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

done.” He kneels down. His arm extends an extra yard so he can lay his hand flat on the surface of the crater. “There are days I don’t think about my friends at all,” he continues. “I think about what’s necessary. I wake up, and I move forward like a car someone else is driving. I get to the end of the day, and I don’t even know what I’ve done, but I know I’m one day farther along. They don’t even feel like bad days anymore.” He looks up at Avi and smiles, a grin that’s too wide and pulls the corners of his mouth out like someone’s tugging at them with hooks.

“I almost asked if you were staying in town,” he says, staring at the space where the town used to be.

“I’m in Moorcroft,” says Avi. “Twenty miles east. They have a Best Western.”

“Sounds nice,” Patrick says.

Avi shrugs. “It has a bar. You?”

“I’ve seen what I need to see,” Patrick says. “I’m headed back.”

“To Bishop?”

“Maine,” says Patrick. “Bishop left me his house up there. I’m supposed to be resting. I’ve been having headaches.”

“Now you’re back on the hunt?”

“My time ‘on the hunt’ hasn’t done sweet fuck-all,” Patrick says. “So no. I’m going to go do what damage control I can here, and then I am going to stare out at the ocean and wait for war.”

“It won’t come to that,” Avi says.

“No, of course not,” says Patrick. “Everything will be just fine.”

—

The bar at the Best Western in Moorcroft consists of four bar stools. Avi walks in and sees Louis sitting at one of them. He could take the one on the far end, but it would be a useless bit of aggression. He sits down next to Louis and orders them each a shot of whiskey. Louis downs his without saying anything, and Avi orders himself a beer.

“Your friend’s a piece of work,” Louis says after a while. “Real fucking charmer.”

“He never liked me,” Avi says. “From day one.”

“And you’re such a lovable guy,” Louis says.

“You’re never going to find Owen Curry, are you?”

“I’ve missed my best chances,” Louis says. “My guess is no. On the plus side, I am expensing my drinks to Homeland, so I am on my way to getting very drunk.”

“You stopped taking my calls.”

“Don’t act like a jilted prom date,” Louis says. “I gave you what I could.”

“I have missing persons reports,” says Avi. “Hundreds, all across the Midwest. I have names on the guys who picked me up, Louis. They match people on the payroll of the same corporation that funds the Kindred Network. There are land deals—”

“So what?” says Louis, turning toward Avi, angry. “You see what I saw today and you want to tell me those guys wouldn’t be justified? One of them killed your wife, Avi. Isn’t that enough?” Avi wants to argue with him, but he’s had enough. It’s not that he wants them put into camps, but there are days he wishes he could forget that the Bishop Academy and Owen Curry and all the rest of it existed. A flush of shame blooms on Avi’s face at the thought as Louis relents. “I’m sorry. Long bad day.” He signals the bartender for another round. “You want to see something strange?”

Louis pulls out both of his phones. He has one for work and one for personal use. The personal one is newer, nicer. He puts the work phone back in his pocket and pulls up an image on the other. It’s a large sample jar full of clear liquid. Louis hits “play,” and a small piece of matter, the size of one knuckle of a finger, wriggles and twitches in the liquid like a worm on a hook. It distends until it is a thin needle the whole length of the jar, then shrivels back up, a dark kidney bean in suspension.

“They found it when they were doing the autopsy on the kid from the Hargrave murder,” says Louis. “Darren Helms. It was in his fucking brain. The kid had been dead for hours, but this little guy was wiggling around in there, nestled up against his—” Louis snaps his fingers, looking for a word. “—para hippo.”

“Parahippocampal gyrus,” says Avi. He presses “play” on the short video again.

“It’s still alive in a fucking jar in a fucking lab,” Louis says. “The tech guys say it’s giving off a signal like they do.”

“Like who do?” Avi asks.

Louis looks around the empty bar, then leans in very close. “The freaks, Avi. The Resonants. It’s doing their whole resonating thing in the jar, just humming the fuck along like we didn’t cut it out of a dead kid’s brain.” The video ends, and Louis pockets his phone. “If you know one of them that’s got superbrainworm powers, let me know. I’d like to bring them in for questioning.”

An ugly thought forms in Avi’s mind, too large and terrible to share with Louis, to even speak yet. He tells himself it’s ridiculous as he orders another drink. The liquor won’t wash it away, and in the middle of the night he’s thinking it. It’s becoming more solid, crystalizing from wild theory into probable fact.

—

When Avi lands in Portland, Maine, he has eight messages and countless texts from Emmeline. He eyes the departures board. There’s a flight to New York leaving in forty minutes and another late tonight, six hours from now. I’ll go and talk to him and make it back in time, he thinks. I can be at the school before midnight. I’ll go to her room and wake her. I’ll take her out of there, and we can be together.

He rents a car and drives south and toward the coast. Out of the city, on Highway 1, he speeds by a gun dealer at seventy miles an hour. He takes a hard U-turn and goes back. For an extra hundred bucks, waiting periods and background checks are forgotten, and Avi walks out with a .38 revolver,