Excerpt from Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

From the cabin of his truck, he aims himself at anything west- ward that he can see a hundred miles away, at the swathe of blue crushing a horizon invaded by the slightest vapor of white—not so much clouds, since there hasn't been a cloud in the sky, let alone rain, in forever. Highway 44 is draped with the flags of Dis- union that grow in number the farther west Aaron gets. Later he'll wonder how it is that on this morning of the argument about the wallet disappearing into thin air, he could have missed there on the flat plain before him the two skyscrapers each a quarter mile high: the breath of Aaron's country, exhaled from the nostrils of Aaron's century.


All our trials

Soon, the change in the landscape announces itself as always. Dashed lava and the blasted detritus of dying asteroids, slashes of geologic red and gold rendering his truck a chameleon. A song finishes, I have no idea what I just heard, but he still remembers what was playing on the radio the time he fell asleep behind the wheel, a mash-up of spirituals and national folk tunes sung by the most famous singer who ever lived: old times there are not forgotten, look away and His truth is marching on and a third, all my trials will soon be over.

In the two seconds when Aaron fell asleep that time, he had a dream that lasted hours, in which the song appeared as a black tunnel on the highway before him. Of course he has no idea now where the tunnel led, or whether it led anywhere or had any ending, because he woke with a great start to that warning of the other truck's horn and the open highway, no tunnel in sight.


Emergence

By midafternoon—the tail end of the five-hour drive to Rapid City from Sioux Falls—Aaron has neither called his wife nor heard from her. He's buzzy and bleary at the same time, in the crossfire of fatigue and two Starbucks espressos self-administered in Chamberlain. But when he slams on the brakes of the truck, without bothering to check in the rearview mirror whether any- one is behind him, he knows he's not in the tunnel of any song. He's not dreaming the thing that suddenly has appeared before him and can no longer be missed as he rounds a corner and emerges from a pass into the Dakota Badlands, with its rocks shaped like interstellar mushrooms and ridges like the spine of a mutated iguana.

He doesn't bother pulling his truck over to the side of the high- way. Stopping in the middle, he gawks for a full minute, opening and closing his eyes and then opening them again. His truck abandoned mid-highway, Aaron strides to the roadside as though the few extra feet will somehow make what he sees comprehensible; a moment later, he returns to the truck's cabin. Unsure what he would say on it anyway, he remembers the CB is dead. He pulls his cell phone from his pocket. "Hey," he says when she answers.


The unheard song

"Hey," he hears her say back, hesitant and quiet.

"Uh ..."

"Look, I'm sorry... ." A pause, and when he doesn't reciprocate she says, "Okay then," annoyed; then another pause. "Aaron?" When he still doesn't answer, she's both irritated and worried by his silence. "Must be close to Rapid City by now."

"Listen."

"I really am sorry"—testy but maybe slightly freaked out? Sometimes he wonders if she wonders if he's going to leave her.

Listen, because he hears the music, or something like it.

The afternoon sun slides down the sky like a window shade. Aaron studies the little icons on his cell phone. "How do you take a picture with this thing?" he asks. "These things take pictures, don't they?"

"You sound like your mother," she sighs, baffled. "Tap the little symbol of the camera. Did you open the icon? So point it at whatever and press the b—"

"How do I send it to you?"

"Little arrow at the bottom ... send it to me later... ."

Excerpted from Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson. Copyright © 2017 by Steve Erickson. Excerpted by permission of Blue Rider Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.