All stories › Horror › Every Tuesday at Station Two › Episode 1
Pack Six
Episode 1 of 3 of Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing · free to read
“Bring her up to one fifty, Kenny,” Wes said.
Kenny rolled the throttle and the deck gun went stiff. Engine 41 sat in the lot with her intake in the pond and the tach climbing.
Tuesday. Same as every Tuesday since I joined the company at nineteen.
Wes Stoddard had been chief nine years. He ran drill like a man with a roast in the oven.
“Time,” Deb said.
“Three minutes,” Kenny said. “She’s fine.”
“She’s fine until she isn’t.”
Kenny Amell had twenty eight years on that panel and still checked the intake twice. He is Deb’s brother in law and they have not agreed on anything since 1994.
“Ladder after this,” Wes said. “Tyler’s raising it.”
“He raised it last week.”
“He’ll raise it until he quits watching the tip.”
Tyler is the chief’s nephew. Two months in, and he still wore his gear to the mailbox.
He had the air packs lined up on the apron, six of them, bottles up, straps laid out the way Marcus taught him.
“Shane,” he said. “Which one is six?”
“The one with tape on the shoulder strap.”
“Somebody already did six.”
I walked over. Pack six had a green tag on the regulator, and the date on the tag was that night’s date.
The initials in the little box were ballpoint that had not skipped once.
“Nobody’s touched them,” I said.
“I know,” Tyler said. “That’s why I asked.”
Marcus Lindquist came out of the bay with a clipboard under his arm. He did not look at the pack.
He looked at Tyler, then at me. Then he set the clipboard on the bumper and left it there.
“Log it inspected,” Marcus said.
“It wasn’t.”
“Log it inspected, Shane.”
Kenny throttled down. The water fell out of the gun and slapped the lot.
The crew went quiet the way a crew does when a man says a thing in a voice he does not usually use.
Deb wrote in the book. She did not ask anybody what to write.
“Sloppy joes,” Kenny said. “Again.”
“You cooked.”
“I did. I stand by it.”
Six of us at the long table, paper plates, the rolls still in the bag.
Deb Amell had thirty one years in and kept the company books because nobody else could be trusted with them.
She carried the binder over and set it beside the chips.
“Inspection column,” she said. “Go back four weeks.”
Marcus kept eating. Wes put his glasses on.
“Those are my initials,” I said.
“Fourth of August. Pack six, weekly inspection, eight forty.”
“I left that night at seven thirty. My mother had a thing.”
“I know. You signed the sheet on your way out.”
She had the sign out sheet folded in thirds in the back. Seven thirty one, S. Purvis, in pen.
Same pen, same hand, an hour and nine minutes later, on an inspection I did not do.
Tyler laughed once and then stopped.
“March fifth,” Deb said. “Same column. That one’s Kenny.”
“I never touched six in March.”
“No.”
“I have never touched six.”
“I know.”
“February,” she said, and turned the page. “That one’s the chief.”
Wes took his glasses off and folded them slowly, which is what he does instead of swearing.
“Is it the shop,” Tyler said. “Do they sign them for us?”
“Shop flow tests the packs once a year and initials in red. This is our pen and our column.”
“Then somebody is walking in here.”
“Doors are locked Wednesday to Monday,” Wes said. “I hold the only key.”
Marcus had not turned around. He was at the sink running water over a pan that was already clean.
“Marcus,” Wes said. “You want to say something?”
“No.”
We went out to the bay after that, plates left on the table. Pack six sat where Tyler had lined it up.
The gauge read twenty two hundred on a bottle Kenny had filled to forty five.
The mask was wet on the inside.
The regulator was warm in my hand the way they get after a man has breathed through one for twenty minutes.
“I filled six last Tuesday at the end of drill,” Kenny said. “Signed for it.”
“So it leaks.”
“It doesn’t leak. And it’s above the bell, so nothing would have told us.”
“That’s a bad gauge,” Tyler said.
Nobody answered him. Wes took the spare gauge off the bench and put it on the cylinder himself and read twenty two hundred again.
“Try it on a different pack,” Kenny said.
“Why.”
“Because I want the gauge to be wrong.”
Wes put it on pack two and read a full bottle off it.
“It isn’t the gauge,” he said.
Deb had the binder open under the bay lights with her finger on the column.
Tonight’s line was filled in. It had not been filled in when we sat down to eat.
The six of us had been at that table in one room the whole time with the doors down.
Tyler’s hand had never come off the strap.
She touched the line with her thumb and showed us her thumb.
The ink was mine and it was still wet.