Kurt put the windows down when he woke up, giving us a little breeze inside the crowded cab.
The trailer had plenty of space, now that we'd ditched most of our goods, but none of us were riding there: the enclosed space was easily over a hundred degrees. On top of that, the cargo had a tendency to slide around unpredictably.
We made good use of the hours of daylight we had left, cruising down empty country backroads parallel the highway.
At first, we stopped frequently to clear pavemimics off, every few hundred feet or so, but after a couple of hours, Byron asked us to let a Monstrosity build up again.
He’d taken over the passenger seat as we traveled, using the space to methodically break off steak knife blades and weld them to the exterior of a pot he’d rescued from our jettisoned haul. It wasn’t easy, even with Focused Flame and his enhanced strength, but he persisted. It helped that when he’d grabbed his third ability he’d gotten enough synergy to stop burning himself.
The device he constructed wasn’t much use against a single pavemimic, which would instantly withdraw when it sensed the sharp surfaces, but it was glorious when used against Monstrosities. When Byron chucked his construction into the middle of a writhing mass of monsters, they pushed one another onto the blades repeatedly as they tried to get clear. They didn’t all die, but the ones closest to the center did. The survivors were alone or in pairs, and often injured: easily manageable.
I shoved Byron. “That was awesome! If we were all melee, that wouldn’t have been possible.”
Byron shrugged, but he was grinning. Even the need to re-affix a third of the blades after weak welds failed didn’t dim his clear satisfaction.
We saw a number of other stopped vehicles, but none with living people inside. Most of the time we could go around, driving on the wrong side of the road to pass the derelicts blocking our way, but not always.
The crashed passenger cars weren’t so bad; Kurt could shift them into neutral with a thought, and it wasn’t too hard to push them to the side.
We had a harder time when we came to a semi blocking the road, even though it hadn’t technically crashed. It seemed like the big vehicle had swerved to avoid a car and come to a stop at a diagonal, occupying both lanes. It was too heavy to move, so we ended up detaching the trailer and pushing the cab off the road, leaving us just enough space to edge through. (The semi’s trailer was no use to us; it was filled with a fortune in now-useless electronics.)
We stopped in the evening twilight. Twinkles woke up just before dark and seemed much better, so we let Davi, Zephyr, and Avalanche have the truck cab while the rest of us spread out in the empty part of the trailer. With the doors shut and the sun down, it should be a safe place to spend the night.
I’d gotten a pattern for a Small Light Source and made the purchase so I could see well enough to review our route. Kurtis found me holding the distance scale I’d torn from one corner of the map of Colorado, holding it up against the roads we'd traveled.
“How far do you think we’ve gotten?”
I shrugged, tapping the map to indicate a spot just outside the southeast outskirts of Denver. “We’re around here. I think we’ve gone a bit over 15 miles. Less than 20.”
“Twenty.” He squinted, thinking. “It’d take us… what, two months to get home at that rate? A little more?”
“Well, we didn’t leave at first light this morning, and we took a several-hour break to unload the semi… But… yeah. Even if we make twice that tomorrow, we've got to add in time for delays and detours. I think two months to get home is about right.”
Kurt scowled. “Too long.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Hopefully we can speed up when we hit the highway. If it wasn’t for all the monsters, we could make 500 miles a day, easy, as long as we could get enough fuel.” We’d been trying to estimate our mileage, but it had been difficult with all the idling we’d had to do. Our best guess was that we were getting between one and two miles per gallon.
“Fuel and monsters are one thing. What about traffic jams, and car crashes?” Kurt asked. “We got lucky with the semi today. What if two of them had crashed into each other, or one had run into a ditch?”
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I squinted at my friend. “Could you move a semi? I know you couldn’t take it far, but could you get it off the road?”
Kurtis laughed. “Hell no! I could barely make a luggage cart wiggle when I first took Animate Machinery, and it hasn’t gotten that much stronger. We’ll just have to hope there’ll be a way to go around accidents. We can always take the northbound lanes south, if they're clear.”
