I slowly yawed my head around, and found....Catalie?!! What was she doing here? How the hell did she even get here?

I didn't know. I didn't understand.

"Jucas," she chanted. Catalie was dressed in white, and an enigmatic light beamed from her eyes. But her eyes... her eyes... they were grappling onto me. For some reason, I couldn't breathe."Jucas."

"Do you....only kn-know....that word-d??" I could feel my soul detaching from my body. I no longer felt in control of my physical movements.

"Jucas," she gestured at me to come closer. As if on a reflex, my body obeyed. I was being hypnotized.

'This can't be real,'I thought. I couldn't believe this. I knew Catalie was back at her motel. But this woman resembled her perfectly. It was too good to be true. I didn't want to believe my eyes, but my eyes made me believe.

"Die, bitch!' I tugged on the trigger of my gun and sent a pack of bullets through her, without any hesitation. I shot at her again, ignoring the pitiful shrieks and distressed screams.

My eyes were closed. I couldn't bear the sight of my dead girlfriend's body. But it had to be done. I only hoped that this wasn't the 'real' Catalina Leanut.

When I reopened my eyes, I saw the waitress there instead of dear Catalie. I kind of felt a surge of relief and satisfaction by wasting that lousy bitch's life. Ha, served her right!

The blood and gore made my car dirty. Who knew how unpleasantly it could stink and reek after a while? I evacuated from the car immediately.

On foot, I began heading back to the Leafy Nut. I toted the shotgun, in hand. Tonight, there'd be no second chances. I didn't care what sort of freak town this was. I only wished to get out of there, ASAP.

*****

The motel's windows were all boarded up. Pitch black in the sky and no light was visible through the windows.

Moreover, the main entrance door was also boarded up with wooden planks. This was seemingly disturbing and strange, 'cause it would take about three or four hours to board up the whole building. Whereas, I had been hanging around the café for only about half an hour. It wasn't only wrong - it was impossible.

No cars in sight. No light except for four street lamps flanking the street, teeming with flies hovering. If you were in my position, I wondered what you would feel at that moment.

No home to go to - I couldn't enter my apartment.

No other apartments or motels in sight, either. Only the ominous dark trees were silently sentinel, surrounding the streets like a dense floral border.

And my shotgun suddenly began to gain weight. I didn't know why. I guess this puny suburban 'town' was integrated with mystic 'unworldly' forces. The place clearly disobeyed a handful of laws of physics. Had this town emerged from the nether?

I felt like I was being trapped in some other world far from peoples' reach. I was trapped in another dimension.

Was I going crazy? Did anything make any sense any longer? Or was I being toyed by spiritual parasites?

Looks like the only surviving option was to return back to the café, that bloody café. Maybe this was it! The café! I must've activated a channel to this out-of-place area when I had first entered the café by mistake. Or maybe the choice of coffee was a password to be initiated into this abstract world of horror. Could it be possible that the café was the birthplace of this unholiness?

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The longer I lingered and remained here, the deeper and tighter the knots of delusion, confusion and revulsion intertwined.

It wasn't a choice but I retraced my steps back to the café, aiming my gun for any sign of hostile pedestrians. Speaking of which, was I the only human alive? Rest of them were probably illusions. Illusions, apparitions and what-not.

I wondered whether Catalie was an illusion as well. I better hoped not.

I noticed my car there, still intact at the position where I had abandoned it. I checked the condition of the interiors but got startled by what I discovered, midway; the waitress was gone. As expected.

The temperature of the environment dropped without a caution. So I entered the car and switched ON the radiators. Keeping an eye out on the café, I waited.

After almost fifteen (boring) minutes, a sweat drop dripped onto the steering wheel.

After thirty minutes, I swatted a mosquito and ignored the unusual blue blood oozing from its corpse.

After a total of fourty-five minutes, I saw a woman enter the café. Probably Catalie. Hang on....Catalie?!! If she was here, then it meant that....that perhaps the motel had been unlocked again!

With no time to lose, I couldn't sit still.

*****

Strangely, the motel appeared to be back to its 'initial' state - or so it seemed to me. Most importantly, the wood planks had vanished and none but all the windows of the building were draped by black emptiness behind the glass panes. Hang on, was I the only resident at the Leafy Nut other than Catalie??

Damn, it was transforming into such a weird and volatile night. Or had night fallen too early here? Ho shit....where the hell had I landed? What sort of a cultist nation was this?!

A distant whirr of an engine interrupted me and my occasional stream of thoughts. I suspected it to be my car....being driven unauthorized by Catalie or the waitress or somebody else. Well, my car didn't matter; I needed to survive.

Just then, a speeding pick-up truck roared from a corner in the street, heading towards....me?! Son of a --

I dived aside, out of its rampage direction. The Toyota missed critically hitting my foot, only by a hair's width.

As for the bloody drunken truck, it collided with an electric pole.

Whatever happened next occurred over such a short span of time, I hardly understood what exactly took place.

The deceased electric pole landed on the truck's roof, falling over clumsily like a giant sequoia freshly sawed off. The connections to wires on the pole tore free apart, after a momentary struggle with their elastic nature. The 'free' wires dangled this way and that, sending sparks of 250 V a.c. in a sprinkler manner. Tragically, a single spark landed near the truck's fuel reserve (tank). Systematically, the fuel tank ignited and went ablaze as I watched the ill-fated vehicle (and the driver onboard) burst vigorously like a firework.

Shrapnels of metal whizzed away from the fire, followed by a sonic wave of an explosion.

Then everything hushed up gradually and the truck's ashen carcass was burning down to its final embers. What about the driver? Was there someone driving it? Practically, from my experience of the queer events in this town, I didn't think there was anybody onboard.

Oh, what distraction AND destruction!

I relapsed my attention back to the motel, back to my survival, back to my "getting out of this forsaken sandbox" scheme.

The main entrance door wasn't locked. But it felt to be heavier than before. It took me a great deal of a shove to push it open inwards.

Darkness awaited inside.

As expected.

Maybe Catalie had turned OFF the power when she left. Maybe the electric supply was handicapped by the split wires of that pylon. But there was something else. Someone else. Some other guest, too.

Thick dense suffocating clouds of a hazy dark smoke wavered in the entrance hall. I knew there were no stoves or cooking equipment down the path. Never spotted them. Taking a whiff, I couldn't recognize any burning stench either.

Just as I placed one more step forward, somebody shut the main door behind me. Great, not a single lumen of light was available now.

My eyes were struck with blindness. And I had no flashlights with me. Speaking of which, my phone's battery died last night and I totally forgot to recharge.

Shortly, I heard a scrape of metal on leather - somewhat similar to that of a blade being drawn from its scabbard.

In the dark, suffering from this temporary blindness, I loaded my shotgun.