At no time did they lose their fixation on the light in the distance. The beacon drew them onwards, their feral eyes now shining with need. Leathery hands flexed and skeletal jaws parted as their owners strode down the dark rows toward their distant destination.

Death was coming to the Textro for dinner.

Twilight - Rachel.

Never forget...any time you poison an animal to the point of unconsciousness, you are taking a risk.

Rachel threw her lab coat against the wall of her back office and swore as the words of her old anesthesiology professor rose in her mind.

"That's a great line, Prof," she snarled at the tile ceiling, "A real pithy truism! But it doesn't help me explain to kindly old Miss Tatum why her precious Prissy is dead when all she came in for was to have her goddamned teeth cleaned!"

Realizing those last few words had come out uncomfortably close to a screech, the young veterinarian slumped into the padded chair, buried her face into her palm and rubbed her temples with thumb and fingers.

She knew any procedure involving anesthesia ran the risk, no matter how small, of this happening. Sometimes the animal just doesn't wake up. It could be because of an unknown heart problem or a number of other hidden conditions making an otherwise healthy appearing animal susceptible to death by anesthesia.

And sometimes the cause is never known.

She had sent her tech/receptionist, Arlene, home for the evening after all attempts to resuscitate the cat had failed. Then Rachel had steeled herself and dialed Miss Tatum's number to deliver the bad news. She only got the answering machine. Miss Tatum had probably gone to the same Knights of Columbus dinner the Hollises had attended.

Lovely.

All she could do was leave a message to call her office in the morning, and hate what a formal and unfeeling bitch it made her sound like.

She really wished she had permission to start in on a necropsy. She wanted something...anything...to tell Miss Tatum that would explain how this could have happened. Some defect she could point at to help make sense of the treasured pet's death.

From all appearances Prissy had been a perfectly healthy eight year old cat. Now she lay stiffening in the freezer while Rachel slouched in her office, hating the world.

Life was supposed to make sense. Things were supposed to happen for a reason. Those two central tenets of her life had propelled her into science with the firm confidence all the answers were out there, just waiting for somebody with her type of determination to find them.

Rachel found comfort in the immutable laws of physics, math, and chemistry. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, two plus two invariably equals four, and multiplying the squared radius of a circle by pi would always give you its area. The universe had rules. Deep down she nurtured the unspoken conviction that "mystery" simply arose from the absence of data and there were no truly unpredictable events in the world.

Her physics professor had once stated that God was found in the places where the outcomes couldn't be predicted.

The only thing Rachel had ever found there was disaster.

People's cats weren't supposed to die just because you sedated them, and husbands weren't supposed to get killed just because they agreed to come out with you on a house call at night and help you with a sick horse. If God liked hanging out in those kinds of places then he could damn well do it without her.

A brief flicker of distant lightning lit the room, causing her to look up and glance at the clock.

"Crap," she muttered, "Looks like the rain is almost here. If there's going to be any supper for Dr. Killjoy, I guess I better get moving.

Rachel grabbed her jacket off the hook, started for the door, then came back to her desk to grab her Kindle and notebook as well. She decided she might as well have a book to read if the storm got bad and she stayed late. And who knows, maybe she could also write Mrs. Tatum something while she sat out there.

A distant rumble of thunder mirrored her thoughts on the subject, and she turned and headed for the door.

Twilight - Deke.

"You want me to what?!" Deke choked on his Coke and sputtered at his grinning companion. "Are you out of your mind?"

The two sat parked beside the water tower on the low hill overlooking Masonfield, drinking sodas and watching the storm front roll in. The line of clouds towered over the little town. They rumbled with internal flashes of light that ricocheted back and forth throughout the approaching mass. Tiny street lights started to flicker on, a good half hour earlier than normal as the great shadow moved across the streets and houses. The distant lights of the football field already blazed with the game well under way.

"Calm down," Harley laughed. "You act like I just asked you to jump off a roof or something."

"Yeah? Well that might hurt too but it would be a lot less humiliating!"

