EIGHTEEN
“What would you like? We have dried meats; a jerky of some kind. Maybe alpaca?” Magnus shrugged. “It’s Peru. Variety of fruit, but you’ve had some of that today.”
I spotted some bread, butter, and cheese. It looked so good at that moment, but my stomach was feeling extra heavy after the conversation I’d just had. Hunger for some good food won the quick battle. I grabbed my pocket knife and went to town on a sandwich, whipping one up for the others too. There I ate what I claimed to be the best post-invasion sandwich the world had ever seen.
The terrain was beautiful here and we moved down what must have been a secondary road, with few cars sitting on it. We kicked up dust as we made for the southern part of Peru. Grass greener than any I’d seen before scoured the landscape for miles, and we laughed when we saw the alpaca roaming on the hills beside us.
“You were right, Magnus. Unless those are llama. Then you’re so far off it’s not even funny.” I even said it with a straight face. I glanced back to Natalia and got a scowl for my trouble. Not only did she not talk, apparently her funny bone was malfunctioning too. I instantly let it slide, knowing what horrors she must have been through. I gave her a soft smile and started to turn back. Carey was staring at his new friend in the back seat, and I saw her give him a piece of meat and a pet. She did have the ability to melt the ice on occasion. I wondered if she and Magnus were more than friends, and felt a moment of jealousy that they got to go through this quest with someone they knew before it all happened.
“You okay there?” Magnus asked, and I realized I was sitting staring out the window with a half-eaten sandwich in my hand.
“I’m good. Just a lot to think about,” I replied, wishing I could share the burden I just heard back in town.
“Why Machu Picchu? Kind of a messed-up place to put some crazy alien device, don’t you think?” he asked.
“It actually makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. It’s one of those bizarre phenomena. They think the Inca built it for some emperor or something. Maybe he was really one of those hybrid guys and his magic, or technology, made them think he was a god. Also makes sense to put it somewhere it’ll be protected. Do you think any group of fanatics could go up there unnoticed? Probably not. Not a busy tourist destination that you can’t desecrate. Although they claim to have put it there hundreds of years ago. If by ‘hundreds,’ they meant the fourteen hundreds, then that would put it spot on with the building of the mountaintop city,” I guessed.
“How do you know so much about it? All I knew was the picture I once saw on a calendar.”
“Bit of a History Channel buff.” He looked at me sideways. “I know. I haven’t got out much the past couple years.”
Natalia tapped Magnus on the shoulder and passed him the GPS unit she had in the back with her. She pointed to the map and he veered off after a few minutes.
“That should take us around the next valley and save us some time. Thanks, Nat.” He winked through the rear-view mirror at her.
“What do you figure, Magnus? We have about two hours of light left now. I know you guys have been going through the nights, but do you think it’s more dangerous now?” I asked, trying to see where his gut was at. I wanted to get there tonight to see if we had any sign of Mary, Ray, or Vanessa.
“I have yet to see a ship, and we’re making good time. Have about what, three-fifty to go here?” Natalia must have given him the nod from the back seat. “Thanks. Let’s do it. Should get there by nine. With any luck, your buddies will be there and we can do this thing. How do we get up to the top?”
“It’s so remote out there. Tourists usually take a train to this little town, Aguas Calientes; from there it’s up the mountain via switchbacks. We researched this...or Vanessa had researched this. If it’s raining there, they say the roads can be treacherous. Hence the trains are the most used way to get there.” I was surprised they didn’t have any of this information. “Didn’t you guys know where this thing was? I thought your buddies told you all of this.”
He looked a little ashamed. “They told Natalia and asked her not to tell me until it happened. Really doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I guess they didn’t want anyone to go early, tamper with it, and maybe break something?”
A lot of things weren’t making sense to me. On one hand, Vanessa told us that they were brought here to save the world. That the bad aliens, who remained nameless, were going to whisk us all away, kill the majority, keeping a handful as slaves. Like her people. But if they trusted her people so much, how had they planted this device and then come here to warn us?
Then I had the lookalike aliens, who claimed the Kraskis couldn’t survive because of the device they’d planted here in Machu Picchu, of all places, known for its speculation of being tied to aliens. They also told me Janine was in on it. Was that why she chose me instead? She picked a battle side and thought maybe that I would figure it all out? Did she have that much faith in me? Why hadn’t she just outright told me all about it?
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.
