THIRTEEN

Dean stopped at the diner first. Pete, the short-order cook, worked his normal shift, but had nothing new to add. No additional memories unlocked beyond the momentary recovery when he burned his forearms before sinking back into unconsciousness. True to her word, Marie had refused to cover Donnie’s shift. Whether the young man had another case of true love or a hot date lined up for the night, he was stuck doling out late-night meals. Before the blackout, he and his date had too much to drink and fell asleep watching a streaming horror movie before the clock struck midnight.

“Wouldn’t have taken much to knock me out even if I’d been awake,” he said as he filled a serving tray. “We’d planned to go to Gyrations later, zone out to some EDM, but never made it.”

Not a fan of electronic dance music, Dean figured the kid was lucky but declined to tell him so. Instead Dean asked him to point out any regulars who might have been in the diner the previous night. A few, sporting fresh bandages, were easy to spot. Dean made a circuit of the diner.

Gabe and Linda, a couple who looked like they had ordered one of everything from the menu, made it through the witching hour relatively unscathed. They’d been sitting in the same booth waiting for their order. Both had merely slumped unconscious in the booth, unlike their unlucky server, Marie.

Henry Addison, who napped throughout the day but could never seem to sleep through the night, sipped from a bowl of tomato soup and told Dean he’d simply toppled off his stool. “Sad to say, I knocked Mabel James off her stool as well,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s my fault she’s laid up with a sprained ankle.”

None of them experienced the brief wakefulness Pete had. None had any warning before the event. Wherever they had stood or sat, they all went down hard. And they all awoke within seconds of each other.

Taking another tack, Dean asked them if they recalled anything usual happening in the days leading up to the midnight event. A few mentioned the afternoon thunderstorms, but nothing stood out.

Dean ordered a slice of blueberry pie, had it boxed and took it to go. He recalled the last time he’d had blueberry pie. Sam had been kidnapped and tortured for information by Lady Bevell—an early black mark against the British Men of Letters. After they rescued Sam and returned to the bunker, their mother bought Dean a delicious blueberry pie. He smiled, and wondered what she was doing now.

He stopped next at Placko Products and talked to the front desk security guard, asking about the reports of casualties after the blackout. Beyond the guard station, Dean heard the rumble of conveyor belts and the continual beeping of forklift horns. If he stayed much longer, he thought the sound might drive him crazy. But maybe it became one more layer of white noise in the factory.

Ed Brunson, a site manager instructed the guard to “give Agent Tench a visitor badge” and then he took Dean on a tour of the facility. The Placko employees experienced a series of minor injuries and one deadly one. A night shift supervisor had died during the incident, falling down a metal staircase that gave access to a catwalk that overlooked the forty-foot high warehouse.

“Horrible accident,” Ed said as they stopped near the stairway. “Larry was a great guy. Been here since day one. The way it happened…” He looked up the stairs and Dean thought he detected a slight shiver of dread. “Could have been any one of us working that shift.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

“In my office,” he said. “One second, I’m checking our numbers on the computer. Next thing I know my face is mashed on the keyboard.”

Dean talked to a few of the employees, several who had suffered some bumps and bruises and heard more of the same. No warning, no recall. He turned in his visitor badge and returned to the Impala.

“Frigging wild goose chase,” he muttered softly as he shoved the key in the ignition. The motor turned over, rumbling reassuringly. He could always count on Baby.

Glancing at the empty seat beside him, he wondered if Sam had had better luck reviewing security footage with Gruber. If he had, he probably would have checked in with Dean. Before deciding on his next move, he glanced at the box from the diner and decided a slice of pie might provide some investigative inspiration.

With the car idling, he wolfed down the pie and tossed the plastic fork in the box. “Thanks, Donnie,” he said, finally deciding to return to the motel and wait for Sam’s call. If his brother had been staring at security footage all night with nothing to show for it, Dean doubted a second pair of tired eyes would unlock Moyer’s mysteries.

He flicked on the radio, which he’d already tuned to the local classic rock station, and shuddered at Donnie’s taste in music. But, that gave him an idea. Donnie had mentioned scrapped plans to go to Gyrations last night. He wondered what happened when everyone on a crowded dance floor took a dive in the middle of an EDM set. With rapid movement, the potential for injury probably increased. And if some of those dancers had been drinking alcohol or using illicit drugs, or a combination, their experiences with the blackout might have been altered in a way that would give some clue how the whole thing went down.

Of course, if repeatedly beeping forklifts had rubbed his nerves raw, he had no idea how long he could tolerate EDM purgatory. Oh, well. Nobody ever said hunting was easy.

A neon sign spelled out the dance club name on its widest wall. To the right of the word Gyrations, blue and pink outlines of neon dancers—not much more than stick figures—shifted back and forth. Rather than a passable demonstrating of gyrating, the binary motion of the stick figures looked more like the hokey pokey. As Dean pulled into the parking lot, the music blasting from inside the club overwhelmed a Clapton guitar solo coming from his car speakers as several people stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Reluctantly, Dean switched off the ignition and the stereo.

“No turning back now,” he muttered as he crossed the parking lot to enter the black-and-silver building.

In the lobby, a perky hostess in a glittery silver dress requested a cover charge in exchange for a wristband entitling him to two free drinks. Instead, Dean flashed his FBI credentials and said, “Official business.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised, her smile faltering. “Can I help?”

