I was very envious.
“I’m coming down,” Sarah said. I could hear her panting on the way down the steps. “You can switch the communicator off,” I said.
As Weasel looked at me from his running board, posing like a rock star before an adoring audience, greasy and torn Gram Parsons shirt and that huge Weasel smile plastered on his face, I flashed back for an instant to our first meeting, a different season, but the the same sort of dramatic entrance he was so fond of.
“Sorry about the barrier, Mac,” he said. “But me and Stevie figured you two would appreciate a little drama.”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “Been getting a little boring around here. Thought we’d spice things up a bit.” Stevie dusted imaginary dust from his black Zeppelin t-shirt. Both of them were trying very hard to be adult and cool about their grand entrance, but the child inside each of them was not to be denied.
Stevie broke first. Jumping down from the running board, he was screaming up at me before he hit the ground. “You shoulda been there, Mac. It was unbelievable. We were going so fast, I thought we were gonna fly. Speed, Mac, speed. You gotta try it. There’s nothing like it. I thought I was in a Terminator movie! You remember when Sarah and John and the good Terminator were bein’ chased by the T 1000 in the big semi? That’s what it was like. Total rush.”
He started running around the truck, still yelling in my direction. “Look at this, Mac. Check it out. Me and Weasel did the whole thing. Wait’ll you see the modifications. You’ll freak. When those bastards that’re after you see this baby, they’re gonna shit.”
“Hold on, Stevie,” I said, laughing at his energy and enthusiasm. “I’m coming. Then you can give me the tour.”
I took the steps two at a time. Duke, caught up in everyone’s hyper state left Sarah behind. He raced out the door, feet and torso skidding on the the front porch like a flat rock on water, rolled down the stairs, and landed square on his nose. He made a big woofing sound when he impacted the ground.
His one-point landing didn’t seem to faze him a bit, and he barked at me enthusiastically. I’m pretty sure he was smiling and saying, “Holy shit.”
Sarah was a few seconds behind. She hadn’t turned her mike off. “Wait for me. Wait for me,” she pleaded. “I want to see this close up.” She hit the doorway and rushed down the steps. Standing by me, Sarah removed her derm and the earring, placing the minuscule components of the set in my hand. “Over and out, General,” she said.
We both stood rooted in our tracks. Duke ran past us and made a circuit around the huge truck, barking loudly every foot of the way, and pissing on each tire. Two or three barks, a headlong charge within a foot or two of the giant machine, piss, and then a back off. That was his pattern all the way around. Weasel and Stevie stood by the passenger door, facing us, side by side, arms across each other’s shoulder, smiling hugely. Behind them stood Weasel’s masterpiece. They reminded me of a Wright Brothers picture I had seen.
By looking at the parts of the vehicle that had not been cut away or augmented, I could tell Weasel had found a brand new truck for us. The paint remaining that was unblemished, a shiny blue and white, proclaimed the truck to be the property of DuPage Concrete and Excavation. It was a dump truck, not as huge as some I had seen abandoned at construction sites, but large enough to haul anything we could ever desire. The bed was large enough to hold a good sized car.
The structural steel of the bed was scorched with burn marks where approximately two feet had been trimmed from the top. This was on the sides only. The part behind the cab still rose to its original eight foot height, protecting its occupants from any foreign objects, namely bullets. The gate was also original.
The sides rose to a height of about seven feet. Several gun ports had been cut into the sides and back gate. Across the top were steel bars, from the Kane County Jail, I later found out, spaced about six inches apart. Where the bars approached the cab, there was a three foot open area, presumably where someone could stand and look over the cab, through another gunport which had been cut from the steel. Two steps had been welded into the bed to accommodate one or two of us in looking over the cab. On top of the cab, part of the original bed was welded across from side to side, protecting whomever was standing from whatever projectiles might be launched from the front of the truck.
The vehicle was downright intimidating, not so much because of its size, but because we had the ability to put its bulk in motion. Its builders had decided that it needed two axles in the rear, each one requiring four tires instead of the normal two per axle, so we had a truck that so huge it required ten wheels to stay on the road.
