The Empty Ones

 

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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You have always been there for me,

and I will always be there for you.

This book is dedicated to you,

whiskey.

 

Acknowledgments

The following people are awesome, and if they ever run up to your driver-side window, frazzled and out of breath, insisting that they need to commandeer your vehicle, please be assured that it is for a good cause, such as pursuing a cocaine smuggler who is escaping via helicopter, or perhaps fleeing the giant eyeball that is currently destroying the city but which you, up until this moment, had remained oblivious to. They almost certainly do not need your car just for drunken joyriding, though even if that is the reason, please give them a pass anyway. They're just that awesome. Their names are: Sam Morgan (my dynamic and powerful agent), Paul Stevens (the editor who acquired this series), Liz Gorinsky (the editor of this book), Patty Garcia (the publicist who's almost certainly the only reason you bought this book), and all the other talented and dedicated folks at Tor, Will Staehle (who designed the amazing covers and, like all of us, did not see the clown until it was too late),
Robert Brockway
(my dad—I don't need to thank me; I know what I did), Meagan Brockway (my loving and endlessly patient wife), and Penny and Detectives Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh (my beautiful, idiotic dogs).

 

ONE

1984. Lima, Peru. Meryll.

I messed up this poor girl's code, and now she's got teeth where her eyes should be.

I looked inside of her, and I saw hunger. Simple as that. You look inside some folks and you see this dense web of needs, desires, secrets, and regrets. It's all laid out like neurons. Maybe train stations is a better analogy. There's always a Grand Central. You just gotta find it.

You take a strand of somebody's personality—like, the way they always say “naturally” instead of “of course”—and you start feeding it back, through moments, through years, through whole lifetimes even, and you'll eventually find the source. They were watching
The Avengers
as a little kid, they saw Emma Peel say that, and they thought it was so sophisticated.

“Naturally,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And she laughed.

This person tried it on for themselves, and they liked it. It stuck. So much hinges on that moment. So many experiences, so many connecting points where if they'd said “yes,” instead of “naturally,” the ensuing sequence of events would've gone in a totally different direction. Because they start using this silly, meaningless little word, they develop an affection for what they perceive to be sophistication. They listen to classical music, not because they like it, but because they want to be perceived as the type of person who likes it. They go to the ballet when they're seventeen. They stay up all night reading about it first, so they can tell their mother “that's a pas de deux,” and she would nudge her husband as if to say “See? See how refined our child is?” All of these little strings, hanging on other strings, wrapped around hubs, providing supports for the whole network. So you find them there, cross-legged on the orange shag in their living room, biscuits all over their face, watching
The Avengers
with eyes like glass, and you pull that out.

You show them that moment. They see that so much of who they thought they were was arbitrary—it all comes from here. And half their lifetime just goes away. You find another hub, getting felt up by Jaime in the locker room, and another, the spider crawling across their ear as a baby. You pluck out a few more of those, and pretty soon there's not much left to a person at all. They just … go away. And all that energy they were wasting by existing, it becomes yours. You can do whatever you want with it.

You can use it to knock an asteroid out of orbit. You can use it to blow up a city. You can shove it deep down inside of you and store it, like a battery. It decays some over time, but there's so much, and it's so easy to get.

But we're talking about a different girl: this girl here, in the wind-blown shack with the corrugated metal roof just outside of Lima.

Some folks need dozens of hubs plucked out of them before they're solved. Most just need three or four. This girl has only one main concern: hunger. She's always been hungry, and she's never had enough to eat. There were other elements to her personality, other things that made her who she was, but in one way or another, all of those strings led back to hunger. You can't pull just a single moment. You wouldn't even get any energy that way—there'd be nothing left to simplify.

So I plucked out all the other, smaller hubs around hunger. Getting beaten by the policeman behind the supermarket. Kissing her little brother on the head before a soccer game in an overgrown lot. And here she is, teeth where her eyes should be. Belly twice the size of her body. Huge hands, fingers curling into canines. Her tongue is six feet long and flailing about like a live wire.

Dang it. Three years, and I'm still making these mistakes.

