Welcome listeners to this installment of fast Food Horror with this tale entitled The Rest
Stop by E. J. Miller. There are countless scary stories I could
tell here, Tells of things that go bump in the night, of things
that lurk in the shadows, of goblins and ghouls, and other frights stories
the depraved or the unimaginable, worst of the human experience only thought of in
nightmares, or the recounting of true actual events. This is one of those.
I won't tell you which the latter or the former. You'll have to
decide on your own. I'll only say that I have spoken to many people
about this subject about what I'm about to share with you, that if it's
fiction, how it should be portrayed, there are very many that are very
emotional about that, and if the story is real, way too many questions
to field from the same. Here we go. I had taken my wife
and three daughters down to Raleigh for a soccer match. My youngest was a
very very big Alex Morgan fan, and she was scheduled to play that night.
I don't have a lot of money, and this would be the closest
she would ever get to us so, trying to be a good dad,
I got us tickets. I had to cut a lot of corners to make
it work. We drove halfway the day before, subsisting on two large coolers
of sandwiches and other things we had packed, stayed the night in a campground
instead of a hotel or a motel, then drove right to the field that
day, arriving minutes before kickoff. We took in the game, and to
save cash and time, when the match was over, autograph signed, merch
purchased. We loaded the kids back into the mini van to head home that
night. Like I said, I have a lot of money. I couldn't
rightly afford a hotel, stay or campground, extend the mini van rental and
a day of meals since the coolers were low, so I intended to drive
straight through to Buffalo ten hours. That's right, sounds crazy, right,
I figured, with coffee and some red bull I could do it. We
made good time getting out of North Carolina and then on through Virginia. However,
the problems didn't start until West Virginia into the mountains, the mist and
the fog of Appalachia. It made seeing very tough through those twisty mountain roads,
bending right and left, then up for no reason. I knew with
one wrong turn we'd be off, falling into the abyss. I had to
take things very slow, well slower than I'd like, only driving as fast
as my headlights. It was also about then that the third or was it
the fourth red Bull started to wear off. I felt like I was going
to crash, not the vehicle, just I got really, really tired,
so I let my wife drive for a while while I tried to nap.
But about thirty or forty minutes into the drive, she really wasn't having the
mountain driving either. It was scaring her as well, the darkness and the
fog, not knowing if the road was going to turn or end, so
she pulled over at an overlook and woke me up. I was rather groggy,
and we were in the middle of nowhere, if you want to call
high up on a mountain, surrounded by forest and darkness nowhere. I urged
her to drive a bit further, hoping to find somewhere safer. After another
fifteen minutes, she pulled off into a rest stop parked in the rear of
the lot, and we joined the girls in a nap. I set my
phone to wake me up in an hour. I just needed to close my
eyes a little bit longer and that I could power through. Maybe the fog
would lift. Maybe with a little bit of sleep it would be easier,
Maybe the sugar crash would wear off. I remember watching one of those documentaries
in school when I was a kid. It was concerning the parts of the
human brain. You probably remember watching a high school too. The cerebellum,
the temporal lobe, the brain stem, and the amygdala and limbic system.
Those last two are the primal parts, the parts of your brain that automatically
detect danger, the survival parts. And mine woke me up from a dead
sleep, like my body was shot with a current of electricity. My eyes
flew open, and I was immediately looking around my surroundings, not knowing or
questioning why, but quickly and efficiently looking all about. Not in the minivan,
not the interior where my family lay asleep, but my eyes immediately began
scanning what was in the woods or surrounding us, looking, scanning with a
feverish intent for the danger I knew innately was there, and then my eyes
locked on it. Forty yards up the hill directly in front of us,
Illuminated only by the moonlight and stars, it stood watching me, watch it,
watching me with a predatory gaze, with red eyes. It stood maybe
seven feet tall, a large, framed, hulking thing that easily tipped the
scales at four hundred pounds, with broad shoulders, long, well muscled arms
extended well past its waist. It was not a person. It was too
large to be that, and what little I could see of it appeared to
be covered with some dark fur. I could not see its face, aside
from the eyes, whose stare had not broken From my position, I watched
as it slowly made its way down the slope, long careful strides, arms
swinging corresponding to each footstep, purposeful and slow, like a lion creeping on
its prey, getting ready to pounce. Ever decreasing the gap. Again,
that part of my brain, that primal, basic part of my brain,
engaged, and it screamed survive. I pulled my wife from the driver's side
of the minivan and quickly leapt behind the wheel. She woke with a start.
Our eyes locked, and we both heard a howl from outside the minivan,
emanating from the mountain. I was just watching and ang angry howell.
She scurried into the back of the minivan, demanding what it was in a
panic voice, what had happened? What was outside? I started the minivan
and put it into a reverse and gund it. The engines roar, not
loud enough to mass the roar of the thing now running towards us. As
I exited the parking lot, I looked in the rear view mirror and saw
it standing there, eyes glowing, chest heaving at the edge of the parking
lot, enraged, a dark thing with long, muscular arms and legs covered
completely in dark, matted fur. I looked back at my wife, who
was holding our two youngest, our third behind her, clutching her neck.
My wife's primal brain had kicked in as well, without hesitation, understanding protect
the young. The rest of the parts of my brain finally started to kick
in as we put distance between us and it, and as the questions started
to flood from the rear of the minivan of what it was, what was
chasing us. The only thing that came out of my mouth was the thing
that didn't sound as crazy as the truth. Because the truth, well,
I said the only thing I could think of, A bear,