Godfall, p.1
Godfall, page 1
“Godfall is the genre-mashup novel of my dreams. With breathtaking imagery and razor-sharp prose, Van Jensen gives us a story that is part alien sci-fi, part mystery—with a doomsday cult, a serial killer, and a dash of sandhill cranes—all set against the beautiful backdrop of rural Nebraska.”
—Erin Flanagan, Edgar Award–winning author of Deer Season and Blackout
“Godfall blends rural noir with a daring dose of sci-fi to create something wholly new and engaging. Van Jensen comes in hot with his [fiction] debut.”
—Alex Segura, author of Secret Identity and Miami Midnight
“It isn’t easy to infuse magical realism with grit, but Godfall does it with panache. I was under Van Jensen’s spell from the first chapter. A striking debut novel from one of my favorite writers.”
—Kevin Maurer, coauthor of No Easy Day and author of Damn Lucky
Flyover Fiction
Series editor: Ron Hansen
Godfall
Van Jensen
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2023 by Van Jensen
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press.
Author photo courtesy of the author.
All rights reserved
The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jensen, Van, author.
Title: Godfall / Van Jensen.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2023] | Series: Flyover fiction
Identifiers: LCCN 2023005951
ISBN 9781496235213 (paperback)
ISBN 9781496238085 (epub)
ISBN 9781496238092 (pdf)
Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Crime & Mystery | LCGFT: Science fiction. | Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3610.E5663 G63 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230421
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005951
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For Doreen.
—V.J.
Contents
Before
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Acknowledgments
Before
Under the moonlight, the pool of blood shone black. David squatted and peered into the yard-wide void rent into the dirt and scrub brush. It seemed deep, like he could fall in and tumble through the earth, spit out in China, Australia. Wherever the hell is as far away from Nebraska as a man can get.
“Sheriff. Which way you figure she went?”
David stood on a knee that stiffened when the weather turned frigid, a reminder of a torn meniscus suffered during a high school football game a decade and change earlier. His muscular build made itself known even under his thick, brown coat, which had the words “Sheriff’s Department” stenciled in yellow across the back. He stood an inch shy of six feet, though the black Stetson on his head made him seem taller. He wore blue jeans, as he always did. The wind lashed at him, needles against his face. Just his goddamned luck that someone would do this on a night so cold.
He clicked on his flashlight, and the pool of blood burned to life. To the side, Gentry Luwendyke stood with his arms crossed against a sheepskin coat. A puff of exhalation issued from below his unruly mustache, then was whisked away by the punishing February wind.
David carved slow arcs with the flashlight. Some ten yards away, the light caught a smear of red.
“This way, it looks like,” David said.
David led the way from one spatter to the next, each splash of blood smaller than the last, moving in a mostly straight line toward the dark rim of trees along the field’s western edge. Frost clung to the grass and prairie sage, which crunched like broken glass beneath their boots. By the time they reached a copse of cedars and Russian olives, the trail had diminished to single drops.
A rage was building in David’s stomach, combusting until he felt its heat beneath his coat; he was sweating, despite the cold. Someone did this. Someone would have to pay. He clenched the flashlight. No. Not now, he told himself. He could be angry later. Now he needed to focus on the task at hand. Where had she gone?
“There.”
David saw her first, lying on her side amid a clearing. She seemed dead, till her chest rose and deflated, and a ghostly plume floated from her nostrils. He leaned over her, careful not to step in the blood running across the ground. David set the flashlight in the grass facing her and pulled off his gloves.
“Sons of bitches,” Gentry hissed.
“Rifle shot. Hit her here,” David said, tracing his hands along the soft fur of the cow’s abdomen.
Into her intestines. Lord knows what organs it hit; she was fading fast.
“Sons of bitches,” Gentry repeated, louder.
Suddenly the heifer snorted and spasmed. Her legs thrashed to find a footing. David fell backward and scrambled away as she pounded her hooves, almost righting herself. Then she stumbled and collapsed.
They inched back closer.
“She don’t need to suffer no more,” Gentry said.
“She doesn’t,” David agreed.
“I’ll do it. My cow.”
Gentry’s eyes were on the Glock nine-millimeter pistol holstered on David’s right hip. David clicked open the leather strap and drew the weapon, cold as hell in his hand.
“No. I can’t have anyone else using my firearm. Regulations.”
He stepped over the cow’s head. She was breathing hard, a froth of mucus and blood bubbling from her nose and mouth. Her obsidian eyes pleaded with him, uncomprehending of the pain inside her, the chaos of the world, the horror of life and the even greater horror of whatever lies beyond it. David had no answers. He rested the barrel against her temple and fired.
