The Gas Station at The Edge of Eternity
By Emmaline Westlund
The Gas Station at The Edge of Eternity
Copyright 2013 Emmaline Westlund
Published by Destruction Productions
The clerk stared out into the abyss of the twilight hours of her Sunday night shift at the corner gas station. She’d worked there for six years, the same three shifts every week- Wednesday night, Saturday night, Sunday night- and could set her watch to the monotony.
In six years, the most interesting thing that had happened was a regular customer slipping and almost breaking her hip on the front walk one winter. Beyond that, life at the corner store was boring.
This particular Sunday night, it was snowing lightly. Earlier in the day, there’d been a short thunder snowstorm. Stella had seen part of the lightning show as she’d driven in for her shift.
Now there was just light, fluffy snow falling in delicate, individual flakes. In the street lamps that were just humming into life, the snow looked like gently falling glitter. For a moment, the clerk stood by the windows that completely made up one of the walls of the store, staring out into the night.
Something hit the side door and made her jump, a muted shriek escaping her lips. Just her boyfriend, Johnny Ridgewater. She scowled, willing her heart to slow back down. “You scared me half to death,” she scolded him when he came around to the front door, “You’re mean.”
“Aw, come on Stel, you mean to tell me you’re able to close this store on your own each night but you can’t even handle someone banging on a side door without pissing yourself?” the boy asked in a slow southern drawl. He stood just shy of six-foot-two and wore a faded Red Sox jersey and a Minnesota Wild ball cap. His lower lip jutted out almost an inch from the rest of his face and he had a lazy eye.
Johnny Ridgewater, once the captain of the varsity football team, now had a sizeable beer gut and a long, jagged scar down the side of his head. Still, Stella Pike saw something absolutely wonderful in him; she just wasn’t entirely sure what that was from day to day.
“It’s been so dead all day that I’d almost forgot what it sounds like for someone to be around,” Stella the clerk said, straightening her apron. Across the breast it said Ethel’s Gas and Go, with her name embroidered below that.
“You missed a hell of a show tonight at the train station. There were these drugged out kids y’see, and they was-” Another loud bang at the side door interrupted him. Both Stella and Johnny looked over and saw something neither of them would ever have expected to see at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
“What the hell is that, d’ya suppose?” Johnny asked, pointing at the thing outside. It smashed into the door again.
Stella hopped up on the counter and slid across, reaching beneath the cash register and turning on the outside light. Suddenly illuminated, the thing outside made a terrible squelching, groaning noise and rammed into the door again. A single, tiny crack spread from the point where it hit the glass.
At one point, it looked like it had been human, but that time was long ago. Its skin was a dark purple mottled with green and pink. One eyeball was still present, fixed on Stella’s apron. The other eye socket was open and empty. Half of its jaw was gone, as well as most of its ribcage.
“What the fuck is that?” Stella asked, bewildered. Before Johnny could open his mouth to reply, another one came into view. It hobbled to the side door and thunked against the glass in the same way the first had. This one looked less bloated and rotten than the first; it actually looked human and was clearly identifiable as a woman. “Jesus H. Christ,” she murmured, then jerked to face Johnny. “Lock the door! Lock the door now, there’s more a-comin’!”
It took him a moment to process what she’d said, but when it hit him he bolted for the front door and latched it shut. “Fat lot of good that’ll do,” he lamented, “The whole front of the store’s glass. They keep smacking into us like that…” He didn’t want to think of what would happen. Shaking his head, he held his hand out to Stella. She took it, and he helped her back over the counter.
“Weapons,” she said, leading him to the back of the store, “we need weapons.” In the time it took them to reach the stockroom, Stella and Johnny could hear glass breaking at the front of the store. Glancing back Stella could see that there were at least four of them at the front and who knows how many at the side. One of the glass doors at the front had cracked and was beginning to shard away under the pressure of the undead.
