This is an excerpt from my latest novel, Slow Fall.
SOMEWHERE IN NEBRASKA
The Chat-n-Chew on the main square opened at six in the morning as it always did and by seven the counter was full and the coffee was hot and the talk was about the weather turning and whether the Reinholdt boy would start and what the county commissioners had decided about the road on the east side of the lake.
Nobody talked about the other things.
The grain elevator was closed. It was closed yesterday too. Someone had put a padlock on the vehicle gate that hadn’t been there last week and the man who managed it wasn’t answering his phone, but his truck was in his driveway, which several people had noted without saying so to each other. A farmer who had a delivery scheduled drove out there at seven and sat in his truck looking at the padlock for a while and then drove home and told his wife and she said that’s strange and he said yes and they ate breakfast and he went back out to the barn. There was work to be done. There is always work to be done on a farm.
The Casey’s on Route 281 was out of regular. Had been since Monday. The owner had called his distributor twice and reached voicemail both times and once had gotten a recording saying the mailbox was full. He was selling premium only and people were paying it without complaining, which was unusual. People here complained about gas prices the way they complained about weather, as a form of greeting, as a way of being known to each other. He noticed nobody was complaining and he thought about that while he restocked the cooler, which was lower than it should have been. A man came in and bought six cases of water and two bags of ice and the owner rang it up and said stocking up and the man said just in case and they nodded at each other and that was the end of it.
At the elementary school the principal had gotten an email from the district at 5 AM asking about food service inventory. Just asking. No explanation, no context, a form she didn’t recognize requesting current stock levels for the cafeteria, quantities on hand, days of supply. She had replied with the numbers and received no response. She mentioned it to the cafeteria manager who said that was odd and they agreed it was odd and then the bell rang and they went to their respective stations because there were children and there was a schedule and the schedule was what you followed.
She taught her third period class and ate her lunch at her desk and watched the parking lot and everything was normal and she didn’t know what she had expected.
The internet was slow. This happened. The county’s fiber was still two years away according to the last town meeting and people accepted it the way they accepted most things, with a patience that looked from the outside like indifference but wasn’t. Still, several people rebooted their routers more than once and stood waiting with their arms crossed, loading screens spinning, pages arriving half-formed or not at all.
The weird thing was there was pretty much no information about anything outside of the immediate area. As if the entire country had faded into a haze.
The hardware store owner had been trying to reach his supplier in Lincoln since Tuesday and kept getting a busy signal. He didn’t know what a busy signal meant anymore, in terms of what was actually wrong, just that something was.
A woman who had a sister in Omaha had been trying to reach her since the previous evening. Six calls, four texts, nothing delivered, the little clock icon spinning next to each message. She had driven past the hardware store at noon and seen that it was busier than usual, men loading things into truck beds in the parking lot, and she had gone in and bought weatherstripping she didn’t need and a box of contractor bags and two extra propane canisters for the camping stove and a twelve-pack of D batteries. She stood in line behind two men she recognized and all three of them looked at what the others were buying and nobody said anything. She drove home and put everything away.
At the feed store the owner sold the last of his stored inventory to a man who bought considerably more than he usually did and paid cash, which people didn’t usually do. The owner ordered more stock through the system and received an automated confirmation and then nothing after that. He called his rep and got voicemail and left a message that he knew, listening to himself leave it, sounded more normal than he felt.
The afternoon was beautiful. Red and orange down every street, the maples at full color, the kind of October day that reminded people why they stayed here in the middle of nowhere when staying sometimes needed a reason. Children walked home from school through piles of leaves. Somebody’s combine was running in the distance, that low steady sound that meant the season was closing, the smell of cut stalks sharp in the cold air.
At four o’clock, a black SUV with darkened windows, the roof bristling with antennas, and blue lights flashing in the grill, roared through town at twice the speed limit. It was followed by two high-ceiling black vans, and a half-dozen black eighteen-wheeler trucks with trailers painted solid black. Two similar black vans followed. They raced through on Route 20 going west. No markings, no license plates, but they looked like they were government, moving fast, and people at the Chat-n-Chew watched them through the window and someone said wonder where they’re headed in such a hurry and that was the end of that conversation.
What none of them knew was that there were markings on the roofs of the vehicles; not visible from ground level but also not from above unless one was looking with an infrared sensor since the symbol was made from near-infrared reflective paint. Every vehicle had it. A large wedge, wider at the bottom than at the top. Narrowing as it rose.
It was the shape of a keystone. The stone at the top of an arch—the stone that held all the others in place by the simple force of its angle. The symbol was there so that a drone or aircraft could identify them if it knew what it was looking for.
The convoy vanished to the west.
The lights came on at dusk as they always did. Supper was on tables across town at the usual hour. The high school football field blazed white and the bleachers were full and the band played and in the second quarter the home team scored and everyone rose and made noise into the cold dark sky and for that moment everything was exactly what it had always been.
After the game the Chat-n-Chew was busy. He was still out of regular. A woman he didn’t recognize paid cash for two full canisters of camping fuel and a paper road atlas, the kind nobody bought anymore, and got into a car with out-of-state plates, Illinois, that was loaded with gear, gas cans strapped on top, and was gone before he could think of anything to say.
He figured she was maybe from Chicago?
He locked up at eleven and drove home the long way, past the grain elevator, and sat for a moment with his headlights on the padlock. It was a good padlock. New. The chain through the gate was heavy gauge and it hadn’t been there eight days ago and nobody had explained it and nobody was going to.
He drove home and told his wife what he’d seen and she listened and they sat at the kitchen table and she said what do you want to do and he looked at the window and the dark fields past it and thought about his brother-in-law’s farm twelve miles out of town, the well water and the woodstove and the cellar his wife’s family had been filling every fall for three generations, and then he thought about his mother two streets over, eighty-one years old, bad hip, alone in the house she had lived in for sixty years and had no intention of leaving.
They both looked out the window when something changed.
A steady stream of headlights on Route 20.
Heading west. Headlights as far as the eye could see. And in Nebraska, in the flatlands, you can see for miles and miles. Headlights.
Every so often, one of those sets of headlights pulled off the road. Then went dark.
And they realized it wasn’t because the people were taking break.
They were out of gas.
He looked at his wife.
Who the hell are they? Where are they coming from? And why? The Interstate was miles to the south. What are they doing up here? Where are they going?
The unsaid question: what are we going to do?
