http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/nasca-plateau-geoglyphs-peru/

Heat ripples rose from the ground in ceaseless waves. In every direction the guard looked, the horizon shimmered with punishing, consuming heat. He wiped his sweaty brow with his hat and looked down the long, straight road.

He thought he saw movement, but it was far away. The asphalt danced in the waves of heat, distorting everything in the distance. It was impossible to tell if the truck was approaching or if what the guard saw was just a classic mirage.

Sighing, he walked back from the road and into the small guardhouse. A soccer game from some far-flung locale played on a dusty laptop. His two compatriots were huddled in their usual spot around the screen.

“No truck yet?” one asked.

“I think I see it,” the guard answered. “But it’s tough to tell with the heat rippling.” He marked the time in the logbook per procedure. 3:56 – the truck was 26 minutes late. It wouldn’t be here in 4 minutes, and he was supposed to call the headquarters at the power station if the truck was half an hour behind schedule.

He desperately hoped to avoid that particular duty. The head of security was unpleasant in the best of times and worse when things went even slightly awry. To kill time, the guard leaned into what he referred to as the Dial Room.

“Doc, everything ok?” he asked. The rig’s engineer had his feet up. He read a tattered old copy of some forgettable sci-fi novel.

“Yep. Getting full though. No word from the truck?”

“I have to call the station in 2 minutes,” the guard admitted.

“Maybe it blew a tire?” the engineer offered.

“Probably. Or they just got a late start,” the guard said. “How long until you have to scale down?”

The engineer glanced at the array of dials and levers and aging read-outs on the display board. He tapped a few buttons on the master keyboard.

“Hour-ish,” he answered. “These old gods aren’t as powerful as the ones closer to the coast, but they put out their fair share.”

The guard nodded his thanks and walked back outside. A wall of heat hit his face, then completely engulfed him. He waded through it, over the hard earth and back onto the asphalt.

He looked down the road, and his heart sang just a little. That was definitely the truck barreling toward the rig. His watch read 4:02. Maybe the driver and his spare wheelman would make up enough time on the trek back to get in under the half-hour threshold. The guard thought it possible and voted against calling in the delay.

Five minutes later, the truck rumbled to a stop. Both driver and his deputy wheelman hopped out. The guard waved them over. Each man wore a colorful bandana over his mouth and nose.

“My friend, we blew it,” the driver said, preempting any questions. “We had a little dust cloud kick up, and I didn’t want to risk going off road and blowing a tire. I pulled over until it passed.”

“Cost us 15 minutes, and we were already late because of some foul-up at the power station,” the wheelman said. He hoisted a bag over his shoulder. “Lost logs or some nonsense.”

The guard waved them off. “Don’t worry about it. I saw you coming, so I didn’t call it in.”

“That’s great. We’ll make it up on the way back,” the driver assured him. The guard instantly felt at ease. He didn’t even think to ask why they weren’t taking off their bandanas.

“Great. I’ve got the checklist, so let’s do this as quickly as possible.” The guard walked around to the back of the truck. The driver nodded at the wheelman who walked toward the guardhouse.

“Ok if he uses the bathroom?” the driver asked.

“Of course. They’ll show him where it is,” the guard said, not even looking up from his clipboard.

“So who do we have pumping into this rig?” the driver asked.

“It pulls from three minor gods,” the guard explained. “The geoglyphs are relatively old, probably second generation, so they don’t provide as much power as the big tri-rigs along the coast. Two on this side of the road and one over on the far side.”

At the guardhouse, the wheelman stepped toward the door but paused before entering. He reached into his bag and pulled out a tiny, high-quality photo affixed to a circular mount. It showed the land and road and just a bit of the front of their truck from a specific angle.

Reaching up, he used a flick of his hand to deftly place the mount over the security camera fixed above the door. It was perfectly aligned – just some land and road and a bit of the front of the truck.

