Several nights later, in the darkness, lights flickered again.
…The fluorescent bulbs turned back on.
…The cash register LEDs glowed.
…The gas station seemed just as dirty and debris-strewn as it had before.
The urban explorer looked around. The gas station seemed… almost like he remembered. The floor was still strewn with debris. He was pretty sure the soda machine was the same. The glass bottles… Were they drinkable? He couldn't tell where some of the items for sale had come from. He stepped carefully between crushed cans and yellowed paper scraps. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed with that same uneven electrical buzz he remembered from childhood road trips. The sound of places that never really slept, only dimmed.
The gas station should have been abandoned. That much was obvious. Dust lined the corners of the counter in thick gray ridges. Something dark stained the ceiling near the freezer aisle. Several shelves stood almost empty except for sun-bleached packaging whose colors had faded into pale ghosts of branding.
The lights worked.
The soda machine worked too.
Its internal refrigeration unit rattled softly every few seconds, like it had never stopped running.
He approached it slowly.
The old branded panel on the front still showed jungle leaves and dinosaurs beneath a faded logo. Behind the cloudy selection glass sat rows of bottles and cans. Some labels looked decades old. Others looked strangely newer. A few brands he recognized immediately. A few he didn’t recognize at all. One bottle had no nutrition label, and another used a logo style discontinued years ago.
One can simply read: "Cola", in flat black lettering. No company name. No ingredients. No barcode. It was just cola.
He stared at it for a long moment.
The machine gave a sudden mechanical thunk. Somewhere inside, a compressor kicked on. Cold air drifted faintly from the dispensing slot. Interesting. He glanced toward the counter. Nobody there. The register screen still glowed in the darkness.
A rotating hotdog warmer near the back wall still turned slowly. Empty. He looked back toward the shelves. That was when he noticed the magazine rack. Not the same magazines from before. Not exactly. Some were familiar: game strategy guides, automotive catalogs, tourist pamphlets. But others seemed wrong. One magazine cover showed a game console he'd never seen released. Another advertised:
“REALTIME DINOSAUR AI - SHIPPING FALL 1998”
A buyers guide reviewed hardware from companies that never existed. Several magazines looked freshly printed despite everything else in the building being coated in age.
He reached toward one… then stopped. The air inside the station felt oddly cold now. Not refrigerated cold - basement cold. The kind that made sounds seem farther away than they should be. Outside the front windows, darkness pressed against the glass. No roadlights. No passing cars. No rain anymore. Just blackness. Then---
A quiet metallic sound from somewhere behind the back-room door. Not loud. Just "clink". Like glass bottles touching together. He stood completely still. The fluorescent lights flickered once. And for half a second, he could have sworn the magazine rack was different again.
…He was reading an old issue of Chaos Quarterly again when the lights flickered. Moments later one of the flourescent lights fell onto the floor from the ceiling. He stared at it. "Ouch. Hmmm…" He wondered what the time was. He stared at the cash register.
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