This was not going the way I’d hoped or expected. But at least I had him talking, and that felt like a step in the right direction. So I bit the bullet, opened the vault, and told him the entire story.
***
I can’t say for certain when we actually met. It’s funny, I can remember my first tornado. I remember my first hot dog. I even remember the first time I saw a rat (I was four years old and very confused about why this tiny dog kept trying to eat my hair). But when it comes to her, I have no recollection of a time before. As far as my memory is concerned, we always knew one another.
My first foster home was only a couple miles from the gas station, and Sabine’s parents thought daycare was a scam, so we spent most of our summer days exploring the forest together, building forts, climbing trees, catching frogs for her collection, wasting our time in sweet, generic childhood innocence. Of course, this was before either of us knew about all the kids who’d gone missing in those woods.
She didn’t go to any of the same schools as me, and I never questioned it. Every now and then, she’d drop an offhanded complaint about her latest tutor or the concept of homeschooling in general. I told her how I wished she could be in my class, while secretly being thankful that she wasn’t around to see how low I was on the social food chain.
For most of my life, Sabine was my best friend. And though the transition was too subtle to denote a clear beginning, somewhere along the way she became my girlfriend. When it came time to find a job, she talked her parents into giving me a shot.
Like all things in life, it wasn’t always perfect. We had our good days and bad, our ups, downs, and all arounds, but something about the veil of time obscures the finer details of even the most important memories. We broke up more than once. It was my idea, or her idea, or both. And we got back together, sometimes passionately and sometimes begrudgingly. But no matter where we were, we were always there for each other.
When I first noticed that I wasn’t sleeping for days at a time, she was the one who pushed me to seek professional help. When the diagnosis came down and I learned I had at best another year before insanity destroyed my mind, she took me out for ice cream to say “It’s not that bad.”
And then we hatched a plan. If we only had a year left together, there was no reason to spend it in this shitty town working at a shitty gas station. We didn’t tell anyone where or when we were going. We packed our bags and left with a clear goal: Head north and see what happens.
I volunteered to take the first shift driving, even though I hadn’t slept in four days. It was okay, I assured her, for the first time in months I wasn’t even tired…
Tom was the first responder on scene. The evidence pointed to a hit and run. Somebody collided with us from behind, and I lost control of the vehicle, sending us off the road and into a tree. The impact knocked us both unconscious. I was lucky to be alive.
I walked away from the accident with barely a scratch, but Sabine wasn’t as fortunate. When she was stable enough to be transported, they moved her to the best hospital in the area. But no matter how many professionals were involved, the diagnosis remained the same.
She scored a four out of fifteen on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Little to no brain activity. After one week, it was the same. After a month, nothing had changed. The reality was as simple as it was devastating. Outside of a miracle, Sabine would never wake up again.
Her parents saw to it that she received the best care and resources possible. They moved her from one facility to the next in search of that miracle, and before long I lost track of her.
Tom came to visit me at the gas station on the anniversary of the accident. A year had passed, and I was still here. I thought about leaving town for good, finishing the trip that she and I planned together, but that idea ended as soon as it began. Without her, what would be the point?
He asked how I was doing. I told him I was fine, then I asked him a question that I’d wanted to ask since the moment I woke up. I couldn’t remember anything that happened in the moments before and after the accident, and if not for his detective work, nobody would know anything. The car that ran us off the road was never found. I asked Tom directly if it was possible that there wasn’t any other car, if I might have fallen asleep behind the wheel, if I was solely responsible for what happened to her. Tom swore that there was someone else to blame, but deep down, I had my doubts.
***
Jerry stared at me with his forehead wrinkled and a look of steady concentration on his face. When he realized my story was over, he took a couple of deep yoga breaths and said, “Wow. That is some heavy stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Thank you for sharing all of that with me.”
“I’ll be honest. I haven’t talked about her in a long time. It’s easier to just pretend that nothing’s wrong.” I waited for him to take the hint, but he just sat there, staring, waiting for me to spell it out for him. “I think it might be worth it to talk about how you’re feeling now. Vanessa’s death obviously hit you a lot harder—”
“Whoa, whoa, wait,” he interrupted. “That’s what you think this is about? No, dude! Van isn’t dead.”
This felt like a moderate setback, but I wasn’t going to give up yet. “Okay. You do remember going with me to her funeral, right? It was a whole thing.”
He smacked himself on the forehead and exclaimed, “Ohhh, I see! You think I’m depressed?”
“Well, no, not depressed. Maybe just…” I looked around his depressing little bus room behind his depressing compound where all of his old church family had mass-suicided without him in the most comically depressing turn of events to ever occur in this town. I couldn’t think of the right word, so I looked back at his sad, depressed eyes. “...maybe you feel a little… melancholy?”
He screamed wildly and waved his hands in the air. I waited for him to finish before asking, “Feel better?”
“I’m not depressed! I’m just stressed out. I’ve been working my ass off and I’m not getting any sleep and I think I might be anemic, but I can’t find anywhere around here that sells kidneys to eat.”
“You haven’t been to work in days.”
“No, not gas station stuff. Real work. No offense."
