The Last Station

by N. D. Coley

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

I looked to the station and saw the man, sitting at a desk behind the counter, reading a paperback book. I exited the car and stormed his way, my feet sinking into patches of mud, and flung open the door. “If you’ll excuse me,” I growled. “What the hell was that?”

The man turned the page and did not look up. He spoke without interest, as if he were shooing away a child. “That is none of your concern, son. You’ve made a wrong turn. Go on now.”

“I won’t. I won’t leave.”

He stood up and closed the book. “Well, you don’t have to. No rule says I have to kick you out. I wish there was, but there ain’t.”

“What are you talking about? What rules? What happened to that woman? Where am I?”

“Son, my job description doesn’t include talking to the likes of you.”

“What’s the address of this place?”

“Unlisted, far as I know.”

I stepped forward as if to speak, and that’s when the rain came down in sheets, as if God had opened the heavens for the second flood that he promised he’d never send again. The rain struck the roof of the station hard, like a spray of bullets from a machine gun. I looked at the man, hard, but he wasn’t looking at me at all. Ignoring my presence, he rose and slid on a yellow raincoat and bucket hat.

Outside, there was a truck parked at the pumps. It was a vintage blue Chevrolet, much like the one my grandfather used to drive. A man, short and plump, was standing outside the truck and leaning against the bed. A splotch of hair on his balding head was soaked, and his palms hid his eyes.

Suddenly the thin man was next to him, and there was an exchange of words, completely muffled by the downpour. The men swung their arms wildly, and the mouth of the fat man opened and closed. He made two fists and punched at the chest of the other, but the thin man did not move.

They both stopped, and the plump man got into his truck and rested his forehead against the steering wheel. He threw himself against the headrest and pounded the horn with his fists. The truck sounded like a boat in distress, trying to find a safe place to dock.

The thin man leaned against the truck, pumping fuel, and even in the downpour I could hear the glugging sound of the gas enter the tank, and the fuel pumped until there was a click. The light outside the station swelled and became larger, and it ballooned and lit up the scene so that the station or truck or trees could not be seen.

And the light was small again, and the truck was gone. The rain continued without interruption and, to my left, I could see, as I leaned against the glass window of the station, a line of cars, large and small, sedans and trucks, all lined up where the blue Chevrolet had been.

Pairs of glowing headlights, like the eyes of nocturnal creatures in the darkness, stretched far back until the road disappeared around a bend and into the tree line. The scene became a song of sorts, and the refrain was the same: a man or a woman would get out, protest in every way that a body could protest, and then go slack with resignation. Each would get back in the car, and the thin man would pump fuel and the light would swell and shrink, and there would be one less vehicle in line.

I lost track of time, and before I knew it there were no cars at all, and the thin man was back in his chair, idly reading a paperback book.

I am not someone who likes confrontation, and now I know what it is like when adrenaline hits you. Everything plays like a movie with gaps in the film, where there seem to be missing pieces, blackouts of a sort, between events. It was in this way that I found my hands around the thin man’s neck, and I squeezed and squeezed. His eyes bulged, and I could see that there was no white in those eyes at all. They were pulsing black orbs.

The man choked and his arms went slack. I lost a moment again, and I found my fists pounding his face, smacking against his jaw, sending spurts of blood going to the left and right. The man collapsed to the side and spit out a tooth. He lay limp, with labored breathing, and then he started laughing, giggling, howling with uncontrollable joy.

He turned to his back, reached for the fallen tooth, and stood. He placed the tooth back in his mouth with a hard click, and smiled at me. “You about finished, son?”

“I’ll kill you. I’ll do it!”

“Oh, you could try, and even if you could, well. I’d be replaced. You know that, son, right?”

I noticed that my fists, now purpled and swollen, were throbbing. I set aside thoughts of assaulting the man again.

“Son, sit. I’ll make this as easy as I can. You’ve made a wrong turn is all, and that’s fine, but—”

“But what?”

“I’ll do what I’ve never done in all my years at this. I’ll tell you everything. Well, almost everything, even though there’s no pay in it for me. Quiet for a moment and listen.”

“All right.”

