“We’re not?”
“No, the Empty Ones will have Unnoticeables watching over all potential candidates.”
“Christ,” I said. “How do you guys even know who to watch?”
“It is complicated.”
“No,” I poked him in the chest. “That’s part of our deal. You answer all of my questions right away or this whole thing is off.”
“You are right,” he said. “I simply did not think there was time. It all begins in the year thirty-six hundred B.C.E.—”
“Oh holy shit.” I threw up my hands. “Fine. We’ll do answers later. Get the door.”
He shrugged his patchwork leather jacket into place with a practiced motion he probably learned from watching Happy Days, gave me a cheesy double thumbs-up, then jump-kicked the girl’s door into splinters.
Never forget what he is.
You spend enough time alone with something—doesn’t matter what; a dog, a plant, a car, a friendly looking garbage can in the alley beside a butcher shop in Koreatown that has a couple of dents that almost look like eyes—and you start to treat it like a person. Like a friend. If I’m ever in danger of falling into that trap with Zang, he only has to move to snap me right out of it. When they drop the mask and stop pretending like the shell they hide in is remotely human, the Empty Ones move like apex predators. Not in a poetic sense, either. No “great beasts dancing in the night” or whatever. It’s like watching a grizzly bear bumbling about in the woods.
“It’s so big,” your stupid brain thinks. “Big means slow.”
And the bear seems to know you make that assumption. Seems to play off of it. It moseys around like an adorable dope. Like some great big snuggly, sun-addled cow. Then you step wrong and snap a branch, and you’ve got its attention. Suddenly it’s moving at you like a freight train. There’s no transition period between slow, lovable fuzzball and hurtling mountain of teeth and claws. It is death; it always was death. The cute stuff before was the act, and the thing that’s killing you before you can blink is the reality. You get that same feeling when you watch an Empty One move—really move, without the handicap of pretend humanity. There’s a little shiver in the back of your soul that recognizes the murderous trick you’ve been falling for.
Zang was up the walkway and through the shattering door in a heartbeat. Straight through it like a cannonball and inside, chasing down the girl without so much as a faltered step. She didn’t even have time to scream.
I stepped through the wreckage of the entryway and found them in the kitchen. Sure enough, she’d been calling the cops—or at least thinking about it. She still held the receiver. Zang stood behind her, his whole body pressed against her back. One hand across her mouth, one around her left wrist, isolating the butcher knife she also held. His fingers dug into her face, pooling the baby fat in her cheeks up around her nose and eyes, which had gone wide with terror and confusion. There was no way she could have reacted to the threat in time, so her nervous system just misfired. She froze in place like a statue, not struggling in the least, now just hoping not to make the situation worse by accidentally twitching.
“Hey again,” I said. I gave her a friendly wave.
She didn’t seem to appreciate it.
Okay, well, so much for first impressions. I guess it’s the hard way.
“You didn’t let me finish earlier,” I said. I plucked the phone from her hand, noted the dial tone with relief, and hung it back on the receiver. “I’m not a rapist, but oh man—my friend here sure is.”
Her eyes slowly slid to the side, trying to see who held her.
Zang gave me a disapproving glance.
“I mean … aren’t you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “among other things. But it is not a flattering introduction.”
“That’s Zang,” I told the girl. “I’d say he’s the worst person you’ll ever meet, but that would be calling him a person.”
I yanked open the door to her faded pink ’50s refrigerator. There was an untouched six-pack of Coors squatting on the lower shelf, shining like the Holy Grail. I snagged it and raised it toward her.
“Cheers,” I said. “Now, if you come with us peacefully we’re not going to hurt you. Hell, I wouldn’t hurt you even if you made a fuss. But Zang, he’s not good at restraint. He might just mean to brush your hair out of your eyes, and instead he accidentally puts a fist inside your skull.”
Zang sighed.
