The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  The entire inside of the trailer, including this thing’s body and clothing, is covered in the gore of the skinny thing. The other things find their own gore unsettling. This thing will have to clean itself before going back out amongst the other things. This thing turns on the shower, as hot as the water will go. It recognizes pain as sensory input. As damage being done. But it does not understand why that input is more important than any other input. This thing regards pain in the same way that the lesser things regard sight, or touch. The water scalds this thing’s skin, the red of the blood washing away to reveal the red of burns. That is fine. This thing heals.

  This thing begins to sing.

  This thing always sings in the shower. This thing recalls a time, before it was cleansed, when it was the star of a children’s sitcom about teenagers in high school. There was an episode where the character this thing played sang in the showers after a football game. The scene got a laugh. The other things enjoy laughter. So this thing makes a point to repeat that scene every time it showers. It is good practice.

  There is a noise from the room outside. Something has entered this thing’s trailer. This thing has had a chance to clean itself, but not the room where the skinny thing was dismantled. The other things will likely find the cleanliness of this thing pleasing, but may still be distressed by the presence of gore in the room. This thing is unsure. This thing decides that it will pretend to be surprised, if the other things inquire as to the nature of the remains.

  “Whoa, what?” this thing will say. “What happened here?”

  This thing will then laugh in disbelief, to further put the other things at ease.

  This thing turns off the shower and walks out the door. It remembers, too late, that the other things do not typically greet company while nude. This thing remembers, too late, that its burns are still visibly healing. The other things may be upset about this. This thing is not sure.

  The other thing is not a lesser being. It is a girl thing that calls itself Meryll. This thing does not fully understand what the girl thing is, but the girl thing is not a mess like the other things. She, too, has been worked on by the Mechanic. Her internals are different, however. They have not been simplified and disposed of like this thing’s were. They have only been rearranged. The mess within the girl thing is still present, but it has been repurposed in a way that exemplifies order and defies entropy. The girl thing has shown great power, and therefore great usefulness. Much greater than this own thing’s power and usefulness. The girl thing is worth more than this thing. This thing defers to the girl thing.

  This thing says: “Hey, chica, what’s the haps?”

  “Gross,” the girl thing says. “Don’t do that. Nobody’s listening.”

  This thing lets the humanity slide from its frame. It is like relaxing a weak muscle that has been clenched too long, and is beginning to give out. “The practice is useful.”

  “Yeah?” the girl thing says. “What was the use in stripping naked and—I’m assuming you just ate a bunch of people? What the fuck happened here?”

  “I was learning from a younger actor. He was teaching me much, until I made a mistake. It is better if people do not see your mistakes. They think you are stronger, and they like you more that way.”

  “You’re just the belle of the ball, aren’t you?”

  This thing does not understand. It does not find usefulness in understanding, so it says nothing.

  “I’ve been to see her,” the girl thing says, after a while. It sits on a padded bench across from the blood-soaked table. It crosses its legs and picks at its nails as it talks. Despite its earlier protests, it is not disconcerted by the sight of the innards of other things. It is a thing that understands it is a thing, like this thing. The girl thing is simply better at pretending. This thing could learn from it.

  “I found this bloody … anti-Christ, or whatever she is to you.”

  “The analogy is good,” this thing confirms. It sits beside the girl thing. It pushes out its chest, like the girl thing. Then it crosses its legs at the knee and gazes at its own nails. “Kaitlyn has destroyed a tool of the Mechanic. She has brought chaos to a beautiful piece of order. Order is the closest analogy for God. Kaitlyn is disgusting, and I would like to piss in her heart.”

  “I don’t see how she did all that,” the girl thing says. It notices this thing copying it, and readjusts its posture. “There didn’t seem to be much special about her. I found her and Carey in a little shop out in the desert. I twisted up a farmhand into something nasty for them.”

