The Empty Ones (23 page)

“I swear on your mother's grave, old man, if we get there and she's already butchered, I'm going to—”

“You'll do fuck-all, son,” Tub said. “I could take you on my worst day, half drunk and with one leg—which is good, because that's precisely what I've got.”

I eyeballed his cane. There were dark brown stains all across the tip. I wouldn't have put money on them being rust.

“Relax,” he said, and waved the rebar at a passing car. It didn't slow. He took a swing at the car as it passed.

“How the hell am I supposed to relax? They got Meryll!”

“Well, yes.” Tub tapped over to the wall of a shuttered newsstand and leaned heavily. He was still sweating, even though it was freezing out here. “Did you think she was gonna jump in there and
slap
the Husks to death?”

“I…”

Yes, that is exactly what I pictured. Meryll delivering huge, reeling, superpowered backhands to Gus's stupid horse face until it inexplicably exploded.

“Ha!” Tub slapped his own leg, then winced. “You told me yourself you boys hit one with a train. What's a strong right cross gonna do?”

“You said we could kill them!”

“We can, but not like that. The only way I've seen a Husk go down is when they get caught up in the blast from a dying Flare.”

“An angel?” Randall wrangled up like a cowboy that had just rode twenty hard miles, bareback, on a metal horse. “You can kill it?”

“
She
can,” Tub said, “and has. Twice already. But she's gotta get taken first. The Husks—they use people like Meryll to summon Flares. Well, the Husks
think
she's like them, anyway. But she's got a surprise in store. They take her and do their little ritual, the Flare shows up, then boom: Anybody standing within the blast, including Husks, gets turned into a bloody puddle.”

“There's got to be a better way to do that than just letting Gus grab her off the street,” I said. “What if he'd just killed her?”

“Well, this isn't Plan A, obviously,” Tub said. “We were hoping to tail them back to the ranges, do this on our terms. But one takes what one is given.”

“We? She was in on this?” I asked.

Randall waved at a cab. The driver slowed down, waited for Randall to jog up, then drove away. He flipped a backward peace sign out the window.

Tub laughed.

“You try to stop the girl when it comes to killing Flares. Hates the damn things like a Welshman hates the English. Or the Scots. Or other Welsh, for that matter.”

“Wait,” I said, mentally scrolling backward. “What's ‘the ranges?' You know where they're going?”

“Most likely,” Tub said. He sneered as yet another cab drove by us. I looked closer, and noticed the cabbie looked familiar.

The motherfucker was circling the block, just taunting us. That's … almost great. You really gotta respect that degree of spite.

“The bloody Faceless are everywhere,” Tub continued. “You've seen 'em in the tunnels, in the clubs, in the streets. It'd be impossible to tell which of their hidey-holes Gus crawls off to, normally. But now that he's got Meryll, well, he'll be needing a ritual site. The Purfleet rifle ranges. Used to be an army range, just outside of London proper. Now it's just a swamp. Gotta be there. Boffins have found remains dating back to the Middle Ages at Purfleet. Sacrifices, by the looks of things. Mutilated and…”

“The fuck is a boffin?” Randall interrupted.

“A researcher, or an academic,” Tub answered. “Smart folks. Though maybe not as smart as they think. See, they believe Purfleet was a druid site.”

“And you know better?”

“Druids weren't much into human sacrifice, by all accounts,” Tub said, “and most of the corpses they recovered were deformed in some way. Extra fingers. Sixth toes.…”

I put it together. Though I sure as hell didn't like the implication.

“We've got to get there,” I said.

“We're bloody well trying, aren't we?” Tub said.

Randall sighed.

“What?” I asked.

“We're gonna have to do a Sit 'n Spin, aren't we?”

I smiled.

“Yes, Randall,” I said, “and after that sucker punch earlier, guess who's doing the sitting?”

*   *   *

The Sit 'n Spin goes like this: You find a car going slow, but not too slow. Ideally it's rainy or foggy out, so they can't see too well and there's less chance of them stopping in time. London was apparently made for the maneuver. When the car gets close, somebody jumps in front, tries to go ass-first into the windshield.