“Is that wrong?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It has happened before. But I am practicing and getting better. It happens less often now. Some credit would be appreciated.”
A tremor ran through the redhead, but she tamped it down.
“So blink twice if you’re gonna play nice,” I said.
She blinked. Then again.
“Good girl,” I said.
I nodded to Zang. He twisted her wrist a little bit at the wrong angle, and she dropped the knife. One by one, his fingers pried themselves loose from her face. A bright red handprint there, already fading. As soon as his pinky left her cheek, the redhead heaved an elbow into Zang’s chest and barreled toward me. I hopped out of the way, holding the precious beer above my head and out of the danger zone. She wasn’t expecting that. She had her shoulder down and all her weight forward, figuring I’d grab for her and she’d have to plow her way through me. Instead she went headfirst into the wall opposite the kitchen door. She left a skull-sized hole in the drywall, but she didn’t let it faze her long. She was up and crawling as soon as she hit the floor. She only made it a few feet.
She looked up to find Zang blocking the front entrance. He was leaning against the jamb and idly picking at his nails in another of his human affectations.
“How did you…?” She leaned back on her haunches to peer past me, into the kitchen where Zang had been just seconds before. It wasn’t humanly possible for him to get there so fast.
“Not humanly possible” still surprises some people.
“See, you thought I was exaggerating earlier,” I said, peeling a can from the six-pack in my right hand and offering one to her. She didn’t take it.
It’s weird how none of these people want a drink when you need one most. Ah well, more for me.
I held the beer up and bit the tab, levering it back with my teeth. Probably a bad habit, since it left both of my incisors chipped, but on the other hand, it left all of my beers open without me having to set the rest down and risk them being stolen by parasites. It’s all about priorities.
“All that stuff I said about him being a monster, accidentally putting a fist through your skull and whatnot—you thought I was trying to be scary. I’m not scary,” I said, and gestured at Zang with the five-pack. “He’s scary. I’m just accurate.”
“Please don’t rape me,” the redhead said, almost too quiet to hear.
Ah, shit. Overplayed the hand.
I just wanted her scared enough to listen—not broken. I forget just how fucked up it is being a girl, when shit like this is a real possibility instead of an overblown threat.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “There are bad people coming.”
She blinked at me.
“Worse than us, even,” I said, laughing.
She didn’t join in.
“Look, we’re not going to rape you, hurt you, or even rob you—I mean, aside from this beer here—you just need to come with us right now, and without making a lot of fuss. That sounds bad, I know. But I swear we only want to talk to you for a few minutes, and then you can walk away.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“No shit,” I answered. “Why would you? But you’ve seen how fast my friend here is—you can’t run away from him, and he’ll be on you the second you scream. You don’t really have a choice.”
“For what it’s worth,” Zang said, all smiles. “I’ve never raped anybody to death.”
The girl shuddered.
“Thanks, man,” I said. “Real big hel
p.”
* * *
Neither Zang or me had a car. I’m a worthless, homeless drunk, so I can’t afford one, and he’s an inhuman maniac with no social skills, so he feels right at home on the bus. We had to walk our captive away. Zang and the redhead strolled hand in hand, and I almost felt jealous—been a while since I touched a woman without being asked to leave the premises afterward. I consoled myself by remembering that it wasn’t a romantic gesture; it was so he could pull her arm off if she tried to run.
She didn’t.
When the Empty Ones touch you, you feel it right away—how wrong they are. There’s none of the minute human communication that naturally comes through our skin. No sweating, no little twitches of the palm, no flush of the skin. It’s like being grabbed by a statue. Like they put your tiny baby arm in a hand carved from stone, and then held you there until you grew into it. Those immutable fingers aren’t just holding you; they may as well be a part of you. You know instantly that you cannot get away without gnawing something off.
A Chinese punk in a stained and torn leather jacket holding hands with a pretty Mexican girl in her pajamas in the middle of the night draws a few looks, even in Koreatown, but something in Zang’s manufactured smile told folks they didn’t want to look too long.
