The Empty Ones (18 page)

I am floating in the ocean. There is no line between the ocean, the sky, and me. It's all liquid, all the same liquid, and it flows from my body into space. It sucks the heat from me and dispels it into the void. The ocean is deep. Limitless. There is no floor; it extends until words like distance and depth cease to have meaning. I cannot move.

Sleep paralysis, Kaitlyn, that's all it is. Just try to move something. Anything. A toe. A finger.

I am locked into place, floating and becoming the ocean, which becomes the sky. There are stars in the sky, so bright it's painful to look at them—but there's nothing else to look at, so I stare even as their images burn into my eyes. The water is not cold, I realize now. It is without temperature. The sky, the water—it's all a part of me. How could it sap my warmth? The only thing here that is outside of me, that is not of me, are the stars. It's the stars that are cold.

And with each degree of heat they steal, they burn brighter.

Everything. Put everything you have into it. You have to move. It's just a malfunction in your brain causing these panicked dreams. Twitch. Please, just twitch.

Something moves beneath me, in the eternity of the ocean. It is impossibly, unfathomably distant, and it is impossibly, unfathomably large. The water does not ripple yet with its passing. Its presence is too far removed to have physical effects where I am, which is everywhere, but I know it's coming.

The thing beneath me is normally content to swim where the currents take it. But I did something. I did something that made it take notice of me. It turned to swim in my direction. The disruption in its wake obliterated galaxies in the ocean that is space; that is me. It's horrible to think such a thing could even notice me—how small I am, how brief I am. What could I be to this thing that swims through the universe?

Please please please move. There! My extra pinky. It's almost …

The stars flicker.

The heat is nearly gone from me. I can feel myself fading.

The stars flicker again, and then, one by one, they begin to go out.

Their frozen light sears me, stains my vision and bleeds my warmth, but it is light. And it is fading. They disappear. I am in the dark. There is nothing left here but the ocean and space and self.

And the thing beneath me.

My finger twitches.

I do not wake.

The giant beneath me surges. It is hurtling toward me with a speed that makes me nauseous to think of. I do not know if it is angry, or hungry, or if such things are beyond it. I can only feel its unceasing progress, gaining momentum by the second.

So faintly that I can barely register it, the water around me starts to move. It washes through my body. It ripples through space.

My head bounces painfully against the bed of the pickup truck.

I'm staring directly at the sun. I don't know how long I've been doing it, but when I look away I can still see the sun in the dead center of my vision. I can barely move—just enough to turn my head away and let gravity take over. I can see my own arm sprawled out next to me. My skin is burnt and bright red. I'm flushed with the fluish warmth of heatstroke. The truck hits another pothole and my skull rattles with the utter failure of its suspension. It smells like rust and sand. I can hear voices. A man and a woman.

“… telling you the radio is broken and it's another two hours at least.”

“I don't care! I'm not giving you road-head just to pass the time.”

“So, what? Twenty questions?”

“Fine.”

“Great. First question: Will you give me road-head?”

A slap, then laughing.

The dream has left a little bit of residual fear dancing around in my belly, but I'm so tired, and so warm. I should say something. Yell out for help or shade or water. You're not supposed to sleep when you have heatstroke, no matter how badly you want to.

Wait, no, that's … that's hypothermia. If there's a chance you could be hypothermic, you're not supposed to sleep no matter how tired you get, or how warm you feel. So it …

 … it makes sense then. That …

You shouldn't

stay awake

with heatstroke. It's for my own …

good

sleep

good

 …

I am wildly uncomfortable. I've tried sleeping on my side, on my stomach, on my back, and curled into a ball. This is the bed that serial killers sleep on in hell. There's a spring poking through the mattress in the middle, but that's also where it sags, so as soon as I start to drift off, my body relaxes and I roll into the spike trap.

But I'm so fucking tired and every part of me hurts. I don't want to wake up, even though I've been, like, twenty percent awake for hours.

