Before sunrise, in deep winter, Interstate 75 had a certain slickness to it that beckoned southward, away from the skin-flaying wind and snow. If drivers weren’t careful, they’d slide past Wapakoneta, Ohio, right down Cocaine Lane, all the way to Florida.

That’s what Larissa’s husband and boss, Bud, was always telling her, anyway.

At this hour the road was quiet and dark, studded with periodic pools of light illuminating gray ruts of snow and ice. She stared out the side window as her older model self-driving car navigated the icy clumps on the road. A beeping sound drew her attention back to the dashboard, and with a touch she acknowledged the low charge notification.

The Luna One launchpad is in Florida, Larissa thought, as the snowy hump of the Armstrong Air & Space Museum appeared through the haze outside the window. The lunar colonies need unskilled labor; I bet it’s a piece of cake compared to Ohio in a blizzard. The gray half-dome of the museum slid past, and she turned her head to track it until it faded from view.

Florida’d be too hot. But there’s no weather inside moon domes, is there?

Larissa was jolted back to reality when her car started skidding. Her seat belt snapped tight across her chest as the vehicle slid into the railing, her ears filled with the squeal of metal on metal as the car skated to a stop. The passenger-side window now provided a close-up of the ice-coated railing already pocked with dents from previous accidents.

Her pulse scudded in her hands as she gripped the steering wheel.

Close, she thought, so close. If the car had been going just a little faster . . .

She put the car in park and shut her eyes.

Bud, a former Wapakoneta football star, attentive husband, and area franchise owner, had told her to take the Interstate this morning. I-75 was usually salted round the clock. He’d informed her that he’d kick her ass if he caught her taking local roads again in this weather.

But now he’d kick her ass for doing what he’d said.

I shouldn’t have put the self-drive on, she thought. I’m such an idiot.

She shook herself. Bud hated it when she was late for work.

Opening her eyes, Larissa stared at the frozen, empty highway. A floodlight illuminated the green sign ahead of her:

Exit 111

First on the Moon

Wapakoneta

EXIT ONLY

Larissa didn’t have enough cash to make it halfway to Florida. But even if she did, who’d open the Charge & Go Express Mart? Did Neil Armstrong ever work minimum wage? How did he get to Cape Canaveral, anyway? She’d been thinking these thoughts for a while now, going round and round, and all roads led back to another early morning at the carryout.

A driverless 18-wheeler rumbled past, the vibrations shaking her car, but it continued down the highway, and the only sound was the low electric hum of Larissa’s car and the heater blowing on her face.

A message flashed up on the dashboard: “Impact detected. Would you like to contact emergency services?” She pressed no.

She couldn’t call Bud to tell him about the accident—he had a strict no personal devices at work policy; Seeing as how it sets a poor example, and all, as he’d said, so she’d stopped bringing her phone.

The cash register had an internal communications system on it, he always said. Who do you need to talk to besides me, anyway? If only she’d kept in touch with her crew from high school, she thought. If only, if only—so many things to regret, and too late now to fix.

Maybe I won’t have to tell him. Maybe the car is fine. Larissa twisted her neck and scanned her body. All good. Lucky. I’ll check the damage to the car when I get to work.

The convenience store was visible through the blowing flakes and on the other side of a chain-link fence. The building stood alone in its frozen, empty parking lot.

One more deep breath, and ignoring the self-drive button, she shifted the vehicle into drive. With a metallic complaint and a sustained gravelly crunchity-crunch, the Escort inched itself into the exit lane. Almost there. She exited the freeway into a sea of slush, and then into the Charge & Go parking lot. It was already five to six. Each parking spot had its own charging station, and Larissa pulled across the small lot from the door and powered the car off.

Her nose hairs stiffened at the blast of cold as she stepped out of her car. Late for work and too darned cold to stop and check the damage on the passenger side or to plug her car into the charging station, she hurried to the darkened shop. The list of opening chores jostled to the front of her head.

