"You pathetic little worm!" Jenna's voice, normally a smooth veneer over her superiority, cracked with spiteful glee. "Did you honestly believe he'd choose you? With your sallow lips, limp hair, those scared-rabbit eyes? Always skulking in the shadows. I bet you couldn’t even make him scream your name..."

The words seared into Elise's brain, a poison hotter than the tears now running unchecked down her cheeks. She stumbled out of the trailer, the only home she'd built for herself, each breath a ragged sob. The world tilted, the carefully tended flower beds a blur of mocking color against the backdrop of shattering betrayal. Her haven was a cage now, every cozy detail tainted by the images in her mind: Jenna and Jeb entangled on Elise's bed, their laughter echoing in her skull as she fumbled for her car keys.

The familiar thrum of her car's engine grated on her raw nerves. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white, half-formed curses tearing at her throat. It wasn't just Jenna's accusations, the way she'd reveled in Elise's devastation. It was the damnable clarity of memory – Jenna's triumphant smirk, Jeb's once-gentle touch now a brand against her own skin.

She'd clung to a shred of hope as she drove, a desperate plea the scene had been a nightmare, a product of her overactive imagination and crippling insecurity. But Jenna's hateful words had ripped away any lingering illusions. Always blaming others, Elise. Don't you get it? He chose me.

A surge of something dark and dangerous cut through the despair. Fury, white-hot, ignited in her chest. Tears dried on her face, leaving behind a fierce determination as she slammed the car into gear. The gravel shrieked in protest as she sped out of the trailer park, leaving behind the ruins of her love and her carefully constructed illusions of a sisterly bond.

Her despair and rage demanded release. Her usual haven, the well-lit main roads with their comforting pulse of life, held no solace tonight. Instead, the darkness beckoned, promising a desolate sanctuary where she could give voice to her fury, a stark reflection of the emptiness consuming her. She wrenched the car off the familiar streets, a visceral craving for anonymity driving her toward the remote road. It was time to unleash the tempest within, to find a place where judgment couldn't reach. Old state Route 66 would suffice. The winding county road, past long abandoned farms, its trees a seductive embrace in the encroaching night, now mirrored the bleak void threatening to claim her.

Headlights slashed through the suffocating darkness, the world outside a smear of rain and tears on the windshield. The familiar vibrations of the car was no longer a pleasuring rhythm but a discordant drone, each vibration like fingernails scraping down her skin. Her gaze snagged on the rearview mirror, and a scream lodged in her throat. Her reflection stared back, a monstrous distortion. Skin stretched taut over sharp cheekbones, her eyes were hollow pits, consumed by shadow. It was a grotesque mockery of the woman who, mere hours ago, had dared to believe in love, in the fragile illusion of family.

Cold sweat beaded on her clammy brow, mingling with the tears tracking icy paths down her cheeks. "God, I look like that whore," Elise groaned, her voice a broken rasp like dry leaves underfoot. Her fingers clawed into the worn leather of the steering wheel, the sudden sting of pain barely registering through the haze of disgust. Disgust at herself, at Jenna, at the cruel joke the universe played on those who dared to trust. White-hot fury flared within her, eclipsing the despair with its cleansing burn.

She forced herself to look away from the twisted visage in the mirror, but the road was an abomination. Familiar asphalt crumbled into an expanse of shattered teeth and gouged earth, echoing the ruin of her heart. The comforting scent of the woods had rotted. A sickly sweet smell of decay clawed at her nostrils, the stink of some roadkill’s voided bowels seeping into her car, into her lungs. Every breath tasted of betrayal.

Elise eased off the gas, the car groaning in protest. Confusion warred with a rising sense of dread. Every instinct screamed that this wasn't right. She stole a glance back at the mirror, her breath catching in her chest. Wrong. The image staring back was a grotesque caricature, a twisted mix of her own reflection and her hated sibling. The smile twisted into an impossible rictus, eyes gleaming with a manic light that wasn't her own.

"No!" The denial tore from her throat, ragged and desperate. She slammed her fist against the dashboard, the jolt of pain a feeble weapon against the terror consuming her. "You lie!"

Jenna's voice, a silken poison, dripped in her skull. Losing your grip, Lise? Just like you used to get Jeb in bed. Just like always. So predictable.

"Shut up!" The words ricocheted in the car's suffocating silence. "Shut up, shut up!" Fury surged hot, but beneath it, the fear gnawed, relentless. Her voice cracked as she addressed an empty car. "He loved me. He chose me. I was his true love."

