Jared smiled feebly, "I'm Jared. Pleased to meet you."

Mike drove down the road. The air conditioner blew freezing air into the spacious cabin of the white knight. He was shaking with barely controlled emotion.

He was going there. He was going there. He hated himself for feeling afraid of a place, but he could not stop the chant in his mind as he drove. He was indeed going to the place where it had all happened.

Years ago, when Mac had died and the diner closed, the road had slowly deteriorated, and been swallowed by the desert. But mike had known it would return someday. He never drove down this road but that his eyes passed over the place where it had been. The way we sometimes involuntarily search for the face of a loved one in a crowd. It was never there. Perhaps it was merely finished with him. He did suspect it was sometimes there for someone, however.

MJ had not come home last night. He had not called, nothing. None of his friends knew where he was. Mike and Cathy had waited up all night for him. Cathy waited with the love and worry of a mother and Mike with superstitious dread that he had tried very hard to conceal even from himself.

The road had led him to Cathy. He was thankful every day of the last seventeen years for that blessing. But who knew where else it led? Had it taken his son? Would he come back? Had the mysterious hitcher now stranded his boy in some remote place or time?

He had been convinced that MJ would return in the morning, like he himself had, on that day so long ago, bearing some wild tale. But MJ hadn't come back.

Mike considered himself cleverer than some, and he knew he was a great mechanic. The continued survival of Stafford's Autoworks was proof enough of that. But, he was no Einstein. Mike could not pick up a piece of chalk and use it to unlock the secrets of the universe. He was a man of carburetors and valves and cylinders. He had always felt that he believed pretty much what everyone else believed was true about the world.

He was smart enough to recognize an extraordinary event when it happened to him, however. He couldn't pretend to understand it, but he knew it was something incredible.

Cathy had wanted to come with him. He didn't know if she too, sensed that something supernatural might have befallen him, or not. He had tried, all those years ago, to convince her, but he never knew how much of it she believed.

He had talked her into staying at home, in case MJ returned. She would keep him there, if he did. He would not be going back to wherever the road took those foolish enough to travel it.

But deep down, Mike Stafford was still afraid, because he was going there.

Jared began to crawl slowly across the bathroom floor. His gunshot wounds hurt more when he moved, and he was forced to stop several times to cough up blood, and gasp helplessly until he recovered enough strength to continue.

Even hogtied, MJ was wiry enough to wiggle under the door to the stall and meet him half way. He was afraid that the cop would die before untying him.

As he reached him he asked, "Where's your partner?"

Jared had stopped coughing, and the tickling in his lung was fading, but he was healing more slowly. The medical implants had been overtaxed by so many serious injuries coming so fast upon each other. In time, he would heal, but only if they could get out.