Chapter 2

We drove in complete silence for what must have been an hour, the only sound the drone of the engine and the whistle of wind against the windows. The world outside had faded to black, and our headlights cut a lonely, narrow tunnel through the oppressive darkness of the desert night. My mind felt numb, shell-shocked. I kept replaying the scene in my head, trying to make sense of it, trying to find a rational explanation for what we had seen.

A person on drugs? Some kind of elaborate, cruel prank? But the speed, the way it moved... no human could do that. The memory of its loping, unnatural gait was burned into my brain. I swallowed hard, my throat dry.

"We need gas," I said, my voice sounding rough and foreign. It was the first thing either of us had said since the escape.

Emily stirred, uncurling herself slowly. In the dim glow of the dashboard lights, I could see her face was tear-streaked and pale. "Where are we?"

"I don't know," I admitted, scanning the dark horizon. "Somewhere in the middle of nowhere."

As if on cue, a faint cluster of lights appeared in the distance. A gas station. It looked like an oasis of light in an ocean of black. Relief washed over me, so potent it almost made my knees weak. Civilization. Safety. Other people.

I pulled into the brightly lit station. It was a small, dusty place with a couple of pumps and a tiny convenience store attached. A single eighteen-wheeler was parked off to the side, its engine humming quietly. As I filled the tank, the mundane act of pumping gas felt surreal. How could the world just keep going on as normal after what we had just experienced?

Inside the store, the air was cool and smelled of coffee and cleaning supplies. A large man with a grizzled beard and a faded trucker hat sat at a small table, nursing a cup of coffee. He nodded at us as we walked in. We grabbed a couple of bottles of water and some chips, our hands still shaking as we placed them on the counter.

Emily leaned against a rack of postcards, her eyes wide and vacant. "Sarah, what was that thing?"

"I don't know," I whispered back, my own mind racing. I was the pragmatic one, the one who always had an answer, but I was completely lost. "It must have been a trick of the light. The heat haze... it can make you see things."

"That wasn't the heat," she insisted, her voice trembling. "You saw how it moved. You saw its arms..."

Her voice trailed off. The trucker at the table looked up from his coffee, his expression sharp and knowing.

"You two see something out on Route 68?" he asked, his voice a low rumble.

I hesitated, not wanting to sound crazy. But Emily, past the point of caring, just nodded. "Yeah," she said faintly. "Something... waving at us from the side of the road. A tall... figure."

The trucker' s face hardened. He took a long sip of his coffee before speaking again. "And you went toward it, didn't you? Thought it was someone in trouble."

It wasn't a question.

I just stared at him, my heart starting to pound again. "How did you know?"

He let out a heavy sigh and leaned back in his chair, the plastic creaking under his weight. "You're lucky to be alive. Not many folks who get that close drive away. You saw the Desert Wendigo."

The name hung in the air, foreign and menacing. "The what?" I asked.

"Local legend," he said, his eyes dark. "Or not so much a legend. Thing's been out here as long as anyone can remember. Preys on travelers on these lonely roads."

The casual way he said it, as if he were discussing bad weather, was more terrifying than any panicked scream. It made the creature real, a known quantity, a feature of the local landscape like the cacti and the scorpions.

"It mimics people," the trucker continued, his gaze fixed on some distant point beyond the store's plate-glass window. "Waves at you, tries to look helpless. It's smart. It knows how to lure you in. Once you're out of your car, you're done. It's faster than anything you've ever seen."

A cold dread seeped into my bones, chilling me more than the store's air conditioning ever could. Everything he said matched our experience perfectly. The wave. The lure. The speed. This wasn't a hallucination. It was real.

"What... what is it?" Emily asked, her voice barely audible.

The trucker shrugged, a heavy, weary motion. "No one knows for sure. Some say it's an old spirit, a curse on this land. Others say it's something else entirely, something not from around here. All I know is, it's a monster. It hunts, and it kills. You see it, you don't stop. You don't look back. You just drive."

He stared at us, his expression grim. "You two got real, real lucky. Whatever you do, don't stop again until you hit a major town. Stay in the light."

We paid for our things in a daze, the crinkling of the chip bags and the beep of the cash register sounding like they were coming from a million miles away. The trucker's words echoed in my head, confirming our worst fears. We weren't crazy. We had encountered a local legend, a monstrous entity known for hunting people just like us.

Back in the car, a fragile sense of relief mixed with the lingering terror. We had a name for it now. The Desert Wendigo. Knowing what it was didn't make it any less horrifying, but at least we weren't just fleeing from a nameless, formless terror. We were fleeing from something known, something we now knew to avoid. Shaken, but feeling like we had narrowly survived, we pulled back onto the highway, leaving the small island of light behind and plunging back into the vast, threatening darkness of the desert.