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

“Why do they look like people?” Fahima asks.

“Someone’s doing it,” Bishop says.

One of the golems puts the bloated slab of its hand on Patrick’s shoulder. It’s a gentle motion, brotherly, but Patrick shoves the golem away with both arms. Undaunted, it starts toward him again.

Kimani is up against the abscess. Two golems come at her slowly, almost patient. Their hands are extended as if to calm her, but she steps away from them, looking back into the shifting hole, terrified.

Sarah is trying to read the one coming at her like a panhandler on the street. It would be less scary if they charged, Fahima thinks. Their slowness makes them feel inevitable. Before the golem gets near her, Sarah blips out, her Hivebody ceasing to exist for a second before she reappears, outside the narrowing circle, staring helplessly as the shapes close in on her friends.

“What do we do?” Fahima asks. One of the golems lumbers toward her, a child’s drawing of a movie zombie.

“Keep them back,” Bishop says. Fahima turns so that she can face the oncoming golems but keep Bishop in the corner of her vision. He lays both of his hands on the abscess. His face contorts in pain and concentration. Fahima feels energy pouring off him. He’s pushing something into the abscess or drawing something up from the ground of the Hive into it. White lines rise up along its base like vines. They expand, webbing its entire surface. The abscess stops fluctuating. It takes a solid shape, a dark cube shot through with veins of bright white. It becomes fully real, and in the next moment it shatters. Shards of black glass fly in every direction, forced away from the explosion of the abscess. Others move of their own accord, fluttering off with the erratic flight paths of bats.

Emmeline stands where the abscess was, her Hivebody bigger than her actual body. It looks as if echoes of her older self are laid over the image of her as a little girl. The effect is holographic, producing a sensation of depth, like seeing her reflected in a hall of mirrors, an infinite regression of images on a flat surface. Emmeline’s hair is a dark corona around her head. Her eyes blaze pale blue. A little girl surging with power. Even Bishop stands back, in awe of her.

The golems continue their approach, and Emmeline’s Hivebody disappears in a liquid flash. Fahima can feel her with them, everywhere now. She’s casting the way Bishop did but more strongly. Emmeline infuses the Hive with herself, becoming a thunderstorm. Bright lines of energy blaze toward the golems from the spot where she was. The lines spiral around them and constrict, squeezing them into the ground, shrinking them like the Wicked Witch melting into smoke, into nothing. They go soundlessly, without protest. Never alive, they’re not dying, only returning to wherever they came from, like a glass of seawater poured back into an ocean.

Emmeline’s Hivebody reconfigures in the air. She looks at what she’s done, a goddess surveying her work. Her hands go up to her face, pressing through the future echoes, condensing her Hivebody into one opaque thing, and then her face goes slack and she falls. Patrick stretches out his arms in time to save her from crashing onto a pile of black shards. He reels her in, clutching the girl to his chest. She mutters something about the stove being on. “I can smell it,” she says. “The blue flame’s not there yet, and I can smell it.”

“What the fuck just happened?” Patrick says.

“We saved the girl,” Bishop says. “That’s what matters.”

“Seems like she saved us,” says Fahima.

Bishop shoots her a look she’s never seen from him. He’s never tried to shut her up. This is the look that does it. Then his Hivebody dissolves, aspect by aspect, until there’s nothing of him left.

—

Fahima can hear Avi crying in the next room. Emmeline says, “It’s all right, Daddy. I’m okay.” Bishop once told Fahima that the Source wasn’t sentient but responded to sentience.

Whatever the fuck the Source is, it’s a big fan of you, kid, Fahima thinks.

She looks at the others. Bishop isn’t with them. Sarah and Kimani look exhausted. Fahima must look just as bad. Patrick looks like Patrick: smug, bored. But Fahima saw it the moment the shape had its hand on him. The horror and repulsion on his face.

“Go talk to her,” Kimani says, interrupting Fahima’s thoughts.

Fahima stands in the doorway, looking on as Alyssa checks the girl’s vitals, Avi cradling her, rocking her back and forth.

“She seems fine,” says Alyssa. “But she seemed fine before, except for being—”

“Brain dead,” Fahima says. Avi winces, and Fahima regrets saying it.

“Emmeline,” Sarah says, “did you see who took you?”

“No,” says Emmeline. “I was there in the shiny place, like you taught me to. I heard someone call me. It sounded like when the radio in the van is between channels. I didn’t like it, but it knew me. I went toward where I heard it. I went down. Then the ground went all black and reached up and grabbed me.”

Sarah gets down on her haunches and holds her hands out. “I’m going to try something,” she says. “I’m going to look around in your head—”

“Get away from her,” Avi says, pulling Emmeline closer to him.

“Sarah, no,” Patrick says. His arm shoots across the space between them and pushes Sarah’s hands down before she can lay them on the girl.

“We need to know,” Sarah says, shaking free of his grip.

“You can’t go into her head right now,” Patrick says. He’s spent more time with Sarah rattling around in his head than anyone else. He knows the disorienting underwater feeling of having her go into your mind. “Let her rest.”

“He’s right,” Fahima says. She’s had Sarah in her head once or twice. She isn’t a big fan.

“Latent memories decay,” says Sarah. “Tomorrow there are details that could be gone. Details we