The Empty Ones: A Novel (The Vicious Circuit) by Robert Brockway

Author:Robert Brockway [Brockway, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781466869318
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

2013. Tulancingo, Mexico. Kaitlyn.

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.

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