The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  So faintly that I can barely register it, the water around me starts to move. It washes through my body. It ripples through space.

  My head bounces painfully against the bed of the pickup truck.

  I’m staring directly at the sun. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, but when I look away I can still see the sun in the dead center of my vision. I can barely move—just enough to turn my head away and let gravity take over. I can see my own arm sprawled out next to me. My skin is burnt and bright red. I’m flushed with the fluish warmth of heatstroke. The truck hits another pothole and my skull rattles with the utter failure of its suspension. It smells like rust and sand. I can hear voices. A man and a woman.

  “… telling you the radio is broken and it’s another two hours at least.”

  “I don’t care! I’m not giving you road-head just to pass the time.”

  “So, what? Twenty questions?”

  “Fine.”

  “Great. First question: Will you give me road-head?”

  A slap, then laughing.

  The dream has left a little bit of residual fear dancing around in my belly, but I’m so tired, and so warm. I should say something. Yell out for help or shade or water. You’re not supposed to sleep when you have heatstroke, no matter how badly you want to.

  Wait, no, that’s … that’s hypothermia. If there’s a chance you could be hypothermic, you’re not supposed to sleep no matter how tired you get, or how warm you feel. So it …

  … it makes sense then. That …

  You shouldn’t

  stay awake

  with heatstroke. It’s for my own …

  good

  sleep

  good

  …

  I am wildly uncomfortable. I’ve tried sleeping on my side, on my stomach, on my back, and curled into a ball. This is the bed that serial killers sleep on in hell. There’s a spring poking through the mattress in the middle, but that’s also where it sags, so as soon as I start to drift off, my body relaxes and I roll into the spike trap.

  But I’m so fucking tired and every part of me hurts. I don’t want to wake up, even though I’ve been, like, twenty percent awake for hours.

  Am I hungover? I can’t remember. Too much of my brain is still sleeping.

  I was supposed to do something. It was vital. I can almost remember it, but I’m really trying not to. Maybe if I spread my legs all the way across I can hook them on either side of the mattress and.…

  Yeah, that’s good. That’ll do it.… Now I can get some …

  Spike.

  God damn this miserable fuck of a mattress. Where the hell even am I? This isn’t my bed. My bed is a beautiful monster, a whole room filled with down and foam. It’s like sleeping in whipped cream. This is like sleeping on an anthill.

  I should just force it. Get up. There’s something important I’m supposed to—

  Oh, shit. The sun. I’m dying out here. Up. Up!

  * * *

  I awoke with a start, causing me to lose my tenuous grip on the mattress and slide down onto the butt spike.

  “Ow, damn,” I said, or tried to. My mouth was so dry it came out like a cat hacking up a wad of aluminum foil.

  I glared back at the bed, and noticed there wasn’t even a sheet. Just a dirty, bare mattress. There were dark stains all around the spring. I did not want to know what they were.

  The floor didn’t exactly look clean or inviting, but I figured that I’d rather get foot diseases than blood and butt diseases. I rolled off the bed, crashed into the floor, and focused on breathing until my body agreed to start working again.

  “Like a swan,” Jackie said. “Like watching a graceful, elegant swan go ice-skating. While drunk.”

  “Shut up,” I tried to say, but it came out like somebody dragged a Dumpster over a gravel driveway.

  Jackie sighed. Footsteps. A faucet turning on, then off again. More footsteps. Jackie held out a glass, and I drank from it. Only after I’d downed the entire thing did I realize it was the glass shell of a burned out candle. The water tasted like wax and dust. It was the best thing I’ve ever had in my life.

  “Where?” I asked. I sounded like Clint Eastwood, but at least I was making human words.

  “The shittiest motel room in the entire universe,” Jackie said. She sat down in a grimy plastic lawn chair beside a TV older than my parents.

  I looked around, and verified the truth of her statement: one room with two beds. Impossibly, I saw the tiger-pit that I had been sleeping on was the nicer of the two. The bathroom didn’t have a door. The drapes were plastic. The carpet was deep brown, but I suspected it didn’t start out that way. The place smelled like a locker room for a team of swamp monsters.

