“...Did I..?” she mumbled.

“Yes.”

“And did you?”

“Yes,” Sam replied, just as firmly, just as confidently, just like this happened all the time, even though, of course, it didn’t happen all the time. If it happened all the time, the diner industry would have been investigated years ago.

“And do you?”

“No way I don’t. How could I understand what’s going on? I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know how long we’ve been here. And I don’t how you went from out the door one second to back here the next. No, not a second. A heartbeat. From one heartbeat to the next.”

By now, Sam was very nearly shouting, though it didn’t make much of a difference. It wasn’t like any more eyes could be looking their way. Perhaps now, though, some of their fellow diners could stare at them a little less shamelessly, on account of the scene the two of them were making.

“At the very least, could we get some god damned water?” Hillary squealed, doing away at last with any semblance of subtlety or decency they had left. Then again, she was thirsty, the service was terrible and there was, literally, no escape.

Almost as soon as Hillary’s voice stopped echoing off all that cold chrome and steel, two waiters zoomed past their table. One dropped off two tall glasses of ice-cold water. He moved too fast; otherwise, Hillary might have kissed him on the mouth she was so desperate for something to drink. The other waiter, a redhead with acne scars and an Adam’s Apple that was cantaloupe-sized made his delivery by way of a tightly folded napkin dropped nonchalantly in front of Sam. He might have used it to wipe the sweat puddle forming on his forehead were it not for the obvious fresh ink stains bleeding through the thin paper.

“It’s a note. Open it. What does it say?” Hillary whispered.

Sam was a little doubtful at first and only opened it after making something of a protective barrier with his arms, no doubt on account of all those alert peppers. Privacy was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

“Well, what does it say?”

Sam’s eyebrows were arched and his face was a little screwed up. The message was simple, though that didn’t help him make sense of it a bit.

“‘Meet me in the restroom. Five minutes. Come alone.”

“Oh,” Hillary replied. “Wait, did he think I would go to the bathroom with you?”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever written a note like that. Gee whiz. Give me a break. I don’t do this all the time, you know.”

It was only the redhead waiter and Sam in the bathroom, which mollified Sam a little. This strange rendezvous would have been made even odder with a full house. Sam, meanwhile, had to coddle the kid after having first confronted him with a demand to explain the whole situation post-haste. The note. The staring clientele. The door to nowhere.

“It’s not like I go along writing secret notes to customers all the time…”

“Right, right. I got it. I didn’t mean to be brusque…”

“...and, yeah, I suppose my technique was lacking. But you know, I’ve only ever read about this kind of thing in comic books. I haven’t been to see any spy films or nothing. It’s not like San Nicolas has a theater, anyway. Lucky we even have a pharmacy…”

Sam, who was never known for his composure, tried his best to compose himself, compose the kid, and compose the situation, all at once.

“Let’s just start at the top. My name is Sam. Sam Spiezio. What’s yours?”

The kid reached out for a handshake. Sam paused, still acutely unsure about the chosen location for their little confab, but begrudgingly extended his own hand.

“Troy Hextall.”

“Perfect. Now, Troy, I don’t mean to corner you on this, to rile you up or catch you off guard. But I need to know what the heck is going on.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Troy eyed Sam unsteadily, like he was a tree and Sam was the saw.

“What do you mean? We were all expecting you to explain things. Lot of good it’ll do me to have to go back and tell everybody that you know less than the last egg in a carton.” Troy had this way of going on. Get him started, he might never stop at all. He was a force of nature. He went at a plodding speed and he meandered rather than taking the most direct route. But his inertia could only be managed; it could not be stopped. “We’re all flabbergasted, the wits worried right out of us, about what happens when the Lip Reader comes and sees you two and you can’t even --”

“We don’t even know where we are,” Sam exclaimed, very much not keeping up with Troy. “We’ve got to figure that out before we can make sense of anything else. And -- the Lip Reader? Who’s that?”

“San Nicolas.”

“What?”

“San Nicolas. You’re in San Nicolas, Arizona. Founded 1876. Population approximately 319,. Elevation, I don’t know, 3,000 feet? That was always the question I got wrong in Civics class.”

San Nicolas. The name was faintly familiar to Sam, like the opening lyrics to a song he only ever knew the chorus to.

“Perfect. Now I know where we are. Now, who’s the Lip Reader?”

“Well, it’s the reason we’re here.”

“In San Nicolas?”

Troy shook his head.

“In the restroom?”

“No, Sam. In the Swan Song. It’s the reason we’re trapped in the diner. At least, it’s the reason the rest of us are trapped here. And have been. For, gosh, we don’t know how long it’s been. As for you and your lady friend? We don’t know how you got here, but we know that the Lip Reader has never been one to take to changes very lightly.”

Troy explained the rest as quickly and succinctly as he could. It was neither quick nor succinct

Sam wanted him to get to the point but he couldn’t will him to get there. Not by reminding him of the ever-present danger of this Lip Reader person nor by telling him that out there, back in the diner, Hillary was entirely unaware of any of it.

