I was telling Wife about my lack of scary stories so far, thankfully, our life has been pretty good. She reminded me about one which I will share now. Remember, I have claimed to be atheist, and if I'm going to not believe in gods and angels, I also don't believe in devils or demons, but this one got close to it all.
The year was probably 2002-2003. Chubs was nowhere in the picture, and we were driving around in a Black Expedition which we owned before we bought my 2004 Excursion. We were in Corpus Christi doing our summer thing, hanging out in our RV over a summer weekend. My mom said they were going to the Virgen de San Juan del Valle Shrine Church. It's a big church and for some reason people make promises to visit it when bad things go down. Not being disrespectful about it, but I never understood why this church was different than the others, other that it was a little bigger than any in our area. Anyways, it was about a two hour trip, she said "if you want to go, we'll go in separate cars, we'll head home, you all can come back to Corpus." It sounded like an OK idea and I quickly started figuring we could head down to Brownsville, I was worldly now, had friends at UT from Brownsville who bragged about the waters being clear on the beach, like you see in photos in far away places. Corpus is nice, but the gulf water is at best nice looking, rarely does it look camera ready and awesome.
We went and my brothers were there, I remember cracking wise the whole time on the church grounds. This is what bothers me about religion, the poor are starving, but they build these huge monuments of grandiosity and excess. I mean the church is beautiful, but it is built on the backs of the poor who give their hard earned money, out of guilt mostly. There is a running faucet, and the water coming out of it is "holy" because bishop so and so made the sign of the cross ten years ago? Buy our plastic 10 cent jugs for $5.00 a piece and you too can have holy water at home. Good for blessing homes, driving out demonic possessions, and also removes tartar buildup. I'm sorry, but I don't buy it.
Anyways, after getting my Mom nice and pissed for cracking wise, we exchanged goodbyes and we headed down to Brownsville. The beach was a tremendous disappointment. We went up and down looking for an entry point, but the whole city is just built up. You can't see the beaches for all the construction. We ended up parking, walking through an alley of some sort and walking on the beach for a few minutes. I was not impressed with the whole business. We stopped at a few souvenir shops, to make sure it got nice and dark on our return back, then got on the road back to Corpus.
This is when our problems started, my Dad had told me, you'll be fine, just make sure you take this road back, not this other one. I didn't pay much attention, figuring as long as they get us back to the general area of Corpus, it'll be fine. Apparently, I took the wrong road, before too long a car approached from behind and flashed his lights, there were two lanes in both directions, I thought, no buddy, pass me if you want, I'm not slowing down. After a while, he went ahead, I said good, but before long a van showed up and it too was flashing its lights for me to pull over. At this point, my wife said it looked like the driver was a demon, with a long tongue and horns. I decided I'd rather get a ticket than give these jerks any chance to stop me, we were going over 90 miles an hour for a good while. At one point, the car tried slowing me down from the front, while the van was behind, but I jumped to the other lane, and floored the thing. Luckily, they might have wanted the Expedition unscratched, he didn't attempt to sideswipe me and once I got in front of them, I did not slow down until we reached whatever little town. I saw in the rear view mirror, they turned back, probably to go after another unsuspecting vehicle.
I swore never again, am I going down that way. My Dad later half-jokingly said we were being punished for smart-mouthing in the church. Maybe, but I think it was just some low-lifes in masks trying to rob people or carjack. Either way, it was before camera phones, I don't think they had license plates to write down and we did have a phone, but there was no service in that region. Nowadays, we take our phones for granted, they seem to work everywhere, but that was a different time.
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