Hold it until the end—”
“No, god damn it! This is serious. This is my life—my friend’s life! I know something weird is going on, but oil monsters? Invincible hollow people? No, dude. No way. Marco’s on some kind of drug. Or he’s a science experiment gone wrong. Or maybe he’s an alien or something, I don’t know. But—”
Carey slammed his bottle down, shaking the table. I stood quickly, knocking my chair over, and flicked the Cobra out. A quiet shunt and a short click as it locked into place.
“You started this,” he said softly, “and you’re going to finish it. You got a real nice toy there. You’re not going to have to use it. I am not going to hurt you. But I’m not leaving here until we’re finished talking. Unless you want to spend the next week cleaning me out of the floorboards, sit back down and listen.”
His face was impassive.
I didn’t think I could have hit him anyway. He reminded me of a dad. Not my dad—my dad was great—but somebody’s crazy deadbeat alcoholic father, surely.
I tipped my chair upright with my foot. I tapped the Cobra on the ground and slid it closed. I sat down and sipped at my water like nothing happened.
“There’s something else,” Carey said, picking up where he was before; “something bigger than Marco and the tar men. They have bosses, kind of. Or maybe gods, I guess. Fucked if I know: I’ve only seen the things a handful of times. All I know is that they reduce people. They do something to our brains, show them stuff they shouldn’t see, and most just up and vanish after seeing it. There’s a bang like fireworks, and the floor rumbles like a garbage truck passing by, then boom—a human being is gone into thin fucking air. But some people, they don’t disappear entirely. They stand there and scream light instead. They puke black sludge and glow like a bonfire’s going on in their skull, then whatever it is slowly hollows them out. When it’s all said and done, you end up with two things: first, a smoking, empty husk that looks a lot like a guy you used to know; that’s how you get things like Marco. And, second, a puddle of cancer at their feet that gets up and moves; that’s how you get the tar men. These bosses or gods or whatever they are—they’re using us for something. I don’t know what, but when it goes right, we just up and go away. When it goes wrong, they end up with a person split in two, and neither half is anything like human anymore.”
I cracked my neck and exhaled some of the tension.
“Thank you. That was a very nice story,” I told him with all the forced politeness I could manage.
Carey was quiet for a minute, then broke into a big smile.
“Good!” he said, “That’s the smart way to go. You might make it after all.”
He chugged the rest of his whiskey—my eyes watered a little just imagining it—and stood to leave.
“Never mind me,” he continued. “I sniffed too much glue in grade school, that’s all. Just the mutterings of a weird old wino.”
<
br /> Carey moved unsteadily toward the front door, and I could feel stress sloughing off of me like dead skin.
That clinches it: I’ve gone crazy again. Just like after Stacy died. None of what I thought was happening over the last few days was real. I might actually be stalking a B-list celebrity and blacking it out, and now I just need to see a doctor. They have pills for everything. I remember the pills. I’ll take a little blue oval twice a day with meals, and this time next year—
“Just let me leave you with two warnings,” Carey said, pausing at the threshold.
“Shoot,” I said, positively giddy.
Say whatever you like! We’re all crazies here.
“First, if you meet somebody whose face you can’t remember—even when you’re looking right at ’em—don’t trust them.”
The room swam around me. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a giant hole, leaning over and spitting down into the dark. A cold wind blew up over the lip. Goose bumps tracked across my legs and arms.
“And two, if you ever see a strange light, brighter than anything should be, making a sound like screaming and singing all at once—if you ever see something that looks like an angel, you run like hell and don’t stop until your legs give out. And you never, ever, ever let it touch you. No matter what you think it’s gonna do, no matter what’s at stake, do not touch the damned thing.”
He turned to weave away into the warm, oceanic Los Angeles night.
My lips wouldn’t move. My tongue was dead weight. My lungs would not draw air.
The edge of the hole slid away beneath me. I tumbled into the void.
“W-wait.” It took all of my energy to force the sound out.
Carey turned back to face me. He looked happy and buzzed.
“I’ve seen them already,” I said. “I’ve seen the angels.”
I think I broke his heart just then.
* * *
“So they got your sister?” Carey was rummaging around my kitchen looking for more booze.
So far he’d found a swig of ancient tequila hidden in a dusty bottle in a forgotten corner atop my fridge; a Hefeweizen I’d been planning to cook a chicken with, back when I was foolish enough to believe I’d ever learn to cook; and an unopened bottle of blackberry-flavored vodka. He shuddered when he read the label, then opened it and poured the entire thing down the drain while glaring at me.
Carey sat down at the dining room table and carefully nursed the Hefeweizen like a man stranded on a life raft in the middle of the ocean.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “The cops—they said she might have run away from the fire. But that didn’t seem too likely. They didn’t find a body or anything, and she never turned up again. They brought my parents in, even. Police thought they had something to do with it at first. But nothing came of the investigation. It’s weird. That night should be such an important part of my life, and it’s just not there. When I do remember parts of it, they’re so vivid it aches—but it’s only a second here and there. Part of a song my mother sang while doing the dishes. Stacy messing with her yo-yo. Playing cars in front of the TV in the living room. And something bright, over my bed at night. Stacy said the word, not me: She said ‘angel.’ Then the fire. Then…”
I spread my hands and shrugged my shoulders.
Carey pulled at his beer and swished it around his mouth for a while before reluctantly swallowing.
“So what does it mean? What are they? What do they want with my family?”
“No fucking clue.”
