When I woke up, I was driving on the highway.

Instinctively I corrected my course—I had been drifting toward the left shoulder. Once I blinked the crust from my eyes and aligned myself stably to a lane, the full shock of the realisation overtook me.

If I woke up while driving on the highway, evidently I had been sleeping while driving on the highway. That, in itself, was a ridiculously dangerous thing to do. It was a miracle that I even woke up at all.

Now that I had ascertained that I was alive, the next order of business was to figure out how long I had been out. What had I been doing before falling asleep? There had been a dance. Last night, across a grand ballroom floor in Cambria Falls, we had been dancing. Waltzing into the ghostly hours, twirl of gown upon coattail, and then losing ourselves to the magic of free-flowing wine-addled conversation, rims stained with lipstick, until we had all descended back to an Earth of brick and concrete and bidden our farewells in the parking lot under a cloudless moonlit sky. The solitary drive back: a few scattered memories of the interstate, faint impressions of farms and junkyards and overpasses—

It must have been two or three in the morning? But the sun was rising now, its rays low over the horizon, harsh and reflective. Which meant that I had been driving for four or five hours. Sleep-driving.

I had probably crossed a state line or two.

Where even was I? My phone, affixed to the air vents above the radio controls, was my navigator. Tap tap. No. It wouldn’t turn on. In all probability it had run out of power overnight. Shit. It was time to work out where I was the old-fashioned way: the road signs.

Where were the road signs?

With a jolt of unease I realised I had not seen a single road sign since waking up. As far as I could tell, the entire landscape was a dusty procession of farms. The same two or three farms, copied and pasted against the same two or three mountains. What kind of highway even was this?

I had a new plan. Take the next exit, follow the road into whatever God-forsaken small town it took me, and read the road signs there. Or drive into the lot of some breakfast house or sleepy dinner or inn, and talk to an actual person. I had roughly a hundred miles of gas left.

That would have been foolproof, had it not turned out that I could not find an exit anywhere. Five, ten more miles, but the right shoulder continued unbroken against an unrelenting series of telephone poles. Was this some strange unfinished offshoot of interstate, a branch to nowhere? Were normal people allowed to be here?

I pulled to the right shoulder and stopped, and then I plugged my phone into one of the battery ports to let it charge. Once it awoke I could use GPS to tell me where the hell I was.

In the rearview mirror I observed a red Tesla also pulling over to the shoulder and coming to a stop right behind me. So I wasn’t the only one lost on this stretch of highway.

I was about to get out of the car to talk to this other driver when another red Tesla pulled over and parked itself right in front of my car. And a third and fourth pulled up to my left. Blocking my means of escape.

Tall men emerged from each of the Teslas, clad in tuxedos, white ties. Dance partners? Who had been tailing me from last night? All this way? But with a second glance, my worries were replaced by something far worse. They weren’t men. They weren’t even human. They were humanoid figures, taller than anybody I had danced with last night, towering seven or eight feet. And their arms were entirely too long, but upon further inspection all of their dimensions were mismatched, slightly off. Unholy mockeries of a human form. And they had no faces.

And they were shambling toward my car.

For a split second I considered running. Throwing open the sedan doors to the wind, sprinting through the chilled morning air into the dawn. Then it occurred to me that I was still in heels and layers of taffeta and sprinting on concrete would be strictly inadvisable. Perhaps I could use my heels as weapons—

THUMP. They were all surrounding my car, tossing their lumbering humanoid forms upon its frame with sickening force. THUMP. A horrible two-foot dent lodged into the passenger door. THUMP. THUMP. I rummaged through my purse, the glove box, anything that could do something, anything—