The wheelman pushed the door of the guardhouse open and stepped inside. The guards looked up at him, said hello, and turned back to the game. With their backs turned, he slipped another photo-and-mount apparatus from his bag. This one showed the interior of the guardhouse, with these two in almost the exact same position. Before they turned again, he quickly slipped it into place on the interior camera.

“Is that the driver?” the engineer called from the other room.

“Deputy,” the wheelman replied.

“You guys alright? Need help out there?”

“Nope, we’re all set,” the wheelman said. He noted the door to the rig’s data center was open. Perfect. From his bag, he dug out a small gas grenade. In one swift, elegant motion, he stepped backwards out of the door and pulled the pin. He dropped it and swung the door shut.

Grey smoke erupted inside the guardhouse. The three men barely had time to react and shout before they took deep, coughing breaths. In moments, all three collapsed.

At the truck, the guard was on the far side of the tank going through his safety checklist. He had to ensure all the tanker hook-ups were in proper working order. The power they were siphoning from the gods trapped in the ancient geoglyphs was volatile stuff. Any leakage could cause an explosion.

There was a sound from around the other side of the truck.

“You here that?” he asked the driver.

“Hmm?” the driver said, distracted.

The guard lowered his checklist and walked around the back of the truck. He did not even make it far enough to see the wheelman kick open the door to air out the gas. A hand went over the guard’s face, a cloth pressed to his mouth, and he inhaled in panicked breaths. Then he went down in a heap by the truck’s rear tires.

Together, the driver and wheelman made quick work of the scene. The wheelman dragged the four unconscious bodies to the side of the road. The driver fired up the truck and backed it into position by the rig’s loading pump. He connected the pump tubes to the tanker while the wheelman went into the aired-out data center. It took him a moment, but he found the proper dial and swung it from UNLOAD to LOAD.

At the truck, the driver cranked the valve all the way open. He gave the thumbs up to the window. Inside, the wheelman flipped the pump on.

With a low rushing sound, the truck began to unload the contents of its full tanker into the rig. Almost at once, the wheelman saw read-outs swing from full to overflowing levels. In the few moments it took him to walk out of the guardhouse, alarms had already begun to go off indicating dangerous levels of power pumping into the rig.

As the pair of saboteurs returned to the road, two pickup trucks sped toward them. They arrived from the same direction as the tanker truck. Screeching to a halt, the trucks disgorged three accomplices.

From the back of one pickup, they unloaded four bodies, each wrapped in thin cloth. With the wheelman’s help, they dumped three in the guardhouse. The fourth was flung beside the tanker.

As they worked, the driver walked out across the dirt and sand to the nearest god. He was a personal god, a guardian of the home, with enormous hands used to defend a family from encroaching evils. The driver picked up a nearby rock and began to draw words into the ground.

Once done, he dropped the stone and stood. He spit twice, each carefully aimed. One went between his words and the lines of the god’s geoglyph. The other went inside the geoglyph lines. Then with his right hand, he made a complex series of waves. When he finished, he lowered his hand and waited. Nothing happened, and he exhaled deeply.

“I hope that worked,” he whispered to himself.

“Come on!” someone shouted from the road.

The driver dawdled no longer. He ran back to the pickup trucks and hopped into the bed of one. They sped off away from the direction they had come. Away from the station and its security forces.

The tanker never finished dumping its payload. The rig overflowed with deitical power when it was still a third full. With a horrendous roar, the rig exploded.

Columns of fire climbed a hundred feet into the air. It was a tremendous blast, and it left a small crater in its wake. A few twisted pieces of metal survived, along with just enough human remains to be identified as four separate individuals.

The words the driver had written in the ground were blown away. But of course the geoglyphs were not. Despite centuries of disuse followed by decades of exploitation, their eternal power slowly siphoned off by the modern world, the gods were not so easily destroyed.

Somewhere down that long road, the driver hoped his words had been taken to heart.

You are gods. Your power is our power.
We won’t leave you trapped in the ground forever.
You walked the world once and ruled it. You will again. We will set you free.