The Somebody 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

  “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

  “Thoughtful, nuanced, kinetic, and, above all, human, this is the superhero story we’ve been waiting for.”

  —Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author of the October Daye series

  “The Nobody People is an expertly plotted, morally complex, brilliantly written, adrenaline-fueled adventure into a new dawn of heroes and villains. Hold on tight to this novel, because you’re in for a hell of a ride.”

  —Benjamin Percy, author of The Dark Net, Thrill Me, Red Moon, and The Dead Lands

  “Smart, exciting, lyrical, and fun. This astonishing book brings the superhero universe of Marvel or DC into our own, with all its rough edges and ugliness. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop.”

  —Sam J. Miller, Nebula Award–winning author of Blackfish City

  “The epitome of a page-turner, with well-drawn-out characters, tense set pieces, and a cinematic feel.”

  —John Marrs, bestselling author of The Good Samaritan

  “Bob Proehl brings striking realism to this extraordinary story, delving into the notion of otherness with nuance and complexity. With an ensemble cast of badass, cool-as-hell, and deeply human characters, The Nobody People is a super-fun ride and a timely tale of love, hate, and everything in between.”

  —Sylvain Neuvel, author of The Themis Files

  “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 Somebody 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 © 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.

  ISBN 9781524799007

  Ebook ISBN 9781524798994

  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

  Prologue: Staring at the Sea

  Part One: The New World

  Vantage

  Destroy Everything You Touch

  Roosevelt Island/Park Slope

  Gala

  Park Slope

  Thieves Like Us

  Blast

  Said Your Name in an Empty Room

  Prospect Heights

  Inquiry

  I Can’t Feel at Home in This World

  Prospect Heights

  Klatch

  Badlands Ain’t Treatin’ Us Good

  Rendezvous

  Roosevelt Island

  Mainly Jesus and My Hot Rod

  Prospect Heights

  No Church in the Wild

  Postmortem

  Eat the Rich

  The Love Song of Kevin Bishop

  Part Two: Beyond the Boundary

  On Living

  I’ll Fall with Your Knife

  On Reentry

  A Song in Which to Weep

  Lower East Side/Throgs Neck

  On Wandering

  Let Me Steal This Moment from You Now

  School’s Out Forever

  Samples

  On Escape

  The Love Song of Kevin Bishop

  Part Three: Blank Generation

  On Home

  Wicker Park

  I’m on Fire

  Takeover

  On Commerce

  I Think We’re Alone Now

  On Clarity

  Rogers Park

  I’m Beginning to See the Light

  Graduation

  The Love Song of Kevin Bishop

  Part Four: The Reasons We Fight

  I Never Asked for the Truth, but You Owe That to Me

  On Arrival

  Exes

  On Ability

  Coda

  On Limits

  Hyde Park

  The Next Five Years Trying to Be with Your Friends Again

  Infiltration

  Part Five: Imagining Defeat

  Evacuation

  Rogers Park/Wicker Park

  All We’ve Won with the Saber and the Gun

  Diplomacy

  Hyde Park

  That Was Your Mother, That Was Your Father

  Inheritance

  If Only Tonight We Could Sleep

  On Returning

  Part Six: A Murmuration of Starlings

  Pills

  On Preparation

  Everything They Say We Are, We Are

  North Avenue

  Chair

  Step into This House

  On Gathering

  I Ache in the Places I Used to Play

  The Bishop Lobby

  Let Me Take My Chances on the Wall of Death

  Sin Eater

  Thirty-first Floor

  On Opposition

  Aftermath

  Epilogue: On Endings

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Bob
Proehl

  About the Author

  A million tiny things add up to a death. Take away one, and life goes on. Laid out in perfect sequence, they lead to an end.

