Tom sat down outside on a metal bench that immediately froze to his butt, set the greasy paper bags full of junk food down next to him, and rummaged the light-shielding glasses out of the padded pocket of his winter jacket.
He had to slide the glasses back and forth on his nose several times until it stuck. That's how crumpled it was. And Tom Fischer felt just as crumpled and crushed. Seventeen euros.
Seventeen euros!
"Have a nice day," the redhead at the register had said with the broadest smile, and Tom had left without a word. Maybe he really had made Tom an offer, but there had been a look in his eyes, a triumphant look that Tom didn't like. That was the look of swindlers who had just made a good deal, laughing at the gullibility of their victims.
Anyway, whatever. What was done was done, and he couldn't change it anyway.
In addition, there was still this strange atmosphere over the rest stop and the parking lot. The view to the highway was obstructed by trees and the roar of the passing cars was somehow no longer audible, Tom nervously noted. The same uneasiness he had felt in the car. As if something was about to happen. Something bigger than the eclipse.
He thought again of that choppy robotic voice from the radio, that monstrous chant distorted by all the crackling and static.
Tom rubbed his hands together. He felt cold again.
If it weren't for the rest stop, he reflected fleetingly, and the gas station, and the boards with the gasoline prices, no one would know where we actually were.
Next to him, the automatic double doors swung aside again, and the father with his pink-haired daughter left the rest stop. Of course, they sat down on the bench on the other side of the double doors, both at silence, and looked out over the parking lot. The last gaps between cars had filled in. They all stood there, their light-shielding goggles on their noses, staring at the sky.
Tom watched, darkened by the light-shielding film, as the last tattered clouds moved across the blue firmament.
Though he would never know it, everyone standing in the parking lot on that cold November day felt the same thing: the unsettling, diffuse sense of a goodbye.
Nothing would ever be the same, and they all knew it.
This was the end of the world.
That's when the sun darkened.
YOU ARE READING
Black Sky
Mystery / ThrillerIn the darkness, every truth comes to light. A freeway service station. In the middle of nowhere. This is where a group of strangers meet as a solar eclipse darkens the land. But this eclipse is different. The light doesn't come back, not after 5 mi...
