User blog:Minithepeanut/Ghost Town - A Lebeaux Gang Fic

Chapter One
Our story begins in ye olde Lebeaux, which is basically just Lebeaux but they were doing some medieval fair thing so it was ye olde timey. After finding out about a fantastic place to visit to escape the tourist trap that was Lebeaux, Connor had convinced his favourite older brother, Chris, to lend them his Land Rover so that he could take Lauren, Jaime, Wes, Brooke and Sam out to the strangely uninviting sounding place of Hell’s Valley. Sam, being the alcoholic she was, made sure to sneak in a few bottles of tequila a) to deal with Jaime’s friends and roommates and b) because naturally when six young adults go on a long trip to a place called Hell’s Valley, binge drinking is the appropriate course of action.

Anyway, they were all throwing their bags and alcohol into the back of the Land Rover, when a familiar face pulled up, smiling and waving as she got out of her car, before being bombarded by a massive group hug from her friends as they all cheerfully greeted her while Sam and Brooke stood there awkwardly, wanting to go back to packing the car. Paige announced that thanks to some really strong convincing from Connor, she’d finally managed to get her brother to look after their sick grandmother and was going to take the week off to go on this really dumb vacation with everyone to a place which takes sixteen hours to drive to, because evidently that’s a better use of time than looking after grandma.

After finally leaving Lebeaux at like midday they all ended up driving around for several hours while Brooke gradually became more and more annoyed at how much Wes was paying attention to Paige instead of him and Sam was too busy feeling up Jaime while he drove to care. Eventually they decided to crash in at this sort of spooky looking motel which seemed to have a lot of vacancies. And by a lot, I of course mean the whole place was empty, with just a sign at the front office which says to take a key if unattended. Seeing as they’re obviously very genre blind, they assume that’s just how things are out in this ghost town with nothing around for miles and take the keys, before splitting up into three separate rooms.

Sam and Jaime take the first room, while Jaime’s so exhausted from driving for hours on end and trying to keep himself from falling asleep that he practically collapses face first on the bed. Sam laughs a little, before going off to the bathroom to wash her face, and as she walks in, she notices an overwhelming smell of mould, which she comments is gross even though nobody’s there to hear her. She soldiers on to the sink and turns it on, finding herself mildly horrified at the brown murky water pouring out of the tap, which eventually turns clear enough that she trusts it to wash her face, but not enough to put in her mouth. She walks back out to the already snoring Jaime and helps him out by taking off his belt and shoes before doing the same for herself and jumping into bed.

Meanwhile, trouble in paradise is brewing over in the second motel room, where Wes remains blissfully unaware of anything he could have possibly done to annoy Brooke, and very stupidly makes the assumption that she got her period. Even if that weren’t the case, she still would have slapped him across the face for saying that, and instead she rolled over in their bed, facing the wall and hugging all the blankets to her chest, while Wes carefully tried to pull some over onto his side of the bed without upsetting her further. Even his attempts at cuddling her to make her feel better went unappreciated as she moved his hands off her waist. (DID I JUST SWITCH TENSE MID-PARAGRAPH? POSSIBLY)

Connor, being the giant that he is, found himself hitting the hay fairly early into the night as well, while Lauren and Paige decided that the best time to stay up all night chatting and being girly girls and braiding each other’s hair was while they were in some creepy abandoned motel. They whispered to each other for hours and tried not to laugh whenever jokes were told so they wouldn’t wake up Connor. Eventually, they both fell asleep, tangled up in each other’s arms on the floor for warmth, because who needs an uncomfortable mattress when you can take the uncomfortable floor. Connor was initially a little freaked out when he woke up in the morning without Lauren by his side, but quickly found her as he got out of bed and almost tripped over the two lesbians lying in between him and the bathroom. He smiled a little at the sight of them looking so innocent and happy. Take it in Connor, Mini is writing this story after all. Anyway, he goes off to the bathroom and while washing his hands he notices that the water in the taps seems to be randomly soapy without him adding the soap. Also, the motel’s fairly old and rundown so it’s probably not some fancy pants technology that mixes the soap for you. (Also, how stupid would that kind of technology be? How would you even splash your eyes if you got soap in them? Run them under some running water?? Well I’ve got news for you, friend.) While he’s busy obsessing over the odd soap bubbles emerging from the tap, he hears the muffled sounds of Paige and Lauren waking up in the other room and decides that they’re more relevant than this dumb tap, so he washes his hands, then turns it off.

Wes, after copping the cold shoulder all night was probably the first to wake up, first showering, then going down to the front office to see if anyone had shown up to work so they could pay for their stay. Even though it was not all that surprising that the motel had been shut down, he found himself surprised when instead of the “If left unattended sign” he stumbled upon a notice from the safety and health inspectors saying that the motel was closed for failing to pass the tests. Well guys. Good job picking the world’s worst motel. Wes goes back to wake everyone else up to tell them the great news. Sam absolutely adores being woken up at 9am and throws her bedside table bible at him, Jaime sleeps through it, Brooke grumbles something about being happy to get out of here and Connor, Paige and Lauren reveal that they all woke up while he was down there.

