Danny Reeves had worked the same overnight shift at the same gas station on Route 9 for six years and in that time he had developed a specific and reliable relationship with the night that most people never have because most people are asleep during it. He knew the way the highway sounded at different hours, the heavy truck traffic that tapered off around one and picked back up around four, the way the parking lot lights hummed at a slightly different pitch when the temperature dropped below forty, the specific cast of the fluorescent lights inside the store at three in the morning which was different from how they looked at eleven at night in a way he could not explain but had never stopped noticing. He knew the regulars, the insomniacs and the long haul drivers and the people who came in for a reason they did not share and did not need to. He had developed a professional and genuine indifference to almost everything the night put in front of him. People needed gas and coffee and sometimes they needed someone to make change without asking questions and he was good at all three and had been for six years and he had never expected that to change.
He had known tonight was different before he even got out of his car.
He pulled into the lot at ten forty five for his eleven o'clock start and sat for a moment with the engine idling looking down Route 9 at the staging area two blocks east. They had moved in sometime in the last several hours, while he was at home eating dinner and watching television in the specific ordinary way he had been doing every evening before work for years. Now there were vehicles parked in a formation that was too deliberate and too uniform to be anything other than military, large dark shapes arranged along the shoulder and into the lot of the abandoned hardware store that had been closed since the spring. Soldiers moved between them with a purposeful unhurried efficiency that suggested they were doing something specific and knew exactly what it was. He sat in his car and watched them for a moment and then got out and went inside and started his shift.
His coworker Tina had called out sick, which she did approximately twice a month and which he normally would have texted the manager about in a mildly irritated way before the night was over, but tonight he found he was genuinely relieved. He did not know what Tina would have made of the staging area and he did not have the energy to manage her reaction on top of everything else. He was glad to be alone in the store with his own thoughts and the hum of the refrigerator cases and the familiar small tasks of the opening checklist.
He got the coffee going and restocked the hot case and wiped down the counter and checked the lottery machine and did all the things he always did in the first hour of his shift. Outside the lot was empty. Route 9 was quieter than usual for eleven on a weeknight, not a lot of traffic, and what traffic there was moved at a slightly reduced speed, drivers slowing almost imperceptibly as they passed the staging area, the same involuntary response he had had himself when he pulled in.
The first few customers came and went. A man in a pickup who bought two energy drinks and a bag of beef jerky and who looked at the window facing down toward the staging area once, a single brief glance, and then very deliberately did not look in that direction again for the rest of the transaction, paying cash and counting it out carefully and taking his change and his bag and leaving without a word beyond what was necessary. A woman in her forties who came in for cigarettes and whose hands were not quite steady when she laid the bills on the counter. She did not say anything about it and he did not ask. A teenager, seventeen maybe, who came in on a bicycle at around midnight, which was unusual, locking it to the rack outside with a lock that was almost comically small for the situation, and coming in for a bottle of water. He stood at the front window for a long moment after he paid, looking out toward the staging area with an expression on his face that was doing its best to look like it was taking things in stride and not entirely succeeding. Danny told him he should probably get home. The kid looked at him with that particular expression that teenagers have when they are trying to seem older than they are in a situation that genuinely requires being older than they are, and said yeah, probably. Took his water and his bicycle and rode off down the shoulder of Route 9 in the direction away from the staging area and Danny watched him go and then went back to the counter.
Around one the traffic on Route 9 dropped to almost nothing. He stood behind the counter reading his phone without much focus. The staging area was still lit up down the road. Still active. He could see the distant shapes of soldiers moving in the yellow light of the intersection and hear, very faintly when the store was completely quiet, the low idle of engines that did not turn off.
He was thinking about nothing in particular when he heard the shots.
He put his phone down on the counter.
Three shots. Distinct and separate. Not close, six blocks at least, probably more, somewhere in the direction of the old residential neighborhood past the overpass where the streets got narrow and the houses were close together. He had grown up in this town. He had been around guns his whole life and he knew exactly what he had just heard and he stood behind the counter and did not move and waited to see what came next.
What came next was the staging area waking up.
