It was late. I was tired. The road ahead seemed endless. It did switch from winding to straight, but in the jet black darkness of the remote area I was travelling in, the difference was infinitesimal. Just more road to drive over until a sign let me know just how much further I still had to go.
I always loved being on the highway. Enjoyed the views and the open road. Seeing new places meant having new experiences and I needed that more than ever.
I wasn’t feeling that this time. This was a part of the highway I hadn’t driven before. I was told that it was a very long and exhausting portion of the highway by a woman I talked to at the restaurant earlier that evening. She mentioned that I should keep my high-beams on as elk were commonly seen on the road at this time of night due to there being very little traffic. I heeded her advice and drove with them on.
There hadn’t been a single vehicle on the road for two hours. No one coming up behind me and no one driving the other direction. It was nearing 12:30 am, so it made sense as most people would be at home and asleep by now, or at the very least at home. I mean, why would anyone be out on a barely lit, old highway at this time anyway, I thought. For some reason, that thought made me laugh, being the poor bastard driving in the middle of the night by himself.
As I crested a hill, I saw a sign on the side of the road. It didn’t look like a typical sign that you’d usually see on a highway, rather more of a makeshift one that had been around for a while.
It simply read “Turn around.” That weirded me out, and the area around the base of the sign looked like someone may have recently placed the sign in the ground.
Part of me thought that the sign might be some locals who weren’t really interested in any outsider traffic interrupting their solace, then again, I would expect that type of sign to read more along the lines of keep out.
I pulled over to the shoulder, and turned the engine off. There was very little cell reception, so I opened my glove compartment, and grabbed a mapbook I’d bought for the particular area. I found the page and began looking for an alternate route to take, when I heard movement ahead of me coming from the forest.
About twelve to fifteen elk walked out of the forest and onto the roadway. I instinctively turned off the engine and cut the lights. What a cool thing to get to see, I thought, hoping that the elk would hang out a bit longer now that the truck was quiet. Thankfully the moonlight was bright enough that the elk were easy to see.
Some of the elk walked down the road, while others moved across the road and into the forest on the other side. I took it in thinking how awesome the moment was when a howl filled the air.
With the lights out, I was in complete darkness, in a car on the side of the road, in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. I looked out every window in the truck, and saw little to nothing, but could hear wind blowing through the trees. The elk were all frozen in place.
Everything was stopped. I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears, and the blood coldly running through my veins. The elk started running, with some going in different directions, a couple blowing past the truck. Then, a massive shape came out of the forest to my right, and leapt on an elk, slamming it to the ground. I could hear the bones of the elk breaking as it hit the asphalt. The creature was seemingly close to the elk’s size, which was hard to believe considering how quickly it blasted out of the woods. It ripped the elk’s throat and blood poured out on the road.
I moved in my seat and reached for the ignition. I heard the creature then stop then release a deep, and terrifyingly guttural growl, probably in reaction to hearing me move in the truck.
With that, I was done. I started the truck and and as the lights came on. Standing right in front of my truck was a huge wolf, almost beyond description. It was nearly four feet at the shoulder and probably about ten feet long. Way bigger than any wolf I’d ever seen in person, either in a zoo or in the wild. It’s eyes were piercingly yellow and it bared it’s teeth and lunged at the truck.
I slammed on the accelerator and gunned it down the road, narrowly missing the dead elk, as the beast slammed off the passenger side. I got the truck up to 80 but realized that I needed to try and drive calmly, or I’d crash, and then I’d be proper fucked. I consider myself a pretty strong guy, at 6 feet and 215 lbs, but this creature, this aberration of nature would have ripped me apart. My heart was racing, as I tried to put together what I had seen. It didn’t make sense. No wolves are that big, like grizzly bear big. I kept driving at 80 for the next hour and eventually saw the town of Fairbrook in the distance. I wave of relief washed over me and I coasted into town.
I pulled into a gas station to fill the tank that I’d probably almost emptied. There was an older man filling his tank in the pump ahead of mine, and as I pulled up to my pump, I noticed that he was looking incredulously at the right side of the front of my truck.
“What the hell did you hit, buddy?” he asked, pointing at my truck.
I walked over and looked at where he was pointing. Four gashes had been ripped into the metal of the truck, and looked to be about three feet in length with each gash being two to three inches in width. My blood ran cold, but at least it was all still in my body.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I told him.
He walked casually up to the car, and pulled a long grey hair out of one of the gashes. He held it up. looked at me, and said “You drove past the sign, didn’t you?”
I looked at him in disbelief, wondering what he was going to do or say next. He smiled at me.
“You made it. Most don’t. Folks think they put up the sign just to scare people. They do want to scare people away from there, and now you know why.”
With that he got into his pickup and drove away.