I’ll charge it later, she thought.

As she stepped up from the snow-covered asphalt to the sidewalk, she slipped. With a yelp, she recovered, and took a more cautious approach toward the locked door.

Too cold, she thought. To be free of any weather at all—now that would be a thing, wouldn’t it?

Fumbling with the keypad under the grayish-yellow illumination of the halogen lamps, it took her three tries to get the shop unlocked. Tears of frustration froze on her cheeks as she pushed her way into the convenience store, but in the warmth of the shop, they melted.

She shucked her coat as the door jingled closed behind her, and she stared through the plate-glass window across the parking lot at her car. A long black scrape swerved along the side of the car. She’d gotten off easy, but the thought of telling Bud she’d been in an accident made her stomach tighten.

Three to six. Time to clock in. She touched the glass of the door, and the red “Closed” sign inside the glass faded and was replaced by the word “Open” in green.

The ancient fluorescents that Bud refused to replace popped and pinged overhead. Her boots clunked as she approached the register. In the middle of the store software boot-up, the entire building went dark, and she heard a poof and a mechanical sigh as the drink refrigerators stopped working. A series of clicks, followed by another set of sighs, brought the store back to life. The flick-flick-flicking of the fluorescents above continued a little longer. It was only a couple minutes past six when the cash register rebooted.

Whoever had closed last night had left a glossy trifold brochure shoved half under the register. Larissa pulled it out. The cover read: The Luna One Colony Needs You: Free Transport from Florida to the Moon. That’d be Danny’s; he was young enough to buy into any offer of a free ride.

The door jingled to announce Larissa’s first customer just as the cash register began ringing. She dropped the brochure into the trash can at her feet.

“I haven’t got the coffee going yet,” Larissa yelled. “It’ll be a few minutes, bear with me.” The customer moved down the snack aisle of the store.

The register was still ringing. She scooped up the headset laying on the counter and answered the call.

“Larissa, are you late? Didn’t you take the highway?” Bud, as the owner of five local Charge & Go franchises, sat back home five miles north. Like a spider in his home office web, he watched the video feeds and the online transactions at every Charge & Go on this side of Ohio.

I hate spiders, Larissa thought. Are there spiders on the moon?

Larissa looked out at the fender of her car. “Yeah, sorry, Bud, I was here, the power went out, and it took a hot minute for me to log in.”

Another jingle, and she saw two more customers enter.

“I gotta get the coffee on, and finish opening. Did you need anything?”

“You haven’t got the coffee on yet? Larissa, I—”

“Gotta go,” Larissa said, and disconnected. A few more people entered the store. A woman in medical scrubs was looking at the empty coffeepot. Apologizing, Larissa hurried over to get the machine going.

The next hour passed in a blur as she served customers, refilled the coffee maker, and took a mop to the entryway after Nora Papich almost wiped out on the puddle that oozed from the rubber entry mat. She tilted the mat up against an expired emergency car charger near the door, shifting the handwritten “CLEARANCE” sign taped to the top, so it wouldn’t get soaked.

It was only when the register rang again that she remembered that she hadn’t salted the parking lot, top of the list of opening duties, and her throat tightened with dread.

Bud again.

“Honey, wasn’t I right about taking the highway today? John Schroder totaled his Silverado on Blank Pike, and he’s still stuck out there, waiting for a tow.”

Larissa finished the transaction in front of her, and the customer walked out into the worsening snow. John Schroder managed the Charge & Go outside of Lima.

“Bud, about the car—”

“I know. You would never’ve made it to work on time if you’d gone that way, these older self-drives are no good in Ohio winter.”

The door jangled again.

“Bud, a customer’s here. I gotta go.”

“Yeah sure, hon. No leftovers tonight for dinner, you hear? And get the salt down in the parking lot.”

