Lost Highway: The Citron County Dinosaur Exhibit
On the edge of the quarantine zone stands a deserted area resembling some kind of bizarre post-apocalyptic mishmash of Stone Age and Jet Age: The Citron County Dinosaur Exhibit. Dominated by enormous concrete dinosaurs (including a headless brontosaurus, a tyrannosaurus rex with shiny steel spikes where its plaster teeth used to be, a sagging tower with a drooping pteranodon on it, etc.) and partially destroyed futuristic domes, spires and swooping roofs and arches, the whole thing used to be a faded family attraction. Long abandoned, the Citron County Dinosaur Exhibit is now rumored to be a nesting and meeting place for criminals, homeless people, supernatural creatures and… something else.
A local hippie commune calling itself the Stegosaurus Love Farm was established there between the years 1968 and 1976, devolving from a life of free love and shared subsistence farming to cultivating cannabis and cooking up LSD to sell on the black market. As the gentler, more easygoing people left the commune and only a hard core of freaks remained, things got weirder and weirder—paranoia, insularity, sexual obsession and mental illness set in. An experimental hallucinogen was whipped up in the commune’s trailer laboratory that was said to have fried the last two families’ brains, and incest, insanity and several murders followed. The horrors of the Love Farm commune were a brief local scandal in the early 1980s, thought of as a last gasp of the collapse of the counterculture, and then soon forgotten.
But were they really over?
Anecdotal claims were made that the police hadn’t actually cleared out the final commune residents, and that other… persons… had joined them in the aftermath of the Love Farm murders. There were stories that said that they were a filthy, psychotic, increasingly inbred rabble that did anything they could to survive. If they really existed, then they clung to existence among normal society for 20-plus years, skulking in the darkness. And then the BioDisaster came along.
All of the Little Jamestown district—now called “Lost Highway”—was quarantined in the aftermath of the BioDisaster. Strange mutagens and unknown viral diseases were supposed to have swept through the area, including the site of the Love Farm Family commune. Did anyone—or anything—survive?
The word is that if you go around the Citron County Dinosaur Exhibit by night in search of some cool artifacts of the old tourist attraction, you’ll find out.
