Every night at 3:33 AM, a hidden road appears near my house. I first noticed it coming home from work last week. I dismissed it as a driveway I hadn’t noticed before until I saw a sign with an arrow pointing down the road, reading:
“To the Death Cap Mountains
70.9 miles.”
Someone had hand painted the sign in a spiky black font.
The fact that my town had no mountains in it, or the next town over or anywhere in that direction at all, made me do a double take. And I had never heard of any mountains by that name anywhere, despite having hiked nearly every public trail in a ten-mile radius. But since I had just worked a twelve-hour shift, I drove on by and went home to get some sleep, vowing to explore the strange road at a later time.
I awoke later that morning, screaming and thrashing. While this wasn’t so unusual for me, I knew the dream was about that road. Even as I came out of it, I could see those spiky black letters bleed onto the soil below as bright silver eyes glowed in the woods behind them.
The next day, I told my friend at work about it while we walked around the warehouse doing inventory control and checking for lost items. Her name was Naomi and she looked the part of a typical goth stereotype with purple hair and far too many piercings. She and I had done some urban exploration before, breaking into abandoned mental asylums and hospitals, and she knew the secrets of the area far better than I did. She was also a connoisseur of firearms, crossbows, hunting bows and even airbows, while I had only gone target shooting a few times. If anyone knew of some secret mountains in the area, she would. Yet when I brought up the Death Cap Mountains, she simply frowned.
“Jason,” she said to me, “are you sure someone didn’t just put some weird sign on their driveway to freak people out? There are definitely no mountains in this area, and I’ve never heard of a range by that name anywhere. My dad has hunted this area for decades and never mentioned anywhere by that name either. And I’d definitely remember it if I had- I really like that name for a mountain range.” She smiled feebly at this. I knew Naomi had a semi-photographic memory, a talent she often showed off at work by just looking at a packet of instructions for a few seconds yet being able to repeat them all verbatim. In some ways she awed me; I couldn’t imagine being able to use my memory like a photograph, to read something and remember it exactly months or years later.
“I don’t think that’s it,” I said, shaking my head and looking down at my clipboard. “I purposely circled back a couple times, remembering exactly where the dirt road is, and by 4 AM not only is the sign gone but the entire road or driveway or whatever it is has disappeared too. Something strange is going on around there.”
“How about this…” she said, smirking thoughtfully. “Tonight when you leave, I’ll go with you and we’ll drive down it together. If it is nothing, just a prank or something, then you drop me back off here. If not, then we’ll figure it out together and have a great story to tell.” My frown deepened.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Naomi. What if we get lost or the car breaks down and there’s no cell service… what if we end up hiking around in the middle of the night?” She patted me on the back reassuringly.
“I’ll bring my Glock 19 and some ammo just in case we meet a bear or serial killer. And you can go to the store during the lunch break and get food and water. That way we’ll be prepared. And I think you’re freaking out about nothing- what are the chances that everything would go wrong at the same time? We’ve been to far hairier places during our urb-ex trips, old collapsing mansions and condemned psychiatric hospitals filled with asbestos, and never had an issue. I think a little dirt road should be no problem.”
“This isn’t some little dirt road,” I said, frowning. “It is a mystery, and probably not a natural one at that.”
***
Everything went according to plan at first. Naomi and I always worked the graveyard shift, coming in at 3 PM and staying until the work was done, whether that be 11:30 PM or 4 AM. Because it was summer and the workload had increased, we regularly got out after 2 or 3 AM, and this night was no exception. By the time we drove out of the warehouse, which was located directly in the middle of the industrial sector of Goreham, and towards the forested roads of Unity where the strange dirt road resided, it was already 3:20 AM. I had to speed to get there in time. From previous nights’ experiences I knew that if I went there at 3:15 AM or 3:45 AM, the road would not be there. It only showed up at 3:33 AM and disappeared a few minutes later.
