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folks.”
    I lowered my voice, making sure the others couldn’t hear. “Her baby is either trapped in the wreckage or lying along the side of the road. Craig too, for that matter.”
    Frank stared into my eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
    I opened my mouth to reply, and found that I couldn’t, because deep down inside the answer was no. No, I didn’t really believe that. As impossible as it all seemed, Frank was right. People were missing. Lots of people. All I had to do was listen, and I could hear their loved ones calling out for them, desperately searching through the snarled lanes of traffic.
    Again I thought of Terri. There was a lump in my throat. “I need to get home.”
    Frank nodded. “We all do. Don’t think we’ll be going anywhere for a while, though. Not until they get a fleet of tow trucks in here and clear away some of these wrecked cars.”
    I glanced around for Charlie, and found him in a thin stand of trees alongside the highway, looking for Stephanie’s baby. I walked towards him, and Frank followed along behind me. Charlie looked up as we approached. His face was covered with sweat, and a mosquito was biting his ear. He didn’t seem to notice.
    “What’s up?” he asked.
    Frank pointed at Charlie’s feet. “Well, for starters, you’re standing in a patch of poison ivy.”
    Charlie jumped out of the undergrowth, cursing. I reached out and swatted the mosquito away.
    “Thanks.” He rubbed his ear.
    “Listen,” I said, “I need to get home. I have to make sure Terri’s okay.”
    “Terri?” He looked surprised. “Why wouldn’t she be okay? She wasn’t traveling in this. She’s safe at home.”
    “At the very least, she’ll be worried. You saw the traffic helicopter earlier. I’m sure this has made the news already. But it’s more than that. Frank here overheard some things on a trucker’s CB radio.”
    “What things?”
    “Something’s going on, Charlie. People have vanished into thin air, just like Craig.”
    He didn’t reply. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
    “Charlie—”
    “I know,” he interrupted me. “Just don’t want to think about it. This kind of shit doesn’t happen in real life.”
    Another scream interrupted him.
    Charlie looked back out to the road. “But it is happening, isn’t it? People are missing. Gone. Like they’ve been abducted by aliens or something.”
    Frank pulled a red bandana from his back pocket, removed his hardhat and mopped his brow.
    “Steve,” Charlie continued, his voice barely a whisper, “Craig disappeared before we crashed.”
    “What?”
    He sighed. “I didn’t tell you before because it sounded crazy. Shit, I didn’t believe it myself. Thought maybe I banged my head in the crash or something. Got mixed up. Hallucinated. But that’s not what happened. He disappeared in mid-fucking-sentence, dude. I saw it happen. He was there, and then we heard that blast, and he was gone. Then we wrecked, and after that I was confused, and then you woke up and—what the hell is going on?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know, man. But right now, I need to get home to Terri. I can’t explain it, but I’ve got a bad feeling. Come with me?”
    Charlie, Hector, Craig and I carpooled because we all lived in the same town, Shrewsbury, which was just across the border in Pennsylvania. Charlie was single and rented a tiny efficiency apartment over the hardware store on Main Street. Terri and I owned a house just a few blocks away, and both Hector and Craig had lived on the outskirts of town in the new development that had gone in after the Wal-Mart. The town of Shrewsbury was basically just a bed-and-breakfast for people like us, people who were born and raised in Maryland and worked in Baltimore, but had moved out of the state to get away from the higher taxes.
    “Come on,” I urged. “Please? Let’s go home.”
    Charlie pointed at the people combing the road for Stephanie’s daughter. “But what about her