Once the next round of customers left, Larissa went into the back room, where she had stowed her coat and gloves, and put them back on. She dug a small bag of rock salt out from under a pile of dirty overalls and used windshield wipers. She waved to the cameras as she crossed the shop floor and lugged the sack out to the parking lot. By the time she reached the far end, the cold was seeping through her coat, and the rock salt petered out. She shoved the empty bag in a pocket as she made her way back and she paused to survey the damage to her car. No way to hide this, she thought. She rubbed at the mark with her gloved hand. Nothing happened. She picked up some snow and made circular motions with it. Nope. Her hands shaking and her throat dry, she picked up a grain of salt from the ground and picked at the mark with it. It remained intact.

Disheartened, she retreated to the warmth of the shop and ducked into the back room to stow her coat on a wooden peg.

The door jingled.

Four individuals entered in space-suit costumes with solid metallic domes, making it impossible to see who they were. She sighed.

“The entrance to the Armstrong Air & Space Museum is the next driveway, but they don’t open until noon on Sundays.”

The collection of astronauts came to a stop before her, their faces unreadable behind their silver visors.

“We need coffee for my mom and hot chocolate for the rest of us,” one astronaut said in a youthful, male voice. “My mom’s in the Atlasvan right there.”

His accent. From Tennessee perhaps? As far away as Georgia?

Larissa and the other astronauts turned to where the young man had pointed. A large, middle-aged woman was plugging her minivan into the charger nearest to the shop door.

“She said we can get whatever we want,” the teen continued. He held up a phone. “Here’s her phone, right here.”

Larissa quashed a spurt of jealousy at a phone full of money to pay for whatever a kid wanted.

“Ummm, ma’am,” This time an adolescent girl’s voice. “Did Neil Armstrong ever buy coffee from here?”

“Astronauts can’t drink coffee,” said the boy. Two very small astronauts were plucking bags of hard candy from their racks and throwing them at each other.

“No, honey,” Larissa answered, “Neil Armstrong was too busy trying to get to the moon to linger at convenience stores.” She stopped dead for a moment, thinking about what she’d just said.

“Hey, I thought I saw a stray dog running around to the back of the building when we pulled in,” the boy continued. “You’d better make sure it’s ok, you don’t want a dead animal stinking up the place when it thaws.”

“Ewwwww,” said the smaller astronauts with glee.

“What?” Larissa’s left eye began twitching, wondering how soon they’d be out of her hair.

“Do you have hot chocolate? We want four of ’em,” the girl astronaut reminded her. “And coffee for Jerry’s mom.” Larissa turned her head towards the parking lot. The middle-aged woman sat, warm, inside her AI-piloted minivan.

Larissa sighed deeply, grabbed the candy from the youngest two, and hung it back on the rack to a chorus of protests.

“Yeah, sure there’s hot chocolate. It’s instant, though. Right this way.”

Are kids allowed on lunar colonies? Larissa wondered as she showed them how to use the hot water faucet on the coffee maker. Surely not.

She watched them, afraid of being sued by the mother in the minivan, and was relieved when they finished making their drinks and she was able to cash them out.

She did a lap through the now quiet aisles, checking for stray bags of candy. Nothing. Once back at the checkout, she adjusted her headset. She paused, then called home.

“Bud here.”

“This is going to sound like a weird question, but have you heard anyone mention a dog hanging around outside the store?”

“A what?”

“Yeah, I know, some kids just said they saw a dog out there, I thought I’d ask.”

Bud chuckled on the other end of the line. “Yeah, the space cadets, huh? That was a trip. Never gets old, watching your store. Maybe they were blowing smoke up your ass?”

Larissa didn’t reply and he continued. “You know full well I can’t see outside but you have a look and call the dog warden if there’s a stray. No good having animals going through the garbage.”

Larissa hung up. She pushed the door to the back room open with her hip and thought about working in a convenience store under a dome, with no weather, children, or dogs.

Or Bud.