  On Wednesday, two fifth-years at the Bishop Academy for the Arts turned in the same term paper, word for word. The teacher hauled them into Headmaster Kevin Bishop’s office and left them to his judgment. Elton Daly claimed Marcine Walden psychically poached the paper from him, and Marcine insisted any theft was accidental. She was a dreamwalker, roaming the sleeping minds of students in the dorms while she slept. It was possible she experienced the paper while wandering through Elton’s dream. She had no more control over it than any dreamer has over their own path. The way she saw it, she was the victim, subject to the nightmares and wet dreams of her fellow students, unable to dream for herself.

  Kevin’s cellphone came to life in his pocket like a lively cricket. He continued listening to the argument, tenting his fingers under his chin in a display of interest. The quickest thing would be to pry into their minds and confirm what he suspected. Marcine had easy smarts and a deep current of intellectual laziness. Elton excelled in all his academics but was failing Psychic Defense. God help me, I know them all so well, he thought. Rather than investigate and dole out punishment, he facilitated reconciliation. Marcine would rewrite her paper with Elton’s help and would teach him to keep his mind shut.

  As they left his office, Kevin caught a spark pass between them—not romantic but an understanding of mutual interest, the seed of community. He smiled at the small joys and miseries of his job.

  His phone showed three missed calls from Laura at her house in eastern Maine. After the calls was a text from her cell:

  been meaning to call u but worried im overreacting. have concenrs abt bobby and hoping u cd come up and talk 2 him.

  The message was no different from hundreds of others he received at the academy. Mothers and fathers sure their children were a danger to themselves or others. Concerns. They all had concerns. Kevin checked his calendar, then texted back:

  So nice to hear from you! It’s been too long. Busy with academy stuff until the end of the week, but I can take the early train up on Saturday and be there by afternoon. It will be good to see you and Tom and Bobby.

  Waiting for a response, Kevin went into the Hive to find Bobby and do a quick assessment. He could see the boy, a shimmer among a sea of twinkling lights. Nothing remarkable, which wasn’t a surprise. Bishop had watched Laura closely growing up, but her ability hadn’t been that impressive: some minor light manipulation. The man she ended up with, over Kevin’s mild objections, was a low-level precognitive who made a living beating the stock market by seeing shifts a few seconds ahead. These things weren’t genetic, but there were trends. When Laura called to tell Bishop she was pregnant after a long period of drifting among the communes and kibbutzes Resonants had built across the world, Kevin bought her a house on Oceanside Drive, near his own. The enclave in Maine was a yuppie iteration of hippie ideals, a nice place to settle into if you never wanted to feel alone. Kevin rarely made it to his own house there, but Laura and Tom had been over the moon and had lived there full-time since Bobby was born.

  The shimmer of Bobby Foster’s Hivebody solidified, and he looked at Kevin quizzically. He was tiny, but that didn’t mean anything. Kevin had students who were physically hulking but manifested in the Hive as ninety-pound weaklings, Charles Atlas ads in reverse.

  “Hello, Bobby,” Kevin said. “Your mom tells me you’ve started to resonate. That’s very exciting.”

  Bobby’s expression didn’t change. He’d never been a cheerful kid, sullen even on the Christmases when Kevin went out to visit, accepting expensive toys from “Grandpa Kevin” with politeness but no enthusiasm. His Hivebody dissipated like smoke.

  Kevin came out of the Hive and checked his phone. There was a text from Laura: thx.

  * * *

  —

  Delays and distractions piled up. A million tiny things. He’d forgotten a dance recital on Saturday and bumped his trip back to Sunday, when the first train out wasn’t until nine, with a long gap between connections in Boston. The Boston-to-Ogunquit line juddered and start-stopped along ancient tracks, and one lurch spilled Kevin’s lukewarm coffee down the front of his white shirt. By the time the train pulled into the Ogunquit station, Kevin was annoyed with the whole trip. He called a cab that took forever to show up because it was the off-season and there was only one cab in town. He texted Laura that he had to stop by his house to get cleaned up and he’d be there shortly.

