I Drive Trucks across Nevada Desert_ This is my SCARIEST Story _ Creepypasta

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
My hands wouldn't stop shaking against the cracked vinyl steering wheel,
and I knew it wasn't just the morphine withdrawal talking.
This time. Three days clean, and my body felt like
it was trying to tear itself apart from the inside out,
one screaming nerve at a time. The dashboard clock cast
its sickly green glow across my knuckles. Three forty seven AM,

(00:25):
and somewhere out there in the endless Nevada darkness, that
black suv was still following me like a patient predator.
I'd been catching glimpses of it for the last sixty miles,
sleek as a hunting shark, maintaining that perfect distance that
said professional. The vipers didn't need to tailgate me or
flash their lights. They knew I had nowhere to run,

(00:47):
not really. Fifty thousand dollars in gambling debt doesn't just
evaporate because you desperately want it to. And Tommy Rourke
wasn't exactly known for his compassionate payment plans, especially not
when it concerned the death of his baby. Marcus, the
twenty three year old bass player whose promising life had
ended in a twisted heap of metal and shattered dreams
on Highway fifty. The memory hit me like it always did,

(01:10):
sudden and vicious, Marcus's base line cutting through the screech
of brakes, the sickening crunch of impact, the way his
eyes had gone wide with terror in that split second
before everything went to hell. I could still hear him sometimes,
in the quiet moments, fingers dancing across those strings, like
he was born to make music. The kid had real talent,

(01:32):
more than I'd ever possessed, even in my prime. But
talent doesn't mean much when you're dead at twenty three
because your bandmate was too drunk and too stupid to
call a cab. My throat burned with every swallow, vocal
chords still raw and damaged from the screaming that night.
The doctors at Mercy General had been brutally honest. The
damage might be permanent, extensive trauma to the lryngeal structures.

(01:55):
They'd called it like clinical terms could somehow make the
reality less horrible. My voice came out like gravel in
a blender, now, assuming it came out at all, just
another piece of me that was broken beyond repair, like
everything else I'd managed to destroy in the past year.
The CBE radio crackled with late night truck or chatter,
disembodied voices cutting through the static, like lonely ghosts haunting

(02:17):
the airwaves. I reached for my coffee cup with trembling fingers,
found a bone dry again. That made five since reno,
my bladder screaming for relief, but my nerves demanding more caffeine.
Sleep was a luxury I couldn't afford, not with withdrawal
clawing at my brain like a rabbit animal, and the
vipers breathing down my neck with their patient, professional menace.

(02:40):
The lawsuits had taken everything. My house in Carson City,
with its tiny studio where I'd written my best songs,
my sixty seven Mustang that had been my father's pride
and joy. Most of my gear, including the Martin guitar
I'd bought with my first real paycheck, all gone to
pay legal fees and settlements that would never bring back
three talented young musicians who trusted me to get them

(03:01):
home safely. All I had left was this rusted out
Peter built and one desperate chance to make enough money
to buy some breathing room, maybe even convinced Tommy to
call off his dogs long enough for me to figure
out my next move. The radio suddenly squawked to life,
making me jump so hard I nearly swerved into the
shoulder northbound on I eighty. This is dispatch, come in silas.

(03:25):
I grabbed the handset with shaking fingers, keyed the mic
and tried to make my damaged voice work. Yeah, I'm here, Donna.
What's the word? Got some real bad news for you,
hon Avalanche came down hard on Donner Pass about two
hours ago, took out a whole section of guard rail
and blocked both lanes. Solid Caltrans is saying no eastbound

(03:45):
traffic until at least noon tomorrow, may be longer, depending
on the weather. The bottom dropped out of my stomach
like an elevator with cut cables. Noon meant dead. The
vipers had given me exactly seventy two hours to produce
their money, and I was already cutting it dangerously close.
This Vegas run was my last hope. Twenty five grand

(04:06):
for hauling a truck full of electronics, no questions asked,
and payment in cash. It would be enough to satisfy
Tommy's immediate bloodlust, maybe even by me time to figure
out a long term solution that didn't involve a shallow
grave in the desert. What about alternate roots, I asked,
though I already knew what she was going to say.
Highway fifty is your best option, but that's going to

(04:28):
add at least eight hours in this weather, maybe more
with the snow they're forecasting. I'm sorry, Silas, I know
you were counting on making Vegas by dawn. Eight hours.
I didn't have eight hours. That might as well have
been eight years, for all the good they'd do me.
I set the handset back in its cradle and stared
out at the empty highway, stretching ahead into the darkness.

(04:49):
Snow was starting to fall in earnest now, thick flakes
dancing in my headlight beams like drunken moths. The weather
was only going to get worse, and my fuel gauge
was already showing less than half a tank. That's when
I remembered what old Jake Morrison had told me at
the Pilot truck stop in Reno three weeks back, when
he'd been drinking too much and talking too loose. Jake

(05:11):
had been driving these routes since before I was born.
Knew every short cut and back road between California and Colorado.
He'd grabbed my wrist with fingers like steel cables, eyes
bloodshot and haunted by something more than just cheap whiskey.
There's another way through the mountains, he'd whispered, breath reeking
of bourbon and regret old silt Highway. Most folks don't

(05:35):
even know it exists anymore, been officially closed since the seventies.
But it's still there if you know where to look,
and it'll cut maybe four hours off your run, if
you've got the balls to use it. I'd laughed it
off at the time, figured Jake was just spinning trucker
fairy tales, the way old timers do when they've got
too much alcohol in their system and too much time
on their hands. Come on, Jake, that road's been condemned

