The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  Marco had released Meryll. He was holding his forearm, which had been snapped in half. Meryll was doubled over on the ground, gagging and clutching her neck.

  I saw another flash. A frozen tableau: Meryll was lying facedown on the ground in a pool of blood. Marco was screaming, terrified, leaping into the flames of the bonfire. In the middle of it all, there was a blank spot, roughly my size and shape—a void in the probability.

  I stepped sideways through the moments, out into the space where nobody was looking, where nobody was aware. The world resumed its normal speed. Meryll got to her feet and tried to run. Her path took her right toward me. Marco grabbed his broken arm at the wrist and twisted it back together. Somebody behind me shouted, “I got her!”

  “Got me, hell,” Meryll said.

  A faceless kid in a black trench coat tried to grab her. She ducked under his arms and uppercut him so hard he flew out of his own shoes.

  She was mere feet away from me, but still couldn’t see me.

  I reached out and grabbed her arm. She jumped and turned, wrenching out of my grasp. She threw a wild punch, and missed by a mile. I shoved her as hard as I could, but she barely moved. I punched her in the side of the head, which felt like it broke my hand. I danced away from her as another blow cut through the air, inches in front of my face. It would’ve taken my jaw off.

  She laughed. “I can’t see you, and maybe that gives you a little advantage. But you sure as shit hit like a girl.”

  Meryll backed away, out of the firelight. I thought about tackling her, then thought about the sound her fist made as it whistled through the air.

  One lucky blow and I’m a vegetable, at best.

  She was going to get away. She was getting away. She was gone.

  I lost again. First Marco, now Meryll—they all just walk away, and I can’t do a goddamned thing about—

  In the shadows about ten feet back from the spot where she’d disappeared, there was a flash and a loud crack.

  Somebody or something was coming this way. It was roughly the size of a man, but all hunched over. Its legs dragged and its posture was all lopsided. Slowly, it emerged into the light: mangled features on a hanging head, big black spiky shoulders. The whole thing drenched in blood.

  Carey had seen better days.

  In his right hand, an antique pistol dangled. Barely. He was trying to raise it again, point it at something behind me. I turned, but there was nothing there.

  Wait … where was Marco?

  There was a small, dark ball near the fire. It quivered and moaned.

  I took a step toward it. It groaned louder. Another step, and it unfolded.

  Marco looked like he was about ten years old and had just seen the bogeyman. His eyes were wide; there were tear tracks through the dust from when he’d buried his face in the ground. Snot poured out of his nose. He was sobbing so hard he’d given himself the hiccups.

  That’s when I realized: There was no blast. When I killed the angel this time, there was no big explosion that took out every monstrous thing nearby. The light just went out—ceased to be—and left Marco unharmed.

  Shouldn’t that make him … less scared?

  I took another step and Marco screamed. He turned and leapt into the bonfire. I lost his details in there; he was just a mad dancing skeleton in the flames, trying to sprint straight through to the other side.

  No, you’re not getting away again.

  Without even thinking, I stepped sideways into that other space and emerged in front of Marco. He was just coming out the other side of the bonfire, already fried to a crisp, his skin gone, his charred muscles pumping as he ran. He didn’t see me, because his eyes had boiled away. He was about to run straight into me, so I stepped aside and held my foot up. He tripped over it and splayed into the grass. He lay still, his fat crackling and popping like bacon frying. He tried to moan, but had no tongue.

  I knew what he was trying to say.

  He was trying to say “please.”

  I pictured one of those strings of knowledge I had seen inside the angel. One of the ones that had slipped right out of my head, because I didn’t understand it. I understood it now.

  I crouched down beside Marco, still whimpering and trying to crawl away from me. The grass burst into flames where his fingers clawed at it.

  I opened my mouth and made sounds I didn’t understand, words that didn’t exist now and maybe never did. The charred sockets where Marco’s eyes used to be lit up. I closed my eyes. The ground shook. When I opened them, he was gone. There was a four-foot-long charred streak in the grass.

  That’s all that was left of Marco. Just a stain.

  Seems appropriate.

  I looked around at the shapes in the dark. They had gathered closer, alerted to what was going on up here by the fire. The angel was gone, they’d noticed that much, and the ones nearest me had seen what I did to Marco. Word was spreading. A few ran. A few others considered it for a moment, and then ran.

  I sat down in the warm grass. I tucked my knees up beneath me and pressed my forehead to the ground. The ground was amazing. It was ground. Just ground. Dirt and rocks. I huffed it. Smelled the earth. Smelled the promise given by that fresh, wet grass. It promised summer days, barbecues, walking dogs.

  It smelled like normal.

  Normal was a thing, now. It was an approachable concept. It was a fucking possibility!

  It was over. Over.

  I looked up and the world was blurry. It looked like everything was underwater. I blinked, and tears ran down my cheeks. I rubbed my eyes. The hunchbacked shape was shuffling toward me.

  “Carey?” I said, laughing.

  No answer.

  “This was Marco,” I said, gesturing at the smoking patch. “He’s gone. He’s really, really gone.”

  He still said nothing.

  I rubbed my eyes harder and blinked a few times.

  There was a weird look on Carey’s face. He looked sad, which was a strange and foreign concept for his face. Even stranger—he looked serious. He was pointing something at me. His hand was shaking.

  The pistol.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I looked behind me again. Nothing. “It’s me. It’s just me.”

  I held my breath. Neither of us moved.

  Then, slowly, his hand dropped to his side.

  I exhaled.

  “What was that all about?” I said.

  “Sorry, darlin’,” he said, “I took a bad beating getting here. I’m just a little confused. Probably got a concussion or six.”