Johnny pushed Stella back into the storage room and closed the door. “What’s back here that we could use?” he asked as Stella started rummaging through a pile of boxes. “Talk to me, Stel,” he said when she only grunted in response.
“There’s those metal shelves,” she pointed above his head, “I know there’s a hatchet around here somewhere… We don’t keep a lot of back-stock so most of the stuff back here’s tools and whatever.” Her voice was shrill and shaky. Johnny went to work immediately tossing stuff off the shelves, sending boxes of unidentifiable junk crashing to the cracked linoleum floor.
“Jackpot!” he exclaimed as he found a baseball bat. He spotted a hammer and some long nails spilling out of one of the boxes he’d tossed to the ground; he quickly got to work hammering some nails into the bat to make an even more gruesome weapon.
“Found the hatchet!” Stella said. Moments later something heavy hit the door. An odd green-brown fluid oozed under the door and they both had to resist the urge to vomit. It had the consistency of half-set gelatin with dark chunks of what could have been flesh speckled through it.
“Oh god that’s rank,” Johnny said through gritted teeth. He was forcing himself to take shallow breaths to minimalize how much of the stench made it into his body. There was another heavy, squelching thunk against the door and they heard something wet plop into the puddle of goo outside the door.
Whatever had been trying to get in let out a death rattle, which was quickly followed by a sloppy thudding noise as it must’ve hit the ground. Then there was silence. The two looked each other up and down, noting their near-identical horrified expressions.
Johnny stepped cautiously toward the door, straining his ears for any sound, any hint that something was looming just beyond that door- but he heard nothing. He turned to his girlfriend, who was nervously gripping the hatchet so tightly that her knuckles were turning white.
Without saying a word, the two decided that Johnny would open the door. Stella would cover him. They would try to get to the office and call for help. Failing that, they’d try to get to Stella’s mom’s old car in the parking lot. Johnny held the bat in one hand and gripped the doorknob with the other.
Taking a deep breath, Johnny turned the knob and wrenched the door open. The tiny hallway that contained the bathrooms and led into the stockroom was filled with stinking, convulsing, rotting bodies that pushed and shoved their way along, ultimately getting stuck as they bottlenecked into the space. Johnny stared for a moment, heart pounding out of his chest, before slamming the door shut again.
“We can’t go out there,” he said, “I don’t care, we’d never make it.”
“We stay here, we’ll die,” Stella replied, “We have to try.”
“I’m not letting you go out there alone.” Johnny’s eyes were wide and filled with fear.
“Of course I’m not. You’re coming along with me. We get out or we go down fighting.”
Something else hit the door with a hard, heavy bang followed by a scratching sound. The wood of the door began to bulge and splinter. Stella gripped the handle of the hatchet tightly and stared at the door while edging closer to Johnny.
Th
e door took another hit, sending splinters flying at Johnny and Stella. Mangled, greenish fingers twitched and pushed their way through a hole that was developing. Without hesitation, Johnny brought the baseball bat down on those fingers, punching a larger hole through the crappy door.
The zombie who had been attached to those fingers gave a howl and surged forward, its arm becoming lodged in the door. “Big mistake, pal,” Stella said as she raised the hatchet high over her head. She took a deep breath and brought it down as hard as she could across the arm in the hole. It sliced clean through and the stump sprayed the same thick greenish-red goo that was oozing through the crack under the door.
Johnny kicked it out of the hole and they heard the zombie it was connected to hit the ground with a sickening squelch. “Together?” He asked, reaching for her hand.
“Together,” she nodded, taking his hand. Johnny reared back and kicked through the door, revealing the slow herd of zombies that were still trying to figure out the physics of a bottleneck. Johnny and Stella stomped out of the stockroom, their hands lingering on each other a moment before they took better hold of their weapons.
The gas station erupted into chaos. Entrails and rotten, chunky flesh flew and stuck to walls and the ceiling. There were fewer zombies than
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