Chapter 781: Gas Station

At half-past six in the morning, the sky was still a hazy gray. Along Route 76 on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, the illuminated sign of an old gas station flickered in the wind. Its glowing red digital numbers prominently displayed the new price: $3.09/gallon. Mike clearly remembered that when he got off work last night, this number had been 2.89.

Mike parked his rusted Ford F-150 in front of the gas pump. He pushed the door open, habitually glancing up at the price board, and couldn’t help but curse under his breath. “Damn it… It’s already over three bucks.”

There were only three cars lined up at one of the pumps—not a particularly long queue. However, in a typically quiet Rust Belt town around Pittsburgh like this one, seeing a line at a gas station at six-thirty in the morning inherently reeked of an unusual anxiety.

He pulled out his credit card and swiped it through the machine. The screen popped up with a prompt: “Pre-authorization: 90 US Dollars.” Mike hesitated for a couple of seconds before his rough finger finally pressed the confirm button. This 2008 pickup had already clocked over two hundred thousand miles, and its fuel consumption was terrifyingly high. Every day, he had to drive from one end of the town to the other to work at the steel warehouse, and then pick up his son on the way home. To save money, his gas tank was almost never full.

With a CLICK, the gas nozzle engaged. The sound of fuel rushing into the tank was exceptionally clear in the morning silence. The owner of the Chevrolet sedan next to him was a middle-aged man wearing a Steel Union hat. His car window was half-open, and the radio inside was blaring a morning talk show.

“…Following the strikes on Iran, crude oil prices have jumped by ten percent. The White House has stated that there is currently no need to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve…”

The middle-aged man smacked his steering wheel impatiently and complained loudly, “They don’t need it, but we do!”

Mike heard this and merely gave a helpless, bitter chuckle.

He recalled the scene at home last night. On the television screen, the news anchor wore a solemn expression, backed by satellite imagery of the Middle East and the flashes of continuous explosions. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen read starkly: “US and Israel strike Iran, market sentiment tense.” His wife, Lisa, had been sitting on the couch, folding freshly washed laundry. She stopped what she was doing, turned to him, and asked, “Do you think gas will go up to four dollars? If it really hits four, how are we supposed to pay this month’s heating bill?” Mike had given a perfunctory reply at the time, “Let’s just wait and see. The TV news always loves to scare people.”

But now, standing in the morning wind, he watched the numbers constantly jumping on the gas pump’s display screen. $47.38, $52.10, $58.27. He inexplicably regretted his flippant “wait and see” from the night before.

With a CLUNK, the nozzle automatically clicked off. The number on the screen finally settled at $73.46. Mike pulled out the nozzle and hung it back up.

He looked up and glanced at the abandoned railway line in the distance. In his memory, freight trains fully loaded with steel coils used to roar past there every single day. Nowadays, the tracks were overgrown with weeds, and only a few old, graffiti-covered boxcars sat quietly on the rusted siding.

He pulled his jacket tight and walked toward the gas station’s convenience store. Pushing the door open, the wind chimes above rang out with a crisp JINGLE. Mike immediately noticed the changes on the shelves. In front of the motor oil, diesel additives, and even those red five-gallon plastic spare gas cans, there were now handwritten cardboard signs in black marker: “Limit two per customer.”

A television hung on the wall behind the cash register, broadcasting a CNN morning show. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen read: “Panic Buying? Officials call for calm as gas prices rise.” The cashier was a young man in his early twenties, wearing a gray hoodie with the gas station’s logo. As he scanned barcodes, he muttered quietly to a coworker next to him. “Last night, a bunch of people came in asking if they could buy empty gas cans, saying they wanted to hoard some extra fuel. The way they were acting, you’d think it was an apocalyptic movie.”

Mike bought a cup of black coffee and a pack of the cheapest cigarettes on the counter. While taking out his money, he caught sight of a plastic donation box placed next to the cash register. Taped to the box was a photograph of a brightly smiling young soldier in a camouflage uniform. Below the photo, bold text read: “Support Our Troops: Local National Guard Deployed Overseas.”

“Is he from around here?” Mike asked, pointing at the photo.

The cashier nodded, his expression darkening slightly.

“He’s my cousin.

“He said it was just a short-term deployment, but who knows? The situation in Iran doesn’t look like a short-term thing right now.”

Mike grunted in acknowledgment and didn’t say anything more. He walked out the door holding his coffee, the hot steam rising into the air. He could feel that the town had become much quieter lately than usual.

Although things were much better here under Leo Wallace’s governance than they had been a couple of years ago—at least everyone had work and didn’t have to worry about starving to death the next day—Mike knew in his heart that this was merely superficial. It was a structural problem.

He had attended the weekend workers’ night school organized by Pittsburgh City Hall and listened to lectures by a professor invited from the university. The professor had said that the reason the Rust Belt rusted wasn’t just because of aging factories, but because of the industrial hollowing-out of the entire country. Since the 1980s, Wall Street, in pursuit of higher profit margins, had tossed manufacturing overseas like garbage. Detroit’s auto production lines had moved to Mexico, and Pittsburgh’s steel furnaces had moved to Asia. Capital had flowed into finance and the internet, leaving nothing here but unemployment, opioids, and broken families.

Bringing manufacturing back and making these chimneys—extinguished for decades—smoke again wasn’t a problem that could be solved by the Federal Government simply writing a few checks or starting a few infrastructure projects. It required restructuring the entire global supply chain, decades of sustained investment, and a mobilization capacity akin to a wartime economy. Even though Mayor Leo was incredible—magically pulling in orders, securing investments, and even creating a localized boom—Pennsylvania was simply too big. Beyond Pittsburgh, there were dozens of surrounding counties and hundreds of small towns just like this one. In these places, although people were no longer going hungry, a middle-class lifestyle remained far out of reach. The orders they received could only guarantee basic survival. Wanting to buy a new car or send their children to a decent university was still a pipe dream.

Worse still, prices were continuing to surge day by day. Bread, milk, rent—they all went up every single week. That newly established sense of security was slowly being eroded by the rising tide of inflation. War was like a massive black hole, devouring all resources and driving up all costs. If oil prices truly spiraled out of control this time, this fragile balance would completely collapse.

“What on earth is the President doing?” he muttered.

The TV endlessly looped grand buzzwords like national security, free navigation, and neutralizing threats. But in this Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania, most people were just calculating a much more immediate equation in their heads: how much higher gas prices would go, and how much longer their paychecks could hold out.

He got into his truck and started the ignition. The engine roared to life. The radio automatically connected, and the host’s voice rang out.

“…Gas stations in some parts of the country have reported longer lines, but officials insist there are no shortages. The President stated that thanks to domestic production, the United States can handle higher international oil prices…”

Mike sighed and turned the volume down, leaving only a low hum of background noise. Outside the window, the chimneys of the old factories stood in the morning mist like rusted tombstones. He knew that when he got home from work today, another argument would inevitably unfold at the kitchen table regarding gas prices, tuition, the mortgage, and that war thousands of miles away.

In this place, Iran, the Hormuz Strait, and the global crude oil market all sounded so very distant. But every time the gas nozzle CLUNKED to a halt, and the numbers jumped to a point they could no longer afford, those names became exceptionally concrete.