Twenty-twenty six was going to be an unusual year for the city of Hope’s View, Nevada. Ted, a scientist both on and off the clock, couldn’t deny the mounting evidence for this point. It was early June and there was an unusual number of Prairie Sunflowers growing throughout the town. They always bloomed in the fields on the outskirts and along the ramps on and off Route 50, but not so often in the neighborhoods. Every now and then the birds, the wind, or the shoes and pant legs of unsuspecting hikers and adventuring children would carry the seeds, and you’d get them sprouting up in small patches every few lawns. But this year they were on nearly every lawn, including Ted’s. He had a row of about nine growing in a zigzag formation near the sidewalk at the front of his house, and a few small uncounted patches in the backyard that he hadn’t bothered to count.
Aside from the sunflowers, Ted noticed that the fire hydrants had all been painted a bright, garish shade of yellow. Not the bright yellow he had expected to see on a fire hydrant, but the kind of yellow he associated with Las Vegas or the small clubs that stretched out from the city over the entire state like missionaries. He had asked his friend Mark, a city worker, over lunch if he knew anything about why the hydrants, which had previously been a mix of faded blues, yellows, and even a couple of matte black, were all now an awful, unified yellow. “Is this what our tax dollars are going to?” The sentence grew less tangible by the syllable, as he shoved a virgin corner of sandwich into his mouth and took his famished first bite. If memory served him well, as it always did, that bite of his Italian sub, with all its eager craving, had compromised the structure of the sandwich in his hands. Some sauce, lettuce, and a handful of bright yellow banana peppers poured out as he tore away at the corner. One of the peppers was salvaged, as it landed on the wrapper, but the others scattered across the table and floor like loose Prairie Sunflower seeds across the lawns of his neighborhood. Mark, either too polite to jest or to enraptured in his own sandwich, didn’t say anything about the mess. “I wouldn’t know, that’s not my department,” Mark said, preparing for the next bite of his own meatball sub. His voice was present, but his mind was clearly far away from the deli they had settled on for lunch.
Lastly, and most importantly, Ted and the other thousand and some change town folk had noticed the armed men in yellow cloaks surrounding their town.
Hotel for Ghosts 