Your average guy might head back to his car, but Prius isn’t your average guy. He recycles, he holds the door open for people, he buys fifteen boxes of Girl Scout cookies every year. He assumes the man in the back seat is taking a nap. That he got tired and pulled over to catch a couple winks. But why go through the trouble of getting into the back seat? Unless the man spent the night in the car. Which would be odd, but surely not unprecedented. But it was odd to still be asleep at four in the afternoon. Surely the guy should be up and continuing his journey.

Prius gives a little rap on the window. Best to see if the man is okay. But the man is nonresponsive. Prius knocks harder. Still no movement.

That’s when the cell phone comes out.

It takes the sheriff ten minutes to show up.

This is where it gets strange.

The sheriff pulls a hose from his car and inserts it in to the muffler of the Lincoln. The car starts to fill with red Jell-O.

The Jell-O, which isn’t your average Jell-O, dissolves the car and everything around it. Except me.

Now it’s the sheriff, Prius, and then me in this red cocoon.

Then another man joins. Then a woman. Soon I am surrounded by men, women, children, dogs, even a couple horses. And then everyone starts eating the Jell-O. They are devouring it, getting closer and closer to me in the middle.

The six foot radius of red is soon just two feet, then two inches. They are about to be out of Jell-O and then they are going to start eating me.

That’s when I wake up.

I jolt upright and peer out the back window. The car hasn’t moved. I shake off the dream, which may have gotten slightly unrealistic at the end, but easily could have happened. Someone could have stopped. Could have peeked in the back seat. Could have called the cops. Sure, the road was off the beaten path, but over the course of the past twenty-three hours, a hundred cars sped past the Lincoln. Maybe a dozen gave the car a single thought, half dozen even contemplating where the owner of the automobile might be. And one even considered stopping. But lucky for me, that one continued on his merry way.

I jump out, do my business on the side of the road, and then hop into the driver’s seat. I put the car in drive and chug the remaining water bottle, eat half a bag of beef jerky, and then finish off a second pack of Peanut M&M’s.

I cover five miles in five minutes.

At 3:06 a.m., the GPS tells me to take a right onto a dirt road.