* * *
|||
The truck rumbled over the rutted dirt road. Under the moon’s glow, David could just as well leave his headlights off. The roads ran straight east-west, north-south, a grid carved into the countryside. He’d spent most all of his thirty years here and knew every washout, every curve, every blind lane. And since being elected sheriff three years prior, he knew far too much about what happened inside the farmhouses at the end of each lane.
As he drove, he walked through what he knew. Gentry heard rifle shots. He went out and saw a truck with a spotlight in the pasture. Then he found the blood. Gentry swore someone did it on purpose, a neighbor with an old grudge. Whether there were people in Little Springs who despised Gentry Luwendyke was not in question. That any of those people would gut-shoot a cow was unlikely.
More likely someone had been out with a case of Pabst or Old Milwaukee sliding around the floorboards, trespassing, searching with the spotlight, hoping a doe or buck might spook. David had done it himself when he was young and dumb. Drink enough beers, a distant cow could look like a deer.
There were six trucks in town with a spotlight. Four belonged to people who didn’t have the capacity for such shit-headedness. The fifth belonged to the Johnsons, and their boy might have it in him, but the family was off visiting grandparents in the Ozarks. That left one truck, and David knew where he’d find it.
He pulled onto the two-lane highway, which ran east and west parallel to the Platte River. Ahead, the lights of town twinkled. At the foot of towering grain elevators, a green sign declared: “Little Springs Pop. 731.” Every decade after the census, there would be a new sign, the population ticking lower and lower.
David turned onto Main Street, a stretch of cracked pavement wide enough for six lanes, made to accommodate the horse-drawn wagons that, a century back, rolled into town each weekend bringing farmers and their crops. On either side, barren brick storefronts had windows covered with plywood. At the far end, a water tower rose up. Years back, the village council had decided to paint it for every season, something to bring a little cheer. But they abandoned the effort soon after, leaving the tower as a massive, leering jack-o’-lantern.
One storefront remained open, its neon sign glowing: Vic’s. David scanned the vehicles parked out front. There. A blue Dodge jacked up on oversized tires, a roll bar above th e cab with a spotlight attached. He parked beside it and peered through the truck’s window. Crushed beer cans on the floor. A rifle on a rack in the rear window. He tested the door. Open.
David reached below the bench seat and fished out a box of ammunition. A few rounds were missing. He took one, dropped it in his pocket, and headed inside.
Vic’s was one room straight back. Bar on the right. A few booths on the left. Two pool tables. Neon beer advertisements and pendant fixtures with mismatched bulbs cast a cacophony of color across the clouds of cigarette smoke. The usual crowd. Overalls and denim, people mostly heavyset, their skin parched and cracked, either from nicotine or the constant wind or both. At the center of the bar, a thickly built man with close-cropped blond hair looked up at the sound of David entering and spun toward him.
“Hey hey! A beer for our sheriff!”
“Hey, cousin,” David answered, easing up to the bar beside him.
Vic, the bartender, pushed forward a bottle of Bud Light and a shot glass of whiskey before David could wave him off.
“I’m on duty.”
“Fair enough,” Jason said, grinning his usual shit-eating grin. “Well, ain’t any problems in here, I’m happy to report.”
To the other side of Jason was Spady, his black hair poking out from beneath a Nebraska Huskers ball cap, thick stubble dotting his ashen face. Spady wasn’t kin, but he’d grown up close enough with David and Jason that he might as well have been. Spady puffed at a Marlboro held in his left hand, then balanced it on an ash tray before using the same hand to lift his bottle of Bud to drink. His right shirt sleeve was pinned at the elbow, where his arm ended. He’d worked railroad crew since high school until the accident, and now nothing but disability pay stretched out before him.
“Big case?” Spady asked.
David realized his hand was still shaking from firing his pistol. He smiled and shook his head.
“Nothing much.”
Jason reached for the beer and shot, but David grabbed his wrist.
“Give me a minute. I might just wrap this case up right quick.”
Across from the bar, three young men huddled in a booth. He’d seen one of them eyeing him from the moment he stepped inside. David approached them, looming in the way that only those who wear a badge can. They were local kids, kids he’d known since they were in diapers. Two of them—Andy Watkins and Tyrell Taylor—stared, unblinking, into their phones. The third, the one who had been watching David, was Derrick Mews. He looked up smugly. The blue Dodge was his, a fancy truck for a rich kid.
“Sheriff Blunt,” Derrick said. “Need to check my license? I’m legal. No more minor-in-possession citations.”
“I know how old you all are, Derrick.”