  “Why?” I said. A little of my normal voice coming through, like a man going through reverse-puberty.

  “We finally maxed out my dad’s credit card,” Jackie said. “We’re operating on cash now, so the budget is tighter. I suggested we splurge on a space where the sheets wouldn’t give us syphilis, but Carey figured that would cut into the beer money. He suggested a compromise, then brought us here, threw the sheets out the window, and went to get beer.”

  “Where is here?”

  “I don’t think it has a name. There’s just a picture of a fat guy holding a flower on the sign. We are at the Fat Guy Flower Motel.”

  I started to snap, but realized I didn’t have the energy for frustration yet.

  “What city are we in?”

  “Oh! Right. Tulancingo. Mexico. We made it, K! The city that never sleeps, because the vultures will think you’re a corpse and try to eat you. The Big Difficult! The Bruised Apple! Drink it in.”

  “I remember driving. Did we crash?”

  “Yeah, there was a…” Jackie trailed off.

  “What?”

  “I don’t even know how to start. There was a Million Tar Man March. Carey’s ex-girlfriend showed up, and she turns old farmhands into monsters. Everything went incredibly crazy, even by our standards. You should be dead, but you’re totally fine.”

  I laughed bitterly. There was a lot to question there, but me being “totally fine” struck me as the weirdest statement.

  “Fine? I feel a rotisserie chicken. Was I hallucinating, or did you guys leave me out in the sun to die?”

  “You’re fine,” Jackie insisted. “You’re not even sunburned.”

  I started to argue, but looked down at my arms and saw she was right. Light brown. Bit of a tan, but no burns. Not so much as a scratch from the wreck.

  “How is that possible?”

  “You tell me,” Jackie said.

  She wasn’t herself. She was putting on a good show, but her delivery felt flat.

  “What’s going on, Jackie? Are you all right?”

  “Am I…” Jackie laughed. “Am I fucking all right? Are you kidding me? My life in LA was shallow and meaningless. It was awesome. And you dragged me away from it. You pulled me into a goddamned nightmare and then you brought me to that nightmare’s ghetto, pointed to the sewer, and told me to get some shut-eye. Fuck you, Kaitlyn. Fuck you for all of this. I am not okay. I am never going to be okay again. But you—you’re perfectly fine! I watched you die, Kaitlyn. You bled to death on a rock in the desert, then we threw your corpse in the back of a truck and watched it bake in the sun.”

  “What? Jackie, I don’t—”

  “You don’t have a scratch! Your face was practically gone. You had no more blood. Less than a day later and you’re bitching like you’ve got nothing worse than a bad hangover. What the fuck even are you?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? That can’t be true,” I said. “I don’t … I don’t remember anything.”

  “K, I don’t even know if you’re you anymore. Is something else in there? Did those things hollow you out? Because, I gotta say, if this is all some fucked-up prank before the shell that used to be my best friend throws me under a bus, I just wish you’d get it over with.”

  “I
’m me, Jackie.” I dragged myself up to lean against the wall so I could look her in the eye. “It’s me. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Everything has changed!” she yelled, but she couldn’t stop laughing. “Does this shithole look like nothing has changed? I don’t want to be here, K. I don’t want to do this.”

  What? I’m the one fighting unkillable psychopaths and acidic bigfoots. I’m the one apparently dying in a car wreck and being thrown in the back of a pickup truck to rot like garbage.

  “Nobody asked you to,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nobody asked you to be here.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You volunteered to come. You practically insisted.”

  “No, you don’t get to play that. You rescued me from that freaky church where I watched hell happen in front of me. I saw a guy pull off his own dick and eat it—and then it grew back. What was I supposed to say when you asked for help after that? ‘Thanks for dragging me out of a Cronenberg film come to life, but kindly fuck off?’ You didn’t leave me any other options.”

  “And yet here you are now, bitching about it.”

  “FUCK YOUR MOTHER IN HALF WITH A—” Jackie seemed to collapse inward halfway through swearing at me.

