Night Shift

The black counterman was frozen by the radio, a dishcloth in hand, looking amazed. His teeth glittered. For a moment there was no sound but the buzzing Westclox and the rumbling of the Reo's engine as it returned to its fellows. Then the girl began to cry and it was all right - or at least better.

My own car was around the side, also battered to junk. It was a 1971 Camaro and I had still been paying on it, but I didn't suppose that mattered now.

There was no one in the trucks.

The sun glittered and flashed on empty cabs. The wheels turned themselves. You couldn't think about it too much. You'd go insane if you thought about it too much. Like Snodgrass.

Two hours passed. The sun began to go down. Outside, the trucks patrolled in slow circles and figure eights. Their parking lights and running lights had come on.

I walked the length of the counter twice to get the kinks out of my legs and then sat in a booth by the long front window. It was a standard truck stop, close to the major throughway, a complete service facility out back, gas and diesel fuel both. The truckers came here for coffee and pie.

'Mister?' The voice was hesitant.

I looked around. It was the two kids from the Fury. The boy looked about nineteen. He had long hair and a beard that was just starting to take hold. His girl looked younger.

'Yeah?'

'What happened to you?'

I shrugged. 'I was coming up the interstate to Pelson,' I said. 'A truck came up behind me - I could see it in the mirror a long way off- really highballing. You could hear it a mile down the road. It whipped out around a VW Beetle and just snapped it off the road with the whiplash of the trailer, the way you'd snap a ball of paper off a table with your finger. I thought the truck would go, too. No driver could have held it with the trailer whipping that way. But it didn't go. The VW flopped over six or seven times and exploded. And the truck got the next one coming up the same way. It was coming up on me and I took the exit ramp in a hurry.' I laughed but my heart wasn't in it. 'Right into a truck stop, of all places. From the frying pan into the fire.'

The girl swallowed. 'We saw a Greyhound going north in the southbound lane. It was . . . ploughing . . . through cars. It exploded and burned but before it did slaughter.'

A Greyhound bus. That was something new. And bad.

Outside, all the headlights suddenly popped on in unison, bathing the lot in an eerie, depthless glare. Growling, they cruised back and forth. The headlights seemed to give them eyes, and in the growing gloom, the dark trailer boxes looked like the hunched, squared-off shoulders of prehistoric giants.

The counterman said, 'Is it safe to turn on the lights?'

'Do it,' I said, 'and find out.'

He flipped the switches and a series of flyspecked globes overhead came on. At the same time a neon sign out front stuttered into life: 'Conant's Truck Stop & Diner - Good Eats'. Nothing happened. The trucks continued their patrol.

'I can't understand it,' the trucker said. He had gotten down from his stool and was walking around, his hand wrapped in a red engineer's bandanna. 'I ain't had no problems with my rig. She's a good old girl. I pulled in here a little past one for a spaghetti dinner and this happens.' He waved his arms and the bandanna flapped. 'My own rig's out there right now, the one with the weak left tail-light. Been driving her for six years. But if I stepped out that door -'

'It's just starting,' the counterman said. His eyes were hooded and obsidian. 'It must be bad if that radio's gone. It's just starting.'

The girl had drained as pale as milk. 'Never mind that,' I said to the counterman. 'Not yet.'

'What would do it?' The trucker was worrying. 'Electrical storms in the atmosphere? Nuclear testing? What?'

'Maybe they're mad,' I said.

Around seven o'clock I walked over to the counterman. 'How are we fixed here? I mean, if we have to stay a while?'

His brow wrinkled. 'Not so bad. Yest'y was delivery day. We got two-three hunnert hamburg patties, canned fruit and vegetables, dry cereal, aigs . . . no more milk than what's in the cooler, but the water's from the well. If we had to, the five of us cud get on for a month or more.'

The trucker came over and blinked at us. 'I'm dead out of cigarettes. Now that cigarette machine .

'It ain't my machine,' the counterman said. 'No sir.'

The trucker had a steel pinch bar he'd got in the supply room out back. He went to work on the machine.

The kid went down to where the jukebox glittered and flashed and plugged in a quarter. John Fogarty began to sing about being born on the bayou.

I sat down and looked out the window. I saw something I didn't like right away. A Chevy light pickup had joined the patrol, like a Shetland pony amid Percherons. I watched it until it rolled impartially over the body of the girl from the Caddy and then I looked away.

'We made them!' the girl cried out with sudden w'retchedness. 'They can't!'