The Empty Ones (14 page)

I can move my legs, but I can't get any strength in them. I prop myself up on my knees, wrap my arms around Kaitlyn's feet, and throw all of my weight into it.

She moves an inch. That's a generous guess.

I should've gone jogging with her. At least once. She asked so many times. She was always saying stuff like, “Hey, let's go for a run instead of rewatching
RoboCop
for the one hundredth time,” or “Let's go hiking instead of drinking margaritas on your roof,” or “Let's go to the gym instead of the hot dog stand,” but no—Jackie digs wieners. Jackie's gonna die for her love of goddamned wieners.

I have moved her maybe four inches.

The tar man is now thirty feet away.

It's moving so slowly, like watching a fat guy swim. That's the worst part. I could mosey, and still outrun the stupid thing, but my legs just will not respond. They get the message. They twitch and stretch, like they understand what I want, but the lazy bastards give up when it actually comes time to follow through.

I pull. I heave. I throw everything I have into it.

Jesus Christ, Kaitlyn, you cannot weigh this much. I am looking at you, and it is physically impossible. Unless your ass is made out of dwarf stars, you cannot weigh this much!

I've moved her, like, six inches. The tar man has advanced another ten feet.

I am going to die in slow motion.

Then something that looks like a giant bat flaps out of the darkness behind the tar man and wraps itself around the thing's head. It's covered in patches and duct tape. It has spikes on its shoulders. It's Carey's jacket. He's somehow gotten behind the tar man and thrown his coat over its head. It seems to be contemplating whether or not it cares about this new development.

Carey takes advantage of the distraction. He runs around in front of the tar man, grabs the part of his jacket that's still over the thing's face, feels around for something in there, and appears to find it, latch on, and yank backwards with all of his strength. There's a sound like duct tape being peeled from the roll, and Carey falls on his ass, holding his jacket in both hands. He looks up at the tar man.

Nothing happens.

At all.

The thing is frozen in place.

Carey shakes his jacket out, and two shiny brass gears thunk into the dust. He looks back at me and gives me a big shithead smile. He is just never going to shut up about this, I can tell already.

“What, no hand jobs for the hero?” he's going to say later, when we get out of this.
If
we get out of this. And once again I'm going to tell him that he looks like he just escaped from the punk rock internment camp and smells like a homeless basketball team.

Oh, but that's all moot. Because here comes another tar man, drawn by all the commotion. I haven't stopped shoving, pulling, twisting, and otherwise uselessly manipulating Kaitlyn's stupidly heavy body. We're maybe a full foot away from where we started, and I'm done. I'm out of energy. I'm hurt and dizzy. Waves of nausea ripple out from my stomach and crash against the backs of my eyes. I'm sweating, and even though the desert still has plenty of lingering warmth, I'm also shivering.

Carey steps around the frozen tar man toward the approaching one, and he pulls out his lighter.

He's just about to throw it when I tell him, “Don't waste it! Look around!” I point to his left.

More tar men have broken off and are pouring in from the side. Carey looks to his right, and sees more of the same. They work more like fluid than animals. Enough start moving one way, and the floodgates open. They all come pouring in.

Carey rapidly displays two looks that I've never seen on his face before. The first is utter and total defeat. The second is something I'd call “thinking,” if I didn't know him better.

He bolts for the Jetta. It's unnecessary. He could have walked over there. There are dozens of tar men, in a huge, rough circle now, slowly closing in on our boulder from every direction. But they're in no hurry. Carey rips off his T-shirt—it's black with a yellow hand displaying a sort of reverse peace-sign, the letters
SLF
across the top—and twists it up real tight. He flips open the gas cap to the Jetta and shoves most of the shirt in there. Then he pulls it out, now soaked in gas. He flips it around and puts the dry end back into the tank, then gets out his lighter. He flicks the flint and it catches on the first try. Carey turns to sprint back toward me and Kaitlyn. Just as he reaches us, he dives, lands on his stomach, rolls, and quickly wraps himself around our bodies, shielding us from the blast.

