Chapter 1

Well here I was, spending my summer doing all the cool things that I had hoped to do; Like hanging out at the beach with all my friends, going to parties every night... Well okay, I wasn't quite spending it how I had hoped, instead I was spending my summer working. My family wasn't exactly rolling in money so if I wanted to continue to go to college then I needed to work every hour possible during the summer holidays. The only time I had spent at the beach this summer, was a couple of weeks ago on my 19th birthday when a few friends had thrown me a small beach party to celebrate.

Most of the rest of the time had been spent working as a sales person in a electronics store; my brother was one of the managers at one of the other stores in the same small chain, so he had been able to help me get the job. It wasn't exactly my idea of the job I had hoped for, but it was better than nothing and paid slightly more than some of the other summer jobs around. As I knew quite a bit about computers it hadn't really needed me to learn anything new. Other than computers and their accessories and software, we also stocked a small range of other consumer electronic products.

Today was meant to be my day off, but Jason, my brother had called to ask if I would work today as someone had called in sick. What he had forgot to tell me was that the person who hadn't came in was the delivery driver. We were only a small chain of nine stores but to keep the stock requirements down, we had our own delivery drivers so that stock could be moved to the stores where it was needed. We had also just started a sales promotion whereby we would take old computers in part exchange for new ones. So every few days these old computers had to be collected from the stores and taken to the small warehouse to await disposal.

I really don't think I would have been sitting here, driving this van if Jason had have told me who was off today. I had never drove anything bigger than my car before. So it had taken me a while to get use to the size of this thing; I guess it was just a normal size middle of the range white van, but to me it was big.

One of the guys in the store had offered to swap with me, but he was a more senior salesperson so it was decided that they would rather have him in the store than me.

"At least I don't have to make any more turns until i get to Rochfield," I thought in relief, having decided that I hadn't really got use to the turning arc of this thing yet.

I had just made a delivery to the store in Grants Crossing which had been my second delivery of the day and was now on the way to my next one which was about 20 miles away in Rochfield. Now that I had got of of town, it was a single road all the way there, which apart from having a couple of hills to climb was a good quality road that would allow good progress, so I didn't expect it to take more than 30 minutes to reach Rochfield. The only problem that looked like it might have an effect on that, was the storm that I seemed to be heading towards. The weather forecast had been for mainly fine weather all day with a few showers but hadn't mentioned anything like this storm. I never had liked being in a car or vehicle during a storm, I wasn't sure why but my mom had said that when I was young we had got caught up in a really bad storm and had to stop because my dad could hardly see the road ahead of him because of the strength of the rain. So as we sat in the car at the side of the road, a lightning bolt had stroke not far from us. My mom said that for the rest of the journey I never stopped crying. I couldn't remember it so I'm sure she was exaggerating about how much I had cried, but who knows. There were few things that I could remember from when my dad had been alive. A couple of years after that event had meant to have taken place, my dad had got killed in a car accident. So all told, driving wasn't my favorite thing to do.

Still a bit of rain wasn't going to hurt me, which was a good job too as the rain was now certainly stronger than a shower and looked like it was going to get stronger. I could already hear the thunder in the distance. Yeap this looked like it was going to a very strong storm and I was going to be driving through the middle of it.

After a few more minutes I really did start to think maybe it was best to stop and let the worst of the storm pass. I knew that there was a small diner a few miles ahead and then after that the only place I could think of was our old cabin by the lake; Which was one of about twenty cabins around the lake, that my dad had bought a few years before he died and even though I was about the only one of our family who used it now, my mom had never been able to think about selling it. Although, she had received enough offers over the years and we could have sure used the money but she had said no to all of them.

Once past the lake, the next place on this road was the Rochfield, which was still a good sixteen miles away yet.

"So the diner it is then." I thought to myself. It was only a few miles away now. I could just about see the tunnel in the distance and then once through that it was only a mile or so along the road.

Looking up at the black clouds above me, that were making it seem more like evening than the ten thirty in the morning that the clock told me it was, I just wished that I had said no to Jason. With the thunder getting louder and the lightning ever closer, something inside me told me this wasn't a place I wanted to be right now. Getting to that diner as quickly as possible was getting ever more important.

With a clear view in front of me, all the way to the tunnel, and not being able to see another vehicle at all, I decided it was safe to increase my speed a bit more, to make those few miles go by that bit quicker.

Everything went fine for the next few minutes and I was starting to relax ever so slightly, but then just as I got within a few hundred meters of the entrance to the tunnel, a strange mist descended onto the road, while the flashes of lightning suddenly got much quicker so that they were now every few seconds. The bolts darting through the sky while every now and then, one would strike the ground not that far away.

"Maybe I should just stop in the tunnel and wait it out," I thought.

But that same strange feeling inside me told me that right now I really wanted to be around other people, and I seemed to be the only person on this stretch of the road right now. So I decided to still press on towards the diner.

The tunnel was only about 500 meters long, as it made its way through the hillside. So it wasn't long before I emerged from the other side, to find that the storm was still as bad if not worse.

Turning up the radio, I tried to sing along to the song, anything to get my mind off the storm.

"What the hell," I shouted as I severed to try to avoid the lightning bolt that had just hit the front of the van.

The back wheels of the van start to skid away from me, while the front wheels crossed the boundary between the road and the grass bank at the side. Remembering what I had always heard, I steered into the skid and finally managed to get the van back under some sort of control.

Stopping the van, I just sat there in stunned silence for a few minutes, before I came around and started to think about what had just happened.

The van had actually got hit by lightning but I hadn't felt a thing. Wasn't I meant to feel it? I didn't know for sure what effect a strike on a vehicle would have. All I knew was that the flash of light had been more intense than anything I had experienced before; I was actually surprised that I could still see. Then it was over and I fought to get the van under control.

"I guess I better check what damage it has done to the van," I thought and then noticed my surrounding for the first time since the strike. I was stopped at the side of the same road I had been travelling alone but somehow it seemed different and the totally unbelievable thing was that the storm had mostly died away; From being a vicious storm a few minutes ago to just some light rain now.

It wasn't until I stepped out the van, that what was different about the road hit me; It was smaller. The road had been two lanes wide in each direction for years but now here I was looking at a single lane for each direction.

"This doesn't make sense, roads don't just change size."

"I've got to call my mom and Jason," I thought as I fought against totally freaking out, but I think I was losing that battle. While reaching back into the van, to get my mobile phone from the passenger's seat.

"Damn, no signal."

"Okay, I just need to check the van is okay to drive and then make it to the diner and I can call Mom or Jason or whoever from there," I rationed.

Walking around the van, it didn't appear that there was much damage. Other than a small brown mark where I guessed the lightning had hit and the fact that I had somehow managed to dent the side of the van.