The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

  So it was with this thing beneath me. I could feel it moving down there, like a planet through empty space: far away, unimaginably vast, and unspeakably uninterested in me. Then something changed. The entity shifted direction. It noticed me. It had a long way to go, but it was coming my way, and when it got here it would swallow me and barely notice.

  I tried to move my arms. My legs. There was a weight on my chest. I recognized the feeling.

  Sleep paralysis.

  My eyes shot open, but it took a dozen panicked breaths and a careful effort to get my hands and feet to respond. I was in my own bed. I could see that much, though my room was dark. A sliver of light split clean through the gap between my closed door and the frame. There were voices out there. Hushed but happy. Giggling. I could hear music but couldn’t make out what it was.

  I focused on my fingers. I tried moving them, and though I broke out in a thin sweat from the strain, I eventually got two of them to twitch. With a shattering effort, I closed my right hand into a weak fist. I did the same with my left, and was so relieved when it moved that I almost didn’t notice the ache in my useless extra finger was gone.

  I tried to sit up slowly, but the head rush still exploded behind my eyes, tunneling my vision to a few bloody pinpoints. It passed. There wasn’t room to stand—my bed takes up the entire room—so I shuffled on my butt toward the door. I twisted the knob, the chipped white paint coming off on my palm, and eased it open.

  The voices paused.

  My legs felt like half-inflated balloons. I moved like I was on wet stilts. I leaned heavily on the wall until I eventually made it to the living room. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw Carey frozen in place, obviously in the middle of telling a story of some kind.

  At least I hope that was the reason he was miming a two-handed death grip on a giant imaginary cock, paused in mid–pelvic thrust against my recliner.

  “K!” Jackie fired up out of the sofa like her ass was made of gunpowder. She flew across the room and locked her arms around me.

  I laughed and tried to return the hug, but my arms were still weak. They rested uselessly on her back.

  “Carey said you’d be okay, but Christ—you slept for, like, three days.”

  Carey released his phantom phallus and gave me a knowing smile.

  “I’m fine,” I meant to say, but instead I made a sound like a sick frog.

  “I know three things,” Carey said happily: “You’re going to sound like Clint Eastwood for at least a week, you’re not going to poop for four days, and you can’t remember the tune to ‘Amazing Grace.’”

  “What?” I wiped the crust out of one eye and laughed at him. “What’s that supposed to mean? Of course I remember ‘Amazing Gr—.’ Holy crap.”

  “I am the magic man. I take payment in cheap beer and cheaper women.”

  “No, seriously. How did you know that? I honestly can’t—it’ll come to me, won’t it?”

  “Nope.” Carey shook his head. “It’s totally gone. You’ll have to relearn it. No idea why that is. The angels take different things when they do that nasty soul-scoop business. You’ll be finding blank spots for years. But for some reason the melody for ‘Amazing Grace’ is always gone.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? This happened to you?”

  “Sort of. A long time ago.”

  “And you didn’t think to fucking warn me?”

  “Excuse me? I told you to never—ever—touch one of the cocksuckers. I told you to run the second you see one and you—”

  “So, hey,” Jackie piped in, “not to interrupt the angry Alzheimer’s convention here, but now you’re going to explain literally anything that happened back in that whack-job church, yeah?”

  “I, uh … I’m still a little muddy myself,” I admitted.

  “Don’t look my way.” Carey threw up his hands. “I explained what I could to your merciless cockteasing friend here, but Christ, Kaitlyn, you blew one of the bastards up! This is uncharted fucking territory.”

  I shuffled into the kitchen and poured some nasty L.A. tap water into a coffee mug with a faded picture of Steve Urkel on it. DID I DO THAT? it tried to say, in barely legible purple Comic Sans.

  I went to down it, but my throat was too weak. I coughed, sputtered, and slumped on the edge of the couch.

  “It was trying to turn you into another angel, wasn’t it?” I finally got enough breath to ask.

  “Yeah,” Carey said.

  “Because you went through something like I just did, when you were younger?”

  “A little bit. The details were different, but yeah. Same shit.”

  “So someday one of those angel things is going to come for me, like it came for you?”

  “Maybe.” Carey picked up a half-filled bottle of dark brown liquid from the table. He sloshed some into his mug—Frosty the Snowman, if you must know.

  “But it won’t be this one,” he continued, “when you nose-dived into the bastard’s guts. It looked like it ate something that didn’t agree with it, then it exploded from the inside out. Disappeared up its own bright and shiny asshole. Sounded like an orchestra caught in a tornado.”

  “We were deaf for half a day,” Jackie supplied.

  “We figured we’d pass the downtime getting hammered and screwing,” Carey said, and he moved to slap Jackie’s ass, but she jumped away.

  “Like hell,” she chided. “You look like somebody stepped on a dried apple, dude. I’m not above flirting a little, but I’d rather suck off a shotgun.”

  “We’ll see about that when we get to the bottom of this bottle.” Carey laughed.

  “Marco,” I said quietly.

  The jokes died out.