(05:58):
for decades. Hell, I'm not even sure it was ever
a real highway to begin with. But his grip had
tightened until I could feel the bones grinding together in
my wrist, and something dark and cold had flickered behind
those roomy eyes. Rhodes real enough, son, question is whether
you're desperate enough to use it? Because that Highway. It

(06:20):
don't play by normal rules. It chews up rigs that
don't belong, spits out ghosts. You hear what I'm telling
you now, Sitting in my idling truck with snow falling
like the world was ending, and the weight of impossible
choices crushing down on my shoulders, Jake's drunken warnings didn't
seem quite so crazy. Just asphalt and ghost stories, right,

(06:45):
I'd survived worse things than rumors and old wives tales.
What was one more calculated risk when I was already
dead if I didn't take it. I pulled over at
the next rest stop, a wind scoured concrete island in
the middle of Noah, and fumbled for my phone with
trembling fingers. The screen was cracked from when I'd thrown
it against the wall after getting the final eviction notice,

(07:07):
but it still worked well enough to connect to the
truck stop's weak Wi Fi signal. I spent the next
twenty minutes digging through obscure trucking forums and archived message
boards looking for any mention of the old Silt Highway.
Most of what I found was contradictory nonsense, half remembered
directions from drivers who claimed to have used the route

(07:28):
decades ago. Urban legends about mysterious disappearances, the usual Internet
garbage that accumulates around anything mysterious or forbidden, But one
thing stayed consistent across multiple sources. There was a collapsed
tunnel entrance about forty miles east of my current position,
hidden behind what looked like a natural landslide, but wasn't

(07:48):
quite natural if you knew what to look for. The
viper's suv pulled into the rest stop just as I
was getting ready to leave, sliding into a parking space
with predatory grace. Through my side mirror, I caught a
glimpse of the driver, Latino guy with prison tattoos crawling
up his neck like dark vines, expensive sunglasses. Despite the hour,

(08:09):
he didn't wave or acknowledge my presence in any way.
He didn't need to. The message was crystal clear. We're watching,
we're waiting, and we're not going anywhere. My hands were
shaking worse now. As I put the rig back in
gear and pulled onto the interstate, the snow was falling harder,
reducing visibility to maybe a quarter mile in my headlight beams.

(08:32):
Normal driving conditions would have forced me to find a
place to park and wait it out, but normal had
stopped applying to my life the night I decided to
drive drunk with three passengers who trusted me to get
them home safely. Twenty five minutes later, I found what
I was looking for. The landslide looked exactly like the
forum posts had described, two perfectly arranged to be completely natural,

(08:55):
massive boulders, stacked and positioned like someone had tried to
conceal something rather than simply block access. Between the gaps
and the rock fall, I could make out the dark
mouth of a tunnel, just wide enough for a semi
if the driver didn't mind scraping paint off both sides
of his trailer. I sat there for a long moment,
with the engine idling, listening to the wind howl through

(09:15):
the CAB's worn weather stripping, and watching snow pile up
on my windshield. This was absolutely insane. I was about
to drive into a tunnel that had been deliberately sealed
off for good reasons, chasing ghost stories and trucker legends
because I was too proud and too terrified to face
the consequences of my own stupidity. But the alternative was worse.

(09:36):
The alternative was Tommy Rourke and whatever creative revenge he'd
been planning for the man who'd killed his baby brother.
I'd heard stories about what happened to people who owed
the Viper's money, stories that made conventional bankruptcy seem like
a vacation in paradise. I put the rig in gear
and aimed for the narrow gap between the boulders. The
scraping started immediately, metal on stone, a grinding shriek that

(09:59):
set my teeth on edge and made my spine crawl.
For one terrifying moment, I was convinced I'd misjudge the
clearance completely, that I'd get wedged in here like a
cork in a bottle and die slowly while the vipers
took their time deciding how to dispose of my corpse.
Then my trailer cleared the last obstruction, and I was
through headlights, cutting into absolute darkness that seemed to swallow

(10:21):
the beams like hungry black water. The change was immediate
and fundamentally wrong. The desert heat that had been seeping
through my windows despite the snow vanished instantly, replaced by
a bone deep cold that made my breath mist and
turned my knuckles white where they gripped the steering wheel.
Outside the cab, the stars simply disappeared, as if someone

(10:42):
had thrown a thick blanket over the entire sky. My
GPS screen flickered once twice, then went completely dark. The
CEBE radio dissolved into static, then something much worse, a low,
guttural growling that seemed to emanate from the road itself.
But it was the asphalt beneath my tires that made
my skin crawl with primal terror. The highway surface was

(11:06):
wrong in every possible way, too dark, like dried blood
under my headlights, with a sticky organic appearance that made
me think of tar pits and prehistoric things trapped forever.
Beneath the surface, Ancient skeletal trees pressed in from both
sides of the narrow roadway, their gnarled branches scraping against

(11:26):
my trailer with sounds like fingernails dragging across a coffin lid.
And underneath it all, vibrating up through the floorboards and
into my bones, was something that wasn't quite sound and
wasn't quite sensation, A hum, deep and resonant and alive,
like the contented purring of some massive predator that had
just cornered its prey. I tried desperately to rationalize what

(11:49):
I was experiencing. Just road noise amplified by tunnel acoustics,
just my withdrawal addled brain, playing tricks in the darkness,
just the normal sounds of an old, old truck on
rough pavement. But every survival instinct I developed through forty
years of dangerous living was screaming the same primal message.
I was being watched, I was being hunted, and I