A few blocks from the girl’s apartment there was an empty lot that still held the skeleton of an old liquor store. The front façade had been burned out and the roof caved in, but most of the back of the building still stood. Enough to at least hide us from the street. Intermittent blue and red lights from the neon sign of the hotel across the street lit the place like a disco morgue. The building felt like it was specifically constructed to be a crime scene. You could just feel all the previous murders staining the shattered concrete floor. Whatever promises of safety I’d made to the girl, she sure as hell wasn’t buying them now. Zang released his grip on her wrist and took three huge, awkward steps backward. He looked around the room, took another half-step to the left, then froze.
We both stared at him. He didn’t offer any kind of explanation.
“So,” I said, “what’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Not even a smile. Huh. Must be uptight.
I offered her a beer again. Still, she refused.
Definitely uptight.
“Here’s how it is,” I said. “From the top down: There are these balls of light—we’ve been calling them angels, but that’s just a name—and they do something to people. Kind of take them away—”
“They are solved,” Zang interrupted. He was still utterly frozen in his strange straddling stance. “All of life can be reduced to an infinitely complex series of interactions. These interactions can be assigned something like numbers, and—”
“Look, she just needs the CliffsNotes version for now,” I cut him off. “The balls of light take people away, only sometimes that doesn’t work entirely and you’re left with a fucked-up shell of a human. That’s what my buddy Zang here is—oh and hey, that’s his name, by the way. I’m Carey.”
I waved.
She didn’t wave back.
Offer the beer again.
…
Nah, better to just power through.
“Anyway yeah, my friend here was emptied out of everything human and now he’s like some sort of immortal psychopath, only he’s trying to be better.”
“I am better,” Zang said. “I have killed far fewer people this year than any other since I was turned. That is an objective improvement.”
“Right.” I nodded. “So he’s getting better. Uh, what am I forgetting?”
Zang quirked his head at me, awaiting permission.
I nodded.
“The animus and the shadow,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“You call them ‘tar men’ and ‘unnoticeables.’ I should add that the latter is not actually a word and—”
“Right, right.” I turned back to the girl. “So the ball of light solves a human and you get Zang here plus a thing that looks like a walking grease stain and melts you if it touches you. The Empty Ones also do something to people that makes them, like, less than people.”
“The animus—the tar men—they are destruction. It is all they do, and all they know. We are the anima. We are creation. It is all we are, and all we know—we seek to give birth to ourselves, but the great tragedy is that we cannot procreate, no matter how badly we are driven to. When we try, we only succeed in draining some of a human being, not emptying them out as our own creators do. Together, the anima and the animus are the essence of the dual nature of humanity, split apart by—”
“Hey,” I said. I held up a finger. Zang dutifully fell silent. “So for the cheap seats, you got evil balls of light that sometimes disappear people, and other times turn them into tar men and Empty Ones. The Empty Ones further feed off of folks, turning them into these kinda faceless people who are hard to remember, even when you’re looking at them. That’s more or less it.”
“Not quite. She does not yet know where she fits into this,” Zang added.
“Holy shit, I forgot how complicated this gets,” I said. “Okay, so you’re a candidate. You’re like, uh … you’re like an angel egg. And they need to fertilize you so you can—look, I failed biology. Or I would have, if I had ever gone. The angels need people like you to make more angels, but I think you’re special. You’ve got an extra finger on your left hand. I knew a girl like that once. She was also a candidate, but she could do amazing things. She could fight the angels, and we think you could fight them, too.”
Nobody spoke. I cleared my throat.
It was about as quiet as L.A. can get, which means there was distant traffic noise, some faint screaming, what sounded like a cat dying nearby, and a trickle of falling water that was probably a hobo peeing on the outside wall.
