User blog:LexPetitxVampire/Ghost Town

The story in which I am about to tell you is how I lost my loved ones; my wife has a half aunt – she comes from a very white trash and roughneck family – who was abused and had a horrible childhood, so when she turned eighteen, she’d often sneak away to California, and actually live her life. And on her 19thbirthday, she had always wanted to go to Calico Ghost town; one of my wife’s favorite places in California located in a desolate little desert town known only as Yermo.

So both my wife’s sisters, their husbands, myself, my wife and her half-aunt, all piled into my van (though, Charlie – my wife’s youngest sister – and my old man, her husband, Joel, took his car – yes, her family’s white trash-ness even started to spill over into my family as well) and we drove to Calico. We paid our admission into the town and parked in the dusty gravel lot, which earned my wife’s half-aunt’s – Hannah’s – ire. “I guess the wild west authenticity starts before you get into the blasted town.”

My wife looked at me and sighed at her rat like voice. “And here I thought she was a country girl.”

I thought Hannah was a country girl as well, I mean, she hailed from Utah, as did my wife and her two sisters; and the three of them were country girls through and through, but Hannah, while she would try, she would always fail. “I am a country girl, Mrs. I can’t marry within my own damn race!”

Yes, I am half Mexican, and while Charlie and Amanda married two white men, I was only half Mexican. My last name wasn’t even Mexican; you wouldn’t know I was Mexican unless I told you, and even then, most people told me I wasn’t Mexican but rather, clinically insane, until they met my family. “Okay, Miss. KKK, why don’t we all just simmer down and get something to drink?” said the oldest of the sisters, Amanda.

It was August and only 90 degrees in the shade! California’s summer heat isn’t the stuff of Hackneyed spectral lore, it’s true! No one fought Amanda over her idea and we all followed my wife and Charlie to a little store that sat at the start of the town, not the very start, but close enough.

We walked in and passed all the candy, cookies and other sugary sweets; I made a mental note to myself to come back here later. Joel, my old man, is addicted to Dr. Pepper, so he made a beeline to the fridge then to the register, while everyone else milled about, looking at the knick knacks and snapping photos here and there.

Hannah was making a huge stink over something, probably something stupid, and my sister-in-law Charlie barked at her, causing her to run from the little store in tears. I watch Charlie, and it didn’t seem like she really gave a shit for making her half-aunt cry like that. She’d probably tell me that the bitch had it coming. And truth be told, Hannah did. She was a rude and mean little girl.

We left the little store and went to check out the old gypsy wagon, and no one really seemed to care that Hannah was still gone except for Amanda. She cared much too much about people and was afraid Hannah had gotten herself lost. She told the group she was going to see where Hannah went, and her husband Chuck said he’d go with her, but she told him she’d be right back and to stay with the group.

We all gathered around the wooden sidewalk to watch a gun fight, and Chuck was obviously nervous about why his wife hadn’t come back. Poor guy, he was a Schizophrenic, yet he had someone like my sister-in-law, though, she was not for everyone but she and him both knew that tad bit of information.

People always found her to be different and even a bit strange, she dances in the rain, laughs when she’s crying, and always loved through her pain. People always fear the unknown, and most had never met a girl like her before. I went with him to see if we couldn’t find Hannah and Amanda.

Each step towards the bottom of the canyon, caused little puffs of dust to rise and swirl in the sunshine. We ended up climbing down to the bottom of a canyon, when we saw the crumpled body of Hannah. Chuck became so distraught, thinking Amanda had met the same end, poor guy was beside himself. But then we heard Amanda scream and we both smelled fire. We both ran towards the source of her scream, and I had to hold Chuck back.

A few feet away from us was Amanda, nailed to a cross much like Jesus, but her stomach had been sliced open and she was on fire. I urged him that we needed to go back to the others, and tell them what we saw, and he finally agreed, almost giving up. The two of us scrambled back up the hill and saw the group was moving up the hill of the little town, the stench of burning flesh rotting in our noses. Before we were back on the main road – nothing more than a dusty little path – Chuck was torn back down the hill.

