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

the shimmering room was where his friend was from originally. Owen tried to remember what it felt like to be in the shimmering room, and as easily as dropping backward into bathwater, he was there. It was different this time. He knew it immediately. People could see him.

“I’m lost,” he shouted. “I need to find my friend.”

Before anyone could answer, he felt the needle of pain in his head again. It was distant, because it was in his body and he wasn’t. As soon as he felt it, he crashed back into reality, back into the chair at the motor inn, waiting by the window. He scuttled up to attention, looking around the room, listening with his ears and with whatever in him heard the voice in his head. There was nothing. A trickle of blood ran out of his ear, and he got up to wash it off in the sink.

Over the sound of the water running, he heard a door opening in the other room. There were three people in his room, people he didn’t know. Two women and a man. One of the women wore one of those head scarf things. Owen had no problem with Muslims. Vibration was more important, and she had it. All three of them did. Owen’s heart leaped.

“Did he send you?” he said. “Are we going to be a team?”

“No, Owen,” said the head scarf lady. “We’re the opposing team.”

Something was very wrong. Owen panicked. He reached inside to null them all out, but the other woman, the blond one, put her hand on his forehead, and his thoughts scrambled, words skittering out of order like spilled Scrabble tiles. Null feed into them. Touch don’t me.

“You’re fucked, Owen,” said the head scarf woman. Owen tried to scuttle away from the blond woman’s touch, but his legs wouldn’t listen. Moving on their own, they walked him forward, through an open door. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to go. It didn’t matter at all.

In the office of the Roseland Rest, a white woman in her seventies wages war on flies, watching infomercials at deafening volume. The Roseland Rest is a half mile from Planet Chicken. Owen Curry would have to be incredibly lazy or ballsy to hole up here, but Avi’s plan is to stop at every lodging in the direction the girl pointed him, and this is the first. It takes three rings of the service bell to get her attention. He shows her the picture.

“You a cop?” she asks. Her tone is exactly the same as the boy at Planet Chicken.

“Reporter,” he says.

She looks unimpressed. She examines the picture. “What’d he do?”

“He won a prize,” says Avi. “All expenses paid.”

“Hell he did,” she says. “The nasty little shit.” She turns around and takes a key off the hook. “Room 152,” she says, handing it to him. “Don’t kick the door down.”

“Why would I do that?” Avi asks.

She shrugs. “People do.”

Louis and half the Chicago Homeland office are at the church, five minutes away. One call and they come down like the wrath of god. Owen Curry goes into the system, and no one ever sees him again. Louis won’t be able to answer any of Avi’s questions afterward, even on deep background. They’re friends, but Louis is a company man. The story will be dead, and Owen Curry will be packed off to some government warehouse with UFO fragments and the Ark of the Covenant. The only way Avi will know what happened is to find Owen Curry and ask.

The room is on the second level, so Avi makes his way up. The stairs are metal, narrow. Avi is careful not to hook the prosthetic under the edges as he goes up. The upper balcony is Astroturf over concrete. Avi inches along toward 152. He can feel the pull he’s missed. The rush of knowing he’s near something terrible. An awful end. There are things about himself he’s had to pass through to get to this point. He’s walked through the dark room full of snakes. He’s looked at everything hateful in himself and said yes, come with me, let’s all step into the fire. The last words he said to Kay were a promise to call Louis. The last thing he said to Emmeline was a promise to pick her up from school. If he dies, they’ll remember him as a liar.

It matters less to him than what’s behind the door.

I thought I was cured, he thinks. I thought I burned it out of me and all it cost me was my leg. But it has to cost everything. It can only ever cost everything.

He slips the key into the lock of 152. He turns the knob slowly, but the latch clicks as it frees itself from the plate. He presses his shoulder against the door and pauses. He’s unarmed, but so is Owen Curry. Except Owen Curry can vaporize a whole building, whereas Avi has a flip-up notepad.

He enters like he’s coming into a surprise party he already knows about. The faucet is running in the bathroom, but there’s no one in the room. He moves along the wall and peeks around the edge of the bathroom door. Empty. The lights are harsh fluorescents, the shower curtain pulled back to show a lime-speckled tub. The motel room looks like a staging of Owen Curry’s room in Seat Pleasant, Maryland: clothes, papers, Planet Chicken containers. On the bed there’s a journal, a marble composition book. The blue-lined pages are scarred up with words, half of the journal full. Avi glances through it, catching certain phrases that repeat. The cattle. Vibration. The null.

He takes out his phone to call Louis and stops. He can’t explain being in the room. He should have called six steps back. He pockets the phone, grabs the journal off the bed, and walks out.

“Did you see him go out?” he asks the woman in the