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

gorilla fucked a wolf and put pants on the baby. And the girls, Tabitha and Marita. Owen assumes they’re lesbians, but they’re not. At least Marita isn’t. She comes to him in the black bone room some nights. She likes to visit him right after she’s fucked Darren or sometimes Oliver. She promises that what they have in the black bone room is special. She does things to him there she can’t do in real life. She burns him all up until there’s nothing left, except he’s still there. He’s seen the red handprints on Darren. Scorched bits of fur on Oliver. “Little flames,” she says. “Not like you and me.” If her needs are anything like Owen’s, it’s dangerous to let her use him as a canvas. It’s only a matter of time before she burns him all up for real. Some guys might get off on that danger. Not Owen. He gets off a different way.

They spend a year this way, running missions. Tabitha calls them ops. Marita and Oliver broke her out of a military prison. The winter was long, all of them cramped in the van, in cheap motels. Now it’s summer, and they can sleep under the stars. They have room to breathe again.

They’re at a rest stop diner outside of Topeka. Yesterday they burned down a medical research facility where people were working on a cure for Resonance. After the building burned, they went to the lead scientist’s house and Owen fed him into the null. The stuff and the idea, all gone. Oliver and Andre and Maryanne stay in the van they stole near Jefferson City. It’s not fair, but they’re too scary-looking to be seen. Soon there’ll be no one to tell them shit like that. Owen thinks about Wendy. When she left weeks ago, heading north back to the Commune while the rest of them went west, she was wearing a massive trench coat, her wings cramped inside. It shouldn’t have to be that way.

On the television behind the counter, a reporter stands in front of a church. There is a massive cross lit by ground lights, Wendy nailed to it by her wings. The camera crews don’t get too close. There are shadows and that digital blurring television does, but you can tell she’s naked. Owen can see her face, the bruises and the cuts. She’s strobed in blue and red police lights. Two men from the coroner’s office reach up toward her. It looks like they’re asking her to come down, but they’re pointing at the spikes that hold her up.

“Oh, fuck,” says Gail. Her voice is a whisper in the front pocket of Owen’s shirt. “Oh, Wendy, no.”

They cut to the man who runs the school in New York, the one where they kept Owen in the basement.

“This is a hate crime,” he says. “Pure and simple. The police here fail to appreciate the gravity of this incident. People need to understand this is an attempt to terrorize and intimidate us. This girl was killed because of what she was.”

Owen will show him such a hate crime. He’ll make him understand what the words mean. But the friend in Owen’s head says no. The school is not to be touched.

After the man from the school, they show the other man, the fat one. JEFFERSON HARGRAVE, TALK SHOW HOST, the words underneath him read.

“This was an act of species self-defense,” he says. “You all want to hug it out with these things and pretend they’re not dangerous. But they are. I feel terrible for the parents of this pigeon girl or whatever she was. But I also applaud the individuals who saw a clear and present threat to their community and decided to act.”

That one, says the friend in Owen’s head. Him.

Owen looks around the table. These are the best friends he’s ever had. Even Darren, whom he doesn’t like. They’ve formed a bond. Like those guys who go to war and meet up fifty years later. Forged in fire. Marita catches him staring at her. Darren’s hand is in the back pocket of her jeans. The look she gives him is mean, twisted up. It reminds him how Amanda Smoot looked at him. Even though he just ate two cheeseburgers, something rumbles in his gut. Marita sees the change in his face, and hers softens. She’s never kind to him, even when they’re fucking. But she’s afraid of him, which is the right way to be.

“You get a message, O?” she asks. They all have the same sliver in their heads that Owen does. But Owen’s connection is deeper. Owen is a kind of chosen one.

He points at the fat man on the screen. “He’s next.”

—

Jefferson Hargrave gets bigger and bigger in Owen’s mind. Owen sees the fat man driving the spikes into Wendy’s wings, jowly face grinning as he does it. In the two days it takes them to drive to Arizona, Owen sits in the back of the van and practices his ability. He takes an apple and nulls shapes out of the inside of it, where he can’t even see. He cuts it open with a pocket knife to check his work. That’s what he’s going to do to Jefferson Hargrave. Take pieces of his insides. Cut him open to check the work.

Maryanne and Gail wait in the van. Ostensibly Maryanne is the getaway driver, but she’s just squeamish. “She needs to get bloody or get gone,” Marita said to Owen last night in the black bone room, Owen’s Hivebody blackened, smoldering. Owen doesn’t disagree, but he also doesn’t want to leave Maryanne alone. She’s family.

“Look at this fucking house,” Darren says. “Can we keep it, you think?”

“We can stay a couple days afterward,” Tabitha says. This is her plan. Her op. “My intel says he holes up here alone for two weeks. In his book he calls it recentering time.”

“You read this asshole’s book?” Darren says.

They stole a copy from a library in