  “So they are dead?” This thing considers feeling disappointed that its hands had not split apart their flesh itself. But when this thing thinks about the blond thing—that trash on the floor of reality—it feels not just a twinge of hate, but something else. Only a remnant of a feeling, but that remnant quivers and crawls. This thing grabs its thumb, and yanks it backwards. It uses the fragment of exposed bone to scratch a bloody smiley face in the flesh of its own leg. This distracts.

  “Eh,” the girl thing says. “Maybe. Carey was looking a bit rougher than the last time I saw him, but he was always a wily one. And if the girl killed one of your precious Flares, she’s apparently got some tricks I didn’t see.”

  “If they are not dead?”

  “Well, that’s why we have you, don’t we?”

  “I am not certain of the plan. I do not know if it is useful to use me as bait. I am strong. I am valuable. If I was not strong or valuable, I understand why you would risk me and why you would not care if I were to die. But I am strong. I am famous and can use my influence to further order. I could ask a woman to come with me and she would. She would not consider what happens after, because I am known to her. That gives me value.”

  “Are you…” The girl thing gives this thing a look that this thing doesn’t understand. “Are you afraid of her?”

  This thing considers the possibility. It does not know how to respond. It decides to use a gesture it remembers from its sitcom. It shrugs, and gives a certain kind of smile that is meant to signal coyness and uncertainty. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a jock!” it says, just like it used to on the television show.

  The girl thing laughs so hard that she snorts.

  SEVENTEEN

  1978. London, England. Carey.

  The darkness moved.

  Luckily, tar men are slow—they hadn’t even made it out of the loading bays yet—so there was enough time for us to haul ass out of the courtyard before they could melt us down to sludge. But there was not enough time to wrestle Meryll out of the grip of roughly half a dozen inhuman dickheads before we got to safety.

  Think, Carey. Think!

  I threw a rock at Gus’s head. It drew blood, but he didn’t so much as flinch.

  Well, that didn’t help.

  I threw another rock.

  It still didn’t help. “I’m out of ideas,” I said.

  I turned to Tub. He was the wise old wizard to me and Randall’s drunken hobbits. He was the tactician, the strategist. The wisdom of years was on his side.

  “Fucked if I know,” he said. Then he turned and started hobble-running away.

  “What the hell, man?” I yelled after him.

  He passed right by Randall without pause. Randall was frozen. He wanted to run, but he was waiting on me.

  On me. It was all on me. It was all hanging on my ingenuity.

  And I was out of rocks.

  I glared the hell out of Gus and the rest of The Talentless on the off-chance that I had Superman heat-vision this whole time and just hadn’t wanted it bad enough until right now.

  No dice.

  Something grabbed my arm. I thrust my elbow back, then spun around to crack whatever it was in the face, if it had one. But it was just Randall.

  “Come on,” he said. He pulled on my jacket.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “We can’t leave her.”

  “You tried, all right? Nobody’s going to say you didn’t try. But we have to g
o.” His eyes were mostly white. They kept darting back, toward Tub and the only exit from the courtyard. His voice cracked.

  He’s afraid? Randall—who once asked a cop if his nightstick smelled funny from all the time it spent shoved up his own ass—is scared?

  Shit. Maybe I should be, too.

  The tar men were everywhere. There wasn’t enough light in the overgrown lot to see them individually. You could catch hints of brass here and there, but otherwise it was just a big, black wave of molasses, slowly consuming everything it touched. I couldn’t even see Meryll, Gus, and the Talentless anymore. They’d been enveloped by the tide of monsters. I struggled in Randall’s grip. I shook him free.

  Maybe if I crack open my lighter and empty the fluid out on that patch of dried grass, I can form a sort of torch to—

  Impact. Pop. Fuzz.

  Muffled voices echoing inside my head.

  Faded lights, and the implication of movement.

  Must have drank too much.

  Where am I?

  It smells like piss and fish. That doesn’t narrow it down any—half of London smells like piss and fish.

  God, my head. What was I, mixing grain alcohol with jet fuel? Jesus. I thought I was beyond this.