“You are so, so nuts,” the girl finally said. “I didn’t even know you could be this nuts. I thought that only happened in movies. I thought real nutty people just hit themselves, or thought the devil talked to them. I never thought nuts could be this complicated and weird. Anyway, I’m really sorry you’re so nuts, but it’s not my fault. I didn’t do it. Can I please go?”
I sighed. Zang did nothing. Didn’t even blink. Thought I talked to him about that.
You’re an idiot. You should have started with proof in the first place, and then explained.
“Hey, Zang,” I said. “Do something fucking crazy. Rip off your arm or something.”
Zang instantly shrugged out of his ragged leather jacket and sunk his fingernails into his own flesh, just below the elbow. He worked quickly and efficiently, tucking his fingertips under the loose flaps of skin and prying them up from the muscle below. It was like watching an old fisherman fillet a catch. Clearly wasn’t his first rodeo. Within seconds he had skinned his entire forearm down to the wrist. He pulled it over his hand like an old sock, and wriggled his fingers free. He shook the flesh glove out, spraying fine droplets of blood all across the floor, then inverted it so the skin was on the outside again. He stepped forward and handed his own arm to the girl. Then he took those three huge, awkward steps backward again and settled into the exact same position and stance he’d left.
The redhead was trying to scream, but she couldn’t catch her breath. It sounded like a deflating balloon.
“Now watch as it grows back,” I told her. “How long is that going to take?”
“Skin takes the longest,” Zang said. “Perhaps hours.”
“What? Shit, that’s no good. It’s the growing back part that’ll convince her. Now she just thinks you’re extra super crazy. Why didn’t you say something?”
“You asked me to pull my arm off. I did that.”
Fucking literal monsters, man. They’re the worst.
“Okay, well, do something else that’ll convince her you’re immortal like I said.”
Zang thought for a moment, then placed one hand on each side of his skull and twisted. His ne
ck snapped. The girl yipped like a frightened squirrel. Zang’s head lolled backward, settling loosely between his own shoulder blades. He had to turn around to face us again. He stared at me questioningly, a faint smile on his inverted lips.
“Will this do it?”
The girl was still making that breathless shriek, her eyes gone the size of dinner plates. I gestured toward Zang with the now-three-pack in my right hand, as if to say “what do you think?”
She nodded.
Good start.
TWENTY-ONE
}}}Kaitlyn. 2013. Los Angeles, California. Costa Soberbia.}}}}}}}}}
I could taste the salt in the air, and feel the crashing of the distant waves reverberating through the ground, but I still couldn’t see anything. I moved forward by tentatively feeling ahead with the toes of my shoes first, then slowly settling my weight onto them and just hoping I didn’t slip on the slick rocks.
I hoped wrong.
Often.
Judging by the scuffs and soft swears issuing from somewhere behind me, Jackie and Carey weren’t faring much better. I bumped into Zang’s butt more than a few times, when he’d pause to listen for something in the air and neglect to tell us. The sounds of the ocean grew less thunderous, eventually fading into a distant lull. I heard that same sound every night, except mine was emanating from the 405 when I left the windows in my apartment open.
Traffic and the ocean.
Breaking waves and the highway.
It all faded into white noise as we traced the ragged path deeper along the darkened bay. The rocks beneath my feet became more angular, and I realized we’d left the path behind at some point and were now crawling over shattered asphalt, the sharper corners smoothed by a few decades in the water. Damp denim pressed against my face.
Zang’s butt.
I sighed and held my own hand out behind me, not willing to give Carey yet another excuse to “accidentally” press his face into my ass. A few seconds later I felt his stubble abrade my palm as he brushed into me. Hopefully he was extending Jackie the same courtesy.
I wouldn’t count on it.
Zang had paused for far longer than usual, but I guess he didn’t feel the need to offer us any explanation. I reached out in the dark and felt around until I contacted his thigh. I tugged on his pants like a lost child trying to get the attention of an adult. He slapped my hand away.
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