Weasel lowered the rear gate, which came down with a thunderous clamor, and Sarah and I climbed into the truck’s bed for an inspection. Having settled his territorial display, Duke also joined us.
“He owns it now,” said Sarah, nodding in Duke’s direction.
We had a pool table in the house. All of us used it frequently. The bed of the truck was large enough for the table, plenty of room to play and several chairs for spectators. There was enough head room for all of us to stand beneath the horizontal bars Weasel and Stevie had welded across the top.
Weasel joined us and said, “Tried to think of problems that could come up in the combat situations. These bars across the top should discourage anyone from tryin’ to jump on the truck and keep out good size rocks and stuff they might want to throw in our direction.”
In the front of the bed, the part nearest the cab, four unused tires, mounted on shiny black new wheels, were stacked in a corner and held in place by three vertical bars welded to the floor. Next to the tires was a yellow device about five feet long, and a foot high and wide that curved on both ends and was tapered slightly. It lay on the floor and looked to be solid steel.
“You know what I say about always bein’ prepared,” said a smiling Weasel. “The tires came off another truck. Never been used. Got ‘em for a good price. They were all flat, but me and Stevie injected some sealant into where they meet the rim and then pumped ‘em up with a foot pump. Had to do the same with all the tires on the truck, too. Think the two of us got the strongest thighs in the whole damn city.”
“What’s the yellow thing that looks like a huge fish?” Sarah asked.
“They call it a jack. You pull out this handle on one end and put the other end under one of the axles. Then you step on the handle a bunch of times and the damn thing lifts up the truck so you can crawl under it and fix what’s broke or just look around awhile. Incredible piece of engineering. Don’t even need a motor.”
We walked to the front of the bed, where Sarah and I could stand behind the cab. There was plenty of room for the two of us and on the left wall, opposite the corner where the tires were stacked, was a gun rack welded into the side of the bed which held a shotgun and a Baretta assault rifle. I noticed there was room for several more weapons. A platform with three stairs allowed us to reach the rifles.
“Each of you grab a gun,” Weasel said to Sarah and me. “Step up and see if there’s enough room for you to maneuver if two people need to be up there firing.” It was no problem. He had probably tested the thing himself several times.
Sarah and I turned on the platform, ending up facing each other. We both smiled.
They had built us a rolling fortress.
“Why didn’t you just bring a fucking tank?” I asked Weasel sarcastically.
“Gave it considerable thought,” he replied straight faced. He wasn’t kidding. “There’s plenty to be had. They get shit for gas mileage, though. Plus they’re diesels. And they ain’t too fast.”
Back in the 20th, people probably didn’t look upon dump trucks as objects of beauty. But to our eyes it was a wondrous and majestic sight. Wondrous because of its speed and power. Majestic in its sheer bulk and muscle. I was in awe that we could make something as huge and bulky as a dump truck move faster than anything in our world.
Nature contributed most of the speed that we wer
e witness to. The death dives of hawks and eagles; the graceful leaps of rabbits and deer; the darts of hummingbirds, so quick as to be beyond the abilities of our eyes to follow; horses at a gallop; wolves in their final lunge to a kill; trout leaving their watery home to snap an insect from the air. Speed was all around us in the natural world. But birds of prey and deer and wolves were not required to move two and half tons in their quests for food or escapes from predators.
Man-made speed came to us in the form of bullets and arrows. Frisbees and baseballs could certainly zip along also. All of them weighed in at the ounce scale of measurement, a far cry from the massive 10,000 pound vehicle that stood before us.
Here was something alien and intimidating. A Frankenstein truck reanimated. A symbol of the destruction humanity wrought upon itself. Maybe a taste of the future. I hoped not. The thought of cars and trucks once again choking the highways like little fat globules in arteries, depriving the heart of the city of oxygen, was repulsive to me.
