The Nobody People
Page 1
The Nobody People is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Bob Proehl
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Proehl, Bob, author.
Title: The nobody people / Bob Proehl.
Description: New York: Del Rey, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011880 (print) | LCCN 2019013141 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524798963 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524798956 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.R643 (ebook) | LCC PS3616.R643 N63 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011880
Ebook ISBN 9781524798963
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Edwin Vazquez, adapted for ebook
Cover illustrations: © Yvonne Gilbert
v5.4_r1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue: The Incident at Powder Basin
Part One: An Unearthly Child
A Null Sphere
The One-Legged Detective
Owen Curry and the Shimmering Room
Room 152
The Door That Wasn’t There
The Boy in the Box
Kept Like a Secret
Part Two: Academy for the Arts
The Tour
Academy Fight Song
The Physical Kids
Fade Away and Radiate
The Interview
The Pageant
Abscess
Part Three: The Tower
The Day the Story Broke
A Walk in the Park
The Orientation
Debriefing
Owen Curry and the Friend Who Came Back
This Is Happening
Part Four: Annus Mirabilis
The Angel of Montgomery
Leftovers
A Sort of Homecoming
The Confession in Powder Basin
Enclave
Coney Island Baby
Part Five: Last Year’s Man
Owen Curry and the Full Bizarre
Examination
On the Air
Glitch
The Five of Cups
Arrival
The Excommunication
Bargain
Part Six: The Next Movement
Gathering
Owen Curry and the Helter-Skelter
The Investigation
Crazy Classic Life
The White Van
Between the Bars
Barricade
Faction
Fall
Part Seven: New Skin for the Old Ceremony
Wake
This Is How We Walk on the Moon
The Last Visit
Working for the Clampdown
Owen Curry and the Judgment of Powder Basin
The Diamond Sea
Device
This Must Be the Place
Part Eight: Putting Out Fires with Gasoline
Pulse
Legislation
Defense
Siege
Aftermath
Epilogue: In Our Rags of Light
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Bob Proehl
About the Author
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
—EDGAR LEE MASTERS, “Fiddler Jones”
When reporters from the Gillette News-Record asked the survivors of the Powder Basin mine collapse how they survived, all twenty-three gave variations on the same answer: It was an act of God. The will of God. God’s own mercy. Bruce Bennett, cornered on camera by the blond anchor from K-DEV down in Cheyenne, said it was the darnedest thing. Like the hand of God Hisself reached down and pulled them out of that pit.
The twenty-three survivors hadn’t had time to confer. Once they were past the blockage, they trudged upward to the mouth of Shaft L in silence. They emerged, owls in the late autumn daylight. News vans were already there. Spouses with supervisors who let them off when the news broke or with baby-sitters who could show up on short notice waited within the circle of cameras, along with gawkers down from Gillette, phones ready to catch footage of miners or their bodies coming out of the tunnel.
The survivors had been underground nine hours. There was six solid feet of rubble between them and the surface, too much for God to cut through. God had nothing to do with getting them out. It was Tom Guthridge’s oldest boy, Sam, whose forged employment papers said he was eighteen.
* * *
—
The Friday afterward, the Powder Basin mine was closed. All 140 employees were given the full day off with pay. The holding company went over maintenance records and noted how long since an inspector had seen the inside of Shaft L. The best course of action was to keep everyone happy.
The men who hadn’t been in Shaft L gravitated toward the Chariot Lounge in Gillette that afternoon. Some said they’d had a bad feeling when they came in Thursday morning. Many claimed they’d heard the shaft go. They lied to feel like part of it. The lies were the way they understood the accident. True stories, made up after the fact.
Among the survivors, twenty spent their free day at home. They clutched their children more tightly than they had since the kids were babies. Dinners tasted better than anything the steak house in Gillette could grill up. That night, with the kids in bed, they made love to their wives the way guys did in the movies, knocking over lamps and tearing at clothes in a rush to get skin pressed to skin. As if they’d found something they’d forgotten losing and only now understood its value. All of them slept deeply and dreamlessly.