  “Help me up,” I said, and held out my hand for him.

  “Help yourself up,” he said. “I’m barely standing. I’ll just join you on the ground.”

  We found Jackie unconscious in a heap. She had a wicked red welt the shape of a hand on the side of her face. It was already swelling. Carey wouldn’t even help me drag her back to the car. I couldn’t blame him. Even dragging Jackie, I outpaced him dramatically. I lost him in the forest, and had to wait a good five minutes for him to drag himself past the tree line and hobble to the car.

  I had to drive.

  Can you believe that?

  After everything I did, everything I’d just been through, I still had to get in some shitty Volvo, turn on the headlights, and release the parking brake. I even signaled. Force of habit.

  I pulled out onto an empty Mexican highway in the middle of the night. I left the radio off. I rolled the windows down. I drove, and it was good to have such a simple purpose. There were no turns I had to worry about. No directions. No traffic. I was exhausted, but still not tired. I wanted to sleep, more than anything, but I guess I hadn’t earned that yet. Jackie hadn’t woken up yet, but I knew she would. Carey was pretending to sleep, but I knew he wasn’t.

  The trees to either side of me were dark. The old kind of dark. Prehistoric dark. No streetlights had made it out here. No power lines, no houses, no gas stations or minimarts. The only light they got out here was headlights and firef
lies.

  I supplied the former, the forest supplied the latter.

  Fireflies twinkled in the dark like stars.

  Like stars … blinking out.

  “Carey,” I said.

  “Rnh,” he said.

  “I have this dream. I keep having it, over and over again. I get a little farther in the dream each time. In the dream, I’m floating in the ocean, but I think it’s more than the ocean. I think it’s the whole universe.…”

  “Gk,” he said.

  “There’s something beneath me, something bigger and older than the ocean. And there are stars above me, but they’re cold, and I think they hate me. The thing below rises, and it consumes me, and together we rise up toward the stars. But as we get closer, they get farther away. Farther and farther, until they start going out altogether.”

  “Ngrl,” Carey added, “pff.”

  “I think I understand the dream,” I said.

  Carey growled and shuffled in his seat, swiveling his head away from me.

  “I think I know how to kill the angels. All of them.”

  I listened to the engine sputter and pout its way up a hill. I held the pedal to the floor, just trying to stave off entropy. When we reached the top, I eased off the gas and let us coast back down the other side, picking up too much speed for the rickety old car. It tried to shake itself to pieces as we descended.

  “How?” Carey finally said. “How do we kill them?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  1981. Los Angeles, California. Carey.

  I cannot roller-skate worth a god damn.

  Look at all those motherfuckers, gliding about like swans out there. This one white guy with a bright red afro—the asshole actually did a spin. A full spin, all the way around.

  That’s just showing off.

  All I can do is run as fast as possible and try to stay ahead of the inevitable shit-eating. But shit-eating will not be delayed forever. I trip over a fat kid tying on his skates and skid to a stop on the shitty roller-rink carpet. It’s got bright red electric guitars on it, running over white ribbons on a blue background.

  It is ugly as shit.

  Uglier than me, though by the raw feeling on my chin, maybe I just got a bit uglier.

  Some girls laugh at me. That’s normal. I’m used to that. I look up and smile at them, and they laugh harder.

  Good sign.

  I can close this deal, but I need a distraction while I sneak into their hearts.

  I look around for Randall. The last I saw him, he was chatting up some black girl over by the jukebox. They were flipping through each selection, explaining to each other why that particular song sucks. But he and the chick were gone now.

  That lucky bastard. Probably off boning by the Dumpsters.

  The girls are already migrating away from me, to wherever girls go when they’re away from me.

  The population of that place must be fucking booming.

  I grabbed hold of the railing and pulled myself up. I tried to make it look super casual, like I was just hanging out on the retaining wall outside the rink, waiting for the right moment—the right song, maybe—to bust out my spins. I surveyed the crowd. Tried to see if I could spot the drunkest girl with the least self-esteem.

  There was a young chick across the rink from me. She was giving me the eye. Just my type, too. Short black hair with a red streak. Black lipstick, too much eyeliner, a torn-up Sex Pistols shirt hanging off one shoulder, exposing a bra strap. It was purple. And I was in love with it.

  She gave me a little wave.

  Shit. Meryll?

  I jumped the wall and started sprint-running across the rink. It was like Scooby-Doo seeing a ghost—me just running as hard as I could without getting anywhere. A pack of girls rampaged around me, gangbanging me with giggles and elbows. I shoved through them and managed to flail halfway across the rink, when that red afro-ed spinning asshole crashed into me and sent me sprawling.

  When I looked up, the girl was gone.

  God fucking da—

  Whatever. It probably wasn’t Meryll anyway. How many chicks in LA look like her, these days? Punk died three years ago. Now the mall rats were wearing its corpse to piss off their daddies.

  In short: It was a good time to be me. I had cachet. I had potential. I had options.

  I didn’t have Meryll. But I didn’t think about that. Much.

  But I punched red afro in the balls for good measure, anyway.

  Also by Robert Brockway

  Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

  Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

  THE VICIOUS CIRCUIT

  The Unnoticeables

  The Empty Ones

  Kill All Angels (forthcoming)

  About the Author

  ROBERT BROCKWAY lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Meagan, and their three dogs, Penny, Detectives Martin Riggs, and Roger Murtaugh. He has been known, on occasion, to have a beard. You can find more from Robert on his website, www.robertbrockway.net. Or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Also by Robert Brockway

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE EMPTY ONES

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Brockway

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Will Staehle

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-7968-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-6931-8 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466869318

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  First Edition: August 2016