It's Not What You Think

Chapter 8

Jawa and Chip turned out to be not very good at faking their deaths, but luckily for them, as soon as they laid down on the ground "dead" a whole new distraction started. This one, however, managed to get everyone out of the area because it started raining suddenly, a torrential downpour that might as well have been one of the plagues of Egypt; there was so much rain.

"Was that hail?" Ben asked Erica as they all bolted for cover.

"I don't think so," Erica said.

"Then what was that?" Ben asked, having to scream to be heard over the noise of the sudden inclement weather.

"I think that that's cheese," Erica said, not quite believing it herself.

"How is it raining cheese?" Ben asked.

"Something's probably happened on the moon," Erica said, now sounding worried.

"Like it blew up or something?" Ben asked.

"Maybe," Erica said. "It's a little hard to tell right now."

The two of them ducked beneath a tree, but that didn't provide much cover from the still strong onslaught of tiny chunks of cheese that were raining down on them.

"What's going to happen with all this cheese?" Ben asked. "Is there going to be some way to stop it?"

"I don't know," Erica said, a little more panicky than she would have liked.

After a few more moments, the cheese storm seemed to be lightening up, so Ben and Erica emerged from under their tree, now up past their ankles in cheese.

"Where do you think everyone else is?" Ben asked.

"I'm a little more concerned about where we are," Erica said. "Because this isn't Gettysburg. Look around you."

Just a few meters in front of where Ben and Erica were standing was a large body of water. It looked to Ben like they might be by the ocean, but it wasn't one of the beaches like he would have gone on a vacation to, starting with the fact that there was cheese in the water by the shoreline. There were trees all over around the water, and the only clearing from where they were was the one they were standing in.

"The forest doesn't look very deep," Erica said.

The sky was still filled with clouds, and it smelled like rain as Ben and Erica waded through the cheese and into the thin strip of woods separating the water from a road.

"Where do you think we are?" Ben asked as he and Erica started walking down the road. There wasn't any cheese out on the road, suggesting that the cheese that was here must have been confined to a pretty small area. However, that wasn't much comfort to Ben and Erica seeing as they still didn't actually know where here was.

"There have to be people around here somewhere," Ben said, then asked "Right?"

"I'm sure there are," Erica said. "But, you know, whatever that cheese storm was might have made some of them think that they would be better off spending the day indoors."

When Ben and Erica finally came across a road sign about a quarter mile down the road, they discovered that they were in Wisconsin.

"Seems fitting that if we had to get caught up in a cheese storm we would end up here," Ben said.

"Yeah," Erica agreed, checking her phone to see if she had any reception. She did, though her phone was in less than spectacular shape after its hundred some mile journey to Wisconsin.

"Can you call the others?" Ben asked.

"I can if this thing still works."

"Also, can you maybe figure out where we are on the GPS?"