The Unnoticeables (28 page)

Randall and I made the platform easily. What few Unnoticeables were still standing were too busy flailing and gibbering back by the train to stop us.

“He is ours!” I heard a familiar, raspy voice proclaim. I tried not to think about its owner.

I helped Randall up the steps and leaned him against a chipped concrete pillar. Thing 1 wobbled in place, mired in the same absent haze as the other punks. She looked so normal without the wig. So …
boring.
When I touched her arm, she instantly whirled on me and scratched half my face off. I swore and spat and called her a crazy bitch, at which point she realized it was me and stuck her tongue between my busted lips.

It hurt like a bastard. I coughed a not-insignificant amount of blood into her mouth.

It was easily the best kiss I've ever had.

When we finally broke apart, she smiled at me.

“I didn't know it was a wig,” was the only stupid-ass thing I could think to say, still muddled by hormones and blood loss.

“What, you thought I was a natural
blue,
idiot?”

Randall laughed and snapped us out of it.

I went around and shook each of the three remaining punk kids. At my touch, one broke into an immediate sprint. She disappeared into the darkness before any of us could get a word out. One started crying, folded into a little ball, and refused to move. We tried to drag him and he nearly clawed our eyes out. Maybe there's something else we could've done, but we didn't. I hope he got out of there okay. The last kid thought we were friends of his college buddies, pulling some elaborate prank. He refused to believe what was happening. Randall spat in his eye and I punched him in the crotch. Twice. The reality of the situation dawned on him quickly.

I pointed up the embankment, and we all started our slow, pained crawl out of that dank hellhole with its gibberish-spouting freaks. We got maybe ten feet before the world lit up like Times Square. It was a lightning strike that didn't fade. A flash so white it stole the color from everything else. I turned and looked right into the face of a tiny star. Which was, oddly, hovering in place about three feet behind me. Something twisted deep inside the light. I don't know that “thing” is even the right word. It was more like an idea—just the very loose concept of sharp edges and absence.

From no direction at all, I could hear stone waves crashing on a glass beach.

From the whiteout area behind the star, I heard Gus's distinct jackass guffaw. It grew and grew into a manic pitch. All the false, detached cool of the dopehead was gone. In its place was utter and complete ecstasy. An unrestrained glee you'd only normally hear from a little girl waking up to find a pony beneath the Christmas tree.

We had been through too much, too quickly. There's only so much fear you can experience in such rapid succession before it all gives way to numbness. I had used up all my terror in those early days with the tar men. I had been wary of the Unnoticeables. I had been sickened by Gus and the business with the gears. But if you had asked me yesterday, I would have told you I'd forgotten how to be really afraid.

There was something turning in the white void of that star that made me remember.

I turned to Randall, to tell the dumb son of a bitch to run until his feet ground away against the earth, but he was looking at something with such intensity that it made me stop. A confused, thin little smile bounced around his face, trying to pin itself down.

“That's weird,” he said in a strangled voice. “I taste beer and chocolate milk.”

His pupils caught on fire.

Brilliant light poured out from somewhere deep inside his brain. He made a sound like icicles breaking in a storm, and hacked up a thin liquid the color of everything. It shimmered, prismatic, when it first dribbled out between his lips, but as it ran down his chin, the fluid thickened and turned black. When it clotted on his chest and started running back up his neck, I could see it was still shimmering, just a little bit, like oil on water. I tried to wipe it off him with my jacket sleeve, and it came back partially melted.

I turned to Thing 1 for help, but she was gone. Already running up the embankment. Told you she was a smart girl.

I looked around for something to do. Something to hit. Something to hit something with.

There was nothing.

I watched as the light spread behind Randall's eyes, hollowing him out.

I did the only thing I could think of. I called the malevolent star's mother a cheap whore, and I dive-tackled the son of a bitch.

