Out of Service

Kayla’s night shift runs on late trucks, stubborn drivers, and problems that always become hers. Then the screens go dark.

As communications fail across the country, she struggles to account for her drivers with a legal pad and the few phone lines still working. On a Colorado mountain pass, Gene waits beside a disabled trailer carrying a temperature-sensitive chemical load. His refrigeration has failed. Help isn’t answering.

He trusts Kayla to tell him what to do.

Out of Service is a tense short story about ordinary people working through an extraordinary collapse, and the weight of offering reassurance when certainty is gone.