He heard it before he saw it. Engines turning over, not the low idle he had been hearing all night but something more purposeful, vehicles being brought up to operating readiness. Voices carrying across the distance, not loud, not panicked, clipped and structured in the way that military communication sounds when things are moving according to a plan that already existed for exactly this situation. Two sets of headlights cut through the dark as a pair of vehicles pulled out of the staging area and turned east on Route 9 toward the overpass, moving fast, not reckless, the kind of speed that gets somewhere quickly without burning out an engine, and in less than thirty seconds they were through the intersection and gone.
Then more shots from that direction. Not three this time. More. A sustained exchange that lasted four or five seconds and had a different character than the first three, something reciprocal about it, and then it cut off completely and the silence that followed was the kind of silence that has weight to it.
He stood behind the counter and did not move for a full minute.
His phone buzzed on the counter next to him.
Marco, who had grown up two streets over from the overpass neighborhood and still lived there in the house he had rented since his late twenties. The text was three words.
Stay inside man.
Danny picked the phone up and typed back: what happened.
He put the phone down and looked out the window. The remaining vehicles at the staging area had not moved. The soldiers visible from here were still moving in the same patterns as before, a little more activity than a moment ago maybe, communication happening, but nothing like an emergency response. Whatever had happened on the other side of the overpass apparently did not require everything they had.
His phone buzzed.
Some guys took shots at a patrol. NWF came back hard. Think at least one guy is down maybe two. They're doing door to doors on Walnut Street now.
He read the text twice.
Put the phone face down on the counter.
He needed something to do with his hands so he started cleaning the coffee machine, which did not need cleaning but was the kind of task that required just enough attention to keep his hands busy without requiring anything from the part of his brain that was currently occupied with other things. He took the components apart and wiped them down and reassembled them and started a fresh pot even though the current pot was barely an hour old and there was almost no chance anyone was coming in for coffee at two in the morning tonight of all nights.
His phone buzzed again while he was putting the filter basket back.
Ambulance just went by. NWF vehicle right behind it.
He looked at the text for a moment and then set the phone down again without responding.
The fresh coffee finished brewing and he poured a cup and stood at the counter and drank it slowly and looked out at Route 9 and the distant lit staging area and thought about Walnut Street, which he knew. He had been to Walnut Street. He had a vague memory of a birthday party there when he was maybe ten or eleven, some kid from his class, a backyard with a trampoline. The houses there were the kind that had been built in the fifties and sixties, close to the sidewalk, small front yards, porches. He thought about what door to doors on Walnut Street looked like at two in the morning and then he stopped thinking about that and drank his coffee.
At two forty a patrol came past the store.
Four soldiers moving along the sidewalk on the opposite side of Route 9, spread out at intervals, walking at an even pace. They wore the same dark uniforms he had been seeing on the soldiers at the staging area all night, full kit, rifles held across their chests. One of them glanced across the road at the gas station as they passed, a brief professional sweep of the eyes that took in the lit store and the guy behind the counter and the empty parking lot and moved on without stopping. The patrol continued south on Route 9 and disappeared around the bend by the overpass and he did not see them again.
He refilled his coffee cup.
Went to the back and restocked the refrigerator cases, the cold air raising goosebumps on his forearms, pulling the drinks forward and replacing the ones behind them in the neat mechanical rows he had been maintaining for six years. The familiar physical work of it was settling in a way he was grateful for. He stayed back there longer than the task required.
When he came back to the counter the store was still empty and Route 9 was still quiet and his phone had no new messages from Marco.
He thought about texting Marco again and decided not to. Marco would say something when there was something to say.
Around three thirty a semi pulled in off the highway. A long haul driver, older guy, trucker hat, the specific unhurried bearing of someone who has been driving since before midnight and will be driving until well after sunrise. He filled his tank and came inside for a large coffee and a breakfast sandwich from the hot case and stood at the counter while Danny rang him up and said, without quite looking at Danny, rough night out there huh.
Danny said yeah, a little.
The trucker picked up his coffee and his sandwich and looked at the receipt and folded it and put it in his shirt pocket the way truckers always did, some habit from the days of expense accounts maybe, and said, saw a lot of activity coming through on 9. Been like that all the way down from the interchange.
Danny said yeah it has been.
The trucker nodded once, the nod of a man who has seen a number of things over a long career and has developed a practical and unsentimental relationship with all of them, and went back to his truck and pulled out of the lot and got back on the highway heading north and his taillights crested the hill and were gone.
Danny stood at the counter in the empty store.
He thought about the guys on Walnut Street.
