If she walks closer do they get worse, are they warning her?

take me with you, the bear... says, for lack of a better verb. i'm your friend.

She's not sure she trusts it.

Has it got any more to say for itself?

i'll protect you, it argues. and I'm cute.

She shudders and moves closer.

Assuming she doesn't get a horrifying feeling of dread… she picks it up.

Quite the opposite: she feels warm fuzzy happy bells.

She tries not to be too creeped out by this. The teddy can come with, she decides.

thank you. we'll have an adventure!

Gosh.

She grabs her bag and checks her phone to work out where she needs to go for the truck, then sets off.

The box truck is where she expects it to be: a private lockup, a waystation for rental vehicles intended to do the highway shuffle from A to Z. A decrepit old janitor helps her find the right storage bay, and after unlocking it with Grandma Scarlett's golden key (and a whispered what wonders hide within?) she sees a completely uninteresting truck—a battered and dirty thing, boxlike and unmarked. The sort of truck you move plumbing supplies or the corpses of unsuccessful gangsters in.

Charming.

She inspects it, making sure there are no obvious defects and taking photos of the outside for later reference, then gets into the cab and looks for some sort of information or documentation.

Then it's time for her to start driving, following the guidance from her map app.

Although she did get to train some for this kind of thing while getting her commercial license, the truck's controls are still somewhat unfamiliar and might benefit from practice.

That's fine. She knows all the technical details of the controls – no weird sticks or buttons where she's not expecting them – and so it's just a matter of using it.

So the map tells her to take Highway Nine.

Got it.

And she's driving and Highway Nine is incredibly long and then—

—there's a moment of dizziness and loss of balance—

—and she's suddenly in a sparsely populated suburban area, with prettily mowed lawns and similar-looking houses decorating the landscape.

She tries to keep control of the vehicle – weird portals or whatever the hell they are, at least she knew this one was coming – and mostly succeeds.

The change of scenery is all the starker for being so sudden. She soon starts seeing children playing around and some people outside, which is nigh unheard-of in the city proper.

And she notices a blinking light on her dashboard: the CB Radio.

She turns it on in case there's anything relevant. Or something.

She hasn't actually used a trucker radio before. Hardly surprising.

The previous driver preprogrammed a handful of buttons to various bands—PUB, BEARS, SIDEB, LAWL, TRFF—but none of those or any others seem to catch anything but static, and the microphone itself is dead.

your people don't live here, the bells sound.

It can go back off, then – hardly affects her at present.

Drive drive drive—

we're here!

—and then she's in the Outlands, and her radio stops blinking.

If she puts it on now?

It's tuned to the BEARS station, and she hears two men talking:

"- shooting you in the back. Can you cut the reds?"

"Done already. Bear's backing down. Worth every penny, putting in the cutter..."

She makes sure her mic is off so she doesn't accidentally embarrass herself, then switches to PUB (which she assumes is 'public').