The Unnoticeables (7 page)

The parasites were all laughing at something. I didn't feel like busting into their nervous little circle. I needed something else to do—something productive and enlightening.

I settled for ogling the cleavage girls and making faces at them when they caught me. One or two seemed to be into it. A stunning redhead, her pale skin practically glinting in the streetlight, waggled her tongue at me in exchange. Most just rolled their eyes and cut off eye contact.

It was to be expected. Richard Hell was playing tonight, and girls went crazy for the bastard. He looked like Bob Dylan's plague-stricken younger brother. He moved like he was always in a bathrobe: all lazy and aloof. Hell had that whole malnourished-nihilist thing going for him. That always brings out the stunners. I did okay for my part: A certain kind of girl was actually drawn to the just-got-hit-by-a-truck look that I carefully nurtured. But when Richard Hell opens a show, it's a Salvation Army runway show out front. Models in precisely ripped T-shirts and meticulously dirty jeans.

I was miming blow jobs to a bored blonde, who was trying to figure out the sexiest way to flip me off, when an argument broke out.

“What is this, the tits-only section?” the kid hollered. He couldn't have been more than fifteen. His hair was done up in shoddy spikes, the telltale white crust of Elmer's glue drying on the tips.

I got a weird knot in my stomach, which I decided to chalk up to microwave burritos and Iron City.

The guy blocking the door just laughed and roughly shuffled the kid away from the awning. The kid spat at him in reply. By the time the bouncer's eyes went wide with fury, the kid was already bolting around the corner, down Seventeenth. A couple of the cleavage girls laughed.

I turned back to Randall, who was watching the proceedings with a worried look on his face.

“Weird,” he said, slapping me on the arm and gesturing to the crowd I'd just turned away from.

I looked back and didn't see it.

“What?”

“There's, like, a dozen people following that kid,” Randall said.

“I don't—”

It was only when he pointed right at them that I finally noticed.

It's not that I didn't
see
them—they were completely visible—it's just that it didn't occur to me that there was anything weird about ten people breaking away all at once to follow some scruffy little punk-rock kid into an empty side street. Not until Randall pointed it out. And even after he did, a huge chunk of my brain argued.

This is boring
, my brain said;
nothing to see here. Let's do something else. Let's start a fire.

It was the way they moved: casual and natural, like somebody sliding past you on an elevator. You don't even think to object when they brush against your junk; it's just a thing that happens, sometimes.

Only when you're not looking for 'em do you notice how weird it is that you're not looking for 'em.

That's what Matt the Black Unicorn had said.

“Hey, where's Matt?” I shouted into the parasite huddle.

“He's havin' a squat behind the skip,” Jezza answered.

Scuffed Flannel giggled.

“Could somebody translate that from asshole to English?” I asked the huddle.

“He's pooping behind the Dumpster,” Thing 1 answered. She did something with the string around her fingers and caught Wash's hand tight.

“Damn. All right. If he gets back, tell him me and Randall are heading up Seventeenth to fight those invisible people he was talking about.”

“Cool,” Wash said, trying and utterly failing to fathom the net of yarn wrapped around his wrist. “Wait—what?”

I was already off jogging after the group, who had just rounded the corner and slipped out of sight. I heard Randall sigh loudly, and then his ratty combat boots were slapping the pavement right alongside me.

We came skidding across a section of wet grating just as the Unnoticeables caught up to the kid. They were all around him, but it wasn't until one reached out and grabbed his arm—
a girl, blond hair, wait—brunette? Jesus, just focus on her, Carey
—that he thought to object.

“Hey,” the kid said, struggling against the girl's grip.

The others moved in, closing a circle around him.

“Hey!” the kid tried again, panicking now. “Hey, fuck you!”

I couldn't see him anymore. The others were blocking my view.

“Help!” he screamed. “Somebody help!”

The kid tried “fuck you” before he tried “help.”

They shall not have this one.

The mob was moving now, the kid caught in the middle as they forced him toward an open garage a half block up Seventeenth. A pale orange light flickered in there, like fire inside a barrel.

