- some sort of murdering beast that he had begun to think of as a were-goat ; that for the first time in his life he was on a wide , open road that was utterly deserted except for him ; there was not a coca-cola sign anywhere in view , or a budweiser billboard showing the world-famous clydesdales ; no ubiquitous wires ran beside the road on either side or crisscrossed above it , as had been the case on every road jack sawyer had ever travelled in his entire life ; there was not so much as even the distant rolling sound of an airplane , let alone the rolling thunder of the 747s on their final approaches to lax , or the f-111s that were always blasting off from the portsmouth naval air station and then cracking the air over the alhambra like osmond 's whip as they headed out over the atlantic ; there was only the sound of his feet on the road and the clean ebb and flow of his own respiration .