I was in the classic approach-avoidance stance, fascinated and frightened. Enchanted by the lethal combination of bulk, menace and speed. Captivated by the Promethean vehicle’s potential to improve our defensive situation and function as a instrument of destruction. It took little imagination for me to conjure up the offensive capabilities of truck.
But the vehicle’s power and potential beguiled me before I could even begin an internal dialogue. Conflict resolution was blown away by my need to experience its power. Hell…I just wanted to play.
“Take me for a ride, Weasel,” I demanded.
“Me too,” echoed Sarah. “Me too.”
“Everyone hop in,” he said, laughing at the two children begging him for a ride. “Stevie, you and Duke ride in the back. You two join me,” he said to Sarah and me.
When the three of us were seated in the cab, Weasel began teaching. “Both of you are gonna have to learn to drive this thing. Stevie already knows. No tellin’ when it might be a lifesaver. I’ll take you through the modifications later.”
In all the vids we had seen, the inside of a vehicle, the dashboard, gear shift, pedals and various knobs, had never been shown. There were sticks and levers and knobs, things that you could pull, push, squeeze, switch or step on. I counted eight different gauges. Sarah and I both thought a computer was much easier to master. At least it didn’t move while we were learning. What was a banality in the 20th cen, looked like the cockpit of a space ship to us. But the teacher in Weasel walked us through it.
“We gotta limit our practice time by doing a lot of dry runs in this thing,” Weasel said, patting the dash. “Fuel is a major problem. We got about 20 gallons of ethanol. This little beauty’s gonna suck down a gallon every six or seven miles. So we can’t go playin’ around, usin’ up all our surplus ethanol.”
“Plus we don’t want to let anyone know that thing even exists,” Sarah said. “If anyone saw this truck moving, it would be a magnet drawing the clans straight to us.”
“Exactly why we do a lot of dry runs and very little actual driving,” Weasel said. “OK. Let me show you what all these doodads are. Then we’re gonna take a two mile trip. Give you a taste. Ain’t no way to learn without watchin’ someone do it.”
So he taught us for about half an hour, but I don’t think we were very good students. It was like someone stopping the vid JURASSIC PARK in the middle to give a lecture on dinosaurs. We wanted the thrills.
When Weasel finally started the engine, I could feel the immense power beneath my feet. “Got a big V-8 here,” he said. “We had to have one because me and Stevie couldn’t have converted a diesel to run on ethanol.” When he stepped on the clutch and put it in the first of six forward speeds, it worked just as he had explained: easing up on the clutch allowed the gears to engage. And we moved, slowly at first, but as he went through the gears, we picked up speed, and the wind rushed through the cab, blowing our hair and roaring in our ears.
Stevie was right. It was a major rush. Behind us I could hear him screaming and Duke barking his dog equivalent of a yell. Up front the three of us were elated, huge smiles plastered across our faces as we joined in the vocal revelry. As we picked up speed, and the landscape flew by, I realized Stevie’s other prediction was right: The clans really were going to shit when they finally got a look at this magnificent machine.
• • • •
We settled into the living room to become acquainted with the modifications Weasel and Stevie had made on the truck. The Moody Blues, a band we could all live with for background music, were orchestrating softly in the background. Crystal glasses filled with white wine were scattered around the coffee table.
After the thrill of flying across the ground in the huge truck had been begun to fade, a contrary little thought, a pesky intruder, began niggling away in my mind. I was balancing the vehicle’s allure with the fact that we had already introduced the emissions of several internal combustion engines into the atmosphere. Reluctantly, I decided to share my unwelcome thoughts.
“Any of you see an irony in our situation with the truck?”
The three of them looked at me. Weasel sighed and smiled. “What’s on your mind, Mac?” he asked.
I was relieved to detect no impatience in his voice. We had begun to evolve into a group with three leaders. In another couple of years we all expected Stevie would be the fourth. Respect for the input of others was vital to that process.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Sarah. “The situation struck a discordant note with me, too.”
Stevie was looking back and forth between Sarah and me, finally discarding both of us as reliable sources and turning to Weasel. “What’s going on with these two?” he inquired.
