Night Shift (17 page)

The kid put his bucket down and collapsed into the girl's arms, shuddering.

My heart was thudding heavily in my chest and my calves felt like water. And speaking of water, we had brought back about a bucket and a quarter between us. It hardly seemed worth it.

“I want to block up that doorway,” I said to the counterman. “What will do the trick?”

“Well—”

The trucker broke in: “Why? One of those big trucks couldn't get a wheel in through there.”

“It's not the big trucks I'm worried about.”

The trucker began hunting for a smoke.

“We got some sheet sidin' out in the supply room,” the counterman said. “Boss was gonna put up a shed to store butane gas.”

“We'll put them across and prop them with a couple of booths.”

“It'll help,” the trucker said.

It took about an hour and by the end we'd all gotten into the act, even the girl. It was fairly solid. Of course, fairly solid wasn't going to be good enough, not if something hit it at full speed. I think they all knew that.

There were still three booths ranged along the big glass picture window and I sat down in one of them. The clock behind the counter had stopped at 8:32, but it felt like ten. Outside the trucks prowled and growled. Some left, hurrying off to unknown missions, and others came. There were three pickup trucks now, circling importantly amid their bigger brothers.

I was starting to doze, and instead of counting sheep I counted trucks. How many in the state, how many in America? Trailer trucks, pickup trucks, flatbeds, day-haulers, three-quarter-tons, army convoy trucks by the tens of thousands, and buses. Nightmare vision of a city bus, two wheels in the gutter and two wheels on the pavement roaring along and plowing through screaming pedestrians like ninepins.

I shook it off and fell into a light, troubled sleep.

It must have been early morning when Snodgrass began to scream. A thin new moon had risen and was shining icily through a high scud of cloud. A new clattering note had been added, counterpointing the throaty, idling roar of the big rigs. I looked for it and saw a hay baler circling out by the darkened sign. The moonlight glanced off the sharp, turning spokes of its packer.

The scream came again, unmistakably from the drainage ditch: “Help . . .
meeeee
. . .”

“What was that?” It was the girl. In the shadows her eyes were wide and she looked horribly frightened.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Help . . .
meeeee
. . .”

“He's alive,” she whispered. “Oh, God.
Alive.”

I didn't have to see him. I could imagine it all too well. Snodgrass lying half in and half out of the drainage ditch, back and legs broken, carefully-pressed suit caked with mud, white, gasping face turned up to the indifferent moon . . .

“I don't hear anything,” I said. “Do you?”

She looked at me. “How can you? How?”

“Now if you woke him up,” I said, jerking a thumb at the kid,
“he
might hear something. He might go out there. Would you like that?”

Her face began to twitch and pull as if stitched by invisible needles. “Nothing,” she whispered. “Nothing out there.”

She went back to her boy friend and pressed her head against his chest. His arms came up around her in his sleep.

No one else woke up. Snodgrass cried and wept and screamed for a long time, and then he stopped.

Dawn.

Another truck had arrived, this one a flatbed with a giant rack for hauling cars. It was joined by a bulldozer. That scared me.

The trucker came over and twitched my arm. “Come on back,” he whispered excitedly. The others were still sleeping. “Come look at this.”

I followed him back to the supply room. About ten trucks were patrolling out there. At first I didn't see anything new.

“See?” he said, and pointed. “Right there.”

Then I saw. One of the pickups was stopped dead. It was sitting there like a lump, all of the menace gone out of it.

“Out of gas?”

“That's right, buddy.
And they can't pump their own.
We got it knocked. All we have to do is wait.” He smiled and fumbled for a cigarette.

It was about nine o'clock and I was eating a piece of yesterday's pie for breakfast when the air horn began—long, rolling blasts that rattled your skull. We went over to the windows and looked out. The trucks were sitting still, idling. One trailer truck, a huge Reo with a red cab, had pulled up almost to the narrow verge of grass between the restaurant and the parking lot. At this distance the square grill was huge and murderous. The tires would stand to a man's chest cavity.