She paused, the door half open, then retraced her steps to the cash register and fished the Luna One Brochure out of the garbage, straightening out the creases with her fingers. There definitely wouldn’t be spiders on the moon, she thought, and she set it on the counter to read when she had a spare second.

Boxes full of chewing gum, windshield wipers, and motor oil cluttered the stockroom. Not a sound except the ticking of a rusted analog clock on the wall above the alley door. Larissa grabbed her coat and gloves from the pile of junk and stepped outside, shrugging into her layers.

A thin layer of snow coated the narrow concrete space behind the door; the garbage containers stood at attention. Beyond a raised curb was the parking lot for the Holiday Inn Express, and even further on, the dome of the Armstrong Air & Space Museum. The minivan that held the young astronauts sat in front of the entrance, exhaust puffing cheerily into the cold air.

Five astronauts came from Ohio, Larissa mused, so desperate to get out of here that they shot themselves off the planet. I can’t even get out of Wapakoneta.

She pulled up her coat sleeve far enough to look at her watch: 11:50. The register rang from inside the shop. She cast one last look to the left and the right. No dog.

Wait, was that a puppy whining or just the wind—

Larissa stepped out, and the door closed behind her.

Jesus H. Christ, are you kidding me?

She punched the code into the keypad on the back door, but nothing happened.

Frozen, she guessed. Good thing I didn’t change outta my boots. Stupid kids.

She trudged through the calf-high drifts around the side of the store, along the alley used by the delivery trucks, to the front. No dog. The sky pressed down, as gray as the dirty snow coating the ground. Larissa suddenly remembered that she needed to charge her car but a single, battered, gas-fueled Honda Civic sat, running, near the entrance. The figure behind the wheel was wearing a dark beanie and a scarf wrapped around their face. Larissa hustled to get back to serve whoever was inside. The door jingled as she pushed it.

Inside, a scrawny white teenager was tugging at the drawer under the register. He looked up as he heard Larissa enter and grabbed a revolver from the counter.

Oh, sweet Jesus. Larissa ducked around the first aisle of merchandise.

“Please, don’t hurt me, I’m not armed!” Larissa looked up at the security camera, praying Bud was still watching over her.

“I need the code to open the register,” the young man barked.

“4-5-8-9-5.”

Wapakoneta’s ZIP code.

The boy snorted in disgust, and with a ping the cash drawer released.

“Where’s all the cash?”

She visualized the meager float of a hundred dollars she’d put in the drawer when she’d arrived: two twenties, two tens, ten ones, and several paper rolls of change. There’d be more than that by now, but not more than a few hundred . . .

“Most people pay with a device nowadays,” she said. “Sorry,” she added, then mentally kicked herself.

“Fuck,” the boy whispered to himself.

Larissa heard bills being pulled out of their slots, the metal arms thwacking down on plastic. She flinched at each staccato sound.

“Stay put, and I won’t have to shoot you.” Footsteps moved toward the front door. The teen made a grunting noise, as if picking something up.

Larissa shrank back along the aisle. The door jangled again and closed. The robbery was over.

Lord Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus Christ, Larissa repeated to herself, creeping her way to the counter, just like she’d seen on old television shows. By the time she was brave enough to look out, the car was gone. The register began to ring.

“How could you let that pimply faced loser get the cash, Larissa? I’ll have to take that out of your next check. Do you hear me? They got that emergency charger too; thank God it was on clearance. You call the cops now. Maybe they can catch that fool.”

Bud ended the call.

She saw the Honda careening along the exit ramp she had taken this morning—the wrong way. A thump came from the highway, then the sound of crushing plastic, metal, and glass.

Her hands were trembling.

She pushed the red button on the bottom-left corner of the screen to contact 911.

The operator, once assured that Larissa wasn’t in any immediate danger, informed her that due to the weather, the police wouldn’t be attending any time soon. Would Larissa consider closing up the shop and filing the report from home?