Am I hungover? I can't remember. Too much of my brain is still sleeping.

I was supposed to do something. It was vital. I can almost remember it, but I'm really trying not to. Maybe if I spread my legs all the way across I can hook them on either side of the mattress and.…

Yeah, that's good. That'll do it.… Now I can get some …

Spike.

God damn this miserable fuck of a mattress. Where the hell even am I? This isn't my bed. My bed is a beautiful monster, a whole room filled with down and foam. It's like sleeping in whipped cream. This is like sleeping on an anthill.

I should just force it. Get up. There's something important I'm supposed to—

Oh, shit. The sun. I'm dying out here. Up. Up!

*   *   *

I awoke with a start, causing me to lose my tenuous grip on the mattress and slide down onto the butt spike.

“Ow, damn,” I said, or tried to. My mouth was so dry it came out like a cat hacking up a wad of aluminum foil.

I glared back at the bed, and noticed there wasn't even a sheet. Just a dirty, bare mattress. There were dark stains all around the spring. I did not want to know what they were.

The floor didn't exactly look clean or inviting, but I figured that I'd rather get foot diseases than blood and butt diseases. I rolled off the bed, crashed into the floor, and focused on breathing until my body agreed to start working again.

“Like a swan,” Jackie said. “Like watching a graceful, elegant swan go ice-skating. While drunk.”

“Shut up,” I tried to say, but it came out like somebody dragged a Dumpster over a gravel driveway.

Jackie sighed. Footsteps. A faucet turning on, then off again. More footsteps. Jackie held out a glass, and I drank from it. Only after I'd downed the entire thing did I realize it was the glass shell of a burned out candle. The water tasted like wax and dust. It was the best thing I've ever had in my life.

“Where?” I asked. I sounded like Clint Eastwood, but at least I was making human words.

“The shittiest motel room in the entire universe,” Jackie said. She sat down in a grimy plastic lawn chair beside a TV older than my parents.

I looked around, and verified the truth of her statement: one room with two beds. Impossibly, I saw the tiger-pit that I had been sleeping on was the nicer of the two. The bathroom didn't have a door. The drapes were plastic. The carpet was deep brown, but I suspected it didn't start out that way. The place smelled like a locker room for a team of swamp monsters.

“Why?” I said. A little of my normal voice coming through, like a man going through reverse-puberty.

“We finally maxed out my dad's credit card,” Jackie said. “We're operating on cash now, so the budget is tighter. I suggested we splurge on a space where the sheets wouldn't give us syphilis, but Carey figured that would cut into the beer money. He suggested a compromise, then brought us here, threw the sheets out the window, and went to get beer.”

“Where is here?”

“I don't think it has a name. There's just a picture of a fat guy holding a flower on the sign. We are at the Fat Guy Flower Motel.”

I started to snap, but realized I didn't have the energy for frustration yet.

“What city are we in?”

“Oh! Right. Tulancingo. Mexico. We made it, K! The city that never sleeps, because the vultures will think you're a corpse and try to eat you. The Big Difficult! The Bruised Apple! Drink it in.”

“I remember driving. Did we crash?”

“Yeah, there was a…” Jackie trailed off.

“What?”

“I don't even know how to start. There was a Million Tar Man March. Carey's ex-girlfriend showed up, and she turns old farmhands into monsters. Everything went incredibly crazy, even by our standards. You should be dead, but you're totally fine.”

I laughed bitterly. There was a lot to question there, but me being “totally fine” struck me as the weirdest statement.

“Fine? I feel a rotisserie chicken. Was I hallucinating, or did you guys leave me out in the sun to die?”

“You're fine,” Jackie insisted. “You're not even sunburned.”

I started to argue, but looked down at my arms and saw she was right. Light brown. Bit of a tan, but no burns. Not so much as a scratch from the wreck.

“How is that possible?”

“You tell me,” Jackie said.

She wasn't herself. She was putting on a good show, but her delivery felt flat.

“What's going on, Jackie? Are you all right?”

