Tales From the Gas Station 2

  Volume Two

  The book you are about to read is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental. (Especially Calvin Ambrose. In fact, that guy is so fictional, I heard he’s started making surprise appearances in people’s dreams. If you are unlucky enough to have this happen to you, just ignore him. He should go away on his own in a couple of hours.)

  © 2019 Townsend Writing Company. All rights reserved.

  This book is dedicated to you. Whoever you are. Thank you for reading.

  Also, special thanks to the Paingravy Discord. You guys make me feel normal.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter One

  It had been a long and uneventful double shift—my third one of the week—and my body’s blood-to-coffee ratio was, as usual, close to fatal levels. The new guy wasn’t scheduled to come in and relieve me until dawn. In the meantime, all I could do was tread water and hope the snowstorm was enough to keep customers from bothering me too much. Only idiots and madmen would go out in weather like this, but unfortunately, our town had a surplus of both.

  What started off as a “localized cold front” had just been upgraded to a “once-in-a-century cold air outbreak.” The temperature plunged into record-breaking lows while a windstorm noisily purged the forest of its weaker branches and small animals. The snow and sleet came in spurts, freezing the icicles sideways into long, horizontal spikes and coating the roads in a layer of black ice. Clearly, Mother Nature was drunk.

  I’ve never paid much mind to all these “once-in-a-century” weather phenomena our town was so inclined to hosting, but somehow tonight’s attack felt personal. I could handle thunderstorms and flash floods all day long. I didn’t care about heat bursts or seasonal droughts, nor did I particularly mind that one summer when it started raining live frogs. But I’ve always had a special loathing for the cold. Each year, winter took up residence in my bones like a bad roommate, and no matter how many pots of coffee I drank, it never seemed to be enough to keep my insides warm.

  I chose to pass the rest of my time by reading a book, same as always. No reason to treat this day any differently. The fact that my best friend, Tony, had been executed in front of my eyes just two weeks prior was a real tragedy. The fact that he tried to hunt me down and kill me first was an even bigger tragedy. But work and life and the universe can hardly be expected to make exceptions for every single tragedy. So, here I was, back where it all started, sitting behind the cash register and getting lost in an adventure story about a shipwreck survivor on an island inhabited by fish people.

  I didn’t notice when the man walked in. The periodic blast of cold wet air that sucked the warmth from the store each time the door opened was my cue to pay attention, but somehow, I missed his announcement.

  Maybe I was putting too much mental effort into ignoring all those intrusive thoughts about Tony. Maybe I was distracted by the book’s unexpected romantic subplot involving the fish princess. Or maybe this customer was something that didn’t need to use doors. Whatever the reason, I only became aware of his presence after he began tapping his knuckles on the counter right in front of me.

  Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap…

  It was as rhythmic as a metronome, yanking my attention back into the present. Like a good employee, I put my book away, apologized for my inattentiveness, and asked if there was anything he needed help with. But he didn’t answer.

  ...taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap…

  And he didn’t stop tapping.

  He was a tall man with a wide, pale face below a dark wool fedora. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark round sunglasses. He had no eyebrows or other hair that I could see, and his smile showed off a mouth full of dark yellow teeth—the only pop of color on his otherwise chromatically muted person. Something about the lack of hair made it difficult to pin down an age. He could have been a healthy ninety or a sickly forty or anywhere in between. All that, combined with his black trench coat and leather gloves, gave him the distinct otherworldly air of a cartoon supervillain.

  I sat and studied him for a moment, uncertain of how best to respond. At first, I assumed he hadn’t heard my question, but that wouldn’t explain why he was standing there grinning and tapping the counter and staring straight ahead—not at me, but at something high on the wall behind me.

  I cleared my throat.

  ...taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap…

  The man continued to tap and stare.

  “Hey mister,” I said directly, “You okay? Are you having a stroke or something? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “How’s your math, Jack?”

  His voice was deep and gravelly. About a half step up from a growl.

  I took a moment to make sure I understood the question before answering. But the extra time didn’t help any. No matter how I rolled it around in my mind, his question didn’t make any sense. I decided to proceed with caution.

  “I’m sorry. Did you just ask me about my math?”

  “That’s right.”

  He continued the incessant tapping with the cadence of a water drip, faster than a heartbeat, hypnotic and ever so steady. Before I realized it, the tapping had blurred into background noise. I couldn’t hear it anymore, and I couldn’t look away from the man’s face.

  “I suppose my math is just as good as the next guy’s.”

  “Don’t be so modest. You’re a smart cookie. You never made anything less than an ‘A’ on any of your math tests in high school. Isn’t that true?”

  Normally, this is where a chill might run down my spine, but I was able to smother it with cold, hard logic before it had the chance. No reason to get nervous yet, I told myself. So this guy knows about my grades, big deal. There were plenty of reasons for him to know that. He could have been working for any one of those government agencies that were keeping an eye on this place. Or it could have been a lucky guess. For all I knew, I was dealing with a well-dressed tweaker hopped up on bath salts.