We didn’t talk much on the way. I put on the radio and listened to some pop songs that we had both already heard ten thousand times before. But as we drew closer to the mysterious road, the radio started to malfunction. The station began to sputter in and out. Soon it went out entirely and a garbling low voice took its place. While I couldn’t hear much of what it said, I was able to pick up snippets of speech.
“…black-eyed ones scream into eternity…” it said, fading out for a few seconds then resuming. “…lights of the dead follow them…” and I glanced over at Naomi, my stomach flipping in knots. These words were followed by a shrill, metallic scream.
“Um, does the radio usually do this out here?” she asked, appearing unnerved and pale in the moonlight.
“To be honest, I almost never listen to the radio. I tend to listen to audiobooks if I put anything on. But I’ve never heard it do this on the rare occasions I have had it on.” She flipped the volume off.
“It must just be interference from another station,” she muttered, sounding completely unconvinced. After a couple more minutes of silence, she started to talk again.
“You know, my grandmother went missing here,” she said. I looked over, surprised. She nodded. “She was only thirty years old when it happened, and my mom was just a baby. My grandmother and grandfather had a little cabin out here in Unity, miles from the nearest neighbor. Apparently one night my grandmother couldn’t sleep and went on a walk. They tried tracking her and, at first, the police dogs had a strong trail. They followed her along a dirt road that wound around Lake Blykal but then the tracking dogs just lost her smell at a cliff that went straight up for a hundred feet. The police never found her body but a volunteer saw a bright hat at the top of a tree growing from the middle of the cliff- an absolutely impossible area for anyone to get to without climbing gear, especially a lost woman who didn’t even bring sneakers or boots with her but only had sandals meant for the beach.” Chills went down Jason’s spine as she recounted this story and we drew close to the mysterious road.
“Do you think she just got lost and they never found her body?” Jason asked. Naomi shook her head slowly.
“I think someone, or something, took her. The way her trail ended so close to here makes me wonder if it has something to do with this road you keep talking about.” I slowed down as we went around the last bend and I looked at the clock. 3:32 AM. I purposely drove along at ten miles an hour, going along at a snail’s pace as I looked for any sign of anyone in the nearby forest. As we closed in the last hundred feet to the road, I saw only the spiky letters of the sign and nothing else. There was very little traffic in Unity even in the daytime and none at all in the middle of the night. I pulled in front of the sign and set my hazards flashing anyway just in case.
“Last chance to turn around,” I told Naomi. She bit her bottom lip uncertainly then shook her head. Without another word, I turned slowly onto the dirt road.
At first it was rather anticlimactic. Beyond the sign, the road curved to the left and right randomly, and I swung to the sides to avoid large potholes that had grown over the years. Ahead of us, the moon cast an eerie glow on the trees. The smell of pine and moss invaded the car.
“So far, it just looks like a regular road,” Naomi said as I swerved around another pothole. Further up, the road straightened out and I sped up above 30 MPH. A sense of anxiety and trepidation rose in my chest, and for a dreamlike moment, I wondered what I was doing out here in the middle of the night.
“Regular roads don’t appear and disappear in the middle of the night,” I muttered.
“Oh my God, look at that!” Naomi said, pointing to a brightly-lit building on our right. It had a large, professionally-made sign on the front lawn that read “Visitor’s Center.” A black Ford Taurus was parked in the lot, almost right in front of the sliding glass door, and as I slowed I could see its tires had all gone flat and dirt and leaves had covered its windows. Its tinted windows seemed to indicate it was some sort of government car.
The visitor’s center had large white pillars in front of a glass facade. Windows ran from floor to ceiling and let bright white light spill out onto the darkness of the concrete lot. Behind the pillars on the far left and far right, blood-red recessed walls ran up to a steep roof topped with two Victorian-style turrets on each end.
“This can’t possibly belong here,” Naomi said. “Unity has a population of, what, maybe two hundred people? There’s no way it has enough traffic to support a huge taxpayer-funded center like this in the middle of nowhere.”
“And yet here it is,” I said mildly. “Let’s go see if it’s open. Maybe it can answer some of the questions I have about this road.” With that, I got out of the car, grabbing my keys, and Naomi followed.