“Am I…” Jackie laughed. “Am I fucking
all right
? Are you kidding me? My life in LA was shallow and meaningless. It was awesome. And you dragged me away from it. You pulled me into a goddamned nightmare and then you brought me to that nightmare's ghetto, pointed to the sewer, and told me to get some shut-eye. Fuck you, Kaitlyn. Fuck you for all of this. I am not okay. I am never going to be okay again. But you—you're perfectly fine! I watched you die, Kaitlyn. You bled to death on a rock in the desert, then we threw your corpse in the back of a truck and watched it bake in the sun.”

“What? Jackie, I don't—”

“You don't have a scratch! Your face was practically gone.
You had no more blood.
Less than a day later and you're bitching like you've got nothing worse than a bad hangover. What the fuck even
are
you?”

“What the hell are you talking about? That can't be true,” I said. “I don't … I don't remember anything.”

“K, I don't even know if you're
you
anymore. Is something else in there? Did those things hollow you out? Because, I gotta say, if this is all some fucked-up prank before the shell that used to be my best friend throws me under a bus, I just wish you'd get it over with.”

“I'm me, Jackie.” I dragged myself up to lean against the wall so I could look her in the eye. “It's me. Nothing's changed.”

“
Everything has changed!
” she yelled, but she couldn't stop laughing. “Does this shithole look like nothing has changed? I don't want to be here, K. I don't want to do this.”

What? I'm the one fighting unkillable psychopaths and acidic bigfoots. I'm the one apparently dying in a car wreck and being thrown in the back of a pickup truck to rot like garbage.

“Nobody asked you to,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Nobody asked you to be here.”

“I didn't have a choice.”

“You volunteered to come. You practically insisted.”

“No, you don't get to play that. You rescued me from that freaky church where I watched hell happen in front of me. I saw a guy pull off his own dick and eat it—
and then it grew back
. What was I supposed to say when you asked for help after that? ‘Thanks for dragging me out of a Cronenberg film come to life, but kindly fuck off?' You didn't leave me any other options.”

“And yet here you are now, bitching about it.”

“FUCK YOUR MOTHER IN HALF WITH A—” Jackie seemed to collapse inward halfway through swearing at me.

She sighed. “Can we just go, Kaitlyn? I love you, but I hate this. We won, right? We got away from them—and sure, they came after us a few times. But we weren't really trying to hide. We're not even hiding now. We keep using my dad's card—I bet that's how they were tracking us. Let's just ditch it and go somewhere else, okay? How about New York? We've done the LA thing. Let's go be snobby about our fucking bagels and yell at tourists. We'll share a shitty apartment that will look like a mansion after this place. We'll get bunk beds and matching PJs and put socks on the door when one of us is getting laid. We got away before, right? In Barstow? You followed me out of that dried-up fart of a town. Follow me to New York, and let's pretend all this was a bad acid trip.”

Jackie didn't cry often. She cried at the end of
All Dogs Go To Heaven
. And she cried about a fish tank once, when she got way too high and couldn't stand the thought of the fish living their lives in such a small space. She wasn't crying now, but I could tell she was right on the edge of it. This is how she was in Barstow, right before we left. She said the town would kill us. She couldn't stand the thought of us working at a Walmart all our lives and being buried in the same cemetery we used to bring boys to make out as teenagers. She couldn't go without me, she said. So I agreed. I agreed to pretty much anything when she got like this.

“No,” I said.

Neither of us were expecting it.

“I can't, Jackie. Marco is still out there. After what he did to us, what he did to those other girls. I know he's going to do it again. And he won't stop coming for me. I can't live my life just waiting to see his face in a crowd. This has to end, and I know I can do it. I almost did it once before. It's fine, though. It's fine if you want to go. We'll get back to normal someday, I know it. I'll show up at your shitty Manhattan apartment with a pizza one day and we'll eat too much and make fun of reality TV like we used to. But I can't go yet.
You
can. You can just take off.”