  She sighed. “Can we just go, Kaitlyn? I love you, but I hate this. We won, right? We got away from them—and sure, they came after us a few times. But we weren’t really trying to hide. We’re not even hiding now. We keep using my dad’s card—I bet that’s how they were tracking us. Let’s just ditch it and go somewhere else, okay? How about New York? We’ve done the LA thing. Let’s go be snobby about our fucking bagels and yell at tourists. We’ll share a shitty apartment that will look like a mansion after this place. We’ll get bunk beds and matching PJs and put socks on the door when one of us is getting laid. We got away before, right? In Barstow? You followed me out of that dried-up fart of a town. Follow me to New York, and let’s pretend all this was a bad acid trip.”

  Jackie didn’t cry often. She cried at the end of All Dogs Go To Heaven. And she cried about a fish tank once, when she got way too high and couldn’t stand the thought of the fish living their lives in such a small space. She wasn’t crying now, but I could tell she was right on the edge of it. This is how she was in Barstow, right before we left. She said the town would kill us. She couldn’t stand the thought of us working at a Walmart all our lives and being buried in the same cemetery we used to bring boys to make out as teenagers. She couldn’t go without me, she said. So I agreed. I agreed to pretty much anything when she got like this.

  “No,” I said.

  Neither of us were expecting it.

  “I can’t, Jackie. Marco is still out there. After what he did to us, what he did to those other girls. I know he’s going to do it again. And he won’t stop coming for me. I can’t live my life just waiting to see his face in a crowd. This has to end, and I know I can do it. I almost did it once before. It’s fine, though. It’s fine if you want to go. We’ll get back to normal someday, I know it. I’ll show up at your shitty Manhattan apartment with a pizza one day and we’ll eat too much and make fun of reality TV like we used to. But I can’t go yet. You can. You can just take off.”

  “Maybe I will,” Jackie said, after a long, quiet moment. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  It wasn’t.

  “It is.”

  “I’m just … I don’t know what to do here. You and Carey are out there lighting these dudes on fire and blowing up angels or whatever, and I’m in the back providing color commentary. So I’m going to leave. You have to promise not to hate me forever if I go, though. If you give me the cold shoulder after you’re done saving the world, I’ll tell everybody about the time I caught you jerking it to that Ginuwine video.”

  I leaned over to slap her, but leaning was a bad idea.

  Jackie laughed. “I’m serious,” she said. “I’ll see you on the news all ‘Girl saves universe from evil disco balls,’ and then next up it’ll be ‘Savior’s friend caught her flicking it to “Pony.”’ They’ll have to get Ginuwine on for some reactions, then we’ll have a panel about what it means for R&B.”

  I laughed, too, even though it hurt my bones to do it.

  When we stopped laughing, and I stopped dry-heaving from the exertion it took to laugh in the first place, Jackie left to get supplies. She had a feeling Carey wasn’t picking up such frivolities as “food” or “water.” The plan was for her to call her dad and ask him to wire her money. She’d say she was flying back, but she’d take a bus instead and split the difference in ticket price with Carey and me. That way we’d hopefully have enough shitty motel and shitty motel diner money to finish hunting Marco.

  I smiled at Jackie when she stepped out, but my expression fell as soon as she closed the door. I felt like I should cry. I would have cried, normally—nice and alone, no one to judge me, just wrap myself up in a cozy blanket of self-pity and sob on the floor of this motel room that would need a shower to qualify as “concentration-camp grade.” But it wouldn’t come. I didn’t feel numb, exactly. I could feel the response inside, but it was like it had to crawl through two acres of mud to get out, and by the time it did, it was too dirty and exhausted to do much of anything but sigh.

  So I sighed.

  A lot.

  I should sleep. That bed was out of the question—it was by far the most uncomfortable feature of the room. But I bet I could prop myself up in the lawn chair, or just lie down on the floor and let the cockroaches snuggle me away to dreamland. It was the same thing as the crying: I was aware of the need for sleep somewhere far away, but it didn’t seem like it was heading in my direction anytime soon. I struggled to my feet like Bambi, and went to refill my dusty candleholder.

