Byron and Nina, a young African American couple, are driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, where Nina plans to start college, when they are forced to stop in a small, desert place just this side of a ghost town. Unaccustomed to confronting racism and bigotry on the scale preserved in this rural anachronism, Byron's confrontational response to slurs, epithets and threats quickly leads to a fight for survival -- and the Chicago couple is alone and outnumbered.