The Empty Ones (17 page)

Mother of fuck.

I looked over at Gerardo for the first time since this all started. Nobody had been paying any attention to him. His face had caved in on itself like sunbaked mud, big black holes where his eyes should be. The skin on his nose hugged the cartilage like Saran wrap. His lips peeled back up above the gums, also receding, showing long, yellow teeth. His clothes, a close-fitting button-up and tight cowboy jeans, were practically hanging off his frame. A tangle of flesh-colored snakes hung from each shirt cuff—his fingers. They already stretched to reach the ground, and were still growing. Sprawling out behind him. Touching, grasping, seizing on nothing. They bent in impossible ways. Dozens of knuckles, one every inch or so, cracked and popped as the fingers writhed senselessly on the filthy concrete.

“God damn it,” Carey spat. “Get on your knees and fight me like a girl.”

Meryll laughed. “I missed you, mate. Seriously, I did.”

Carey feigned floundering, then came up quick, a flash in his hand. Meryll stared down at the three-inch shard of glass sticking out of her belly and sighed. “You got old, Carey,” she said, “and boring.”

“No,” the attendant said, and slapped the flat side of the machete on the countertop. “No no no! You go! You both go!”

Meryll flashed her a winning smile and said, “No worries. I'm going right now. Looks like he might want to hang out for a bit, though.”

She inclined her head toward Gerardo, now basically just cracked skin wrapped around a screaming skeleton, and ten writhing digits, ranging in length from three to twenty feet.

The attendant followed Meryll's gesture, seeing what Gerardo had become for the first time.

“Chinga tu madre,”
she whispered, and the machete dropped from her fingers. It clattered on the weathered laminate.

One of Gerardo's probing fingers had found its way to my shoe. I stared down at it, still paralyzed. My own fingers were in my mouth now. I don't know why—I think I was trying to crawl into myself to get away from this. What looked like it had once been Gerardo's thumb tapped at the rubber soles of my Pumas. It writhed up onto the canvas, past the laces, and up to my bare ankle. It touched my flesh, and I squeaked. The thumb jolted alert. It raised up like a cobra, oscillated about, then slowly settled, pointing toward my calf. It shot out, too fast to see, and wrapped itself around me. The knuckles crackled like Bubble Wrap as it tightened. Pain shot up my leg. My skin bulged and turned purple where it squeezed. The thumb yanked, and I lost my footing. I fell onto a mat of hard, round gumballs and glass. Another yank.

The other fingers had gotten the message. They were all turning to face me. I'm sure I'm anthropomorphizing here—they were just a bunch of fucking fingers, after all—but I swear they looked … curious. Curious, and hungry.

Yank. Yank.

I tried to grab onto something, but the gumballs beneath me were rolling. I may as well have been on ice.

What, were they going to eat me? H-how?

“Finger food,” I said, out loud, and laughed hysterically.

I looked to Carey for help, and saw he wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention. Meryll was carefully picking her way around him, toward the door. He lunged for her ankle and she danced away.

“Sorry about all this,” Meryll said, “but I heard about your little friend and that Flare in LA. I really don't need the competition. Not right now. Ta!”

She paused in the doorway to shake her butt tauntingly, then left. Cans clattered, there was a blaze of natural light from the desert outside, and she was gone.

Another pull. The other fingers were moving now, feeling their way toward me. A wave of crackling, like static. I looked into Gerardo's face, thinking I could plead with him, but there was nobody home. He was still screaming, or trying to. But I guess his vocal cords had withered now, too, because all that came out was a high-pitched hiss. His teeth clacked against one another automatically, like those little windup toys. I couldn't even see his eyes, just the sunken holes where they used to be. His skin had drawn so tight that I could trace every ligament in his jaw. Most of him had just melted away, flowed down to these crawling, tapping finger snakes. While I watched, one of them split at the tip. The split flowed down the length of the finger, and then there were two worms undulating there. Another pulled the same trick. And another, until I stopped counting.