Three reasons you want to go ass-first:

You're less likely to break your more important bones.

You're less likely to break the windshield.

It's funny.

That's the Sit. The driver gets out, either to check and see if you're okay, or just to yell at you for being a dipshit, then your friend clocks 'em from behind and you take the car for a nice Spin.

It's brilliant.

Well, it's brilliant in its simplicity.

Well, at least it's simple.

You gotta give me that.

*   *   *

It was the same cabbie, coming back for another taunt. I almost felt bad for the guy—he had The Sonics in the cassette player and two packs of Camels and a warm can of beer in the glove box. In a different scenario, I think I could have called him “friend.” But this was an emergency, so we left him by the side of the road with a bleeding head and yet another reason to hate Americans.

For some reason, Randall got to drive. He always gets to drive.

He insists it's because he knows how to drive, but I don't get what that has to do with anything.

From inside the cab, London was a blur of damp stone and watery halos of light. Tub snapped out directions and Randall barely made the turns. Eventually, the honks, screamed profanity, and streetlights grew fewer and farther between, until we were barreling straight through the black night, our dim headlights cutting out little triangles of road directly in front of us.

“Stop!” Tub said, and Randall slammed on the brakes. I crashed into the dashboard, and felt Tub do the same to the seat behind me.

“What?” Randall said.

“We're here,” Tub answered, rubbing his bruised face.

I looked out the window at nothing. It was dark, sure—but even in the pitch-black, you could tell there wasn't anything around for miles. You could just feel the emptiness. A scraggly tree here and there, picked out by what faded starlight made it through the soggy blanket of clouds.

“There's nothing here,” Randall said. “In fact, I'm not sure there's ever
been
anything here. I think we left the damn universe. You're sure this is the spot?”

“It is,” Tub said, stepping out of the cab. His hip crackled like Chinese fireworks.

Me and Randall got out after him. The open air smelled like a basement. Not one of those nice ones from the magazines with shag carpeting and a pool table, either. One of those shady, forgotten, cobwebbed “I'm certain there's something under the stairs that's gonna reach out and grab my ankle” kind of basements.

“This place sucks,” I said.

I'm always so much more eloquent in my head.

Tub grunted approval. He pointed at something with his cane. I gave it a minute, and little lights picked themselves out of the darkness. Either small, or impossibly distant.

“There's no road out that way, is there?” Randall said, but he already knew the answer.

*   *   *

I do not recommend walking through a swamp in a pair of Chuck Taylors. If you absolutely have to, though, I highly recommend taping up the tears in the sole first. If you can't do that, I at least recommend wearing socks.

I was following zero of my own recommendations.

“How you doing?” Randall said, somewhere out in the black.

“Fine,” I snapped. “I'm just over here foot-fucking a mound of rotten pudding. How about you?”

Randall laughed.

Tub hushed us.

I could hear it now. I thought the low chattering was birds at first. But as we grew closer to the noise, I could start to pick out an occasional voice in the static.

Happy yelling.

An angry bark.

A sharp, short burst of laughter, abruptly silenced.

We crested a small, soft mound of something. I tripped on a less-soft mound of something else, and fell onto a series of hard somethings. I crawled past them and reached the top of Mount Whatever. There were two silhouettes ahead of me, outlined against the background light.

If they weren't Tub and Randall, what was I going to do? Fight them in the pitch-black? Run? I couldn't even fall down properly. I sidled up alongside them, elbowed one in the ribs, and half waited for death.

“Ow,” said a voice. Luckily it was Randall's.

I started to say something, but he shook his head. The fact that I could see the gesture at all told me something had changed. I looked below us and saw blobs of fire, suspended in the air, surrounded by hollow, ghoulish faces. A series of barrel fires, people clustering around them. Their faces registered as normal, if you weren't paying attention. If you tried to pay attention, you were rewarded with what felt like the start of a migraine, and a blurry smear of nonfeatures.

