The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  I gagged and swore and pushed Tub’s mangled body off me. I retched into the muck for a bit, then felt around for Meryll.

  If she was hurt, we’d get her help. If she was dead, we’d get her a proper burial. If she was fine, we’d make out.

  But she was none of those things. She was just gone.

  “Hey,” a voice called from above. I could see the outline of Randall’s dipshit face peering down after me. “Are you spider food, or what?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  2013. 1.7 Miles Off of Unnamed Rd., Puebla, Mexico. Kaitlyn.

  I’ve never been in one of those sensory deprivation tanks, but this is how I picture it: not cold, not warm. Aware that you’re floating, but unaware of the water you’re floating in. My sense of self is blurred—the surface of my skin feels indistinct. At once it’s here—so close—and there—so far. I’m spread thin, diluted by the water. Above me, the night sky is full of stars. An impossible number of stars. There’s nowhere on Earth you can see this many. There’s more light than dark. But it isn’t pretty or romantic. There’s something up there that scares me.

  The ocean is still. No waves, no sound. I move my hand—at least, I think I move my hand—but even that causes no ripples.

  I know what comes next. I’ve had this dream before. Something stirs in the dark waters beneath me. Hundreds of feet, thousands of feet—thousands of miles?—below. The stillness begins to give. The water swells around me. All around me, as though something the size of the ocean itself is coming up.

  I know this ocean goes on forever.

  Whatever lies beneath must go on forever, too.

  And it sees me. It’s coming for me.

  I wait an eternity. The thing in the water is so far away, but it moves fast. Time crawls, but then you look back on how much of it has passed, and it seems like an instant.

  The waters around me break. They slosh steadily at first, then grow chaotic and violent. My diluted body is tossed around, folded on itself, spread apart, and whipped into a frenzy. I used to get scared at this point. I knew the thing from below was close now, that it was almost here. But I’m not scared anymore. Or, rather, I’m more scared of the stillness. Of it continuing how it is, forever, and my body slowly merging with the ocean until there’s nothing left of me. Most of all, I’m scared of living another minute under those cold, cold stars.

  Whatever is coming up from beneath me, at least it’s not the stars. In fact, as it gets closer, something strange seems to happen. The stars twinkle. Their light was always steady and unbroken, but now they flicker. Some even go out. The waters are rising all around me now, lifting into the air. Physics dictates that they should be pushed out of the way as whatever this massive thing is emerges. But there’s too much of it. It’s too late, and there’s nowhere for the water to go. Together, the water and I are flung toward the sky. As we lift into the air, the stars drift apart. No, not drifting. They’re moving away from me, like a school of fish separating around a shark. They’re afraid of the thing in the water, but they’re also afraid of the water. I am the water, though. And now, I understand, so is the thing.

  We break through the sky.

  We are in another place. A place that is not this place, as impossible as that is to understand. Just thinking about it makes my brain hurt, but if I don’t think about it, it makes perfect sense. This place that is not a place is nothing like the place that I know. The angles don’t work. Time doesn’t flow. I try to move, only to find that I’ve already moved; I stop moving, only to find that I’m just starting the movements. This is a place made of places. A billon places stacked on one another, woven through each other and fused together to make a new place. A shape like a pyramid that is also a sphere. And all throughout this place there is light. Writhing tubes of cold starlight that snake through the other places, burning wherever they touch. There is no central hub where they meet, just an endlessly dense network of tentacles, twitching like living lightning. They grip the edges of the pyramid-sphere and they pull, twist the shape until it buckles and turns inside out. Now it’s a sphere that is also a pyramid, and the other places shake. Some of them disappear entirely, only to be replaced by new places. But the light survives.

  It sees me now. The tentacles stretch in my direction. They whip and writhe, grope and lash, and are almost on me. I try to shy away, but I only find myself back where I started. I realize I’ve already left, even though I’ve always been here. A fork of light branches off the nearest tube. It touches my leg. It’s in my veins. It’s burning through my synapses. It’s like winter air, emanating from my bones and out toward my skin. I try to scream, but I already was screaming, and I will never stop.

