Dramamine

Title has nothing to do with the story itself. Written while listening to Modest Mouse, Sparklehorse and the Firewatch soundtrack.

I’d been driving all night. It seemed like forever ago that I left the city, but there was no other choice, nothing else I could do. After what I did, I could never show my face there again, but that’s not important. Now all I could see were fields and farms, the occasional windmill, the moon hung low in the sky, just on the verge of setting. I tried switching on the radio, but I was met with nothing but static on all the channels. I knew I didn’t have much fuel left, and that I would have to stop in the next town, hopefully, someone there could point me in the right direction. Once I reached the nearest town I could find, I stopped at a gas station, and as I was filling up my tank I noticed a man dressed in a stained blue jumpsuit smoking outside the building, he looked like he might work there, and I decided to go talk to him. “Excuse me, sir, I was wondering if I could get some directions,” I said in the most polite manner I could, but before I had a chance to say anything else he grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and hastily said “get out of here, get out of here before it’s too late!” and he ran off into the night. Needless to say, I was a bit suspicious, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to stay in the town a bit longer to try and get some answers as to what exactly was going on. I got back in my car and drove around the streets a bit, all the houses seemed to be empty or abandoned, all the buildings were closed, lights off, not another soul in sight. But that’s when I noticed that the far end of the street I was on turned into a hill, and on the top of that hill was a large mansion with some of the lights on in the windows, it seemed to be the only other building with any sort of life in it, and I went to go check it out. The hill was bumpy, small rocks scattered along the dirt path, but eventually, I made it up to the house itself. I stood in front of the large curving doors, and I rang the doorbell, a voice from the other side said: “who is it?” And I replied with “someone who needs help.” A man wearing jeans and a striped shirt opened the door, he didn’t look like someone who could afford a house like this. “What can I do ya for?” he asked, I told him “I don’t know where I am, I need help and I can’t go back to where I came from.” “Oh, I see, you’re an outsider. Come with me.” Before I could respond, he started leading me up another part of the hill behind the house that I hadn’t seen. I didn’t know where we were going, but before I knew it, we had reached the top, and we stood near a cliff that overlooked the whole town. He then said to me “There’s a reason no one lives here, if anything foreign enters this town for too long, they will come.” “What? Who will come?” I said to him, almost shouting. “Look, I think I can see them coming now.” I looked back down outside the house, and I saw what appeared to be 4 men in hazmat suits wielding flamethrowers, their faces were completely obscured, and they seemed to just… appear there. They all aimed their flamethrowers at the same time, and before I knew it, my car had gone up in flames, smoke filling the early morning sky. As the sun slowly rose over the mountains on the horizon, I could see them entering the town, burning up everything I had touched, and also severing any methods I had of leaving. Sure, I could walk, but then again, I had no idea where I was. At that point, I realized, it looked like I would being staying in that town for awhile.