  “He got away,” Carey finally said. “Hell, ‘got away’! Like we were in any shape to go after him. Your friend’s lucky she still knows English after what the angel did to her. If you’d been a few minutes later, you’d be changing her diapers. Or watching her do the psychopath dance with Marco. It was all we could do to walk out of there under our own power.”

  “So it was all for nothing.” I nearly spat on the floor, before remembering that it was mine and I’d have to clean it.

  “No way!” Jackie leaned forward and took my hands. “God, you should have seen it.”

  “That was some Raiders of the Lost Ark shit,” Carey agreed. “The Empty Ones standing too close when you took the angel out just melted like government cheese. Well, better than government cheese, actually…”

  “Most of the faceless dudes just shut off. Somebody flipped a switch and they went full vegetable,” Jackie said. “It was awesome.”

  “And I don’t mean to overstate this, but I’m pretty sure you killed that son of a bitch. As in, for good. And I’m also pretty sure that’s never been done before. Ever. In the history of everything.”

  “K,” Jackie said, laughing, “I think you’re, like, the chosen one.”

  Carey tipped his mug back, drained it, then thumped it solidly on the table.

  “A drink for the messiah,” he said, and moved to pour whiskey into my empty cup.

  I put my hand over it. He looked at me sideways.

  “Jesus, Carey,” I said, “I feel like microwaved death. I’m pretty sure I’d take one sip of that rotgut and throw up my nervous system.”

  “Suit yourself,” Carey said, refilling his own mug instead. “But if there’s a problem bottom-shelf bourbon can’t fix, darlin’, I don’t think it can be solved.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

  I dreamed I was floating on a sea of breasts. Just coasting from one boob to another, completely free and unhinged from society. It was majestic.

  Then I opened my eyes and tried to come to terms with being in my own shithole apartment again, living my shithole life surrounded by my shithole friends.

  The broken, sagging cot that hilariously failed to pass for my bed almost fell apart when I shifted my weight on it. I had barely gotten my e
yes open when something limply whacked up against my face. Not quite hard enough to hurt. I looked up into Randall’s lopsided smile. He had a partially crushed can of Schlitz in one hand and a drooping slice of pizza in the other.

  He had pizza-slapped me. The bastard.

  “Wake up, my precious little sleepyhead,” he said.

  I tried to swing for his balls, but the second I moved my arm, I found I couldn’t support my own weight without it, and slumped backward into the wall. My head thunked painfully. The world wiggled a bit, then settled down once it decided I was nauseous enough. I took a few breaths and tried to ignore the sound of somebody peeing in the bathroom behind me.

  The toilet flushed and the bathroom door opened, clipping the frame of my bed. It moved my head a fraction of an inch.

  I very nearly threw up on myself.

  Matt the Black Unicorn was wiping his hands on his shorts. He froze when he saw me sitting upright on the faded green army cot.

  “Holy shit! Carey’s awake,” he yelled into the other room, and I learned to hate him a little just then.

  There was a minor commotion. Somebody was coming this way, but I couldn’t focus on that right now, because Randall was waving a moist and flaccid slice of old pizza under my nose.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  I swatted it away.

  Safety Pins poked her head around the corner. She smiled broadly at me. You didn’t see that much from her—she was usually too concerned with looking unattainable. Which, Jesus, she still did, in that low-cut beige tank top and those skintight jeans.

  Wow, am I horny already?

  “Are you okay? Do you need anything?” she asked, kneeling down in front of me. I could see right down her top.

  “If…” I tried to speak, but my throat was packed with wet sand and cat litter. “If you could … bounce around a little. I think that would really help.”

  Safety Pins rolled her eyes and stood. She refrained from slapping me, thank God, but when she pushed off of my knees, even that little jostle was like being rolled in ground glass and deep-fried in shit.

  “What the fuck happened?” I asked.

  Randall drained his beer and tossed the can aside. It clattered off the wall and fell into one of the many, many piles of empties.

  “I’m not really sure,” he said. “I blacked out for most of it. I can remember a piece here and there, but most of it is gone. Mouthless dudes. Gears. Blood. Screaming. Then you and Thing 1 hauling me away. Then light and burning.”

  “She get out?”

  “Jenny?” Matt said. “Yeah, man, she’s here. She’s doing a beer run. Be back any second.”

  “She said you tackled a fuckin’ fireball.” Randall laughed. “Too bad I missed that. You’ll have to do it again sometime so I can see it.”

  “What about Gus? I’m assuming he had a massive coronary after witnessing my heroism, right?”

  “No dice. I was conscious for the after-party,” Randall said, kneeling down and rummaging beneath my cot for something. He came up with another can of warm Schlitz. My emergency stash.

  The son of a bitch.

  “When I came to, you were lying in the dirt while the faceless kids all clapped and cheered. The ball of light was gone, whatever it was. Gus gave some big speech. Mostly gibberish. Stuff about engines and numbers. Then he went a little gay on you.”

  “Wh-what?”

