The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  The ghost Meryll is gone. The foresight went with her.

  I have no fucking idea what to do.

  I decide on collapsing into a broken little pile.

  It doesn’t seem to matter much. The Faceless who weren’t caught in the blast are running. They scream as they wrestle through the muck and scrabble up the hillsides. The tar men are moving away, too, but glacially and in silence. The only thing moving toward us is this ridiculous stick figure thing, coming up from the woods. It climbs the stage with difficulty, then crawls over to Carey and Randall, still lying unconscious.

  It only has one arm left, and big hunks of its torso are gone. But the face is coming back. It has an eye, some skin, lips.

  “Hey man,” it says to Carey, all junkie casual. “I’m real sorry about all this. After all you did for the cause back in NYC, you’ll be remembered as a saint! But you gotta die before you become a saint, man.”

  Gus wraps his single bony black hand around Carey’s throat, and begins to squeeze.

  I never understood what Gus was, exactly. I mean, I knew the name for things like him—he was a Husk—but all I really knew about them was that they had to die. Now it was like I could see him. Really see him. It was sad, what he was. He was just parts. Just garbage. The remainder of an equation that couldn’t be neatly solved. He was supposed to just disappear when the Flares solved him, but there was junk in his code, and now there are only little bits of him left. He’s trying to make sense of himself, trying to figure out why he wasn’t just dispersed like he was supposed to be. The only thing he can figure is that he was meant for some greater purpose, because he just can’t fathom that he’s an accident. He’s old leftovers, forgotten in the fridge. He worships the Flares, because he doesn’t know they don’t give a shit about him. They’d flush him away, if they even cared enough to bother in the first place.

  All these little pieces. They make the whole make sense.

  I don’t have much strength left in me. Burning out a Flare takes a lot. But I have enough to stand. Carey’s turning blue. Gus’s one arm is shaking from the effort of choking him. I lean close to the burnt space where his ear should be, and I whisper.

  Light pours out from inside of his skull. He screeches like a barn owl. There’s a burst of colors I’ve never seen before. The stage shakes so hard that half of it falls off the sawhorses. And Gus is gone.

  He was just a remainder. And now I’ve solved him.

  That’s something even the Flares couldn’t do.

  TWENTY-SIX

  1978. Purfleet Rifle Ranges, England. Carey.

  Fuck, I’m blind. I’ll have to get a cane and a dog. I don’t even like dogs, always looking at you with all that love and adoration. It’s too much goddamned pressure, living up to a dog’s expectations. Can’t hear much, either. Feels like the first few minutes after a really good show, your ears stuffed so full of guitars you gotta yell right in the face of the dude next to you to be heard.

  My face feels like I put it on inside out this morning. After dropping it in the dirt. And stepping on it a few dozen times.

  Couldn’t see much of anything, but there was a pretty decent shape in front of me. Had some nice lines on it. Kinda wanna fuck that shape, whatever it is. Luckily it turned out to be Meryll, and not Randall … again.

  That’s a long story we’ll get into never.

  “Whaaabbagush?” I said.

  “He’s dead,” she answered. “Gus is dead.”

  Holy shit, she understood me. She really is my soulmate.

  “Whoo! Ahnooitfursht—” I rolled on my side and spat out a solid pint of stale blood and some chunky bits I really hoped were just teeth.

  “I knew it,” I said, this time more legibly. “First time I saw you, I said you were a fucking genius.”

  She stared at me. Through me. Like she was looking at something a mile behind me. It made my balls pull up a little.

  “Hey. Hey! We won, right?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she finally said, and the start of a smile broke through the mask. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

  I smiled back—well, probably two-thirds of a smile at best, now.

  Pop.

  Her eyeball exploded.

  Warmth and wet sprayed my face.

  Meryll fell to her knees, then over on her side. She didn’t move.

  Tub stood behind her, holding a fucking ridiculous-looking pistol. It looked like something a Confederate would use on a Yankee. That kind of gun doesn’t kill people. It sits in a museum. It has a little plaque with a bunch of boring facts under it and it bores the shit out of fourth graders on field trips. It doesn’t kill pretty young girls with fists like hammers.