Which does not come.

I'm staring past his armpit, watching a flaming T-shirt hang from my wrecked car.

“So uh…”—I finally break the silence—“is this cuddle time or…?”

Carey carefully unfolds himself and stares back at the Jetta. The flames have traced themselves up the shirt and into the tank. They're starting to spread across the rear of the car, but it doesn't look like it's going to explode. It just looks like it's going to burn for a while.

“I thought that was going to be way cooler,” he says.

“Nice atmosphere, though,” I say, trying to sound all calm and flippant.

That's me. That's firmly within my funny-girl character to say. It would not be within my funny-girl character to scratch Carey's ugly face and scream and cry and beg the encroaching horde not to melt me and my best friend. That's what I want to do, but it just doesn't seem like “me.”

We watch the fire burn for a minute.

“Can you move?” he finally says.

“I don't know,” I answer, and I try my legs.

They're responding now, just a little. I might be able to hobble away, but …

“I'm not leaving Kaitlyn,” I say.

It surprises me, too.

Is this loyalty, or are you just performing for an audience? Would you sit here and die with her if you were alone, with nobody to judge?

I don't have any answers for myself.

Carey loops one of his arms under Kaitlyn's and drags her to her feet. He motions for me to follow. My legs are overcooked spaghetti, but they get me upright. I put an arm around Kaitlyn's other side, but it's just a gesture. I can't take much, if any, of her weight. I'm leaning against her for balance as much as I am holding her. We start to make our way around the boulder, out of the flickering orange light, and into the darkness of the desert. But it's like I thought—we're in the middle of a much larger crowd of tar men. A few dozen paces away there's a river of black acid, peppered with dully shining brass.

But the boulder is lopsided. It's lower to the ground on the back end. We get Kaitlyn rolled up there, though “we” is being pretty generous. Really, I stand and rest my hand on her hip while Carey, shirtless, all ropy muscle and scars and shitty tattoos, wrestles her off the ground. He pulls me up after her, and together we drag her up as far as the slope would allow. It's not very far, maybe ten feet off the ground. One of those tar men could probably just reach up here and grab us. Anybody could walk right up that little slope and eat our screaming faces.

But they don't.

The tar men that had been closing in on us back on the highway follow our path around the boulder, then just keep going. They merge into the mass of tar men on the far side and shamble away.

“What just happened?” I ask Carey.

“I don't know,” he says. “I don't think they were after us.”

“What are they doing, then?”

“It looks like they're … migrating.”

I ask if we shouldn't make some sort of tourniquet for Kaitlyn's head. Carey says that's a great idea, and waits for me to take off my shirt—he already lost his while performing “acts of stunning heroism.” I tell him I'm not wearing a bra—I don't generally need to; I'm not exactly packing heat—and he says he doesn't mind. I finally convince him to give me his jacket. I make sure there's no tar remnants in it that will burn my flesh off when I slide into it. But it's clean.

Well, that's a relative term. I mean, it's still
Carey's
. But it won't melt my skin. Probably. At least not right away.

Carey tears my
Adventure Time
shirt into strips and ties them around Kaitlyn's forehead, neck, and upper arm. They're soaked through with blood in seconds.

We watch the tar men flow like a glacier toward the horizon. We watch the car burn itself out until it's just a steel skeleton. Like some huge, bizarre turtle died and was picked clean by gigantic vultures. We watch the sky turn from black to clear and blazing blue.

We watch Kaitlyn bleed out onto the rock. It flows down the slope and pools on the ground. We watch the blood stop, and wonder if it's coagulating, or if she's just run out.

 

ELEVEN

1978. London, England. Carey.

Meryll had her own stash, and she was eight beers deep already. I was eight beers more in love with her. She could drink like a fucking longshoreman, and it was literally the hottest thing I had ever seen. All I wanted to do was hold her and feed her beer until we both grew old and died from liver disease, together, in each other's arms.

Shit, I'm getting all sappy here. Head in the game, Carey.