  They say alcoholics don’t get hangovers, because they’re drunk too often.

  When is that shit going to kick in for me?

  Those muffled voices again, like they’re coming from the other side of a waterfall. Made of pudding.

  Shit, whatever bed I passed out on really sucks. It feels like hard, wet pavement. This pillow is like a rock.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was laying on hard, wet pavement. My head was on a rock.

  Way to pick ’em, Carey.

  The voices were a little clearer. I lifted my head and the world shifted unpleasantly. Randall and Tub were talking.

  “… think the cripple’s gonna carry him? That’s your burden, boyo. Shoulder it.”

  “So what, you’re just gonna leave us?”

  “If you can’t beat those bastards in a footrace, you deserve what you get.”

  “Christ,” I said, and tried to spit out whatever disgusting thing was in my mouth.

  It was my tongue.

  “Here we go,” Tub said, then turned and started limping away, leaning heavily on his rebar cane.

  “Why’d you let me pass out in a fucking quarry?” I asked Randall, and sat up, which turned out to be a terrible decision.

  “Listen, I know you’re pissed but…” Randall was sweating. He kept checking behind him.

  “Nah, just get me—”

  Meryll.

  It came back to me.

  “You motherfu—”

  “What was I gonna do, let you dive into a pool of tar men? You weren’t thinking.”

  “Thinking ain’t what we do, and you know it!” I stood up quickly and aimed a kick at his crotch, but I missed by about a yard and fell down. I threw up for a minute, then decided that if I just kind of scooted toward him on my butt, I could kick upward into his dick just fine.

  “Hey! Stop!” Randall jumped away as I crab-walked toward his genitals. “Stop! Tub said she’s fine! She’s fine!”

  “The hell she is! Five Empty Ones and a tsunami of tar men—what kind of fucked up definition of ‘fine’ are you working off of?”

  “I don’t know, man. Tub said something about it all going down pretty much like he thought, and that now we just have to find a ride to catch up with them.”

  “What? He knows where they’re going?”

  “He does. It’s going to be all right—Tub’s got some kind of plan.”

  “He better,” I said, offering my hand to Randall so he could help me up.

  He smiled and took it.

  I kicked him in the crotch as hard as I could.

  * * *

  Randall walked funny all the way up Oxford Street. We’d caught up with Tub, and had been trying to flag down cabs for twenty minutes, but, strangely, nobody wanted to stop for an old hobo wielding a nasty piece of rebar; one bleeding, crusty, punk rocker; and one asshole in a stupid shirt walking like he had spikes on his testicles.

  “I swear on your mother’s grave, old man, if we get there and she’s already butchered, I’m going to—”

  “You’ll do fuck-all, son,” Tub said. “I could take you on my worst day, half drunk and with one leg—which is good, because that’s precisely what I’ve got.”

  I eyeballed his cane. There were dark brown stains all across the tip. I wouldn’t have put money on them being rust.

  “Relax,” he said, and waved the rebar at a passing car. It didn’t slow. He took a swing at the car as it passed.

  “How the hell am I supposed to relax? They got Meryll!”

  “Well, yes.” Tub tapped over to the wall of a shuttered newsstand and leaned heavily. He was still sweating, even though it was freezing out here. “Did you think she was gonna jump in there and slap the Husks to death?”

  “I…”

  Yes, that is exactly what I pictured. Meryll delivering huge, reeling, superpowered backhands to Gus’s stupid horse face until it inexplicably exploded.

  “Ha!” Tub slapped his own leg, then winced. “You told me yourself you boys hit one with a train. What’s a strong right cross gonna do?”

  “You said we could kill them!”

  “We can, but not like that. The only way I’ve seen a Husk go down is when they get caught up in the blast from a dying Flare.”

  “An angel?” Randall wrangled up like a cowboy that had just rode twenty hard miles, bareback, on a metal horse. “You can kill it?”

