John Person is a struggling actor in Hollywood . Working part-time as a messenger, he delivers scripts he'll never star in to producers he'll never work for. Behind on his rent and heavily in debt, he accepts an unsolicited offer from a strange neighbor to courier a blue suitcase up to the desert truckstop of Baker, California. There, in the middle of nowhere, at a seedy motel in the shadow of The World's Largest Thermometer, he'll simply deliver the locked suitcase to a trucker called Cowboy and be paid twenty-seven thousand dollars in cold, hard cash. John's given a loaded gun and told he must defend the blue suitcase with his life. It's easy money. But on arrival he discovers he's already missed the mysterious man and soon he's reluctantly mixed up with a young local vixen, her hot-headed jealous boyfriend, and paranoid, alien-obsessed locals. When the FBI arrives at the local watering hole to question him about the murder and decapitation of his strange neighbor and hundreds of people recently gone missing, John realizes that he might be mixed up in something much more dangerous and bizarre than he ever imagined. Nothing is ever easy. Then, later that dark night, when Cowboy violently appears, John is faced with a choice that might change his life forever. "The Big Empty" is a strangely twisted journey that transports John Person to another world, in more ways than one.