California Dreadfuls #2: Danger at Donner Pass, is a survival-horror story of a brother and sister stranded in the woods near Donner Lake. This chapter takes place the morning after the two kids found themselves lost in the wilderness. In a dramatic car accident, the Martin, Carrie, and their dad fell down a hillside deep in the Sierras. Their Dad was pinned under the dashboard, but Martin saw that there was another car nearby with a driver still inside. They hoped to find help there...
Chapter 6
Carrie and I crawled out of the broken back window of the
minivan. Carrie looked up, for the first time, at the hill that the car fell
down the night before. She stared for a while, examining the muddy path that
our car slid down. She took off her glasses, cleaned them on her shirt, and
looked back up before saying, “Whoa. How did we live?”
“Look at the car,” I said. We both looked at the minivan. It
was dented and scraped and broken all over. It looked nothing like the car that
we left Lake Tahoe in the night before.
“Go on, guys,” Dad said from inside the car. “I’m going to
try and see if I can’t get my legs out. And see if the phone is working. Don’t
forget a water bottle, in case the driver of the other car needs it.”
“Got it, Dad,” Carrie said. “We’ll be right back.”
I led Carrie around the hill to see the little red Bug at
the bottom of the hill. “I think you’re right,” she said.
“There does look like
someone is in there!”
“Hey!” I called. “Anyone there?”
“Can you hear us?” Carrie yelled. “He’s not moving,” she
said to me. “He can’t hear us.”
We walked over to the car, slowly. Water was still dripping
in huge drops from the pine trees around us. The only sound was the birds and
the dripping water. The driver of the other car was absolutely still, probably
still sleeping. I had no idea what time it was.
We got closer and looked up the hill. There was no muddy
path that it slid down, like on the hill above our car. “How did it get here?”
Carrie said. “If it didn’t fall down the hill? Wouldn’t it be great if there is
another road nearby?”
“Maybe it’s a camper!” I said. “He could have spent the
night in his car when the rain started coming down so hard last night!”
We were getting excited and we were running faster over the
rocks and branches toward the car. As we got closer, I saw that the little car
was filled with flowers. Big, tall, yellow flowers like little sunflowers.
“Why do you think he has the car filled with flowers?” I said
to Carrie.
“Who cares?”
We got to the car and stopped just a few feet away. “Hey,”
Carrie yelled. “Hey in there, are you okay?”
“Wake up!” I yelled. “We need help! Dad is stuck in our car!
We had an accident!”
We waited a second, but the man or woman or whoever that was
in the car just sat there, not moving, leaning against the car door, his red
hair pressed against the window. Carrie finally walked up and grabbed the door
handle and pulled the door open.
We both screamed.
The man fell out of the car and onto the ground right in
front of us. We looked down and saw that he was dead and had been dead for
years. His face was a skeleton face—just deep, dark circles where his eyes used
to be; two narrow holes where he should have a nose; a grizzled red beard circled
his teeth, and another patch of hair fell off of his skull when he rested fully
on the ground. His clothes were rags and we could see bones and dried, dark
skin in the holes of his shirt.
The flowers in the car were weeds that had grown up through the floor of the car over the years.
I never thought that I would hear screams as loud as the
ones we had made the night before as the car fell down the hill into the
forest. But Carrie and I screamed and screamed, falling down backwards at the
sight of the dead man on the ground. We scrambled backwards, our legs pushing
us back as fast as we could go until our backs were resting against a tree
trunk.
“Oh my god!” I yelled. “No! No! No!”
“How long has he been
here?”
“Carrie,” I said. “He’s been here forever, and he’s never
been found! No one is going to find
us! No one knows where we are!”