“You all think that the universe runs like a clock, don’t you? Fate or whatever. Stuff like that. That before you’re born there’s a plan for you to grow up and fall in love and have babies and, when the right time comes, die and make room for the next person.”

“I don’t think anything of the kind.”

“Yes, you do, but I’m sorry to say that this life ain’t like a clock at all. Well. It is and it ain’t. There are plans in place, or something like them, and they usually go ok and nobody has to worry much, but every once in a while there’s a mistake. A gear gets stuck for a moment and someone leaves for work or the grocery store a few minutes later. Later than they were supposed to.”

“Talk sense.”

“I am. When things get stuck and then unstuck, someone who was supposed to step in front of a car or fall over of a heart attack. Well, that doesn’t happen, and, if it didn’t happen, that person would become another mistake, and they’d just go like always, only their life would make — what do you call it — a chain reaction of errors. And that’s no good.”

“I don’t get you.”

“What do you think would happen, over enough time, if those mistakes just piled up? You think there’s enough room for everyone? Sorry, son. It’s like this store. There’s only so much candy on the shelves and there are only so many shelves. You got to go through the product to fit more in.”

“Shut up.”

“And so that’s where I come in. You miss your cue, and you end up here, and we finish the process. Though it’s funny; you didn’t miss your cue at all. I’ll have to talk to someone about that. We can’t have this happening all the time.”

The thin man sat back at this desk, picked up his paperback, and continued reading, and that’s when I noticed how much my hands hurt and throbbed. It felt as if each palm were filled with a group of miners, chipping away at my flesh with pickaxes. I winced and studied them, those painful clumps of flesh, and I took a closer look.

The charm was gone. I had lost it somewhere in the fight, in the blackouts. In a panic, I paced the store, looking at the empty black and white tiles underneath my feet. I saw nothing and growled, and I paced more and, in my anger, I took my arms and started heaving product from the shelves. Chips and candy and bags of nuts went flying about. I stomped my feet, crushing the snacks, fixing globs of chocolate and caramel to the bottom of my shoes, and the thin man read his book without expression.

I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled. The pain worse than before. My palms felt like heavy stones, clumps of useless rock fused to my arms. I pressed my head against the floor and, underneath the bottom of a shelf, saw the charm. I reached out with my arm and went for it, but there was no feeling in my fingers. There was no grip, and my reach was not long enough. I grunted and sobbed. I pushed until it felt as if my arm would come out of the socket and snap off.

I reached one last time, where the charm should have been, and found nothing. Just cold tile and empty space and, out of nowhere, a hand slid over mine, and there was the touch of skin against skin, of a shoulder pressing against my shoulder. Soft fingers pried my hand open, digit by digit, and pressed the charm into my palm.

I jerked away from the counter and sat up. Above me stood a woman, dressed in dark blue jeans and a tan turtleneck. A hooded raincoat was draped over her shoulders, and hair, long and black and pressed into waves, rested above her breasts. Her eyes were blue. A necklace hung around her neck, and the other half of the charm rested in the center of her chest. I choked out words, sure nothing would come out. “Is that you?”

She nodded, her face shifting between a smile and a frown.

“Elmira?”

She reached down and pulled me up by my arms. “Not Elmira. My friends call me Emmy.”

“And you’re my friend?”

“Yes, Miles, my friend.”

I looked into her eyes, hoping to become lost in them, hoping to forget about this place, this station, this unlisted address in at the bottom of this valley, this portal to Hell or some place worse, where so many had come and fought and disappeared, but I didn’t become lost at all. Instead I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, one last car parked opposite to mine. Her car.

I gulped. “Emmy you’ve got to get out of here, now. Go. Get out of—”

She shook her head and whispered to me. “It’s okay. I talked to the man. I’ve got to go now, Miles. You know that.”

She gestured and blew a kiss and went for the door, the man followed. I had seen this scene before and would not see it again.

I raced out the door, into the rain, and pushed myself between the two. The man had his hand on the pump, and Emmy had hers on her door. One foot was in the driver’s side. I put out my hands between them and screamed, but the rain was coming so hard, so fast still, that no sounds come out.