He did not know who they were. He did not know if they were people from the neighborhood, local guys who had decided that the first night was the right time to make a point, or if they were something more organized than that, people who had planned for this and had equipment and a strategy or at least thought they did. He did not know if they were alive or arrested or dead. Marco had said at least one down and then the ambulance and the NWF vehicle behind it and nothing after that and Danny had not asked for specifics because the specifics would not change anything about the night and he was not sure he was ready for them yet.
What he knew was that somebody had fired on a patrol on the first night and that the response had come within minutes and had been enough to end the exchange in under five seconds and that door to doors had started on Walnut Street before the sound of the shots had finished echoing and that somewhere in this town tonight there was an ambulance with a NWF vehicle right behind it going somewhere to do something that he did not have full information about.
He made a third pot of coffee.
Cleaned the hot case thoroughly, pulling the trays out and wiping underneath them, something he usually saved for the end of the week.
Swept the floor even though he had swept it an hour ago.
Restocked the candy aisle.
Checked the lottery machine twice.
The sky outside had been fully dark all night in the way that November skies are dark, a low solid overcast with no stars visible, and it stayed that way until somewhere around five thirty when the overcast began to thin in the east and the darkness started becoming something other than dark, the slow barely perceptible shift that happens before first light when the sky goes from black to a color that does not have a good name.
At six Marco texted him.
Heard it was two guys. One dead one arrested. NWF put out a notice this morning saying unauthorized armed resistance will be met with immediate force and all residents of affected areas are subject to identity verification.
Danny read the text standing behind the counter with the store still empty around him.
Typed back: you okay.
Marco said yeah. Then after a moment: it's weird out here man. Real quiet. People are just inside.
Danny said yeah.
At six fifteen Dave pulled into the lot for the morning handoff, Dave who managed three stores and drove between them every morning in a specific order and who was one of the more reliably consistent people Danny knew, same coffee order every day, same slightly harassed expression, same way of pushing through the door like he was running slightly behind schedule even when he was not.
Dave came in and looked around the store the way he always did, a quick professional assessment of stock levels and cleanliness and general operational status, and then he looked at Danny and said, you hear what happened on Walnut Street last night.
Danny said yeah, a little.
Dave shook his head and went to pour himself a coffee and was quiet for a moment and then said hell of a thing and Danny said yeah and got his jacket from the break room and his keys and his phone and clocked out on the register and went to his car.
He sat in the parking lot with the engine off for a moment.
The staging area was still there down the road. Morning light now, gray and flat, and in it the vehicles and the soldiers looked more real somehow than they had under the sodium lights of the night. More permanent. A soldier was standing at the edge of the staging area facing Route 9 with his hands behind his back just looking at the road and the morning and whatever else there was to look at.
Danny started the car.
Drove home on roads that were quieter than a Wednesday morning should be. Saw two more NWF patrols on foot in different parts of town, both moving with the same even purposeful pace, and a checkpoint being set up at the intersection of Main and Fourth that had not been there when he drove to work the night before.
Got home. Locked the door behind him, which he did not always do. Made himself eat something even though he was not particularly hungry. Went to bed with the curtains closed against the pale morning light and lay there for a while with his eyes open thinking about nothing with any resolution before sleep finally came for him.
He slept until two in the afternoon.
Lay in bed for a while after he woke up looking at the ceiling.
It was day one.
Out on Route 9 the trucks were running again, he could hear them through the window, the steady commerce of the highway continuing the way it always did because it had to, because things still needed to move from one place to another regardless of what else was happening, because the night ends and the morning comes and the day starts up with or without your permission.
He lay there and listened to the trucks and thought about his shift starting again at eleven and the staging area that would still be there when he pulled into the lot and the patrol that would probably come past the store again sometime in the small hours and the specific silence of the town in the early morning after whatever Walnut Street had been.
He did not know what day two looked like.
He was not sure anyone did yet.
But it was coming regardless, the same way everything comes, without asking, without explaining itself, just arriving and making itself at home and waiting to see what you were going to do about it.
He got up.
Put the coffee on.
Stood at the kitchen window while it brewed and looked out at the ordinary daylight street and the ordinary houses across from him and the ordinary sky above all of it.
Ordinary, and not.
Both things at once.
He poured his coffee and drank it standing at the window and watched the street and waited to see what day two was going to be.