$1,000,000

      The mountain's long shadows grew shorter and shorter each minute. The sulfuric, rank stench of the sea and the arid desert wind made their lips and eyes bone dry. They couldn't wait to get to the cool  comfort of home. 
      Alex and his wife were on a leisurely hike at the Salton Sea on a warm and sunny June weekend to get away from their annoying children.
      "You see that?" Alex's wife Mary asked, pointing at a peculiar brown boxy object protruding from the desert ground. 
      "Yeah, what is that?" contested Alex.
      "I don't know, might be a mirage of some sorts. Want to go check it out and see what it is?"
      "Sure, doesn't seem too far from where we're at." The couple walked through the tumbleweeds and the thick desert air and found a damaged road leading to the object. They looked around for a dust cloud thrown up by a passing car but nothing was to be found.
      "It's abandoned, honey," Mary said nervously.
      "Well, this is Salton City, what did you expect?" After what felt like miles in the beating sun, the couple neared and neared to the object. Their visual clarity finally revealed a brown Toyota Sienna minivan rolled over on the side of the road. There was glass everywhere. The front of the van was blackened by flames. 
      "Honey, go check if there's anybody inside," said Mary, trembling. Mary noticed that their van was the same model and same color and thought that was peculiar.
      "Okay." Alex went to check the inside of the car, but nobody was there. What Alex noticed was the grisly and gruesome sight of blood on the seats and some brain matter on the mangled dashboard. 
He looked around the vicinity of the car to see if the bodies were thrown out of the car. None.
      "Honey, are there any bodies?"
      "There are none, but there is blood."
      "Oh crap," replied Mary.
      "I don't know why they didn't clean up the car but they took the bodies." Alex checked the area once more to double check if there were still bodies. He still found none, but found a briefcase a few feet away from the car. He opened the case to see if there was any clues for the identification of the victims, but there was money instead of documents. The moment he touched the delicate cotton bills he felt the strangest feeling; he could not pinpoint whether it was happiness or anxiety. "Hey, I think we just won the jackpot!" He sat down on the side of the road being careful not to sit down on any shards and counted the dollars that were inside the case. "There are a million dollars in this case, honey! Come look! No bullcrap!"
      Mary came to Alex for confirmation that the money was legit. "I think we just did," Mary said happily, hugging Alex. They didn't seem to care about the origins of this money and where the bodies were at this point. "We need to take this home before we lose it."

      When Mary and Alex arrived home after a couple of hours, they noticed something different, but didn't know what it was. Was it the atmosphere? Was it how the house looked? No, it could not be. The house was the same. The couple soon brushed it off, saying it was a form of homesickness. 
      
      "How's the dinner, kids?" asked Mary.
      "It was fine," the kids replied.
      "Fine? How is it just fine, I put a lot of time into making good food for you guys and you say it's just 'fine.'" Mary mumbled, "ugh, kids." 

      "Mom, you should be able to make really good food with that money."

      "We're gonna buy a new car with that money, not food for you kids!"

      After a long period of silence, the lights shut off and the TV turned on to static for some reason. The children and Mary screamed while Alex just was nervous.

      "Okay. This is strange," Mary said, scared out of her mind. The TV switched to an odd channel for a second.
      "You will die," a strange man with a suit on the TV said. Alex saw the room in which the man was sitting in as dark and storage-like, with spiderwebs and dim lighting. It returned to static.
      "What the hell?" Alex yelled out. The kids held on to their parents. "This is just a strange coincidence," Alex repeated to himself a couple of times.
      "The kids can sleep with us tonight," Mary said, regretting her distaste for the children.
      "Okay," Alex contested.

      The night after, the children returned to their bedrooms and Alex and Mary once again slept together by themselves. They said their goodnights and returned to sleep. 

      A couple of hours into their sleep Alex woke up to a knocking sound in the hallway. He walked to see if it was a sound emanating from the toilet or the shower. As soon as he flipped on the lights, he saw a glimpse of a man with a suit, and he remembered that he had no face. The man disappeared a millisecond after it went dark.

      "Oh sh-!" Alex yelled in the midnight darkness after he shut off the lights. He ran back to bed and curled up by his wife, cursing whatever it was. "This man," whispered Alex panting, "This man was inside the house. He looked like the guy on the television yesterday. God, help us." The both could not go to sleep, but the children slept soundly.

      The morning after, tired from the lack of sleep, Mary made breakfast for the children. 

      "Time for breakfast!" Mary exclaimed into the morning atrium. Alex was at the table with Mary, who was waiting for the children. He tried to piece the things together. "Let's pay off this house and get out of here, honey, with that million dollars we got at Salton City. Go on vacation, doesn't that sound nice? A cruise in the Bahamas, leave the children with their Uncle Walter."

      "I don't know, something's telling me that the million dollars are cursing us. It must be, the crazy things happening in our house. I really want to get out of here, and quick!"

      "We'll get the paperwork done soon, and we'll get out of here A-S-A-P because this crap is scaring the hell outta us!"

      Suddenly the couple heard a loud noise coming from the ceiling.

      "Must be the kids waking up." They waited a couple of minutes for the children. No one came.

      "Come down here this instant!" Mary screamed once again, "I'm going to check what they're doing. They're getting on my nerves!"

      Mary ran upstairs and found a thin, metallic object protruding from the door. Mary walked closer and it was a bloodied knife, with a note stuck between the door and the knife. It read: "Retu n the m ney to its o igin l sp t or d e." Mary could not make out some letters because of the blood obscuring them.

      "Open the door! This must be some horrible joke! Open the door now!"

      No one replied.

      "Open it now!" Mary's voice became louder gradually like a crescendo. Mary attempted to open the door by punching it, but that did not work. She then walked back a couple of feet back in the hallway and rammed herself against the door, which then fell down. Mary discovered both their children's bodies hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling fan. There were deep gashes on their bodies and they obviously appeared dead. There was blood splattered everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, on the computers.

      Mary stood for five seconds, shocked, traumatized, and then let out a screech the whole world heard, "Nooooooooooooooo!"

      Alex abandoned his food to run upstairs to investigate the commotion. "What's going on?" he asked, and then saw the blood, "Son of a-." His expletive was cut off by another scream his wife let out. 

      "We must return the money this instant!" cried Mary, sobbing.

      "I need to call 9-1-1 first."

      The next night, after tons of interrogation by officials and the newspeople, the couple got in their brown Toyota minivan with the million dollars and found the location on GPS. They drove as quick as possible, dodging traffic under the moonlight, although they knew that it would take a couple of hours to reach there.

      When they were close to arriving, they were speeding when suddenly it became daylight. A man with a suit and no face appeared in front of the car and Alex swerved to the right. Their car flipped over and burst into flames, the couple's heads were crushed to the dashboard of the car. They were all bloodied, surely dead when the car came to a rest. The briefcase flew a couple of feet from the minivan, making the same scene they had seen earlier. The man walked to the flaming car, and let out a sinister laugh.