Shadowbahn(12)
She’s still looking at him. “Why not?” she says so incredulously that, especially under the heat of her glare, it makes him look back at her. “Keep your eyes on the road,” she says, then, “maybe you’re a little nuts.”
He looks back at the road, then looks at her again. Then he pulls the car over to the side of the highway and stops.
“What are you doing?” she says.
He turns off the ignition and twists in his seat to face her. For the first time, she finally detects in him apprehension. “Wait a minute,” he says, finally getting it, voice slightly breaking. “Are you trying to tell me these are the real Twin Towers?”
Within two hours of the
Towers’ initial sighting, Sheriff Jardin gave her deputy a hard look when he asked her the same question. Behind them, traffic on the highway gathered in full force. Around them, the crowd of onlookers billowed. The two continued watching the Towers awhile in silence until the deputy said, “You going in, then?”
? ? ?
The sheriff gave him another hard look. Unsettled enough by a lot more than her displeasure, the deputy dropped formalities. “Rae,” he protested as respectfully as he could manage, “you gotta stop looking at me like I’m the craziest thing that’s happening here.”
suspicious minds
The deputy persisted, “And I notice you didn’t answer my last question.”
“You noticed correctly,” said the sheriff. “Damned astute of you, too.”
Gazing at the rapidly escalating number of cars and people, the deputy asked, “So are, uh, we in charge here?”
“Don’t know if this is even county jurisdiction.” The sheriff nodded at the Towers. “Where they’re standing may be tribal land.”
The deputy peered the other way at a red truck with gold racing stripes. “By the way, first suspect to see the Towers, or to claim to see them, is right over th—”
? ? ?
The sheriff said, “Suspect?”
Jesus, she’s a bitch today. Didn’t take that early retirement early enough for either of us. “Okay, I guess he’s not actually suspected of anything. Also—”
“Man you have a lot of questions, Deputy.”
“And you don’t? I just—”
“What?”
“—hear . . . music.”
“Let’s go talk to the suspect, shall we?” said the sheriff. “Maybe if we lock him up, all this will go away.” She wished the song that was whistling in her head would go away too.
the denied song
Aaron explained, “I came around the bend and there they were.”
“That bend?” In her midfifties with the faintest trace of an accent, graying hair pulled back in a short ponytail, the sheriff pointed over Aaron’s shoulder. “How do you know you were the first one to see them?”
“I was the only one here,” Aaron told her, “then everyone stopped. Unless someone before me just drove right past without noticing.”
“Ever drive this way before?”
“All the time. Sioux Falls to Rapid City.” She studied his red truck with the stripes and a bumper sticker she didn’t understand. Around the same bend, other law enforcement was arriving; new aerial reconnaissance circled overhead. The sheriff turned back to Aaron. “So in other words,” she said, now pointing in the eastern distance, “coming down 44 from that direction, you saw nothing at all until the bend.”
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Oh,” Aaron answered a bit heatedly, “like the rest of this does.” The two locked eyes. “Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“You do hear that, right? Music?”
“No, sir,” she lied emphatically. “I don’t hear anything.”
jihad
The phenomenon of the Towers’ reappearance two decades after their downfall is so terrifying and so eludes explanation as to avoid lesser phenomena of society and commerce. Even as the throngs continue to gather, no souvenir stands have appeared, no pennants have been sold, or buttons. A few entrepreneurs have tried to hawk sandwiches and soda, only to meet rejection and indifference. Contention among county, state, and federal governments as to who has domain is complicated by circumstances in which no one knows what “domain” means.
? ? ?
For some, the Towers’ appearance makes a mockery of their disappearance. Some “news” channels that need not be identified suggest that the Towers are a federal conspiracy, although to what end even excitable commentators find confounding. Others argue that the new Towers are a pernicious kind of jihadist attack, an act of mass psychological terrorism aimed at deranging not just a nation but a defiled century and whatever defiled world inhabits it. To still others, the onset of End Times is so obvious as to barely warrant its loud and incessant mentioning.
those
By the fourth day, several hundred thousand congregate at the Towers. They keep a distance that’s been dictated by nothing other than some collective judgment to go no nearer. If anything, the impulse of the gathered throng is to pull back. They can’t be said to wait, since waiting implies an expectation of something and no one has such expectation. Once the curious have observed the Towers in the same way they would the world’s oldest redwood or presidents’ faces carved in rock, nothing holds them but an inexplicable covenant struck between those already there and those who keep coming.