Heat Wave

"Put it in gear and then give it some gas," Todd Barton told his sister Caitlin, "nice and easy."

"Sure," Caitlin said, doing her best to seem at ease and competent on her brother's ATV.

Todd had brought his college roommate Duncan down from San Diego to join them for a weekend of running the sand dunes at the far southeastern edge of the Imperial Valley. Caitlin thought this Duncan fellow was pretty nice - and not bad looking, either.

The typical early summer day they had chosen for riding was clear and hot, the sun a yellow scorching mass above the dunes. Heat waves rose from the dun brown dunes and the sky was a washed out blue.

"Come on, Cait," Todd admonished his sister, "hit it."

"Alright," Cait yelled back, "alright."

More quickly and less smoothly than she had hoped for, Cait shifted the ATV into gear and gave it gas. The vehicle shot forward. While Todd and Duncan watched in amazement, Cait struggled to control the ATV. She shot across a tall dune, managed to turn up towards its top, accelerated more to reach the summit.

Gunning the vehicle to make the last few yards to the crest, Cait noticed a wavering, floating heat wave in front of her. It had an odd, bright light at its center. Unheeding, unhearing, cries to slow down from Todd and Duncan, Cait shot through the heart of the heat wave and cleared the dune's summit.

"Yeoww," she cried as the briefly airborne vehicle slammed back down onto the sand.

It landed nose first, the impact simultaneously pitching Cait off the ATV and killing its engine. For a moment Cait lay sprawled on the dune, then rolled over, spitting out hard, salty sand granules. It took another moment for her to regain her wits.

"Crap," she said, standing and knocking the sand off her hiking shorts.

The ATV was on its side a few feet from the backside of the dune crest. Cait walked to it and after a bit of a struggle got it righted again. The engine started easily. More carefully, she steered the vehicle back to the top of the dune to see where Todd and Duncan were but, strangely, there was no one on the other side of the dune at all.

"What the…," she said to herself, "where did everybody go?" Turning to look back in the direction of her recent spill, Cait let out a surprised cry.

In the distance, at the end of the dunes, was a huge city, vertical towers driving high into the white-blue sky. There seemed to be some sort of aircraft buzzing around the tall buildings in this peculiar, unexpected apparition. Cait thought perhaps she was seeing a mirage, as the city seemed to float among the burning heat waves rising from the desert floor.

"What is that?" she wondered out loud. "I didn't know there was any town out here."

"Intruder at ten o'clock," a booming voice suddenly called out, causing Cait to jump in the seat of the ATV. "Stand and identify yourself."

It seemed to Cait that the voice was practically beside her but she didn't at first see anyone. Then she spotted the vehicles. A half dozen, at least, racing towards her. They looked something like ATVs but moved above the dunes, as if hovering on air. Each carried a large, dark figure dressed in reddish-brown body armor and each of the figures held out a long, dark instrument, aimed at Cait.

"Whoa!" she cried as one of the instruments, clearly a rifle of some sort, fired a silent charge at her.

The sand beside the ATV exploded into the air from the impact of the weapon's non-metallic round. In rapid succession, several more shots were fired - all near misses. With a yelp, Cait roared across the big dune on which she had crashed, chased doggedly by the pursuers. Maneuvering back and forth faultlessly, she kept just ahead of them as rounds from their weapons continued to dig up the sand all around. Turning to avoid yet another blast, Cait temporarily stalled the ATV. In seconds she was surrounded.

"Stand down," the same booming, authoritarian voice she'd heard before commanded. It still didn't seem to come from a specific place. "You have violated Federated space. Identify yourself and surrender to authority."

Whispering a good luck mantra, Cait restarted the ATV and looked for an escape route. There was a space between two of the chase vehicles just to her left. Smoothly shifting the four-wheeler into gear and then hammering the gas, Cait shot the gap. Sand showered her from weapon blasts, but she drove on hard, back towards the top of the big dune. Approaching the crest from behind, she saw the heat wave again, the bright light was still in its center.

With the trailing hunters right behind her, Cait cleared the top of the dune and sped through the center of the wavering image. In an instant she was back on familiar ground. There was Todd and Duncan waiting for her at the bottom of the dune. Behind her - no one.

"Holy cow," Todd cried, "where did that come from?"

"What?" Cait asked, shifting the ATV into neutral and taking a deep breath. She cast a quick, nervous look back up at the tall dune.

"You're driving … it was…," Todd began.

"Amazing," Duncan finished.

"Where did you go?" Todd asked.

"Over the dune," Cait answered, smiling at Duncan.

"You seemed to disappear up there," he said. "It was as if you went off into another world."

"As if," Cait said, checking out the dune a final time.

There was nothing there now. No one was coming after her. She couldn't tell the guys about it anyway, they'd think she was crazy.

"As if," she repeated, letting the incident drop from her consciousness as quickly as it had come and then gone. "Another world indeed."

Find more by J.B. Hogan in the Author Index.

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