  Then the light pulls back. It snaps back and forth in a way that reminds me of a wounded animal. There’s something dark creeping up the forks from where it touched me, making its way down the central shaft, joining the others, and spreading.

  Corruption.

  The light is making a noise, or it always had been, and I just never thought to hear it before. It sounds like static. It sounds like waves. It sounds like screaming.

  …

  I jolted awake, which was a bad idea. It felt like somebody had replaced my bones with tin foil. There was something in my mouth, the texture of cottage cheese and the taste of undercooked steak. I spat out a wad of coagulated blood. I looked at the red chunks oozing down the front of my shirt, and threw up.

  More blood.

  What happened? Was there some sort of accident, or…?

  I was squinting into a bright light. My eyes must have turned supersensitive, because it gave me an instant headache. And that sound, like a superhighway running between my ears.

  I must have been hit by a car. The lights, the sound, the blood … it makes sense. I remember being in one with Jackie, and we were going to—

  Oh, shit.

  Jackie? What have they done with her? I can’t see her anywhere.

  I focused on the light. There were layers upon layers inside of it, shifting independently from one another. The parallax made me nauseous, but it was the sound—that crackling chorus—that sent me over the edge.

  I ignored the pain and thrashed in place, only to remember that my hands were pinned.

  That’s right. Still tied to the old tree where Marco started cutting me. God, it felt like that went on for hours. I lost so much blood. I remember everything fading and being kind of grateful that it was all over. Not just the pain, but the pressure, too—nobody could say I hadn’t done my best to stop him. But he won. I was dead, and it was all okay.

  But now I wasn’t dead, and it wasn’t okay.

  The angel wasn’t coming for me, so I guess it still couldn’t see me. That was a break, at least. But this time Marco and the Unnoticeables were ready for it. Two Unnoticeables were already untying my feet, a third working on the bonds that held my wrists. I tried to focus on them, but all I got was a blurry sketch of generic features and the urge to look elsewhere. They got my ankles loose first, and didn’t bother holding me down. Either they thought I was dead, or too weak to fight, or maybe just had nowhere to run to. Maybe they were right on all accounts.

  The one behind me finished untying my hands.

  I had meant to kick the one on the left in the face, then flee while they were disoriented. Instead, I managed to bump one in the nose with my head as I fell, limp, into their waiting arms. She said, “Ow, damn,” and then got on with the process of dragging me toward the light.

  The last time I met an angel, I got pulled inside of it—into a null space where my physical body didn’t really exist. I found a weakness in there, and I killed it, but it took everything I had. It felt like I was using muscles I never knew existed, and had never exercised. It was like trying to do push-ups with my tongue. I couldn’t even do a regular push-up right now. Seriously, I was trying. I was trying to push off the ground and kick the Unnoticeables away from my feet, but all I managed was to weakly claw at the dirt. I left five thin, snaking t
racks in the dust with my right hand, six with the other.

  Somebody grabbed my shoulder and flipped me onto my back.

  When I was thirteen years old, I wanted nothing more than to fuck Marco Luis until my hips disintegrated. I wasn’t even really sure what “fucking” was—I had the talk and everything, but it was all such a distant concept, unrelated to my actual life. All I knew was that I wanted him on top of me, and that it would be warm. When I had those thoughts, Marco would smile at me with that trademark smirk of his, raising just one side of the mouth—the side with the dimple. It was a smile that said, “I know what you want, girl, and if you’re real good, maybe I’ll let you have it.”

  Now the real Marco was giving me that same smirk. It was still saying the exact same things, actually—I just finally understood what “it” was, and I no longer wanted it.

  “Hey, chica!” he said, full of inappropriate pep. “The big day’s finally here, huh?”

  He winked at me.

  I tried to tell him what he could do to himself and how hard, but I mostly just drooled blood on myself. I reached out to try to slap him. The blow was so feeble as to be laughable, but Marco still jumped back about six feet.

