Gladys Deacon looked up from her perch behind the counter, then immediately lost interest and went back to watching the little portable TV behind her counter. A skinny, middle aged woman with a beehive hairdo, Gladys had been a fixture here as long as Deke could remember. The only concession the schoolmarmish clerk had made to the changing times was now she stepped outside to smoke her cigarettes. Otherwise, she remained the same dour woman Deke remembered when his father brought him here as a kid.

He wasted no time in turning and pushing through the side door to the restaurant beyond.

"Hey Deke! Hey Harley! I'll be right with you."

Candy Beller finished ringing up the tab of a couple of highway patrolmen then hustled around the desk to them. The little blonde was a bundle of energy in a constant motion.

"I'm going off shift here in just a minute, but I can get you drinks if you like. I'll leave the menus with you guys, and Stacey or Marisa can get your orders when they come up front." She gestured at the mostly empty diner. "Go ahead and pick your own table."

The only other diners in the place were a couple of truckers sitting at the bar, a pair of young out-of-towners at a table beside the window, and a woman he vaguely recognized as the veterinarian, Doc Sutherland, who sat reading one of those new e-readers in a booth against the inside wall.

Deke gave a brief thought of asking which tables were served by which waitress, then came up with a more elegant and less embarrassing solution. He headed for an outside booth by the windows. Whichever girl had the inside tables would also have the bar, and if it turned out to be Stacey he could easily move there later to talk to her without raising a spectacle.

Pleased with solving his first problem in this evening's little exercise, he took his seat and smiled up at Candy as she brought them their coffee.

"Not much happening tonight, huh?"

"Not yet." The waitress set their coffees in front of them and added a pair of menus. "This place don't see much action on Friday nights until the football game lets out...then it's a madhouse."

"Pretty crazy, huh?"

"Yep." She leaned in close and lowered her voice. "That's why I'm in a hurry to clock out and get out of here, before Big Earl calls in and wants me to work a double shift. It's still a couple of hours till the game lets out though, and until then this place will be dead as a graveyard.

Twilight - Benny.

"Hey girls, come check this out!"

Benny Trujillo held the back door of the truck stop open and motioned to the pair of girls who were just putting on their aprons to go on shift. He waited patiently as Marisa and Stacy glanced at him, and then at each other. The look conveyed their shared opinion of men and the often dubious outcomes that particular line led to.

In his case, the portly little janitor knew it was just habit on their part. In truth, both of them considered him a safe, older, and married man who was fun to tease yet trustable enough to confide in. Still, he found it slightly humorous and flattering the habit extended towards him too.

Not that he blamed them.

It only took one glance for anybody to understand their job history hadn't been the first thing Big Earl Anderson looked at when he hired this pair. They were as different as night and day, and quite possibly the two most smoking hot women within a hundred miles. Both were sharp as tacks, and had turned out to be surprisingly good workers, but there the similarities ended.

Marisa Valdez was a tall and graceful Latina with a full mane of lustrous black hair, expressive brown eyes, and legs seeming to stretch for miles. She moved like a dancer through the tables, drawing admiring looks from most of the patrons...especially after she passed. As Big Earl had once so eloquently put it, "If eyes were lasers, that girls butt would have caught fire after only a few seconds on the job."

Benny had laughed at the time, and pointed out if that had been the case then poor Stacey would have gone up in flames as soon as she stepped into the room.

Stacey Collins was not near as tall as Marisa and built along completely different lines. She had short brown hair, perky features, and a bright elfish smile that lit up any room she entered. The girl possessed an earthy, slightly redneck charm combined with a vivacious good cheer which tended to infect the people she interacted with. She also had what Earl once poetically described as "the most magnificent pair of huge, natural born hooters this side of the Rocky Mountains."

Benny had warned Earl that hiring these two beauties and putting them on the same shift (hell, even the same crew) was asking for trouble. He pictured the Textro turning into a battlefield of feminine egos and seething rivalry, with the rest of the crew caught in the middle.

As it turned out, he couldn't have been more wrong.

After a couple of days of quietly sizing each other up, the two astonished everybody by forming a tight working friendship that at times seemed to pit them against the world. Despite their vastly different backgrounds they became a two girl team, supporting each other with both customers and coworkers alike. After his initial surprise-and a big helping of crow-Benny came to understand that despite their differences the two girls realized they had a lot in common in a world prone to dealing with them primarily on their looks.

Now they regarded him with matched smiles of mock suspicion as he gestured towards the door.

"You see?" Marisa addressed Stacy while nodding towards him. "I told you he was a dirty old man. 'I want to show you something,'" she made little quote marks with her fingers. "You know how that always works out. Like we've never seen one of those before."

"Maybe he meant it like 'Hey girls, watch this," Stacey responded. "But those are usually more funny than bad...especially when they wipe out and break bones."

They both giggled, eyes twinkling in merriment.

"Ay yi yi!" Benny groaned aloud, "You two are exactly like the awful daughters I was afraid I would get, way back before I got lucky and had boys! When you're through giving a poor old man a hard time, you should at least come over and see what he was trying to show you."