“Hmm.” I traced the colored lines of the map. "Probably best to stick with the bigger roads then. More options."
Kurt nodded, and we were both quiet for a while.
I flipped to the map of New Mexico, reviewing our possible routes for the twentieth time. I wasn’t really doing anything productive, but I was too wired to sleep. Today had been exhausting - in multiple ways - but we were making progress! It had been almost a week since the world went to hell, but I felt like I had taken the first real step back toward Meghan and the kids. Getting out of the airport and to the ValuCo had been more about saving my own skin than making it home; this was different.
“Do you really think there will be a new monster tomorrow?”
I jumped. I’d almost forgotten about Kurtis’s presence. “Yeah. Probably.”
“Hope it’s something more like the spacedogs than the pavemimics.”
“For sure.”
We could plow right through the spacedogs, earning a smattering of points without even slowing. A few attacked us each time we stopped to clear the pavemimics off the wheels, but otherwise the truck - which John kept nagging us to agree on a name for - made them a complete nonissue.
I set down the road atlas. Kurt’s question about the monsters was a reminder that we’d have another long day tomorrow. Even if I couldn’t sleep, I should at least rest.
I was out the moment my head hit the hoodies.
…
There was a new monster, as predicted.
It was irritating as fuck.
We made good time before it appeared, even as vehicles - and our need to clear them from the road - grew more frequent. It only took us an hour to reach E470, the smaller highway we’d take over to Interstate 25, although we found a pileup on the on-ramp. After we confirmed that there was a clear route up the off-ramp, it took us a solid twenty minutes to coax the semi through a three-point turn in the narrow space.
“New rule!” Kurt said. “We never take this thing into a narrow space without scouting it first.”
No one argued, although I heard John mutter “His name is Pacer, not thing.”
Shortly after we made it up the off-ramp, the new monster appeared. Our first warning was when John - our driver at the time - started to ask “What in tarnation-”
His question was cut off by a deafening boom and a jolt that knocked everyone off-balance.
John slammed on the brakes. “Jesus Christ! It just charged right at us!”
We got out to check.
The monster was dead, corpse nowhere to be found. I’d assumed as much; even if we were only going 30 or 40 miles per hour, we’d still be hitting whatever-it-was with a force of more than a million Newtons. If a monster could survive that, we’d be in deep shit.
Our old-model truck had a rugged steel bumper, but that bumper now bore a noticeable dent. John ran his hands over the blemish, heedless of the grime and dead insects. “Well, we killed it, but… if we keep doin’ that, we’ll get busted up eventually. We’re gonna have to take it real slow until we figure out a solution. Maybe have a few people run ahead of us?”
Byron grabbed the road atlas as we climbed back aboard. “Does this show train lines? Damn. It doesn’t. What we need is one of those big metal things they have in front of trains. Cow-catchers, I think they’re called?”
“Are those still a thing?” I asked. “I used to ride the South Shore to and from Chicago, and they didn’t have them. I think they just shape the front of the train. Maybe we could make something similar?”
Byron waved his finger back and forth, briefly materializing a flame. “I don’t think I’m up to fabricating something that can hold up to one of those hits without falling apart.”
I got a better look at the monsters when I took my turn running ahead of the truck. They were quadrupeds with clawed feet, like the spacedogs, but that was where the similarities ended. They were about twice as tall, back rising to just above my knee rather than mid-shin, and they had a distinct head covered by a glossy helmetlike bone. They were the least “alien”-looking of our attackers so far, with brownish fur that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an earth zoo and a body that was almost feline, if overly stocky.
Our smooth progress degraded into a fitful crawl. Even though we were well-rested and superhumanly fast, the need to constantly fight slowed us down. Keeping the rams off meant keeping defenders outside. Keeping defenders outside meant fighting each and every trashy little spacedog.
The monsters were predictable, at least.
Other people? Less so.