Truckers Read online

  He went out afterward and sat at the top of the bank with his chin in his hands, watching the highway again.

  It was a stream of red and white lights. There were humans inside those boxes, going about whatever mysterious business humans spent their time on. They were always in a hurry to get to it, whatever it was.

  He was prepared to bet they didn’t eat rat. Humans had it really easy. They were big and slow, but they didn’t have to live in damp burrows waiting for daft old women to let the fire go out. They never had maggots in their tea. They went wherever they wanted and they did whatever they liked. The whole world belonged to them.

  And all night long they drove up and down in these little trucks with lights on. Didn’t they ever go to sleep? There must be hundreds of them.

  He’d dreamed of leaving on a truck. Trucks often stopped at the cafe. It would be easy—well, fairly easy—to find a way onto one. They were clean and shiny—they had to go somewhere better than this. And after all, what was the alternative? They’d never see winter through here, and setting out across the fields with the bad weather coming on didn’t bear thinking about.

  Of course, he’d never do it. You never actually did it, in the end. You just dreamed about following those swishing lights.

  And above the rushing lights, the stars. Torrit said the stars were very important. Right at the moment, Masklin didn’t agree. You couldn’t eat them. They weren’t even much good for seeing by. The stars were pretty useless, when you thought about it. . . .

  Somebody screamed.

  Masklin’s body got to his feet almost before his mind had even thought about it, and sped silently through the scrubby bushes toward the burrow.

  Where, its head entirely underground and its brush waving excitedly at the stars, there was a dog fox. He recognized it. He’d had a couple of close shaves with it in the past.

  Somewhere inside Masklin’s head the bit of him that was really him—old Torrit had a lot to say about this bit—was horrified to see him snatch up his spear, which was still in the ground where he had plunged it, and stab the fox as hard as he could in a hind leg.

  There was a muffled yelp and the animal struggled backward, turning an evil, foaming mask to its tormentor. Two bright yellow eyes focused on Masklin, who leaned panting on his spear. This was one of those times when time itself slowed down and everything was suddenly more real. Perhaps, if you knew you were going to die, your senses crammed in as much detail as they could while they still had the chance. . . .

  There were flecks of blood around the creature’s muzzle.

  Masklin felt himself become angry. It welled up inside him, like a huge bubble. He didn’t have much, and this grinning thing was taking even that away from him.

  As the red tongue lolled out, he knew that he had two choices. He could run, or he could die.

  So he attacked instead. The spear soared from his hand like a bird, catching the fox in the lip. It screamed and pawed at the wound, and Masklin was running, running across the dirt, propelled by the engine of his anger, and then jumping and grabbing handfuls of rank red fur and hauling himself up the fox’s flank to land astride its neck and drawing his stone knife and stabbing, stabbing, at everything that was wrong with the world. . . .

  The fox screamed again and leaped away. If he had been capable of thinking, then Masklin would have known that his knife wasn’t doing much more than annoying the creature, but it wasn’t used to meals fighting back with such fury, and its only thought now was to get away. It breasted the embankment and rushed headlong down it, toward the lights of the highway.

  Masklin started to think again. The rushing of the traffic filled his ears. He let go and threw himself into the long grass as the creature galloped out onto the asphalt.

  He landed heavily and rolled over, all the breath knocked out of him.

  But he remembered what happened next. It stayed in his memory for a long time, long after he’d seen so many strange things that there really should have been no room for it.

  The fox, as still as a statue in a headlight’s beam, snarled its defiance as it tried to outstare ten tons of metal hurtling toward it at seventy miles an hour.

  There was a bump, a swish, and darkness.

  Masklin lay facedown in the cool moss for a long time. Then, dreading what he was about to see, trying not to imagine it, he pulled himself to his feet and plodded back toward whatever was left of his home.