I turned to help the guy up, I could understand why he could have slipped off of the rocky hill – his mind wasn’t on climbing, it was on the loss of his wife. But instead, I saw him crumpled – but alive – on the floor of the canyon. And standing above him was a massive man with tumorous bulges coming from his head and shoulders, and above his head, he held a pick axe. Ready to bring it down upon Chuck.

Knowing there was little to nothing I could do –aside from being murdered by the tumored freak myself – I ran back up the hill and found the group again. They were getting ready to go into the mine. My old man made some joke – apparently I had looked like I had been kicked there all the way from Orange County by someone in a bad mood - which I would have laughed at under normal circumstances – but when I told them Hannah, Amanda and Chuck were dead, the group fled into the mine.

I will admit, it felt safer down there in the mines; but my wife – the horror nerd – had to remind everyone of that movie The Hills Have Eyes, had to remind everyone that the killers lurked in the mines.

Which is where we stood – a far cry from New Mexico, granted, but that security blanket was ripped from our hands. My sister-in-law said our best plan would be to run back to the car and get the hell out of dodge.

And for once, I agreed with her. We followed her and my wife through the mine – trusting them because they were obsessed with mines and had been to Calico a few dozen times in their lives. There was a part of the mine that forked, but the girls knew which side to take to get the hell out of there, but before we could disappear down the correct tunnel, we all saw Hannah – standing there, waving to us.

My wife said she’d go get Hannah, and while I protested and tried to stop her – not something I do too often – she didn’t listen. She ran down after Hannah, and while I watched her disappear into the inky blackness of that mine tunnel, I debated whether or not if I should follow. I felt something twitch inside of me, something deep and something old, something that made me dizzy just for a second.

And like I had thought, we all heard her scream. I was beside myself in that moment, I had lost my wife of not even two years, her sister had to drag me down the correct tunnel. I had no idea if Hannah wasn’t actually dead, and was working for these freaks of nature, or if they were holding her corpse up trying to get us to go down there.

Charlie pointed at the end of the mine, at some black steel stairs and that led up – the way out of this hell hole! We let her go up first, and when she opened the door, myself and her husband heard a gunshot, and she fell upon us. Her husband caught the brunt of her, screaming. Half her head was missing!

I urged him to knock her out of the way and get out of there as I watched the mutant bound off to God knows where. I knew my old man was in a horrifying nose dive into a torturous oblivion. It took a few tries, but he wised up and shoved the corpse of his wife off of the stairs and we were both outside.

I knew my old man was beside himself with grief, he had loved Charlie, and now she was gone, but I reminded him on where we needed to go and that was back to the parking lot, back to the safety of the van. And then we needed to drive home, drive as fast as we could and get some form of help. Joel said nothing only nodded, grief having turned him mute, but we started to run in the direction of the van.

I made it to the van as did my old man, and I unlocked the car and climbed inside shutting the door and buckling my belt and even in the safety of my own van, my world was still spinning around and around, but I never heard him climb in. I looked over and didn’t see him, but still I drove off.

By the time I hit the edge of the desert, the sun was already setting, making this that much easier to see. And what I was able to see easier was flames. Shooting off about two miles deep into the desert and I felt as wobbly as a colt taking its first steps.

But the screams, the screams are what made me pull over. The fire shined in the distance like a brilliant jewel. The screams belonged to my old man, and as he screamed tied to a stake in the middle of bum fuck nowhere, I had removed myself from the van and tried to make my way out there to him. His roaring screams grew louder and louder, the closer and closer I got to him. The sound was deafening.

By the time I got to him, the flames were already dying out, as were his screams. The smell, the smell was the worst part, a combination of smoke, singed hair and boiling flesh. My old man’s eyes glinting with the fire that still burned inside of him. I untied him, and drug him back to the car – and sped off to a hospital. He passed away. He’s in a better place now with his wife. The police were sent out to Calico, and the ones that came back had the ghost town shut down. Apparently not even half the cops they sent out there came back.