The next morning, they had breakfast at a Denny's next to the motel and set off just before 8:30. The sky was an unbroken gray and the flat prairie stretched into forever. Lincoln was reminded of the blasted hellscape he had seen in his dream the previous evening. In the light of day, however, it didn't bother him. Nor, for that matter, did the truck. He was sure now that he had been mistaken and that he didn't really see it prowling the parking lot.

To prevent his imagination from going full edgelord again, Lincoln skipped The Great War and instead watched a movie on his phone, settling for something funny and light-hearted. The highway was straight and open, and they made good time and before long they had passed through Nebraska into Colorado. The plains turned into mountains and the highways went from straight to corkscrew-shaped in under an hour. Lincoln finished his movie and stared out the window in breathless wonder at the jagged rises overlooking the highway. For nearly twenty miles, a rushing river matched the road bend for bend, flowing so fast that it was white, and Lincoln wondered how cold it was. The temperature outside hovered near eighty but patches of snow were visible on the summits of the mountains. Because it filtered out of the higher hills, the water was probably icy af.

Staring out at the Rocky Mountains, Lincoln's imagination kicked into high gear again, only this time, instead of dying in a gas attack on the Western Front in 1917, he was surrounded by Injuns in a wooded glen circa 1867. He was a veteran of the Confederate Army and out west doing veteran of the Confederate Army stuff (attacking Unionists because he was salty over losing the way, maybe?) when shirtless red men drenched in warpaint jumped out of the bushes with swords and tomahawks. Did the Indians have swords? He wasn't really sure but they did now. One came at him, slicing the in an elaborate zig-zag pattern. Lincoln whipped out his six shooter and shot him in the chest. He flew out of his moccasins with a scream of "Hooooooow."

The others scattered and Lincoln pounded his chest in victory.

"Go around!" someone yelled.

Lincoln snapped out of it. He was back in the van in boring old 2021. Dad leaned out the open driver side window and waved a car behind them on. Lincoln twisted around to peer through the back window, and his heart dropped.

BEATINGU read the license plate, and before he even saw the rust and cattle guard grill, he knew who it was.

Instead of going around, the truck stayed behind them, a single car length behind. The grill all but filled the world and above it, the dirty windshield. Lincoln could see the driver more clearly this time. His shoulders were broad to the point of being massive, and a wide brim hat covered his head. Shadows cloaked his face but Lincoln swore that he caught a flash of yellow, reptilian eyes before the truck swung around and accelerated. It zipped past Vanzilla and cut it off, its big back end coming close to clipping it. Dad hit the brakes and Lincoln jerked forward against the seatbelt. Lola cried out, Luna dropped her brownies, Lori's phone flew out of her hand and hit Lana in the back of the head, and Lynn slammed into the back of the passenger seat, obviously not wearing a seatbelt.

"Asshole!" Mom shouted.

The truck disappeared around a bend.

"He's been following us!" Lincoln cried. "I saw him yesterday on the road and then at the motel! He's chasing us!"

Mom brushed her hair out of her face. "Well, he's gone now."

"But did it yesterday and he came back!"

"Whoever he is," Dad said, "he needs a lesson in how to drive."

Mom laughed and that was it. Lincoln tried to make them understand that they were being followed by some nutjob in a 90 year old piece of shit but they wouldn't listen, especially when he told them about the yellow pair of eyes he had seen hovering over the wheel. Dad said he was overreacting and Mom pointed out his"active imagination." She thought he had seen a similar truck on the highway and then spun it into a grand, paranoid fantasy. She pointed out the time he did the same thing last year. He became convinced that a van parked across the street was from the FBI and that it was surveilling him for "accidentally" looking up loli anime. He was so sure of it that he drew up a last will and testament to be read after his conviction: Lily would get Bun-Bun, Lucy would get his laptop, Lori his phone, and Lynn a big fat nothing. As it turned out, it was just a normal van doing normal van stuff.

"But this is different," Lincoln whined.

"No buts, young man," Mom said.

"Mom -"

Lori whipped around and glared at him. "Shut up, Lincoln, you're giving me a headache."

Sighing, Lincoln flopped back in his seat and crossed his arms. Next to him, Lucy leaned in and lowered her voice to a whisper. "I believe you," she said. "Strange things happen on the road all the time."

