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

“That’d be fucking great,” says Owen. Twenty minutes crammed in a pickup, the doubled stink of two cows’ obsolescence thick in the air. When I’m done, he thinks, I could come back here and—

No, Owen, says his friend. You are my justice, my scalpel. Soon you’ll feed on cities. But for now you have to stay secret.

Owen’s been secret almost a year. Not a single cow fed to the null. No one hurt. Hiding in one hotel room after another, gorging on takeout, and isn’t he a little thick in the middle lately? Hasn’t his face, once a flinty collection of sharp angles, softened until it’s cherubic? He used to have the face of a predator instead of a sheep. Owen’s spent three days frequenting the diner in Damascus, Ohio, population 578. Waiting for a sign. Getting soft. The best look for a predator is blood in the teeth.

Annoyed, bored, defiant, Owen Curry reaches into the part of his belly where the null resides, ready to let it out, let it have this cook with his stained apron and milky bread smell, and Jake in the dish room, and the cop at the other end of the counter, and the old ladies stuffing envelopes in the corner booth. He’s about to open himself, like the cracking of a terrible egg, when pain stabs his head, a sword made of heat piercing his brain.

Not. Yet.

“You okay, guy?” the cook asks. Owen is white-knuckling the counter. He lets it go, rubs the spot between his eyebrows.

“I’m good,” he says. “I’ve been getting these headaches.”

“It’s all that coffee,” says the cook. He delicately removes Owen’s mug, his arm coming close enough that Owen could lurch forward and bite it. “I’m cutting you off.”

—

Damascus isn’t big enough to have outskirts. If it did, this would be beyond them, into the interstitial wastes between Damascus and the next one-stoplight nowhere. In school, Owen learned that the universe is empty space spotted with dense bits of matter. America is like that, too. The cattle cluster and huddle in cities. Coagulate in small towns. The bulk of the landscape is fallow. Maybe that’s the solution, he thinks. We’ll take everything they built. They can have the wastes.

The cook, Paul, is drunk by the time he picks Owen up from the motel. Jake the dishwasher is drunker. The truck careens along dirt roads. Headlights flirt with ditches and dead trees. Jake offers Owen a beer, and he accepts it, although it’s warm. Jake and Paul have each finished off two before Owen drinks his first.

“We’re lapping you, O,” says Paul.

“And we had a head start,” Jake adds. They decide Owen has to shotgun a beer, which he can’t do in a moving truck. They pull over and step into the glare of the headlights. Paul demonstrates, holding the can of beer up so the headlights glint off the aluminum. He takes his Swiss Army knife and punctures the base of the can. He puts his lips to the hole and cracks the top of the can, swallowing frantically.

“You’re up,” he says to Owen, wiping foam from his chin. Owen takes a can and the knife. He lifts the can like Hamlet with that skull, then stabs it. He turns the knife to leave a dime-sized hole, like a bullet through a forehead. The liquid is suspended, held back with no air to displace it. He covers the hole with his mouth and pops the top, spraying lukewarm beer down his throat. He manages to glug it all down, but when it’s done, he’s coughing and hacking, tears in his eyes. Blood pounds in his ears. Jake and Paul laugh. It’s been a joke on him. Everything from the meeting in the diner to this moment, ridiculing him in the woods.

He reaches for the null in his guts, and the pain floods his head again. He’s determined to push through it. His friend can turn his brain into jelly. Owen doesn’t care.

Jake slaps him on the back. “That’s not bad, O,” he says. “Got it down and kept it down. Better than Paul did his first time.”

“Launched my lunch,” Paul says. “Come on, let’s get going.”

They come to a convoy of three trailer trucks and an RV drawn into a semicircle around a muddied stretch of dirt, stray patches of dead grass slicked down like a bad comb-over. There are a handful of cars and pickups parked along the road, maybe twenty customers milling around. Smoking cigarettes, lining up at the backs of the trailers. As Owen and his new friends approach, a young man with pale, delicate features and a powder blue suit spattered around the legs with mud comes up to them holding a cash box.

“Twenty for the strange, forty for the weird, fifty for the full bizarre,” he says. “That’s the suggested donation. You’re welcome to give more.” He puts his hand on Paul’s bare forearm as he says this, and Owen watches Paul pull out five crisp twenties. The boy gives Paul three tickets and thanks him. Jake sees this, too, and shakes his head as he gives the boy twenty bucks. “Only the strange?” says the boy, reaching for him. Jake twitches away.

“I’m good with the strange,” Jake says, taking his ticket.

Owen hands him twenty dollars. As he does, the boy brushes Owen’s index finger. Owen takes another twenty out of his wallet and hands it over.

“Thank you,” the boy says, smiling and backing away.

“She’s usually in the bizarre trailer,” Paul says. “I’m starting out there—”

“And staying till they kick you out,” Jake says.

“—but if you guys want to start at the first one.”

“We’ll give you two some alone time,” Jake says.

“It’s not like that,” says Paul.

“Is so,” Jake says. “Come on.” He tugs Owen by the arm. They head for the trailer on the left. The strange. There’s a wooden set of stairs with a railing on one side that leads up into the back of the trailer.