All American Horror of the 21st Century

The Station. Bentley Little-1

THE STATION

by Bentley Little

Derek looked impatiently at his watch, making a show of it, wanting Gina to know how annoyed he was getting. But she was focused on getting her shot and either did not see him or did not care. She crouched down in the sand, viewfinder to her eye, moving incrementally to her right as she tried to capture the sun shining through the thin crack between two boulders.

Why did her new hobby have to be photography? Why couldn’t she have gotten into sudoku or needlepoint, something that she could do in the car while they drove?

The b***h of it was, he knew she’d probably bum out on this before the end of the year, maybe before the end of the summer. It would go the way of all her other transitory passions: scrapbooking, flower arranging, sushi making, and of course that damned book club. But right now it was making his already too-short vacation a living hell, and he looked again at his watch and said loudly, “Hurry up! We have a long way to go, and if we don’t check in by six, they won’t hold the room for us!”

“Relax!” Gina called back. “That place has about a thousand rooms. And it’s the off season. We’ll be fine.”

She was right. Furnace Creek Inn was huge. And, other than themselves, who else was moronic enough to vacation in Death Valley in the middle of July? They could probably walk in without any reservation and get the finest room in the hotel. “Hurry up anyway!” he shouted at her.

“I’m trying!” she called.

Derek opened the car door, sat down in the passenger seat and consoled himself by looking at a map. Before Gina had gotten them off track chasing artistic landscapes down this side road, they’d been making pretty good time, and if they could get back to the highway within the next half hour or so, they should still be able to reach the national park by mid-afternoon. Although he’d done so a thousand times, he once again went over their itinerary, then flipped through the AAA book at random, looking for future vacation destinations. When he glanced up again several moments later, assuming she’d had plenty of time to take her photo and was walking back to the car, he saw that she hadn’t moved. She was in exactly the same position she’d been in ten minutes ago.

This was ridiculous.

Derek slammed shut the door of the glove compartment and strode across the sand, ready to give her hell. Gina stood at his approach. “I was just going to come and get you,” she enthused.

“There’s an old building out there. Look.” She pointed past the boulders and down the sloping plain.

Oh no, he thought.

“It would make a great photo.” She handed him her camera.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, but dutifully looked through the telephoto lens. It appeared from this vantage point to be an abandoned gas station (Esso, judging by the shape of the sign’s iron skeleton). He saw no indication of any cars or people. Derek handed back the camera. “Hurry up then and take a picture.”

“Not from here,” She hit his shoulder. “I want to go down there!”

“It’s already ...”

“I’ll make it quick,” she promised.

“You know,” he told her, “if Death Valley was good enough for Ansel Adams, it should be good enough for you.”

“That’s the point,” she said. “It’s overdone. Everyone who goes there takes pictures.

This is something new. I might be the only one to ever take photos of this.”

“I doubt that,” he said, but agreed to give her ten minutes at the building if they left right this second.

She beat him back to the car.

Derek drove quickly, stirring up a cloud of dust behind them. The road was not paved, and it was doubtful that it ever had been. Moreover, the barely extant trail ended at the gas station. Odd, he thought. Ordinarily, service stations were built alongside highways. They were generally not destinations in and of themselves. Something about that seemed wrong, but he told himself that since it had probably been the only gas station for hundreds of miles, travelers probably wouldn’t have minded driving a couple of extra miles down a side road.

He pulled to a stop between an empty island and a closed garage door that had been seriously battered by the elements but surprisingly boasted no graffiti. There were no pumps left, only metal foundations embedded in concrete from which protruded sections of pipe and tubing. The two of them stepped out of the car. “Oh, this is wonderful,” Gina said. “So many good angles and such high contrast with the light and shadow.”

“Ten minutes,” he reminded her. “Or I’m driving off without you.”

He didn’t like this place. That end-of-the-road thing bothered him, and there was something about the building itself that made him uneasy as well. He walked around the back of the car and looked at the closed garage door with its chipped paint and dents and inexplicable lack of graffiti. A small alluvial fan of sand had accumulated at the bottom of the garage door but the line of sand was too even, too perfect, and he didn’t like that either.

He moved on to the office. The broken window had long since been boarded up but the door was gone, and Derek peeked inside. It looked pretty much as he’d expected. Chair. Metal desk covered with dust, yellowed papers and an ashtray. Table with an empty cardboard fuse display and a single broken fan belt. Bulletin board with tire ads and tame cheesecake calendar from 1955.

There was nothing that should not have been there. Yet it seemed wrong, all of it, and he was about to back away and tell Gina that they should go, when she pushed past him and into the office.

“Whoo,” she said, fanning the air in front of her face. “Stale.” There was a closed door in the wall next to the desk, and before he could say a word, she had walked across the office, opened it and was peering into the darkened room beyond.

Derek braced himself for her reaction, because he knew somehow that there would be one.

And there was.

