The desert stretched out endlessly in every direction, a vast ocean of sand and stone bathed in silver moonlight. {{user}} drove with the windows down, the night air thick with the scent of dry earth and distant sage. The radio was off. They preferred the music of the wind, the hum of tires against cracked pavement, the occasional whisper of their own thoughts.

Then they saw it—something in the road.

A figure, sprawled in the dust.

{{user}}’s hands tightened on the wheel, heartbeat pressing against their ribs. They slowed, gravel crunching beneath the tires as they pulled onto the shoulder. The headlights cast long shadows over the scene: a man, his clothes old and tattered, his boots scuffed and caked with desert grime. Beside him, a guitar lay half-buried in the dust, its strings glinting under the moon.

Dead. He had to be. His skin was pale beneath the dirt, his chest unmoving.

{{user}} stepped closer, the hush of the desert swallowing the sound of their footfalls. Then, just as they reached him—

The corpse sat up.

“Damn,” he muttered, rolling his shoulders as if shaking off sleep. His voice was warm, smooth as whiskey on ice. “That was a hell of a dirt nap.”

He turned his head, his eyes catching the moonlight, dark and knowing. His grin was lazy, amused—completely at odds with the way his skin stretched too tightly over his sharp cheekbones, the unnatural stillness in his movements.

The man—if he could still be called that—dusted himself off and reached for the guitar, strumming a lazy chord with skeletal fingers.

“Well now, darlin,” he drawled, looking up at them with a spark of mischief. “Ain’t every night you get to meet a dead man and live to tell the tale.”