"Sorry, Benny!" the pair sing-songed together with exaggerated looks of contrition on their faces. "We'll be good!" They made a big show of shuffling over to him with their heads down and hands clasped in front of them like chastened school girls.

"Augh!" He rolled his eyes and pointed through the open back door into the twilight. The girls peered out in the direction he gestured, "Que?" Marisa frowned out into the gloom. The sodium vapor lamps were just beginning to flicker on and illuminate the back parking lot under their yellow glare. "I see the maintenance garage. And I see some trucks lined up along the back of the lot. Aaaannnnnd I see a cornfield."

"Oh look!" Stacey pointed off to the south at a female figure wearing tall hair, a tube top and hot pants, who was slowly making her way towards the line of trucks. "It's Libby the Lot Lizard, starting her rounds."

"Hi Lizzie!" the two girls sang out loudly, waving furiously at the truck stop prostitute.

Benny groaned as the older woman stopped and glared. She snatched the cigarette out of her mouth and snarled something incomprehensible at the waving pair before shooting them the finger and resuming her slow walk towards the garage. The waitresses almost collapsed in laughter, and the little janitor could only shake his head at the strange politics of women.

"So that's it?" Marisa dabbed her eyes as she recovered. "You wanted to show us Libby? We've seen Libby before, you know."

"All of her," Stacey chimed in, "If you count those two times she got thrown out of trucks without her clothes."

Benny winced at the memory, but stayed on topic...a real challenge when dealing with these two.

"No, you gooses! I was pointing at the sky back there above the cornfield."

"Ohhhhhhhhh...."

Both girls looked back out the door at the western sky.

"Well, it's dark," Marisa offered.

"Wait for it..."

"And it's getting windy."

"Wait for the lightning."

"Okay, but we need to..."

Fortunately, right then nature decided to be kind and produced the desired illumination. Lightning flashed and the girls both "oohed" at the scene revealed under the brooding clouds.

The western sky was full of birds.

Hundreds of black silhouettes flickered as if in a strobe light as they whirled in a great circle beneath the thundercloud. It was like a cyclone of crows, all sailing in the dark, windy sky.

"Hijole!" Marisa gasped. "What are they doing, Benny?"

"I don't know, chica," the little janitor frowned at the sky. "I saw them earlier, before you two came in, but they were circling way out there over the corn field. Now they're almost here."

"Awesome!" Stacey enthused. "And weird! I bet they are coming in ahead of the storm."

Benny studied the aerial whirlpool for a second, then gave it a bemused grimace.

"Could be," he shrugged. "You'd think they would go hide out in the trees at the Clark Creek, but maybe they got other ideas."

The two girls watched for a few seconds longer, then glanced at each other again and then their watches.

"Yeah, you would think," Marisa agreed, "but we'll have to go hide out in Clark Creek if we don't get a move on and get to our tables."

"Go ahead," Benny waved the girls back to their duties. "I've got to get a move on too. Tomas wants me to hold down the kitchen for him while he goes on break and runs some food back to Arnold and Leon."

Marisa snorted.

"You know the only reason he does that is so he and Leon can share a joint behind the shop, right?"

"Not my business," Benny shrugged. "He just needs to work on being a little quicker about it."

"You're too nice, Benny," the black haired girl frowned. "You need to stand up for yourself. Don't let him run all over you."

"Yeah, that's our job!" Stacey piped in.

"Will you two go to work?!" the older man groaned and shooed the girls away.

After they left, he spent a moment longer at the back door and watched the skies. Lightening flickered within the clouds again, once more revealing the frantic aerial whirlpool of crows. Their winged bodies swooped and swerved high overhead. Then the lightning faded, causing the vast flock to disappear once more against the blackening sky.

Benny frowned up at the blackness.

Stacey was right. It really did seem odd for birds to be cavorting out here in front of an oncoming storm like this. He figured they should be hunting for trees to shelter in by now. There certainly weren't any around here.

"Then again," he shrugged philosophically, "what the hell do I know about birds?"

What he did know was there was work to be done. The football game would let out soon and he had things to get ready. So Benny decided to leave the storm and crows to sort themselves out, and pulled the door closed behind him.

Twilight - Libby.

Those smart ass little sluts!

Libby Darnell seethed as she resumed her course towards the distant trucks at the back of the parking lot.

Well they could call her "Lizzie" and have their little laugh, but as far as she was concerned those two little tramps didn't have any damn right to look down on her. If they thought for one minute they had been hired for their waitressing skills then they were even dumber than they acted. They already had their feet well down the road she had travelled and were too damn stupid to see it.

She would have loved nothing better than to get in their snotty little faces and explain the facts of life to them...with a little fist action involved...but she knew Big Earl wouldn't tolerate her laying a finger on them. And the last thing Libby wanted to do was get crosswise with Big Earl Anderson. What she called a living nowadays depended on having access to the Textro Truck Stop, and he could wreck it just by forbidding her from setting foot on the place.

