The Gas Station The Broken Web, Part 4 Spider had never travelled, she had never had the chance. When she reached what people for miles around called 'The Big Road', she had considered turning back. Evening was falling and the great plains stretched away in dusky silence, vanishing in a line of distant indigo. Spider had never seen anything so big, her mind hurt with it, the backs of her hands had begun to sweat. An hour's walk from the long, hickory shaded path that lead back to the plantation along 'The Big Road', lay an abandoned gas station, overgrown with weeds and half collapsed in on itself. Spider shrugged her bag off her shoulder and sat next to it with her back to a tree. If truth be told she had little or no idea if the coach that used to traverse this part of the country still stopped here but night had truly fallen and she had nowhere else to go. The cicadas were beginning to sing, Spider waited for the oppressive heat of the day to fade, it didn't. The terror of the previous evening toyed with her thoughts as she stared into the darkness but she pushed it away, she had heard of people who lived in fear of the night, who dreaded the coming of the dark man every time the sun sank below the horizon, she was not going to be one of them. Spider was determined to fight and that meant, that meant the city. Her heart beat faster just thinking of the word. Just as Spider began toying with sleep, a half finished bottle of warm beer resting loosely in her hand, the coach arrived. It had seen better days, there was little doubt of that. Once it had been a gleaming chrome pleasure cruiser of the highways, a vehicle that epitomised freedom, on which any young man or woman could go anywhere for the most modest of fees. Now it was a tarnished, battered and leaking old wreck with dirty windows and an exhaust that belched and spluttered thick black fumes into the night sky. Spider stood up. The folding doors clattered back on a wheezing pneumatic hinge and an old black man wearing a green visor leaned over from the driver's seat. "You going' anywhere doll?" he said, passed a ball of sodden tobacco. "Yeah" said Spider, slipping her bag onto her shoulder.