"Aw c'mon, Deke. You've asked out girls before. Hell, you were running around with that Harper girl when I first got back."

"Yeah, but that was Molly Harper. This is a whole different ballgame!"

"How?" Harley took a long swig of his drink then crumpled the can. "Did Molly have webbed feet or something?"

"No! Jeez, Harley!"

"Okay, just checking. You never know. So what's the big problem here? I don't see it."

"The problem is, we're talking about Stacey Collins."

"So?"

"So?" Deke looked at Harley as if he had grown a second head. "We're talking about me asking out Stacey Collins! Do you realize who she is?"

Harley squinted at Deke, tossed the can into the back of the truck, and started the engine. Then he tilted back his hat and made a big show of scratching his head.

"Let me think...works at the Textro, pretty face, sexy smile, sunny disposition, and ginormous ta-tas. That Stacey Collins?"

"Harley," Deke shook his head, "you just don't get it. I went to school with Stacey. She was a pom-pom girl...hell, she was THE pom-pom girl. She was runner up for both Homecoming Queen and Prom Queen. She dated the quarterback, fer God's sake. She was way up there on her end of the social ladder...and let's just say I was a few rungs down."

He wasn't about to go into just how many rungs those were.

"Really?" Harley shrugged and pulled the truck out onto the roadway. "Well, high school is over and now she's a waitress at the Textro, trying to keep her ass from getting grabbed by every horny trucker who drops in. She might not look down on you from as high as you might think. Besides, the worse that can happen is she says 'no.'"

Deke wasn't so sure about that. He had a pretty vivid mental image of the gorgeous waitress dissolving into a fit of hysterical laughter so full of feminine scorn the mere sound of it would melt him into a puddle of pure humiliation.

"So this is why you wanted to go hang out at the Textro tonight, isn't it."

"Well, I had noticed you looking at her before, and I just thought..."

"Of course I was looking at her, Harley! I'm male and I'm human! I've noticed the other hot number they have waitressing there too, you know."

"I just thought," Harley persisted, "that you have been pretty down in the dumps lately and needed to do something to shake things up. I hear she's available right now, and I think it would be good for you to take a risk and ask her out."

"Getting my pride squashed and used as toilet paper ain't exactly what I call shaking things up, Harley."

"Oh come on," the older redneck laughed again. "Now I know you're bullshittin' me. You've been turned down before, and you survived."

"Yeah, but those were surprises. At least I thought I had a chance with those girls. Besides, what would I say? Hey Stacey, how's it going? You want to come hang out over at my house with me and Mom?"

Harley didn't answer right away.

The two sped down the hill in the rattle trap truck, neither speaking for a moment. Harley reached over and popped open the glove box with a sharp blow and pulled out a cd case. He fished out the disc and pushed it into a dusty cd player he had duct taped on top of the dashboard.

"Oh no," Deke groaned. "Not this."

"It's time for some man-up music, Deke. You need this, son."

The deep twang of a steel guitar rang through the truck to the tune of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Deke rolled his eyes as Harley started beating the steering wheel to the rhythm of the song with his hands.

"Harley," he raised his voice to be heard over the music, "this ain't the answer to everything, y'know."

"It is for what ails you."

"Aw c'mon. What's that supposed to mean?"

Harley didn't answer right away, but chose to sing along with the song instead. It didn't end until the truck chugged to an intersection where they turned off the road and onto the highway heading away from town. The shadow of the great line of clouds fell across them as they accelerated down the roadway towards a distant white sign glowing on the horizon.

"Your problem," Harley nodded towards him, "isn't that you're afraid she'll turn you down."

"Oh no?"

"Nope. You're scared to death she is going to say yes."

"What do you mean, 'is going to'? I'm not sure I'm doing this."

"You will."

"Oh, you think so? I'm just gonna march up to the hottest living female in Mazon County and say 'Hey babe, how about you and me gettin' together and startin' something special,' huh?"

"I don't know how you're gonna do it...and I sure don't recommend that approach...but you will. You promised, remember? Besides, you need to."

"I do?"