It takes some thorough team effort to wake up Jaime and Sam, before Connor steps in and manages to wake up Jaime almost straight away. They’re bros. They have telekinesis (maybe). Just go with it. Anyway, they manage to lug everyone’s asses down to the car, and as they all pile in, Connor tries to start up the car, only to hear an unceremonious, anticlimactic nothing. Like, at all. Obviously they all get out checking what happened, only to find that under the hood there is no battery. How they even drove that thing ten hours out of town is a mystery. Lauren is the first to start freaking out about how the sign changed and now their battery is gone and their stuck in the middle of nowhere, when Jaime tells her she’s being a drama queen and Connor doesn’t even try to stop her from hitting him. (There’s a lot of girl on guy violence here. What’s going on?)

Sam brings up the helpful suggestion of calling her roommates for help, only for everyone to almost simultaneously discover there is zero reception out here in Nowheresville. In fact, the motel sign doesn’t even have an actual name other than just Motel. Somehow they missed all these details while half asleep and exhausted from sitting in a boring car all day. Paige, being the wise one she is, makes the totally unwise suggestion that maybe they could split up and walk down the road until they find a payphone where they can call a mechanic. Sam and Brooke both pull a ‘lol nope’ and Sam suggests that if Paige thinks it’s a great idea, she should be the one to go look for a phone while she stays put, because splitting up is a great idea that totally won’t get them killed.

After much discussion, Connor and Jaime found themselves as the unwilling volunteers who accompanied Paige on their two and half hour hike and chat until they eventually found a roadside diner with only a few people inside. After getting themselves nice and refreshed, they ask the owner if they can make a phone call, and while he lets them ring a local mechanic, they soon find out that most of the mechanics in the nearby town are closed for the long weekend and won’t be back until Tuesday. Although slightly disappointed, they do take the opportunity to buy some food for the others, assuming that they must be starving by this point and they lug it back for another two and a half hour hike, by the end of which, they feel ready to collapse. Everyone else lets out loud groans of annoyance after they spent five hours trying to keep themselves occupied with a deck of cards and no reception (not even Wi-Fi) only to find out that they’re spending more time at the world’s most boring abandoned building – all anyone had managed to find in the other rooms was a dead rat.

After eating their dinner which was mostly stone cold burgers and fries, everyone split back up into their separate rooms again, some more regretfully than others. While she couldn’t stand the thought of being stuck in this motel, she decided she could think of better ways to keep herself entertained, notably involving Jaime and one of her favourite sex locations – the shower. They patiently waited for the water to run through clear, she noticed it too seemed to have soap suds in it. After waiting for it to dissipate, Sam and Jaime decide that they’ve waited long enough and start getting all hot and heavy in the shower, until Jaime notices something heavier than water dropping on his back. As he pulls away from Sam he notices red rain pouring down from the showerhead, covering both of them. Sam starts to scream and fumbles out of the shower as Jaime turns it off and tries to yank at the bathroom door handle.

While slightly bickering about how the fuck they ended up covered in blood and both of them agreeing that this is the most fucked up thing they’ve ever experienced, both of them come to the realisation that the bathroom door has been jammed shut, and they start yelling out for help, not really caring if there’s a murderer around who might be listening for them. They’re already covered in someone else’s blood and trapped in a bathroom that rains blood sometimes. I think death is the least of their concerns. Lauren and Connor are the first to hear them while walking past the first room after a little romantic walk they decided to take. Connor asks what happened and Jaime explains that the door is jammed shut and it’s raining blood, and honestly I wouldn’t blame Lauren and Connor for not knowing what the fuck was going on. Even this author didn’t know how to explain this at first.

Connor manages to knock the door off its hinges while Sam and Jaime sit inside, shaking and covered in blood. Lauren and Connor help them over to the bed, where Sam has gone almost catatonic in shock, only she’s trembling fiercely. Connor pulls the blanket up over both of them, trying to work out what happened, when Jaime suggests that Connor passes him the bottle of tequila that he’s sitting next to. Jaime passes the bottle over to Sam who drinks some without hesitating, drinking enough until she can stop shaking. Brooke and Wes, who heard the loud thud, run in to find out what all the commotion was about, while Jaime works on explaining what he understands from it.

Connor recounts how his sink had soapy water when he woke up in the morning – Sam mentions that it wasn’t soapy the night before, and the more they try to work out what’s going on with the weird soapy and occasional bloody water, the more confused they get, until Wes, on a whim, remembers to ask where Paige is – with Lauren, in a panic, remembering that her and Connor had left Paige alone in the shower while they went for a walk. She runs back to the third motel room, with Connor following close behind, then Wes. All they can hear is the water still falling steadily. Lauren knocks on the door and calls out to Paige, but there’s no answer. She knocks again, this time with Connor calling out her name, louder. Connor announces that he’s coming in, before ramming the door open with his shoulder.