  She’s fucking invincible. She heals. She gets up.

  She wasn’t getting up.

  “Wh—” I wanted to ask a million questions, but none of them would come out.

  I felt like I was gonna throw up.

  “You can’t let her take too many,” Tub said.

  He sounded tired.

  “They take a Flare,” he continued, practically collapsing onto his cane, “and a little bit of it gets inside them. It starts to eat away. It changes them. They take two Flares, and maybe they start acting weird. They take three, four—maybe they’re not entirely human anymore. They take five, six, and you’ll never stop them. They’re not Husks. They make you dream of Husks. They’re so much worse. You gotta do it right now. Right after they take a Flare, when they’re at their weakest.”

  “Motherfucker,” was the first and last word that came to me. The rest could be said with punches.

  But when I stood up, the world bucked like a stalling motorcycle. I took a knee.

  Tub took a step back. “You think I wanted to? I raised that girl like my own. I put the food on her table, and the beer in her belly. I kept the perverts at The Office off her when she passed out. I brought her tea and stew when she was sick. But a man does what a man has to do, boyo. You’re in this fight now, and it can’t be half-assed, because you best believe your full ass is in the fire. You stay in the fight, and maybe someday you’ll have to make this decision, too. When a thing like Meryll starts doing things a human being can’t, when they start getting that thousand-yard stare, you must put something of significance through their left eye. Do it, or they will do something much worse to you and everyone you love later.”

  I grabbed his knee and pulled, but he just swatted me away like I was an excited dog jumping all over him after he got home.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why not kill her after she took the first angel, then? Why bother playing house at all? Why pull the trigger now?”

  My punches were on the fritz, so I guess we had to go with the last resort: talking.

  “Because she was useful, son. Things like her—they’re the only ones that can kill the Flares. Not to mention the Husks. They’re worth the risk.”

  “They’re … fucking worth it? Messing with her head, toying with her life, and then taking it—just to put out a few fancy lights and kill some immortal hipster dipshit?”

  Tub stabbed his rebar cane into the plywood. Then he did it again. And again. He screamed something—not words. Then he took a minute and made some words instead.

  “You … you’ll see. You stay in this world, and you’ll see. The Flares will take everything from you. Everything. And when that happens, you’ll do anything it takes just to kill a few of the bastards. Some little girl’s life? No matter who she is, that’s a trade worth making. It always was. It always will be.”

  “It … always was?” said Meryll.

  Holy hell.

  Meryll.

  She’s alive.

  She should not be alive.

  Tub went white. Well, he was Welsh. He went more white. Transparent.

  “You’ve done this before?” Meryll’s voice was even and measured. Her hands were still. The twitching hole full of gore in place of her eye was the only thing on her that quivered.

  “Of course,” Tub said, a
nd he laughed a little bit. A laugh you’d give when your car wouldn’t start, so you had to take bus, then it started pissing down rain once you got to the stop. Then the bus blew right by you, spraying you in filthy street water as it went. That kind of laugh. “I wonder if it’s me that’s off, or the number…”

  “The number?” Meryll asked.

  “The caliber of the bullet. Well, I guess it’s more of a ball. .36. It’s a significant number. It always worked on the other girls. It’s gotta be me. I didn’t care enough.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

  “It’s how you kill things like this,” he said, and the look he gave Meryll was sad, angry, and scared all at once. Like she was a beloved family pet that had gone rabid. “The weapon’s gotta be significant, sure, but the person using it has to care. They have to love the mutation. It’s the same way she kills the Flares. The bloody lights take all those gooey sentimental bits away when they turn you. You have to give some of it back—anger, sadness, love, something human—to destroy them. A thing like her, once she takes enough Flares, the same rules start to apply. Ah hell, it’s my fault, I know it. I’ve just done this too many times. I’m burnt out. I don’t care enough to kill them anymore…”

  “How many?” Meryll said. “How many other girls before me?”