  “She can,” Tub said, “and has. Twice already. But she’s gotta get taken first. The Husks—they use people like Meryll to summon Flares. Well, the Husks think she’s like them, anyway. But she’s got a surprise in store. They take her and do their little ritual, the Flare shows up, then boom: Anybody standing within the blast, including Husks, gets turned into a bloody puddle.”

  “There’s got to be a better way to do that than just letting Gus grab her off the street,” I said. “What if he’d just killed her?”

  “Well, this isn’t Plan A, obviously,” Tub said. “We were hoping to tail them back to the ranges, do this on our terms. But one takes what one is given.”

  “We? She was in on this?” I asked.

  Randall waved at a cab. The driver slowed down, waited for Randall to jog up, then drove away. He flipped a backward peace sign out the window.

  Tub laughed.

  “You try to stop the girl when it comes to killing Flares. Hates the damn things like a Welshman hates the English. Or the Scots. Or other Welsh, for that matter.”

  “Wait,” I said, mentally scrolling backward. “What’s ‘the ranges?’ You know where they’re going?”

  “Most likely,” Tub said. He sneered as yet another cab drove by us. I looked closer, and noticed the cabbie looked familiar.

  The motherfucker was circling the block, just taunting us. That’s … almost great. You really gotta respect that degree of spite.

  “The bloody Faceless are everywhere,” Tub continued. “You’ve seen ’em in the tunnels, in the clubs, in the streets. It’d be impossible to tell which of their hidey-holes Gus crawls off to, normally. But now that he’s got Meryll, well, he’ll be needing a ritual site. The Purfleet rifle ranges. Used to be an army range, just outside of London proper. Now it’s just a swamp. Gotta be there. Boffins have found remains dating back to the Middle Ages at Purfleet. Sacrifices, by the looks of things. Mutilated and…”

  “The fuck is a boffin?” Randall interrupted.

  “A researcher, or an academic,” Tub answered. “Smart folks. Though maybe not as smart as they think. See, they believe Purfleet was a druid site.”

  “And you know better?”

  “Druids weren’t much into human sacrifice, by all accounts,” Tub said, “and most of the corpses they recovered were deformed in some way. Extra fingers. Sixth toes.�
��”

  I put it together. Though I sure as hell didn’t like the implication.

  “We’ve got to get there,” I said.

  “We’re bloody well trying, aren’t we?” Tub said.

  Randall sighed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We’re gonna have to do a Sit ’n Spin, aren’t we?”

  I smiled.

  “Yes, Randall,” I said, “and after that sucker punch earlier, guess who’s doing the sitting?”

  * * *

  The Sit ’n Spin goes like this: You find a car going slow, but not too slow. Ideally it’s rainy or foggy out, so they can’t see too well and there’s less chance of them stopping in time. London was apparently made for the maneuver. When the car gets close, somebody jumps in front, tries to go ass-first into the windshield.

  Three reasons you want to go ass-first:

  You’re less likely to break your more important bones.

  You’re less likely to break the windshield.

  It’s funny.

  That’s the Sit. The driver gets out, either to check and see if you’re okay, or just to yell at you for being a dipshit, then your friend clocks ’em from behind and you take the car for a nice Spin.

  It’s brilliant.

  Well, it’s brilliant in its simplicity.

  Well, at least it’s simple.

  You gotta give me that.

  * * *

  It was the same cabbie, coming back for another taunt. I almost felt bad for the guy—he had The Sonics in the cassette player and two packs of Camels and a warm can of beer in the glove box. In a different scenario, I think I could have called him “friend.” But this was an emergency, so we left him by the side of the road with a bleeding head and yet another reason to hate Americans.

  For some reason, Randall got to drive. He always gets to drive.

  He insists it’s because he knows how to drive, but I don’t get what that has to do with anything.

  From inside the cab, London was a blur of damp stone and watery halos of light. Tub snapped out directions and Randall barely made the turns. Eventually, the honks, screamed profanity, and streetlights grew fewer and farther between, until we were barreling straight through the black night, our dim headlights cutting out little triangles of road directly in front of us.