The water keeps falling, but nobody’s standing under it. No one really wants to look down, but slowly, Lauren lets her eyes wander down, first to the bloody handprint on the tiles, then further down to the lifeless, naked body of her best friend slumped in a heap as water kept beating down on her, washing more and more of her blood down the drain. Without a moment to think on it, she threw herself into the shower, cradling Paige’s head in her lap and letting the water fall down on her as she sobbed our Paige’s name. The sobs turned to pleading, then to anguish as she begged and prayed that this wasn’t actually happening. Connor couldn’t think of anything to say as he turned the shower off, while Wes remained behind them, lost for words – mumbling out incoherent nothings.

The longer the silence grows on, the more Wes can feel the rage welling up inside him, amplified when Connor asks if he can go tell the others. After Wes leaves, Connor crouches down next to Lauren, pulling her into his chest as she continues to sob. Even though he wants to cry, he’s focused himself on keeping himself together for Lauren’s sake. Even still, he can’t stop the tears from streaming down his face as he tries to calm down his distraught fiancé. After a while, Connor convinces Lauren to join everyone else in the other room, taking their bags with them so that they don’t have to walk back in. As they move their stuff into the first motel room, all eyes remain locked on Lauren’s blood covered, soaked shirt as she tries to maintain the slightest fragment of composure.

Sam, after drinking herself into a lull state, passes around her bottle of tequila, with everyone taking a drink until they feel more at ease. Finally Wes can’t take it anymore (and also the writer realised she went two long paragraphs without any comedic narration and the death of everyone’s favourite character) and he snaps, angrily yelling at Connor. He doesn’t know exactly why he chose to direct his anger at Connor, but all he can think is that if Connor hadn’t have convinced her to come, she’d still be alive and looking after her grandmother. Lauren is the first to yell back at him, telling him to shut up, reminding him that everyone wanted Paige there, and clarifying that it’s not anyone’s fault. (Well except maybe the person who stabbed Paige. It’s a little bit their fault.)

As everyone drinks themselves to the point of passing out, Lauren and Connor find they are the last two awake. Trembling with fear, Lauren confesses that she doesn’t want to go to sleep and end up like Paige, but then that if it were to happen; she’d want to be unconscious. Connor rocks her in his arms, trying his best to fight back tears as he promises her that he won’t let anything bad happen to her. Lauren takes another mouthful of the spirits before passing the bottle back to Connor who declines. With a shaky voice, she tells him that she doesn’t care about Hell’s Valley anymore. She just wants to go home, and Connor lulls her to sleep with promises that they’ll get home.

Brooke and Wesley are the first two to wake up in the morning, returning to their room so they can bring all of their stuff into the one room together, when Brooke decides to ask who Wes would have blamed if she was the one who got stabbed. Wes fumbles around for an answer as Brooke’s voice cracks when she asks if he would have preferred that Paige wasn’t invited and she had died instead. Being the clever guy that he is, Wes tells her that he doesn’t have anything to say – and leaves it at that. As they walk back into the other room – according to Wes’s watch, it was just before noon – they overhear a conversation between Jaime and Connor, who are busy making plans to return to the diner, and explaining them to Sam and Lauren who had just woken up.

Sam, after last nights’ trauma, was having none of this being left alone at the motel shit while the guys went off to get help, and pointed out that she doesn’t know or trust any of them, other than Jaime, and that wherever Jaime goes, she goes. Lauren adds on to this, saying that she doesn’t want Connor to come back and find her like they found Paige, so she’s going with them too. Brooke, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want to be left alone with Wes, and seeing as nobody really actually wanted to stick around with the creepy murder motel, all six of them packed up their stuff, and by three, they had made the trek from that motel to the diner, only to find the diner closes early on Sundays and isn’t open for the public holiday. Everyone frowns a little, then even more when Brooke makes the really terrible suggestion that maybe they should just go back to the car and Sam puts it out there bluntly, saying that there is nothing in this world that could make her go back to the motel where she got painted in their dead friend’s blood.

Lauren asks what they’re going to do, when Sam starts looking around the garden, trying to get her hands on a rock that looks big enough to smash a window. She throws it through, and everyone’s sort of like “welp I guess we’re staying here now. Lauren makes a slight protest about them trespassing, when Wes reminds them that technically, they were trespassing at the motel anyway, so this isn’t much of a difference. After smashing the window and after everyone helps Sam climb through, she lets them in through the front door, as they all gather around to set up their new camp in an abandoned diner, which is at least slightly better since we know it was functioning the day before.