Fuel

He cranked the wrench, the cap turned, hissing, coming off with a 'pop'. Fumes poured out, creeping through the air - moving as if they had a life of their own. Sometimes he saw faces take shape. Ghosts he thought, lost eternally in a toxic purgatory. Perhaps in some way they had been claimed by the substance itself, their souls imprisoned forever within the gas. The fumes clawed at his face and he breathed them in. It was an intoxicating aroma, the smell of poison euphoria, the smell of his life wasting away. It was a life measured not in years or time in general, but gallons. Gallons and liters and barrels. He had lived at the fuel station as long as he could remember. It was all he knew, and as far as he was concerned, all their was. The world beyond it was empty. Empty in all directions. Just dust, darkness and silence. But their was something which caught his interest. Out in the distance there was a single bright flare. It cast a beam of light around the horizon. It was the only light in this world. It never moved and never went out. He often wondered what kept it burning, thought it might have something to do with the fuel. And the fuel... The fuel was what really drove him mad. He pumped the oil, refined it into gas and pumped it into barrels. The barrels were loaded onto the cargo trains and the trains took off towards the horizon, towards the flare. Six-hundred sixty-eight trillion, nine hundred twenty one thousand gallons of fuel. It would be seventy-nine thousand more gallons until Cerberus would return for the one million gallon statistical analysis. He had decided he would ask Cerberus about the flare. Ask him about the fuel. Ask him about Ryan.