“The machete,” I called toward the counter.

I could only see the underside of the counter from where I lay on the floor. Particleboard, dried gum, cobwebs. I hoped the attendant was still on the other side.

“Give me the machete!” I yelled again.

A face, round and wrinkled like a plum left out in the sun, poked itself over the counter and stared down at me.

“Please,” I said, my voice strangely level. “Hand me the machete.”

The woman's eyes roved down my leg, saw the thumb wrapped around my calf like a boa constrictor, and froze. Her face slowly withdrew.

“No!” I demanded. “The machete! You need to give me the machete!”

Another pull. The nest of fingers was just a few inches away now. They were tapping the concrete, feeling around and shoving the gumballs away. Lunging blindly. Searching for me.

A long, slow scrape. Then another. I looked up just in time to dodge the falling machete. The woman had tipped it over the edge of the counter bladefirst. It nicked the concrete where it hit, and skipped off my forehead.

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to kiss the old woman, or punch her in the neck.

I didn't have time to consider it. I grabbed the black rubber handle and swung. The machete snapped through the meat of the finger more than cut it. Its edge had gone dull. What I thought was blood, I could see now was just rust. It looked a century old, but was probably just a cheap piece of shit the attendant had picked up a few years ago. A small chip of metal flew off the blade where it bit through to the concrete. The writhing mass of fingers reared back, tensed, then angrily scrabbled at the air. They darted out more desperately, now. The nails scratched at the concrete. They caught on the imperfections there and snapped off, leaving bloody slug-tracks where they traveled. I scooted back on my butt and pressed myself up against the counter as hard as I could.

I tapped the secret psychic powers I was always so sure I had—the Force, my hidden X-man mutation, the Harry Potter wizardry left tragically untutored—and phased through the wall behind me.

Well, I
tried
.

Nothing happened.

Damn it all, Jackie, nothing ever happens. You have to entertain the possibility that you might not be an undiscovered superhero. That you might fucking die right here in a gas station in Mexico, strangled by a thousand spastic fingers.

Carey hadn't gotten his footing yet. He was slipping on the gumballs, too angry to take the time to find traction. And, besides, he wasn't heading for me. He wasn't even looking at me. He was trying to get to the door. He was trying to go after Meryll. He was trying to leave me to die.

I gripped the handle of the machete so tightly I could feel that one of the screws wasn't flush. It bit into my palm.

You have to move.

I stood into a crouch, my head still just beneath the lip of the attendant's counter. I took a step. The fingers stabbed at nothing. One had knocked a bag of chips onto the floor and was angrily poking holes in it, smashing Doritos into the concrete. They should not be this fast. They shouldn't be this strong, either. It was like all of Gerardo's muscle had moved into these fingers. What was left of his body stood there, looking like a POW from hell, every joint and bone poking out of his own skin, which was pulled so tightly it split in places. The chattering of his teeth had grown weaker. So had his screaming: just a breathy rasp now, directed at nothing and no one.

But the fingers … they bulged like hot dogs in the microwave. They were flush with blood, veins standing out thick and ropy as they pressed all around themselves, feeling for me.

All but a few.

Some of the shorter fingers—thinner, and with fewer knuckles—were pretty much still. Their tips were unnaturally thick. They bulged out at the ends like fleshy lollipops. Their pads were pressed into the floor, and they quivered slightly now and then, but otherwise didn't move.

I took a step.

The shorter, fatter fingers pulsed. The longer ones, thousands of them, swung toward me as one.

Oh, shit.

I thought back to Kevin Bacon in
Tremors
. What did he do to kill the worms? All I could remember was his butt in those tight cowboy jeans and that old Chinese guy saying “Graboids.”

No, wait—they used a tractor, and dynamite!

Well that's fucking helpful, Jackie. Do you have either of those things?

