Chapter 1: The Glitch in the Road

The fog had swallowed them whole.

Liam gripped the steering wheel of his beat-up Honda Civic, leaning forward until his nose nearly touched the windshield. The headlights carved out maybe ten feet of visibility through the thick, gray soup that had rolled in from nowhere. What had started as a clear autumn evening had turned into something from a nightmare—dense, choking fog that seemed to press against the windows like living fingers.

"Dude, I can't see shit," Andy muttered from the passenger seat, his usual bravado stripped down to nervous energy. He'd been the one pushing for this midnight exploration of the abandoned logging roads deep in the Cascade foothills, promising they'd find something worth documenting. Now he was white-knuckling the door handle.

"Maybe we should turn back," Dario suggested from the backseat, his camera gear rattling as they hit another pothole. The sound was muffled, wrong somehow, like the fog was eating even their voices.

Liam wanted to agree. Every instinct screamed at him to turn around, to get back to civilization and fluorescent lights and the comforting hum of Wi-Fi signals. But the narrow logging road had no shoulder, no room to turn around, and backing up blind through these twisting mountain curves would be suicide.

"There's got to be a turnaround ahead," he said, though his voice carried less conviction than he'd hoped. They'd been driving for what felt like hours, though the dashboard clock insisted it had only been twenty minutes since the fog descended.

The trees pressed in on both sides—massive Douglas firs and cedars that had probably been growing since before any of them were born. Their trunks vanished into the gray void above, creating the sensation of driving through a tunnel with no ceiling. The silence outside was absolute. No wind rustling branches, no distant hum of highway traffic, no night birds. Just the labored wheezing of Liam's ancient engine and the crunch of gravel under worn tires.

Andy shifted restlessly. "This is fucked up, man. Fog doesn't just—"

His words died as Liam hit the brakes. Hard.

The car skidded to a stop, and for a moment, the only sound was their collective breathing, rapid and shallow. Ahead, barely visible through the murk, two paths diverged. The main logging road curved left, its familiar gravel surface disappearing into the gray. But to the right...

"What the hell is that?" Dario whispered.

To the right, a paved road stretched into the darkness. Not just any paved road—this was smooth, pristine asphalt that looked like it had been laid yesterday. Yellow lines ran down its center, perfectly straight, glowing faintly in their headlights as if they contained some inner phosphorescence.

Liam blinked, certain he was seeing things. They'd been on this logging road dozens of times over the past two years. He knew every turn, every washout, every fallen log. There was no paved road here. There had never been a paved road here.

"That's impossible," he breathed.

"GPS is dead," Andy reported, tapping his phone frantically. "No signal, no nothing. Dario?"

"Same." Dario held up his phone, the screen casting an eerie blue glow in the fog. "Everything's just... gone."

But the road was there. Real. Solid. The yellow lines seemed to pulse gently, like a heartbeat made of light.

"We should take the left fork," Liam said, though something in his chest was pulling him toward that impossible stretch of asphalt. "Get back to the main road."

"Or," Andy said, and Liam could hear the dangerous excitement creeping back into his voice, "we could see where this goes. I mean, when are we going to get another chance like this?"

"It's probably just some old Forest Service road we missed before," Dario added, already reaching for his camera. "Could be worth documenting."

Liam's hands trembled on the steering wheel. The sensible part of his mind, the part that had kept him alive through twenty-five years of careful decision-making, screamed at him to take the left fork. Go home. Pretend this never happened.

But the other part, the part that had driven him to explore abandoned buildings and forgotten places, whispered something different. When would he ever see anything like this again? A road that existed in fog but not in daylight, marked with lines that seemed to glow from within?

Before he could stop himself, he turned the wheel right.

The moment their tires touched the asphalt, the world changed. The engine's rough idle smoothed to a whisper. The fog didn't thin exactly, but it became somehow more... organized, flowing around them in patterns that almost made sense. And the silence deepened, becoming something physical that pressed against his eardrums.

"Holy shit," Andy breathed. "Feel that?"

Liam felt it. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees in the span of seconds. Their breath came out in visible puffs, and frost began forming on the inside edges of the windows despite the heater running full blast.

They drove in silence for what felt like miles, though the odometer seemed stuck. The road was perfectly straight, perfectly maintained. No potholes, no cracks, no debris. Just smooth, dark asphalt stretching endlessly ahead, bordered by that impenetrable wall of fog.

Then the trees fell away.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Andy whispered.

They had emerged into a vast clearing—no, not a clearing. A parking lot. An impossibly massive parking lot that stretched beyond the reach of their headlights in every direction. Row upon row of parking spaces, marked with faded white lines that seemed to continue forever into the gray void.

And the spaces weren't empty.

Cars filled the lot as far as they could see. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Every make, every model, every decade. Rusted-out Chevys from the fifties sat next to pristine BMWs that looked fresh off the showroom floor. A yellow Volkswagen Beetle with flowers painted on its sides nestled between a massive Cadillac Eldorado and something that might have been a Model T Ford.

But none of them had drivers. None of them had license plates. And none of them made a sound.

"This isn't real," Dario said, his voice barely audible. His camera hung forgotten around his neck. "This can't be real."

Liam brought their car to a stop at the edge of the lot. The silence was crushing now, a physical weight that made it hard to breathe. Not one engine turning over. Not one car alarm. Not even the tick of cooling metal. Just absolute, perfect quiet.

And at the far end of the lot, barely visible through the fog, a single truck sat with its engine running. Not idling—running, with the deep, throaty rumble of a diesel engine under load. Exhaust poured from its stack, but instead of dissipating in the air, the smoke seemed to pool and flow along the ground like liquid shadow.

The truck's headlights were on, cutting through the murk. But they weren't pointed at the rows of dead cars.

They were pointed at them.

"We need to leave," Liam said, his voice tight with fear. "Right now."

"Wait," Andy said, reaching for the door handle. "We should—"

"No." The word came out sharper than Liam intended. Something about that distant truck, about the way its headlights seemed to watch them, sent ice water through his veins. "We're leaving. Now."

He threw the car in reverse, not caring about the careful three-point turn he'd normally execute. The tires squealed on the asphalt as he spun them around, and for one terrifying moment, he thought the car might stall. But the engine caught, and they shot back down that impossible road like a bullet.

Behind them, just at the edge of hearing, a horn honked once. Long, low, and mournful.

They didn't speak until they were back on the logging road, back in normal fog that felt thin as gauze after what they'd just experienced. Only when they reached the main highway, with its blessed streetlights and the occasional passing semi, did any of them find their voices.

"Did that actually happen?" Dario asked.

Liam checked the rearview mirror. Nothing but darkness and fading fog. "I don't know."

But he did know. They all did. The image was burned into their retinas—that endless lot filled with the cars of the dead and lost, watched over by something in the distance that had noticed their intrusion and filed it away for future reference.

Two months later, that memory would drag them back into the mountains, searching for a road that shouldn't exist and answers to questions they weren't sure they wanted answered.

The truck's horn still echoed in their dreams.