The Nobody People Bob Proehl (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

splitting headache, a burning right in the center of his skull. He meets up with friends that night at one of Cleveland’s divier bars, intending to self-medicate with tequila. In the morning, the headache is gone, replaced by a new one, more diffused through the entirety of his head. His mouth is dry and fuzzy. There’s a man next to him in the bed, although he can’t remember coming home with anyone. Omar gives him a prod in the ribs, and the man rolls over to face him. He’s a perfect duplicate of Omar: every hair, every tattoo, even the pockmark above his left eyebrow where he’d picked off a chicken pox scab as a kid. Terrified, Omar scrambles backward, tangling himself in the sheets and toppling over the side of the bed. His double pauses breathing, then returns to gentle, undisturbed snores.

Jeneva Cheatham believes she ate something spoiled at lunch. She swears off clams the way she’s sworn off hard liquor and guys who claim to be writers. That night she vomits up a sticky, opalescent black liquid that cools into glass in her hands.

Dorian Manzo feels a spring in his step. Finally over him, he thinks. He’d hoped his grief about the breakup would die this way, starved for the sunlight of his attention rather than picked apart in therapy. He doesn’t notice that his feet are no longer touching the ground. Tomorrow he flies.

Barbara Stannis, single mother first, dental hygienist second, attributes the buzzing in her head to last night’s third glass of red wine and gulps a handful of Tylenol when she gets home. The noise persists the next day and the next. It’s a week before it resolves from a staticky distraction to a bell-clear running feed of her teenage son’s contemptuous thoughts about her as he sits at the breakfast table, waiting for her to serve up eggs. Barbara doesn’t last long in the brave new world. Before support services can emerge, she’s overcome by the barrage of other people’s honest, cruel thoughts. Pills and the most expensive bottle of vodka she’s ever bought chase her into the quiet. She’s not alone. The suicide rate in the United States skyrockets for six months. One in four newly minted psychics take their own lives before the year is out. It turns out that lying and concealment save lives.

Many of the affected are children, babies. Their abilities manifest in their early teens, in a changed world. They remember the Pulse as a time they felt safe. I feel like a cell in an organism, Rosa Nash tells Mr. Saunders, her sixth grade science teacher at Allentown Middle, who has grown stone-hearted to the intuitive insights of children. Years later, after the war, Rosa floats above Mr. Saunders’s house, watching him load up his minivan so his family can join the parade of the displaced. She feels vindicated watching someone who pissed on her dreams crash hard against reality.

Some changes are immediate. In a marketing meeting, Lucie Arsenault bursts into flames. She’s fine. Ronnie Eggleston, sitting next to her, is rushed to the hospital with second-degree burns on his arms. A polyester swath of his cheap suit fuses into his flesh, leaving him a houndstooth-patterned tattoo.

Syd Buckner breaks out in eyes, all over his skin. Each one pops open with a wet unsticking noise, flooding his visual cortex with information until he manages to get the bulk of them to shut.

Clay Weaver’s boss is talking about the summer numbers, gesticulating enthusiastically, but the sound and his motions are slowed down. Clay feels as if he’s watching a movie, and the film’s become stuck in the projector, warping and melting.

In Central Park, a pregnant woman floats into the air. She grabs at a lamppost to keep from drifting away.

On Main Street in San Jose, a teenage boy rips a mailbox out of the ground and holds it effortlessly over his head to impress a girl, grinning idiotically.

At a diner in Syracuse, a wife looks at her husband in horror and begins screaming curses at him. The words emerge from her mouth, streaming hot pink letters that crash into his face like the torrent of a fire hose.

In the common room of an Omaha nursing home, an elderly woman pets the luxuriously furred tail she’s sprouted and invites others to do the same.

At North Fremont and Michigan in Portland, Oregon, a cop pulls a gun on her partner, aiming it at his face, which has the consistency of melted wax. Through drooping lips, he begs her not to shoot.

On Delta Airlines Flight 2377 from Los Angeles to Chicago, the passenger in seat 15F explodes in a burst of nothingness. Null. He turns up unharmed on the ground directly below, cradled in the piece of fuselage he took with him. The passenger in 12A, acting on instinct, unbuckles her seat belt, brushing aside the bright yellow mask dangling from the ceiling. She pushes through panicked passengers to the wound in the side of the plane and presses her hands toward it. A shimmering wall expands out, sealing the breach. When Flight 2377 lands, the passenger in 12A is taken into custody. The passenger manifests are scrubbed from Delta’s computers. Of the 189 people on the flight, 103 are Resonants when they land. None say anything as the passenger is taken. Photos of the plane on the tarmac at O’Hare, gaping hole in the side, are drowned in the noise of that news day. The hero of Flight 2377 never resurfaces and is never named.

On the floor of the Senate, Senator Frank Adkins at the podium argues that although the Japanese internment was a mistake, we now face a clear and present threat. He looks down to see his hands, gripping the edges of the lectern in his fervor, are glowing blue. The minority leader, Stewart Quinn, can hear the thoughts of all the senators present, along with everyone in the gallery and the protesters outside. He bangs his gavel frantically