"None taken."
"Okay, look, I didn’t want to bring you into this because I didn’t want to stress you out, too. But if it eases your mind, I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.” He reopened the desk drawer, pulled out a stack of papers, and handed them to me. I looked at the notes on the first page and saw row after row of names and details: “Mina Philips - addicted to Minecraft. Dee Gonzales - shoplifter. Frances Couns - insurance fraud.”
I looked up from the sheets. “What is this stuff?” He was already holding the portable electronic device in front of his chest.
“It’s the Russian radio.”
“Are you serious?” I tried to mask my annoyance, but it was impossible to keep it from bubbling over. “You’ve been blowing off work so you can listen to this jibberish? I’ve been picking up your shifts-We’ve been worried about you-I brought you soup and told you my deepest secret-And you’ve just been sitting here, listening to your radio?!”
“I know you don’t want to believe this, but it’s not just random. I’ve followed up. Everything the guy has said so far has been true. Not just time and temperature either. The stuff he shouldn’t know. Stuff nobody should know.” He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Who doesn’t love who anymore. When the milk at the grocery store is going to expire. Who’s pregnant, and when the baby's due. He called a car accident at the vape shop an hour before it happened. I’ve been listening to this thing practically nonstop for days, and not once, not once has it given me the winning lotto numbers. Ain’t that some shit?”
“Jerry, you have a problem.”
“Thank you.”
“In what way could that have possibly been a compliment?”
“I wasn’t really listening.”
“You
need help.”
“It also told me about your deal with Mr. Normal.”
I held my breath.
“What deal? What exactly do you think you know?”
“Relax. I know they’re threatening you and you’re not supposed to talk about it. I also know that Vanessa isn’t really dead. It’s all just an elaborate hoax. Anyway, I need to get back to this before I miss something important.”
He put the radio onto his desk, switched on the power button like he couldn’t wait any longer, and released a long, unsettling moan as soon as he heard the dulcet voice.
“...birdhouse... Max Hopper’s computer has been stolen by ex-girlfriend Amber Harris... Amber Harris will sell computer to pawn shop on—”
There was no doubt in my mind. Jerry was addicted. He couldn’t even wait for me to leave before satisfying this craving. He grabbed a legal pad and pen and started making notes as I leaned forward and clicked off the radio.
“Heyyy!” he whined.
“Why are you listening to other people’s personal stuff? Isn’t that voyeuristic?”
He stretched his arms and cracked his neck. “I don’t want to do this. You think I like knowing everybody’s deepest, darkest secrets? Do you know how often people masturbate in public? The radio does. It’s a lot more than you’d expect.” He widened his eyes and silently mouthed the words "a lot."
“Why are you obsessing over this?”
“Because what if I miss the next time he drops a major clue? What if I’d been listening the night Spencer came for you?”
“You’ve been sitting here in front of the radio in hopes that it will mention another crime so you can go and stop it? What are you, Batman?”
“I don’t expect you to understand, but I am a Mathmetist, the last of my kind, and I took an oath. I can’t just sit back and do nothing.”
I thought about it for a moment before the moral implications started to overwhelm me.
“Actually,” I said, “this is a pretty straightforward example of a classic philosophical argument. Do you automatically have a moral duty to act if you alone possess knowledge that can affect the outcome?”
“That depends on whether or not you buy into utilitarianism. Personally, I’m more of a deontological ethics kind of guy. According to Kant, the sign of morality is an intrinsic sense of duty, and goodness is the act of following up on it.”
“Oh,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you to—”
He raised his voice. “To what, Jack? Study philosophy? You know where you are, don’t you? It wasn’t all pancakes and orgies! Sometimes the syrup ran out and we talked about this stuff. Francis Bacon said that knowledge is power. And Uncle Ben said ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Ergo, I’m responsible for the radio. It is my burden.” He grabbed the device and held it to his chest. “It is… my precious.”
I snatched it from his hands. “Counter point: you don’t have any responsibility if you don’t know what the radio is going to say.”
He reached for it. “Counter-counter point: We have a moral duty to educate ourselves.”
I pulled it away before he could get to it. “Really? We do? Then why don’t you go to school and become a doctor? How many more lives could you save that way? Or how about a firefighter? Or 911 operator? Or even a rodeo clown?”
He poured another shot of Pedialyte, threw it back, and made a sour face. “How much of this stuff do I have to drink before I start feeling a buzz?”
“Face it, Jerry. You’re not doing the world a favor here. If the voice on the radio is legit, and I’m not saying it is, but if it’s really telling the truth, then that doesn’t make it your baby. Someone else created the signal, right? If they’re smart enough to do that, then any moral imperative to act is on them. The only thing we need to do is stay out of the way.”
“You know, it might just be the Pedialyte talking, but you’re making a lot of really good points. You ever think about starting a religion?”
I held the radio in front of me. “Are we done with this? Because I’ve got so much crap going on right now that I cannot keep up with all these different plotlines, and I really need you back at work. Part-timers keep dropping left and right like they’re on Game of Thrones. I cannot keep up on my own.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll stop listening. But just give me like ten more minutes.” he said, reaching for the device. I held it over my head and leaned back just out of his reach. “Come on, Jack, I could tell he was working up to something.”
