***
The old man ran a gas station between San Antonio and West Creek. Traffic up one fifty one was sparse, it seemed extending the highway had been a waste of time and tax dollars. Still, being the only place to get fuel this far north of the bigger city, he monopolized on business and crafted himself a good fortune from West Creek citizens who traveled to San Antonio for well paying jobs, or even further south to the oil fields where corporations poisoned the great state of Texas to fill the man’s pumps.
He lifted his skinny, creaky bones from his rocker from behind his cashier’s desk, a white thing stained heavy with years of coffee spills and tobacco smoke, to watch a black Firebird with an awful sounding glass pack pull up to one of his two red retro age pumps. The machines pumped the new fuels, but they worked as pumps did when he was young and spry, and cars where sleek and attractive, not this ugly boxy monster that had driven onto his lot.
Despite his distaste in the man’s car and its noises the driver waited patient enough for him to come out of his gas station and lean over to look into the windows. He saw darkness of some weird tint maybe, smoke rolled against the glass and he spared a wonder if the man inside was getting high, “Need a fill?”
The door for the fuel reservoir at the back of the car opened, he was about to ask what fuel it needed, he carried unleaded, diesel, biofuel, and even had an electric charging station, but stopped himself short of speaking. It was a nineties’ Firebird, he knew it took regular unleaded. The old man reached for the hose at the far end, nearest the man’s tank, and hooked it in, letting the gas flow.
He’d have asked the man if he was filling it to the top, but whoever owned the car didn’t appear to want to speak. He’d pump till it was full or the driver told him to stop, take his money, and let the stranger be on his way to West Creek as he looked to be traveling north.
The engine growled to life and the old man jerked the pump out of car with a curse. He winced as his thumb became wedged between the bend of the trigger and the metallic hand guard, causing it to stick and spray over the car’s side, the ground, and his own clothing, assaulting his breathing with the oxygen eating fumes of gasoline.
Securing his eyes against the sudden rush of nausea and exhaustion he felt, he realized too late he was hearing the car drive away as more of the toxic fuel splashed over his sneakers soaking them. The old man opened his eyes, and watched, unable to do more.
The black Firebird guttered to a stop not five feet from him, its passenger side to him, the pool of fuel just reaching the vehicle’s back right tire. He felt that there was not a person in there but that the car itself was evil and acting upon its own will. Had he observed nothing inside because of the tint or had he in reality seen no one and his mind couldn’t comprehend it?
The passenger window opened a quarter of the way, tendrils of blackness rolled out of the crack to lick at the roof. From the darkness flew a small orange orb of a light, it arched through the air in a flight so slow it seemed time had come to a crawl for that one small orb of light. The light flipped, cart wheeling away from the car, towards him, end over end, as it came closer to the gas soaked asphalt.
Just before it struck the old man realized in dawning horror that the smoldering white tube with an orange glowing end was a half used cigarette, giving him a ridiculous moment of wonder at how the man, or the thing, had been smoking while he had been fueling.
Then the gas nearest the car went up in a whoosh, lighting the back end of the Firebird and breaking his trance. The fire streaked towards him across the pavement, he palmed the pumping pump’s handle which bit at his thumb. He pulled hard, harder than he should have been able to, realizing somewhere in his primal core it was his finger, or himself.
The fire flared up as it grew closer, lighting the toxic fumes of the pool around him, setting his hair to smolder in pure heat, melting the hoses of the other pumps. He ripped the thumb from his hand with a cry of pain and hurried fear, but before he could release the nozzle the inferno engulfed him. He stumbled out of the flames, a charred, blackened, inferno himself, and fell upon the ground to watch the flaming car speed away as an explosion rocked the ground behind him. The growl of that glass pack bit into his head as the flames took him far too slow, he prayed to God that he’d die soon.
Dead Ends Page 2
