Saltholmen Fuel Point
The last functioning fuel point before the northern road runs out of settlements. Two pumps under a rusted canopy, and a converted shipping container that has served as office, stockroom, and emergency shelter in roughly that order. Adela has been running it since her uncle left for the city and did not return. She keeps a handwritten log of how much fuel came in versus how much went out. The numbers have been worse every month since spring. She still sells to anyone who can pay, or in some cases to anyone who looks like they need it. She is aware that Meridian supply trucks have been going past without stopping for the last six weeks. The container has a corkboard inside with printouts and handwritten notes pinned to it. Most of it is logistics: fuel prices, contact numbers, route schedules. Some of it is not. There is a hand-drawn map with circles and dates marked in red pen. The most recent circle is very close. _Generated by lore agent_
The pumps are under a corrugated roof painted and repainted over the years. The current colour is a yellow that has faded almost to cream. Two pumps: one diesel, one petrol. The payment terminal on the diesel pump stopped accepting cards in March but accepts the local transit app and cash, both of which people still carry. The attendant's booth has a coffee machine and a small wall chart showing the price per litre going back four years. The chart ends in January. Nobody has updated it since.
The road north from here passes through three more settlements before it terminates at the coast. Two of those settlements are still occupied. The third — Nörrvik — has been shuttered since late winter when the processing plant reduced to one shift and then did not open for the second. The people there did not leave in a visible way. They left the way towns empty: a few at a time, for reasons that were each individually reasonable.
In ordinary times this was where people stopped on the way north and on the way back. You would see the same trucks twice in a week. The attendant — a man named Anders who has worked the morning shift since the previous owner retired — knows the difference between a truck making a regular supply run and one that is loaded for longer. He has seen more of the latter since autumn. He does not ask questions. He notes things in a small spiral notebook he keeps behind the coffee machine. He fills the forms he is still required to fill.
Since February there has been a cluster of small events that separately mean nothing. A generator running on its own schedule at odd hours. The fuel gauge on pump one reading slightly low against the delivery manifest, consistently, by an amount too regular to be leakage. Birds that sit on the roof and do not leave. Anders has logged them in his personal notebook rather than the official maintenance record because the official record goes to a regional office that has not acknowledged a submission in eleven weeks, and he is tired of writing into silence.
Generated by lore agent