I didn't have a plan. I probably wouldn't come up with a good one in the next few seconds. So I did the only thing I could think to do, and I ran. It was a mistake. I made it two steps before a dozen long fingers seized my legs so tightly that I instantly lost feeling. I thought the thumb alone was crazy strong—it had sunk into my leg like razor wire. But, together, the fingers were something else. They lifted me like I was nothing and whipped me into the chest freezer so hard that it tipped backward and nearly fell over. All the breath went out of me. I saw little sparkles, fading.

The other fingers were coming now. Some inched like worms, some hopped, others slithered. I looked down, and was amazed to see myself still holding the machete. In all those action movies, that's the first thing to go in times like this—the weapon flies off into the distance, leaving our hero unarmed. Builds drama. But I was holding onto that sucker with a vise grip. My whole hand had gone white with the effort of it.

I swung the blade down and cut through half of the fingers wrapped around my legs. The others recoiled instantly. They waved and pounded at the ground. I swung again at the one closest to me, but only clipped it a bit. Still, the others writhed and grasped in pain.

They didn't just get the blood and the muscle. They got the nerves, too.

I looked at the short fingers, which were feeling the ground for my vibrations. The others had thrown me closer to them. If I was quick I could—

I didn't think.

I jumped, lunging as wildly as I could—not away from, but directly
at
Gerardo's screaming husk, and the squat feelers at its feet. I brought the machete down right across their tips, and managed to cut clean through a few of them before the blade shattered against the concrete.

The whole mass pulsed, then flopped on the ground and writhed slowly. They were still alive, still moving, but senseless and in agony. I ran for the door.

I forgot about the gumballs. I forgot about my numb, bruised legs.

I ate shit into a shelving unit full of Japanese peanuts.

I crawled the rest of the way to the door. To my undying credit, I didn't even start crying until I had it shut behind me.

“Holy shit,” Carey said, his back to me. “Look at her go!”

He nodded down the highway. I could just see a bent brown shape disappearing into the heat waves. The attendant.

“Lady sure can move, give her that,” he said. And he laughed.

He fucking laughed.

“You left me to die!” I screamed.

I tried to stand, but it was all pins and needles.

“Did not,” he said. “I saw you had the machete. Seems like you had the situation well in hand.”

“Fuck you!”

“Did you get it?” Carey asked, and he turned around to face me. He wasn't smiling. His eyes were hard and empty. “Well in
hand
?” he said, again.

My legs were overloaded with sensation. All the fight had bled out of me and I could already feel the giddy, post-adrenaline exhaustion setting in. God help me, but I laughed.

Carey didn't.

“What the hell is your deal?” I asked, too tired—for now—to be angry, though I made a note to be fucking furious with him just as soon as I had the energy.

“She left her,” Carey said, and pointed to the bed of the truck, where Kaitlyn still slept. “Why would she go through all that, and then just leave her?”

“Who was she?” I said. I sat with my back against the door and drummed my heels against the dust to get some feeling back into them.

“Just some chick I used to bang,” Carey said.

“Bullshit! That's not ‘some old girlfriend.' She turned that old Mexican guy into something out of
The Thing
.”

“You know what they say,” Carey said. “Never stick your dick in crazy.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

There would be a reckoning. The son of a bitch had a lot of questions to answer, and he would have to deliver them in between the ceaseless and rapid ball-kicks that I owed him. But for now, all I wanted to do was get the hell away from that gas station, curl into a ball, and sleep in a waterbed made of my own tears.

Carey helped me to the truck. The feeling in my legs was starting to come back, and I wasn't terribly happy about that. Thin bruises wrapped around my calves, already shifting from bright red to deep purple. He propped me up in the passenger seat and hopped into the driver's side. The old truck stuttered, stammered, and coughed to life. We eased out onto the highway.

“Shouldn't we like, cover Kaitlyn up or something? She'll get sunstroke back there, now that the sun is up.”

“No, she won't,” Carey said, with complete authority.

How the hell would he know that?

More questions. But right now I had more important things to do, like throw up out the window and cry until I hyperventilated.

 

FOURTEEN

2013. Tulancingo, Mexico. Kaitlyn.