  Actually, that might be a good reason to get nervous.

  In my experience, those on mind-altering drugs should be treated like sleepwalkers. Keep them away from vehicles and sharp objects. Give them plenty of space. And be careful not to bring them crashing back to reality all at once, or someone could get hurt.

  He didn’t look like a traditional junkie, but just to stay on the safe side, I humored him. “The schools around here have pretty low standards. My last three math teachers were all named ‘Coach.’ Everyone gets an ‘A’ if they want one.”

  “But you understand things, don’t you? Things others don’t. You’re special, Jack. And you should be proud of it.”

  “I can assure you, special doesn’t mean good.”

  “Take the damned compliment, Jack.”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  “Let me give you a quick math problem. One hundred and fifty thousand people die every single day. That seems like a lot, doesn’t it?”

  He paused.
>
  “That’s not a math problem,” I said.

  “The wait was a courtesy. To let you cry, or mourn, or whatever it is you do.”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  “Well, okay then. If a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, then how often does a single human die? A real person leading a real life. Full of experiences, relationships, memories good and bad. A monumental event. The only thing in life that’s certain, yet the least understood. How frequently would you say that happens? On average?”

  “About once every five hundred and seventy-six milliseconds,” I answered.

  He lowered his gaze until his face was pointed at mine. From where I sat, I could see my own face reflected in his glasses as he spoke. “How remarkable! You did that all in your head? You’re even smarter than I—”

  “No, of course not. You think I’d be working here if I could do that sort of stuff in my head? My phone has a calculator. Check it out.”

  I held up my cell phone for him to see the screen. He inspected my work and grunted. “Zero point five six seven seconds. Do you have any sense of the scale? Think about it. In the time it takes to say 'Mississippi,' two people died. In the time it takes to boil an egg, one thousand people will die. In the time it takes to gestate a baby, forty million people—over twice the population of New York state—will perish.”

  I could tell he was prepared to keep going all night if I didn’t interrupt. “Okay. I get it. Death is not an anomaly. It’s a certainty. We’re all doomed from the moment we’re born. Life is suffering. Free will is an illusion. The cake is a lie. So, what? What’s your point?”

  He said nothing. His only answer was taptaptap taptaptaptaptap…

  I finally put it all together. “Oh. I get it now.”

  With that, he finally stopped tapping. The silence that took its place was annoyingly palpable.

  The point he was trying to make, I realized, was that each of those taps corresponded to a person who had just died somewhere in the world. And he’d tapped hundreds of times since this conversation started.

  “Would you like to cry some now? Knowing that all these people are dead?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Then why should you shed any tears over Antonio?”

  He was really trying to push my buttons.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What makes him any more important than the millions who’ve died since him?” His smugness shone through like a lighthouse in the fog.

  “I don’t know.”

  He raised his voice. “What makes this one so special?”

  I tried to think up a better answer, but all I could come up with was, “I don’t know.”

  His voice was louder now. “Face it, Jack. You’re being ridiculous!”

  “Okay.”

  He was suddenly on the verge of screaming. “Well?! Are you going to do something about it?! Are you going to change your mind and get over it?! Or do you still care about this one little insignificant nobody?!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?!”

  I matched his volume and yelled, “Because he was my friend!”

  The sound of my voice startled me more than it did him. He laughed. I didn’t.

  His laughter was high-pitched and staccato, conspicuous as a car alarm, and very much on the other end of the vocal spectrum from his speaking voice, yet just as unnerving. He leaned over my counter and growled softly, “That’s a pity. You had so much potential.”

  I waited for my heartbeat to return to normal, embarrassed over my unintended outburst. It wasn't like me to get emotional (I blame the caffeine). And despite what this asshole was implying, I did not cry when Tony died.

  As he stood over me, his glasses slipped down his nose, and I watched as a jointed brown appendage unfurled from behind one of the lenses. It was skinny and bristly like the leg of a roach, but at least four inches long. The tip of it quickly caught the falling glasses by the rim and pushed them back into place before retracting into the space where his eye should have been.

  He smiled and acted like the whole thing hadn’t happened.

  Okay. I guess the weird stuff is about to start back up again. The break was nice while it lasted.

  I pointed at his glasses, “You know you’ve got a giant bug crawling out of your eye-hole, right?”

  “No I don’t!” he snapped back.

  He wasn’t terribly convincing, but I wasn’t about to argue with the guy, so I let it go. Besides, maybe he was right. My grip on reality was never that strong to begin with, and lately that tether was tenuous at best and illusory at worst. Between the medications, trauma, general stress, and ludicrous amounts of caffeine, it was hard to know what was real and what was just another fevered machination of my diseased mind.

  “Sorry,” I offered. “You’re probably right.”