  What?

  “You should have her restrained,” he said, his voice gone flat. “She should not be able to move. She should not be able to touch me.”

  The Unnoticeables immediately dropped to their knees and seized my forearms. I actually did manage to laugh a little, then.

  What am I gonna do, weakly paw him to death?

  “Is it time,” Marco asked, but there was nothing in his intonation to mark it as a question.

  “Might as well be, yeah,” answered a female voice.

  Meryll was standing a few feet from the angel, just beside the raging fire. She glared down at her own nails with studied disinterest.

  “I can’t see the girl, but I figure that if you feed her to the Flare first, I can take them both at once.”

  “Take…” Marco echoed.

  I saw a flash. Like a single out-of-place frame in a film reel.

  “What do you mean, ‘take,’” he said. “That is not in the ritual. We have performed the rites to summon a Tool of the Mechanic here so that it may solve her. To give back what she has stolen.”

  There it was again. Just a flicker of an image, and then it was gone. But I saw it clearly that time. There was another set of events happening, overlaid on these ones, like tracing paper over a photograph.

  Here: Marco and Meryll on either side of the fire, three Unnoticeables hoisting me toward the ball of light hovering between them.

  There: Marco had Meryll by the throat, the Unnoticeables were scattered, frantically looking for something. I wasn’t in the picture at all.

  “I mean ‘take,’” Meryll said, “as in absorb. It’s what I do. Don’t worry—the Flare will, uh … live on in me or whatever. Think of it like this: We’re just collecting forces. Putting the girl’s and the Flare’s powers in the same basket as mine.”

  “You mean to do what that thing did,” Marco asked, pointing at me.

  He was always still. No shuffling, no blinking, no breathing. But he was especially still now.

  “I … bloody hell,” Meryll said, and she ducked just as Marco snapped into motion. She was fast, but he was faster. He had her by the throat before I could blink.

  Flash. The same picture. But without me in it.

  I could feel where everybody was looking. No, it was more than that. I could feel what everybody was aware of. The three holding me were focused entirely on the angel. They were staring into its depths, watching the fractals turn in there. Marco was focused on Meryll. Meryll was focused on Marco. Nobody was focused on me. Nobody was aware of me. And if nobody is aware of you, who’s to even say where you really are?

  I felt myself move sideways, and I was gone. I was still here, in the same reality, but I was now outside of theirs: The Unnoticeables were holding nothing. I was laying on the ground between them, watching them move in slow motion. I rolled to my side, hacked until my vision went blurry, then crawled toward the fire. I was hoping I’d just missed something. Maybe Jackie was lying down and I couldn’t see her. But no, I couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Maybe they’d let her go, now that they had me. Maybe she was running down to the road right now to get help. Maybe she’d learned how to fly with the power of positive thinking and was already halfway to Neverland.

  It was denial, but denial keeps you going.

  There was only one thing I could do. It was madness. It would certainly kill me. But maybe it would kill them, too. Maybe that would be good enough.

  Just a few more feet and I could reach the light. But I had to crawl right past Meryll and Marco first. Marco’s face was blank. His fingers dug into Meryll’s throat so viciously that they broke the skin. Meryll had one combat boot firmly planted in his groin and both of her hands wrapped around his wrist, just trying to support her own weight. They were barely moving right now, but how long would this last? I had no idea what I did to get here, to this other place, and no idea when or if I’d be kicked back out.

  Just a few more feet.

  I could almost reach the angel. My fingertips brushed its surface. It was cold and sharp, like winter wind. I pushed, and the surface yielded. Then broke. The world rushed into the angel like I’d just poked a hole in the bottom of a pool. I went with it.

  …

  White.

  Noise.

  White noise turned up to 11.