The rearview mirror was a mockery. “That cunt could never leave well enough alone” the reflection mocked, a skeletal horror warped by grief and rage, mocked her broken pleas. Skin pulled tight over sharp bones, eyes like empty pits…a monster conjured from her own shattered soul.

"No, you're wrong." Elise's voice had turned into strangled whimpers. "You always twist things. He promised…"

The screams of passion which brought Elsie running into her bedroom, followed by Jenna's laughter, echoed a knife in her mind. He said I was better, prettier, worthier. And he was right.

"No!" Elise screamed at her sisters distorted reflection, her hands clawing at her ears against the onslaught of imagined voices. "He loved me! He loved me!" Her sobs cut through the car's heavy silence, a futile protest against the desolate wasteland of her broken heart.

The fury burned on, a bitter ember against the creeping dread gnawing at her resolve. Every instinct screamed at her to drive onwards, to escape the decay and the tormenting whispers in her own head. But the road twisted with impossible, malicious intent, shadows transforming into clawing, pustule-covered hands. A fresh wave of panic washed over her - was she truly lost, or had the darkness consumed her sanity altogether?

Her trembling fingers fumbled to find her phone, a lifeline to the world she'd so desperately fled. The thought of Jenna's voice, smug with self-satisfaction, was almost as unbearable as the horror unfolding around her. But the encroaching, unnatural night was the greater terror. Swallowing bile and a surge of renewed anger, she punched in Jenna's number, each tap echoing the desperate plea she refused to voice. "Jenna," her whisper held both fear and defiant resentment, "I think I'm lost. Something's...it's not right..."

An answering crackle filled the phone, a staticky hiss that made her skin crawl. Jenna's voice finally emerged, but it was wrong. Distorted, the familiar tone twisted into something alien. The words themselves were barely discernible, replaced by low moans and whispered syllables that formed no coherent sentences.

Each warped sound sent a fresh wave of terror through Elise. Desperation clawed at her throat, her cries for help swallowed by a cacophony of unsettling laughter— laughter that was both on the phone and somehow echoing within the car itself.

The screen flickered, the 'low signal' warning flashing ominously. Then, nothing. Dead air, replaced only by the pounding of Elise's heart against her ribs. Her trembling hand hovered over the phone, a cold dread rising within her. This wasn't a malfunction, not a bad connection. She'd spoken to a ghost, to a spectral echo warped by the same terrifying forces that twisted the road...twisted her own reflection.

Her fingers recoiled from the phone as if it had burned her. Logic was a tattered flag against the onslaught of the impossible. Every instinct screamed to flee, to escape that spectral conversation and the mocking hag reflected in the mirror – a face contorted into a wide, unnatural grin, the teeth impossibly sharp.

The road behind her was a crumbling wasteland, a cruel echo of the ruin Jenna's words had wrought. Each bump and crater sparked a flare of white-hot rage. "Damn it!" Elise slammed a fist against the dashboard again, the pain of her bloodied knuckles barely registering above the roaring in her head.

The car spun out, sending a spray of gravel in her wake. The headlights snatched fragments of decay – asphalt dissolving into clumps of earth, trees withering into grotesque parodies of life. She blinked back tears, but her sight was blurry, her focus ripped apart by the scene's relentless deterioration. And then, for a heartbeat, there was only silence. A silence so absolute it felt like the world had ended.

"You pathetic coward," Jenna's voice echoed in her skull, each word a hammer blow. "Can't handle anything, can you? Always running, always blaming…"

"Shut up!" Elise shrieked, voice cracking with the effort. Her knuckles stood out like bleached bones against the steering wheel. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

But the voice wasn't just in her head. It whispered from the twisting branches outside, hissed through the disgusting mirror. Her own accusations hurled back against her, amplified by the terrifying decay. She stepped on the gas, hoping to outrun the terrors that were chasing her.

A monstrous form flickered at the edge of the light, oozing with darkness and impossibly vast. Elise choked back a scream, the wheel jerking in her hands as the car swerved. The monstrous shape dissolved back into the shadows, but now the abyss writhed, every tree a leering face, every root a clawing hand.

"Make it stop!" she wailed, barely aware of her own voice. Tears and rain mingled on her face, the world a chaotic blur. She sobbed, each ragged breath a plea for escape from the relentless decay, both within and without.