Ah, well. I'll find a use for her.

Hi, my name is Meryll. And this is the story of how I became God.

 

TWO

1977. London, England. Carey.

The band sounded like a domestic violence case in progress. Couple of hoarse guys yelling over guitars so distorted they sounded like somebody rapidly flipping channels on a TV that only got static. The drums rolled out, all crashes and bangs—the catfight in the alley outside knocking over some trash cans. All the scene was missing were some police sirens, and by the look of the crowd, they wouldn't be missing for long.

My head hurt. I'd been wearing the same socks for about two weeks and was just starting to realize it. My beer was warm, stale, and nearly empty—just like the four on the floor at my feet. The blonde next to me elbowed me in the ear, again. She was blitzed. She'd bounced her tits out of her shirt two minutes ago, and hadn't even noticed yet.

It was about as close to a perfect night as you could ask for.

“Hey! Ho!” Joey Ramone yelled, and the crowd screamed in response.

It was New Year's Eve at the Rainbow Theatre. I was doing everything I could not to be happy, and it just wasn't working. I would've spat in your eye if you'd told me this last month, and I'll do worse if you ever tell anybody I said it now, but god damn if the British punks couldn't teach us Americans a thing or two. There's an anger to the scene here that makes it feel fucking
vital
. It has to
do
something—succeed, or explode in everybody's faces, or dance a merry jig and poop in the corner. Nobody knows
what
it's doing, exactly, but “nothing” isn't an option, because the scene is the only damn thing the Brits have. I love New York like the filthy whore she is, but sometimes concerts there feel like fashion shows and the line out front of a venue is a place to be seen. Here in London, it's a place to be stabbed. I watched a man get his front teeth knocked out an hour ago, and his only response was to spit a mouthful of blood on the guy that did it. They both laughed.

It was a magical time.

I'm sure the coke was helping with the festive atmosphere some. Last time I went in the bathroom, people were pissing in the sink so folks had more room to do lines off the backs of the toilets.

Hey, I'm not passing judgment. At least it kept these fuckers dancing. I've been to a few shows where more people were sleeping than listening to the band. The only drug I'm against is heroin, because it keeps you from dancing, fucking, and fighting—and really, what else is there? I'm not crazy about acid either, but that's only because a dog lectured me about dropping out of high school for three straight hours the last time I did it. But if it peels your banana, you do it up. Just don't shoot dope into your arm and fall asleep on my shoulder on the way to the show, that's all I ask.

But energy wasn't a problem at the Rainbow tonight: Hundreds of young punks, all stinking of cheap cigarettes and warm beer and sweat, hopped up and down to the music like hyperactive rabbits. Their heads rose and fell in great waves. A swell of greasy-haired skulls broke against the stage, where three skinny, gawky boys stood—each looking for all the world like dirty mops dressed in leather jackets—and flailed at their instruments like the things had grown mouths and called their mothers a bunch of bitches.

Aw, there I go, waxing all poetic again. Give me a break: I'm four beers and two joints into the night. That's the poet's ratio.

I felt an elbow in my crotch. And not in a friendly way. I grabbed the attached arm and looked down into the raccoon eyes of a short white girl, just a touch on the pudgy side. She had a streak of crimson zigzagging down the back of her shoulder-length hair. It matched the smear of blood on her black-painted lips. There was a look in her eyes that said she hadn't gotten it in fun.

She was wearing thick leather bracelets, black-and-purple leggings—torn at the knees—under a tight black miniskirt, and dusty combat boots. A plain white T-shirt, just a bit too tight, read “Punk's not dead, it's just pining” in Magic Marker.

She sneered, flipped me a “V” with her fingers—I guessed that didn't mean “peace” over here—and wrenched her arm away from me. She swam into the crowd and I let her.

The Ramones were just launching into “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment,” my buzz was teetering on the edge, about to fall facefirst into a sloppy pile of drunk, and I was pretty sure this blonde with her forever-bouncing tits wasn't going to be exactly discerning tonight. I bet American boys pissed off her daddy.

I didn't want to go.