(12:12):
was no longer the one in control of this situation.
The steering wheel fought against my hands like a living thing,
and I realized, with growing horror that the truck was
responding to something other than my input. The asphalt seemed
to grip my tires with deliberate, intelligent purpose, guiding me
forward whether I wanted to go or not. My headlights,
powerful enough to cut through desert darkness at highway speeds,

(12:35):
barely penetrated the oppressive blackness that pressed against the windshield
like thick velvet. I wasn't driving any more. I was
being swallowed. The hum grew stronger as I drove deeper
into the unnatural darkness, vibrating up through my seat and
into my spine like the purr of some massive patient predator.
My headlights seemed weaker, now barely cutting through the oppressive

(12:57):
blackness that pressed against the windshield like thick velvet. The
skeletal trees crowded closer to the narrow roadway, their gnarled
branches scraping against my trailer with sounds that made my
teeth ache and my skin crawl. I'd been driving for
maybe ten minutes since entering the tunnel, though time felt
wrong here, stretched and distorted like everything else. When I

(13:19):
first caught movement in my side mirror, at first I
thought it was just shadows cast by the twisted trees,
tricks of light and exhaustion playing games with my withdrawal
addled brain. But then I saw it clearly, and my
blood turned to ice in my veins. Liquid darkness was
pouring from the tree line, like oil, flowing across the
sticky black asphalt with impossible grace. As I watched in

(13:43):
horrified fascination, the flowing shadow began to coalesce, taking on
a shape that shouldn't exist in any rational world. It
formed into something roughly the size of a large dog,
but wrong in every fundamental way. The thing moved with
predatory purpose, keeping perfect pace with my truck, despite running
on what should have been solid ground. Its eyes were

(14:05):
the worst part, two burning embers in a face made
of shifting shadow, glowing with malevolent intelligence and ancient hunger.
They fixed on my mirror with unwavering focus, and I
felt the weight of that alien gaze like ice water
in my veins. This wasn't some mindless, supernatural phenomenon. This
thing was aware, intelligent, and utterly focused on me. I

(14:28):
pressed harder on the accelerator, but the speedometer needle barely moved.
The truck felt sluggish, unresponsive, as if the road itself
was fighting my attempts to escape. The shadow hound matched
my speed effortlessly, its burning eyes never wavering from their target. Then,
with growing horror, I realized it wasn't alone. Two more

(14:49):
shapes emerged from the opposite tree line, flowing like liquid
night across the asphalt. They took positions on my left flank,
forming a loose triangle around my rig. The coordination was perfect, professional,
like a pack of wolves that had hunted together for centuries.
They made no sound that I could hear over the
engine and the ever present hum, But their presence radiated

(15:10):
malevolence so pure it made my damaged throat constrict with
primal fear. I tried to convince myself it was hallucination,
withdrawal induced psychosis, brought on by three days without morphine
and too many hours without sleep. But the rational part
of my mind knew better. These things were real, solid
enough to cast shadows in my headlight beams, real enough

(15:32):
to move with purpose and intelligence, and they were hunting me.
The lead shadow hounds suddenly burst forward, covering the distance
to my truck in a heartbeat. I braced for impact,
but there was none. Instead, the thing simply flowed onto
my hood like spilled ink, its forms spreading across the
windshield without weight or substance. Where it touched the glass,

(15:53):
frost exploded outward in crystalline patterns that defied the desert
heat I had left behind in the normal world. The
temperature inside the cab plummeted so fast my breath came
out in visible puffs. Ice began forming on the inside
of my windows, and in that frost, words began to
etch themselves with deliberate terrifying precision silence, your song pay.

(16:17):
Before I could process what was happening, the c Bee
radio crackled to life with a sound that drove ice
picks through my heart. It was music, my band's last song,
the one we'd played at that final fatal gig. Marcus's
bass line cut through the static, note perfect and heartbreakingly clear.
But underneath the melody was something else, something that made

(16:38):
my hands shake on the steering wheel. The screech of tires,
the crunch of twisted metal, the sound of three young
musicians dying because their bandmate was too drunk to drive straight.
I opened my mouth to scream, to rage against the
violation of my most painful memory, but nothing came out,
not even the damaged croak that had been my voice
since the accident, just empty silence where my voice should

(17:00):
have been. I clawed at my throat with one hand
while fighting to keep the truck on the road with
the other, but I couldn't make a sound. The shadow
thing had stolen my voice, ripped it away as payment
for whatever twisted toll this road demanded. The frost on
the windshield melted as suddenly as it had formed. The
shadow Hound flowing off my hood and back into the
darkness between the trees. But the damage was done. My

(17:24):
voice was gone, stolen along with something else, a piece
of that horrible memory, a fragment of sensation and detail
that left a cold, empty void where it used to be.
I could still remember the accident, but it felt distant now, clinical,
like reading about someone else's tragedy in a newspaper. The
three shadow hounds resumed their positions, pacing my truck with

(17:47):
tireless patience. They'd fed, and I could sense their satisfaction
in the way they moved, less urgent now but still watchful,
still hungry for more. I tried to rationalize what had
just happened, to find some logical explanation for the impossible
altitude sickness maybe, or carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty

(18:08):
exhaust system. But deep in my gut, where instinct lived,
I knew the truth. This road was alive, intelligent, and
it was taking pieces of me bit by bit. The
voice was just the beginning. My hands trembled on the
steering wheel as I drove deeper into the unnatural darkness.
The hum had changed, become more personal somehow, as if

(18:30):
it were resonating with something inside my chest, now that
part of me belonged to it. Every few seconds, I
caught myself trying to hum along, to match that deep,
thrumming vibration with vocal cords that no longer worked. The
urge was disturbing, alien like the road was trying to
reprogram my brain to its frequency. The asphalt beneath my
tires felt different, too, less like pavement and more like

(18:54):
something organic. It gripped my wheels with deliberate purpose, guiding
me down curve I hadn't chosen to take around bends
that led deeper into the skeletal forest. When I tried
to slow down, the truck barely responded. When I attempted
to steer toward what looked like a shoulder, the wheel
fought me like a living thing. I wasn't driving any more.