 

TWENTY-THREE

1977. New York City, New York. Sammy Six.

I was holding on pretty good there for a little while. I thought I might make it: I'd put up nonsense barriers around all of my emotional core concepts, just like Yusuf had taught me—but then something shifted in the attack patterns. The angel punched through my psyche like a meteor, leaving a frozen trail of little pieces that used to be me. I perceived the attack sequentially, at first, when I was still holding the bastard off. Then the angel flared through, and all sense of chronological order vanished.

I could see what happened ten minutes ago about to happen any moment. I watched the events unfold exactly 1,296 inches beneath the moldy floorboards of my shitty motel room as they happened, had happened, would happen, and did. I saw the dark arena in the subway tunnels from the angel's point of view: a series of infuriatingly cluttered equations, constantly shifting and evolving in unproductive directions. It reached out and gently rearranged some bits, and a small chunk of the world that used to be a boy named Randall started to simplify. It projected the most probable event flow resulting from that action and was pleased when everything went according to its nature—when the candidate named Carey offered himself bodily unto the angel. The interface was … less than seamless. He had been prepped sloppily by the algorithm—this one had proved difficult—but he had been taken through experiences similar enough to my own. He had been through the chase, he had made the decision, he had abandoned the old candidate to save his friends, and he had voluntarily touched the angel. Giving it his code. Code that was now close enough to mine to provide the last missing piece for the most important problem of the day.

My life.

That stupid kid jumped headfirst into the angel, just like it wanted, and it gathered up his neural patterns, now carefully conditioned to be compatible with my own, and used them to shatter the last stubborn fortress of my humanity. I couldn't really blame him.

After all, I'd done the same thing, exactly thirty-six years ago.

Well, not quite: I had skillfully maneuvered a speedboat in a thrilling chase through the Puerto de Alicante. And in that palace in Alicante, I had swung down into my angel on a rope, just like Errol Flynn. It was far classier than an unbalanced motorcycle ride and some clumsy dive-tackle. But the sentiment was the same. As soon as I had touched the lukewarm light, I felt part of myself shunt away, never to return. And though the Empty Ones let me leave with Isra, we never saw her dad again. They turned poor Yusuf into an angel, though he'd fought against it his entire life. But I had made my decision and sealed his fate. And now a different one was being made for me. Just like, thirty-six years from now, some other fool with similar core concepts—a violent sort of loyalty, a longing for purpose, a knee-jerk disdain for authority—would do the same to Carey. Abandon him. Let him become one of these monsters. It was the cycle. It had repeated and would repeat forever, until the universe was a smoothly idling engine of sterile perfection.

In another part of my brain, the more superficial elements that comprise my self—the cadence of my speech, a key set of memories, my emotional responses to various stimuli—are being solved, simplified, and erased. I am being transformed bit by bit into one of these calculating aberrations. But I knew that was going to happen, and I was prepared. Yusuf taught me how to split my mind apart a long time ago. It wouldn't last. I was stalling, not winning. It was clear I would not be the one to break the cycle after all. Even with the training. Even with the preparation. The second that stupid fucking kid hit that light, I was done, and now it was just a matter of time.

But man, you have to put up the effort. That's part of being human: That arrogant little part of you that says you're special, that you can beat it, that when the time comes, it won't happen to you—
you and you alone are immune!
We all have that delusion. It's one of the core concepts of humanity, as a species. And it's hardly ever correct. But at least I'd spent twenty years preparing to be wrong. Two decades stitching one very simple, fundamental idea into my being—and then systematically erasing every part that even remembered why.

God, it took so many lives to get that idea. My darling Isra, the Gator, that cunt Tomas—all hollowed out or disappeared entirely, just to get me into the Citadel for thirty bloody seconds. But I got in, and I got out: I walked through that inferno and came out the other side with a beautiful killer of a concept seared into my head. I came out with the number six.

