Most of the vehicles on the highway were still empty, any people having made a break for nearby civilization. The monsters were reappearing faster than they were in the countryside, but still not nearly as fast as they had at the airport. If a group was capable of taking down a few aggressive rodents, they could have made it to the houses and businesses a little way away.

The exceptions were clustered around semi trucks similar to our own. You could pretty much predict whether or not a truck was inhabited based on what logos were painted on the side. Moving truck? No way. Grocery store? Absolutely.

In one way, it made things easier: no one here was starving. Some were eating really limited diets, but that was easy enough to help with: they’d trade us a portion of their sweet tea or candy bars or what-have-you and we’d give them a more varied mix of goods from our truck.

That didn’t mean every exchange was positive.

One group kept us talking, haggling over details, while a thief slipped into the back of our trailer. We didn’t even notice him on the way in, but Zephyr tackled him as he left.

“Thieth! Aaaaargh, he’s naked!”

Weirded out, she leaned back, letting the thief scramble away. His body had the same color and pattern as the road. From a distance, he was only visible when his body blocked my view of something else, like Zephyr, the canned goods he’d dropped, or the road’s painted lines. When he moved into the grass, his naked gray body was starkly visible for a couple of seconds. Twinkles shot an Ice Bolt, nailing him in the back. He yelped and threw himself to the side, dodging Byron’s Fire Bolt followup.

“I could see the cans, you idiot!” Zephyr screamed, wiping her hands on her shirt.

A green grassy pattern spread through the gray, concealing the thief.

The group we’d been talking with? They looked surprised by the incident… but not confused. Several looked guilty.

“Back to the truck!” I called.

It was a tense minute until we were all aboard; I was worried they’d have something else underhanded to try, but we’d been lucky. About half their group was focused on the grass next to the road, apparently just as unable to see their friend as we were. None of them tried anything else before we pulled away.

Even with the trades, we would have made good time... if it weren’t for the fact that nearly everyone who saw our truck seemed willing to jump out in front of it to demand an explanation for how we’d gotten it moving. We were stopped about twice per mile. Davi started trying to write out a “fix-your-car” guide to distribute, but trying to make the process clear without taking a wrist-breaking quantity of handwritten words was difficult.

A lot of people weren’t interested in fixing their own vehicles after they realized we were headed in the general direction they wanted to go. When the first person asked to ride along with us, it caused some tension.

Byron tried to dissuade the woman. “We’re going to try to get off the highway soon. We probably can’t take you to Castle Rock.”

She shrugged. “Then you’ll drop me in Franktown, which is still much closer to home than I am now.”

“You don’t want to stay with your truck? You’ve got food here.”

“I’m taking some. Anyway, it’s not me I’m worried about. My son’s 15. I wasn’t worried about leaving him home alone for the morning, but…” she shrugged helplessly. “I didn’t expect this. I need to make sure he’s okay.”

What could I say against that?

It didn’t cost us much to carry people - although we tried to be very clear that other than “generally south” we couldn’t guarantee our route - and we picked up a person or three every stop thereafter. Most brought some of whatever food they’d been camped around with them, so our generosity would probably only lead to a small dent in our supplies.

There was no way to fit everyone in the truck cab, but with the rams limiting our pace, riding in the trailer was much more feasible, and several of us joined our hitchhikers. Byron spot-welded the doors open so we’d get some airflow; the weak connection points would be easy enough to break later. We were driving slower today, following the people guarding our front end against rams. None of us were worried about our cargo sliding around with the truck moving at walking pace.

Sharing our space, transportation, and spoils wasn’t comfortable, but it ended up saving our asses later that evening.

We’d been inching down the road all day, making absolutely terrible progress.

“Sun’s starting to go down and we’ve driven maybe 15 miles,” Byron said, glaring at the atlas. “This was a mistake.”

I shrugged. “A thirty-mile detour might not have been better.”

“We could have knocked out this whole distance in an hour or two!”

I made a face. “Yesterday, maybe, but not with those rams. At least they don’t seem to be respawning, so we’ve had to fight fewer of them with all the people around.”

“I guess. If they’d left them in place, it would have been perfect for getting a better idea of how monsters-per-mile relates to population density.”

Davi snorted, jumping into our discussion. “The rams weren’t going to let people ignore them. Stop whining! We just got onto Highway 83. I was talking to some of our passengers… We’ve got maybe another five miles of congestion, and then it’ll be a four-to-six-lane highway through a rural area. Best of both worlds.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Our driver braked as Davi finished speaking, and we all swayed.

“Here we go again,” said Byron.

I grimaced, hopping out of the cab to follow him forward. I’d been putting on an optimistic front, but internally, I was more frustrated than Byron. Twenty miles yesterday? Probably less than that today? It wasn’t fast enough.

I meandered up to the front, where John and Kurtis had emerged from the cab to talk with a group of a dozen people who’d spilled onto the road in front of us, blocking our path. Avalanche and Zephyr were already there, since they’d been taking their turn on ram duty.