(19:15):
I was being driven. The road had control now, and
I was just cargo being delivered to whatever nightmare waited
at the end of this impossible journey. The mile markers,
when I could see them in the weak glow of
my headlights, made no sense. Mile thirteen, then mile fifteen,
then mile eleven. They appeared and disappeared, in the darkness

(19:35):
like fever dreams, confirming what my gut had been telling me.
The normal rules of space and time didn't apply here.
This wasn't just a road. It was a trap, a
maze designed to confuse and disorient its victims until they
were completely at its mercy. My fuel gage was dropping
faster than it should, the needle sinking toward empty with

(19:57):
each passing mile. The engine temperature was cl dim too,
despite the supernatural cold that had invaded my cab. It
was as if the road was draining my truck's life force,
along with my own, feeding on diesel and anti freeze
and whatever else it needed to sustain its hungry existence.
I passed the same lightning struck tree three times, its
twisted branches reaching across the road like grasping fingers. Each

(20:21):
time I saw it, a fresh wave of panic crashed
over me. I was trapped in a loop, caught in
the road's digestive system like a fly in amber. The
shadow hounds kept pace with mechanical precision, their burning eyes
never wavering from their vigil. They weren't trying to catch
me anymore. They were hurting me, driving me towards some
predetermined destination. The CBE radio crackled with static, then fell silent.

(20:47):
My dashboard lights flickered and dimmed. Even my truck, faithful
companion through a thousand lonely miles, was being systematically drained
by this hungry, living road. Soon I'd be dead in
the water, completely helpless against whatever was waiting in the
darkness ahead. But it was the hum that frightened me most.

(21:08):
It had become a physical presence, now vibrating in my
bones and making my teeth ache worse. It was starting
to feel familiar, almost comforting, like a lullaby sung by
something that wanted to devour me. I caught myself relaxing
into its rhythm, letting it wash over me in waves
of alien contentment. The road wanted me to surrender, to

(21:29):
give up fighting, and let it carry me to whatever
fate it had planned. And the most terrifying part was
how tempting that surrender was becoming. My body ached from withdrawal,
my throat burned from the theft of my voice, and
my mind reeled from the violation of my most painful memories.
It would be so easy to just let go, to
stop fighting, and let the hum carry me away. From

(21:52):
all the pain and guilt and fear. But somewhere in
the back of my mind, Tommy Rourke's face swam up
from the darkness, Marcus's brother, the man whose debt had
driven me to this nightmare road in the first place.
If I died here, if I disappeared into whatever hungry
void was waiting at the end of this journey, he'd
never get his money. The families of the other musicians

(22:14):
I'd killed would never get their justice. My death would
be meaningless, just another vanishing on a road that didn't
officially exist. I gripped the steering wheel tighter and pressed
harder on the accelerator, even though it made no difference
to my speed. The shadow hounds adjusted their positions, tightening
the noose around my truck. In my mirrors, I could
see more shapes flowing from the trees, reinforcements, or maybe

(22:37):
just scavengers drawn by the scent of fresh prey. The
road curved ahead, disappearing into absolute darkness between towering pines
that looked older than human civilization. I had no choice
but to follow where it led, no option but to
see this nightmare through to whatever conclusion waited in the
blackness ahead. As my head lights swept across another impossible

(22:58):
mile marker, mile thirteen. Again, I understood with crystal clarity
what was happening to me. I wasn't just lost on
a dangerous road. I wasn't even just being hunted by
supernatural predators. I was being processed, prepared, broken down into
digestible pieces, by something ancient and patient and utterly alien.

(23:18):
The shadow Hounds weren't trying to kill me. They were
tenderizing me, making me easier to swallow when the time came,
and somewhere ahead in the darkness, growing stronger with each
stolen piece of my humanity, something vast and hungry was
waiting to finish the meal. The shadow Hounds had been
pacing me for what felt like hours, though my dashboard
clock had stopped working entirely, its digital display flickering between

(23:42):
impossible times before going dark. Without my voice to curse
or prey or even whisper reassurances to myself. The silence
inside the cab felt absolute, broken only by the relentless
hum that had burrowed so deep into my bones I
could no longer tell where it ended, and my own
heartbeat began. The mile markers continued their impossible dance mile thirteen,

(24:06):
mile fifteen, mile eleven, mile thirteen, again, like a cosmic
joke being played by something with a twisted sense of humor.
Each time I passed the same lightning struck tree, its
gnarled branches reaching across the narrow road like arthritic fingers,
I felt another piece of my sanity crack and fall away.
The loop was tightening, the road's grip on reality growing stronger,

(24:30):
while mine weakened. With each revolution through this nightmare carousel,
my fuel gauge had dropped to less than a quarter tank,
though I'd barely been driving for what seemed like an hour.
The needle trembled, as if the gauge itself was afraid,
and I found myself wondering if the road was literally
drinking my diesel, converting fossil fuel into whatever dark energy

(24:51):
sustained its hungry existence. The engine temperature was climbing too,
despite the supernatural cold that had turned my breath to
mist frosted the inside of my windows. The shadow hounds
maintained their triangular formation with mechanical precision, their burning ember
eyes never wavering from their vigil. They'd grown bolder since

(25:11):
feeding on my voice, occasionally flowing closer to the truck
before retreating, like sharks testing the waters before a feeding frenzy.
I could sense their satisfaction, their patient anticipation. They knew
something I didn't knew what was coming next, and whatever
twisted ritual this road demanded. That's when I saw it ahead,
and my blood turned to ice water in my veins.

