They were wandering around a 7-Eleven store in a sparse city that Abbott thought was Lubbock, Texas, unless Lubbock was the next one and they were in some equally desolate expanse of pavement. […] it would be a tight contest to decide which US state was the emptiest, but Texas was making a strong case. It wasn’t just the vast expanses of perfectly flat nothing along the highway; it’s that even within the towns, the structures were scattered as if they’d all been slid across a smooth floor. There were wide stretches of pavement and/or dying grass in between buildings, as if they couldn’t stand to be too close to one another. This particular gas station was at a busy intersection across from a sports stadium of some kind, surrounded by hotels that stood like islands in a sunbaked ocean of parking.