  Grimma was waiting at the burrow’s mouth, holding a twig like a club. She spun round and nearly brained Masklin as he staggered out of the darkness and leaned against the bank. He stuck out a weary hand and pushed the stick aside.

  “We didn’t know where you’d gone,” she said, her voice on the edge of hysteria. “We just heard the noise and there it was you should have been here and it got Mr. Mert and Mrs. Coom and it was digging at the—”

  She stopped and seemed to sag.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Masklin coldly, “I’m all right, thank you very much.”

  “What—what happened?”

  He ignored her and trooped into the darkness of the burrow and lay down. He could hear the old ones whispering as he sank into a deep, chilly sleep.

  I should have been here, he thought.

  They depend on me.

  We’re going. All of us.

  It had seemed a good idea, then.

  It looked a bit different, now.

  Now the nomes clustered at one end of the great dark space inside the truck. They were silent. There wasn’t any room to be noisy. The roar of the engine filled the air from edge to edge. Sometimes it would falter and start again. Occasionally the whole truck lurched.

  Grimma crawled across the trembling floor.

  “How long is it going to take to get there?” she said.

  “Where?” said Masklin.

  “Wherever we’re going.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They’re hungry, you see.”

  They always were. Masklin looked hopelessly at the huddle of old ones. One or two of them were watching him expectantly.

  “There isn’t anything I can do,” he said. “I’m hungry too, but there’s nothing here. It’s empty.”

  “Granny Morkie gets very upset when she’s missed a meal,” said Grimma.

  Masklin gave her a long, blank stare. Then he crawled his way to the group and sat down between Torrit and the old woman.

  He’d never really talked to them, he realized. When he was small, they were giants who were no concern of his, and then he’d been a hunter among hunters, and this year he’d either been out looking for food or deep in an exhausted sleep. But he knew why Torrit was the leader of the tribe. It stood to reason—he was the oldest nome. The oldest was always leader; that way there couldn’t be any arguments. Not the oldest woman, of course, because everyone knew this was unthinkable; even Granny Morkie was quite firm about that. Which was a bit odd, because she treated him like an idiot and Torrit never made a decision without looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Masklin sighed. He stared at his knees.

  “Look, I don’t know how long—” he began.

  “Don’t you worry about me, boy,” said Granny Morkie, who seemed to have quite recovered. “This is all rather excitin’, ain’t it?”

  “But it might take ages,” said Masklin. “I didn’t know it was going to take this long. It was just a mad idea . . .”

  She poked him with a bony finger. “Young man,” she said, “I was alive in the Great Winter of 1999. Terrible, that was. You can’t tell me anything about going hungry. Grimma’s a good girl, but she worries.”

  “But I don’t even know where we’re going!” Masklin burst out. “I’m sorry!”

  Torrit, who was sitting with the Thing on his skinny knees, peered shortsightedly at him.

  “We have the Thing,” he said. “It will show us the Way, it will.”

  Masklin nodded gloomily. Funny how Torrit always knew what the Thing wanted. It was just a black
square thing, but it had some very definite ideas about the importance of regular meals and how you should always listen to what the old folk said. It seemed to have an answer for everything.

  “And where does this Way take us?” said Masklin.

  “You knows that well enough. To the Heavens.”

  “Oh. Yes,” said Masklin. He glared at the Thing. He was pretty certain that it didn’t tell old Torrit anything at all; he knew he had pretty good hearing, and he never heard it say anything. It never did anything, it never moved. The only thing it ever did was look black and square. It was good at that.

  “Only by followin’ the Thing closely in all particulars can we be sure of going to the Heavens,” said Torrit uncertainly, as if he’d been told this a long time ago and hadn’t understood it even then.

  “Yes, well,” said Masklin. He stood up on the swaying floor and made his way to the tarpaulin. Then he paused to screw up his courage and poked his head under the gap.

  There was nothing but blurs and lights, and strange smells.

