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

Pitt grins at Carrie, but there’s a nervous edge to his smile. He’s decided she’s a person on the fringe of insurgent groups within the camp, and he’s trying to buy her off with something she’s already secured for herself with the help of other prisoners and the sympathies of the occasional humane guard. What is it he hopes to get in return? Compliance? Carrie envisions the message Siu sent out into the Hive, moving like a great boomerang, gathering up help, a force of arms, and dragging it back here to land on Pitt’s desk. It’s been over a month, but maybe it’s taking that long to organize a proper response, summon an army to come tear down the fences around Topaz Lake. An answer to his hypocritical rhetoric. A reckoning for all the good he imagines he’s done.

Owen resents how cheap the phrase trial of the century has become. Google it and you get a hundred results. Ones from way back were trials related to major issues. The Scopes monkeys. Dreaded Scott. They decided the path of the country. But the phrase devolved into low-rent celebrity murder trials: roid-raged jocks past their expiration date, washed-up record producers, B-list television actors. By the time reporters affix the Powder Basin trial with of the century status, it doesn’t mean shit, except that the lowest tier of cable networks runs constant coverage. But this one meant something. Twenty-one men accused of lynching a family of Resonants, torching their home with the bodies inside. A crime that took years to come to light, covered up by the police and the town since it happened.

Go there, the friend in his head says. On your own. Go there and see to it justice is done.

Owen looks around the table at what’s left of his team. They respect him more since he killed Darren. Or they’re more scared of him. It doesn’t matter. Either effect suits him.

“I have to go on a side trip,” he says. “A couple days. I’ll find you when I’m done. There’s something he needs me to do.”

If Darren were alive, he would have said something stupid, ruined the solemnity of the moment. And it is solemn. Because Owen’s not sure he’s coming back.

In the parking lot, they say their good-byes. Little Gail hops off Tabitha’s hand onto Owen’s shoulder, crosses it, and gives him a kiss on the cheek like butterfly wings. Marita yanks him into the black bone room for a split second. Don’t forget me, lover, she says, her skin like the coil of an oven burner against his. She pulls his head back by his hair and presses her face into his, not a kiss but an assault. She burns through his Hivebody, hot knife through butter, then lets him up again, breathless.

It takes two days to hitchhike to Gillette, where the trial is being held. There’s a room waiting for him at the Arrowhead Motel in a strip mall outside of town. In the room, there’s an envelope full of cash. His friend has physically been here, making preparations for him. Owen searches the room for traces: depressions in the carpet or wrinkles in the sheets. There’s nothing except the envelope.

The morning after he arrives, Owen tries to get into the courtroom for the trial, but there’s a queue. Family members and reporters get priority. Beyond that, there’s a lottery system for seats. Owen loses out the first two days but gets in on the third, when the lawyers present closing arguments. The air-conditioning in the courtroom is dead, and a collection of large, loud fans blow air hot as breath around the room. The lawyer for the prosecution is a black lady who looks like she has eaten exactly her full helping of shit from these people and wants no more. It takes a moment, but Owen realizes he recognizes her. She was sitting down the pew from him in the church, the one he didn’t feed to the null. He can’t be positive, but he feels sure of it. There’s something right about it, her being there at the beginning of his becoming, when he held back, and here now, when he is about to fully bloom. Owen likes her even though she has no vibration. This happens now and then, even to him. Affection for the cattle. Farmers must get it, too, but at the end of the day, they’re in the business of meat.

Kay Washington steps into the open space in front of the jury, sets her feet, and begins.

“A hundred fifteen years ago, outside Atlanta, Georgia, a black farmhand named Sam Hose was dragged out of his jail cell. He’d struck his employer, a white man, and gone on the run. It took the police ten days to find him, and in that time the papers whipped people into a frenzy, accusing Hose of rape, infanticide. When he was caught, excursion trains brought two thousand people to see him strung up, stripped, cut up, skinned alive, and burned. Souvenir hunters scrambled through the ashes and fought over his organs and his bones.

“Sixty years ago, in Money, Mississippi, three men dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Till out of his grandparents’ house. A white woman in town said the boy had whistled at her. Turns out she was lying, but it didn’t matter. They beat on him and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and throwing his body in the river.

“Four years ago, in Powder Basin, Wyoming, twenty-one men gathered together in order to lynch Lucy Guthridge and her children, Sam, Paige, Jeb, and Melody. We owe it to the Guthridges to call this what it is, to use a hateful word we hoped we’d put to rest. You can call these men defendants, or assailants, or murderers. But when you talk about them as a group, you owe it to their victims to name them