“Lessgo arready.” It is the hitchhiker –real or apparition- sitting in the seat opposite. His head drips: not with sweat, but its actual form and contours drip onto the seat and dashboard. “Less-go-ar-ready” the puddles of hitchhiker tremble in a sluggish bass.

The pickup is moving, but it’s not the linear movement of a car or any vehicle guided by a road and tires. The driver can’t even be sure if he is the one directing the car. He himself feels like his is sinking and he only clutches at the wheel as a life preserver.

Lights crash into one another and pieces of highway appear from the chaos every now and again, but the scene outside the windshield is nothing comparable to driving. A spaceship or submarine would be more believable; races of creatures flit by that could only exist in the outer reaches of the chartable world.

The driver has to stop. He pushes down on the pedal that he believes will do the trick, but the amorphous colors only grow brighter, and speed up with the urgency of those in a chase.

A familiar sound brings the driver partially back to the situation. He doesn’t recognize it at first, but its whirring vibrations slow down until it becomes the recognizable flatulence of a motorcycle.

“Bikers!”

Just like that, they appear; as if naming them is enough to summons them into existence. Except there’s only one: a hulking mass of a man with a woman clinging on to his shoulders. Her black witches hair trails them like the streamers of a kite.

They surpass the pickup from the adjacent lane and then dart out in front. Every hallucinating cell in the driver’s body is telling him to catch them. The hitchhiker voices his support in a polyphonic mess of “whoooooppeeeeee”s and “gogeduuuuuuuuuuum”s.

The rear wheel of the bike is like a spinning taunt. It speaks to the driver, mocks him, and dares him to come anywhere close to its gravelly spit. The driver doesn’t have to shift gears or press down on the pedal before the pickup’s hood is on the bike’s rear tire, like an attack dog sinking its teeth into its prey.