The horn began to blare again; hard, hungry blasts that traveled off in straight, flat lines and echoed back. There was a pattern. Shorts and longs in some kind of rhythm.

“That's Morse!” the kid, Jerry, suddenly exclaimed.

The trucker looked at him. “How would you know?”

The kid went a little red. “I learned it in the Boy Scouts.”

“You?” the trucker said.
“You?
Wow.” He shook his head.

“Never mind,” I said. “Do you remember enough to—”

“Sure. Let me listen. Got a pencil?”

The counterman gave him one, and the kid began to write letters on a napkin. After a while he stopped. “It's just saying ‘Attention' over and over again. Wait.”

We waited. The air horn beat its longs and shorts into the still morning air. Then the pattern changed and the kid started to write again. We hung over his shoulders and watched the message form. “Someone must pump fuel. Someone will not be harmed. All fuel must be pumped. This shall be done now. Now someone will pump fuel.”

The air blasts kept up, but the kid stopped writing. “It's just repeating ‘Attention' again,” he said.

The truck repeated its message again and again. I didn't like the look of the words, printed on the napkin in block style. They looked machinelike, ruthless. There would be no compromise with those words. You did or you didn't.

“Well,” the kid said, “what do we do?”

“Nothing,” the trucker said. His face was excited and working. “All we have to do is wait. They must all be low on fuel. One of the little ones out back has already stopped. All we have to do—”

The air horn stopped. The truck backed up and joined its fellows. They waited in a semicircle, headlights pointed in toward us.

“There's a bulldozer out there,” I said.

Jerry looked at me. “You think they'll rip the place down?”

“Yes.”

He looked at the counterman. “They couldn't do that, could they?”

The counterman shrugged.

“We oughta vote,” the trucker said. “No blackmail, damn it. All we gotta do is wait.” He had repeated it three times now, like a charm.

“Okay,” I said. “Vote.”

“Wait,” the trucker said immediately.

“I think we ought to fuel them,” I said. “We can wait for a better chance to get away. Counterman?”

“Stay in here,” he said. “You want to be their slaves? That's what it'll come to. You want to spend the rest of your life changin' oil filters every time one of those . . .
things
blats its horn? Not me.” He looked darkly out the window. “Let them starve.”

I looked at the kid and the girl.

“I think he's right,” he said. “That's the only way to stop them. If someone was going to rescue us, they would have. God knows what's going on in other places.” And the girl, with Snodgrass in her eyes, nodded and stepped closer to him.

“That's it then,” I said.

I went over to the cigarette machine and got a pack without looking at the brand. I'd stopped smoking a year ago, but this seemed like a good time to start again. The smoke rasped harsh in my lungs.

Twenty minutes crawled by. The trucks out front waited. In back, they were lining up at the pumps.

“I think it was all a bluff,” the trucker said. “Just—”

Then there was a louder, harsher, choppier note, the sound of an engine revving up and falling off, then revving up again. The bulldozer.

It glittered like a yellowjacket in the sun, a Caterpillar with clattering steel treads. Black smoke belched from its short stack as it wheeled around to face us.

“It's going to charge,” the trucker said. There was a look of utter surprise on his face. “It's going to charge!”

“Get back,” I said. “Behind the counter.”

The bulldozer was still revving. Gear-shift levers moved themselves. Heat shimmer hung over its smoking stack. Suddenly the dozer blade lifted, a heavy steel curve clotted with dried dirt. Then, with a screaming howl of power, it roared straight at us.

“The
counter!”
I gave the trucker a shove, and that started them.

There was a small concrete verge between the parking lot and the grass. The dozer charged over it, blade lifting for a moment, and then it rammed the front wall head on. Glass exploded inward with a heavy, coughing roar and the wood frame crashed into splinters. One of the overhead light globes fell, splashing more glass. Crockery fell from the shelves. The girl was screaming but the sound was almost lost beneath the steady, pounding roar of the Cat's engine.

