There were still three booths ranged along the big glass picture window and I sat down in one of them. The clock behind the counter had stopped at 8.32, but it felt like ten. Outside the truck prowled and growled. Some left, hurrying off to unknown missions, and others came. There were three pickup trucks now, circling importantly amid their bigger brothers.
I was starting to doze, and instead of counting sheep I counted trucks. How many in the state, how many in America? Trailer trucks, pickup trucks, flatbeds, day-haulers, three-quarter-tons, army convoy trucks by the tens of thousands, and buses. Nightmare vision of a city-bus, two wheels in the gutter and two wheels on the pavement, roaring along and ploughing through screaming pedestrians like ninepins.
I shook it off and fell into a light, troubled sleep.
It must have been early morning when Snodgrass began to scream. A thin new moon had risen and was shining icily through a high scud of cloud. A new clattering note had been added, counterpointing the throaty, idling roar of the big rigs. I looked for it and saw a hay baler circling out by the darkened sign. The moonlight glanced off the sharp, turning spoke of its packer.
The scream came again, unmistakably from the drainage ditch: 'Help. . . meeeee .
'What was that?' It was the girl. In the shadows her eyes were wide and she looked horribly frightened.
'Nothing,' I said.
'Help. . . meeeee .
'He's alive,' she whispered. 'Oh, God. Alive.'
I didn't have to see him. I could imagine it all too well. Snodgrass lying half in and half out of the drainage ditch, back and legs broken, carefully-pressed suit caked with mud, white, gasping face turned up to the indifferent moon...
'I don't hear anything,' I said. 'Do you?'
She looked at me. 'How can you? How?'
'Now if you woke him up,' I said, jerking a thumb at the kid, 'he might hear something. He might go out there. Would you like that?'
Her face began to twitch and pull as if stitched by invisible needles. 'Nothing,' she whispered. 'Nothing out there.'
She went back to her boy friend and pressed her head against his chest. His arms came up around her in his sleep. No one else woke up. Snodgrass cried and wept and screamed for a long time, and then he stopped.
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?'