But instead, I kept spewing words. “Wow, this is turning into a mess, huh? Look, I’m bad at these kinds of things. I know it’s not much of a surprise, but I don’t actually have that many friends. I mean, I was kinda friends with Tom before he died. And Tony, before he died. And Vanessa, too, for a little while there. My point is, I don’t have a whole lot of practice talking to people other than customers and members of law enforcement. Honestly, I’m pretty sure my shrink hates me, too. If I said something tonight that crossed the line, please know I didn’t mean it. Sometimes I get—”
“Dude,” he interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, I’m totally listening to you, and I know it’s important, but I just farted and it was really bad and I wanted to warn you because I’ve been eating broccoli all day and I think we should go wait outside for a few minutes.”
That was the last time I ever felt awkward talking to Jerry.
***
He passed out around four in the morning. Fortunately, he made it to the hammock in the supply closet first, so I didn’t have to worry about dragging him out of the way while I got the store cleaned and ready for the morning rush.
Sunrise was still a couple hours away when I heard the phone ring.
My heart started beating fast. Why would someone be calling the store phone this early in the morning? It didn’t make any sense. Unless—
Unless it’s Spencer, calling to let me know he’s already inside the building!
I answered the phone with pretend confidence. My voice let out a friendly, “Hello?” But in my mind, I was rocking back and forth, repeating one thing over and over like a mantra: Please don’t be Spencer. Please don’t be Spencer. Please don’t be Spencer.
“Jack!?”
Oh, thank God. Not Spencer. It’s just Pops.
“Yes.”
“How’s everything going over there?”
“Things are good. Except, you remember that guy who attacked me and broke my leg? Well, it turns out he’s stalking me now. He called earlier, and the new deputy thinks—”
“Shut up about that for a second.”
“Okay.”
“I need to talk to you about something that’s actually important. The new guy, Calvin Ambrose.”
“What about Calvin Ambrose?”
“Tell me your thoughts on him.”
“I don’t get the impression he’s trying to kill me, so there’s that.”
“Yeah? What else?”
“I think he’s a perfect example of grossly overqualified and underprepared. I can’t understand how you got him to agree to come work here.”
“Uh huh. What else?”
“He seems nice.”
Pops sounded genuinely upset now. “Why would you lie to me, Jack?”
“Sorry,” I said. “He seems creepy. He seems like the human equivalent of a mayonnaise sandwich. He seems like the kind of guy who has stock options and orders his toilet paper off of Amazon and puts raisins in his potato salad, and I think he might be some kind of rule-fetishist.”
“That’s more like it.”
“Is this really what you called for?”
“No. There’s something else.”
“Okay.”
“I need you to do me a favor, and I’d like for you to keep this between us.”
Here we go again.
“Can do.”
“I’m looking at the time clock report, and according to this, Calvin’s staying way over his scheduled hours.”
“He likes to linger.”
“This is very important. Crucial, even. Calvin doesn’t get any overtime. Understand? Make sure he clocks out and goes home when he’s supposed to. I don’t care what you have to do, just get him out of that place when it’s time for him to leave.”
I didn’t ask why it was so important, and I doubt Pops would have told me if I had. This wasn’t the first time I’d received mysterious instructions from the owners, and the fact that I never pressed them on it was probably why they kept me around.
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks, Jack. I knew I could count on you.”
He hung up on me, and I filed away my new secret assignment.
As much as I hate to admit it, Calvin Ambrose was right about one thing. There is a long list of unwritten rules at the gas station, and that list was steadily growing.
Don’t ever follow a customer into their car.
Don’t eat any of the food that mysteriously appears from time to time.
If the gravity starts to act up, close the store, turn off the pumps, and get out.
Stay away from the woods. If someone calls to you from the forest, ignore it. Even if you recognize the voice. Even if they use your real name.
And now I had another one: Don't let Calvin go into overtime. It sounded important, up there with Never make eye contact with the fox lady and Don’t touch the lawn gnomes with green hats.
I’m sure Calvin was used to being right, but on this point, I doubt he knew just how right he was. This town was weird. This job was weird. And if Calvin Ambrose really thought he was going to be the one to figure it all out, he was in for an unfortunate surprise.
Chapter Three
The morning rush was slower than usual. Recreational hunters have always made up a disproportionate amount of our early crowd (and our town’s population, for that matter), but with the temperatures continuing to plummet and the pessimistic weather forecast dominating the news (the exact phraseology that locals were kicking around was “snow diarrhea”), most people were happy to give up a day or two of hunting to stay indoors where it was safe and warm. For once, I found myself in agreement with the vox populi.
I got around to reading that sci-fi novella and found the author’s foresight accurate, if not a tad too optimistic. He missed a few of the bigger details, but totally nailed the concept of an advanced civilization utterly dependent on, and at the mercy of, technology. The story ended on a laughably somber note, with robots killing the last of the humans. I’m not so sure we’ll make it that far.
“Why do you think the owners made such a big deal about Calvin not going into overtime?”