  It was all going wrong. It had seemed so sensible that night, a week ago. Anything was better than here. That had seemed so obvious then. But it was odd. The old ones moaned like anything when things weren’t exactly to their liking, but now, when everything was looking bad, they were almost cheerful.

  People were a lot more complicated than they looked. Perhaps the Thing could tell you that, too, if you knew how to ask.

  The truck turned a corner and rumbled down into blackness and then, without warning, stopped. He found himself looking into a huge lighted space, full of trucks, full of humans. . . .

  He pulled his head back quickly and scuttled across the floor to Torrit.

  “Er,” he said.

  “Yes, lad?”

  “Heaven. Do humans go there?”

  The old nome shook his head. “The Heavens,” he said. “More than one of ’em, see? Only nomes go there.”

  “You’re absolutely certain?”

  “Oh, yes.” Torrit beamed. “O’ course, they may have heavens of their own,” he said. “I don’t know about that. But they ain’t ours, you may depend upon it.”

  “Oh.”

  Torrit stared at the Thing again.

  “We’ve stopped,” he said. “Where are we?”

  Masklin stared wearily into the darkness.

  “I think I had better go and find out,” he said.

  There was whistling outside, and the distant rumble of human voices. The lights went out. There was a rattling noise, followed by a click, and then silence.

  After a while there was a faint scrabbling around the back of one of the silent trucks. A length of line, no thicker than thread, dropped down until it touched the oily floor of the garage.

  A minute went by. Then, lowering itself with great care hand over hand, a small, stumpy figure shinned down the line and dropped onto the floor. It stood rock still for a few seconds after landing, with only its eyes moving.

  It was not entirely human. There were definitely the right number of arms and legs, and the additional bits like eyes and so on were in the usual places, but the figure that was now creeping across the darkened floor in its mouse skins looked like a brick wall on legs. Nomes are so stocky that a Japanese sumo wrestler would look half starved by comparison, and the way this one moved suggested that it was considerably tougher than old boots.

  Masklin was, in fact, terrified out of his life. There was nothing here that he recognized, except for the smell of all, which he had come to associate with humans and especially with trucks (Torrit had told him loftily that all was a burning water that trucks drank, at which point Masklin knew the old nome had gone mad. It stood to reason. Water didn’t burn).

  None of it made any sense. Vast cans loomed above him. There were huge pieces of metal that had a made look about them. This was definitely a part of a human heaven. Humans liked metal.

  He did skirt warily around a cigarette end and made a mental note to take it back for Torrit.

  There were other trucks in this place, all of them silent. It was, Masklin decided, a truck nest. Which meant that the only food in it was probably all.

  He untensed a bit and prodded about under a bench that towered against one wall like a house. There were drifts of wastepaper there, and, led by a smell which here was even stronger than all, he found a whole apple core. It was going brown, but it was a pretty good find.

  He slung it across one shoulder and turned around.

  There was a rat watching him thoughtfully. It was considerably bigger and sleeker than the things that fought the nomes for the scraps from the litter bin. It dropped on all fours and trotted toward him.

  Masklin felt that he was on firmer ground here. All these huge dark shapes and cans and ghastly smells were quite beyond him, but he knew what a rat was, all right, and what to do about one.

  He dropped the core, brought his spear back slowly and carefully, aimed at a point just between the creature’s eyes . . .

  Two things happened at once.

  Masklin noticed that the rat had a little red collar.

  And a voice said: “Don’t! He took a long time to train. Bargains Galore! Where did you come from?”

  The stranger was a nome. At least Masklin had to assume so. He was certainly nome height and moved like a nome.

  But his clothes . . .

  The basic color for a practical nome’s clothes is mud. That was common sense. Grimma knew fifty ways of making dyes from wild plants, and they all yielded a color that was, when you came right down to it, basically muddy. Sometimes yellow mud, sometimes brown mud, sometimes even greenish mud, but still, well, mud. Because any nome who ventured out wearing jolly reds and blues would have a life expectancy of perhaps half an hour before something digestive happened to him.

