The Nobody People, Bob Proehl [best ereader for epub .TXT] 📗

at the shoulder. The bottom six inches of the shaft of his cane sits on the floor. There’s no blood. Avi feels the smooth surface of the wound with the back of his hand. It’s tender to the touch, like the socket of a pulled tooth.

He hears the door open and shut back down the hall. “I brought you some books from my parents’ house,” calls a voice Avi can’t immediately place. “I’m meeting Senator Lowery, then going to New York. I’ll be back in a day or so. It’s important you don’t go out. You’ve done an amazing thing, but you need to rest.”

Patrick Davenport stands in the doorway, holding a small stack of paperbacks. Mysteries and sci-fi novels, the kind Kay used to read. Avi levels the gun and fires the last bullet. It tears through Patrick’s shirt and sinks harmlessly into the flesh of his chest. Patrick drops the books and watches as Avi continues to pull the trigger, the hammer clicking into empty chambers.

“What have you done, Avi?” says Patrick. He’s smiling, but there’s no warmth in it. He doesn’t look like the man Avi knows but someone else, someone crueler. He steps toward Avi slowly. “Don’t you know what he was? What he was capable of? He was going to win the war to come. That little town full of bigots? Your wife? Those were a warm-up. A snack.” Avi can’t tell if Patrick’s wincing or grinning, but his teeth are bared. “You killed him like it was nothing.”

“You made him do it,” Avi says.

Patrick stops, calmed. He puts his hand on Avi’s cheek almost tenderly. It feels wrong. Something twitches and writhes under the surface of the skin. “How did you know?”

“They found a piece of you in Darren Helms’s brain,” says Avi.

“Ah,” Patrick says.

“Why did you—”

“Shut up,” Patrick says, squeezing Avi’s cheeks until his eyes tear up. “You know I can’t control Damps like you.” One of Patrick’s fingers stretches along Avi’s face, behind his earlobe, into the edge of his hairline. “It’s frustrating. When I put a piece of myself in someone with no Resonance, a useless Damp like you, it does the strangest thing. It goes to the same spot it would in one of us. But instead of nestling in and letting me speak to them, it roves around, knocking things over. Looking for the magic bit of them that just isn’t there. We’re talking about the midbrain here, so the things it’s destroying are memories. Isn’t that funny?”

It slides into Avi’s ear, thick and viscous like a glob of spit. It blossoms inside his head, splitting into a dozen, a hundred tendrils. By the time Avi understands that they’re tearing his memories to shreds, it’s too late. He tries to hold on to one thought, a single moment. Standing with Kay in Central Park, Emmeline spinning at the center of a flock of geese. But the moment breaks. He sees the image, but it doesn’t mean anything to him. Who is that woman, that girl? Pieces slide away, and there’s only him, lying on the floor of a strange room. A man he doesn’t know towers over him. The man kicks him in the shoulder where his arm should be, and he screams in pain.

“Now I have to change my shirt,” the man says. With his finger, he plays with a hole in the shoulder of his dress shirt. He leans down, his face close to Avi’s. There’s something in his breath, a smell like something is dying inside him. Avi struggles not to throw up. There are things moving in his head like a school of terrible fish.

“You haven’t stopped me. You haven’t saved anyone,” says the man. “Everyone, even you, is going to forget you ever were.”

The man walks out. Avi listens to him going down another hallway. He can hear the man humming to himself. He listens as a door opens, closes. A car starts, pulls away.

He brings himself up to sitting. There’s something he knows. Not a memory but a structure. A container you put things in. A way to start. Whowhatwhenwherewhy. He begins with the most basic.

“Who?” he mutters to himself. No answer comes. The structure falls apart. He starts to sob because he knows something has been lost and because there is no way back. You can’t get anywhere from nowhere.

He’s sitting on something. He shifts his weight and digs it out with his remaining hand. It’s a gun. It smells of spark and burn. He turns it over, admires it. He’s aware of a weight in his pocket. He sets the gun down and reaches in, pulling out the bullets and looking at them as if they’re birdseed, nickels, something benign. He loads them into the gun, holding it between his knees to compensate for his missing arm. It’s an action his body knows, inscribed farther down in the nerves rather than in the wreckage of his brain.

He feels a hand on his head, running through his hair. He looks up at a young woman standing next to him. She is pretty, in her early twenties, maybe, with dark skin and bright blue eyes. Her hair is like fireworks. She is crying. He doesn’t know her or recognize her. She puts her hand on his face. Someone just did this, a minute ago, he thinks. But that was bad and this is nice. The thought skitters away from him, and he focuses on the young woman. Along the inside of her forearm, there’s an oblong scar that looks like a galaxy written onto her skin. He reaches up and touches it with two of his fingers. He knows it from somewhere.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks.

“No, Daddy,” she says. “You didn’t hurt me.”

“I don’t know you,” he says. He looks at the gun. “Everything’s gone. Can you fix me?”

“I can’t,” she says. “There are things that happen, and they always happen. There are things I can’t fix.”

He nods. “You should go,” he