Why does the hand-crank pump still dispense gasoline though the underground tanks were sealed in 1923? Which Model A returns every Tuesday for fuel but leaves no tire tracks? What's written in the logbook that the attendant won't let customers read? And why do the oil-stained coveralls hang moving in the breezeless garage?
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The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The fuel needle trembled on empty as Rachel pulled into the weathered station, its single pump standing like a sentinel against the endless stretch of desert highway. The attendant emerged from the shadows between rusted oil drums, his smile too wide, his movements unnaturally fluid as he approached her window.
“Fill her up?” His voice carried an odd resonance, as though spoken through water. Rachel nodded, watching in her mirrors as he began the process with deliberate, ritualistic precision. Each number on the pump clicked forward with mechanical certainty, yet she could swear the digits flickered between sequences that defied mathematics.
Inside the cramped office, yellowed photographs lined the walls---decades of travelers, all bearing the same vacant expression, the same distant smile. A ledger lay open on the counter, filled with meticulous entries in a spidery hand: names, dates, fuel amounts, and strange symbols she couldn’t decipher. Her own name already occupied the final line.
When she returned to her car, the attendant stood motionless beside the pump, his eyes reflecting the dying light like polished stones. “Safe travels,” he whispered as she drove away. Hours later, when she finally stopped to check her fuel gauge, it read exactly the same as when she’d arrived---empty---though she’d driven over two hundred miles.
The receipt in her pocket bore no date, no station name, only coordinates to a location that, according to her GPS, didn’t exist.