Sam Guthridge didn’t leave his room the whole day, which wasn’t unusual. He was a solitary boy, kind and gentle. His father, Tom, used to say Sam was too soft for this town. Not in anger or disappointment but regret that he couldn’t offer Sam better. Tom and Lucy Guthridge had been socking money away for Sam’s college. All that came to nothing when Tom got sick. Medical bills ate up the savings faster than the cancer ate through Tom’s lungs. Lucy took it as a blessing that her husband hadn’t lived long enough to see Sam go into the mines.
Sam didn’t talk much to his mother about what happened. “We did what we had to, and we got out,” he said. Lucy knew the truth and knew there would be consequences to come. There were times she wished she could take her kids out of the world. Hold them safe and away until the storm passed. But that wasn’t the way of things, and as Lucy
’s mother once said, it rains on the just and the unjust alike.
Sam was a brave boy, but he carried too much. Tom had been the same way. A goofy grin covered the fact that he was holding the world up with his hands. Sam never knew that side of his father, but he picked it up all the same. You couldn’t hide what was in the blood. When Sam didn’t come to the dinner table Friday evening, Lucy sent his little sister Paige in with a plate. Sam thanked her quietly and kissed her on the cheek, because among his three little siblings, Paige was his favorite.
Joe Sabine, who’d never kept a woman around more than a week, and Danny Randall, whose wife had run off to Denver with an IRS auditor the previous year, burned Friday on Joe’s back porch, both wearing their ratty varsity jackets against the cold of the November evening. They were a long time getting around to what needed talking about. They sucked back cans of Coors and threw the empties over the railing onto the lawn. Danny crushed his third on the armrest of his Adirondack chair, same as he did in high school. Joe followed suit, tossing the resulting disk away like a Frisbee. It was past dusk, and both of them were drunk before Danny mentioned the blue lights that had shot out of the Guthridge kid’s eyes. The light cutting through the rock. The thin wisp of smoke, a serpent rising out of the stone. How the boy carved away manhole covers of shale. How the men heaved them aside as the light sheared them from the wall of rubble, edges hot to the touch. Down to the last one, the one that peeled away to show sickly sunlight. And air, air pouring out like beer from a tap, so the men crowded toward the opening, mouths gaping for it. Except Sam, who stepped back and let them, then started in again, widening the hole with his light.
“Wasn’t normal,” said Joe.
“No shit,” Danny said.
“Wasn’t any act of God either.”
“No,” said Danny. “Not God.”
Monday, Danny Randall called in sick and drove up to the public library to use the computers. He had to wait in line. No one bothered to chase off the crazies and jerkoffs until the school let out. He was looking for context, a word for what Sam Guthridge was. There was something he remembered hearing on a radio show maybe a year before, driving back from the Chariot after last call. He tried a bunch of searches, but it was “strange abilities am radio late” that hit pay dirt. It was a radio show called The Monster Report with Jefferson Hargrave. Tinfoil helmet stuff broadcast on one of the Kindred Network stations to which his mother kept her car radio dialed. Danny borrowed a pair of headphones from the desk to listen.
Jefferson Hargrave reminded Danny of the Pentecostal preachers he’d been dragged to see when he was a kid. Sweaty men in starched white shirts railing on about the Lord and His wrath while Danny’s mother swooned. Hargrave pounded words like nails into wood. “I’ve got reports here going back to the fifties,” he said. “Government reports. And if you’re surprised the government knows about these people, then you have not. Been paying. Attention.
“The thing is? The numbers are increasing. I’ve charted this, and it’s, over the years, it goes…swoop, upward and upward. But what do I know? Maybe gamma radiation levels are on the rise, or it’s hormones in hamburgers. I mean, the sun causes cancer. In a world where the sun causes cancer, anything is possible.
“This I can tell you. There’s no links between these people that I can see. There aren’t pockets or hot spots. You know, when some corporation leaks something awful and everyone on Shit River gets ball cancer? It’s not like that. Their people, their parents, are normal, like you or me. Which means you could have a kid with gills or x-ray vision right out of nowhere.
“And then what happens to them? Because I can tell you, once one of these people gets spotted? They’re not sticking around to talk to the press. They’re not registering themselves as weapons. Which, from what I can tell, a lot of them are. They’re weapons. And once they’re found out? They disappear.
“So you’re thinking I’m going to say it’s the government. That these people are being rounded up and trained at black ops sites to fight the war on terror or come take your guns and your women.
