The car flies up an on-ramp and merges across a solid white line onto the highway. There is a series of orange-lit streetlamps that escort the traveler out of the city. They whiz by in a hypnotic succession, -light, dark, light, dark- but the flashing-movie-projector effect is interrupted by a silhouetted figure standing below the final post. He is walking out into the road, waving one arm while a sack dangles from the other. He stands directly in its way, but the pickup does not slow down.

The driver sees the deranged figure, and has to swerve to avoid hitting him. The tires screech and the pickup fishtails and the driver has to lean on the brake pedal with all of his weight to prevent the car from careening into the metal guardrail at the meridian.

The hitchhiker takes this abrupt stop as a hopeful sign and rushes over to the vehicle, idling just out of the last streetlamp’s reach. The dark figure scurries up to the door and peers through the window, the sack slung over his shoulder in anticipation of an affirmative response. The driver says nothing, giving the man a sidelong glance and turning back to face the windshield. His hands tighten on the wheel and the pickup lurches forward, but not before the hitchhiker has wrenched open the door and half-jumped onto the passenger seat.

With that one insistent movement, the situation has darkened from a mere plea for a stranger’s kindness to a more sinister demanding, like the taking of a hostage. The driver feels no urge to argue, or even acknowledge this interloper beyond a frozen look up and down. There is time for little else as the pickup starts for the last lights of Barstow. Beyond their sulfur-tinged flicker grows a chilly expanse: empty, dark and silent, punctured only by the dotted lines of the road and the shifting of two strangers’ bodies in a car. There are still one hundred and fourteen miles to the Nevada border.