"He's following us," Lincoln said. "I saw him, I know it."

"I bet he's a monster," she said. "And he wants to eat our skin."

A shiver slid down Lincoln's spine. Leave it to Lucy to make him feel even more afraid than he already did.

But was she really so wrong? He knew for a fact that the eyes he had seen weren't human. They were cold, hard, and alien, unlike anything he had ever seen before. Part of him wanted to dismiss it and came up with excuses - he was too far away to tell, the window was caked with grime, the reflection of the sun only made the eyes look yellow - but he knew in his heart that whatever that thing following them was, it wasn't human.

For the rest of the afternoon, he waited for the truck to return, but it never did. At several points, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up and goosebumps raked his arms; he had the distinct impression of being watched, but every time he turned around, the road stood empty behind him.

Past noon, they stopped at a restaurant housed in a ski lodge. It sat atop a tall hill surrounded by snow-capped mountains, a two story timber building with a pitched roof and a giant porch on stilts to one side. Inside, animal heads were mounted on the walls, a fire crackled in the hearth, and Native American inspired rugs covered the hard wood floors. The menu included bison, buffalo, venison, and other woodland creatures common to the Rockies. Normally, Lincoln would have been excited to try a new and exotic food, but he was still on edge from earlier, and his stomach subsequently ached. He ordered a Bison burger and nibbled on it while watching out the big front window, waiting for the truck to pull up.

It never did.

But of course it didn't. The demon - or whatever it was - wouldn't make his move in public. He would wait until they were on an isolated stretch of highway, maybe in the day but probably at night. What it would do to them, Lincoln didn't know and didn't want to know.

So of course his mind brought up every terrible option it could think of. Maybe the creature would eat their skin, like Lucy said, or maybe it would spring them off to its lair, wrap them in webbing like a giant spider, and punch some kind of straw-like sucker through their chests to suck out their juices. What if it ripped them limb from limb? What if it pulled out their guts? What if it spat corrosive acid in their faces? God, there were so many terrible things it could do.

The worst part of it all was that Lincoln didn't even know what it looked like. He could only imagine, and that made it a thousand times scarier. He bet it had sharp teeth and claws. Its skin was probably black and rotting and its face had to be a grinning skull, it just had to.

By the time lunch was over, he was a trembling, quivering mess. From the lodge, Dad angled south toward Arizona. The terrain grew drier and flatter and Lincoln's nerves calmed a little. There was no way the demon could hide; you could see everything all around you, so he couldn't sneak up on them or drop down on them from a hill or something. Fifty miles or so from the Arizona border, the land turned to desert and craggy hills thrust up from the earth. Lincoln's worries faded for the moment and excitement took its place. He hoped he got to see a real live cactus. He'd only seen ones in potter plants at school; observing one in the wild would be a whole other animal.

On his left, Lisa faced the window and rattled off the scientific name of all the flora and fauna they passed. Lucy's nose was buried in a dog-eared paperback with a vampire on the cover. Leni was dazed and half conscious. Lynn watched a football game on her phone. And Lori blazed her thumbs across the screen of her phone. "You guys wanna take the scenic route?" Dad asked into the rearview mirror.

Everyone grumbled and groaned except for Lincoln. He shot his hand up and half stood, restrained only by his seatbelt. "Ohhh! I do! I do!"

"They ayes have it," Dad said.

Lincoln's sisters all glowered at him and he chuckled nervously.

Changing lanes, Dad got off the highway and turned onto a two lane road that twisted and turned around steep, rocky hillsides. Lincoln spotted a cactus and pumped his fist. "Whoo! There it is! Can I have your autograph, sir?"

"Lincoln," Lori said, "you're a weirdo."

"A real fagolini," Lynn muttered.

"Shut up," Lincoln snapped. Cactuses are cool."

"Cacti, Lincoln," Lisa said, "cacti."

Whatever.

The road bent and curved through twenty miles of canyons before straightening out. Hardpan carpeted with scrub sloped away from the highway and wild desert flowers blossomed in the pounding desert sun. Lincoln's eyes widened and he smooshed his face to the glass, a ray of sunshine cascading over him like God's favor. He had read a bunch of western novels set in the high plains and Southwest and he always imagined the desert as a vast wasteland, but he was wrong. The desert here teemed with life, from plants to jack rabbits to smaller, more hidden things: Snakes, scorpions, and spiders, burrowing rodents, lizards, and strange bugs that looked as though they belonged on another planet and not on earth at all. The sudden urge to walk through the scrub and relish the badlands gripped him, and he looked away from the window. "Can we stop?" he asked.