I walked towards the sliding glass doors, giving one last mistrustful glance at the dusty run-down car as I passed. The visitor’s center seemed so well-maintained, free of leaves and grime, and the juxtaposition of the junky car and the spotless building unnerved me. I saw Naomi unholster her pistol as we crossed the threshold of the door. With a chill running down my spine, I grabbed the spring-assist knife in my pocket, wishing I had something heavier in case of trouble.
Without a sound the doors opened and revealed a brightly-lit room beyond, stocked with shelf after shelf of canned goods, bottled water, soda and various toiletries. A large banner hung over the room, stating “Welcome to the Death Cap Trail!” in dark red cursive letters. From the back of the room I heard a soft sound, like quiet footsteps.
“Hello?” I called out loudly. “Is anyone here?” From between two shelves I saw a man appear, and I involuntarily stepped back at his ghastly appearance. His eyes looked sunken and dark, and his disheveled salt-and-pepper beard had grown below his neck. His hair shone with grease and stuck out in all directions. His white T-shirt was shredded and appeared to have dried blood soaked into it. Worst of all, I could smell him from across the room- a smell like sweat, urine, feces and grease, all rolled into one and left to ferment for weeks.
“Oh God,” he said in a quivering voice, “are you real?” He slowly moved towards us, and from the corner of my eye I could see Naomi had unholstered her Glock, though she still kept it pointed at the floor.
“Last I knew,” Naomi said, smirking slightly. “Who are you?” The man didn’t appear to hear, but simply continued to exhibit his dissociated 1000-yard stare.
“Have you heard them yet?” he asked, his hoarse voice cracking as he spoke. He looked past us at the sliding glass door. I followed his gaze, but the lights in here were so bright that I could only see vague silhouettes outside.
“Heard what?” I asked nervously. This guy gave me the creeps and I wanted to get far away from him as quickly as I could. But I also needed to hear what he knew about this place and the mysterious road outside.
Ignoring me, Naomi asked, “Sir, what’s your name? I’m Naomi Payne and this is Jason Fiergo. We are from the next town over and just wanted to know what this place is…” All at once his thousand-yard stare disappeared and he snapped to attention. He stared right at me, meeting my gaze with the intensity of a soldier abandoned alone in the middle of a warzone.
“I’m Max. Max Theriault. And this place? As far as I can tell, this is Hell, young lady. Pure and simple. I think we are all in Hell.” Max visibly blanched, his skin turning pale. “There are things here that should not exist in any rational world. I try to stay in the visitor’s center as much as possible. Especially at night.”
“Is that your car out there?” Naomi said. Max nodded gravely.
“I got stuck here months ago. I was coming down from Boise, Idaho, going to my brother’s new house and took a wrong turn onto this road labeled ‘Death Cap Mountain Avenue.’ I didn’t know the area I was in well but I thought for sure there was no mountain called Death Cap anywhere around. Anyways, after driving for a few minutes, I saw this visitor’s center. I came in here to ask for directions but no one was around. So I went out to my car and turned around. But do you know what happened?”
We both shook our heads ‘no’.
“I was driving back the way I came, on a straight road with no turn-offs, and I came back here. I drove on again and came back here. Every few minutes, even though I was traveling in a relatively straight southward direction, I would come back to this same damned place. So I tried going northwards, and then the loop ended. I found new sights, new turns but still it seemed to lead to no way out, at least not anywhere close. And there are things in these woods. They are not human and look like no animal that I have ever heard of existing. After encountering a couple of the creatures I turned around and came back here, the safest place around as far as I know, and hoped for rescue or for some way out. You two are the first normal people I’ve seen.”
“That story doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “We are definitely in Connecticut- we just turned on this road in Unity. This place is thousands of miles from Idaho.”
“I don’t think we are in either Idaho or Connecticut, friend. I am not even sure we are on Earth anymore,” Max said. I saw Naomi roll her eyes.