(25:33):
The road was moving, not just the usual organic rippling
I'd grown accustomed to, but actual, deliberate movement. The asphalt
was splitting apart, like flesh peeling back in wet, horrible
strips that revealed something underneath that shouldn't exist. The pavement
opened like a massive wound, exposing a pit so deep
my headlights couldn't find the bottom. The edges weren't clean brakes.

(25:56):
They pulsed and writhed, like the lips of some enormous mouth,
dripping with a substance that looked like liquefied shadow. The maw.
It stretched across the entire width of the road, maybe
forty feet from edge to edge, impossibly vast and hungry.
From its depths came a sound that made the hum
seem like a gentle whisper, a roaring, grinding noise, like

(26:17):
massive teeth gnashing together, like the earth itself was chewing.
The air above the pit shimmered with heat distortion, though
everything else around me remained freezing cold. But it was
what writhed inside the pit that truly broke my mind.
Tendrils of pure darkness lashed upward from the depths, thick
as telephone poles and moving with predatory intelligence. They swayed

(26:40):
like cobras, testing the air, seeking prey. Where they touched
the edges of the road, the asphalt hissed and smoked,
dissolving under their caustic touch. These weren't just shadows. They
were extensions of something vast and alien, tentacles of a
creature so large that what I was seeing was just
a tiny fraction of its true form. I slammed on

(27:02):
the brakes with both feet, but the truck barely slowed.
The road had complete control, now dragging me forward. Despite
my efforts to stop, The shadow hounds abandoned their flanking
positions and flowed ahead of me, forming a living barrier
that prevented any chance of escape. Behind me, the road
had already begun to close off, sealing my retreat with

(27:23):
fresh asphalt that bubbled up from nowhere. The hum became
a deafening roar as I approached the pit, vibrating through
every atom of my being. My teeth felt loose in
my skull, my bones ached, and something warm and wet
trickled from my ears. The sound wasn't just noise, It
was communication, the voice of something so ancient and alien

(27:46):
that human minds weren't equipped to process it. Then the
tendrils struck. Three of them, punched through my air vents
like spears, moving faster than my eyes could follow. The
metal grills shredded like tissue paper, and suddenly the calab
was full of writhing, caustic darkness. Where the tendrils touched,
frost exploded outward in crystalline patterns that hurt to look at.

(28:09):
The temperature plummeted so fast that my breath came out
in clouds, and ice began forming on every surface Inside
the truck, the cold burned worse than fire. My hands,
still gripping the steering wheel, went numb within seconds. My feet,
pressed uselessly against the brake pedal lost all sensation. But
it was when the tendrils wrapped around my left arm.

(28:31):
That the real agony began. Pain beyond description shot up
from my elbow to my shoulder, a burning, tearing sensation,
like my arm was being dipped in liquid nitrogen while
simultaneously electrocuted. I opened my mouth to scream, but of
course no sound came out. The road had already stolen
my voice. All I could do was writhe in silent agony,
as whatever force animated those tendrils began to dig deeper,

(28:54):
seeking something more precious than flesh. Words formed in the
frost on my windshield, etched by an visible finger, forget
their touch, pay, And suddenly I was there again. In
that final moment before everything went wrong, Marcus was laughing
at something our drummer Jake had said, his fingers dancing
across the bass strings in a warm up riff. Our

(29:15):
lead guitarist Sarah was tuning her stratocaster, humming along to
the melody. The green room at O'Malley's was thick with
cigarette smoke and the nervous energy that came before a
good show. Sarah had reached over and squeezed my shoulder,
her calloused fingertips warm through my thin t shirt. You
ready for this, silas this crowd's gonna love us. Marcus

(29:35):
had bumped his fist against mine, grinning with the infectious
enthusiasm that had made him impossible not to love. Best
band in Carson City right here, We're gonna kill it tonight,
Jake had nodded at me across his drum kit, steady
and reliable as always, the rhythm section backbone that held
us all together. The memory was so vivid, so perfect,

(29:58):
that for a moment I forgot where I was. I
could smell Sarah's perfume, feel the warmth of human contact,
hear the promise in our shared laughter. This was what
I'd lost that night, not just three talented musicians, but
the last time I'd felt genuinely connected to other human beings,
the last time anyone had touched me with affection instead

(30:18):
of anger or pity. Then the memory shattered, The tendrils
ripped it away like pages torn from a book, leaving
behind a cold, clinical void where warmth used to live.
I could still remember the events, but the emotional connection
was gone. The feeling of Sarah's hand on my shoulder,
Marcus's playful fist bump, Jake's encouraging nod. All of it vanished,

(30:42):
replaced by empty facts as lifeless as newspaper headlines. Simultaneously,
all sensation disappeared from my left hand, not just numbness,
complete absence of feeling, as if the hand had simply
ceased to exist below the wrist. I looked down in
horror to see my fingers had gone bone white, like

