I winced as my F.M. reciever died in a burst of deafening static, leaving me with just the sounds of the road. That was all I needed. I was out in the middle of nowhere, in the dark and now I had no music either. Without Sieber’s “Long Past Gone” to distract me, small details began to annoy me: the smell of stale coffee, intermittant tapping against the windshield. Worst was the everpresent darkness outside that, except for the thin strip of road illuminated by wan headlights, seemed to go on forever in every direction.

I cracked the window to let in the cool night air.

At the end of this broken asphalt worm lay Iron Hill and a brother in need of help. A post card had reached me a week ago. A post card in the age of cell phones and social networking. Why would my brother entrust his worries to a mere scrap of paper? Not to mention the USPS.

In a hasty scrawl, my brother hadn’t mentioned much beyond being trapped and some kind of danger “from the skies” but then again madness runs deeply in our family.