“Well, that’s super cheerful, but also irrelevant,” Naomi said sarcastically. “If we’re on an alien planet, which I doubt, there’s nothing we can do about it. The real issue I see is that there is no way out, eldritch monsters, one working car, one working gun, limited gas, and what else? Am I missing something?” Max grinned, for the first time, and a little of his old life seemed to come back to him then.
His eyes momentarily focused on us rather than looking through us, and for a moment I could see him as a younger man. He used to be rather good-looking, with pale blue eyes and dark hair, a tall man with a fit body. Yet these past months must have aged him and given him dark circles under his eyes.
“About the gun part you’re thankfully wrong. I do have a couple guns- after all, I’m from Idaho and the gun laws there are practically non-existent if you’re a US citizen without a felony record. In my car I have a little .22, just a rifle I mostly keep for target shooting or the occasional small vermin, and I have a couple boxes of ammo for it. Also I have a Mossberg 12 gauge with a couple boxes of deer shot as well as some slugs and buckshot.” Max looked sheepishly around. “And I have a Stag Arms AR-15 with a laser sight and flashlight.” He flashed a smile and said, “Gotta love the old U S of A.”
“So why aren’t you carrying them?” Naomi asked, narrowing her eyes.
“I am terrified of leaving this place. If you had seen what I’d seen you wouldn’t be excited to go outside. None of those things in the woods seems capable of coming in here.” Max shook his head. “I am in no rush to die.” Then, with a spastic jerk, Max raised his eyes to the ceiling and repeated his same nonsensical question from before- “Did you hear it yet?”
I was about to respond when I suddenly heard a shrill, high-pitched noise from outside.
“The cries…” he said softly, and as if on cue, I heard the far-off wail again- the shrieking, rising and falling wailing of what sounded like an infant.
“Oh my God, is that a baby?” Naomi asked, her voice rising to a nervous yell. The man in front of us vigorously shook his head.
“Don’t go out there unless you want to die,” he said. “That is no baby.” I felt a strange urge to laugh at his dead-pan delivery and the absurdness of the situation. A random baby crying in the woods at night and this bizarre road made this seem like a dream, and the absurdity of dreams often had me wake up at night laughing, or sometimes screaming. I always thought both impulses came from the same place in the human mind.
“Is it a fisher cat?” I said. “A fox? What?”
“That’s no fisher cat,” Naomi said, glancing over at me with an inscrutable expression. “I’ve heard plenty of them in the woods behind my house growing up and they don’t sound like that.” She pulled my arm and led me away from the man and towards the door. She leant close to me and whispered in my ear.
“Listen, I think this guy might be mentally ill, probably has a few screws loose if you know what I mean. And that sounds like a baby. 100 percent. we need to go look and make sure some sicko didn’t dump an unwanted infant in the woods to die.” She glanced over at Max. “I mean, we don’t even know this guy at all. For all we know he could have dumped a baby out in the woods. I’m not saying he did, but… he is the only one around.”
“Ok, let’s do it,” I said, even though I felt like anything besides going outside right then. My stomach turned and twisted with anxiety. And in that instant, I got the weirdest feeling ever- the room became slightly transparent and filled with shimmering multi-colored white light over everything, and I could see the thoughts and feelings of Naomi and Max. Hell, I could see their memories. It was like some four-dimensional television, where I just looked at one or another and my vision would start to zoom forwards until I was seeing Max as a kid playing on the swings, or Naomi as a teenager crying at her grandfather’s funeral. Then, with a shudder, regular reality fell back into place, and I was just standing there blankly staring at Naomi.
“What is it?” she asked. “You looked like you just saw a ghost.”
I shook my head grimly, and with a slight half-smile I looked up and said, “Acid flashback?” She grinned slightly.
“Ok, sure. I felt weird too when we got here though. Everything looked… weird for a moment. Like half-invisible and real colorful and moving fast. But after a second it went away.” The baby began shrieking again and Naomi motioned for me to follow, saying, “We will talk about this later. First, let’s go rescue that baby!” This statement caused me to double over with laughter- the silliness of it, the excited way she delivered it, the absurdity of the whole situation. I saw her laughing too. After we were done, I felt much better.
