All stories › Horror › Every Tuesday at Station Two › Episode 2
The Sign Out Sheet
Episode 2 of 3 of Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing · free to read
“Wet ink,” Deb said, and she turned the binder so Wes could see.
“That’s enough for tonight.”
“It isn’t. Sit down, Wes.”
He sat on the tailboard. So did the rest of us, which is not how we do things, a chief on a bumper and a probie on the floor.
“It runs Tuesdays,” Deb said. “Only for whoever is in this building when the pump check ends.”
“Runs how,” Kenny said.
“The night comes back and you get it again. I have had this one thirteen times.”
Tyler put his helmet down very carefully.
“Anybody can go home. Any point in the night, and nobody gets stopped at the door.”
“Then what’s the catch.”
“When you sign out, pack six gets your initials in the column, in your hand.”
“That’s all it does?”
“That column is this department’s word. Whatever it says, we did.”
“What does it want,” Tyler said.
“Its paperwork right.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s the part I can prove.”
“Prove the thirteen,” Kenny said.
She took a gas receipt out of her shirt pocket and set it on the tailboard.
Then another from her coat. Same station, same gallons, same 6:12 p.m.
She kept going until thirteen of them lay fanned out like a hand of cards.
“I buy fuel on the way in. Same pump, same dollar amount.”
“That’s thirteen receipts.”
“That’s one Tuesday, printed thirteen times.”
Tyler counted them twice, stacked them, and squared the stack.
“Okay,” he said.
Wes was looking at the floor drain. “Tell them the rest.”
Deb turned to the old section, the pages with carbon still stapled in. Run 09-14. Delcher Road, structure, two companies mutual aid, dispatched 0451 hours.
“There’s no in service time,” she said. “Nobody ever put Forty One back in service.”
“So write one in.”
“I have. Thirteen times. It does not take.”
“Write it in pencil and I’ll type it.”
“Kenny.”
“I’m asking.”
“It does not take, because the line is short.”
Marcus was at the workbench with his back to us. He had been on Delcher Road. He was twenty four that year and he has never once put it in a story at the table.
“There were seven of us coming out,” he said.
Nobody asked him to say it again. He did not offer.
Deb put her finger on the personnel line.
“Six names,” she said. “It needs seven.”
The fill station bell went off behind us and every head turned. It was the compressor cycling.
Kenny walked back to shut it down and I heard him say a word he does not say.
He came back holding his hand up in front of him.
“The cylinder is hot,” he said.
It had blistered him across two fingers and the base of his thumb.
Marcus ran it under the tap and wrapped it in gauze out of the jump bag. Neither of them talked while he did it.
“Urgent care,” Wes said.
“It’s a blister.”
“It’s a burn, and you’re going.”
“Deb, tell him it’s a blister.”
“I wrote it up line of duty,” she said.
“Of course you did.”
“How many of us have to stay,” Tyler said.
“One.”
“Says who.”
“Says thirteen Tuesdays of me trying two.”
Wes stood up. He is not a talker and he did not make it a speech.
“Somebody puts a seventh name on that line,” he said. “Then drives Forty One out there and clears the run from the address.”
“And if nobody does.”
“Then we keep getting Tuesday, and we get it apart.”
“Why seven,” Kenny said.
“Because seven came out.”
“Six went in.”
“I know what went in,” Deb said.
“Once your name is on that line,” Marcus said, “you were crew on a working job. Not a man at drill.”
“I’ll sign it,” Tyler said.
“You have two months in,” Marcus said.
“So?”
“So sit down.”
“Then who signs,” Tyler said.
Wes looked at me, because I was the one already signed, twice, in my own hand, on nights I was thirty miles off eating dinner with my mother.
I took the pen off the clipboard.
Deb turned the run sheet so line seven faced me. Six names from 2009 above it in her handwriting, and nothing under them.
I put S. Purvis on it, and the date, and 9:41 p.m.
“You can still hand me that pen,” Wes said.
“I know.”
Deb closed the binder. Nobody ate.
The bay lights did the thing fluorescents do when a heavy load comes on, and then they came back.
When I looked up, the pump panel was at idle. The intake was dry.
The tach was climbing toward one fifty for the fourth time that night.
Kenny asked what happens to whoever goes.