(31:03):
marble or bleached driftwood. The skin had taken on a waxy,
artificial appearance that made my stomach lurch with revulsion. The
tendrils withdrew as suddenly as they'd appeared, retracting into the
depths of the maw with wet, sliding sounds. The pit
began to close, the lips of torn asphalt pulling together
like a healing wound. Within seconds, the road looked normal again,

(31:27):
if anything about this nightmare highway could be called normal.
But I wasn't normal. I was diminished, hollowed out, missing
pieces of my humanity that I would never get back.
My left hand hung lifeless at my side, a constant
reminder of what I'd lost. The memory of human touch,
the last vestige of connection to the people I'd killed,

(31:49):
was gone forever. The shadow hounds reformed their triangular escort,
but I could sense a change in them. They were
more satisfied, now less hungry, like predators that had just
enjoyed a particularly fine meal. The hum dropped to a
contented purr, and I realized with sick certainty that this
was how they fed, not on flesh or blood, but

(32:12):
on memory and sensation, on the very essence of what
made their victims human. My truck lurched forward under its
own power, the engine responding to commands I wasn't giving.
The steering wheel turned without my input, guiding us around
a curve I hadn't seen coming. My dead hand bounced
on my lap like a foreign object. Pale and cold
and utterly sensationless. I tried to make sense of what

(32:35):
had just happened, to catalog my losses like an accountant
tallying debts. My voice gone, a crucial memory drained of
all emotional content. The feeling in my left hand vanished.
What would be next? How many pieces of me could
this road take before there wasn't enough left to qualify
as human. But even as despair threatened to swallow me whole,

(32:57):
a stubborn spark of defiance flickered in my chest. Tommy
Rourke's face swam up from the depths of my mind.
Not the grief stricken brother seeking justice, but the cold
eyed criminal who'd threatened to gut me like a fish
if I didn't pay his money, If I gave up now,
if I let this road consume me completely, his threats

(33:18):
would never be fulfilled. The families of my victims would
never get their justice. My death would be meaningless, just
another unexplained disappearance on a highway that didn't officially exist.
The road curved again, and suddenly there was light ahead.
Not the sickly glow of my failing headlights, but the
warm yellow light of electricity. As we rounded the bend,

(33:40):
I saw salvation rising from the darkness like a mirage.
It was a building, the first sign of human construction
I'd seen since entering this nightmare, A low, single story
structure built from weathered wood and corrugated metal, with a
neon sign that flickered erratically in the window. Elijah's last stand.
The sign read, with smaller text underneath, advertising cold beer

(34:03):
and hot food in letters that had seen better decades.
A roadside bar, a haven, a place where other human
beings might exist, people who could help me understand what
was happening, or at least bear witness to my suffering.
The shadow hounds fell back as my truck coasted to
a stop in the gravel parking lot, but they didn't disappear.

(34:26):
They arranged themselves in a loose, semicircle around the building,
ember eyes glowing patiently in the darkness, waiting, watching, making
it clear that this wasn't escape, It was just the
next stage in whatever twisted game they were playing. My
engine died without me turning the key. The headlights flickered
once and went dark. Even my dashboard lights faded, leaving

(34:49):
me in perfect darkness except for the neon glow from
the bar's windows. In that unnatural quiet, the hum seemed
louder than ever, vibrating up from the ground beneath the
truck and resonation in the building's walls. I sat there
for a long moment, cradling my dead left hand with
my right, trying to summon the courage to face whatever
waited inside. The bar looked normal enough, pick up trucks

(35:13):
in the parking lot, warm lights spilling from the windows,
the comforting promise of human contact and cold beer. But
I'd learned not to trust appearances on this road. Nothing
was what it seemed here. Still, what choice did I have?
The shadow hounds blocked every avenue of escape, and my
truck was as dead as my voice. If there were

(35:34):
answers to be found, if there was any hope of survival,
it lay inside that flickering neon sanctuary. I grabbed the
door handle with my good hand and stepped out into
the cold night air. My boots crunched on gravel that
felt real enough, and the wind carried the scent of
pine trees and something else, something organic and slightly rotten,

(35:56):
like meat left too long in the sun. The bar's
door was heavy, wood, reinforced with metal bands, like something
built to keep things out, or maybe to keep things in.
I pushed it open with my shoulder, the hinges creaking
in the universal language of old buildings everywhere. The warmth
hit me immediately, along with the smell of stale beer

(36:16):
and cigarette smoke. For a moment, hope flared in my chest.
This felt real, normal, human, But as my eyes adjusted
to the dim interior lighting, that hope curdled into fresh horror.
The bar was full of people, all right. They sat
at tables and along the bar, drinks in their hands,

(36:36):
cigarettes burning in ash trays. They looked like truckers and locals,
the kind of weathered faces you'd expect in a roadside dive.
But they weren't moving, they weren't breathing, and when I
looked closer, I could see the ice. Each patron was
encased in a shell of crystal clear ice, perfectly preserved

(36:57):
but utterly dead. Their face were locked in expressions of
terror so pure it made my knees buckle wide, eyes
gaping mouths, hands clawed, as if they died trying to
scratch their way out of some invisible prison. They looked
like museum exhibits, frozen moments of absolute horror, captured for eternity.