My coworker was standing on the other side of the counter, staring out the front door at the snow. I put the book down and picked up my coffee as I considered his question.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s just another one of those things.”
“Don’t you ever get curious?”
“Why would I? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
He turned and faced me, then walked up to the counter and leaned over to whisper, “You wanna know what I think?”
I looked him in the eyes and, for a brief moment, felt that something was off about him, but I didn't want to be rude, so I ignored the feeling. “Sure. What’s your theory?”
He continued to whisper, “I think there’s something wrong with this place. I think any time someone stays here too long, it starts to mess with them. The building gives off a kind of radiation, and the more you’re exposed, the worse it gets. I think that’s the real reason why the owners were always so leery about hiring full-time workers.”
It was an interesting thought, and it certainly had some merit. I took a sip of my coffee and noticed that it had already grown cold.
“But what about me and Jerry?” I asked. “We both practically live here.”
“I think that you and Jerry are somehow immune to it. Maybe it’s because your brains are wired wrong. Or maybe this place is doing a number on you, too. And you’re already so far gone you can’t even see it.” He jerked his head to the side like a nervous squirrel and looked back out the window. “Even when it’s happening right before your very eyes.” He jerked his face back towards me. Then towards the windows. He seemed skittish. Nervous. This wasn’t like him. What was he so afraid of, anyway?
“Is that why you never worked more than a couple hours at a time?”
Tony looked back at me and smiled
.
“Could be.”
“Wait a second...” Suddenly, I remembered something very important about Tony. “Aren’t you…”
He laughed.
All the heat in the room disappeared, replaced by an unwelcome gust of cold, wet air that kicked me into gear faster than ten cups of coffee. I looked over to see a man in a hoodie, baseball cap, and sunglasses walking into the store. When I looked back at Tony, he was gone.
And yet, I could still hear him laughing.
I closed and rubbed my eyes long enough to take a few deep breaths all the way to the bottom of my lungs. When I opened my eyes, he was still gone, and so was the sound of laughter. I stuffed the novella into my backpack, trading it out for the old journal where I’d been keeping notes of these increasingly common episodes. Auditory and visual hallucinations. Check. Disorientation. Check. Confusion. Check and check. This was nothing out of the ordinary. At least I was still functional for now.
“Hey, Jack.”
I looked up to see the man in the baseball cap and hoodie standing where Tony had (or hadn’t) been standing just a moment earlier. As soon as I recognized him, my eyes instinctively darted towards the corner of the store where our old security cameras once were, but their conspicuous absence left me resigned to the effective certainty: We were about to be robbed again.
“Hi, Karl,” I said. Was it a good idea to let him know I recognized him? Surely, he realized this half-assed disguise wasn’t very disguising. I quickly tagged on an addendum just to be safe, “...if that is you, Karl. It’s hard to tell. I just got back from my eyeball cleaning. Now I can’t identify faces to any degree that would hold up in court.”
Karl Thomas was a tall, stocky guy with curly brown hair that he never bothered to wash. He was once a gas station regular, but I originally knew him from high school. We were close in age, with him beating me by a couple years. We weren’t friends, or even friends of friends, but in a town this small, everybody knows everybody’s business whether they want to or not (as a general rule, I do not).
He was infamous for a number of small town scandals, the most scandalous of which was the time he beat his pizza delivery driver nearly to death in a drunken misunderstanding about the fifteen-minutes-or-it’s-free rule. (The delivery driver explained how that wasn’t a real thing anymore. Karl disagreed using fists and steel-toed boots.)
Luckily for Karl, his father was a judge, so he was able to make the whole thing disappear, legally speaking. Unluckily for Karl, the pizza delivery driver had a lot of friends, and there wasn’t much any judge could do to stop or slow the juggernaut of small-town gossip.
After the pizza incident, Karl started to feel the consequences of his actions. He couldn’t keep a job because all the employers in town knew what he had done. The local Baptist church expelled him from the congregation out of principle. And to top it all off, none of the delivery places would go out to his apartment anymore. It didn’t take long for Karl to turn to a life of crime in order to sustain his snowballing drug addiction.
He would visit the gas station at least once a week to buy a lighter and a Chore Boy scouring pad. We never had any problems with each other until the day I came home to find him attempting to break into my house at four o’clock in the morning.
This was about a year after his first arrest, back when Tom was still alive and saddled with gas station duties. When I spotted Karl from the road attempting to pick the locks of my front door, I made the block and gave Tom a call.
Poor Karl must have thought he was losing his mind, using his fancy lockpicking kit to turn all three deadbolts one after the other, trying to figure out why the door still wouldn’t open. If he’d been a little smarter, he might have figured out that I only ever turned the top and bottom locks. The confusion cost him enough time for Tom to show up and catch him in the act.
Once again, Karl’s father pulled some strings. He managed to plead out to a simple seatbelt violation. I was a little miffed but at the same time relieved that I wouldn’t be forced to go to court or testify or any of that nonsense. I tried to let the whole thing go, and Karl added the gas station to the list of places he wasn’t allowed to show his face anymore.
Until now.