  Whereas this nome looked like a rainbow. He wore brightly colored clothes of a material so fine, it looked like a fries wrapper, a belt studded with bits of glass, proper leather boots, and a hat with a feather in it. As he talked, he slapped his leg idly with a leather strap which, it turned out, was the leash for the rat.

  “Well?” he snapped. “Answer me!”

  “I came off the truck,” said Masklin shortly, eyeing the rat. It stopped scratching its ears, gave him a look, and went and hid behind its master.

  “What were you doing on there? Answer me!”

  Masklin pulled himself up. “We were traveling,” he said.

  The nome glared at him. “What’s traveling?” he snapped.

  “Moving along,” said Masklin. “You know? Coming from one place and going to another place.”

  This seemed to have a strange effect on the stranger. If it didn’t actually make him polite, at least it took the edge off his tone.

  “Are you trying to tell me you came from Outside?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “Is it?” Masklin looked worried.

  “There’s nothing Outside!”

  “Is there? Sorry,” said Masklin. “But we seem to have come in from it, anyway. Is this a problem?”

  “You mean really Outside?” said the nome, sidling closer.

  “I suppose I do. We never really thought about it. What’s this pl—”

  “What’s it like?”

  “What?”

  “Outside! What’s it like?”

  Masklin looked blank. “Well,” he said. “It’s sort of big—”

  “Yes?”

  “And, er, there’s a lot of it—”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “With, you know, things in it—”

  “Is it true the ceiling is so high you can’t see it?” asked the nome, apparently beside himself with excitement.

  “Don’t know. What’s a ceiling?” said Masklin.

  “That is,” said the nome, pointing up to a gloomy roof of girders and shadows.

  “Oh, I haven’t seen anything like that,” said Masklin. “Outside it’s blue
or gray, with white things floating around in it.”

  “And, and, the walls are such a long way off, and there’s a sort of green carpet thing that grows on the ground?” asked the nome, hopping from one foot to the other.

  “Don’t know,” said Masklin, even more mystified. “What’s a carpet?”

  “Wow!” The nome got a grip on himself and extended a shaking hand. “My name’s Angalo,” he said. “Angalo de Haberdasheri. Haha. Of course, that won’t mean anything to you! And this is Bobo.”

  The rat appeared to grin. Masklin had never heard a rat called anything, except perhaps, if you were driven to it, “dinner.”

  “I’m Masklin,” he said. “Is it all right if the rest of us come down? It was a long journey.”

  “Gosh, yes! All from Outside? My father’ll never believe it!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Masklin. “I don’t understand. What’s so special? We were outside. Now we’re inside.”

  Angalo ignored him. He was staring at the others as they came stiffly down the line, grumbling.

  “Old people, too!” said Angalo. “And they look just like us! Not even pointy heads or anything!”

  “Saucy!” said Granny Morkie. Angalo stopped grinning.

  “Madam,” he said icily, “do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “Someone who’s not too old for a smacked bottom,” said Granny Morkie. “If I looked just like you, my lad, I’d look a great deal better. Pointy heads, indeed!”

  Angalo’s mouth opened and shut silently. Then he said: “It’s amazing! I mean, Dorcas said that even if there was a possibility of life outside the Store, it wouldn’t be life as we know it! Please, please, all follow me.”

  They exchanged glances as Angalo scurried away toward the edge of the truck nest, but followed him anyway. There wasn’t much of an alternative.

  “I remember when your old dad stayed out too long in the sun one day. He talked rubbish, too, just like this one,” said Granny Morkie quietly.

  Torrit appeared to be reaching a conclusion. They waited for it politely.

  “I reckon,” he said at last, “I reckon we ought to eat his rat.”

  “You shut up, you,” said Granny, automatically.

  “I’m leader, I am. You’ve got no right, talking like that to a leader,” Torrit whined.