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

He says, more emphatically than he's ever said anything to her, "Now. You have to see this and tell me—"

"Tell you ... ?"

"—that I haven't lost my mind," but he knows he hasn't lost his mind, he's not in any dream. He's not in any tunnel; now another truck approaching in the distance from the other direction—this one's front bumper festooned with the flag of Disunion—stops in the middle of the highway too, like Aaron's. Like Aaron, the other driver gets out of the other truck to walk to the roadside, rubbing his eyes as if in a cartoon. Yet another vehicle nears, and as Aaron turns to gaze over his shoulder, up and down the highway other cars have begun to stop, passengers emerging, everyone's stupefaction surfacing in thought balloons. The sound that's like music, that Aaron thought he was hearing, he hears again: Ask me what I just heard, I have no idea, but not this time. "Yeah," he calls to everyone in and out of earshot, spinning there in the middle of the highway, "oh yeah! Explain that," gesturing at the two towers.

Did they just appear out of the thin air into which things don't just disappear? It's midafternoon, hundreds of cars and trucks already having passed this way since daybreak; Aaron has driven this highway many times, as recently as the previous weekend, spotting nothing but the forbidding Badlands horizon utterly undisturbed by human endeavor. But before his eyes now, striped by their four horizontal black bands, patterned by their gray verticals—demarcating windows narrow enough to offset the absurd fear of heights felt by the Japanese- American architect who designed the structures to be the tallest that ever stood—twin towers rise from the volcanic gorge.

They aren't just the tallest things that Aaron has seen, since he knows that wouldn't be saying much. They're the tallest things most people have seen, with their two hundred twenty floors be- tween them, each of identical height, except one is topped by a colossal aerial antenna jutting out another four hundred feet. The dual monoliths rocket to the heavens even as they're ominously earthbound. Aaron lifts the cell back to his ear. "Cee?" he says as calmly as he can manage.


Badlands

Anyone who's looked at a television or the Internet or a history book the previous score of years recognizes the buildings instantly. On the other end of the phone she finally says, "I don't get it."

Some slight hysteria rises in his voice. "What do you mean you don't get it?" Let's not fight about this too, he thinks. "You don't see it? Them?"

"I do see it. Them. But ... where are you?"

"Highway 44 in the Badlands. Same 44, same Badlands I drive almost every damn day."

She says, "Maybe they're a monument of some kind... ."

"A monument?" Aaron practically shouts in disbelief.

"Like Mount Rushmore ..." but she understands, as he does, that having a fight about this doesn't make sense. "Okay," he snaps, "they're a monument," realizing this time he's about to hang up on her. "Don't go," she pleads, and then Aaron can hear she's scared, and knows he's scared; he peers around at the rapidly swelling sea of human disbelief, the highway traffic jam devolving to a parking lot. "They look just like in the pictures," she says.


Return to sender

She says, "But it can't be them, the actual ... I was seventeen when they came down." It was a Tuesday, she remembers. "I mean, where did they come from? What are they doing in South Dakota?"

"What are they doing anywhere?" answers Aaron. He had just turned twenty-one. That weekend his pals were taking him out to get him hammered; they wound up not going. He pulls the cell from his ear for a moment to make out something, raises the phone in the Towers' direction. "Do you hear that?"

"Just your radio."

"My truck radio's not on now, and the CB is broken. It's coming from ..." He hums to himself, trying to identify it. "What is that, anyway?" He can't tell whether the music is actually from the Towers themselves or from the earth around them.

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.