After penning the last words of The Final Farewell and Stolen Witness, I turned my attention to the final story for my patrons, a suspense. Again, given the constraints on my mind, I leveraged AI for a prompt. It didn’t take long for me to find an interesting one. Travelers become stranded at an isolated roadside motel after a bridge washes out. While I’ve seen and read stories like this before, it’s always fun to delve into familiar tales and give them a fresh coat of paint.
A powerful storm can transform a mundane moment into something unsettling. It doesn’t take much. With relentless rain, familiar roads disappear, planned destinations become unreachable, and travelers are forced to seek whatever shelter they can find. Sometimes, the only option is a roadside motel and the strangers who happened to arrive before the weather closed off the surrounding world.
That is where we’ll begin. Beyond the windows, relentless rain continues to reshape the landscape as washed-out bridges sever the motel from everything beyond it. Inside the walls of the small motel, an eclectic collection of travelers settles in to wait for the deluge to stop and the roads to reopen.
For Mara, this unexpected stop is just supposed to provide a dry room during an inconvenient delay. Yet isolation has a way of making ordinary moments feel different. As night settles over the motel and the storm continues outside, all anyone can do is wait for morning.
Excerpt of Flooded Opportunity
As the windshield wipers strafed the glass, more rain plummeted onto it. Mara wiped her eyes as she squinted to see through the deluge. With a muttered curse, she activated her high beams in time with the sudden crunching on a motel’s gravel parking lot. She glanced at the rearview mirror, discovering water spilling across the road behind her, like a typhoon chasing her to higher ground.
Once stopped, she clutched her bag, bolted from the car, and raced to the entrance. When she stepped under the motel’s awning, a man burst through the doors, his eyes wider than dinner plates. “The bridge has been washed out!”
As the words rebounded off the covering, several faces filled the windows to watch the pouring rain. Mara hurried to the door and squeezed through. “What bridge are you talking about?”
“There’s a nearby creek that’s become a dumping ground for concrete blocks,” the man said, closing the door. “With this downpour, the waters have risen along every waterway that intersects it.”
“Matty, leave her be,” the man behind the counter said as his gaze shifted to the newcomer. “It would seem you just arrived before the worst of the storm. You’re also fortunate enough that I have a couple of spare rooms for you tonight.”
“Thank you,” Mara said as she crossed the lobby to the front desk. “I’m soaked. Please take me to the nearest room.”
The man nodded as he grabbed a key. “Right this way, ma’am.”
***
After changing into dry clothes, Mara returned to the lobby and discovered several guests raiding the motel’s pantry. She clutched her upper arms and followed suit, preparing a sandwich. She grabbed one of the small bags of chips and a bottle of water before joining Matty, a trucker named Curtis, a young couple, and a salesman named Ellis at a table.
As Curtis introduced himself, Ellis’s sandwich slipped from his fingers. Every set of eyes shifted to the fallen food. Curtis cleared his throat and gestured at the scattered contents of the sandwich. “Is something wrong?”
Ellis reassembled his meal without looking up. “Thought I recognized you.”
An uncomfortable laugh filled the room as Curtis raised his hands. “I get that more often than you might expect.”
***
Hours later, a scraping pulled Mara from a deep sleep. She slipped from her bed and cracked the door open. As she stared into the void, something thumped around the corner. A shadow flickered across the hallway before disappearing beyond her view.
“Hello?”
Only the rain answered her cry. Mara leaned farther into the hallway, but the darkness concealed anything beyond the corner. She closed the door and secured every lock before digging into her sheets, waiting for sleep to reclaim her.
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