Dad hummed. "Sure, why not?"

Lincoln pumped his fist. Score one for the good guys.

Lori groaned, Luna hung her head, and Lynn let out a long-suffering, "Ugh."

"It'll do us good to stretch our legs a bit," Mom said. "I don't know about you guys but mine are starting to cramp."

A few miles later, they came to a wide spot in the road and pulled off of the blacktop. Dust swirled in the air and vultures watched keenly from hilly perches. Lincoln scrambled over the row of seats ahead of him and pulled the door open. At once, the dry, sandpaper heat of the Arizona wilderness washed over him. He hesitated, shocked by the intensity of the heat, but forced himself out like a paratrooper jumping behind enemy lines. His feet kicked up puffs of dust and sweat instantly sprang to his brow.

Mom and Dad both got out, and everyone followed, except for Lola, who refused to "soil" herself in "this ungodly heat."

Oh well, More Lebensraum for him.

While everyone else did their thing, Lincoln bounded into the desert and frocllicked among the scrub brush like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. In his first couple minutes, he bumped into a cactus (ow!), communed with a scorpion, and fell head long into a tumbleweed. He got up, dusted himself off, and gazed into the distance. Far away, a dirt road followed the base of a giant rock formation. Lincoln held his hand up to his forehead ot block out the glare of the sun and scanned its length. An oddly shaped boulder sat on this side of the road and Lincoln looked at it for a moment.

It wasn't a boulder at all.

So faded and flecked with rust that it blended into the background, it was a truck,

With a square back.

And a cattle guard grill.

Lincoln's heart gave a tremendous thump and then stopped.

The driver stood by the back end staring at him. At this distance, he was little more than a black silhouette in a wide brim hat and long trench coat. Even from so far away, Lincoln was able to tell that he was impossibly tall and muscular.

Rooted in place, Lincoln stood there for almost a full minute before his paralysis broke. He wheeled around and ran back to the van, his arms and legs pumping. He looked back over his shoulder and instantly tripped over a rock. He sprawled on the ground, skinning his elbows, and began to cry with terror, A dark shadow fell over him and he screamed.

"Lincoln?" Mom asked and knelt. "Lincoln, what's wrong?"

Lincoln opened his mouth to tell her but a rush of gibberish came out instead. "Calm down, honey," Mom said. "What happened?"

Getting a hold of himself, Lincoln told her everything. By the time he finished, Dad and the others had come over and formed a circle around him. Lori rolled her eyes, Leni touched her chin in confusion, and Luna chuckled. "You don't believe me?" Lincoln asked. "Look for yourselves." He twisted around and jabbed his finger in the direction of the truck.

It was gone.

"You're mental," Lynn said.

"If you're trying to be funny," Luan told him, "you're failing."

"He was there," Lincoln said. "I swear."

His sisters all grumbled and walked away. Dad helped him to his feet and slapped him on the shoulder. "You probably just saw a rock and freaked yourself out."

"It wouldn't be the first time," Mom agreed.

They didn't believe him.

Pressure welled inside of Lincoln and he felt like he was going to explode into a million meaty little pieces. "I'm not making it up," he snapped, "he was there, I saw him."

"We better get going," Dad said, completely ignoring him, "daylight's wasting."

Lincoln opened his mouth, but Mom and Dad both walked off toward the van. Heaving a perturbed sigh, Lincoln slumped his shoulders. It was true that he often let his imagination get the better of him, but this was different: He was telling the truth. Why couldn't they believe him? He knew what he saw. It wasn't a rock, it was that creepy truck again.

A horn honked and Lincoln jumped.

"Come on, son!" Dad called out the driver side window. "Let's go."

Lincoln turned back to the road.

The truck still wasn't there.

Where was it, though?

He didn't know, and that thought chilled him.

Running to the van, he climbed in, slammed the door, and took his seat.

He hoped to God this was the ned of it.

But something told him it wasn't.

It told him that it was only the beginning.