‘We’re looking for people like YOU!’
Billboards tend to blur in the peripheries until I’m checking for a likely lunch spot or the rare Shitholes destination that advertises outside of the book. I could have driven past a number of these before noting anything that seemed… strange.
‘Are you between the ages of 18 and 64? We’re looking for people like YOU!’
‘We’re looking!’
‘We’re looking for PEOPLE!’
‘Are you between the ages? We’re looking for people like YOU!’
No phone numbers on these signs. Just a general declaration of what the advertiser is looking for. I stop to look it up but the only hits are people, like me, who are trying to figure out what the story is. I add my findings to a couple forums for posterity and pull back onto the highway.
‘We are looking for PEOPLE!”
‘We are looking for YOU!”
Just before Hector and I make it to our exit I see a much larger version of the same sign, flickering with halogen bulbs and propped up on two stilts, precariously tall. An arrow points from ‘We’ to a dim warehouse below the sign. An arrow drawn from ‘YOU’ indicates my general location on the highway.
I stop again and flip through Shitholes, nervous in the untrodden dark. No entry indicates any knowledge of these signs or of the warehouse to which they seem to lead. Ahead, the sign pulses with a heat mirage, swarms with moth-hunting bats and bat-hunting bigger-things that swoop heavily on the edge of the light.
We exit early, content to let that one pass. The compulsion to seek out mystery in the face of danger has faded, in me, at long last.
-traveler
