Motel Seven

The Road Less Traveled

Dmitri drove for what felt like eternity. For every mile he went, the lights seemed to only grow inches closer. This was growing old, quickly.

Dmitri looked at his gas gauge. He was alright still, but he still needed gas soon. The man hesitated before pushing down more on the gas, getting a slightly louder hum from the engine as he did. The humming seemed to cut through the silence of the night, like a knife through butter.

He increased his speed by a twenty or so miles an hour (about thirty over the speed limit now, he was sure), and finally it seemed as though the light was growing nearer.

Dmitri drove for about thirty minutes at this same speed until he came to a slight fork in the road. He slowed his car down. Shit, which way was the light coming from?

He sat there for a moment, his car slowly rolling as he did, but eventually chose the smaller, one way road that broke off from the main road. It seemed to go more in the direction of the light than the main road. He figured he could get a good night sleep by the light, then come back out onto the main road in the morning.

The road was no more active than the one he had previously been on. He quickly understood why, too. The road was terrible.

Dmitri had lived in the north for his entire life. He knew how bad pot holes could be. The winter ice almost always created terrible pot holes and cracks on the roads.

Those didn't compare to the pot holes in this road.

One could cook a chicken in these pot holes, no, a deer.

Hell, one could live in these pot holes.

It was as though no one had ever tarred the road in the last 50 years. Dmitri was honestly beginning to worry for his car's alignment.

He began to feel bad for anyone that lived or worked off the road. Hell, he began to feel bad for anyone who lived anywhere near there. The area really was empty.

The light seemed to grow nearer, now, maybe in the next few miles he'd be there. He could now see that the one, single light had multiplied into about three, now. They were still rather soft lights. That meant they would probably be easier to sleep under.

If he was lucky, the light was attached to the home of some nice old couple. Or a gas station. If it was a gas station, he would probably just get a refill and continue on. He could sleep in the morning.

What if it was a hotel? Like a Comfort Inn or a Rodeway? That would be wonderful. Dmitri was growing tired of sleeping in his car. A nice bed, no matter how rock solid or suffocatingly soft it was. Hell, he'd be okay with bedbugs at this point.

But what if the light was out in front of some eerie, abandoned place? An abandoned barn wouldn't be too bad, he'd probably just pull his car in, or even an abandoned gas station. What if it was an abandoned house or something of that sort? A two story, wooden structure with black windows and broken glass sticking out like teeth. How would he handle that?

After a while, the building underneath the light became somewhat visible out across the flat, straight road. It was one story, whatever it was, with a flat roof. Abandoned or not, it was beginning to look more and more like a motel. Things were really going Dmitri's way.