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

of a known quantity that people answer his questions. They know he’s a baseliner, a Damp. Either they’ve Hivescanned him with no luck or they just know. Maybe there’s a way to tell from how he talks, the way he stares as if each one of them is a god writ small. He’s known in the neighborhood and known not to be a threat.

It only takes a mention of white vans to set people talking.

The disappearances have been happening for weeks, although many people he talks to won’t call them disappearances. Some explain them away. “You build a community and it feels like it’ll last forever, and it doesn’t,” one of the older folks told him. “People leave.” But Avi’s watched the girl who goes in and out of the apartment across from the coffee shop. He can’t bring himself to talk to her, but he can see the shock on her face, even two days later. She’s been left behind. With a breakup, part of you sees it coming or can do the postmortem and recognize signs. There’s none of that in the girl’s face. Miquel Gray didn’t leave; he was taken. It follows that the other people who’ve disappeared were taken as well. Several stories involve white vans.

When nothing else comes together, Avi calls Louis. They haven’t talked since Avi passed on the Hargrave story. Afterward, Avi understood it as an olive branch, one Louis needed to poke him in the eye with before making peace. He feels like a line is open between them. The risk is that he’s wrong and Louis tells him, once and for all, to fuck off.

“What do you need, Avi?” Louis says when he picks up. His tone is flat, his office voice. It means there are limits on what can be said. People are listening. Avi presses on anyway.

“White vans on North Avenue,” he says.

“A baby blue Dodge Dart on South Division,” says Louis. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“There’ve been disappearances,” Avi says. “Going on for weeks. Witnesses keep seeing white vans at the scene.”

“Any of these reported?”

“These people don’t go to the police.”

Louis pauses. “White vans mean nothing to me,” he says. “Lake Shore Drive, half the traffic is white vans.”

“I saw a kid get taken,” Avi says. “The guys that took him looked like old-school Homeland.”

“Not everybody in a blue suit works for me.”

“Your guys aren’t cherry-picking Resonant kids off North Avenue?” Avi asks.

There’s the pause again. It’s not a complete tell: Louis clears his throat when he’s lying. A pause means he isn’t sure. A sign of doubt, a crack. “I’d know if we were,” he says, trying to sound confident. Doubt creeps back in. “This kid have a name?”

“Miquel Gray,” says Avi. “Address is 413 North Avenue. Upstairs apartment.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” says Louis. “But from what you’re talking, if someone was going to authorize this, it’d be me.”

“And you didn’t,” Avi says. He phrases it as if it’s something he already knows rather than a question.

“I’ve never been that guy,” says Louis. “Even over there, when there were plenty of those guys, that wasn’t me.”

—

Setting an empty glass on the coffee table, Avi looks balefully at the stairs, considering whether the comforts of his bed outweigh the discomfort of the trek up. He hasn’t gotten over how much easier it is to be single, how much less adult you have to be. The sink is full of dishes, the living room is strewn with laundry, and there’s no one to call him out on it.

He’s resolved to go up when the doorbell rings. He hoists himself off the couch and considers going up to the attic to get the pistol in his desk drawer. By the time he got up there and back, whoever’s at the door would have broken in or gone away. He peers through the peephole. Louis’s face is distended by the fish-eye lens.

Avi ushers him into the living room and pours him a whiskey without asking. “I’m not here,” Louis says. “You understand that?” By the smell of him, he’s already drunk. He takes a seat on the couch and stares into his glass. Avi stands over him.

“Two months ago, I was tasked with a viability study,” Louis says. “Coordinating with police to create local-level internment camps. Chicago was top on the list of test sites because Chicago PD got away with something like this before. You know about Homan Square?”

“Interrogation site,” Avi says, pulling the story up in his head. “It got busted by Spencer Ackerman at the Guardian.”

“Look for a U.S. story that follows up with anything that isn’t in the Guardian piece,” says Louis. “They ran a black site prison for a decade, and all they got hit with was an article in the foreign press.”

“It got closed down,” says Avi.

Louis looks at Avi like he’s said you can’t get a girl pregnant if you do it standing up.

“The determination I passed along to my bosses was that it could be done but obviously it shouldn’t be done,” he says. “You’re talking preemptive arrest and detainment of citizens. At some point, you stop and say, This is America and there are things we don’t do.”

Avi has seen the things America does. He gives Louis back the same look, eyebrow cocked at his naiveté. “Someone’s doing it.”

“Not in the system,” Louis says. “But some of our guys are involved. Entirely off the books. Big funding from someone on the West Coast. I had to get the right guys the right kind of drunk to hear about it. Some of the younger guys think we’re already at war.”

“What do you think?”

“This is America,” says Louis. “There are things we don’t do.”

“Where’s the site?” Avi asks.

“I don’t know,” Louis says. “One of my guys was about to tell me, but his friend clammed him up. My understanding is this has gone on for months. Our guys, local cops. Working with fringe militia. Hargrave’s disciples. I couldn’t get