Night Shift

This was becoming an uncomfortably common occurrence around the gas station as of late. *This* being a group of five or six cars filing into the parking lot beside the gas station and sitting there, engines on and unmoving for hours. No one came in. Then, when they’d been there for so long that Ezra forgot about them, they would all file out again and into the six gas pumps, filling their out-of-date cars and leaving in eerie sync.

Of course, they weren’t doing anything wrong, and Ezra couldn’t exactly call the town PD with the excuse ‘yeah, uh, there's these cars that’ve been annoyingly synchronized around the station lately’. Nope. Mostly he ignored them, they weren’t even really loitering, Ezra had checked, and so there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Right now, though, Ezra was working a late shift, not necessarily because he needed the extra money but because Jacqueline, the girl who usually ran the counter, was at the hospital checking up on her dad and didn’t have anyone else to fill her shift for her besides him. And Ezra was anything if not a middle-aged man with nothing to do back home except re-watch The Golden Girls or really bad telenovelas that reminded him of the ones him mom used to put on. So, he offered to fill in and she thanked him profusely, promising that her shifts were usually pretty quiet: ‘a lotta tired folks and no creepy cars’ she said. Ezra laughed and waved her out before she could start kissing his shoes.

The cars never came at a specific time. They didn’t even come every day—sometimes they skipped a day or two—but they had never come at any time past four PM. Right now, it was about nine in the afternoon and Ezra was just checking out a tired-looking woman who had brought up three large Monster cans and a pack of Twinkies. He gave her a sympathetic ‘hope you have a good night’ and watched her leave before he saw them. Six cars out in the lot, engines idling. Ezra frowned. He really hoped they didn’t come in; he was pretty sure he was the only one on the clock—unless Trinity was still in the back doing stock—and he didn’t like those odds if things got nasty.

Trinity wasn’t exactly security around the station; she was deathly afraid of almost everything with more than two legs (small dogs and cats included) and had an unhealthy anxiety towards most things bigger than her (this included everything from horses to big balloon decorations.) Ezra liked to think that was why they got along so well, she was at least two inches taller than him and had confessed several times that she saw him as the exact opposite of a threat- a thin man standing at five-four and a half (the half is crucial.) He was never sure whether it was a compliment or not, but she always smiled when saying it so he chose to believe it was a good mark in her book.

Either way, his unthreatening demeanor wouldn’t be very helpful if six weirdos chose to bust down the doors and call a robbery or something. He tapped his fingers on the counter anxiously, consoling himself by remembering that they never came inside on any of the other days. Still, it was late, and he had to wonder what they were doing here at a time like this— a long con, maybe? He wondered distantly if there was anything valuable enough in the store to warrant that.

Lost in thought, he almost missed the cars starting up and driving out of the lot and to the pumps. He squinted into the dark as the drivers-side door of every car swung open and a man stepped out. Under the fluorescent lights you could see that the only thing similar about these men was their movements—they weren't even wearing the same clothes. And when Ezra squinted, he could tell they weren’t even moving at the same time as he had thought. Occasionally one of them would spend too long at the screen or reach for their wallet in their coat before remembering it was in their pants. Instead of the mechanical coordination he’d thought he'd seen before, now all he saw was six men doing the same things at the same time.

It was almost scarier that way, he realized. These men seemed like they wanted to be an illusion to outsiders. It was awfully cult-ish, and Ezra chewed on the inside of his lip while he watched them swipe their cards in union before simultaneously grabbing the pump and putting it into the filler.

All but one.