Head to the Gas Station

I decide to head back to the gas station. I grab my Maglite and my revolver. By the time the gas station finally comes into view again, the sun has begun dipping lower across the desert. Long shadows stretch from the pumps and garage across the cracked concrete lot. The place looks abandoned. A knot tightens immediately in my stomach.

I slow my pace instinctively while my hand drifts toward the Colt Peacemaker. The front door of the station hangs slightly open, moving faintly in the warm breeze. No lights shine from inside the station, and the radio that had been crackling with old country music earlier has gone completely silent.

The front door hangs slightly open beneath the fading desert sun while the entire building sits motionless around me. I push the door wider with the barrel of my revolver, and the bell above the entrance jingles softly in the stillness. Nobody answers.

The smell hits me immediately when I step inside. Dust, burnt coffee, and old cigarettes still linger in the warm air, but another scent hangs beneath them now too. Cold grease and stale air mix together in a way that makes the station feel suddenly lifeless, as though somebody abandoned the place only moments ago and took all the energy with them.

I sweep the room slowly with the Maglite even though sunlight still spills through the dirty windows. The shelves remain stocked exactly as before. Motor oil. Road maps. Candy bars faded nearly white from age. The old register still sits open behind the counter with loose bills inside. Nobody had stolen the money. That bothers me.

“Hello?” I call out. My voice sounds wrong in the empty building. No answer comes back. I move deeper inside, checking the office behind the counter first. The chair sits overturned beside a desk cluttered with old receipts and cigarette ash. A half-full coffee mug rests beside the radio. The coffee inside looks fresh enough that a thin skin still floats across the top.

He was here recently, close enough that the coffee still looks fresh inside the mug sitting beside the radio. Ash remains in the tray behind the counter, and the register still hangs open with loose bills inside, but now the old man is simply gone. I move quickly toward the garage and sweep it with the Maglite, only to find the entire space completely empty.

The deeper I move into the station, the more the place stops feeling abandoned and starts feeling preserved, like a fly trapped in amber. Dust hangs visibly in the air whenever my flashlight beam cuts across the room. Every surface carries a greasy film that turns ordinary objects faintly sticky beneath my fingertips.

The shelves lining the walls are crowded with canned food so old the labels have faded nearly white. Bags of jerky hang stiff as leather beside rusted hooks. A rack of sunglasses stands crooked near the register, every pair coated in fine desert dust. Half the products look expired by at least a decade, but nothing has been thrown away.

It feels less like a business than a nest. My boots creak softly against warped floorboards while I move farther inside. The walls are cluttered with photographs, newspaper clippings, and old license plates from half the country. Some of the pictures show ordinary travelers smiling beside cars from the seventies and eighties.

Others are stranger, hunters posing beside mutilated coyotes, meen standing proudly beside dead rattlesnakes nailed to fence posts. One faded Polaroid shows a group of filthy people standing in the desert at night around a bonfire. Somebody scratched out all their faces with a knife.

I stop in front of the counter. The coyote skull mounted above the cigarette rack watches me with empty eye sockets yellowed by nicotine stains. Feathers and animal bones hang from strings near the doorway like crude charms. An old television sits in the corner with its screen shattered inward, the broken glass still resting on the floor beneath it.

The smell gets worse the farther I move into the station. Burnt coffee, rot, and the sharp stink of overheated electrical wiring all hang thick in the stale air, but beneath them lurks another scent that turns my stomach the moment I recognize it. Something coppery lingers underneath everything else, faint but unmistakable.

I sweep the Maglite toward the back hallway leading to the restroom and storage rooms. The beam catches strange marks carved into the wooden walls. At first they look random, but after a second I realize they are tally marks.

Maybe thousands of tally marks cover the walls once I finally notice them properly. They run in crooked vertical clusters up the hallway beside the restroom and disappear behind shelves and doorframes, carved directly into the wood over years of repetition. A pulse of uneasiness crawls slowly through me while I stare at them beneath the beam of my flashlight.

The station no longer feels like a place where travelers stop for gas and coffee before continuing down the highway. It feels like a place people pass through once and never leave. The garage beyond the hallway is even worse, darker and more oppressive than the station itself.

Every tool bench is cluttered with greasy engine parts, broken fans, rusted tire irons, and piles of stripped wiring. Animal hides hang from hooks beside stained mechanic coveralls stiff with age. A massive industrial meat grinder sits against one wall beneath a tarp spotted dark brown with old stains, but no sign of the old man remains.

My flashlight lingers on the industrial meat grinder a little too long before the faint buzzing finally registers in the silence around me. There are not many flies, but there are enough to make the sound unmistakable as they drift lazily somewhere deeper in the darkness beyond the garage shelves. I sweep the beam slowly across the concrete floor and workbenches, searching for signs of ****.

I find no blood, no signs of a struggle, and no tracks obvious enough to follow across the oil-stained concrete. The restroom is worse. I stare at the hole beside the stall again while the fluorescent lights buzz overhead. The darkness beyond it looks deeper now somehow.

I crouch beside it slowly and shine the Maglite through. There is nothing, just old wood and darkness between the walls. Still, the feeling crawls across my skin almost immediately, eyes watching me. I stand back up fast enough to hit my shoulder against the stall divider.

The station suddenly feels wrong in a way it did not earlier, as if somebody stepped outside moments before I arrived and is now waiting quietly somewhere nearby. I leave the restroom immediately. By the time I step back outside, the sun has nearly reached the horizon. The desert glows deep orange beneath the coming dusk while shadows swallow the spaces between the looming hills.

I stand beside the pumps thinking. I look back toward the mining road disappearing into the canyon. My Airstream still provides shelter. I have supplies, water, and firearms. More importantly, if somebody is watching this station, I do not want to remain here after dark. I exhale slowly and prepare to start heading for the hills.