As sunset approached, the encampment at the turnoff was rapidly
expanding as vehicles arriving from the road joined those returning
from Pete's. Dianna, Janie and Meg joined Daniel atop the camper,
which with the truck was designated Skybox. Meg quickly estimated
the fleet to be forty vehicles strong. Cars were outnumbered by vans
and pickups, and there was a high proportion of heavier vehicles,
ranging from a completely incongruous ice cream truck to a
30-passenger Gillig school bus. Janie pointed and laughed at an
approaching old short bus painted to look distinctly like a
watermelon. “Is that Laramie's bus?” Meg asked.
“So, Dr. W told you that story?
Actually, no it isn't,” Dianna said. She pointed to the Gillig.
“That one is. We call it Gilligan.” Meg goggled and then
guffawed. “It started as a rear engine diesel bus in the fifties,
probably one of the first, then someone turned it into a big motor
home, and then the college rigged it up to run on a diesel-electric
generator. There's solar panels on the roof, too. Lar sold it to
George and Carlos eventually, but for months, he was trying to drive
that thing around town. I heard he spent a grand on parking tickets
alone.”
“Then what about that one?” Meg
asked as the short bus drew nearer, and momentarily answered herself,
“It's a band tour bus... a weird, cheap, messed-up little tour
bus.” It was a Dodge truck conversion of late-forties vintage,
either an early Power Wagon or one of the wartime trucks they were
directly copied from. In addition to bands of light and dark green,
there was purple-pink trimming that was wavy and smudged, including a
solid field at the bottom that was the backdrop for the legend
“HEDLEY KOW”, presumably the band's name. Various irreverent
captions in very official letters were positioned in official-looking
places around the bus, such as “Gov. Wallace Academy For The
Ungifted”, “School of Hard Knocks”, and the evident name of the
vehicle “FÄRTHER”
on a placard over the windshield.
“Hedley and his band have been
with us since our second week on the road. They're nice enough, their
music, not so much,” Dianna said. She raised her eyebrows
mischievously. “You know what's really funny? The `H' is supposed
to be silent.” Janie burst into giggles. “Oh, and look over
there. Recognize it?”
Meg followed a pointing finger to a large fire department station
wagon, heavily chromed and polished and patriotically painted red,
white and blue. “I can tell it's an ambulance,” she said, “and
it looks to be late-fifties, I think a Ford. But I've never seen a
grill like that. You know, it really looks like a toilet seat, or
one of those ladies' urinals.”
“Yeah, it's one of those things
everybody's heard of, but hardly anybody would recognize if they saw
it,” Dianna said. “What you're looking at is a 1959 Edsel. That
grill was actually bigger in the 1958 model, so the the later years
are a bit harder to recognize. It was the last vehicle in the fire
department lot. The way I heard, they hid it behind the tanker.”
“And they thought injured people
were better off in an Edsel?”
“The Edsel wasn't really that
bad,” Dianna said. “It just didn't live up to its own hype. And
anyway, that paint job says parade duty. I think maybe they used it
for a hearse.” Meg laughed.
Dianna pointed out a rustic Power Wagon, with a meshwork variation of
the “longhorn” grill that had only been used in 1961, with a
stake bed that was serving as a pen for a flock of goats. A horse
trailer was unhitched to let the goats out, and a couple burly ranch
hand types started releasing live chickens from the trailer.
“That's Horace Horsehauler,”
Dianna said. She pointed to the ice cream truck and an L600 panel
truck. “Those are Frosty and Chilly Willys, our refrigerated
trucks. Frosty has a walk-in refrigerated compartment, and Chilly is
a retired mail carrier fitted with an industrial ice maker and a
shaved-ice machine. At the start, we stocked them with perishables we
found at grocery stores, but most of that stuff went south months
ago. Now, we use them to store eggs, milk, leftover canned goods, and
any meat we can bag. It just about makes up for the power and upkeep
on the refrigeration units.”
“Say,” Meg said, “why don't
you use regular semis?”
