The Diner Trap
The headlights didn't just shine—they pulled.
Jake felt his body lurch forward before his mind caught up, dragged toward the light like metal to a magnet. Rachel screamed his name, but her voice warped, stretched thin like a record player slowing down.
Amber's laughter followed them as they were yanked through the diner's plate glass window—
—except there was no shattering.
One moment they were inside. The next, they stood on the broken yellow line of a midnight highway, the asphalt warm and breathing beneath their boots.
Rachel gasped. "This isn't real."
Jake crouched, pressing his palm to the road. The blacktop yielded slightly, like skin over a slow-beating heart. "It's real enough."
Behind them, the eighteen-wheelers from the truck stop idled in a perfect circle, their headlights forming a glowing prison. The drivers stood motionless outside their cabs, their shadows stretching impossibly long toward the center of the ring where Jake and Rachel stood.
One by one, the drivers turned their palms upward.
Each hand held a single rusted coin.
"Toll," they chanted.
The word vibrated through the ground.
The Keeper's Crown
Jake's vision doubled. For a heartbeat, he saw through the highway—to some vast, dark network of veins beneath, pumping black sludge between every road in America.
Then the pain hit.
It started behind his eyes, a white-hot drill boring into his skull. Voices flooded his mind—Holloway, Dawson, Tommy Mercer, Liam—all whispering at once.
"Keeper," Liam's voice rose above the others. "He wants you to see."
Jake's knees hit the pulsating asphalt as the vision overwhelmed him:
A maintenance worker in Kansas pouring black tar that slithered up his arms
A family sedan swerving to avoid something crawling across I-70
Every bridge they'd burned, reknitting itself with writhing human shapes
Rachel slapped him. Hard.
"Stay with me!" she shouted over the chanting.
Jake blinked blood from his eyes—when had he started bleeding?—and saw the truth. The drivers weren't offering coins.
They were offering themselves.
Each man pressed the rusted penny to his own forehead. The metal sank into flesh like water into sand, leaving behind a dark, oozing hole.
The first driver spoke through his new third eye:
"The roads must eat."
The Bargain
The semi-trucks began to move, circling faster, their headlights strobing. With each rotation, the highway beneath them softened, their boots sinking ankle-deep into hungry asphalt.
Rachel grabbed Jake's face. "Listen to me! You're fighting it, but you need to use it!" She pointed to his temple—where a single black drop of blood had fallen.
It wasn't bleeding down.
It was bleeding up.
Jake remembered Holloway's ledger. Remembered the way Dawson had known their route.
The keepers could hear the roads.
And now, so could he.
Jake closed his eyes and pushed into the pain.
The voices screamed—
—then suddenly, blessedly, obeyed.
For one terrifying second, Jake controlled the heartbeat of the highway.
Stop, he commanded.
Every truck's engine died at once.
The drivers collapsed.
The asphalt stilled.
Amber's shriek of rage came from everywhere at once as the illusion shattered—
—they were back in the diner parking lot, on their hands and knees, vomiting black sludge.
Rachel wiped her mouth. "What the hell was that?"
Jike touched his throbbing temple. "A audition."
Somewhere in the dark, a mile marker sign creaked as something heavy landed on it.
Claws on metal.
Waiting.
The New Rules
They drove west with the windows down, letting the desert air scour the stench of tar from their clothes. Jake kept one hand on the wheel, the other pressed to his bleeding temple.
"The roads are alive," he said hoarsely. "Not just the bridges anymore. All of them."
Rachel white-knuckled the ledger. "And it wants you to be its new Holloway."
Jike stared at the dotted yellow lines flowing under their headlights. They pulsed faintly, in time with his new headache.
Not a headache, he realized.
A heartbeat.
He could feel the entire interstate system now, a vast circulatory system pumping that black sludge to every infected vein. And at the center of it all, something vast and ancient waking up beneath the asphalt.
Rachel's phone buzzed with an alert—another bridge collapse, this time in New Mexico. No bodies recovered.
Just black stains in the shape of people.
Jake's fingers tightened on the wheel. "We can't burn them all."
Rachel turned to him, her face hard. "Then we go where the roads can't follow."
She unfolded a map, her finger landing on the one place without highways, without bridges, where the veins of America's infrastructure ran dry.
The Navajo Nation.
Where the old stories still remembered how to kill things that refused to stay dead.