I tried to think of something creative to say as I was sprinting up to them, but I settled for a flying tackle instead. I nailed the biggest one first. It was hard even to tell that much, looking at them all together: Big, small, blond, redhead, race, clothing—the more there were of them in any one place, the harder it was to pick one out. Just a big indistinct mass of wiggling humanity.

As we tumbled across soggy pavement, the sharp points of our limbs knocking painfully on the cement, I got to focus on the big guy a bit more clearly. He was tall but not thick. Black guy. Close-cropped hair and hooded eyes. He didn't even look surprised to see me, as I headbutted his nose into a brownish pudding.

I looked back in time to see Randall clock a petite girl in pigtails with a trash can. She crumpled like a wet paper bag. He was trying to use the momentum, ride the surprise of the moment, but none of the Unnoticeables was shaken in the least. The four nearest him turned to face Randall, while the rest continued shuffling the kid off toward the garage.

I got my feet under me and executed an absolutely stunning two-footed, full-body, Captain Kirk–style dropkick on a guy that looked like a punk-rock accountant. Wire glasses, birdlike features, carefully stained Ramones T-shirt, and sharp-creased jeans. He folded up double and stayed that way. The man even passed out in an orderly fashion.

I cracked my tailbone painfully on the landing but pushed away the shock and tried to stand again. Too late. Two of the Unnoticeables were on me. They were too close together. I couldn't tell them apart. I saw a vague mass of limbs and flesh enclosing me, tangling up my arms and feet. I was looking one dead in the face—I swear to God I was—and it was like I was forgetting him even as I spat right into his eyeball. I cursed, tried a wild bite, took a blow to the head. No good. I couldn't move.

One set of limbs released their grip.

Then another.

I looked up at Randall's face, grinning wildly down at me.

I glanced over to where I'd last seen him, and there were four lumps of indistinguishable human clutching themselves and moaning.

Randall offered his hand and I took it.

“How did you take all those fuckers out?” I asked, spitting blood and shaking my head clear.

“I got steel-toed boots and they got balls.” He shrugged. “Even Wash can do that math.”

We heard a muffled protest from somewhere behind us: a gentle request for somebody to go fornicate with themselves, forcibly.

Randall and I turned to face the garage, just in time to see a rolling hump of Unnoticeable flesh kick the spiky-haired kid down an open manhole.

I started to run after him, but Randall caught the arm of my jacket and used the momentum to swing me down and back onto my ass. I began composing a filthy ode to his mother, but he just silently pointed into the shadows on either side of the garage.

Something glinted there. Brass. Round. Grooved edges.

Two pairs of gears, floating in the dark.

The tar men shuffled forward on stumpy elephant feet. They moved like cold molasses. More flowing than walking. I could smell them now. Plastic and molten rubber. Tupperware left on a stovetop.

“Fu—” Randall started, but the words left him.

He hadn't been up close with them like this before. He probably only half-believed what little he'd seen, until that moment. He was backpedaling with his arms, but his legs weren't moving.

The tar men advanced on us like a slow-motion flood. They burbled and burped from somewhere deep inside. The gears on one's face snapped together with a metallic clink and started to whir as they picked up speed.

That goddamned sound.

I felt the vertigo in my knees first. Nausea broke over me like a barstool.

Randall was weaving. Unsteady on his feet.

“These ones are easy,” I reassured him, trying to keep my own voice from cracking.

I slid my shiny new brass Zippo from the small pocket in my jeans and snapped the flint against my hip. It struck immediately. The tiny flame wavered but stayed strong. I tossed it underhand right into the guts of the tar man with the spinning gears.

It went up like a bottle rocket: a high and painful whistle as air sucked into the frantic inferno of its chest. There was a thin pop followed by a deep, reverberating thunderclap, and the tar man flared out of existence. When my eyes stopped misfiring sparks, I saw that the other tar man was still there. Still coming toward us.

“Randall.” I slapped his cheek, and his eyes slid over to me. The rest of his face stayed fixated on the approaching blob.