  He rested his hands on the counter, took a sharp intake of breath, and sneezed louder than a gunshot. As he did so, a line of tiny orange roaches swarmed out from under both shirt sleeves and across the counter towards me. They were small, ranging in size from strawberry seeds to pencil erasers, enough to pour over one another like liquid as they scurried away from the man.

  “Oh, pardon me!” he exclaimed before scooping them all together into a skittering pile and brushing them off the counter into his open palm. He casually stuffed the lump of bugs into the pocket of his trench coat and smiled at me like this had been a perfectly normal thing for someone to do.

  “Well, that was about the grossest thing I’ve seen all night,” I said. “Who are you supposed to be, anyway?”

  “Me? I’m just a passerby who saw a person in desperate need of help. I’m not actually supposed to talk to you, but I feel like I’m looking at a poor, stupid, struggling turtle that’s been flipped onto its back. It takes so little effort to kick it over right side, and who doesn’t like kicking things? Right?”

  “Is this what you think ‘help’ looks like?”

  He leaned in closer, took a deep breath through his nostrils, and whispered, “Help doesn’t always feel good, Jack. Besides, I got you to scream, didn’t I?”

  I was mildly peeved.

  “Are you planning on buying anything?”

  He stood up straight and looked around the store for a brief moment before announcing, “I would love to patronize this outstanding establishment, but I’m afraid I haven’t any money. I wouldn’t suppose you’d be interested in an alternative form of payment?”

  I pointed at the door. “Please leave.”

  The man giggled to himself and walked out into the icy cold night while I picked up my book and considered whether or not I should make another cup of coffee.

  Chapter Two

  In case you missed the first part of my memoirs, or in case someone (or something) erased your memory of it all, allow me to recap the important stuff:

  At the edge of town, there’s a shitty gas station open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Weird things happen there, and nobody seems to know why.

  A few months ago, an ancient deity awoke beneath the gas station, possessed a bunch of minds, brought a slew of people back from the dead, and scared the crap out of me and my coworkers. We accidentally killed a politician named Kieffer (several times). I joined minds with the godlike entity and learned that a supreme being who feeds off pain and suffering was coming to end the planet. A monster hunter named Benjamin showed up. The dark god exploded. My coworker, Tony, revealed that he had been working for a mysterious shadow organization. Also, I barfed on a rabbit.

  To be fair, it is entirely possible that none of that stuff really happened. I don’t have any proof, and if you were to believe my highly-credentialed psychiatrist, the more likely scenario is that I imagined the entire thing.

  I’ve been working at the gas station ever since I graduated from high school, and I’ll be here until the day I die. But despite how it sounds, that’s not exactly a long-term plan. I have a brain defect and sleep disorder
that, by all accounts, should have already killed me by now, but for some reason I’ve always been really bad at dying.

  Other than that, I’m a pretty boring guy. I don’t go looking for trouble. I try to mind my own business. I know that curiosity kills and ignorance is bliss and “good enough” is good enough. Which is probably why the new guy, Calvin Ambrose, harbored so much animosity towards me.

  ***

  “You’ll be happy to know that the tar pit is finally gone,” he said as I walked in to start my shift for the night. He delivered the news with a smirk, and I could sense that there was more than simply pride behind those words.

  I didn’t know what else to say besides, “Oh, cool. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Good evening, officer!”

  That last part was directed at the woman following me into the store. She returned his greeting with a courteous but silent nod before heading to the corner to fix herself a cup of coffee.

  Deputy Amelia O’Brien had been giving me rides to and from work ever since an old childhood acquaintance of mine attacked me at the gas station, an unfortunate encounter that left me with a broken leg and him with an active arrest warrant should he ever show himself again. O’Brien was under the impression that my attacker, Spencer Middleton, was likely to return and finish what he started, and she was committed to making that task as inconvenient for him as possible.

  As I made my way to the timeclock station behind the counter, Calvin added, “I also cleaned that spot by the coffee machine, got the last of the spray paint removed, and reorganized the cooler.”

  He was claiming these accomplishments with a sense of personal pride, even though we both knew he hadn’t done any of that work himself. He was the kind of guy to delegate assignments to the minimum wage part-timers and take all the credit for himself. I had nothing against Calvin personally, but his and my management styles were completely at odds, which is likely why the owners—Mammaw and Pops—hired him as the new day shift manager.

  For years, the gas station operated with a single full-time worker and a rotating fleet of part-timers, but after a minor disaster and subsequent grand reopening, the owners decided it was time to shake things up a bit. They tried to sell it to me as a positive development, delicately explaining how a manager for day shifts would split the workload and give me a much-needed break. The reality was transparent, though. Mammaw and Pops were on the short list of people who knew about my looming health issues. They understood I wasn’t going to be around forever, and they needed somebody in place to take over once I was out of the picture. I couldn’t blame them, and I certainly wasn’t one to complain about less work. But all things considered, I had to wonder if Calvin Ambrose was really the best they could do.