(37:19):
Behind the bar, the bartender stood in the same crystalline tomb,
one hand reaching for a bottle of whiskey he would
never pour. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, and
frost had formed elaborate patterns across his weathered face. On
the wall behind him, scraped into the wood with fingernails
or maybe broken glass, were words that made my remaining

(37:41):
sanity creak like old floorboards. It takes until you are
nothing but cold, give it the anchor. And there, sitting
on the bar like an offering, was a chunk of
black volcanic glass, obsidian sharp enough to cut enough to burn.
Even from across the room, I could feel the unnatural

(38:04):
chill radiating from its surface. The door slammed shut behind me.
The frozen patrons stared at me with their terror locked
eyes as I stood paralyzed in the doorway of Elijah's
Last stand. The warmth I'd felt upon entering was already fading,
replaced by the same bone deep cold that had stolen

(38:24):
pieces of me on the road outside. Ice crystals began
forming on my breath as the temperature plummeted, and I
realized with sick certainty that this wasn't refuge. It was
the final stage of whatever twisted ritual the road demanded.
The obsidian shard on the bar seemed to pulse with
malevolent energy, drawing my gaze like a magnet. Even from

(38:47):
across the room, I could feel its unnatural cold radiating outward,
making my dead left hand throb with phantom sensation. This
was the focal point, the instrument of my destruction, and
I was being herded toward it as surely as cattle
to slaughter. That's when the voice spoke, not through frost

(39:08):
etched words this time, but directly into my mind, with
the grinding, multi layered whisper of something ancient and utterly alien.
The sound scraped against the inside of my skull like
broken glass, and I tasted blood as something warm trickled
from my nose. Your regret is rich, it said, each

(39:30):
word a physical blow. Your fear is ambrosia. Give me
the root, give me the reason you run. The meaning
hit me like a sledgehammer. It didn't want another memory, fragment,
or another piece of flesh. It wanted the core of
my guilt, the foundation upon which my entire identity was built.

(39:50):
It wanted my music, not just the ability to play,
but the passion that had driven me to pick up
a guitar in the first place, the creative spark that
had made me believe I could be something more than
just another nobody drifting through life. The temperature dropped so
fast that frost began forming on the inside of my jacket.

(40:10):
My breath came out in thick clouds, and I could
feel my remaining functional fingers growing numb. The frozen patrons
seemed to lean forward in their icy tombs, as if
eager to witness the completion of whatever process had claimed
them the anchor that binds you to meaning. The voice
continued its alien cadence, making my teeth ache the last

(40:34):
thread of what you were. Surrender it and no peace.
Refuse and join them in their eternal watching. I looked
at the ice in cased victims and saw my future
written in their horrified expressions. This was what happened to
those who refused the road's final demand, Trapped forever as witnesses,
conscious but powerless, watching as other travelers were broken down

(40:57):
piece by peace. Death would be merciful compared to that fate.
But my guitar was in the sleeper cab of my truck,
the last tangible connection to the person I'd been before
the accident, My father's Gibson Les Paul, the one he'd
taught me to play on when I was twelve years old.
It represented every song I'd ever written, every moment of

(41:21):
joy i'd found in creating something beautiful from nothing. If
I gave that up, what would be left of silas vance.
The cold intensified until I could barely feel my feet.
My jacket crackled with forming ice, and when I exhaled,
the moisture froze instantly and fell to the floor in
tiny crystals. I had maybe minutes before hypothermia claimed me,

(41:44):
but the truck felt impossibly far away. With my good hand,
I grabbed the obsidian shard from the bar. It burned
with cold so intense it felt like gripping molten metal,
and I had to bite down on my tongue to
keep from dropping it. The thing seemed to pulse in
my grasp, eager for whatever sacrifice it was about to receive.

(42:04):
I stumbled back outside into the night air, which felt
tropical compared to the supernatural cold inside the bar. The
shadow hounds watched from their positions around the parking lot,
but made no move to stop me. They knew I
had nowhere to run, knew that the ritual was already
too far advanced to abandon now. My truck's door was

(42:25):
frozen shut, but I managed to wrench it open with
my elbow. The sleeper cab felt like a tomb as
I crawled inside, my numb fingers fumbling for the case
that held my father's guitar. When I found it and
clicked open the latches. The familiar sight of the honey
sunburst finish nearly broke what was left of my resolve.
This guitar had been my companion through fifteen years of

(42:47):
playing dingy clubs and recording demos that nobody wanted to hear.
It had been with me the night I met Marcus
and Jake and Sarah, the night we decided to form
a band and chase the impossible dream of making it big.
Every song I'd ever written, every moment of transcendence I'd
found in music, was bound up in this instrument. But

(43:08):
the alternative was worse than losing my identity. It was
becoming a conscious prisoner, trapped forever in ice. While other
victims were processed around me, I carried the guitar back
to the bar, the obsidian shard clutched in my dead
left hand. The frozen patrons watched with their terrible, knowing
eyes as I laid the gibson across the surface of

(43:30):
the bar and raised the volcanic glass like a pick.
Play your final note, the voice commanded, and I understood
with crystalline clarity what was required. The obsidian shard came
down like a guillotine on my left pinky fingertip, the
same finger I'd use to fret countless chords on this

(43:50):
very guitar. The impact shattered more than just flesh and bone.
It shattered something fundamental inside me, some core connection between
my so and the music that had defined my existence.
There was no blood. Instead, my finger tip exploded into
black frost that swirled around the obsidian shard like smoke.