“When we started, we picked up a
diesel big rig and a ten-thousand gallon tanker,” Dianna said. “We
called it the Purple Diesel Eater. I'm convinced it slowed us down by
at least two weeks, which I suppose is all for the best to you. We
not only couldn't keep it full, we couldn't even get enough extra gas
to make up for what the rig was using up from our diesel stores. On
top of that, it wasn't anywhere near suitable for the kinds of roads
we have to deal with. The L-series is better cross-country, and also
more maneuverable.”
Suddenly, Daniel snapped off two shots. Meg looked in time to see a
shuffler go down a hundred yards down the road. Daniel kept his
weapon up. It seemed to Meg that he actually relaxed when he saw
five more following behind. He cut them down one after the other
with well-aimed double-taps to the head, and when four of them rose
again, he fired even more precise shots to the neck. He glanced at
Meg, and answered the unasked question: “Corporal, Army special
reconnaissance. I wasn't over there, that got done while I was
finishing first in my class at the academy, but I wouldn't deny being
in the neighborhood.”
He shot a shuffler again, and continued, “We came up from the south
and east. About a month back, our scouts ran across a big group out
in the desert. We slowed down to stay behind them. We wouldn't be
as close as we are now, but we really needed what we're looking for
here. Those, and the ones you ran into, are just the ones that
wandered off from their stragglers.”
“Wait a minute,” Meg said, “I
came here from the other way, and I didn't see anything like what
you're talking about.”
“You wouldn't have,” Daniel
said. “At the start, there were films of bunches of Jonny Revs
stumbling around, bumping together and tripping over each other like
it was a vaudeville act. They showed it to us as training footage,
and I heard they released it to the public. All BS from the brass.
They staged it with captured specimens that were already in bad
shape. I'm sure at least some were deliberately mutilated to make
them slow and off-balance, the way they cripple a bull before they
let it in the ring with the matador. I don't know what all they did,
but I can tell you, no revenant in the field ever runs into another
rev. It's an instinct, it has to be, and however it works, it gets
stronger when they're together in greater numbers. The more there
are, the more they spread out. With the biggest groups, you could
walk right through and only see a few- until and unless they come
after you.”
“How often do they do that?”
Meg asked.
Daniel shrugged. “All we know is, if they come after you once,
they'll do it again. Always.”
Meg looked about for some other topic of conversation, and her eyes
lit on a returning GMC van, which she recognized as both the same van
that had driven into the station behind the Goliath and the same
model she had seen on the flatbed. “Hey,” she said, “are those
the same Vanduras that Carlos's Dodge got sold for?”
“The very same,” Dianna said.
“I swear he took them with us just to keep trashing GMC. That one
on the flat bed hasn't run in months, and we stripped anything worth
saving weeks ago. It's almost like he's saving it for some kind of
revenge.”
Back at Pete's, the last of the vehicles were pulling out. Carlos
smiled were he stood tall in the front seat of his Thing as Flipper
drove away with Teutonic poise on a set of new shocks. Then he looked
to the new acquisitions as they lined up before him. There were the
two RVs, the Subaru 360, the VW pickup, the Jeep van and the Power
Wagon. He stepped forward and started tapping each vehicle with the
side of his hammer.
“I confirm your titles as Lady
Maude, Duchess of Goldbrick and Chuck, Prince of Daystar,” he said
for the RVs, and continued down the line. “I dub you Princess
Ladybug, Baron Van Flatbed, Lord Redbrick, and you shall henceforth
be known as Dodgzilla. You have been found worthy of the fleet.
Perform your duties well, and we will take good care of you. If you
do not...” He slapped the hammer in the palm of his hand and then
glanced expectantly in the direction of the Vandura.
“Is he nuts?” Phil said over
the hiss of an acetylene torch.
“It's his aboriginal heritage,”
George said, then hedged, “I think. I understand he spent most of
his childhood with his parents and their tribe, before he was adopted
by a white family. He doesn't talk about it much. Native Australian
culture is based on animistic religion: Animals, plants and even the
inanimate can be seen as having spirits with broadly anthropomorphic
qualities. There are also many aspects that are a matter of symbolism
and tradition, as much as literal belief...”
“I believe what the Prof's
getting to,” Laramie said, “is yeah, of
course he's nuts.” He
lowered a mask and started a heavy buzz saw.
David N. Brown Mesa Arizona
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