Episode 04
Route Marker Nine
Two lifelong best friends drive a two-thousand-mile last-summer road trip before their real lives split them up, take a shortcut off a dead cell zone using a highway that exists only in his late grandfather's nineteen eighty-seven paper road atlas, and spend three days learning that the road remembers every car that has ever taken it — and does not agree that any of them left.
Cormac and Del have been inseparable since they were nine years old, and this trip — one enormous, unplanned drive before Del moves away for good — is supposed to be the last uncomplicated thing they ever do together. Cormac keeps his late grandfather's 1987 road atlas in the glovebox, half a good-luck charm, half a keepsake, and thinks nothing of it when Del jokes that his own father once did "some version of this exact drive" and came home a week later than planned with no real explanation.
When their phones lose signal in a dead zone the map app shouldn't allow, the atlas is the only thing that still shows a road: Old Number Nine, inked in red, a shortcut back to the interstate. They take it as a joke, a way to get some use out of a dead man's book. The road is long and straight and pleasant enough — until a gas station receipt prints a date seventeen months in the future, and a motel guest book turns out to hold the same handful of names, cycling every few pages, across four decades that shouldn't fit inside one register.
Cormac reads back through the book while Del showers, telling himself there's a boring explanation for everything in it. Then he finds a name he recognizes.
Spoiler-light synopsis — the rest airs Tuesday and Friday nights.