It has to be simple, you see. Anything too complex can be restructured and dismissed. You can't count on an idea retaining the same value, or even existing at all, after an angel finishes with you. And if you have too much psychic buildup around a concept—memories, explanations, tangents—the angels will burn all of that away and the idea will still be there but hold no importance. So I made it into something they couldn't understand.

I made it into madness.

I spent twenty years repeating the number six to myself. Twenty years finding it in everything I saw. Counting my steps by sixes and shuffling on the seventh. Every sixth breaths, I inhaled twice. Six beats of the heart, and I blinked. I found multipliers of six everywhere I looked: I broke down addresses, transcribed new alphabets and, most important, I drank myself into oblivion. I ruined every brain cell that remembered why I was doing it. I drowned every single neuron that knew the significance of the six. I burned the number into my soul even as I erased it from my brain. Even now, looking back at all I've given up for it, I could not tell you what the number six is supposed to mean, or how in God's name encoding an affinity for it into the angel I will become will help anybody.

I just know that the angels can clear up madness most times, if it's just a simple matter of tracking it back to the source. But true insanity? Irrationality and obsession that come from nowhere, with no explanation? That would have to be left behind, as a sort of spiritual remainder. Junk characters in an otherwise perfect equation.

It wouldn't bother the inhuman light I was about to become. Not much, anyway. Most angels had some garbage floating around in them. Little quirks that gave them a bit of personality. The one that got Yusuf thirty-six years ago, it liked the sea. No idea why, but the ocean held some kind of importance to the man or woman it once was, and so it kept popping up in coastal towns. That's how we tracked it. How we found the Citadel. How we came to know about the six.

And this one? This twinkling ball of asshole sorting out my insides like a stock boy, filing away and destroying my most important memories just so it could reproduce and turn me into a glorified lightbulb? This one, when all was said and done, would have one tiny quirk. A little thing it couldn't quite explain.

It would like the number six.

It would seek it out. Favor it. Maybe even tend toward candidates somehow associated with that number, when it came time to reproduce again. A harmless little foible that, with a little luck, would someday kill the bastard dead. With a lot of luck, it might kill them all.

I felt my love for bicycles go. I could never explain that. I just liked them.

Then it was the taste of cheap wine.

Shit. That was getting close. That was
really
important to me.

I should say something meaningful. That's what one does, typically, when they're about to vanish from the world forever. But I have no memories to draw from anymore. No experiential basis with which to impart wisdom. I have only information.

Information is everything.

Information is purity.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.

The fluid dribbling from Jackie's chin started off the color of a rainbow reflected in murky water, but somewhere around her chest, it ceased its natural downward flow and reversed. It clouded up. Thickened. Grew cancerous. It looked sort of like those pictures they showed you of smoker's lungs back in health class, but alive. It raced up Jackie's neck and poured back over her jaw, her cheeks, her hair. It didn't seem to be hurting her physically, but good God, with all that screaming, how could you tell?

It wasn't the sound of pure animal agony. I mean yes, it was absolutely that—Jackie was screeching like a trapped rat—but it wasn't
just
that. She was trying to communicate something: She barked out unrelated words, numbers, ratios, little snatches of music.

She started hollering out the start of a funny anecdote I recognized. It was one of her favorites. She was always such a good storyteller.

“So there I was at the prom in a full-on old-fashioned diving costume—we're talking metal helmet and—”

Then she went back to reeling off digits. I think I recognized my phone number in there.

If the sound didn't make it clear, the light pouring out of her would have been enough of an explanation. It fired up small, at first, like a sparkler behind her pupils. But now it was all through her. I could see her veins illuminated through the skin.

The whole church smelled like burning plastic.

Jackie was being hollowed out from the inside.

And nobody cared.

The Empty Ones hopped around idiotically, hooting like drunken monkeys and tearing their own flesh from their bodies. I looked to Carey for help, but he couldn't have given a shit if you paid him for it. Here we were, watching my best (if I'm being honest, my only) friend burning up like a meteor in the atmosphere, and all he could do was yank on my arm and scream for me to run.