Nathan Hystad - The Event

I had far too many questions and none of the answers. The way Vanessa so coldly shot the first one, and the fact they did nothing to harm me each time I saw them. I just needed us to get there before the others, if there were others still, so I could try to make the right decision. All of the military, mercenary, air force, and engineers, and the accountant was the one who had the fate of the world on his shoulders. My head hurt. It felt like tax season.

“They told Natalia, assuming she wouldn’t tell anyone, hey?” I felt suspicious of everyone at the moment. Maybe I was the only one who was really human. Mary felt human, but so had Janine. “We’re woven deep into this web of mystery. Natalia, I’ll take another chunk of emu jerky, please.”

Magnus and I laughed as we cruised down the road in the Jeep, the sun sinking on our right as we went.

For the first hour after the sun went down, Magnus accepted my suggestion of keeping the lights off, but as we got close to our destination, the terrain was terrifying at moments. The narrow roads often flirted with the edges of hills that turned into small mountains. It had recently rained, and everything was covered in a thick, gooey layer of mud. A few times, I had to ask that he slow down. “We need to make it there alive to do this,” I’d said.

At seven thirty, he put the lights on, and I was sure that it saved us a dozen times on the last stretch there. Natalia got him to change course a few times, and everything looked great. Then the storm hit. Flash floods hit fast down there, and in mere minutes, not only could we hardly see out the Jeep’s windows, but the roads were washed out completely. We fought it for a while and tried to find routes to get us to the little town at the base of Machu, but it was hopeless.

Magnus pulled over and rested his head on the steering wheel. Carey whimpered in the back seat as lightning flashed, followed by the booming thunder, telling us we were close to the source.

“You said there were trains, right?” Magnus asked, looking excited.

“Yeah, right to town,” I said, picking up on what he was suggesting. “Natalia, can I see the GPS, please?” I asked, moving to the east to look for the tracks. There they were, heading from the northeast. “Looks like there’s a side road over there, back a couple minutes. It’s going to be a crapshoot heading down there in this storm, but it looks like we’ll intersect the train tracks in a couple miles.”

Magnus lifted his head from the steering wheel and slowly looked at me, his blue eyes intense even in the darkness. The Jeep was lit up by the glowing orange lights coming off the dashboard, and I felt the desire to scan the sky for a ship. Did they not know we were here? It seemed to me there were two sides, and they both knew exactly where the thing was. If that was the case, why wouldn’t they just blow the damn thing to smithereens?

“Let’s do it! Train tracks it is!” he shouted, throwing the Jeep into reverse. We splashed and slid down the muddy road, making a sharp turn at the road that would lead us to the tracks. Lightning flashed a few times, and I saw how deep the water on the road really was. I said a little prayer that the lightning wasn’t going to hit the water and shock us. I couldn’t remember if that was an old wives’ tale or not, but I made sure I wasn’t touching any metal.

“I can’t slow down! I won’t be able to get started again in this mess!” Magnus yelled over the storm.

We raced down the road mostly blind, water beginning to seep in the bottom of the doors.

“We better get there soon, or we’re going to be stuck,” I shouted.

The tracks elevated slightly from the ground beside them, and the Jeep climbed the incline eventually after sliding down the slick, muddy hillside. Once on top, we stopped to regroup. The storm was still raging; raindrops the size of quarters were falling hard on the windshield.

“Here we are, Dean. On the tracks to our second-to-last stop before the big moment. There’s no turning back now,” Magnus said as he put it into drive. The ride was an extremely bumpy one, even with the twenty-two-sized tires and suspension on this beast. We bobbled up and down like marionettes, and it wasn’t the first time I’d felt like the aliens’ puppets today. I checked to see if Carey was okay, and he was firmly sitting in Natalia’s lap. It was quite the sight.

“What happens if there’s a train ahead?” I asked.

“We try to go around it. Should be simple. Let’s just hope there’s not, and if there is, that it’s firmly parked outside town so it won’t matter,” Magnus said.

Our headlights shone up and down and all over the place as we jostled about on the wet tracks. The clouds made it pitch black out at this point, but there was no sense in worrying about the aliens seeing us. We were all in. Committed to the job. Just what that was, was beyond me.

I could tell we were climbing some elevation, as my ears popped. Lightning flashed and I looked out the window, to see nothing but a cliff beside us to the right.

“Whatever you do, don’t veer to the right. Straight down to Deathsville that way,” I said, trying to sound like I was calm, completely betraying the hysteria I was fighting inside.

The miles piled on, and my back was already sore from bouncing up and down. We had mainly been riding alongside the mountain for the past hour, and Magnus had slowed down a bit. The rain still fell, but not as ferociously as before; the thunder and lightning duo only came to visit every few minutes now. We slowed down, and my stomach sank. There was a train on the tracks, a few hundred yards in front of us.

“Is there anywhere to pass on the left?” I asked, hopeful.

“I think there might be, but it’s pretty steep over there too.” Magnus clenched his jaw.

“Options?”

“Not many. Go around, or we climb over it and start to hike. Not an idea I want to explore much further. If we were only ten miles, I might say it’s a good idea. I figure we have another fifty or so.”

We didn’t have the luxury of time. I needed to beat the others there. “We go around with the Jeep,” I said firmly. He nodded at me and pulled off the tracks. We instantly tilted to the left twenty or so degrees. We followed the train for a hundred yards, and then we saw something that was going to ruin our whole plan. The mountain jutted up, and the train was in a tunnel. There was absolutely no way around the thing now.

“Damn it!” he yelled.

I racked my brain for ideas, but nothing was coming to me. If we walked, we were committed to the tracks. If we went to find a road, they could all be washed out, and even if we found a car out in the middle of nowhere, we might not be able to get through.

Natalia drummed her fingers on the console between the front seats. We both turned to her, and she rolled her brown eyes at us, like we were so obviously missing something simple. I’d seen that eye roll before. It was saying, “ Men!”

“What? Do you have some brilliant plan, lady?” Magnus asked her softly, like he knew a secret about her and didn’t want to share.

She just pointed at the train and got out of the Jeep.

“You heard the woman. To the train.” Magnus got out of the Jeep and started to take his gear out of the back. “You coming, or you just going to sit there and have a nap?”

Carey had already jumped out and was running around, getting soaked again. I guess he was in on the joke too. We were going to take the train there? It sounded kind of crazy, but maybe it wasn’t. I guessed that by not talking, Natalia had a lot of good thoughts going on in that head of hers.

I got out and helped grab the rest of the gear. Natalia was way ahead of us, walking in the dark with a flashlight lighting her path. When we had everything we needed to bring, we followed her. Carey walked over to me and jumped on my leg with his wet paws. He looked happy, like he was on the biggest, most fun adventure of his life. I supposed we all were. I bet Carey couldn’t wait to get home and tell his mommy Susan all about it, if we could get her back along with everyone else.