And then, the mirror. That thing was still there, its too-wide grin mocking her terror. It mimicked her every expression, tears mirrored by jagged fangs, helpless gasps echoing as horrific laughter. Her shattered reflection of Jenna was the final, crushing blow.

Although she was barely aware of her surroundings, the road was now nothing but a churning expanse of mud, barely navigable, and yet she pressed onwards. A primal fury consumed her, obliterating any last vestiges of fear. Rage burned hotter than the distorted landscape twisting past her window -- a hellscape of decaying flesh, grotesque shapes barely glimpsed in the flickering headlights. She choked out an enraged laugh, the sound bouncing back from the writhing trees.

Her sister’s reflection in the mirror was an unidentifiable abomination. Black sockets stared emptily where eyes should be, and its grin stretched to impossible lengths, a jagged maw of razor teeth. But the terror it should have evoked was overwhelmed by a twisted echo of her own rage.

"Damn you!" she shrieked at the reflection, her voice hoarse, cracking. Her hands pounded the steering wheel, each blow a futile attempt to externalize the tempest within her. "Damn you fucking backstabbing bitch-cunt! Liar, betrayer…I hate you, I hate you…"

Her words, once fueled by rage, dissolved into a mindless chant – a feeble ward against the encroaching madness and the relentless mockery of her reflection. The car lurched through the mire, its groans a macabre symphony echoing her own dying gasps. The world was a smear of decay, an organic manifestation of her shattered spirit, and somewhere beneath the ceaseless mantra pulsed a jagged core of truth.

"I hate you, hate you, hate you…" The words, each one rasped from her raw throat, lost their fury. They became a hollow litany, a desperate plea against the all-consuming darkness. Each repetition grew weaker, a final, defiant whisper swallowed by the oppressive silence. Her body rocked, a futile attempt to counter the inexorable pull toward the precipice of her own sanity.

Her hands, slick with sweat, twitched against the ruined wheel. The blur of rotting landscape outside, the grotesque mockery of her own face, all reflected the dissolution of her mind. The chant withered into feeble mumbles, lost in the maddening decay. Reason, even the last embers of rage, proved pathetically frail against the encroaching void. Deep within her crumbling psyche, a terrible clarity bloomed: this was the end. No dawn, no rescue, only the suffocating dark and the fading echo of her own fading voice.

"I hate you...hate you...hate..."

Epilogue

A few months later, Jenna found a single voicemail notification on her phone. An unknown number and a knot of apprehension released from her gut like last night's Taco Bell binge. Not guilt, she told herself firmly, but a flicker of unease at the unknown. She listened to the state trooper's somber voice – extensive search, no trace, the case officially closed. Elise's signal vanished after the last failed call was sent from old state route 66.

Jeb, ever-present since Elise vanished, placed a comforting hand on Jenna's shoulder. His worried tone on the missing person report, the lingering scent of cheap perfume clinging to his clothes… it was all so familiar. The pattern was old, older than her own insecurities. He'd been out late far too often recently, a fact she'd excused when his lips curved into that apologetic smile, his voice filled with promises she wanted desperately to believe. Jenna's jaw clenched tight. He'd moved in with indecent haste, his presence a balm on the wound Elise's disappearance had left. And yet, a part of her squirmed,remembering those late nights, the whiff of unfamiliar fragrance he dismissed with a careless shrug and a mumbled comment about his love for jasmine. It was easier to accept the lies because, after all, he'd chosen her, hadn't he? Chosen her over that miserable, pathetic excuse for a sister.

Jenna stared at her sister's photo, the image of her sister's face, frozen in a faded smile, sparked a flare of rage in Jenna. Jeb's hand on her shoulder was warm, yet she shivered, remembering Elise's touch, cold and accusatory even in the heat of their worst arguments. For all the uncertainty the damned road held, at least it offered Elise freedom from the mess she'd created. But freedom wasn't enough. A dark wish took root – not just that Elise was gone from their shared world, but truly, horrifically gone. Dismembered by some roadside monstrosity, erased in a way that would cast the blame back where it belonged. On her. On her for daring to sleep with Jeb before her, for finally escaping Elise's pitiful introversion. The wish burned as brightly as the resentment, a venomous bloom in the wake of her sister's disappearance. It was a monstrous hope, but amidst the complex tangle of emotions, Jenna couldn't deny its twisted comfort.