Train Out of Time

Lily’s head was spinning. She was disoriented and confused—and found herself sprawled out on a cold, metal floor. Her surroundings slowly came into focus.

She could feel the vibration of movement and she managed to pull herself up slowly. She moved her toned body across the empty seats and looked out a window. She steadied herself, still a bit dizzy. The scenery was rapidly passing by her and the aspen trees out the window were streaming by her faster and faster. And they were moving downhill. Where was she?

Somehow she was on a train! How in the the hell? she thought. Then some of her memory slowly trickled back in pieces. Lily knew instantly that this train was in earth’s past. And the aliens that she’d been fighting as an agent of the underground resistance must have sent her back in time to this impossible danger.

The alien Orto are a cruel race. Instead of vaporizing the inhabitants of earth, they are sending them back individually to different locations in the past—never to see their loved ones again. Some were being sent back thousands of years into the past and some were sent back a few hundred years. It was just a random algorithm, but the program scanned the DNA of each person to assure that people with similar DNA were sent centuries or even millennia apart.

The Orto preferred to have humans die of broken hearts in isolation.

Lily ran to the front window to look into the train car in front of her. It looked completely barren of passengers. Thank goodness no on else would be hurt, she thought. She knew she had little time left—the train was moving fast and eventually it would encounter a curve it could not handle. The law of physics would win this one.

Then she heard a loud crackling, almost electronic sound behind her. Lily whirled around.

A smoky hologram cloud phased in and out before her with an image within it. “Lily! Lily! I hope you can hear me,” the voice said. “ This hologram is only one-way. Try to activate your homing beacon implant—it is impossible for me to do it from here! I could only send this message to the coordinates where you were transported.”

“Jeff?”

As suddenly as it appeared, it vanished. She’d recognized the voice, although the image wasn’t really clear. At least that worked!

Jeff was the resistance technology leader. They had started to implant homing beacons in agents in the event they were captured and sent back in time. It was all experimental, and had never been tested on a live human being. They were about to do that when she landed in the past against her will.

I guess I am the guinea pig, she thought.

The only way to activate the beacon and initiate the time machine they stole from the Orto, was to get her adrenalin level to a heightened state so it triggered the homing signal. Then the Orto time machine would supposedly open up a space-time continuum vortex and pull Lily back.

“How do I do that?” she yelled out to the space where the hologram was a few seconds ago. “How do I scare myself into a panic attack?”

Lily knew the answer seconds after asking the question. And she knew what she had to try and do. She took a deep breath, ran her fingers through her hair and looked around. She didn’t want to remain in this timeline regardless.

After struggling, she wrestled the door to her train car open. To her relief, she saw steel rungs welded into the frame of the outside of the car. She climbed up while the fierce wind blew her red hair all in her face. She made it to the top of the car and carefully stepped upon it, keeping herself as low as she could so to minimize the force of the wind against her. She ignored the mind-numbing cold.

She could see the pure mountain snow piled up beside the train. And in the distance, she could see the valley floor. Lily knew that would be the final resting place for this train.

Lily’s heart was pounding in her chest and she was afraid she might really have a heart attack. She had no choice. Even if she did not survive, maybe the resistance team would learn something from this to save others.

Lily got as far she could to the edge of one side of the car, and sprinted as fast as she could to the other side. She leapt off the train with as much force as she could muster. Her body sailed toward the snowy embankment.

Everything went white and silent.

Lily woke up days later in an underground medical facility that the resistance set up. Her first site was Jeff’s face. She smiled at him. “I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life,” she said and slowly grabbed his hand from her hospital bed. Her body was sore, but she felt enerigized and so glad to be alive.

“It worked” he said. “The vortex opened up and you materialized in the transporter room .” That’s what they affectionately called the room where the time machine operated.

“When can I get back to work?” Lily asked. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. A planet to save and people sent back in time to rescue somehow. “