The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

“What does every baseliner want?” Waylon asked her, tenting his fingers and leaning on his elbows. He’d shed the baby fat he’d sported at Bishop. Bryce had him eating better, and he kept himself clean despite the volume of drugs that passed through Vibration. His face was long, thin, permanently dour. He’d waited until Miquel was off playing darts with Jonathan, who was dating Hayden but had left the band the moment before they got big. Waylon must have intuited already that this job offer was best kept secret.

“No idea,” Carrie said.

“They want abilities,” Waylon said. “They want to be like us for an hour, then shut it off and go back to their shit lives.”

It felt true to Carrie. She and Miquel had driven out to Deerfield the night before to have dinner with her family. Her brother wanted his boss off his back. Her mother wanted her daughter to not be a freak. Her father wanted what Carrie had, to be able to move through the world without being seen. They all wished things were different and knew this meant becoming different people. They felt the impossibility of change. Carrie and Miquel, people like them, represented the chance to break through the limits of an ossified self. Her family watched them move through their new lives with a mixture of resentment and jealousy.

Waylon pulled out a small metal tube that looked like the nitrous cartridges she used to steal from the cafeteria at Bishop so they could do whip-its.

“Rez,” said Waylon.

“You’re not actually calling it that,” Carrie said.

“Hong named it,” he said. “I wanted to call it TurboBoost.”

“Rez is not that bad,” said Carrie. She reached across the table, took the cool metal, and closed it in her hand. It stayed cold, drawing heat from her palm until it was painful to hold. “This gives them abilities?”

“Nothing dangerous,” Waylon said. “A glimmer of what they could have been, if.”

“If?”

“If they’d been like us and not like them,” Waylon said.

“You’ve seen it work?”

“I’ve felt the warm thermic glow off a homeless Damp in an alleyway,” he said, doing his shitty impression of Rutger Hauer from the end of Blade Runner. “I’ve seen a UIC undergrad who thought she was in a psych study float gleefully across a lab.”

“You did studies,” said Carrie. She put the cartridge back on the table. It left a red shadow of itself on her palm.

“This isn’t bathtub crank,” Waylon said. “I take drugs very seriously.”

“What’d you tell this undergrad after she went Tinkerbell for an hour?”

“ ‘You’ve inhaled a shitload of hallucinogenic drugs. Keep your ass hydrated the next three days. Here’s a hundred bucks.’ ”

He didn’t mention the early abreactions, test subjects in St. Elizabeth’s with flimsy and superfluous limbs that were reabsorbed into the body the morning afterward or patches of dragonlike scales that flaked away to reveal fresh pink skin beneath. He didn’t mention that the psych ward at Presence Saint Mary had seen cases in which people claimed to be besieged with voices, only for the symptoms to fade after a few hours. What he did mention was the retail price, the number of buyers already clamoring for it, and the low-double-digit percentage of gross she’d take home. He was recruiting Carrie for distribution, the invisible circuit along which the drug would travel.

The next day, she dressed for her temp job: white button-down blouse and beige pencil skirt. She kissed Miquel good-bye in the little kitchen of their apartment, hopped onto her bike, and rode to the end of North Avenue. She pulled over, called the temp agency, and asked them to take her off the call lists indefinitely. Then she put in her earbuds, clicked “play” on a Clash album, and went to pick up some drugs.

There wasn’t a moment she decided not to tell Miquel. She simply never did. She learned to make the job invisible. A collection of conversational blocks and feints did the trick. Paying their rent gave Carrie moral high ground if it ever came to an argument. More important, she loved Miquel. Loving him required her to protect him from the real world.

—

Every time she runs a pickup to Hong’s Auto Repair, she tries not to think of it as a meth lab. It’s on Laramie, down the street from a horse-racing track. The block is pawn shops and liquor stores and e-cigarette retailers. Hong’s has been there three generations, as Hong likes to remind her.

“My grandfather didn’t realize shops in America used first names, like Joe’s Body and Glass or Bob’s Muffler and Brakes,” he said. “He named the shop Hong’s Auto Repair after the family name, but everyone started calling him Hong like it was Steve. Same with my dad. Except dad would correct them every time. Next visit? Same thing. I go by Hong because no one’s going to bother to call me anything else.” Hong was the kind of guy who talked when he was nervous, and he was always nervous. “He’d kill me if he knew what I was doing with the place. He had a horror about drugs on account of certain stereotypes regarding Chinese people and opium or whatever. But he’s dead five years and I’m keeping the doors open, so suck on that, Dad.”

There’s no one in the front office when Carrie arrives. She shouts for Hong, and there’s a clang of metal before he steps out of the back, sweaty and grease-streaked.

“I forgot you were coming,” he says. “Come on back.”

The inside of the garage is lined with electrified chicken wire as a makeshift Faraday cage. When Carrie asked him what it was supposed to keep out, he winked knowingly at her.

“Waylon’s been trying to contact you through the Hive,” Carrie says.

“Yeah, I hear him,” says Hong, making a motion like putting on earmuffs. “I don’t go in there anymore. You ever see the black coral in there? On the ground?”

“Yeah, of course,” Carrie says. It was like Starbucks. She noticed when