“Yeah, it’s not too bad if you’ve got an old diesel truck,” John was telling them. “Didn’t take too much work, just re-wiring the ignition, cleaning out the engine, and filtering the fuel. Cleaning the engine’s the hard part, though. Took us ‘til the cows came home, let me tell you.”

“But your truck’s all good, now?”

“Yessir!”

“Any chance we can convince you to head north? We’ve got people waiting on us in Montana and Idaho.”

Kurt shook his head. “We all need to go south. We’ve got some people headed southeast, some headed southwest… but all south.”

The spokesman wasn’t helmeted. I could see his face twist in anger.

Kurt hurried to try to calm the situation. “I’m sorry. There was another old truck about two miles north of here. It wasn’t carrying food, so I don’t think anyone would mind if you took it to fix up.”

“Two miles. For a maybe.” His eyes narrowed. “There’s a truck already working right here. Don’t see why we shouldn’t take yours.”

He was hardly the first to threaten us.

John and Kurt were standing a good fifteen feet back, well outside of normal conversational range. Kurtis raised his hands placatingly, “Hey now. There are a lot more of us than of you. Let’s not get hasty. No one needs to get hurt.”

At Kurt’s words, something flickered across the spokesman’s face. He smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly look. “Right you are. McKinney! Fog ‘em!”

As he finished speaking, a thick mist burst around Kurt and John, as opaque and white as a bag of dropped flour. I was in motion immediately, swinging wide of the cloud to intercept our attackers. A man in a green hat was looking over as I came into view around the cloud’s oddly abrupt edge. I had just enough time to see his eyes widen and fingers twitch before moisture swirled up around me, making it impossible to see more than a foot or two away.

Pft. That won’t stop me. I know where they are.

Wrong: the blue glint of the Force Shield barely registered before I ran into it, full-tilt. The glimmering light broke, but knocked the wind out of me.

I reeled, gasping. With the Force Shield gone and the fog all around, there were no landmarks to use to orient myself. It was impossible to say which way the truck was, and I had only sound to help me find friends or foes.

There was shouting everywhere.

“Thieves!”

“Attack!”

“Over here!”

“I can’t see!”

“Holy shit!”

I stumbled into someone else, a woman I didn’t recognize. Was she a hitchhiker, or with our attackers? She seemed just as uncertain. I saw her mouth move, but I couldn’t make out the words, and when I shouted “What?” she didn’t seem to hear me either.

Just then, I felt a strong gust of wind. The mist thinned dramatically, letting me make out the solid profile of our nearby semi.

I jogged over, this time keeping a careful watch for any obstructions.

The fog ended a few feet from the cab, where a full-out brawl was taking place. I didn’t see any blades out, just people grappling and punching, but that could be dangerous enough.

JoeyT was in the doorway of the cab, trying to keep the brawl from spilling inside and clearly struggling. More people were rounding the nose of the cab by the second, and I recognized many of them. Our hitchhikers? They must have come around the far side of the truck when this one got fogged.

I waded into the melee, methodically throwing punch after punch, trying for targets that would take people out of the fight: kidney, liver, solar plexus, ear, or groin.

I took a few hits myself, but most people are terrible at punching, and even worse at aiming. Several of the hits would leave bruises, but that was all. The abilities tossed my way did more damage, but the damage was mostly to my skin - burns, abrasions, and rashes. Painful, but not enough to put me down.

With more of our hitchhikers arriving at the fray by the moment, our attackers were soon badly outnumbered. It didn’t take long until our people were the only ones standing.

“Everyone okay?” Bolero called.

It took a few minutes to take stock, but the answer that came back was a relief. There were tons of injuries, but no fatalities.

“What now?” One of our hitchhikers asked. “Do we kill them?”

Begging erupted from the groaning figures at our feet.

“No,” said John. He’d healed himself up, but his attempt to wipe away the blood trickling from his mouth had just smeared it across his chin. “I won’t stand for that. They were trying to steal Pacer, not kill anyone.”

“What they did could have killed us,” JoeyT said, voice tight with repressed pain. He was leaning on the side of the truck as he spoke, and I could already see bruises purpling his arms and legs.

I nodded: he was absolutely right. Even a bad fall onto a hard surface could put someone in the ER. Mix in some alien abilities? Anything could have happened.

“You want to murder them in cold blood?” John asked, his usual meekness disappearing.

“No. I’m just saying that what they did was dangerous. Let’s just… go.” Joey turned away as he finished speaking, limping as he walked back toward the truck.

John shouted after him. “If we leave them like this, monsters will get them! That’s just slow murder.”

I shook my head, waving my left arm at John. A huge wet-looking patch ran from my wrist to my elbow where an ability - a kind of laser? - had torn a furrow. “Nah. Some of them have abilities that don’t take muscle. They should be able to fight anything that comes for them until they can heal up.”

“Might be rough.”

I snorted. “Maybe they’ll think twice before they decide to rob the next guy.”