The Nobody People Read online

  Praise for

  THE NOBODY PEOPLE

  “[A] complex novel about the cost of being different…The characters are intricately human, each rendered in minute and thoughtful detail that pushes back against stereotypes….[The Nobody People] leaves the reader eagerly awaiting the next installment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Bob] Proehl masterfully uses science fiction as a lens to examine social inequality and human evil; readers will find it hard to believe that they’re not actually looking into the near future.”

  —Booklist

  “Thought-provoking…As intriguing yet frightening as the premise of The Nobody People is, it also leaves the reader with a glimmer of hope.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “The Nobody People smashes the ordinary and the extraordinary together for an electric story of modern-day America. Proehl’s strong narrative voice, his complex characters working to survive in a world that fears them, and the conflict and empowerment that comes when you must stand up for who you are all turn The Nobody People into a thrilling story, one that will certainly resonate with its readers long after they finish.”

  —Martin Cahill, author of “Godmeat”

  “Bob Proehl is one of those authors you can trust to guide you out of your comfort zone. The Nobody People is a gripping, haunting, and complex book, perfect for our times. It will take you on a warrior’s journey. In fact, I’m reminded of something Gandalf said to Bilbo at the outset of The Hobbit: ‘If you do [come back], you won’t be the same.’ ”

  —Michael Poore, author of Reincarnation Blues

  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

  Excerpt from The Somebody People by Bob Proehl copyright © 2020 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 is a registered trademark and the CIRCLE colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2019.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Somebody People by Bob Proehl. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  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 9781524798970 (trade paperback)

  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 design: David G. Stevenson

  Cover illustration: © Felix Tindall

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  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

  Excerpt from The Somebody People

  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 fo
und 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.