  I was lost in sunshine that gave no warmth. It was just like the last time—a pervading, blinding void that was at once lukewarm and freezing—but this time I saw the trick. This place wasn’t empty. That’s what I thought the first time I went inside an angel. I thought it was the purest, most unbroken emptiness that I had ever seen. But it wasn’t empty at all. It was just overly dense. There were fine, twisting strings everywhere. They were made out of light, each independent but also interlaced with one another. A million-dense thread count woven into infinity. They were communicating something—information flowing to, or from, a place that I couldn’t see. I got glimpses of it when I unfocused my eyes and managed to watch all the strings at once. But it felt like an ice pick in the back of my neck when I did it. My eyes immediately focused and my thoughts shunted elsewhere, like the sight had triggered a self-defense mechanism inside my brain. But each time I looked at the whole picture, I came away with a little detail. Just tiny, unrelated pieces.

  There was information that burned my tongue, information that shook my bones and pulled at my tendons. I had no framework to even start to comprehend it. My brain kept trying to knock it away, the oscillation of a star twenty-eight billion light years from here—gone. The shifting rift pattern between seventeen dimensional barriers. Gone. The infinitesimal amount of heat radiating from a colony of mold on an asteroid in—no, gone. The only things that stayed in my head were the human parts. The stuff I could find a way to relate to.

  There was a string in here from a girl named Luz. The person this angel used to be. The person this angel killed to become what it is. There were little shreds of her left all over.

  I saw the same sorts of things inside the first angel. I found a little piece of humanity in there, all tiny and sad and worn. The number six. It got to me—what they do to us. They simplify us, like all of our complications are things not worth having. Like our problems aren’t really a part of us. And it pissed me right the hell off.

  Back then, I made a fist. It wasn’t really a fist—I don’t think I even had hands—but the idea of a fist. I felt the power surge through my extra finger, and I smashed my way out of the angel from the inside.

  I tried to find that fury again. I curled my imaginary fingers and I swung. Again and again. It was like punching through molasses. Like trying to run in a dream. I had no anger left in me. Just … exhaustion.

  Good god, I want my bed. I want my twelve inches of memory foam. My two inches of temper
ature-sensitive pillow top. My well-washed flannel sheets. My down comforter and goose-feather pillows. My window fan blowing cool air over my too-hot body. My bed. My fucking bed. Filling the whole room. Every tiny inch of it. Everywhere I roll—and I do roll; I curl up sideways, I lay spread-eagle, I turn upside down and prop a leg up on the wall, I take every inch of that space—is part of my bed.

  I miss it with every atom. And I just want to go to sleep.

  I swung again.

  Nothing happened.

  I don’t sink, I don’t float, I don’t sit, I just exist—all alone in this white space, just watching incomprehensible information slip by.

  The pattern solar radiation makes as it strikes the dust of a nebula in a galaxy that nobody has ever seen and will never name.

  The sound that entropy makes.

  A brick.

  What?

  A memory flitted by, chilly but happy. Fireworks and the smell of rain. A bench by a well, and two little kids throwing rocks at each other.

  I chased the memory, try to find the person it came from, but she’s scattered, and most of her is gone.

  Pieces.

  A brick.

  A brick in the well. It has initials carved into it.

  LG + JH.

  I reached out and wrapped my fingers around the brick. I worked them into the gritty spaces between the bricks. I dug away the mortar—so old it crumbled at my touch. I worked the brick back and forth, a steady grinding sound like teeth on teeth, until I drew it out.

  The brick atop this one fell into the empty space. The brick beneath it crumbled. The bricks to the side faded. The strings of information unraveled. The white gave way—slowly, like it feared the dark, but it gave. It faded like a Polaroid developing in reverse.

  And I was left standing on a mossy patch in a Mexican forest. It was humid as hell. Breathing felt like snorkeling. There was a bonfire to my left that had passed “out of control” an hour ago. It had jumped the bounds of its little pit and spread to a nearby bush. The little dry patches of grass all around it were aflame. There were shadows out there, just beyond the light of the fire. Some were dancing. Some were fighting. Some weren’t human at all. Just shadowy humps, groaning and drifting in the dark.