The Nobody People

to Chicago. A stack of money: crisp twenties and even a couple of hundreds. And one other thing.
“So we’ll never be apart,” his friend said. He put his hand on Owen’s cheek the way he had in the black bone room. This time it was a cool liquid thing on Owen’s skin. A drop rolled upward into Owen’s ear. He could feel it moving, burrowing. Owen thought about the scene in Wrath of Khan. The Ceti eel. It used to scare him when he was little, and his mother would call him a pussy. This was like that, but it wasn’t scary. He trusted his friend. He accepted the gift.
On the bus ride to Chicago, the little piece of his friend in Owen’s head spoke to him. It talked about plans, about the black bone room and how important people like Owen were. We’re here to be shepherds, his friend said. And if we’re the shepherds, what does that make them?
“Sheep,” Owen whispered. The person in the seat next to him snored as the bus plowed through the night somewhere in the country’s flat midlands.
They’re livestock, his friend said. Cattle. It’s important that you learn to think of them that way.
He told Owen he wanted him to use his ability somewhere particular this time. There was a church near Chicago. He wanted Owen to feed it to the null.
“Why a church?” Owen said, whispering. A thin needle of pain shot through his head. He felt something warm and wet in his ear, and when he swabbed it with his pinkie, the finger came away bloody.
First Corinthians Church in Roseland, said his friend. Tomorrow night. Take the whole church for me.
The bus dropped him in Roseland, on Chicago’s south side, after the sun had gone down. He asked the driver for directions to First Corinthians, but the driver had no idea. He wished he’d kept his mother’s iPhone with the maps on it. An old black lady at the bus station gave him directions. She smiled sweetly at him. Owen tried to suss if she had vibration, but she was cattle, like his mother, like Amanda Smoot and everyone he’d fed into the null at the mall.
Owen found his way to First Corinthians, a ten-minute walk in the cold. It was a church for black people. There were kids practicing for a Christmas pageant. Owen sat in the back of the church, rubbing his hands together to warm them. He listened to those kids sing about angels. There was a black lady down the pew from him who was a little younger than Owen’s mother but pretty. She was watching the kids, rapt. He couldn’t tell which one was hers, but he could tell how much she loved whichever one it was. He reasoned that he had a job to do and that someone had loved Amanda Smoot and all the other people in the food court. What Owen was part of was bigger than love.
When he reached down to find the empty spot in his guts, he felt something strange, like an echo. Someone in the church had vibration. It screamed at him from every direction. He went into the black bone room, letting his head loll on his shoulders as if he’d fallen asleep in the pew, and he could feel it. Owen was sure his friend wouldn’t want him to null out someone like them. Someone special. He came back to. The pretty black lady was looking at him. She probably thought he was a drug addict. She had no idea what he was.
Owen snuck out the back. He walked back toward the bus station, near the middle of town, and got a room at a motor inn. The next day, he found another church nearby, called Salem Baptist. It was mostly empty, just the preacher and a secretary and some kid. Cattle. The preacher yelled at Owen to get out, and Owen dug the null up, tugging it upward from the center of him. He imagined it growing big enough to engulf the whole church, but he stopped it. He pulled it back before it took the secretary. He left her as a witness to what he’d done, to what he was becoming.
He walked back to the motel room. Lying on his bed, he waited for his friend. He knew he shouldn’t stay here, so close to the church, but he didn’t want to leave without instructions. He waited all night and the next morning, but his friend never showed. Owen tried to wake up the little piece of his friend that was in his head, but he didn’t know how. It wasn’t like a phone you could call out on. He had to wait. He bought a marble composition book and a bag of Bic pens at the convenience store and started writing down everything he remembered his friend telling him. He felt like the men who wrote the Bible must have, fumbling divine thought into clumsy words on paper.
After a few days with no word, Owen was worried. He had taken the wrong church. He hadn’t done what he was asked. He wanted to beg his friend for forgiveness, but how could he if his friend wouldn’t even talk to him? He sat at the window, peering out through the blinds at a man getting out of a minivan. There was something about him Owen didn’t like, something in the way he walked. He wondered if he could reach across the parking lot and feed the man into the null. He’d never done anything like that before, and it excited him, thinking about new things he could do with his ability. He needed his friend to guide him, to show him who he was going to become.
Owen thought about the dreams he’d had before they met. The shimmering room full of people. Something in the dream felt like the black bone room. Owen wondered if the two were connected, rooms in the same house. Maybe