"Yep. You need to start doing something to feel good about...even if it means getting shot down. Remember, it ain't about whether or not you win every battle but whether or not you fought them. There's the way you win the war of life."

"That's deep, Harley." Deke rolled his eyes. "Maybe I ought to just walk in and shoot the girl. It'll save us both a bunch of embarrassment and I don't have to grow old living with my Mom."

"That's a solution too," Harley nodded sagely.

"You're not helping."

Deke felt a small pool of acid form in his stomach as the Textro sign grew larger in the windshield. Even if by some unbelievable miracle she agreed to this, what the hell was he going to do with a girl like Stacey Collins?

"You see, you are going to do it. Good for you!"

"I am? Oh really?"

"Yep. I can tell by the look of sheer terror on your face. You're already considering outcomes."

"You're a real pal, you know that?" Deke watched the approaching sign like it was a harbinger of doom. "If I ever get hit by a bus, at least I know who I can count on to tell me how painful it looked."

"I'm just here to help."

"Oh, yeah? So what exactly am I supposed to ask this girl out to do? Sit at home and watch Jeopardy with Mom?"

"You'll think of something."

"Dammit! If you're going to throw me to the wolves, you can at least throw me a bone to wave at them! This is your stupid idea, so how about a little help?"

"Listen to you!" Harley crowed, "Think about where you are...now you have reached a place where the idea of succeeding in asking out a hot girl scares you."

"I know, Harley! Maybe I ought to start smaller. What do you think?"

"I think you would only end up with 'smaller'...which is part of your whole problem. If you don't do this, you're going to end up ten years from now sitting at home with your mom and making excuses to yourself for another girlfriend with webbed feet."

"Molly didn't have webbed feet!"

"Don't you think it's time you upgraded your criteria from that?"

Deke slapped his forehead into his palm, and then dragged his hand down his face to see they were arriving at their destination.

The Textro was a medium sized truck stop. It sat near the front of a five acre square of grease-stained asphalt at the corner of the US Highway 103 and a small country road. Its bleak isolation was accented by the cornfield bordering the parking lot on the other two sides. The main building was a rectangular structure with large plate glass windows running across the front and about two thirds of the way down each side. A large row of gas pumps sat under a red and gold awning out front of the store/restaurant, and another long awning covered the diesel pumps off to the south.

At the rear of the lot, a large maintenance building housed the garage and mechanic shop. Attached to it was a smaller structure containing a restroom, showers, and a small locker room for the truckers parked nearby. Most of the trucks were parked in a line near the back of the parking lot. At the moment, only the tall Textro sign and the red and gold neon around the top of the main building was lit, leaving the trucks sitting back in the gathering gloom.

"You ready to do this, kemosabe?" Harley pulled the old pickup into a parking space between the gas pumps and the front of the building. The spaces for cars ran in a row parallel to the building, about thirty feet away from the front sidewalk.

"Just give me a minute," Deke complained, his throat suddenly tight and dry. "I need to think up an approach that at least has some chance of success here. You act like you just want me to run in there and tackle her or something."

Harley laughed.

"Now I would pay real money to see that!"

Deke shook his head and rolled his eyes.

"You're a sick man, Harley," he sighed. "Just so you know."

"But I'm in your corner, Deke. Never forget."

"Oh yeah, lucky me," Deke grumbled and opened the truck door. "Well, let's get on with it. I can figure out how to do this over some coffee."

He hopped out and met Harley in front of the truck before the two strode across the parking lot under the darkening sky. The air felt thick and electric from the approaching storm. It wasn't quite nightfall, but the windows already shined with a cheery light casting long bright rectangles on the ground outside. Still, the only hint of autumn Deke could detect was the less than usual number of bugs starting to fly around the outside lights.

He pushed open the door and stepped into the truck stop.

The entrance opened into the store side of the truck stop, with another glass door to his immediate left leading to the restaurant. The store itself featured a bright collection of knick knacks, bumper stickers, drinks, and the usual junk food that people on the road found convenient to eat on the go.