Naomi went first, running out the door and into the woods. She had crossed her arms in front of her, her right hand holding the gun and the left hand her flashlight. I held my pocket knife in front of me and also held out my keychain mace and tear gas combo canister in my left hand, finger on the nozzle and ready to start spraying. As soon as we stepped over from the grass of the lawn surrounding the visitor’s center into the woods, the crying stopped.
“Hello?” Naomi cried, shining the flashlight rapidly from right to left, even aiming it up into the branches of trees then down at the roots surrounding our feet. We saw nothing.
“I warn you, I am armed,” Naomi said in a calm voice. “If there is someone out there in the dark, please announce yourself.” A shrill cry echoed around us in response, similar to the crying noise but now much deeper and stretched out. It sounded more like the crying of a whale than a human now.
Without warning, a pale figure came out behind a large tree trunk, moving towards us at an incredibly fast pace. It appeared to be a woman on all fours, doing a rapid backwards crab walk across the sticks and leaves of the forest floor. Her back bent at an ungodly angle, and her upside down face was split into a grin so wide it should have ripped her cheeks. I had heard the expression of someone smiling from ear to ear, but this woman actually was smiling from ear to ear. Too many rotted and sharp teeth poked out from all sides of her grin. Her mouth resembled a shark’s with her apparently endless teeth stretching out throughout her smile. Her skin was so pale that I could see veins running under it throughout her naked body, veins that seemed to pump black ichor instead of blood. Her eyes were entirely white with a slight darkening where the pupil and iris should be, as if cataracts or blindness had marred her. Yet she stared right at me.
“Stop right there!” Naomi shrieked, and I quickly tried to backstep but tripped right over a root and went sprawling. Naomi shot once, sending a spray of black bile out of the front of the monstrous woman’s chest, but it didn’t seem to slow her down at all. She came at us far faster than any human being could have, gnashing her teeth and leaving behind a trail of disgusting, fetid-smelling ooze as she went.
I pushed the spring-assist notch to fling the knife blade open. The creature leapt with tremendous speed and came crashing down on me, snapping her unhinged jaw over and over like a rabid dog and driving the knife into her chest as she did so. I saw cracked and broken teeth, far too many of them for a regular human mouth. It seemed like she had hundreds of teeth extending to the back of her monstrously malformed jaw, all of them oozing blood so dark it looked black. As I fell on my back and she landed on top of me, I pulled the knife out of her chest with a wet sucking sound, then stabbed blindly over and over again. The blade tore into her throat and kept her from biting my face off.
With all my strength I pushed the knife farther in, until the hilt hit her ashen flesh. Disgusting black blood flooded my face, and I accidentally breathed some into my nose and mouth. It tasted like pure rot, like meat that had been left out under a hot sun for days. I gagged and threw up a small amount in my mouth as she snapped at me, maneuvering her snapping mouth lower despite me pushing against the knife with all my force. With a terrible burning pain, I felt her tear off a piece of my left ear. I screamed as Naomi came running up, put the pistol at point-blank range and fired into the monstrous being’s stomach. This caused her to shriek so loud that my ears began to ring, but she did jump off me and began to retreat.
Grabbing the police mace, I began spraying the woman in the face. While it didn’t stop her from running backwards on all fours, it apparently blinded her as she began shrieking louder and smashing her face from side to side to try to free herself of the noxious chemicals. I sent out a second, longer spray, which made her come to a total writhing stop, twisting on the ground in crippling pain. Unfortunately, some of the aerosolized jet was blown back into our faces by the unfavorable direction of the wind, which had chosen that exact moment to pick up speed. Gagging and covering our faces, Naomi and I began to sprint away as fast as we could from the contaminated area.
