Lani and Adventures

See, in Bariloche, I shared a room with Kina. And the window looked out into a hostel. There were always lots of attractive 20-something traveling people on laptops and making food and a couple of times we noticed some guy changing his shirt.

(That above paragraph is the last bit of truth I´ll be telling you)

But one day we looked out the window, and EVERYONE WAS DEAD. Everyone. Bodies and blood everywhere, people were decapitated, limbs all over the place… and on the window, written in the dripping red of a freshly killed backpacker´s blood, were the words ¨YOU´RE NEXT.¨

So that was a little scary. We went to Spanish School the next day and told everyone what was going on. Blake calemed us down using his ninja leader skillz, and we decided that it wasn´t directed at us. We were in an apartment, with lots of other people. Nobody but our group and the people we were living with knew where we were living. It didn´t make sense for it to be for us.

And we went to class feeling a little traumatized, but basically better. We had a break every day for about half an hour to eat medialunas and drink fake coffee. We all had a rousing political debate, as has been our habit on this trip. Quinn brought up some amazing points, and Blake was very vocal and persuasive.

Then after class, we all met up outside the school, as we´d been doing every day. And we couldn´t find Quinn anywhere. There was nobody in the bathroom, he wasn´t in the classroom getting to know his teacher, and he wasn´t showing up.

Wyatt, being the leading source on all things Quinn, decided to go looking for him.

But then he didn´t show up.

Blake asked Ingmar to go look for them, and he left, giving us odd looks as he did.

A few minutes later, we all heard a pirecing scream. We ran to see what was going on, and one of the teachers was standing there, still screaming, pointing in horror- at Ingmar, standing over the dead bodies of Quinn and Wyatt.

¨No! It wasn´t me! I just found them like this!¨Ingmar protested, and after much discussion, we decided that we trusted him. Five minutes was hardly enough time to strangle Quinn and drown Wyatt in the sink, anyway.

But it was clear, after that, that someone was after us. So we decided to run away. We took the first bus that we could, a double decker that was empty, besides us and the driver. It was a long ride, and we got into the Atacama desert, and everything seemed to be getting better.

Now, the bathrooms on these busses are possibly the most disgusting things on the planet. And we avoid them like the plague. But after hours and hours on the bus, with a steady supply of water to keep us hydrated, you´re gonna need to go.

¨Ugh, I´ve been holding it in for hours, but I can´t anymore.¨Hanna complained. ¨Just kill me now.¨

We were all on the top level. She decended the stairs to go pee. She was taking a long while. We hoped she hadn´t fallen in. Some of us heard a thud, but assumed it was the bus. The trip went on.

After several minutes, Jonah, being the caring boyfriend that he is, decided to go check on her.

He went down the stairs. He ran back up them a second later, yelling and shouting and crying, carrying the dead, faceless Hanna behid him.

¨You killed her!¨He screamed at Ingmar. ¨I never trusted you! And you killed her!¨

Comotion on the bus. Yelling, arguing, and Ingmar is standing there, holding Blake´s iPad, blood on his hands.

Hanna´s blood.

Jonah saw this, and in his rage and grief, he took a plastic food tray and swiped at Ingmar´s head.

¨No! It wasn´t me! It was…¨Ingmar protested, but the strange gesturing at his head was useless and he fell to the ground. The last words he managed to utter were ¨Shit… goes down… at hostels.¨

And the last bit of sinew in his neck connected to his body broke off. His head bounced down the stairs, and rolled beneath the driver´s feet.

The driver, of course, freaked the fuck out, lost control of the bus, and we crashed. There were explosions. There was fire. Most of us were blasted out of the bus, landing on the hot, hard dirt of the desert. Benji´s dreads were burned off. Julie was in a coma. Jonah was still clinging to Hanna´s body. And Blake? Blake wasn´t there at all. He burned alive. Thank god we couldn´t hear his screams. The roaring of the fire covered it.

Jonah couldn´t handle it. His girlfriend, his beloved girlfriend, was dead. He looked back at us, trying to figure out what to do, and he knew he couldn´t go on.

¨WE´LL BURN TOGETHER!!!!!¨He screamed, and he ran as fast as he could, back into the flames of the bus.

Kina, Jalen, panic!Josie, sick!Claire, dreads-less!Benji, and coma!Julie and I were all who were left.

We started walking, knowing we needed to get away. If Ingmar was telling the truth, and he wasn´t the one who did it, then we still had someone after us.

Kina, Jalen, Josie and I carried Julie´s body, one to a limb. Claire and Benji walked behind us. Benji lost it, not having his hair. The PTSD of hair loss was getting to him. He just babbled.

And Claire? Well, Claire knew she wasn´t going to make it. With a beautiful, heartwarming speach, she convinced us to leave her behind. Crying, we did.

After much walking, we happened upon an oasis. There was a freshwater pool, and palm trees with shade, and it was magnificent. We stopped. We drank. We splashed water on Julie´s face, which revived her- but her brain was addled.

¨It´sa me! Mario!¨She exclaimed, and proceeded to perform the soundtrack of her life, sounding like old video games. She also kept trying to eat weird flowers and mushrooms.

Being clever, we fashioned a wig for Benji out of the fuzzy part of a coconut we found on the ground. He immidiately came to his senses, and decided that we needed to find something to eat. Realizing what this meant, he decided to go back out and get Claire´s body- it was better that we survive on her flesh than the vultures get her.

Josie went to pee, because she´d been crying and wailing and we made her drink a lot of water when we got to the oasis so that she wouldn´t get dehydrated.

But as he walked away, it became clear that the vultures were going to get him too. They descended in a wall of black, until everything was obscured by the crowing birds.

And then a figure emerged. A tall figure, the face covered, wearing a bus driver´s shirt, but with Hanna´s face pinned to it.

We ran.

We ran for what felt like forever.

And then I remembered Josie.

With a shout, I turned to go get her.

¨No! Don´t do it! Save yourself!¨Kina a Jalen cried, but I didn´t listen to them. I just kept running. They really had no choice but to follow.

I came close to the figure, but not close enough for it to get me. I was smarter than that.

¨Hey! Darren Criss! How did you get to the Atacama Desert?¨The figure asked in surprise, his voice strangely familiar.

I wasn´t smarter than that.

He got me.

The man was holding me captive, about to kill me, and Kina and Jalen were too far away to stop him. It seemed as though my death was upon me.

And then with a scream like a monkey, Josie lept onto the back of the man and stabbed him through the heart with the shard of a coconut shell.

¨Fucking Unschoolers. I hate you all.¨He muttered as he fell, blood pooling by his body, the arms that had been holding me becoming limp.

We pulled the mask from his face.

Blake Boles nearly killed us all.

The End.

P.S. Oh and then the horror of what had happened made Julie go sane again, we got rescued by people racing across South America on dirt bikes, she took over Unschool Adventures, and we held a funeral for Hanna´s face with a touching ukulele rendition of Deep Fried Oily Pinapple Duck Sex by Kina.