ELECTRIC AVENUEby Joshua Allen(Originally published in Entropy)Spec Thomas was so far lost, he could think of noconceivable way to ever return home. He was on a road thatstretched infinitely long in either direction. He didn't knowhow he'd wound up on such a road. Things had been going smoothlysince he left Omaha, then he'd exited the interstate to find aplace to pee and now he'd been going down this road for twodays. The road had no turnoffs, no signs, just the occasionalgas station.He stopped at the first gas station, a flat area of dustwith a prefab metal building stuck in it, not realizing what theroad had in store for him. He brought a bottle of Dr Pepper tothe counter and tapped his fingers to catch the attendant'sattention. The man was old, occupied with the Omaha newspaperand lording over his domain, which included the dust, a fewgallons of gas and a bathroom key attached to a hubcap."Dollar fifty," the man said, not looking up from hispaper. Spec dug out the appropriate amount of change. Counted itout onto the counter. Recounted it before the old man covered itwith his hand. Re-recounted it in his head as the man absently

stuck the money in his pocket. Spec raised his eyebrows at this.The register remained untouched.Spec decided to test the waters, try to broach the subjectof his money. "So, the highway's just back that way?" Specpointed to his left.The man flipped the page on the Omaha paper, "Reckon.""Get a lot of visitors this way?""Nah."Spec looked around. The place seemed to have a permanentlayer of grime. "You own this place?""Nah." The man could have been clearing a chunk of phlegm.Spec decided a dollar fifty wasn't worth any furthercommunication with this man, and instead returned to his companycar, which he'd come to think of as his own.He drove back toward the interstate, but was confoundedwhen, after three hours, he had yet to reach it. Then he startedthinking he'd really started out the other way and had beenturned around when he left the gas station, so he went back.He'd made up his mind, after still failing to find theinterstate or the fuel station with the strange old man the restof the day, that he would continue going the same directionuntil he found some sort of civilization or sign of civilizationbeyond the fuel stations.

He stopped at another fuel station the next day, run by asimilarly disinterested, almost completely absent old man. Hetried to ask the man where he was, framing it as a joke, and gotno response. When he asked where the nearest town was, the oldman responded, "Just down the road a stretch." Later that day asimilar gas station yielded similar results but still there wasno town in sight.As the predictions of the gas station attendants continuedto prove wrong, Spec realized there was something wrong with theknowns, the givens. Spec worked with truth for a living andtruth was merely a set of known factors to which one applied therules of logic and came to a single, irrefutable conclusion. Heknew this, and yet when he applied the rules of logic to what heknew, the axioms of distance, velocity, and time he and everyother member of the planet Earth had come to rely on duringtheir life spans, his conclusion that there must be a way offthis road kept coming up false.It was the end of day 2 and Spec was curled up in the backseat of his Saturn on the side of the road. He was already tiredof the pasty-faced old men of the service stations staring athim like he was insane or completely ignoring him when he toldthem how long he'd been driving without seeing anything. Some ofthem laughed like it was all a big joke. He was starting to feelthat it was a big joke, and this feeling was overridden by the