The children's play area is closed, it's a simple sign, black text and white laminated

paper where the fast food chains logo in the bottom right corner.

The restaurant is closed now, so every starlight filters in through the wall-sized windows

all around us.

The peeling posters and the various stands and trash bins cast overlapping and curious shadows.

It wasn't hard to break in.

Would you believe they didn't even bother to lock the doors?

The restaurant stands essentially alone, along one of America's longest, most forested

stretches of highway.

There's an unmanned gas station opposite.

One lone flickering neon bar is the station's only source of light.

It casts a watery, pale blue aura across the pumps.

The line of fast-paced and skeletal transmission towers stretch away above the treetops in a straight

line in both directions, perpendicular to the road.

But in terms of man-made structures, that's pretty much it.

There are no street lamps, no buildings, just sprawling endless forest, so have attended

pines in the darkness.

I turn my attention from the view outside, back to the restaurant interior.

The supervisor is fiddling with a locked door.

The one with a sign on it.

The children's play area is closed.

Her tongue sticks out from her mouth at an angle, and her eyebrows are furrowed.

...