“Jesus, that hurts!” Naomi yelled. With double vision and tears streaming down our faces, we began to run back towards the visitor’s center. I heard the ogrish woman still stomping around on her hands and feet behind us, but she looked aimless, like a hornet just sprayed with poison. Naomi put her arm through mine to try to steady herself, though it also helped to orient me through this excruciating partial blindness.
“We need to get some water and flush out our faces,” I said. “That was only a small dose we got, whatever dispersed residue was light enough to get blown back, but goddamn that stuff is potent. I can’t imagine how that thing feels, seeing as it got drenched with a direct spray for at least five or six seconds straight.” My adrenaline was so high at the time that I barely even felt the injury to my ear, as nearly all my attention was fixed on my eyes, shrieking at me with constant pain. I tried to wipe at them with my shirt but tripped over a root instead, taking Naomi down with me. We both went sprawling on the ground. I smashed my head against a young elm tree while Naomi was inches away from hitting her head on a massive moss-covered boulder next to the path. I was stunned for a second but before I knew it Naomi had hauled me back up and we were again jogging towards the lights of the visitor’s center, which now only looked a hundred feet away.
I heard the shrieking of the freakish humanoid not too far behind us, encouraging us forward at a faster pace. And off in the forest, I heard two more infantile shrieks respond.
“Oh my God, there’s more of them!” Naomi said. We sprinted into the building through the automatic sliding doors and began barricading the doors with all the chairs, tables and newspaper stands scattered around the main lobby. Naomi also hit the emergency stop button for the doors so they wouldn’t automatically open if we were followed. With an excruciating fire in my eyes and aches throughout my body, I made my way towards the cool drink case and grabbed a bottle of spring water, pouring it over my eyes and face slowly in an effort to remove any remaining residue from the tear gas/ mace cocktail.
With a half-smile that made him look years younger, Max gestured at me and Naomi. “So… how did it go?” We didn’t even deign to respond to his sardonic quip. I could hear a slight chuckle in his voice. “Listen, I tried to warn you. You guys should really listen to me. You might think I’m nuts, but everything I’ve told you is the truth.”
“Max, can those things come in here?” Naomi asked. “Have they come in here, or at least tried?” Shaking his head, Max looked through the door. Three of those abominations circled in front of the visitor’s center now, doing their odd crab walk along the far edge of the parking lot. Two of them appeared female, with matted black hair that ran down half their body, and the other one looked male. His face looked half-melted, as if he had been in a fire. Keloid scars from his injury had regrown over one eye, and strips of skin appeared to be missing along his legs, letting some black bile drip out slowly onto the pavement and mix with the fluids of the monster that Naomi had shot. The one that she had shot kept stumbling and falling over as she dripped dark blood all over the pavement, but otherwise didn’t seem nearly as affected by the gunshots, knife wounds and mace as she should have been. If she had been a normal human being, just one of those gunshots likely would have killed her. But that raised the question in my mind- what exactly was she? Was she even human, or was she once human but now transformed?
“I’ve wondered to myself whether they can come in here or not,” Max said. “From what I can tell, they avoid coming in here or even getting too close to the door. That-” he said, pointing to where they now crawled at the far edge of the parking lot, “-is the nearest I’ve ever seen them come.”
“Good,” I said. “That means we can get back in the car and drive out of this god-forsaken place. Find a bag and fill it with drinks and snacks, especially anything that will drive off hunger pangs. Peanut butter, almonds, trail mix, jerky, whatever they have.” Max shook his head.
“Leaving isn’t that easy, friend. But I’ll come with you just to see. I tried walking back the way I came and got stuck in a strange loop.” Max smiled. “I don’t think you can ever get out of here unless this road lets you.”
“OK, well, let’s try it anyway,” Naomi said, grabbing a bag and throwing random sports drinks and soda into it from the case. I followed her lead, and in a few minutes we had everything and were ready to go.
“We should use the bathroom before we go,” I said, eyeing Max. “You don’t smell too good, bud- no offense or anything. If I had been here as long as you I’m sure I wouldn’t smell like roses. But maybe you can use the sink and try to clean yourself up quickly? They even have deodorant and toothpaste here.” Max nodded.
