That doesn’t explain why the driver is so shocked to see that his gun has been raised, and now points at the hitchhiker’s chest. He did it without thinking, maybe as a reaction to the hitchhiker drawing his. Neither of them seems particularly enthused to have two barrels separating them where several hours ago there was only a worn gear shaft and staid silence.

Face to face with Paula’s murderer: how many times has the driver dreamt of this moment since he first found the body, her blood drained from a wound five years in the making? He wants to pull the trigger. He wants nothing more than to watch this savage’s body fall to the well-maintained lawn, one piece at a time in meaty strips of gore.

He can’t pull the trigger because that will leave him completely alone. He’s alone now, to be sure, but the hitchhiker provides that kind of solidarity in loneliness that can only be enjoyed by two men who have nothing left in this world, except maybe their own, tortured companionship.

The driver loved Paula. There’s no other way he can express the devotion that burnt him up so completely; for which he was willing to drive to the end of every highway, even if that meant the end of himself as well. This is the end, and Paula’s murderer, the hitchhiker, is as much a part of it as is the driver or his late fiancée.

He wants to pull the trigger –for her, for them- but he doesn’t want to do it first. He waits for the click of the hitchhiker’s hammer. It never comes. A cloud shrouds the moon like a mortician covering a corpse’s pale face. It becomes so dark that eyes open or closed, living or dying: it’s all indiscernible. It’s all the same chilling wait. The driver waits. The hitchhikers waits, breaths, points. There’s absolutely no sound.

“Get outta here.”

The hitchhiker doesn’t stir.

“I said ‘get’!” In another beat, and sadder, “Fine, I’ll get.”

The driver floats to his pickup. The hitchhiker follows and the driver can’t help but be reminded of an abandoned puppy, begging not to be left behind.