Backroads Scare

As a young child my family took a trip to Kansas City, Missouri. With us went my grandparents who drove separately, my parents, my sister and my baby brother. Our plan was to spend two nights in a nice hotel we found, so on day one we got the zoo out of the way and ordered dinner to be delivered to the hotel.

That night, my brother started coughing and wouldn’t stop. As far as I know this wasn’t because of the food. He must’ve been getting sick anyway, but he couldn’t stop and his face was turning blue, so my parents packed him into the car and peeled off, leaving my sister and I with our grandparents at the hotel for the night.

Due to insurance or something of the sort they couldn’t go to the nearest hospital there in Kansas City, so they had to drive the however many miles home. They drove and drove and were guided along with the Garmin GPS we had hooked up. About half an hour before they made it to the hospital back at home, the GPS decided to have them take a backroads route around the city just outside of the town we lived. They thought it was weird but the GPS told them it was the quickest way there, so my dad drove that way.

Through the headlights, he started seeing things in the trees. He’s told me that that road was the scariest stretch of road he’s ever driven through, and as he passed, he’s told me that he saw faces peering from behind the trees, people standing and staring. This is a phenomenon that he has experienced throughout his life, where he will see people or things in vacant houses or scary places, and the wooded backroads they drove through was the worst of them all. He found himself praying under his breath, my mom completely oblivious to all this. To her, they were driving quickly down a strange stretch of road that she hoped would turn into a more clearly defined space soon, and that was all.

When my dad prayed, the car began to shake. My mom, oblivious to the people he saw, was not oblivious to the car shaking, and she felt the same whooshing sound that my dad did. Something happened to the car, but they continued to move. When they looked around at the trees, they realized they had left that creepy road behind, and were finally on a patch of well-marked road. The bridge into town was approaching, and the hospital sat just on the other side.

But they made it 25 minutes early. When the car made the whooshing sound that they both felt, my mom noticed that the GPS quickly recollected itself, and told them that they were only 3 minutes away from the hospital, when just seconds before they were 28. The entirety of the town before ours had evaporated, and they found themselves at the tail end of a long and winding backroads.

Something saved them, something saved my brother. When they made it to the ER the doctors were able to do whatever operation they needed, and without much of a hassle, my brother made a complete recovery.

My grandparents drove my sister and I home the following morning. My brother would go on to swallow the head of a Spider-Man figurine the following week, and when he did, he was completely fine as well.