“Wait—what the hell? You just said—”
“I just said if you see one, run. I’ve tangled with ’em before, and all I know is exactly what I told you: The angels do something to people. They ‘solve’ them—that’s the word the Empty Ones use. When it happens, most people are just gone, but some don’t go away completely. They split in two. They don’t solve right, I guess. They leave behind remainders. Things like Marco and the tar men. I know if you let the tar men get a hold of you, you turn into a meat milk shake. I know if you let Marco get inside of you, he turns you into something like him. But a shittier version. Those people you can’t remember, even when you’re looking at them? That’s what they are. That’s what you would’ve been if I hadn’t pulled you out of his car a few nights ago. A faceless thing, following Marco around like a puppy. ‘Unnoticeables,’ we used to call them. And I know that Marco and the things Marco makes—they serve or worship or maybe just give dainty little hand jobs to these angels. What they do and why they do it is your guess, because that’s as far as I’ve gotten, and I’ve been at this for decades. For some reason, it’s hard to get a straight answer out of a half-solved psychopathic angel-worshiping machine cultist. Go figure.”
“What do they do with the ones they take? Is Jackie even … is she alive?”
A bundle of nerves pulsed up my neck. My vision blurred and I blinked back the tears.
“Maybe,” Carey said.
He didn’t seem to plan on elaborating, but then he saw my face and added: “It’s hard to tell. They do awful shit to the people they take sometimes. But not all the time. I’ve gone in after friends and found a pile of bloody pulp being fucked by a coven of monsters. Then I’ve gone in after friends and found them happily dazed in the middle of an empty subway station. I don’t know what the rhyme or reason is to it. I don’t have anything more for you.”
Carey contemplated his beer for a second, then chugged the rest and set the bottle down hard.
“I wish you had more for me, though. Tell you what: I’m gonna return those cans and do a beer run to the Seven-Eleven across the street, and when I get back we’ll come up with a game plan to rescue your friend. Fair warning, though: most of my game plans are ‘light something on fire and throw it at somebody that looks like they know something.’ If you want brains in this operation, you’ll have to bring them.”
I laughed, and locked the door behind him. I walked down the narrow hallway toward the bathroom, my head lost in daydreams of busting into giant machine temples and rescuing Jackie from angry, faceless natives.
Ha-ha, why natives? TV has ruined me.
I dropped my jeans to the floor and settled against the cold porcelain, forcing the ridiculous fantasies away.
Where do you start looking for a missing person? What would the cops do, if they were helping?
I’d barely started peeing—just a few hasty drops splashed into the water below—when I heard a metallic squeak and felt a hot blast of steam.
The shower.
How did it—?
A man’s voice, deep and resonant.
“Getting to knooooow yoooou,” it sang. The voice was only separated from me by a ten-dollar shower curtain I’d bought on sale at Target. It was six inches away from my bare knees.
“Getting to know all aboooouuut you.”
Marco.
Every muscle in my legs seized at once. It physically hurt to move them, they were so tense. I slowly, quietly, achingly pulled my jeans up just enough to stand, and started reaching for the doorknob. I heard the sliding clack of the shower curtain being pulled open. A rush of warmth.
“You can join me,” Marco said, his voice casual and friendly. “I don’t mind.”
I lunged for the knob and yanked it, but there wasn’t enough room. The bathroom was so small, and the door opened inward. I had to lean toward the shower to get it open, and as soon as I did, a strong hand wrapped about my naked waist and started pulling me into the stall.
I thrashed, at first just trying to get my bare ass pointed away from Marco, then trying to scramble out of his grasp, then trying to keep my legs out of the impossibly hot spray. I felt it burning me all over, but Marco’s skin—and I could see now he was completely nude—wasn’t even red. He smiled impassively as I punched and clawed at his face. He didn’t even blink when I put a fingernail into his eyeball. His smile didn’t falter when I busted my knuckles against his perfectly white teeth. He held me immobile, both hands on m
y hips, as burning water broke against the back of his neck and scalded my limbs.
Marco started marching us one awkward half step at a time toward the open bathroom window. He repositioned his hands to hoist me toward the opening, and I took the opportunity to twist out of his grip. I kicked off of the toilet and knocked my head painfully against the partially open door. Marco, still smiling, blood streaming down his face from his ruined eye, bent to reach for me. I kicked his knee out, and his bare feet slid on the wet tile. He went down bad. Sideways, and without even trying to catch himself. His neck nearly broke in half when it hit the sink.
Marco lay still. He was a tangled heap of grotesquely twisted limbs on my bathroom floor.
I allowed myself one steadying breath, then yanked my pants up and crawled out the door.
I only made it a few feet into the hallway when something caught my leg. I tried to shake it free, but no luck. I looked back and saw one twisted, tanned hand clutching the hem of my jeans.
Then it started to pull.
I finally thought to scream. My voice was hoarse and ragged. It left me completely when Marco’s head peeked around the door, upside down and swiveling loosely on a neck like a boiled noodle.
He smiled at me. That pool-party-poster smile. That smile from my teenage-girl bedroom. And he said, without a hint of pain or discomfort:
“Where you goin’, chica? We’re just getting started!”
I kicked the wall. I kicked the floor. I kicked his hand. I kicked the door, over and over. I thrashed and flailed in a seizure of uncontrollable, primal fear. I did not want to go through that door. I did not want to see the inside of that bathroom. That nightmare of broken limbs. That smiling, inverted face, laughing at me. I kicked again and again and—almost too late, it occurred to me.
I bucked and wriggled backward out of my jeans. They snapped instantly around the bathroom door and out of sight. I crawled backward the first few feet down the hall, then stood and ran. I threw back the deadbolt, yanked open the front door, and sprinted straight out of my apartment and directly into Carey.
He pivoted instantly. His reflexes were strangely quick for a man who looked so broken and worn. I thought he was moving to catch me, but he ducked away at the last second, and I scraped my knees bloody on the driveway. I looked up and found him protectively cradling a twelve-pack of Pabst like a mother with a newborn babe.
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