Four college classmates drive straight into a highway space warp. In 1986 four women from Southern Utah University, riding in the same car, take a shortcut off Highway 56, which would soon threaten their very lives. Sad to think it could have been a bonding experience. Maria and Crystal and Jonnie and Abbey, took a day trip to Nevada, to see the rodeo in Pioche. Jonnie was driving her father's painstakingly restored Chevrolet. It was nighttime when they returned on Highway 56. It was getting late, and they had finals tomorrow. After crossing the railroad tracks in Modena, they came to a fork in the road, and no one remembered which road they had come in on. All the roads out here looked the same, flanked by the same fields of endless sagebrush. The blacktop road that headed east, must be the right one, they all agreed. They were now driving toward Gadianton Canyon. They drove for a long time. The road changed from black asphalt, to white concrete, and Maria suggested it might be time to turn around. But they were already at the end of the road. Jonnie had to stop the car, because the only thing in front of them now, was a huge landslide of red canyon rock. So they turned around and drove back. But the open country was not the same. Instead of a desert, they saw fields of wheat. The sagebrush was gone, replaced by grain fields, rippling in waves, under the full moon. A full moon that was not supposed to be there, at this time of year. They were lost. Incredibly lost. With great relief, ahead on the road, they saw the glow of civilization, of the street lights of a small town. They came to a diner on the edge of town. Jonnie immediately pulled over into the parking lot. Crystal said she could smell hamburgers. The diner had one of those neon signs, which hummed, and occasionally spit. But the neon sign was not in English. Its letters did not look like that of any known alphabet. As the girls pulled in, some patrons were coming out of the burger joint. They were laughing and arguing with each other. One of them turned around and pointed at the Chevy. The others grew quiet. Abbey's window was already open, so she leaned out to get directions. She tasted the cool night air, then, abruptly, she leaned back, and rolled up her window, fast. "Let's go," she breathed. Crystal was also on the passenger side, and she began to scream. Jonnie put all her weight on the gas pedal. In slow motion, the Chevrolet spun around, spraying gravel against the glass windows of the diner. Suddenly they were headed back the way they came. The streetlights receded behind them. Jonnie said, "I saw them too." Abbey was mute. She was in shock. And then Crystal said, "They're not human." Maria was busy looking out the back window. "We're being followed," she said. Jonnie could see them in the rear-view mirror. Two vehicles were coming after them. At first she thought they were motorcycles. They weaved from side to side. She drove faster, but their pursuers were gaining. Then Jonnie could clearly see, these vehicles were not from the Earth she knew. They were egg-shaped, with tiny wheels. They had intensely bright headlights. Their engine noise was high-pitched, like a nest of mad hornets. According to the speedometer, Jonnie was now traveling over 80 miles an hour, and the others begged her to slow down. That is when the road itself gave out. The Chevy flew into the darkness, kicking up a huge cloud of red dust in its wake. Now she had to slow down, as the car bucked over the sand, and tore into the sagebrush. She had almost succeeded in getting it under control, when the car fell head-long into dry stream bed. The car got stuck in the bottom of the arroyo. The motor stalled out, and refused to start. Although bruised and scared witless, none of the girls was seriously injured. It seemed like a lifetime before daylight came. They abandoned the car, and struck out on foot, heading West through the desert. They walked for miles before reaching Highway 56, but it wasn't twenty minutes before they flagged down the Utah Highway Patrol. It was Maria who first approached the patrolman, then returned to the group, to report that the officer was really a human being. The Chevy was recovered three miles east of the main highway, with no tire tracks behind it, as if it had just materialized there, out of thin air. There is no fork in Highway 56, and no trace, of where the girls left the main road, was ever found. The girls believe they drove into a different world. A world where Utah had never become a desert. A world that suffered fewer meteor strikes, and fewer extinction events than our own planet. Where the dinosaurs never died out. Instead, they evolved.

• published: 14 Feb 2016
• views: 81