  “Who cares?” Tub said, and spun faster than I’d ever seen him move. His rebar cane whistled through the air, but that’s all it did.

  Meryll stood a mere inch beyond the strike. She had barely moved. Just enough.

  She stepped forward, like she was moving up a place in line at the post office, and touched Tub’s hand. A spasm went through him. He dropped the cane. His spine bent so far backward it snapped. A sound like Chinese firecrackers. His face was looking straight at me, but upside down. His eyes rolled back in his head. He opened his mouth and a thin black liquid trickled out from the side. Light—pure and without color—poured from his eyes.

  But he didn’t disappear.

  He just bent even further, completely in half. The back of his head rested against the backs of his heels. A bouquet of bones sprouted from his stomach, spraying blood. The bones snaked upward in a dozen directions, before articulating and bending downward like spider’s limbs. They continued growing until they dug into the wood. The rest of Tub’s body grew progressively more limp as the bones expanded, until he was just a sack of soggy flesh. The bone legs hit solid ground, and took the weight of his body into the air. Tub hefted up and swayed there, below the bone-spider, just a wad of pendulous weight hanging like a human ball sack.

  He opened his mouth and screamed.

  I peed. So much.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  1978. London, England. Meryll.

  What did I do? Oh Jesus god damn what the hell did I just do?

  I only touched his hand. I didn’t mean—

  How could I have even—

  This isn’t happening.

  Tub shot me, and I’m dying right now. I’m hallucinating as the blood leaks out of my brain.

  The thing that used to be Tub scuttled toward Carey, its thin, bloody bone legs clacking across the plywood. The limp wad of skin that used to be Tub’s body quivered with the movement. Somehow, he was still able to scream, a high, terrified, and unceasing wail. He would scream until he was out of breath, take in just enough air, and start screaming again. Carey rolled backwards out of the way of the charge, but not quickly enough. One of the bone spears stabbed through the back of his jacket, pinning him to the plywood stage.

  I didn’t mean to do that to Tub. I just wanted to knock his teeth in a little bit, maybe castrate him—nothing like this. But when I touched him, it was like with Gus: He just made sense to me. He didn’t want to hurt those girls—the others like me; that was true. But he did it anyway. He got good at it. He spent a lot of time learning how to play them, how to twist their emotions, how to act the father figure while still convincing them they were lonely. By the end, they’d do anything for him. I would have done anything for him. I did do anything for him. And Tub was ready to throw me away. He set out the traps, pulled the girls in, sucked them dry—and then he killed them.

  Like a spider.

  That was the last thing I thought when I touched him, just before he started changing.

  I finally realized that I was just standing there, mouth open, staring uselessly as Tub squatted over Carey and drooled something black from his mouth. It dripped onto Carey’s shoulder and started sizzling through the leather of his jacket. He twisted away from it and managed to get the arm out of the sleeve, but the other was still stuck to the stage.

  He was going to die, because of me.

  Maybe if I touched Tub again, and I thought of how he was supposed to be—his gray beard, his round chin, his ribs sticking out of his sweater—I could undo this.

  I ran forward and grabbed the nearest bone-leg. It was slick with gore and warm to the touch. There was something running down the underside of it. It flexed when the leg moved. Tendons, I guess. I tightened my grip and I thought of the Tub I knew. I tried to put all the anger and betrayal out of my mind. Just Tub and those terrible eggs he made on Sunday. Just Tub and his weirdo jazz records. Just Tub and his smell, like cherries and tobacco.

  The bone slid out of my hands, cutting through my palms. It was sharpened at the tips. Then it raised up and lashed out, cutting a deep gash through my arm. I fell. I screamed. I looked around for help, and caught Randall’s eye. I wished I hadn’t.

  That stupid sense of relief I had when the foresight hit me—“he likes me!”—that was gone.

  He looked at me like I was a pile of sentient dog shit that had just knocked on his door, trying to sell him magazine subscriptions.

  Fine. I’ll save your friend’s ass on my own then, jerk.