“I have tried to bathe over the past few months, using wet paper towels to try to give myself a kind of sponge bath, but with all the horrors running around and the hopelessness of the situation I guess I kind of fell off. For a while there I was just wandering around here, eating and sleeping, barely conscious of reality. Every time I dreamed, I had nightmares that were too terrible to remember. To be honest, I didn’t think I would ever see a normal human being again.” Max looked wistfully at us and smiled slightly. “I’m glad that you guys came along, even if it doesn’t help us get out of here. I really didn’t want to die alone, and I thought for a while I was losing my mind. This place messes with you in ways that are hard to explain. Creepy music begins playing any time I try to sleep, and in the daytime sometimes a man’s voice comes through and begins talking about news on the road, saying that it is raining fire further down at someplace called Trinity Shore, or that another man or woman on the road had died. I don’t know how many people- real people, I mean, not monsters- are alive on this road, but based on those weird news reports, most of the people who are alive are further down towards the mountain range, with a few new ones trickling in periodically. Unless there is another way in and some of these people just bypass this visitor’s center.”
“For all we know, there could be thousands of entrances into this place,” I said. “Or there could just be one.” Shrugging, I said, “You two ready to go?” Max put a finger up and ran to the bathroom. As soon as he was gone, Naomi leaned in close to me. We talked as we began removing the makeshift barrier in front of the glass sliding doors, putting back the tables and newspaper stands.
“What do you think of this guy, really?” she asked. I looked at her intently.
“You are the one with the eidetic memory and a college degree in psychology. I think I’d rather hear your opinion first.” Despite working a blue-collar job in a warehouse with a ton of working-class joes, Naomi was one of the smartest people I had ever met. When I asked her why she didn’t use her degree, she would shrug and say that she made $60,000 a year here to listen to audiobooks and drive around on a jack. “Better the devil I know than the one I don’t,” she would always say.
“Well, I think he is on the verge of some kind of mental breakdown,” she said. “He has been alone here for who knows how long, surrounded by monsters and God knows what else out there. Also,” she continued, lowering her voice, “do you notice anything strange about this place?” Rolling my eyes, I bit back a caustic remark.
“Literally everything about this is strange,” I said definitively.
“OK, but I mean specifically this visitor’s center. He says he has been here for months or longer, but this place is still fully stocked with food and drinks. I don’t even see wrappers or anything, no sign of someone eating through most of their rations. So does that mean he cleans the place? But even if he did, that wouldn’t explain how all the goods get restocked. My best guess is…”
I never got to hear the rest of her idea because at that point Max came back from the bathroom, his face still gleaming slightly from a quick wipe-down. He smelled much better, having apparently used deodorant before spraying himself down with air sanitizers designed for cars. He smelled like a new car, in fact, and it was somewhat overwhelming. Noticing my wrinkled face, he says, “A little too much, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Naomi said. “Let’s go.” Pulling the emergency stop button back out, she let the sliding doors fly open. The car was parked only twenty feet away, and the abominations were still circling at the edge of the lot. As long as they couldn’t or wouldn’t come closer to the building, we were fine to get in.
“I’m not taking any chances,” Naomi said. “We run to the car and immediately slam and lock all the doors. I don’t know if those things will try to hunt us when we run out there.” Nodding, Max and I scanned the darkness for anything else we were missing. We saw nothing besides the three humanoids.
“On three,” I said. “One… two… three!”
We all ran at once. The three humanoid monsters turned to gaze at us through their opaque eyes but didn’t make a move. Before I knew it we were all in the car, Naomi in the driver’s seat starting the engine, me in the passenger’s seat and Max sprawling across the back. As soon as Naomi had turned the car on and began driving across the parking lot, the three monsters crab-walked into the forest, scattering in all different directions. By the time the headlights turned back onto the dirt road, all signs of the three creatures had faded behind the thick foliage and bushes of the forest.
Part 2 can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/zequ0o/my_experiences_in_the_death_cap_mountains_part_2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button