The building vibrated with repetitive, pulsing electronic music. He could feel it through the soles of his boots. Though tempted to say neighbors had filed a noise complaint, he asked if she’d worked the previous night during the blackouts. But that had been her regular night off, and she’d been home all night, in Bakersburg. He noticed a small black ribbon pinned to her dress and inquired about it.

“In memory of Lettie Gibbs,” she said. “One of our servers. She died last night.”

“What happened?”

“It was awful,” she said, momentarily covering her mouth. “They said she fell and—and she sliced her throat on a broken champagne bottle. By the time everyone woke up…”

“You know her?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dean said. “I’d like to talk to anyone who was here when it happened.”

“Sure,” she said, and waved him down a short hallway decorated with flashing, multicolored, multidirectional neon piping that ended at two smoky glass doors, each in the shape of a half circle. As he approached, both doors swung open toward him, greeting him with an undiluted blast of EDM.

Inside the main room a long, curving glass-and-chrome bar overlooked a large dance floor surrounded by recessed spaces with intimate tables in a similar style, each a step to three steps up from the dancers. More multicolored neon piping decorated black walls scattered throughout an abundance of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Rotating spotlights and an impressive assortment of strobe lights created flares on the chrome and, combined with the mirrors, made the interior space a dizzying spectacle.

Along with the two free drinks, Dean thought the cover charge should include a handful of aspirin. Even allowing for the soul-crushing music, Dean found the size of the crowd—including those on the dance floor, sitting at tables or clustered along the bar—a bit underwhelming. On the other hand, only a day had passed since a cocktail server had had her throat severed by a broken bottle, so he was surprised anyone had showed up at all. And now that he looked around, he realized the dancers were a bit subdued in their movements. Pairs and groups conversing evinced serious expressions more often than smiling, animated chatter.

Dean flashed his ID at the nearest bartender and ordered a bottle of beer. Might help the music go down. But he doubted it.

With a deft movement, the bartender flipped the cap off the beer bottle and pushed it toward Dean along with a frosted mug. Dean ignored the mug and took a swig right from the bottle. “Investigating the blackout.”

“Awful night,” the bartender said.

“You were here?”

He nodded. “Real shame about Lettie,” he said. “Manager decided to close the place in the morning, out of respect, but some of her friends wanted to take up a collection for her family. Lot of the regulars knew her.” He nodded toward a collection jar a few stools down the counter with a photo of a smiling young woman taped to the front above her name in large print with details about the collection in smaller print below.

Dean asked him what he experienced around the blackout event. Within a few minutes, word spread, and other servers stopped by to relay their accounts. Even some of the regular customers added their pieces to the puzzle. The physical toll of the blackout, beyond Lettie’s death, included sprains, contusions, a few broken noses, chipped teeth and one broken jaw. Most of those injured the previous night hadn’t come back, but many others had returned to discuss the shared experience with each other.

Gareth, a Gyrations server with an assortment of sterling silver facial piercings, was convinced aliens had abducted the residents of Moyer the previous night. “For experimentation,” he said. “Explains the lost time.”

“That’s a lot of people to probe,” Dean said. “In a short amount of time.”

“Okay, maybe not all of us,” he said, adapting his theory on the fly. “But with everyone out cold, they could pick and choose who they wanted—and maybe those are the ones acting crazy now.”

“Interesting theory.”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” Dean said, suppressing a chuckle.

“Aliens smart enough to travel across the galaxy would have tech good enough to hide themselves from us.”

“That’s enough, Gareth,” said Erin, another server, as she stepped away with a drink order. “Want that FBI man to toss you in the loony bin?”

“Hey,” Gareth called after her. “For all we know, they could be standing here right now watching us!”

Not if they have any taste in music, Dean thought.

Dean tried to determine if any of them had resisted the initial blackout, as had Pete the short-order cook, or if any of them had woken up before the others. But his questioning revealed nothing beyond the expected responses. Neither alcohol nor illicit substances had any mitigating effect on the loss of consciousness.

He looked around the dance club again. Saw a couple stuff some bills in the Lettie fund jar. The woman squeezed the man’s hand and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

Hard to believe less than twenty-four hours have passed—

Dean glanced at his phone display.

11:58 PM.

“Standing here right now watching us…”

Sam and he had been treating the blackout as a one-time event and the weird behavior that followed as an ongoing problem to investigate. The police were so busy putting out fires, they had no time to deal with the blackout that preceded them. And the residents of Moyer treated the blackout like a localized natural disaster, even so far as to collect funds to help the survivors. But what if everything was based on a faulty assumption? They had no idea how or why the blackout happened, which meant they had no reason to believe it couldn’t happen again.

11:59 PM.

Pushing his beer bottle away, Dean stood up, turned toward the dance floor and cupped his hands around his mouth so everyone would hear him over the synthesized dance track, “Listen! Everybody down! On the floor—now!”

Those who heard him turned toward him, confused frowns on their faces. But most of them couldn’t hear him above the music.

Confused, the bartender caught Dean’s arm. “What’s going on?”

Dean spotted Erin, a few stools away, filling her serving tray with several cocktail glasses. He sprang toward her, slapped his hand on the tray as she started to lift it off the bar, rattling the glasses. “Everyone—down!”

More quizzical looks from those around him.

“It’s almost midnight!”

Erin’s eyes opened wide in understanding.

Nodding, Dean turned to the bartender. “This could happen ag—!”