He took off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of unhealthy, bloodshot eyes. “You don’t have to worry about me, man. I’m not here to start any trouble. I’m trying to make things right. I wanted to apologize and let you know I’m getting help.”
“Glad to hear that. Speaking of help, I’m volunteering at the local animal shelter. I just adopted two rottweiler/pit-bull mixes with behavioral control problems. Fun fact: their previous owner played death metal every time he fed them, so now they associate the sounds of human screaming with dinner.”
“Look, man, I’m not supposed to contact you. I could get into a lot of trouble for this. But I wanted to warn you—”
“Speaking of warnings, pitweilers are bred for their cunning. Did you know they’re clever enough to set traps?”
“Jack!” He shook his head, frustrated. “You don’t have to do that. I’m not going to bother you anymore.”
“Why would you? I don’t have anything valuable in my home. You know, except the dogs.”
“No, you don’t get it. I wasn’t supposed to take anything out of your house.”
Once again, I was filled with that all-too-familiar feeling that I wasn’t operating with a full deck of cards.
“What do you mean? What were you ‘supposed’ to do?”
At that moment, his phone started to ring. He took it out, cursed to himself, then answered, saying, “Yeah?” He gave me a sad look before turning and heading out. “I told you, I’m on my way now.”
When he was gone, I remembered that I had been holding my breath.
***
About an hour after Jerry stumbled out of the supply closet and went home, Calvin Ambrose showed up unexpectedly, wearing a white button-down with a blue tie and slacks. Something about his wardrobe almost felt personally insulting.
“Good morning, Jack!” he said exuberantly. “How was your night? Any issues to report?”
I put away the book I was reading. “No, just the same old same old.”
“You working hard?” Oh god don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. “...Or hardly working?” He giggled like a deranged clown.
As a professional courtesy, I forced a fake laugh before giving him the vaguest answer I could think of: “Oh, you know.” After that, I trailed off, hoping he’d get the hint.
He looked around the building, “The place is in good shape. Nice work.”
“Thanks.”
“Busy night?”
“Not particularly.”
“Did you have any problems with that homeless gentleman?”
“I never saw any homeless man, gentle or otherwise.”
“Really? Well that’s good news. Maybe he’s finally moved on to greener pastures. Knock on wood, right?” He proceeded to tap his fist against the side of his own head while giving me a huge smile and dead-eyed stare.
I could not bring myself to fake laugh at that.
“Why are you here?” I asked directly. “You’re not scheduled to come in until Devon gets off.”
Devon was one of our newest part-timers—a teenager with a face full of acne and the general demeanor of a fish in the desert. He spoke broken English, but managed to communicate from day one that this was his first and only job. He really wanted to do well, but he was terrified of everything. I had to sit him down on the first day and assure him that he was already overqualified.
I made it a point to schedule Devon exclusively for day shifts so that he wouldn’t have to worry about the fox lady. I had this job down to a lazy science, so when Calvin Ambrose kept trying to fix a system that wasn’t broken, I couldn’t help but feel annoyed.
“I was up and about and thought I’d swing by for some of Jack’s world-famous coffee,” he explained as he crossed over to the coffee machine, st
opping briefly to stare at that mysterious stain that had once again appeared on the floor. I expected him to make a passive aggressive remark, but he surprised me. All he did was shake his head and proceed to fix himself a cup.
It was interesting to watch, to see firsthand as Calvin learned the unwritten rules of the gas station.
That’s right, Mr. Ambrose. We don’t acknowledge the stain. We don’t talk about the stain. And next time you feel like cleaning, you’ll do better by pretending the stain isn’t there.
He walked back to the counter, sipped his coffee, and made an over-exaggerated noise that sounded like “Yum.”
Keeping my secret assignment in mind, I did my best to push him out the door. “Well, enjoy your joe. And the rest of your morning. I’ll see you at the end of your shift tonight?”
A sudden barrage of noises filled the room. Like an earthquake, it came out of nowhere, and before either of us had time to figure out what was happening, it was already too late.
Only in the aftermath were we able to piece together the chain of events. The undercurrent was the sound of mixed engines from several pickup trucks. The high-pitched screech came from the tires as they fishtailed into our parking lot. They gunned their engines and ran donuts around the gas pumps. With their windows rolled down, their radios blared rock music while they shouted mock tribal jeers and fired shotguns and rifles into the air.
It’s impossible to say for sure if this intimidating truck-dance was all they meant to do. But it says a lot about their aim if one of them was trying to shoot the sky and somehow missed. A single bullet went through the window over the booth table and lodged itself into our cold drink case. The sounds of glass breaking and cans exploding and Calvin screaming and falling to the floor to protect himself were all drowned out by the noises coming from the guns and the engines and the angry jeering mouths of the guys controlling them.
And then it was over. They left the parking lot covered in skid marks, hit the main road, and drove off before we could get a good look at any of the driver or passengers. Not that either of us were inclined to go outside and chase trouble.
When the moment had passed and reality sank in, I grabbed my crutches and made my way to the front door to assess the damage.
Tales From the Gas Station 2 Page 3