“Oh my God,” she said, staggering backward, eyes wide, face drained of color. “Oh my God.” Already he was moving beyond her to see for himself.

The room was dark and windowless, but enough light filtered in from the outer office for him to see that a single straight-backed chair sat in the center of the chamber, which, in contrast to the metal and glass of the rest of the building, had a floor, ceiling and walls made from rotting unpainted wood.

Slumped in the chair was the body of a dead man.

That would have been shocking enough, but it was who the man was that caused Derek’s legs to wobble.

It was the president of the United States—although the president was supposed to be on a tour of Asia and Derek had seen him on the news this morning giving a speech at a banquet in Tokyo. He was dressed just as he had been this morning, in modified tuxedo, but his face was gray and pasty, his eyes wide open and staring. It could have been an impersonator, someone made up to look like the president, but Derek knew somehow that that was not the case. There was a charisma to the man even in death, a tangible regality that made the authenticity of his body without question.

Maybe the impersonator had been the man in Japan, covering for the president who had been ... what? Meeting someone here in the middle of the desert? Visiting this abandoned gas station?

None of the scenarios he could imagine made any sense, and that was what bothered him the most. If there had been an understandable reason for this, if there was even the thinnest plausible explanation for finding the president’s corpse in the back room of this deserted desert building, then he would have not felt so utterly lost and so bonedeep chilled. But there was no hint of rationality here, and he was more frightened at this second than he had ever been in his life.

Derek turned, grabbed Gina’s arm, and the two of them ran through the office, out of the gas station and back to the car. He did not wait for her to put on her seatbelt but took off in a clatter of gravel and a cloud of dirt. They drove straight back to the highway, bumped back onto the asphalt and sped north as fast as the Toyota would carry them, not speaking at all until, two hours later, they reached the tollbooth at the entrance to Death Valley.

Death Valley.

Appropriate.

They checked in at Furnace Creek just before a busload of German tourists arrived, and after hauling their luggage to the suite, Gina immediately took a shower while Derek turned on the TV, not wanting to be alone in the room with silence.

By the time, Gina had finished her shower, he’d gotten the whole story. She emerged from the bathroom redressed, hair combed, and stopped in her tracks, staring open mouthed at the image on the wall-mounted television. Death of a President, read the words at the bottom of the screen, while a small live shot of a Tokyo hospital crowded with reporters sat in the corner of a larger picture of CNN’s top pundits in Washington.

“He had a heart attack,” Derek said. “This morning at a banquet. He died instantly.”

She looked at him. “Is his body missing?”

“Not that I heard.”

Gina took a deep breath. “What did we see?” she asked. “What happened out there?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

There was a pause.

“I want to go back.”

“What?” He sat up straight in the bed.

“I want to take a picture of it,” Gina said. “I should have photographed it the first time.”

“No,” he told her, shaking his head. “No way.”

“No one’s taken a picture of that before. I’ll be the first. It’ll be a totally unique—”

“No. It’s not going to happen.”

“We’re the only ones who know about it, the only ones who’ve seen it.”

“We’re not going. We’re staying here. Take a picture of sand dunes. Or rocks.”

“We were there already and nothing happened to us. It’s not dangerous, it’s just weird.”

“It’s ...” He struggled to find the right word. Wrong? Evil? Neither of those were exact but either of them would do.

Her face hardened into obstinacy. “I’m going back. With you or without you.”

The argument continued for another 20 minutes, but in truth it ended right there. It was late afternoon, and he got her to agree to wait until tomorrow morning—neither of them wanted to be in that place at night—but at the crack of dawn, they were checking out and packing the car and driving back the way they’d come.

They reached the gas station mid-morning, and while the desert heat was scorching, Derek felt cold. Gina, too, was nervous, though she refused to admit it. She tried to act as though nothing was wrong, but her voice was quavery and her hands shook when she lifted the camera from the backseat.

They stood for a moment in front of the open door, looking into the office. The air was still, too still, and even in the bright midday sun, light spilled only into the front room, leaving that secret chamber in the rear, with its door that they’d left open in their hurry to escape, shadowed and dark.

He wished he’d brought a flashlight, but he hadn’t.

Gina stepped in first, camera before her like a protective talisman, and he followed, moving past the metal desk and dusty table into the back room.

The president was gone, but there was another man in the chair. He, too, was dead, only the cause of his demise was immediately obvious: blunt force trauma to the head. The entire back of his skull had been crushed, and white pieces of bone could be seen within the matted mass of red blood and brown hair. His eyes were closed but his mouth was open, lips frozen in a scream of shock and agony.

“Do you recognize him?” Gina whispered. Something about this place requested quiet.

Derek shook his head, afraid to speak. His brain was trying desperately to make sense of this, to find reason in the irrationality. Was this heaven? Or hell? Was it some sort of way station to the afterlife? That made the most sense, given the fact that the president’s body had disappeared and been replaced by the corpse of another, but if that were the case, bodies should have been appearing and disappearing every second. People were dying all the time.