“No, Jerry. It’s over. You haven’t showered in days.”
He faked like he was going to turn away, then lunged for the radio. I pulled it close and hugged it tight. He yelled, “I go days without showering all the time! It’s how I assert dominance!” He jumped to his feet and bent closer. I tried to lean back but fell off my seat and hit the ground. The radio dropped onto the floor of the bus, slid into a wall, and turned itself on.
“...the collector has found another god to capture... Vanessa Riggin is trapped at old school...She cries in cage...She has fever of thirty-seven point eight five degrees Celsius...She has not eaten for twenty hours...A new calf is born on Farmer Brown Junior’s property...”
Jerry picked up the radio and turned it off. He looked at me in desperation.
“Dude. It’s Van.”
I pulled myself to a standing position. “Jerry. It’s not her. I hate that I didn’t tell you this sooner, but Vanessa is dead. I know she is. I watched Spencer kill her. The radio is a cruel lie.”
“Alright, fine. Prove it.”
“What?”
“Let’s settle this once and for all. The radio says Van’s at the old school, right? Let’s go get her. If she’s not there, then you’re right. The voice is a liar, and I won’t have to keep listening anymore. But if she is, then you owe me a Coke. Either way, it’s a win. Right? Come on, dude. Please?”
His puppy eyes were killing me. I looked down at the stack of pages he’d meticulously collected over the last few days and realized that this might be the only way to help him kick this monkey off his back.
“How much have you had to drink today?”
“Just those three shots of Pedialyte and a gallon of homemade orange soda.”
I knew I’d regret doing this. But I knew I’d regret doing nothing even more.
“Fine. We’ll go to the old school, pop in for a quick second, check it out, and leave. After this, you’re done with the Russian radio for good.”
“Deal.”
***
The old school was right where the town left it—in the middle of an unused and overgrown patch of land slowly being reclaimed by nature. Several generations ago, it served as the area’s single elementary, middle, and high school.
There were plenty of stories about why we abandoned an entire building instead of repurposing it. Some say the black mold problem got too resilient to battle with conventional means. Some say the school board purposely let the place slip into disrepair out of spite after a certain court ruling went into effect back in ‘54. Some say there’s bad juju ever since a senior prank to spike the football team’s water cooler with LSD in the middle of a game went horribly wrong. Some say it was just too expensive to keep refilling the sinkholes in the playground.
I did some research, and the truth was all of the above. And so the town shed the old school like a snake sheds its skin, leaving it to wither and rot at the end of a pothole-riddled street that no longer served any purpose.
I would have suspected that Jerry was hitting every single pothole on purpose, but that would have required a degree of skill that nobody possesses. He cruised the broken pavement at about five miles per hour until we reached the rusted gates of the old school. They were the beginning and terminus of the long winding chain-link fence encircling the derelict structure. The barrier stood eight feet tall with razor wire spun in coils around the top—our town’s final effort to stop the flow of bored teenagers from breaking in and having sex or seances
on the grounds.
I looked at the chains and locks around the fence and took a last-ditch stab. “Seems like the place is closed down. I guess the radio was wrong.”
Jerry laughed and said, “Good one.”
Before I knew it, we were off-road, driving along the snow-littered grass, looking for something we both knew would be there. A quarter mile off the road, we found it—a break in the fence.
It didn’t look man-made. Just a combination of bad weather, cheap craftsmanship, and time. The bottom of the fence had torn away from a pole and curled up like a Goliath’s finger, calling us hither. The space was just wide enough for us to duck under without needing to crawl, and when I spotted it, I cursed under my breath.
I guess this is really happening.
We left the car parked near the tree line nearby. If someone were to come looking, they wouldn’t be able to see us from the road, and if we were lucky, the steady snowfall would obscure our tire tracks in time. Of course, if somebody else was going to come out here to the abandoned school in the middle of the woods, we probably had bigger problems to worry about.
As soon as Jerry turned off the headlights, I realized how dark it was. Snow clouds blocked the moon and stars, and there were no street lamps this far from the live part of town. But Jerry wasn’t going to let a little blindness set us back. He flicked on a tiny keychain flashlight, held it under his chin to give himself scary-story face, and said, “Let’s roll,” before climbing out and starting for the school.
He went through the fence-hole first and made it look effortless. I handed him my crutch, tried to lower myself enough to duck under, and promptly fell onto my back. Jerry grabbed me by the collar, dragged me through like a piece of luggage, then helped me to my foot and gave me back the crutch. I didn’t know whether to feel annoyed or grateful, but he didn’t wait for a “Thanks” or “Fuck you.” He turned and cut straight across to the closest door.
Amazingly—and disturbingly—it was unlocked, and my last hope of cutting this trip short was dashed to pieces.
Jerry was obviously motivated in his search. I trudged along as closely as I could, but the whole thing felt inappropriate. I watched her die. I knew she wasn’t going to be here.
Tales From the Gas Station 2 Page 21
