He thinks that he’ll get up the steep embankments surrounding the several-acre ditch easily, but he’s injured and nobody zipping along the highway can see him down there. Days pass and each plan for getting out fizzles. Then, just like his literary predecessor, he finds another set of footprints. Eventually, Maitland comes to see that the highway makers bulldozed over an older neighborhood and the basements of various businesses are still there under the surface. He identifies his own his own nightmare-version of “Friday”, a brain-damaged homeless man, but he also finds a young woman living there who doesn’t want anyone to ever leave the “island”.