She didn't dare let that happen.

The next truck stop this size was two counties over, and the owner there took a sizeable cut of a working girls income...as opposed to just being willing to look the other way in exchange for the occasional favor like Big Earl. She couldn't afford to relocate, and she damn sure didn't want to be giving up any of her hard earned money to some pimp. Not to mention, she had certain habits. And moving would mean having to learn a whole new group of contacts so she could get what she needed.

So, at least for now, the two little shitheads were safe.

For now.

Lightning flashed, and Libby looked up to see the crows wheeling overhead. She squinted briefly at the flying air-show before hunching her shoulders and continuing on her way.

There had once been a time in her life where she might have indulged in a little wonder at the sight, but that girl was long gone. Right now her main goal was to get together a little scratch so she could get to Conner's Liquor to set herself up for the weekend. And getting shit on by some stupid crow would not help her chances.

The prostitute stopped at the corner of the maintenance garage to finish her cigarette and pat her hairdo to make sure it remained bird shit free. Thankfully her hair was still clean. The rest of her would just have to do, since she hadn't had money to run down to the Laundromat lately. She had chosen the little tube top and hot pants primarily because they were small and therefore in her mind less obviously dirty than her other clothes.

Now she wished she had picked something else.

Libby wasn't terribly happy with the figure the little outfit revealed. She knew she had put on a few pounds over the years, but tonight's encounter with those teenage trollops with their ridiculous young figures had served as a reminder of how things were starting to slip. She knew her hot pants were causing her to sport a serious muffin top these days, with a pale stomach threatening to overhang her belt in a way she didn't want to think about.

She didn't dwell on it though because that would lead to thoughts of possible future remedies, and Libby preferred not to think more than a couple of days ahead. The future was a place best left unconsidered...at least until her winning lottery number arrived someday and changed everything.

The blast of an impact wrench sounded through the thin metal bay doors of the garage, causing Libby to jump.

Damn! Arnold was still here, and must be working late! The Textro's mechanic was a mean-hearted old shit who didn't like her hanging around "his" building. The last time he had caught her out here he had cussed her out royally. And of course she had to take it or he would run to Big Earl and start trouble.

Growling a curse, the woman threw away her cigarette and left the slight shelter of the buildings corner. It was time to get to work anyway, so she headed towards the row of trucks. She didn't even bother to look at the showers and bathroom as she walked by, other than to note the light was on inside, since it was another area forbidden to her. Big Earl had restricted her hooking to the side of the lot near the diesel pumps, and the rows of trucks themselves. He said it cut down on complaints.

She had her own ideas about the complainants and what they could do with their whiny bitching. She had to make a living, dammit.

At least she recognized a couple of trucks.

There was a rough old Peterbilt belonging to "Leaping Larry" Brown, which counted as a minor bit of good news. Larry always had twenty bucks for a blowjob, which meant he was a reliable client and quick and easy to please. At least she would be able to pick up a couple of cheap bottles at the liquor store tonight.

There was also a big new International ProStar owned by Gary "Buddha Boy" Norville. On the bright side he was actually semi-polite to her, and also willing to pay well for the full deal. On the downside, he was completely hairless and weighed well north of three hundred pounds...and he insisted on being on top. Doing business in his sleeper cab was kind of like having Moby Dick repeatedly land on you while you were both stuffed in a sardine can.

"Beggars can't be choosers," Libby opined philosophically, but relegated Buddha Boy's truck to the end of her list of intended stops.

Lightning flashed again, dotting the parking lot with the shadows of the gyrating birds overhead, and she quickened her pace towards the trucks while holding her purse above her head. She could smell the rain in the wind as it picked up. The storm was almost here, and getting caught in a downpour was almost as bad as getting plastered in a mass crap attack by a flock of birds.

Libby reached the first truck in the row and wasted no time in pulling herself up on the passenger side step and hammering on the door. Being coy didn't pay in this business. It wasn't expected of her, anyway. After waiting for about ten seconds, she knocked again on the truck.

Still nothing.

When no lights came on, she assumed the trucker was either in the restaurant or ignoring her and waiting for her to go away. Nice way to treat a lady with it being about to rain. Bastard. The prostitute gave the door a third good banging, just to be sure, then climbed down from the side of the vehicle.

The first try seldom got results anyway, but one had to start somewhere. She slouched her way around the front of the big semi, and winced at the rumble of thunder. A glance at the distant store and restaurant reminded her that if it started raining now, there would be no way to avoid getting drenched. Her best hope lay in getting admitted into one of the cabs, and catching a ride up to the store later.

Coming to the other side of the semi, she paused briefly at the blackness filling the gap between the large rigs.

A tiny flash of instinctual caution tried to assert itself, but another growl of thunder intruded. This time a brief spatter of drops accompanied the rumble, and Libby realized her time to find shelter might be measured in seconds rather than minutes. Fortunately, the next semi belonged to Larry.

She hopped up onto the step and knocked.