  The Tub-spider had its front two legs raised, poised to stab down through Carey’s back. Most of its weight was shifted rearward, balancing precariously on a piece of plywood on the end of a sawhorse. I kicked a boot out and caught one of the spider’s legs, throwing it off balance just enough to get its attention. It started to turn toward me, but there were no joints left in Tub’s actual body. The legs had to rotate that limp bag of face all the way around just to see what had hit it. It took a few seconds, and that was all I needed. I hopped up and stomped down, right on the edge of the plywood. It bounced and jumped off the sawhorse. Both of us went tumbling into the dark, cold mud beneath the stage.

  There were little sparks flitting around in the black. Dizzy. I must have hit my head on a rock or something on the way down. I jumped back up and reached for the stage, but it was like being in the ocean at night: I couldn’t figure out which way was up. I kicked off of a lump and fell on my side. Bog in my mouth. Tasted like shitty Scotch. My hands just sunk when I tried to push myself up. I could hear the Tub-spider scrabbling around behind me. Something scraped against my boot and made my foot feel wet. Blood, probably.

  A thin crack of weak light from above. No time for second thoughts. I jumped for it. My palms slapped wood. Something was pulling on my boot. I pulled back. But I had no traction. I was sliding, back into the dark with that thing.

  That thing I made.

  Then there was Carey. I’d never been so glad to see his goofy face, all wrong angles and bumps. He was on all fours, shrugging back into the sleeve of his shredded jacket. He looked up and saw me. I smiled. I held out my hand.

  He didn’t take it.

  I reached out for him—

  I’m right here, jackass. Be a gentleman and help a lady up.

  He threw himself backwards and crab-walked frantically out of my reach.

  None of that old, thinly veiled teenage-boy lust left in his eyes. Before, he’d always looked like he wanted to toss me on the ground and fuck me, every single second we’d been together. It had gotten kinda creepy, to be honest. But it was better than this.

  Now he looked at me like I was a leper.

  From below, the spider pu
lled. From above, there was no help. I slid backwards. My fingertips pulled up splinters from the wood. Then they lost their grip entirely, and I went backwards into the pit.

  * * *

  Shit. Shit! You rotten-ass coward, what the hell are you doing?

  Meryll was counting on me, and I couldn’t even put out a hand. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I swear. I wasn’t even thinking about what she did to Tub, and the possibility of her turning me into, like, a testicle-scorpion or something with her touch. I just got up, and then she was there trying to grab me—a mysterious hand reaching out to grope my face—so I backed away. If I’d had time, I would have saved her.

  I would save her.

  It’s not too late.

  I crawled to the edge of the hole that Meryll and the bone-spider had fallen in. Couldn’t see a damn thing.

  Wait, no—movement!

  Shit! Movement!

  I ducked just as a jagged length of bone speared the place where my head had been. I laid on my belly and tried to shuffle backwards. I didn’t get far before the legs started appearing. Slick red shafts of bone coming up from the darkness, moving with that slow spider grace. They spread out to every side of the hole and hefted. Tub’s withered body eased into view, his mouth still screaming, his eyes rolled back in his head, looking at nothing.

  Shit. Shit. Shitshitshit—

  I sang a little song to myself, and every lyric was “shit.”

  The spider spread its legs wider and lowered its body, getting ready to pounce.

  I pushed off the stage and tried to run, but I tripped over something.

  A rusty brown length of rebar, with a round bit of concrete at one end.

  Tub’s cane.

  “Hey, Tub,” I said, gripping the shaft in both hands. “I got something of significance for ya.”

  I dove straight into the hole, right below the bulk of the spider. I thrust the cane out in front of me as I fell, and it sunk deep into Tub’s withered, hanging face.

  I hit bog with a sound like squeezing an empty mustard bottle. I awkwardly shifted around on my back and looked up through the stage. I could only see the spider above me as a silhouette, barely distinguishable from the cloudy night. It twitched and spasmed, made that sound like somebody trying to scream after getting the wind knocked out of them. Then something that felt like a wet garbage bag full of ham hocks fell on me.