00:00If you think a locked door can always keep you safe, let me tell you about the summer after
00:05college. It was nearly five years ago, right as the semester ended. Instead of flying straight
00:11home to my parents in Minnesota from my campus in Boulder, Colorado, I decided to be spontaneous.
00:17I packed up my old sedan and decided to drive across the country, a sprawling multi-day road
00:24trip through the heart of the American plains. At first, the endless flat oceans of farmland were
00:30strangely hypnotic. But as the miles dragged on and the route pushed deeper into heavily forested,
00:37isolated backcountry, the weather turned. Dark, bruised storm clouds rolled across the sky,
00:44opening up into a torrential, blinding downpour. Fatigued 10 hours deep into driving through
00:51pitch-black wilderness, I decided I couldn't go another mile. I pulled out my phone and searched
00:57for the nearest lodging. Google Maps spat out a single result. A small, independent motel situated
01:04well off the main highway, nestled down a narrow, one-lane service road surrounded by dense pine
01:10trees. I turned off the highway, bumping down the decaying, unlit asphalt road for 20 agonizing
01:17minutes. Finally, a pair of flickering neon signs cut through the dark. A run-down gas station,
01:24and directly behind it, a decrepit, single-story motel. Cash was tight, and I figured a cheap room
01:31was a cheap room. But as I pulled into the empty gravel parking lot, a heavy wave of unease hit
01:38my
01:38chest. There wasn't a single car parked outside the units. The place looked entirely dead, save for a few
01:45sickly buzzing neon tubes illuminating a peeling marquee that read, vacancy. I killed my engine,
01:53stepped out into the freezing rain, and hurried toward the motel office. Inside, the lights were on,
01:59but the atmosphere was deeply wrong. The lobby wasn't staged or decorated like any normal business.
02:06It looked hastily thrown together, dusty and abandoned, like a stage set left behind in an empty
02:13warehouse. The front desk was completely unmanned. I stood in the stale, dead air for 60 seconds,
02:21listening to the hum of an old refrigerator, before my survival instinct screamed at me to get out.
02:28I turned on my heel, bolted back to my car, and threw myself into the driver's seat, desperate to get
02:34back to the safety of the main highway. I threw the car into drive and stepped on the gas.
02:39I barely made it 15 seconds down the dark, one-lane access road, before my engine coughed,
02:46sputtered, and completely died. All the dashboard lights flickered and flatlined. The car rolled to
02:53a silent halt along the muddy shoulder. Panic seized my chest. I turned the key over and over.
02:59Nothing. The engine was entirely dead, as if it had been surgically disabled. I looked out the window.
03:08Absolute, pitch-black wilderness surrounded me on all sides, with only the decaying motel and gas
03:14station glowing ominously behind me in the distance. Stranded on a dead road in the middle of nowhere,
03:20I felt violently, terrifyingly exposed.