It reversed, clanked across the chewed strip of lawn, and lunged forward again, sending the remaining booths crashing and spinning. The pie case fell off the counter, sending pie wedges skidding across the floor.

The counterman was crouching with his eyes shut, and the kid was holding his girl. The trucker was walleyed with fear.

“We gotta stop it,” he gibbered. “Tell 'em we'll do it, we'll do anything—”

“A little late, isn't it?”

The Cat reversed and got ready for another charge. New nicks in its blade glittered and heliographed in the sun. It lurched forward with a bellowing roar and this time it took down the main support to the left of what had been the window. That section of the roof fell in with a grinding crash. Plaster dust billowed up.

The dozer pulled free. Beyond it I could see the group of trucks, waiting.

I grabbed the counterman. “Where are the oil drums?” The cookstoves ran on butane gas, but I had seen vents for a warm-air furnace.

“Back of the storage room,” he said.

I grabbed the kid. “Come on.”

We got up and ran into the storage room. The bulldozer hit again and the building trembled. Two or three more hits and it would be able to come right up to the counter for a cup of coffee.

There were two large fifty-gallon drums with feeds to the furnace and turn spigots. There was a carton of empty ketchup bottles near the back door. “Get those, Jerry.”

While he did, I pulled off my shirt and yanked it to rags. The dozer hit again and again, and each hit was accompanied by the sound of more breakage.

I filled four of the ketchup bottles from the spigots, and he stuffed rags into them. “You play football?” I asked him.

“In high school.”

“Okay. Pretend you're going in from the five.”

We went out into the restaurant. The whole front wall was open to the sky. Sprays of glass glittered like diamonds. One heavy beam had fallen diagonally across the opening. The dozer was backing up to take it out and I thought that this time it would keep coming, ripping through the stools and then demolishing the counter itself.

We knelt down and thrust the bottles out. “Light them up,” I said to the trucker.

He got his matches out, but his hands were shaking too badly and he dropped them. The counterman picked them up, struck one, and the hunks of shirt blazed greasily alight.

“Quick,” I said.

We ran, the kid a little in the lead. Glass crunched and gritted underfoot. There was a hot, oily smell in the air. Everything was very loud, very bright.

The dozer charged.

The kid dodged out under the beam and stood silhouetted in front of that heavy tempered steel blade. I went out to the right. The kid's first throw fell short. His second hit the blade and the flame splashed harmlessly.

He tried to turn and then it was on him, a rolling juggernaut, four tons of steel. His hands flew up and then he was gone, chewed under.

I buttonhooked around and lobbed one bottle into the open cab and the second right into the works. They exploded together in a leaping shout of flame.

For a moment the dozer's engine rose in an almost human squeal of rage and pain. It wheeled in a maddened half-circle, ripping out the left corner of the diner, and rolled drunkenly toward the drainage ditch.

The steel treads were streaked and dotted with gore and where the kid had been there was something that looked like a crumpled towel.

The dozer got almost to the ditch, flames boiling from under its cowling and from the cockpit, and then it exploded in a geyser.

I stumbled backward and almost fell over a pile of rubble. There was a hot smell that wasn't just oil. It was burning hair. I was on fire.

I grabbed a tablecloth, jammed it on my head, ran behind the counter, and plunged my head into the sink hard enough to crack it on the bottom. The girl was screaming Jerry's name over and over in a shrieking insane litany.

I turned around and saw the huge car-carrier slowly rolling toward the defenseless front of the diner.

The trucker screamed and broke for the side door.

“Don't!” the counterman cried. “Don't do that—”

But he was out and sprinting for the drainage ditch and the open field beyond.

The truck must have been standing sentry just out of sight of that side door—a small panel job with “Wong's Cash-and-Carry Laundry” written on the side. It ran him down almost before you could see it happen. Then it was gone and only the trucker was left, twisted into the gravel. He had been knocked out of his shoes.

The car-carrier rolled slowly over the concrete verge, onto the grass, over the kid's remains, and stopped with its huge snout poking into the diner.

Its air horn let out a sudden, shattering honk, followed by another, and another.