“Well, son,” Weasel said to Stevie, “we got a very nice family here and we’re damned lucky all of us got good brains. Thing about brains, though, is they work differently for everyone. So all of us are smart in different areas. Now these two confused individuals,” he nodded in our direction, where we sat side by side, holding hands, “and I mean that with respect, see what’s called `the big picture’ better’n you and me. The two of us,” he now put his arm around Stevie, “are better at creating things and fixing stuff than they are. So we got good balance. Wouldn’t wanna have it any other way.”
“Well spoken, Weasel,” Sarah responded. She gave my hand a squeeze. “I think I’ll let Mac explain what’s on our minds.”
“All of us know what caused the collapse. That truck out there was one of the major contributors.”
“But, Mac, it’s only one truck,” said an exasperated Stevie.
“True,” I said. “But is it a first step? Ten years from now is there going to be a fleet of cars and trucks and ethanol complexes refining fuel and filling the skies with fumes again?”
“Even if there was,” said Weasel, “it would be only a fraction of what was goin’ on in the 20th cen.”
“Bullshit,” I said to Weasel. “If we get technology cranking again our population could be in the billions again in a couple of hundred years. We already did it once. I figure the world right now is pretty close to what it was around 1790. Took them 200 years to crank it to max and then blow it to hell.”
“Who cares?” said Stevie. “We’ll all be dead.”
“So it’s OK with you, Stevie, if we go down in the history books as the morons that started up the use of the internal combustion again?”
“Well…uh…actually I don’t guess I want to be remembered like that.”
“So where do we stop?” asked Sarah, entering the battle. “What’s our responsibility.”
“Our responsibility,” said Weasel, “is to survive and protect people like all of us who just want to live a good life and be left alone to do it. That there truck is gonna help us.”
“Are we that important? More important than the idea of never again repeating the mistakes of the past?”
Weasel looked intently at both of us. “How many people you figure are out there that’re l
ike us? Don’t wanna cause no trouble. Decent folks. Care about their kids. Wanna be free of the clans.”
“A whole bunch,” I said. “I can’t see them. But they have to be out there somewhere. We can’t be the only ones.”
“You figure those decent people can afford to lose you and me and Sarah and Stevie? How about ol’ Duke? He be able to find a nice family like us if we get killed? What if the three of us get killed and Stevie lives?”
His questions hung in the air, like eagles drifting on thermals, wings out stretched, unaware of the menace below.
“Enough,” I said, standing and reaching out to shake Weasel’s hand. “Thanks, Weasel. Sarah and I never considered not protecting our family. But we had to ask the question.”
“Havin’ a conscience sure is a pain in the ass,” he replied. “But I wouldn’t want to have you two any other way. Thing is, if I get you two killed off, who’s gonna be the conscience for the rest of us? There ain’t no way you two would ever let someone start building refineries. Hell if we couldn’t talk ‘em out of it, we’d just blow the fuckers up.”
“Yeah,” said Stevie. “CHINA SYNDROME, dudes. Mac is Michael Douglas and Sarah is Jane Fonda. No one would get away with that shit with you two around.” He gave us all high fives. “Let’s get back to business. We got plans to make.”
Weasel looked over to Sarah and me. “You two OK with this? I don’t wanna move on until you’re comfortable.”
We both nodded our assent. Our survival outweighed considerations of a problem that couldn’t begin to manifest itself for fifty or a hundred years into the future. After all, I thought, what kind of positive impact could we have if we were dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Here’s the way I figure it,” Weasel said. He was decked out in a welder’s apron, black leather boots, welder’s gloves, a big visor that flipped down when he was welding, and a torn Son Volt t-shirt. The visor had a little window in it so he could see what he was doing and was in the up position as he laid out the work plan for us. He looked like a cross between a blacksmith and a 1940’s steel worker. We were in front of the garage, the four of us and Duke gathered around the truck, ready to put in a hard day’s labor.
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 26