Why yes, she’d consider it.

She stood at the counter and listened to the wind. Through the wild snow she could still make out the black mark on her car. She realized she was sweating, her coat still on. The Luna One brochure rested on the counter, and she scooped it up, but her eyes wouldn’t focus.

Walking over to the window, Larissa craned her neck to see through the chain-link fence. Hazy through the curtain of snow, she could see the getaway car flipped over on the highway and entangled with another vehicle.

Larissa closed her eyes, but then tried again to focus on the Luna One brochure. She opened the trifold. Free transport for anyone willing to sign a ten-year work contract upon arrival to Cape Canaveral. The getaway car held several hundred dollars, more than enough to get her to Florida. The trembling faded.

Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window. Her breath quickened.

She touched the sign inside the glass door to the Charge & Go, and it switched to “Closed.” She tapped off the lights, and ignoring the ringing of the register, she shut it down. On her way out she locked the door behind her.

She approached her car and ran her gloved hand along the gouge.

How do you undo an accident? Is it as simple as traveling backward? Or does it require unexpected motion forward?

She drove the car in manual mode at a snail’s pace the wrong way up the exit ramp, the urgent chime of the low-battery notification digging into her brain, until she reached the crash site. A passenger from the AI-piloted vehicle that had collided with the getaway car was pulling at the door of the upside-down wreckage.

Larissa stopped her car and got out. She couldn’t move for a moment, like a deer she’d almost hit last summer. She remembered the doe’s eyes, unfocused and wild.

If I’m ever going to get out of here, this is it. Get yourself together, girl, she chided herself. The stranger had paused in his attack on the wrecked car’s door and was watching her expectantly.

She cleared her throat.

“I work right there at the Charge & Go. Are the passengers all right?”

“Not sure yet, I can’t get the door open,” he replied. “It’s so old, I think it has keys.” He shook his head.

“Lemme give you a hand,” Larissa said, and moved next to him.

Together, they wrenched the door open and had a look at the two boys inside. A slow build of lights increased the visibility of the scene as more cars stopped on the other side of the crash.

“You got a cell phone?” The driver spoke from behind as Larissa stuck her head into the car and cringed at the blood. “Mine’s smashed.”

She shook her head.

The stranger stepped back, and Larissa poked her head in, pretending to check the victims. Both were motionless. She found the wad of bills in the gangly boy’s pocket; he was mumbling, returning to consciousness. There wasn’t much time. She took the cash and then she registered the presence of the emergency car-charger in the other boy’s lap with her scrawled “CLEARANCE” sign still taped to the top. Tightening her core against the awkward angle, she took it, eased herself back out and stood up. A traffic jam was building at the scene, hazard lights creating a festive atmosphere. Several people stood outside their cars on phones.

“What’s that,” the other driver asked, pointing at the charger.

Larissa held it up, with the “CLEARANCE” sign tucked into her chest.

“They stole this from my work. Seeing as how I don’t get it back there, my boss’ll have it out of my next check. I can’t afford that. I’m taking it back right now. We good?”

The stranger tilted his head and took a breath like he was going to say something, but he closed his mouth, nodded slow, then turned back to the kids in the car. A couple other drivers were approaching on foot, and Larissa hurried back to her vehicle.

A gust of wind spattered sharp snowflakes onto her face and tugged at the cash, nearly pulling it out of her grasp. She shoved the wrinkled bills into her pocket and retreated to the safety of her own car, hooking up the charger through the dash plug. As the Escort purred back to life, she took one last look at the empty fields across the northbound side of the highway and wondered how expensive corn-on-the-cob would be on the moon.

She’d pay any price, she decided, if it tasted as good as freedom. She put the car into manual and eased her foot down onto the accelerator. Ice and snow sputtered under her wheels but eventually released her, and she dreamed of cornfields beneath weather-free domes as Wapakoneta slid out of view behind her.