  On the bathroom counter, I found two moderately clean glasses sitting upside down beside the sink.

  God damn it, Jackie.

  It was for the best. Really, it was. She was right: I had been selfish, asking her to come with me. I needed comfort. I needed to bring a piece of home with me. I needed her color commentary, as she put it, to keep me from drowning myself in a toilet. But that’s not a good enough reason to risk her life. I might actually take more comfort from her leaving. Knowing that she was safe somewhere, and I would have at least some small semblance of a life to come back to when all this was done.

  It was something to look forward to. A light at the end of the tunnel.

  Sometimes that light is a train.

  Oh shut up, Kaitlyn.

  I drank eight glasses of water. My stomach was so full that it sloshed when I walked. I flipped the mattress, and found that the underside was, impossibly, even more stained and disgusting, but there didn’t appear to be any tiny knives poking out of it, so I considered it an upgrade. I lay down. I was laughing to myself about how miraculously, astoundingly uncomfortable it was when I heard keys in the door.

  I don’t know why, but I closed my eyes. It was a gut reaction—some variant of the “blanket over the head keeps monsters away” defense. If I was sleeping, surely nobody would come and talk to me, crush me with the psychic burden of human interaction.

  Shuffling. Paper bags crumpling. The door slamming shut.

  I jumped a little, but hoped the intruding presence wouldn’t notice. Footsteps. A burp.

  Silence.

  Then, right next to my ear, at about crotch height, the sound of a zipper being undone.

  My eyes flew open.

  I scrambled backward, nearly falling off the bed, then held up a fist.

  Carey was squatting awkwardly beside the mattress and holding the zipper of his jacket.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Ha! Knew you weren’t sleeping,” he said.

  He smiled, pulled a can of Tecate from a paper bag on the floor, and held it out to me.

  I nearly threw up just thinking about it. “God, no,” I said.

  “Come on—it’ll put hair on your chest.”


  “I don’t want hair on my chest.”

  “Sure you do! People’ll call you ‘hair-tits’; it’ll be great.”

  But he wasn’t even offering me the can anymore. He cracked it open and fell into the stained lawn chair by the TV. The legs bent crazily. It bobbed and weaved like a seasick boxer.

  “Where’s Jackie?” Carey asked.

  “Gone,” I answered.

  “Good.”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “I’ve had a lot of friends get mixed up in this shit. The ones that leave, live. The ones that don’t usually last just long enough to curse you with their dying breath. I know it feels like somebody crapped in an open wound right now, but, really—it’s good.”

  “I know, all right! Stop fucking talking about it and give me time to process. Jesus.”

  “Nah, that’s not what you need. Your generation and your bullshit ‘processing’ and ‘emotional awareness.’ What you need is six beers, a good fuck, and a fistfight. And I can offer you two out of the three right now. You pick which.”

  “You seriously do not ever shut up, do you?”

  Screw it, though. Why not? Like I have a reason to stay sober right now.

  I motioned to Carey. He plucked a beer from the bag and tossed it to me. It was cold and wet with condensation. The temperature difference between my flushed skin and the can was so sharp that it stung just to hold it. I cracked it open, took one long pull, and it was gone.

  “Holy shit!” Carey laughed. “I knew a kid who could do that once.”

  He tossed me another, and I took my time with this one.

  “Is what Jackie said true?” I asked him.

  “Absolutely not. Why, what’d she tell you? The shower thing? Girl needs to learn how to work a lock. I mean, talk about your overinflated sense of self, I was just—”

  “About me. She said … she said we were in a bad wreck and it looked like maybe I wasn’t going to make it. Maybe I … didn’t make it?”

  “Nope,” Carey said, too quickly. “Shock is a hell of a thing. She was just confused. Your brain, it exaggerates when it comes to this traumatic stuff. Every time you remember something bad happening, your brain has to tell you a story about it. Like all good storytellers, that fish gets bigger and bigger every time. You took a little knock, is all.”