“Randall!” I shook him. “Just use your fucking lighter, man!”

“I-I can't,” he finally managed, “I lent it to Gray Greg. I … I think he pocketed it.”

I slowly and with great and unwavering purpose raised a middle finger directly before his face. I shook it there for emphasis.

“Carey,” Randall said, his eyes going wide.

Yes, Randall. Absorb it. Observe all of this middle finger. It is all for you. Forever.

“Carey,” he said again, more urgently.

I almost turned. Almost in time.

I heard my neck burning before I saw it. Little angry pops, like slapping cold bacon onto a hot iron pan. I felt my own sizzling fat fly off and scald my cheek before I actually felt the tar man's touch.

It wasn't anything. It was just pressure. The nerves were already gone.

The fear got me more than the pain. I screeched and tried to duck away, but I was already stuck. Every inch of the tar man was like flypaper, melting my flesh away in a thin pink river even as it held me fast. Somehow, I managed to keep myself from slapping at it. From getting my hands caught in it, too.

But that was all I could do. I dropped to my knees, hanging my head like a kitten caught by the scruff. It only had an inch of me: A black and burning finger seared into my flesh, sending my own liquid skin running down the curve of my back and sopping into the elastic band of my underwear. But I could feel its grasp expanding. I could feel it pouring over me. Pain, spreading syrupy and slow. Impossible, unimaginable pain. The only thing worse were the spots that didn't hurt anymore. The spots I knew were already gone.

And then somebody took a picture. Or maybe a flashbulb went off. I was free, lying on my stomach and shaking. I watched my own lighter skitter across the pavement in front of my face. I focused on the decal, marred and partially burned away: a happy bee smoking a joint, sticking its stinger perversely into a cartoon flower. The word “love” written above it in obnoxious balloon letters.

My back was warm. I was on fire.

Then I was wet.

Randall was peeing me out.

 

SEVEN

2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.

“Some party, huh?” Marco asked nobody in particular.

I was the only other person in his car—some growly, chrome-and-leather Mercedes thing, of course—so I answered: “Sure was.”

“Your friend is something, huh?” Marco said again.

He wasn't even looking at me, but he didn't seem to be focusing very hard on pulling out of the steeply angled driveway, either. He nearly clipped the mailbox and cut off a delivery van as he fishtailed onto the street.

“She sure is a noun,” I answered, not meaning to be quite so sarcastic.

“What's that?” Marco asked, downshifting and passing a string of Priuses over a double yellow line. They all honked.

“A noun? Like a person or a place. A general thing. You were asking really broad questions, so I…” I looked over at him. No emotion on his face.

“That's funny!” he screamed. Then he laughed very precisely.

“Yeah, sorry. I'm not usually such a jerk. I guess I'm just nervous. I, uh … I don't usually get along very well at those industry parties.”

“Why not?” Marco swerved wildly around some expensive foreign beast, all bright colors and sharp angles, then cut back into his lane just as suddenly.

I was white-knuckling the passenger handle and my own thigh, trying to hold on to something. I know everybody in L.A. is supposed to be a terrible driver, but this was beyond the pale.

“I don't know,” I answered, talking mostly to distract myself from my own impending death, playing across the windshield. “I guess it's because I don't really want to act or model or anything. I like stunt work, and I'm good at it, but most people don't take me seriously at first.…”

Marco must have been doing sixty on the winding residential street. He whipped by a For Sale sign so close it flew off of its post and skidded across the road behind us.

“You
could
act,” he said, utterly unconcerned about the rapid series of close calls and near crashes.

“Yeah, but—” I started, but Marco weaved over the line on a blind corner and missed a head-on collision with a pickup truck by a few inches. I made an unintelligible keening noise instead.

As soon as my voice comes back, I am going to say something. Should I say something? I can't blow my only chance with the unattainable celebrity I learned to masturbate to, but nobody's going to be hooking up in the burning ditch we are certainly going to end up in, at this rate. Maybe I can figure out a polite way to—