25
Cell phones and cell phone towers still existed but reception was abysmally bad. Moreover as luck would have it, the team had crashed just beyond a mountain pass near the city of Paso Robles which all but erased their chances of getting a signal to call out. To add insult to injury even if they could get a call back to their family or friends there would be no way for them to charge up and mobilize two cars early enough to pick them up before the following morning.
Chupacabra elected to drag the deer off of the road to prevent another tire screeching near-fatality should a motorist happen by their location. Selfishly and perhaps stupidly the team mowed through a large portion of the rations that they packed for their trip. Evidently twenty plus years of growing up in an introverted, sheltered environment had engendered a confidence among the group. They all quietly believed that someone would come to their rescue well before they had to resort to eating the freshly pulverized remains of Bambi or even worse, each other.
Over the course of the next few hours the group split up into opposing directions in an attempt to get a call or text back to Murkin to alert him to their situation. Betelgeuse and Katt tried climbing up a hillside as high as they could while the other three backtracked the way they came for a few miles. After several failed attempts Betelgeuse said to Katt half joking, half serious "What if we die out here?"
Suddenly a blob of brown and white leapt in front of the windshield. Matrix stomped on the brake pedal and jerked the wheel hard to the right but his atrophied reaction time wasn't fast enough to miss from smashing the object head on. All one hundred and fifty pounds of a full grown white tailed deer slammed into drivers side windshield before popping up and over the Nissan's roof. Panicking, Matrix tried to correct the trajectory of the car but in his excitement overcompensated and inadvertently sent the car spinning in circles at sixty miles an hour. Amid a flurry of smoke and tire chirps the Leaf bounded over the soft gravel shoulder and plunked ass backwards into a hilly thicket of grass.
Surprisingly short of a couple of scrapes and bruises everyone in the car escaped the accident unscathed, the car and the deer however did not fare as well. About 400 feet behind the Nissan's final resting place the body of the formerly bounding deer exhaled its final breath. The car while not a total write off, suffered significant damage to the body, but most critically one of the rear wheels had been slapped horizontal and impacted inward. Even if a member of the team had the tools or the talent to replace a tire, there was no way they could fix the damaged rotor and rear suspension.
Zigoat stumbled out of the car and limped into the middle of the road. He surveyed the skid marks, blood spots and splintered fender pieces strewn across the concrete. He tuned his gaze further down the highway as far as he could see before turning around and doing the same thing in the other direction. After standing in the street for about five minutes he shouted out loud enough for the others to hear: "What the fuck are the chances of that happening?" "What are the chances of what happening" Betelgeuse responded. Stammering slightly Zigoat approached the group before continuing. "I bet that three cars at the most, AT THE MOST" pass through here every couple of days, and the moment one does, it's the exact same time and place that A FUCKING DEER IS CROSSING THE STREET?" "Oh yeah" Betelgeuse replied, "I guess that is pretty random." "I have a better question" Matrix chimed in. "What the fuck are we going to do now?"