(44:13):
The volcanic glass began to glow with that familiar, malevolent
blue light, and I felt something precious and irreplaceable being
ripped out of my chest. Not a memory this time,
but the capacity to feel music as anything more than
organized noise. The shadow hounds flowed into the bar like
liquid darkness, their forms dissolving and merging with the charged

(44:35):
obsidian shard. The blue glow intensified until I had to
look away, and when it finally faded, the shard had
vanished entirely. In its place, my finger tip had been
replaced by smooth, cold obsidian that seemed to pulse with
its own internal rhythm. The crushing cold receded instantly. The
hum dropped to a barely audible whisper Around me. The

(44:59):
frozen patron began to crack and crumble, their icy prisons
dissolving as whatever force had sustained them moved on. They
didn't wake up. They'd been dead for decades, but their
bodies finally found the rest that had been denied them.
I stumbled outside to find my truck's engine running, headlights
cutting through the darkness. Ahead. The road stretched out before me,

(45:23):
no longer the organic, predatory thing it had been, but
just ordinary asphalt leading back to the normal world. In
the distance, I could see the first gray light of
dawn touching the horizon. The drive back to civilization passed
in a haze of exhaustion and hollow victory. I made
my delivery in Vegas just as the sun crested the mountains,

(45:44):
collected my twenty five thousand dollars in cash, and drove
straight to the drop point Tommy Rourke had specified. The
envelope of money disappeared into the shadows of an abandoned warehouse,
and with it the immediate threat of violent retribution. But
I felt nothing, no relief, no satisfaction, no sense of accomplishment.

(46:07):
The passion that had once driven me to create music
was gone, replaced by a cold void that no amount
of success could fill. I quit trucking that same day,
sold my rig to a used car lot, and used
the remainder of my money to rent a small apartment
in downtown Vegas. I found work tuning pianos for the
casinos and hotels, a job that required technical skill but

(46:29):
no emotional investment. My damaged voice didn't matter when all
I had to do was adjust strings and hammers. The
work was methodical, precise, and utterly soulless, perfect for what
i'd become weeks past. I adapted to my new limitations,
learned to function with a dead left hand and an

(46:50):
obsidian fingertip that never warmed. I avoided mirrors when possible,
Disturbed by the hollow look in my own eyes, sleep
came in fits and starts, haunted by dreams of endless
dark roads and the grinding voice of something ancient and patient.
But it was music that truly revealed the extent of
my loss. I'd kept the Gibson more out of habit

(47:14):
than hope, and sometimes, in the quiet hours before dawn,
I'd take it out and try to play. My fingers
remembered the chord progressions, the scales, the intricate patterns I'd
spent years perfecting, but the music that emerged was hollow, technical, lifeless.
It was like listening to a player piano, mechanically perfect,

(47:37):
but utterly without soul. The creative spark that had once
burned so brightly in my chest was gone, stolen along
with my finger tip, and fed to whatever hungry darkness
lived beneath the old silt highway. I could play music,
but I could no longer feel it. I was a
musician without music, a songwriter without songs. Three months after

(48:01):
my encounter with the road, I was tuning a grand
piano in the empty theater of the Bullaggio when I
heard it again, the hum. At first I thought it
was just the piano strings resonating some harmonic frequency created
by the tuning process. But as I worked, the sound
grew stronger, more distinct. It was coming from below, vibrating

(48:22):
up through the floorboards and into the piano's sound board,
and it was emanating from my left hand, specifically from
the obsidian shard that had replaced my finger tip. I
pressed the black stone against the piano's frame, and the
hum intensified into something I could feel in my bones.
The sound was hungry, patient, and utterly familiar. It was

(48:44):
the same frequency that had drawn me deeper into the
road's trap, the same alien rhythm that had resonated with
my captured humanity. But this time I understood what it meant.
The black top hound hadn't released me, It had conscripted
me the obsidian. My finger wasn't just a scar. It
was an anchor, a beacon, a permanent link between my

(49:06):
physical presence and the ancient predator that lurked beneath forgotten highways.
Through that connection, it could sense every road I traveled,
every driver, I encountered, every soul desperate enough to take
the dangerous short cut. I was its early warning system,
its lure, its judas goat. When the hum grew stronger,

(49:29):
it meant the entity was active somewhere, feeding on fresh
victims who'd made the same desperate choice I had, And
my presence in the civilized world, my proximity to major
highways and trucking routes, was like a dinner bell, calling
the hungry darkness up from the depths. The worst part
was understanding that the connection worked both ways. Just as

(49:52):
the hound could sense potential prey through my movements. It
could also call me back. I felt it sometimes in
the deep hours of the night, a pull toward the desert,
toward the hidden places where desperate people made terrible choices.
The obsidian would grow cold against my skin, and I'd
find myself standing at my apartment window, staring out at

(50:14):
the lights of I fifteen and fighting the urge to
walk back into the darkness. I wasn't a survivor. I
was a recruiter, an unwitting agent of the thing that
had devoured my humanity piece by piece. Every day I
remained in the world of the living was another day
the black top Hound could use my presence to hunt

(50:35):
every trucker who passed my apartment building. Every desperate soul
contemplating a dangerous short cut was potentially marked by my proximity.
The road hadn't finished with me. It had made me
into part of itself, a walking wound in reality through
which it could smell fear and desperation from hundreds of
miles away. I was the bait, the trap, the reason.

(50:58):
Other silas Vances would find themselves on midnight highways with
no good choices left, and in my dreams I could
hear them screaming all the voices the road would steal,
all the memories, it would devour, all the lives, it
would hollow out and use as instruments of its patient hunger.
I was their profit, their herald, their unwitting executioner. The

(51:22):
Blacktop Hound was ancient and patient. It could wait decades
between feedings, content to let its human anchor walk among
the living and mark potential prey. But it was always there,
always listening, always ready to open its maw when someone
desperate enough came within range. I wasn't free. I was

(51:45):
a scar on the world, and through that scar, the
Blacktop Hound could smell every road, every driver, every soul
stupid enough to think they could cheat fate by taking
the short cut. The hunt never ended. It had just
found a better way to feed.