“You know what? That’s the best. Case. Scenario. That’s what I’m hoping for. Because what’s more likely? What, it seems to me, is the real nightmare? Is that they are organizing themselves. That they are forming, under our noses, their own army.
“And you have to ask yourself, to what end?”
Danny sat staring at the screen. He clicked the share button and sent the recording to Joe Sabine. After thinking about it another minute, he sent it to the other survivors. All except Sam Guthridge.
* * *
—
Tuesday after shift, the Chariot seemed like a safe place to talk, although who knew? Maybe the Guthridge kid could hear them from across town or read their thoughts like the sports section of the News-Record. That was the damnable thing. You could never know.
Danny bought a round of pitchers. He sprang for the fancy ones from the brewery in Jackson Hole even though it shot his beer budget for the month and left a taste in his mouth like sucking on a penny. Danny let the other men talk. He’d planted the seed and could tell it had found purchase. Alvin McLaughlin brought printouts of blurry photos and typed witness statements. Marc Medina fancied himself an expert on DNA and the effects of gamma radiation thereupon.
“Imagine a string of letters, except only four of them, repeating,” he told Scott Lipscombe. “This radiation slices right through them. GTT slice! Like that. Then you’ve got two loose ends floating around. And they can join up again wherever.” He laced his fingers together, then bent them into a tangle. “Genetic mutation,” he said.
More rounds got bought. Troy Potter, the weeknight bartender, caught a couple of sideways looks and found things to busy himself with in the back. Talk turned to the subject at hand. What to do about Sam. They all made a point of saying they liked Sam. They acknowledged that they were indebted to him. They owed him their lives for what he did.
“With his abilities,” Danny added, throwing it out there. “What he did with his abilities.”
He let the strangeness of the word do its work on them. Some of the men nodded. Others squirmed.
Lowell Tyler, the oldest rockbreaker at the basin, met Danny’s eyes.
“I don’t like where you’re taking this conversation, Danny,” he said. “Even if Tom’s boy hadn’t saved your ass, which he did. This kind of talk doesn’t go anywhere good.”
“It’s talk,” Danny said. He held his hands up innocently. “Situation like this merits discussion, don’t you think?” He gave Lowell his best “we’re all friends here” grin. When it didn’t work on Lowell, he turned it on the rest of the room. People were eager to chime in with agreement.
Lowell had lost a kid in Iraq and trained Tom Guthridge when Tom wasn’t much older than Sam was now. He took Tom’s death harder than anyone. In the weeks after the funeral, Lowell would show up at the Chariot spoiling for it, daring the young bucks to take a swing at him, like he needed physical pain to match what he felt in his gut. No one stepped up and decked the old man even though they would have been doing him a favor.
“I’m having no part of what you’re talking about,” Lowell said. “I’ll tell you, Danny. Put it down. And you two—” He pointed at Alvin McLaughlin and Joe Sabine. “—don’t forget this asshole talked you into breaking into Antelope Valley’s locker room to shit in their helmets when you all were kids.”
“We won that game,” said Joe. His voice was a high whine.
“You two listened to it on the radio in county lockup,” Lowell said. “And Danny got himself off without a hitch. The three of you forget that part.” He held out a ten to Danny. “Here’s for the beers.”
“I got these,” Danny said.
“This is for mine,” said Lowell. Danny took the bill. He looked at it like Lowell had wiped his ass on it. They watched Lowell walk out, then turned to Dann
y. They weighed what Lowell said. They wondered if they ought to follow him out the door.
Danny slapped the ten down on the bar.
“Looks like Lowell stood us another round,” he said. It got the desired laugh. More important, it put Lowell Tyler’s blessing on them. Lowell said he had no part of it, but Danny had him buying the beers.
“The thing is,” Danny said, “there’s a risk this is the start of something. You can’t know where something like this is going to lead. That’s what we need to find out. The only way to do that is to go have a talk with Sam.”
There would be time later for all the survivors to reconcile their actions and their consciences. Although, as it turned out, not much time. For now they were resolved. And as Danny Randall said, “It might as well be tonight.”
* * *
—
Lucy Guthridge hadn’t been to bed since the incident. She drowsed on the sofa or in the armchair after the kids were asleep. When she answered the door in her gray uniform from the diner, she knew this was what had kept her up. A vision of this assemblage, this mob camped out on her lawn. It’s a wonder you all aren’t sporting pitchforks, she thought.