Creepypasta & r/nosleep Stories

Tales from the Gas Station (2/?)

At the edge of our town, there's a shitty gas station that's open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and sometimes longer. If you were to go inside, you would probably see the tired cashier sitting behind the front desk doing his best to mind his own business. He's real. You may also see someone else. You may also see something else. If you're curious about the reality of anyone or anything else (including yourself) inside that small ammonia scented flickering-fluorescent collection of off-brand junk food, dirt, four walls, and a roof, may I recommend that you follow the cashier's lead and mind your own business?

I've been working at that gas station almost non-stop since I graduated high school. At this point, I doubt I could quit if I wanted to. But enough about me. Let's get back to the interesting thing. The gas station.

I spent a decent amount of time yesterday at the start of my shift trying to decide which story would be worthy of being my first to document to the world. Any time I tell someone outside of the gas station anything about what happened therein, I know what to expect. People don't believe it. Or people don't want to believe it. Imagine the difficulty I had trying to call the sheriff station to explain that half of a pig broke into the store and is currently running amok, breaking things and screaming with the voice of an old woman.

"Yes, I meant half of a pig."

"Yes, a pig."

"The front half."

"No this isn't a joke. I'm at the gas station."

"What do you mean, which gas station? The shitty one at the edge of town. You must be new; can I please talk to someone else?"

She finally put me through to Tom. Tom is the sheriff's deputy that drew the short straw all those years ago and had to come out to the gas station for the first time, back before his hair was all white. He's been in enough times now that all I have to say when he picks up the line is "It's half a pig. It won't stop screaming and I can't catch it." And then he grunts, mutters something about that being "pretty freakin' weird," and then drives out to help me catch it. Tom is a good guy.

I asked around, but nobody knew where the pig had come from. This was back when Farmer Brown was still alive, and he came down to take a look and provide his expert opinion. According to Farmer, the pig had somehow been chopped down the middle, but miraculously none of the important organs were hit. Nothing supernatural about it, just really unusual. It stayed at the local elementary school as a kind of mascot for the summer before a scientist and his team from somewhere up north offered the school a thousand dollars to let them take it. For science, I suppose.

Anyway, I don't mean to ramble, but my point is that it's hard to believe some of these stories if you haven't been inside the gas station at least once. And maybe you have. We're the only gas station for miles. We're close enough to some big crossroads. If you've ever been out driving in an unfamiliar part of the country and found yourself lost, it's not impossible that you could have found yourself at my doors, maybe looking to top off your gas, maybe to ask for directions. If you have a strange memory of a weird place that somehow doesn't seem to fit with the rest of your memories, then there's a chance we've actually met.

Now back to last night. I was sitting behind the counter with a pen and book of receipt paper, trying to remember the strangest thing that has happened to me that still falls within the realm of believability, (I've had plenty of things happen that were strange but so unbelievable I won't even waste anyone's time ever telling them. I call those the "try-and-forget stories") when Carlos interrupted my concentration.

Carlos is one of the part-timers at the gas station. We have a long list of part-time employees. The owners like to hire transients, drifters, hitchhikers, passers-by and runaways looking for work for a few days. I try not to get to know the part-timers. They come and go after a few days, or sometimes a few weeks, rarely long enough to form any kind of meaningful relationship.

But then there's Carlos. Carlos has been working here for almost a year now. He started as part of the prison work-relief program, unloading trucks twice a week. He was the only one of the twelve prisoners that didn't disappear during a freak snow-storm last December, but that's none of my business. Carlos did his time, and when they released him he came to work here, cleaning the store and unloading trucks. He comes in six times a day for each of his thirty-minute shifts. Now that I think about it, I'm not exactly sure what he does during those shifts. The store is never clean and trucks only come twice a week, exclusively during the daylight hours as per an arrangement following the "incident." Maybe one day I'll ask Carlos what he does for the owners. All I know is that he's the closest thing to a friend that I have here.

When Carlos approached me at my register last night, I knew something unusual was going on. He was sweating bullets, pale, and on the verge of passing out. He kept glancing back at the man in the suit that had wandered into the store and was standing next to the frozen drink machine. He told me that he needed to talk. "Now."

I told him, "Go ahead," but he refused to say anything unless I followed him into the freezer.

I usually hate to leave the front of the store unwatched. We have the occasional shoplifter. Plus there was that one time Rocco got in and made off with two cases of cigarettes. But Carlos seemed serious, so I made an exception for him.

Once we were in the subfreezing safety of the walk-in cooler, Carlos asked me if I had seen the guy in the suit. I said yes, I saw him. He asked if I knew the guy. I said yes, I'd seen the guy around town. His name was Kieffer. He was running for some kind of office-I can't remember which one-and stopped by the gas station every now and then. He drove an old black SUV that only took premium. I didn't know him much from in town, but he was definitely local. His picture was framed in my high school's trophy case for one of those sports competitions he had won years and years before I got there. We only have so many things to be proud of, I suppose. I knew of Kieffer, but we weren't exactly acquaintances. I told all this to Carlos, who shook his head and said, "No. That can't be Kieffer."

I said, "Why not?"

And Carlos told me, "That can't be Kieffer, because Kieffer is dead. I killed him two days ago, and his body is in the trunk of my car right now."

And that's when things started getting weird.

I really don't want to do this. I recognize how awful it is to pause a story at a place like this, but I'm about to head back to work. I'm only just now taking my lunch break and I came all the way down here to the library to document last night before I forgot. I still have to eat and change out of these dirt-covered clothes before I head back (I did a lot of digging last night). Plus I don't want to leave the part-timers alone with all those lawn gnomes until we know exactly what's going on.

Oh, I forgot to mention the lawn gnomes! I'm so scatter-brained right now. Like I said, it was a very strange night. Between the hand plants, Farmer Jr., and that cultist that wouldn't leave me alone, I hardly had any time to collect my thoughts. And of course, there is the Carlos situation.

I promise I'll come back and tell you all about it, but first I need to grab some coffee.