The Unnoticeables were having a party.

They were milling around in tightly clustered groups, all along a shallow depression between two hills. At the far end, they had a crude stage set up: a bunch of sawhorses holding up some plywood. I've seen dozens of those at shitty outdoor shows upstate. They generally fall over when the band gets too drunk and forgets that they're playing on a set of Lincoln Logs. In the darkened areas, where the light from the barrel fires couldn't reach, the shadows churned. Tar men.

It was too dark to even guess at how many.

A couple hundred Unnoticeables. God knows how many tar men. And at the far end of them, Gus and Meryll, standing alone on that rickety stage.

Meryll was lashed to a branch halfway up a massive old tree at the back end of the stage. Gus had his back to me, but I could tell it was him. You know how you can instantly pick out somebody you love from a crowd, even if you're not really looking? Turns out I can do the same thing with somebody I hate.

It was too dark, and they were too far away to make out details, but by the way Meryll slumped against that tree—like a boxer who's spent the last ten rounds losing—she was in rough shape. Gus had something in his hands. Long, curved, and off-white. Bone? He reached out to Meryll with whatever it was, and ran it down her face.

I could hear her scream like she was next to me.

The crowd cheered.

“Was this in your fucking plan?” Randall asked Tub.

He didn't answer, just ground his teeth.

Gus yelled something to the crowd, but I couldn't hear it over the hooting and catcalls from the Unnoticeables. I got the sense that it was a question, and the crowd responded in the affirmative. He turned back and cut Meryll again with the bone. She just shook this time, still in shock from the last swipe, unable to get the breath to scream.

The question wasn't whether or not we were going down there. We were going down there. The question was: How many of those assholes could we take down before they kill us?

Then I thought of a better question: What around here is flammable?

 

EIGHTEEN

2013. Tulancingo, Mexico. Marco.

“… it's about family,
esse,
” this thing says. “It's about love, y'know? Love from right here.”

This thing thumps the skinny boy's chest. It is a gesture meant to indicate the heart. It is stupid, to think that emotion comes from a pump located behind the rib cage. Emotion comes from human instincts failing to keep pace with evolution. Humans have fear because, long ago, fear kept them alert for predators. Now they fear abstract concepts—failure, embarrassment, being alone—because they think there are no more predators.

They are wrong, of course.

This thing has been talking, even while it reflects on glorified muscles and evolutionary failures. It finds convincing social interaction difficult, but it has long ago memorized this speech. It has used some variation on it at several charity events, one award show, and thirteen dates.

“… and you can't let what's in here,”—this thing points to the skinny boy's head—“get in the way of all you got in
here
.” The chest again.

There are tears in the boy's eyes. He nods. He leans in. This thing scrambles to analyze the cue—is it an attack? This thing could tear the skinny boy apart in seconds. Hook the thumbs into the eyeholes, apply outward pressure to the ocular cavities, and rend the skull in twain—

A hug.

The skinny boy is attempting emotional solidarity through an embrace. After a moment, this thing returns the gesture, because it would be frowned upon to pull the boy's head apart now.

The director yells cut. Its obnoxious trucker hat is soaked. Its sparse, ironic mustache is dripping with sweat. It is apparently a very hot day in Tulancingo. This thing must practice how to appear bothered by temperature. None of them notice the absence of distress now, but one day they might, and then this thing will have to eliminate them before they can disperse that information.

This thing stands. There is motion all around it. Now that they are freed from the obligation of “the scene,” there is real work to do. This thing is looking at nothing in particular. It is just waiting for the other things to complete their functions. This thing is not looking, but it sees anyway.

The prey moves amongst the crowd. It realizes it has been seen. It flees. This thing pursues.

This thing has forgotten that it must appear artificially slow, bounded by the physical constraints of a human's worthless, dysfunctional body. This thing hears the gasps from the assembled gawkers as it rushes through them at speeds they consider unnatural. This thing knocks aside two men, one woman, and a small child to get free of the crowd. It has momentarily lost its prey.