Louis, again, with those dead-X eyes.

He smiles.

"Don't come near me," she warns. "You come near me, I will break your tree-trunk neck, I swear to all that is holy."

He chuckles, shaking his head. "C'mon, Miriam. You've already established that this is a dream. You already know that I'm you. So are you saying you want to break your own neck? That's very counter-productive. Suicidal, really. You should seek professional help."

Louis starts to pace, and as he moves, Miriam sees two crows in the middle of the highway. Dark beaks peck at a smashed armadillo, pulling up strings and tendons of red. The dead animal almost looks like a cracked Easter egg. The birds peck at each other.

"Maybe I'm not you," Louis says, slowly ping-ponging from dusty shoulder to dusty shoulder. "Maybe I'm God. Maybe I'm the Devil. Could be that I'm the living manifestation of fate, of destiny, of that thing you curse every morning you wake and every night before you lay your head to sleep. Who can say? All I know is, it's time to meet ze monsta."

Miriam begins to pace along with him. They are like two predatory cats, stalking each other on two sides of the same cage.

"Get me out of this dream," she says.

He ignores the request. "Maybe I really am Louis, though. Maybe I'm his sleeping mind, psychically calling out to you – because, after all, you're so sensitive. Poor little psychic girl. Maybe I know what's coming, and I'm begging for you to make it stop. Please, make it stop, Miriam. Boo-hoo."

"I can't make it stop."

"Maybe. Maybe not. You still have choices. I'm going to die in two weeks, but instead of trying to stop it – or, at least, trying to make my life a little better during that time – you're going to haunt me like a ghost and steal from my dead, eyeless body."

"Girl needs to eat." Miriam sneers.

He stops pacing. "Is that how you justify what you do?"

"You don't know what I do or why I do it," she says, even though she suspects the opposite must be true. "I'll be with Louis – and trust me, you're not him – and maybe I will make his life better for those two weeks."

"Blowjobs are nice," Louis says. "Try one of those."

"Fuck you. I can make him happy during that time. But don't ask me to save him–"

"Save me."

"– because it ain't happening. It can't happen. It won't let me."

"It."

"Fate. You. God. Whatever."

He shrugs. Then he looks somewhere over her shoulder.

"Hey," he says. "What's that?"

She falls for it. She looks.

It's a Mylar balloon. Drifting over the road-top, caught in a heat haze, dripping blood onto the asphalt, where it sizzles as if on a hot griddle.

Miriam turns to say something to Louis, or not-Louis, or whatever he is, but –

He's gone.

He's been replaced by a white SUV, and it strikes her dead in the chest, and she feels something break inside of her.