**This story revolves around a fictional religious Cult referred to as 'Lanzarote'. Any similarities in this story between this fictional Cult or an actual religion or Cult are purely coincidental.**
"Three days?! It took you three days to call me back?" Dana chastised her friend over-the-phone.
"I know, but let's just say the last few days have been un-like anything I've ever experienced before." Stacy explained.
"I don't get it. All day Thursday you're on the phone with me every ten minutes telling me how you're packing your car and moving-out. You need a break from Jimmy once and for all. I tell you you're welcome to come here for a while until you two work things out, again. I even moved one of my kids out of their room so you'd have your own space then you just evaporate and I don't hear anything from you. Did you and Jimmy make-up again?" Dana asked accusingly.
"What? No. I'm sitting at a repair shop waiting for my car to get fixed." Stacy replied.
"No doubt because you're driving that old Honda with 250,000 miles on it while your lump of a husband has his nice new Camaro. What happened and where are you?" Dana asked her friend.
"I'm like two hours away from your house. So I packed-up my car and was driving to your house on Thursday, but because the registration is way expired on my car I didn't want to take the highway and risk getting a ticket so I took the back-roads..."
"That was stupid." Dana interjected. "You didn't go through the mountains did you?"
"Yes. I took highway 81, the old road. It's a nice drive at first, goes through a lot of farmland. It was kind of relaxing actually and I might have enjoyed it more if my heater worked."
"Anyways, so I'm on the 81 and it starts to climb into the mountains and a few minutes later my car starts acting-up. It didn't have any power, then it made some strange noises and finally it just quit. I coasted to the side of the road and it wouldn't re-start."
"Wait, it rained here over the weekend which means it probably snowed up there." Dana interrupted.
"Yeah, it did. It was so cold and there was absolutely no one on that road. I sat there and shivered for two hours. I had every blanket I'd packed covering me, but I had no food and I was hungry and so cold. Then it started getting dark, my cell phone had no service and I was really scared."
"So what happened?" Dana asked, forgetting that she was mad and now hung on her friends every word.
"Well I didn't know what I was going to do. I mean I kept thinking someone was going to drive-by at some point but no one did. It was so scary. But then I saw an SUV pull-up behind my car."
"So this guy gets out. He's in his early 40's maybe. Tall, in-shape and just starting to go grey. He walked-up to my door and asked if I needed help."
"Was he alone?" Dana asked.
"Yes, no one else was with him. He said his name was Mark and he looked friendly. I told him about what happened with my car. He opened the hood, poked around a little bit then closed it and said he thought something in the engine had broken and that the car would need to be towed."
"Did he his cell phone work?" Dana asked, now captivated by her friends story.
"No. Mark said that there was no coverage up in the hills where we were but he told me there was a town about thirty minutes ahead. He was headed to a hunting cabin he has not far from there and offered to drive me to town where he said the shop in-town would send a tow truck for my car and I could get a room."
"So what did you do?" Dana again asked.
"What other option did I have? It was freezing cold, I knew rain or snow was going to come and he was the first person I'd seen in the past couple of hours. I grabbed the few things I could cram into my hand bag and climbed into his SUV."
"Really?! Just you and this creepy guy cruising through the woods in his backwoods redneck mobile?" Dana quizzed.
"No, it was pretty nice actually. It was an older Pathfinder but seemed to run pretty well. It was obvious he'd driven those roads for quite a while; he seemed to know where every turn was and knew a lot of local history. To be honest, as we we're talking as he drove I started to feel like I'd known him for years."
"Was he married?" Was Dana's next question.
"No, he mentioned that he had been engaged but it had ended a while back. He said he works in Provo as a high school history teacher."
"Wait, he says he works in Provo? What was he doing almost 100 miles away in the hills by himself?" Dana wanted to know.
"Friday was a holiday at his school and like I said he has a small cabin just outside of this town he was headed to when he came across where I was broken-down. He said he goes up there whenever he has a long weekend to do some hunting and fishing."
"Oh, yeah that doesn't sound creepy." Dana said sarcastically.
Stacy ignored the comment and said, "So by the time we get to the town it's snowing and like nine at night and the whole town seems to be closed-up tight. There was only one Motel, it was just a mom and pop place and were told that they were fully-booked because the road past the town, leading deeper into the mountains was closed due to a rock slide, which now that I think about it is probably why there wasn't more traffic on it."
"So what did you do?" Dana again asked.
"There was a bar in town which was open and Mark said they had a grill so we went in there and got something to eat. I didn't know what to do beyond that though. The owner of the local garage was in there. Mark and I talked to him and he said he'd send a truck down the hill in the morning to tow my car to his shop; he didn't think it would be anything too serious. Then Mark offered to let me stay at his cabin with him."