  Is that why I feel like such crap? Did I get molested by a monstrous Iggy Pop impersonator in my sleep?

  “Ha!” Randall gestured at me with the hand holding the beer, and some of it sloshed onto my leg. I thought about lapping it up, but I doubted I could move that far right now. “You should see your face. Not like that. He came over while you were out and rearranged you. Put your feet together, crossed your arms over your chest. He kissed you on the forehead and thanked you.”

  “What the very fuck?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Matt said. “I mean, we saw some weird shit a few nights ago. That black thing, the faceless kids—but the stuff Randall’s been telling us is a whole new kind of strange. I mean, evil balls of light? Are you guys sure you didn’t just huff a bunch of glue in the sewer?”

  “My grandma saw one once, way before any of this happened,” Safety Pins said, “those balls of light. She thought it was an angel. It spoke to her in my dead grandpa’s voice.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Randall said. “Your crazy grandma is full of shit. Whatever that thing was, it sure as hell wasn’t an angel.”

  “They just, what, let us walk out of there?” I asked.

  “They didn’t give a hot god damn what happened to us,” Randall said. “They just packed up and filed out after Gus got all romantic on you. They walked off down the tracks. They sang the whole way. Like the Seven Dwarfs.”

  “Whugho?” I got some spit down the wrong pipe and nearly choked on it. When I recovered, I tried again: “Where did they go?”

  “No idea.” Randall shook his head. “We’ve been asking around, but nobody’s seen any of the faceless kids for a few days. Gus’s club is all boarded up. But I think I know where we might be able to find him.…”

  Matt jumped a little. I got the feeling he’d already drilled Randall about the rest, but apparently this was news to him.

  Randall pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his back pocket. He handed it over. I unwadded it and smoothed it out on my leg. It was part of a magazine column—an editorial about the importance of domestic beer at local punk shows—with a lined box off to one side. Inside the box was a list of dates and places. Most I didn’t recognize. One I did: “The Roxy—28/12—The Talentless.”

  It was a show date. At a venue in London.

  “Are you kidding me?” I tore the page in half. “Gus’s fucking band is going on tour?”

  “Guess they got signed a few weeks back.” Randall smiled bitterly.

  I thought for a minute.

  “He’s not getting away with this,” I said.

  “No way in hell,” Randall agreed.

  “What?” Safety Pins spat. “Do you hear yourselves? They’re gone! They left! They’re somebody else’s problem now. Fuck London! We barely got out of this alive. Some of us didn’t.…”

  “She’s right.” Matt nodded. “Melissa—uh, Safety Pins—her and me are getting out of here, anyway. She’s got an uncle out in L.A. that has a guesthouse we can crash at. I bet we can sneak you guys in there for a while.”

  Safety Pins looked at him unhappily, but she didn’t say no. Sweet girl.

  “Thanks,” I said, and weakly snatched at Randall’s beer. The monster pulled it away. “But no thanks.”

  “Besides,” Randall added, “those London posers have been going around saying they invented punk. Somebody’s gotta go over there and set ’em straight.”

  I laughed and it was a terrible mistake. I was so busy coughing, I didn’t hear the door open.

  When my vision came back, I saw Thing 1 standing there. She had gone back to the blue wig. My jacket hung over her shoulders, huge, filthy, and limp. A case of beer rested on one cocked hip, and a brown paper bag nestled up against her breasts. She smiled at me. It was the sexiest thing I had ever seen in my life, and the girl wasn’t half bad, either.

  Thing 1 set the beer down on the floor and reached into the bag.

  “I don’t know if you’re feeling up to it,” she said, “but I bought this for you. It’s like a ‘thanks for not letting me get crushed by a weird cult’ present.”

  She pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey.

  I was shaking. A strong wind would disperse me like a pile of leaves. Every movement sent shock waves of nausea through me, and my throat felt like I’d tried to swallow a belt sander.

  This was the perfect time for alcohol.

  I grabbed the bottle, twisted the cork out, and took two deep swallows.

  “God damn,” I said, “if there’s a problem top-shelf bourbon can’t fix, I just don’t think it can be solved.”
<
br />   Randall looked at me with plain jealousy and sneered down at his own tepid beer. Thing 1 eased gently onto the cot beside me, like she knew that the slightest jostle felt like a punch to the gut.

  Safety Pins got up and went into the living room. I heard her rummage around in there, then the slide and shuck of a record being pulled from the stack and out of its cover. A few clacks, some muffled pops, and distorted guitars spilled out like drunks leaving a bar after last call. I took another swig of whiskey and offered the bottle to Randall. He smiled and yanked it out of my hands. For a while there, it was just booze and friends and music.

  It was pretty all right.

  About the Author

  ROBERT BROCKWAY is a senior editor and columnist for Cracked.com. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Meagan, and their two dogs, Detectives Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh. He has been known, on occasion, to have a beard. You can find more from Robert on his own site, robertbrockway.net. Or sign up for email updates here.

  Also by Robert Brockway

  Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

  You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (from the editors of Cracked.com)

  Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

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