Emmy looked at me, through me, and told me with her eyes that she had to go now, and with my hands I said no. I grabbed her wrist hard, pressing my swollen fingers into her flesh, and the adrenaline hit me again, but with more force. I lost a moment and then I was there again, and she was with me, running, away from the station, over the road, through the rain and into the trees.

We raced down, darting under low branches and around the trunks of the pines. Our feet got caught on clumps of leaves, and we stumbled but did not fall. I pulled her, and she pulled me, and we ran until there were no longer trees, but a clearing, and when we were in the clearing the rain had quit. The clouds thinned and scattered, and rays of sunlight settled on her face.

Neither of us spoke. I took her and pressed her face against mine, her lips against mine, and I squeezed her to me as if to make her one with me, to hide her away. There was no emptiness, no awkward feeling. It was a moment that had been taken away in nightmare after nightmare, but not here. It was as real as anything ever was.

But there were tears. I felt the wetness on her cheeks hit my lips and my tongue, and I felt a sense of dread. I opened my eyes and looked all around me. We were both at the gas station again, standing outside her car, just as if we had not run away at all. The thin man was holding the pump and, as he always did, motioned for her to get in and start the ignition.

I looked at him intently. Before I could blurt anything out, he seemed to read my thoughts. He studied me curiously, as if he had never seen a thing like us in the world.

I stepped closer to him and put my hand on the nozzle.

“Is there a rule against it?” I asked.

He took a long pause and shook his head. “Can’t say that there is. No, son.”

“I won’t break anything if I do? I won’t create some mistake? Some mess that you have to mop up somewhere else?”

“No, son, but you have to know this. If you do this, she’ll die the way you were supposed to, and you may not leave in a pretty fashion. I’m afraid I can’t say how you go, but whatever you get, she’ll get. I can only say that it isn’t for a long time.”

I looked at Emmy, whose face had the look of fear and pleading, and I nodded back at the man. “All right,” I said.

I broke the bracelet from my wrist, and grabbing Emmy by her right hand, took my left and clicked the charm back into place. The orange heart in the center let out a glow and a steady hum. I planted a single kiss on her lips as the adrenaline hit again, and I hovered over that moment.

In my mind, I built a space that was a thousand years times a thousand years, where she was mine, and I was hers, and where there were no rules, no mistakes, no exchanges. It was a place where we could not be touched. We had our picnic in a secluded place in the woods, on a day with just enough sun and clouds, and we ate fruit and tossed the scraps at each other and lost our clothes and rolled up in the blanket, and we lived this scene again and again, and there was no gas station or thin man to take us away.

I pulled my lips away and looked at Emmy. “When I see you again, you give my half back to me, okay? You keep it until then.”

Emmy nodded. A single tear dripped down her cheek and onto the dirt.

I stepped back and grabbed the nozzle from the thin man, the steward of the last gas station, deep in that valley, and rammed it into the tank. The man tipped his hat and winked, and I got inside Emmy’s car and turned the ignition.

* * *

There’s no heavy wind when it happens to you, I’ve learned. No whooshing. No bright light. You just turn the key and you’re gone, driving on another road. As it turns out, it is a road very much like the ones I knew from the old days: it is a long, perfect slab of pavement, and it climbs up and over the mountains, down hills and valleys, through trees and over rivers, past lands that are not filled with people, but with creatures that only live. They have no thought as to what they will do or how, but simply are.

The animals in these woods simply move because movement is all they know. There is no plotting, no conspiracy, no rules, no exchanges, and no mistakes. It’s like being on the road again, though everything is brighter than it could possibly be in real life. The colors of the trees and the grass are too vibrant, and everything looks white around the edges, much like a dream.

The recorder that I found in the glove box, a pocket RCA player with a blank cassette, is almost out of tape. I am nearing the end of this message, and for that I am glad, though I would feel better if I knew that someone, anyone, could listen. There is a lesson in all of this. There is always a lesson when there’s a listener.

I hope I find a listener.

I do not know what’s down this road: Heaven or Hell or perhaps something different, like a blank room where I can only sit, alone with my thoughts. If that is what awaits me, I could certainly have done worse. One needs only a few moments to fill eternity.