A man walks into the path of an oncoming motor home in the Mojave Desert.
He's dressed like an 1880s miner. His bones are over a hundred years old.

Welcome to Barstow.

Detective Beth McDade was an LAPD homicide cop until she wasn't. Now she's working the graveyard shift in a town nobody chooses, and she has a body in Yermo she can't explain. The security camera caught the dead man running into traffic seconds after a flash of lightning that wasn't really lightning, more like something tearing a hole in the sky.

Days later, an LA food blogger vanishes off the same stretch of Interstate 15. The last footage of him alive shows him buying beef jerky at a gas station up the road.

When his skeleton turns up — a hundred years in the ground — and the dental records match the man on camera, Beth realises something out there in the desert is moving people through time.

And it's been doing it for a very long time.