The Mews boy was a born asshole who tied firecrackers to cats’ tails and spray-painted genitals all over the Old River Bridge. But because he was the only son of Harold and Donna Mews, owners of the feed lot and what passed for wealthy in Little Springs, Derrick always skated.
“How long have you been here?” David asked.
“A while,” Derrick shrugged.
With no warning, David pounded his fist on the table hard enough to rattle glasses and earn stares from the bar.
His arms trembled as a wave of rage surged through him. It wasn’t just the act itself but what it meant. This town was just barely holding together, and one incident like this could have whole families at war, everyone taking sides, till the whole damn town splintered.
“Jesus,” Tyrell said, looking up from his phone. “What?”
“I asked how long you’ve been here. And ‘a while’ isn’t half specific enough,” David warned.
Andy had already fallen back into staring at his phone.
“What does it matter?” he almost whispered. “We’re all gonna die anyway.”
“The hell is he talking about?”
“Nothing,” Derrick said. “This bullshit on the internet. Some weird asteroid is going to hit and kill us all. They think everything on Reddit is real.”
“It isn’t bullshit,” Andy muttered.
David waved them off. “I don’t give a shit. The only thing I care about is that some dumb sons of bitches drove onto Luwendyke’s land to hunt deer. Except, these dumb sons of bitches were too drunk or too dumb to know better, so instead of a deer, they shot one of Gentry’s heifers. It died.”
Derrick glanced nervously at his friends, then recovered.
“That is a sad story, sheriff.”
David retrieved the rifle cartridge and placed it on the table so that it pointed up, a miniature obelisk.
“See, these dumb sons of bitches don’t understand ballistics, which, really, isn’t much of a surprise. I can fish the rifle round out of that cow’s guts in the morning and compare it to any rifle belonging to anyone in town who happens to own a truck with a spotlight. Now, I find a match and we’re looking at trespassing, animal cruelty, poaching . . .”
All at once, Derrick’s slick veneer broke, and his eyes turned misty.
“Whoa. Okay. Listen . . .”
Just throw the full weight of justice at the kid. Knock him off the pedestal that his rich folks made for him. Make him suffer. But . . . No. He couldn’t go that way. If he brought the hammer down on Derrick, his parents would swing all their influence around town, and Gentry would be on the warpath. His real job wasn’t closing cases, meting out punishment. His real job was protecting the town.
David gathered himself, then leaned within an inch of Derrick’s face.
“You listen, shithead. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to have Gentry load that cow up and deliver it to your folks’ shop. You’re going to tell them to pay him the full worth, plus a thousand for his trouble. Should be enough to stop him from pressing charges. And should you ever trespass on his land again, I’m not sure I could be bothered to arrest a man for defending his property. Understood?”
Derrick stared down at the table and nodded.
“Good. Enjoy the year’s worth of beef.”
David strode back over to the bar.
“Fine work there, sheriff,” Spady said.
“You clocked out?” Jason asked.
“Indeed I am.”
David downed the shot, set the glass upside-down on the counter, then pounded the beer in a single go.
* * *
|||
In the small house at the edge of town, David found Tabby in the living room, curled up on the couch. The TV was tuned to the news. He angled for the bathroom, so that he could have a swig of mouthwash before she smelled alcohol on him and knew the real reason he was so late and another fight started up between them.
“Sorry, honey. It ended up being a hell of a night. You won’t believe what that damned Mews kid did . . .”
“David.”
He knew that timbre of her voice; his wife was crying. As he came to her, she didn’t look up at him, didn’t pull her eyes from the screen. He followed her gaze there and saw it. The same image he had seen on the phone in the bar. Gray and grainy amid the black of space.
The news anchor was speaking in an almost reverent tone.
“. . . minutes ago came the stunning confirmation from NASA that it is real. This image of the asteroid was first captured by scientists at the Allen Telescope Array.”
Not an asteroid, this thing filling the television screen. A head, arms, torso, legs. Not quite human in proportions but unmistakable. A body, hurtling through space.
“We don’t know what it is. We don’t . . .” the anchor halted, seemingly run out of anything else to say.
David felt Tabby take his hand. He didn’t remember moving onto the couch beside her. A pang gripped his intestines. It couldn’t be real. But there the image was, a chyron below declaring “UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT ON COLLISION COURSE WITH EARTH.” Then all at once the screen cut to black and reappeared inside the Oval Office. The president stepped into view and sat at the desk. He wore none of his usual makeup, and so he looked older, but more human, than he ever had before.
He spoke haltingly, glancing down to his notes and up to someone off-screen, searching. No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event, he called it.
