The Nobody People by Bob Proehl

Author:Bob Proehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

The cook raps a greasy knuckle on the flyer Owen Curry has been staring at for five minutes. “You been?” he asks.

Owen is startled. He jostles his coffee, his fifth cup. It spills on the picture, a still from an old movie. FREAKS! the flyer declares. Welled on the surface, the drops look like pale blood. They soak into the paper dull tan.

“Not yet,” Owen says. The cook is sweaty, unshaven. He smells like hamburger and that body odor cattle have. Bread soaked in soured milk. Owen feels nauseous being around so many of them. Couldn’t I—

No, says the friend in his head.

Owen crams cold pancake into his mouth and looks at the cook as he chews. “You?”

The cook holds up three fingers, then leans in so close Owen gets a whiff of his stale breath. “Seriously fucked up,” he whispers. “They got this girl with tentacle arms. Normal except for that, but her arms are tentacles with suckers and everything. Imagine you saw her on the street. You’d check out her ass, because it’s like an easy eight. Maybe whistle or say something. And then, bang, tentacles.”

“That’s fucked up,” says Owen. He knows this is how guys talk to one another. Girls’ asses rated like movies, thumbs up or down. His manager at the Planet gave three letter grades to every girl who worked at the mall, one for tits, one for ass, and one for face.

“Worst thing is I can’t stop thinking about her,” says the cook, wiping his hands on a dirty towel tucked in his belt. “I get these nightmares of those tentacles touching me, but it’s like I’ve got to know what they feel like. If they’re warm or cold.” His eyes go out of focus. Someone’s fucked with his mind, Owen thinks. Someone like me has laid their mark on him. He wonders how long and how badly this hapless cow will be haunted. “Anyway,” the cook says, “you got to go. Bring a sick bag in case you get queasy. But you got to go.”

Owen looks at the flyer. He points to the address, some county road. “How far is it?” he asks.

“Twenty-minute drive.”

“I don’t have a car,” Owen says.

The cook stares at him. “How’d you get here without a car?”

“I’m on a sort of walking tour,” says Owen. “Like a pilgrimage.”

“Like Moses.”

“Yeah,” says Owen. “Like Moses.”

“Me and Jake are going to drive out there after work,” says the cook, cocking his thumb at the dishwasher in the back. “It’d be tight, but we could take you out.”

“That’d be fucking great,” says Owen. Twenty minutes crammed in a pickup, the doubled stink of two cows’ obsolescence thick in the air. When I’m done, he thinks, I could come back here and—

No, Owen, says his friend. You are my justice, my scalpel. Soon you’ll feed on cities. But for now you have to stay secret.

Owen’s been secret almost a year. Not a single cow fed to the null. No one hurt. Hiding in

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