The Drive – a tale of terror

We drove along the narrow and winding roads, unpaved and dry, trying to escape the clutches of this place. My foot pressed against the gas pedal. Steady and motionless, we all sat silent and horrified. Could what we had seen really have been seen? Perhaps it had been the light, the trees and their leaves, which had cast odd shadows through the house windows. Perhaps our minds had played a trick on us, all of us. Perhaps it had been.
There were no two ways about it. It had happened.
The tree branches flew by, barely recognizable as they scraped and banged against the windshield and surrounding windows. The high beams being dead, only the five meters ahead of us were visible, and all we could see of each other was what the dashboard’s red glow emitted. Sally began to mumble, shell-shocked-like.
We were in what they called “the middle of nowhere”. Some vacation, shit we’d been driving all day until we realized we had gone off course. We had no maps. I had told Jane to bring one along but she was so goddamned stubborn. I don’t even know why I’m thinking this right now, it was nobody’s fault, it had just sort of happened.
We were in the mountains. It seemed so gigantic, endless and engulfing. We were not supposed to be going through the mountains. A wrong turn somewhere had caused the deviation.
It was getting late, we were tired and didn’t want to be driving on these types of roads in such little light, so we started looking for a place.there had to be a place, a motel or inn to stay the night; to rest. There was nothing to be seen in all directions and then Jane thought she had seen a hand carved wood sign by one of the paths. I didn’t take the time to back up and look if she was right; I was so tired I was willing to take whatever option seemed at hand.
I tried to find a rational explanation for what we saw but there just wasn’t.
The sky was dark as on any autumn night, and we came to a clearing just a little ways down the path. The thing about this clearing, as far as I could see, was that it was dirt. Not the type of dirt you see on mountains, this was as if a patch of desert, cut out from Nevada had been placed here on the mountain. The air felt different and it was warm and dry.
We walked towards the lodge-like, hotel-like, whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it establishment and went in. Not a single light was on, but it smelt nice and fresh as if regularly cleaned or something. Billy managed to find a switch while searching the wall and had flipped it.
As the lights came on, we almost all had heart attacks. There in front of us was a hotel lobby; grand and gorgeous, full of people, at the service desk, on the couches, leaning against walls with drinks in their hands. The only thing was that these people were not alive.
They were bodies dressed up, posing, motionless, some decaying, some still in good condition as far as can be said about corpses.
As our brains finally allowed our legs to run, after about five minutes of looking around us horrified, we heard now behind us from the lobby, a recorded message coming from the desk saying: “Welcome, choose a room.wisely. We are sorry for not being able to bring your bags up. Enjoy your stay.” This was followed by the screechy old record sound of bits and pieces of conversations jumbled together and forks and plates scratching, party sounds, as if the people before us were really there, and living.
In the driver’s seat, struggling to get the key into the ignition, I began to cry while laughing, my mind unable to compute what I had just seen.
We could not see more than eight meters in front of us speeding along going nowhere, going everywhere, just trying to get away.
Jane pulled the gun out of the glove compartment and shot herself, right as I realized I had taken another wrong turn and we were plunging head first off a cliff into oblivion. As I looked ahead, the high beams finally came on as if to show me something.And show me something they did. At the very bottom of the precipice were about thirty hunks of metal, twisted, destroyed, scattered with broken glass.