  Kevin’s house was a bungalow with a sliver of beachfront. He hired people to keep the place up and tried not to think of them as “staff.” The yard was trimmed and the house was spotless, with not a speck of dust on the collection of maritime kitsch that had come with the house. Upstairs, the dressers and closets were stocked with clothes. Kevin often thought of retreating to the beach house on a whim, no suitcases, but it never worked out. The clothes he kept there were castoffs from a former life, shed skins. He picked out a chambray dress shirt that was too sharp at the shoulders to be fashionable and snug around his paunch. He walked down Oceanside Drive toward Laura and Tom’s place as the daylight sputtered out behind a row of new construction, houses built tall on the hill to afford the owners views of the water. Their long shadows crept over the street, over the smaller houses bought early and cheap, and onto the beach, inching toward the incoming tide.

  Laura and Tom’s house was bigger than Kevin’s but modest: a family home on a piece of the beach that transitioned from rough sand to sharp rock, down from the breakwall that protected the nicer homes farther down the street. Their lawn was littered with Bobby’s toys, sun-faded primary-colored hunks of plastic with edges rounded for safety, some of which Kevin remembered purchasing. From under a miniature picnic table near the side of the house, Kevin heard a mewling sound and went toward it. Squatting onto his haunches, he came eye to eye with Easter, the elderly and round-faced silver tabby he’d bought for Laura on her twenty-fourth birthday. The plump cat’s hind legs had been replaced with the back end of a gray seagull. The thin bird legs couldn’t support Easter’s bulk. She dragged herself toward Kevin on her forelegs, webbed feet slapping uselessly on the wet grass. Kevin held out a hand to the cat, which bowed her head like a condemned man waiting for the mercy of the ax. He scratched under her jaw as dread stirred in his guts.

  Kevin heard another noise from inside the house. It was wheezing and plaintive, not unlike Easter’s pained cry. He pulled his hand back and headed toward the house, Easter trying futilely to follow, calling for him to come back.

  Having come from his own house, Kevin was reminded by Laura and Tom’s living room that there was a difference between a well-kept house and a lived-in home. Simple clutter, the echoes of use, imbued warmth to a space. Here it was augmented by the smell of nag champa burning and a Tori Amos album on the stereo. Laura had played it constantly in the months after her mother died, the dancing piano and lilting soprano drifting out of her dorm room whenever Kevin went to check on her. A year later, when she told him kindly but firmly that she was too old to stay at the school any longer and that it was time for her to be out from under his care, he played the same album to fill the absence in her wake. The songs came to hold conflicting emotions that were impossible for the words and music to bear. He hadn’t listened to it in years, and hearing it now brought him back to the day she left. He stood in the doorway, momentarily lost, until he heard a whine of pain and fear from the kitchen.

  The tile floor was scattered with shards of broken glass and a pool of red wine Kevin mistook for blood. Laura sat on the floor, leaning against the side of a counter. Her eyes were panicked, and her thin cry got louder when she saw him. Jutting out of her right side, where her arm ought to be, was the torso of Tom, his Patriots T-shirt seamed together with her blouse in a line that ran across his chest from
one shoulder to the opposite armpit. Kevin closed his eyes and tried to mentally sort them back into their proper places. He tried to superimpose the image of the two of them from the most recent photo they had sent: Laura and Tom on some faraway beach with the sun setting behind them. Bobby had stayed with Tom’s parents for a few days—“figured you had enough kids to deal with” the note from Laura said. He tried to restore them to the way they looked at their wedding, watching through tears as the closest thing Kevin would ever have to a daughter walked away from him again, this time toward another man. When he opened his eyes, they were still an inextricable tangle of parts. The fusion was inexact, failing to connect Tom’s upper chest to a working set of lungs. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, and his lips had the blue tinge of a drowning victim. Laura clawed at the line where the two bodies rudely intersected as if she could separate herself from the dead weight of him.

  “Room,” Laura said, squeezing the word out from overtaxed lungs. She twitched her shoulder to point, and the motion shook the body melded to hers, Tom’s head lolling sickly to the side.