“You ever driven a train before?” I asked the big Swede.
He shook his head. “Nope. I’ve driven a lot of things, but not a train. How hard can it be? You don’t even have to steer,” he said with a laugh.
“You have me there. If anything, we’ll show up in style.”
We approached the front cab of the train, and saw that Natalia was inside it.
“She doesn’t waste any time,” I said.
“Never has,” he replied and climbed up the steps to the doorway. The train was bright blue. I hadn’t been able to tell until we were right up close and I saw it in the flashlight beam.
“Nice looking train too. Looks brand new. Check out the cow catcher on this thing,” I said, nodding my approval.
“You’re some sort of train expert too, I take it?” Magnus asked.
“No. Grew up in farm country, and we had a lot of trains passing through when I grew up. My dad loved train sets and took me to a couple museums about them when I was little. I always laughed at that name. Cow catcher. I was sure they didn’t catch cows as much as kill them and toss them to the side. Probably more wild animals than cows too. I knew two people that were killed walking the tracks. Murray Lindberg died when I was in high school. He’d been listening to Guns N’ Roses on his Walkman at the time. My parents didn’t let me listen to Axl in the house after that, because the town called it devil worship. Sorry, I’m rambling.” I had no idea what drove me to go on like that, but maybe it was just the pent-up nervous energy I was harnessing.
We were in the cab now, and I was surprised by the amount of room in it. Natalia was looking around, and in a moment, she hit something, waited for the light to come on, and started the engine.
“Diesel, I guess,” Magnus commented.
“Think so. These days most are a hybrid of diesel and electric, and this thing looks new.”
When the train came to life, so did some small lights in the cab, and we could see around. Carey barked outside and I went back out into the rain, and we entered together on the car behind. The door pried open easily, and we got in to see leather seats. There were even a few bottles of champagne sitting warm at a serving area. First class train ride in Peru. Things could have been worse, like me flying around the passenger seat of a Jeep in a storm.
The cars connected, and I knocked on the window when I found it locked. Magnus hit some lever and it opened. Carey ran right to Natalia and licked her hand.
“Nice arrangement back there,” I told them. “Nat, you think you can drive this thing?”
She looked back at me and smiled. Soon we were starting to move along, lights showing our path on the tracks.
“I guess that answers that,” I muttered, and Magnus slapped me on the back.
“You should see her fly a helicopter!” he barked, and had a good laugh at his own joke.
I was sure that Mary would have a fast friend in this Natalia if they got the chance to meet. I really hoped they would, and soon. Time was running out on us, if what Vanessa said was true. A week before they were to dispose of most humans, the rest to be slaves
for eternity.
NINETEEN
We were cruising down the line on our way to Aguas Calientes. Lightning still flashed occasionally and I kept a watchful eye out the window, trying to see if I could spot a ship among the dark clouds. The train was moving at a good pace, and I was thankful we were almost at our destination. I walked toward the engineer’s room exit, the door sliding open as I moved in front of it. Carey trotted along beside me and we moved down the hall to a washroom. The lights came on automatically as I entered the single restroom. Carey stayed outside the door like a little police guard dog. I appreciated the love.
I looked in the mirror and saw myself more disheveled than I’d been in a long time. It brought back flashes of myself a week after Janny had died: me not showering, not shaving, and hardly eating. The similarities were there, but now I felt more alive than I’d ever felt before. I’d survived the loss of my wife, the loss of the whole world basically, and now I had a mission.
After scrubbing my face in the sink, I lathered up and did the best job I could to bathe in the sink. It wasn’t pretty, but in a couple minutes, I was smelling a lot better, and felt ready to make the trek. The deep bags under my eyes were still there, but I saw a little extra sparkle in them that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“Come on, Carey. Let’s find some food.” His ears perked up at this, and he had a little more jump in his tired step. We made our way down a couple cars, and there was a lounge. Behind the bar, I found some trays of food in the cooler. The temperature was still fairly cool in there. This state-of-the-art train had some good backup power. I found a still slightly chilled cheese and cracker tray, and grabbed a couple of apples. I filled my bag with some more miscellaneous foodstuffs: granola bars, potato chips, and the ever popular peanuts and pretzel mix. I tore a bag open and gave Carey’s drooling mouth a few pretzels before finding a bowl and filling it with “mountain fresh” water. He slurped it up, and I loaded a few of those bottles into my now heavy pack.
The Event Page 13
