Night Shift(55)

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 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 parking lot. At this distance the square grill was huge and murderous. The tyres would stand to a man's chest cavity.

The horn began to blare again; hard, hungry blasts that travelled 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 saying "Attention" over and over again. Wait.'

We waited. The air horn beat its longs and short 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 towards 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.