In the next moment, the biker and his woman are on the hood. The front of the pickup lilts with the weight and a there is a denting noise like that of a crushed can. The woman falls immediately to the wayside, but the biker rolls up onto the windshield. It begins to crack. The driver is somehow manages to bring the car to an instantaneous stop, and the biker is gone like a spec of dirt caught by the wind.

The dying down of the engine brings a momentary calm. It is underscored with the rolling thud of arms, belly, and head body flopping against asphalt. It finally comes to a halt with a muffled crash: a great weight hitting frozen dirt.

The way the pickup has swerved to a halt, its headlights follow the asphalt to the highway’s shoulder, where it drops off into an unseen ditch. Streaks of blood glisten in the light. They too disappear at the road’s ledge.

The driver staggers out of the car and he is followed closely by the hitchhiker. They both manage to stumble towards the ditch, miraculously without falling in.

“Shit.”

They can barely make out a denimed whale below. It doesn’t move. A little further off in the blackness of an empty field, a motorcycle sputters with the diesel whimpers of a wounded animal.

“Let’s get outta here.”

They turn back to the pickup but quickly catch sight of a white figure in a torn dress. She resembles a lithe insect, half squashed but still managing to flop a displaced limb and pull itself along the ground. She too glistens with red and her arms are arranged in a way that no arms ever should.

The hitchhiker runs for her and she collapses completely. He is able to hook two arms under hers and pulls. The scrape of flesh on the coarse roadway is painful to listen to. More of the deep, red wine, left behind in a pool: it colors the hitchhiker’s sleeves, up to his elbows.

The driver wants to yell that he can’t throw her inside the truck, but he knows they can’t leave her out here either. She slumps in the middle and the almost simultaneous slamming of car doors signals the close of yet another chapter –really no more remarkable than the ones to come before- in the adventures of the hitchhiker and the driver, as they batter their way through the American West, under an American Sky, on into another American Night.