The road to death

I remember that night like a dream that keeps coming back every night, from which you wake up out of a sudden in the middle of the night, breathing hard and fast then feeling cold sweat on your back. 

The night where our life's length could have been shortened within seconds 

My friends and I were getting ready for our countryside trip. Josh's grandparents had a small, traditional house somewhere up in the mountains. We thought that we were going to have the time of our life, but it could have been the last time of our lives. Josh was the only one who knew the road, as it was far away from the city. Mason convinced his father to give him his old, very old, van. You may think that it was some nice, vintage van you usually see in movies but it was the exact opposite. His father's van was older than Mason's father, and it looked like it was. The color on it was struggling to be a tea kind of green, however, it was more a grey than a tea green. Somehow, the van was still working, with a few cracking sounds and a hand brake which was more or less working. The van was our only option because none of us wanted to take responsibility for a car we would have rented.  

It was me, Josh, Mason, Eva, Jade, and Tian. While we were all packing our bags at my Mason's house, I got a sudden feeling of worry. I felt like something was going to happen. I was feeling like we shouldn't go like there was something set up just for us. So, I told Eva, one of the most understanding people on this planet. The day I got that certain feeling, we were all getting ready to leave. 

"Eva?" 

"Yes?" 

"Am I the only one who feels like we shouldn't go?" She frowned while going down the stairs to get the luggage into the van. The guys and. Mason, Josh, and Tian were standing right there, leaning on the old van, laughing with their arms crossed. 

"Jo, I think you should relax and stop all the panic you live in right now"  

"Yeah but-" Tian stopped me to get my luggage and put it into the van's trunk. 

"What happened?" He left the luggage in the trunk and turned to both of us. Tian had always been the father of the group, trying to solve all the arguments and problems between the six of us. 

"Jo says that she feels like something is going to happen if we leave for our trip" Tian put his arm on both of my shoulders and opened the door for me. He was smiling bright, suppressing my worry about leaving. 

"I think you are just overthinking. It is just a trip, the van is decent and Josh is an experienced driver, so I don't think you should worry about this." And that was the last thing I heard from Tian before we all got into the car.  

The road until nightfall was fine, except for the fact that I was constantly worried and couldn't have the fun the others were having. We were going to spend more than ten hours in the car and one hour or two was going to be spent on some very curvy and difficult roads. After we finished the first half of our road, the worry started to fade away. We got ourselves some ice cream at a gas station and we were having more and more fun. 

Everything was like this until the night started covering the day more and more. The raindrops started little by little to fall from the clouds. I could see that Josh was getting more and more tired and started having problems focusing on the traffic. Because of the weather which was getting more and more cloudy all of the passengers were getting more and more asleep, until of the passengers fell asleep. 

It was late at night, past 1 a.m., when all of us woke up. We all got up and looked out the window. The rain had gotten way heavier and heavier. There were no flashlights or illuminated signs on the road we were driving on. Looking out the mirror next to me, I couldn't see anything but endless blackness with no sign of light. The car was getting deeper and deeper into the night. No one in the car was talking. All the people in the car were dead silent looking at the windshield. You couldn't see a thing out there in that open black hole that was sucking the car more and more. The raindrops were hitting the windscreen so hard that the windshield's wipers couldn't wipe all the water coming from the night.  

Out of a sudden, I felt like the car was driving faster. I didn't ask Josh what speed he had but I could easily see on his car's dashboard that we were pacing at 90km/h with no lights except the car's flashlights. While we were pacing fast on that curvy road, I heard Josh saying something. 

"I don't know this road. Where is this road taking us?" The tension-filled the van and every single person in the car started looking around the van. During our most tense moments, Jade got up and started saying something. 

"But...what if this road takes us nowhere?" And that was the moment when Josh stopped the car. All of us hit the first thing in front of us which was the reaction we had after Josh stopped the van after pacing more than 100 km/h. We all looked at each other to see if everybody was okay and got out of the car, and had the most terrifying shock right in front of us. 

Probably a couple of meters in front of the car, we saw a huge thick wall and right next to it a few candles. Everybody was left speechless. If Jade would have said that sentence a couple of milliseconds later, we would have hit the wall and immediately died. We all looked at each other, terrified to our bones with our hearts beating out of our chests and a crazy feeling of nausea, thinking about how we had our lives hanging by a few seconds.