Just Until Morning

Eleven at night. The keys are in your hand. A 24-hour gas station on Rural 17, an hour from anywhere. Four pumps under a buzzing canopy, a shop that smells of coffee and floor cleaner, and a road nobody drives at night. You came in through the fog, and the fog stayed. Turn the sign to OPEN. It is just one shift.The cameras see more than you do. Four grainy camera feeds on a monitor behind the counter. Most of the night they show pumps, a parking bay, a dumpster, a storeroom. Sometimes they show someone standing where nobody should be standing, and when you go out to look, the forecourt is empty. Nothing in this game announces itself. You notice, or you do not.The lights are keeping score. There is no health bar. There is the station, and how much of it is still lit. Every call you ignore leaves a lamp off. Every visitor you do not answer puts one out for good. You can always walk over and switch them back on. You can also decide it is not worth the walk. When enough of the station is dark, whatever has spent all night needing a camera stops needing one.Nowhere is far. Everywhere is far enough. The restroom is thirty steps from the register. At three in the morning, with the radio behind the counter playing a record you did not put on, thirty steps is a long way. Someone will call. Someone will knock and say it is the relief. Whether you open the door, whether you stay, whether you are the one who locks up at seven: seven ways the night can end, and all of them are yours.The fog does not leave. It sits on the road, in the trees, on the forecourt, and it thickens as the hours go by until the far end of the lot is a rumour. Headlights arrive out of it and go back into it. The lamps under the canopy make a small room of light, and everything outside that room stops being certain. You keep working. That is the job.A place, not a level. No jump-scare quota, no monster closet, no map markers. One station, one night, and the growing certainty that you are not working alone. A shift is about ninety minutes, and it will not be the last one you work. Headphones on, lights off, just until morning.