The no outlet sign is gone again. I'd like to think the wind stole it but I know it was just some bored kids or a pair of drunk newlyweds driving down from Las Vegas in a rented Ferrari with a beat-up license plate. A hundred miles of dust and vacant shrubbery can draw even the most focused traveller into a highway hypnosis so deep he becomes a planet in orbit. Neptune: 2.8 billion light years from the sun. Cool like the desert and hot like blue flames flaring into the atmosphere. The same supersonic winds that scathe its sapphire surface whip this California sand into dunes like a dissatisfied sculptor endlessly reshaping his creation.
A bloated structure made of pig skin in free-fall around the Earth controls the tides. The moon is pale and full tonight, almost lost in yesterday's dust storm. My car has a clock. A hundred thousand years and circuits approximate the time with painstaking presicion but the moon never falls out of orbit. All this detail and we still can't accomplish as much as two chunks of rock floating in space.
160 miles an hour and I make my own wind now. City people think the desert is dull but there's more motion here than in all the waves and oceans. Change is vicious and sand scrapes away at your skin until all that's left is bone. Where seabirds never flock, vultures gouge at carcasses like fungi devouring rotted fruit. There's a reason my house is the only one for a hundred miles in every direction.
As the night gets colder, the fever burns. It rages through every nerve in my body and brings my vibrational frequency to an excited state. My organs disorganize and boil alive. I know because the stench of petrol turns putrid as it mixes with the blood evaporating from my veins and wafting up my nose. Mercury is an metal planet, a blistering core of iron hurtling through space at a hundred and twelve thousand miles per hour. If it smelled there, I'm sure it would smell of blood.
Dead End Warehouse, the end of ends. "No outlet" doesn't do this place justice. If a single road is a dead end and a network of dead ends is a no outlet, this must be something else. A maze of roads sprawling through thousands of miles of desert, never going back, only branching off until the final fork. Then a dead end. The majority don't see it or don't care enough to stop. They careen off into the dunes at breakneck speeds and die on impact and their flesh rots in the sun or is eaten by beetles. If you see the end and manage to screech to a halt, that's when you're really fucked. If you're lucky, you'll give up before you're too worn out. Step back into your car and burn rubber with your eyes closed and your hands anywhere but on the steering wheel.