“What if she came barging in here right now?” Sam asked. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

This Troy did not take well to. However, if he sped up his telling of the story, it was only by the tiniest of margins. Troy could be pushed and shoved; cajoled and nearly threatened, but he would not be hurried.

Sixty years prior, on an October night so cold and dry that the air seemed to rip the moisture right out of your lips were you so foolish to brave the outdoors, the power went off in San Nicolas. It was a small town that bordered no interstate or natural monuments. No more than a handful of families spread across an ambitiously plotted grid of aspirationally named narrow streets. Begonia. Winterhaven. Sunshine. It was still the desert, of course, despite man’s machinations or his bottomless determination. It only took the power taking leave to remind folks of that.

Those still with coal or wood stoves were in better shape than those who had hopped onto the grid for heat, but no single person in town was excited about having no electricity. These weren’t modern times and it was not a luxurious place; still, people had been accustomed to a certain level of comfort. Now they had to go without their televisions, their refrigerators, their desk lamps, and their vacuum cleaners.

It took the people of San Nicolas no time at all to harangue the ladies working at the power company, who could do little else than to ensure their captive customers that the lines would be checked in the morning. The news was delivered in the passive voice, as if it didn’t require a man, many men, to go out in heavy, uncomfortable gear, climb dangerous, rickety, flimsy poles and inspect all those twisty, finicky cables. Something in the voice of the gals back at the electric company pleaded with the people of San Nicolas to have a little patience. Couldn’t they go one night with their shows? Did they really need to use that hot iron at nine in the evening?

So they did without. Power outages were nothing foreign to them. Plus, they were stout and hardy people, of good lineage, of good stock. They could survive one night without electricity. Their forebearers had been Vikings and pioneers and evangelizing profiteers all without a single spark of electricity. Surely they could go one night without this modern convenience. So long as it was for only one night.

And so the outage stretched over days and days and days…

The lines were fine, said the men who checked them. Nothing had been severed between the town and the various power plants and substations that generated their electricity either. No single thing could explain why the town was suddenly powerless. They would need more men to investigate, and men with more expertise, too. Engineers and scientists and doctors, though not the medical kind. This help, it would take time. Days, perhaps stretching into weeks. In the meanwhile, they plead with the people of the town for ever more patience. Those with the means were encouraged to find generators. They stayed warm and their milk and eggs stayed cool. The rest of the town, most of the town, had only their wits to fortify them. Small comfort came from the platitudes of their disaffected politicians: ‘In all the time man has cavorted on this lopsided planet, this is but a blip, a dust mote. No one will remember it; though your struggle may seem mighty now, it is but an eyelash on the vast, scarred body of human existence.’

With no other recourse, they waited. Behind mostly boarded-up doors, they waited. Not including the occasional hunt for fresh fruit or vegetables, times when they would venture outside, they waited. Ensconced like last year’s Christmas decorations in the attic, they waited.

Except those that disappeared.

It happened slowly enough to go mostly unnoticed. Only one or two at a time, for weeks at a time. And then another. And another. Maybe folks would have noticed if they had been talking to each other as in better times. But the weather was cold and angry. The bowling alley was closed. The bars were shuttered. Nobody gabbed to anybody else on the dead quiet telephones. Word didn’t spread because it couldn’t spread: there were no vectors for the disease of gossip. Folks were simply there one day and gone the next, their neighbors none the wiser.

Help consisted of little more than prayers and apologies. Little else was done, for a long time, by the electric company, county, or state. San Nicolas, so it must have been thought, was small enough to be ignored. Its suffering was just distant enough, just quiet enough, to be countenanced.

Not everything in town, though, had been left to rot in somnolent silence. If anybody had ventured out, putting up with the howl and fury of the wind, they would have seen the lights on inside the Swan Song Diner, that little husk of a building off of State Route 16. The peach-colored paint on the exterior was cracking and the parking lot was no more than hardscrabble gravel, but the lights were on and that was more than almost anywhere else in town.

Not once did anyone stumble upon the Swan Song in those lonely days, but if they had they would have found no locks, no booby traps, no chains on the door. If they had wanted to, they might have waltzed right in.

That wasn’t the usual means of entrance though. The more likely way into the Swan Song Diner was by special invite. That’s how Troy got there. And Davey, who worked the griddle. The other waiters and waitresses, too. Heath. Jones. Rebecca and Yvette, the Cherry twins. Plus all the patrons. They had been invited too. That’s how the Lip Reader worked. A person, upon seeing their brother or sister or father or mother vanish in front of their eyes from the middle of their living room might think that their loved one was lost forever but no. They were in the diner. They had been invited. By the Lip Reader.

“Fine, fine. I get it. Thank you,” Sam said, genuinely appreciative of all that backstory but also wondering if maybe Troy had been a little long in the tooth, a little wordy. “But who is the Lip Reader?”

A shiver went through both of them at the same time. Sam couldn’t place it and might not have said a thing about it, but Troy had no compunction.

“I think,” Troy’s voice quivered,” you’re about to find out.”