Tub was still talking. I couldn't even process it anymore. There was too much already. Randall had done the smart thing and fallen asleep an hour ago. He was drooling onto his own shoulder.

Here's what I gathered before my attention span hit empty: The angels don't give a shit about humanity. They show up at random, collapse some poor bastard into his own chest cavity, then skip off into space to the planet of celestial assholes, or wherever it is they go. It's the Empty Ones who have forced structure on them. They're some sorta number freaks, like my drunk-ass mom who actually bought lottery tickets using the numbers on the backs of those little slips of paper in fortune cookies. The Empty Ones have developed all sorts of rituals to manipulate the angels. Ceremonies that can summon the bastards to Earth, or even force them to solve specific people. But then there's the big one: Every thirty-six years they conduct a ritual to try to birth a new angel. The problem is, for each angel, there are only thirty-six candidates in all of humanity who qualify for the “honor,” and only one will make the cut.

“You can see this reflected in mythology,” Tub was saying. “Jews called them the Nistarim and believed they were the thirty-six saints whose existence justifies humanity to God blah blah fart Bob's-your-uncle Mary Poppins.”

That's where I tuned out.

But one of those candidates is born with a mutation. An extra digit on their left hand or foot. Most times, this mutant doesn't do a damn thing except maybe die horribly, crushed between some sacrificial gears or melted by a tar man. But if they figure it out in time—if they know what they're doing when the Empty Ones and the Unnoticeables and the tar men come for them—the mutation has the power to fight back.

They almost never figure it out in time.

Tub couldn't even shut up long enough for me to make a move on Meryll. She seemed to be mostly fine now. Her voice was still a little raspy, and there was a massive red handprint across her neck. But, let's be honest: I've fucked girls with worse wounds.

She should be dead, though. Do you think that makes her more or less game to screw around?

“Early Christianity often depicted saints and other holy entities as possessing a sixth finger, or extra toe,” Tub had said. “You can even see it in some depictions of Jesus on the cross such as yadda yadda pip-pip cheerio I'm a fucking beer hog.”

Seriously, the guy grabbed the last six-pack out of the broken television, gave me and Randall one measly beer each, then sat down and drank all of the rest. I mean, yeah, I would've done the same thing if I were him—but I was starting to lose my buzz. You try processing a mountain of crazy guru-yogi crap on the cusp of an early hangover. If you're going to destroy a man's entire understanding of the world, you give him the lion's share of the six-pack. Maybe even chip in for a half rack. Damn.

Something else I picked up before Tub's voice turned into background noise: The mutations all get a kind of Superman gig—stronger, faster, heightened senses, better reflexes—but as they kill angels, they start to take on some of their powers. No idea how much of this to believe, but Tub swore that, way back in the day, one of them could melt people by looking at them. Another knew what was going to happen ten seconds before the event. One of them could even control the tar men. Bet that was a nasty surprise for the Empty Ones. Would've loved to have seen that happen with Gus—his stupid donkey mug going all slack as his cronies turn on him. As they put their acid hands on his skin and melt his gangly frame into a dickhead milkshake. Push their fingers into his eyes, shove their fists down his throat, and burn him from the inside out, like he did to Thing 2 back at our place in NYC. I'd love to see his spine cracked and—

“You all right?” Meryll was looking at me funny.

“Yeah,” I said, shaking myself out of the fantasy.

“You looked pretty cheesed off just then.”

“It's nothing,” I said.

“Nothing, hell—you were punching the air a little bit. You were turning red.”

“What are you all worked up about?” Tub said, draining the rest of the last beer and tossing it into the barrel fire. “I was just getting into pre-Germanic myth cycles.…”

“Jesus Christ,” I moaned.

“Well, no,” Tub said thoughtfully. “That's a tenuous link at best, although there is something to the mutation and the messiah figure in many reli—”

“Stop it!” I stood up and kicked a piece of cinder block. That was dumb. I felt my toes fold up through my flimsy canvas Chucks. “I don't give a shit about cycling myths or pre-Germans. There's only two things I want from you, and you can't give me either.”