“I’m Jeff and that’s my wife Sara Jo. The one in the back screamin’ there is little Jeff, Jr. and the one screamin’ in the front is Precious Anne. We’ve been traveling for a long time. All the way down from Myrtle Beach and we haven’t seen anybody. I took a wrong turn a few miles back, I guess. Where are we?” He offered Richard his hand.
“You are outside Spartanburg about twenty miles or so.” Richard shook his hand guardedly. “You must be really lost to have wound up here. Where you headed?”
“Uh, we were headed to the national park down west of Greenville. Heard there was a campsite for refugees down there. I took that cutoff road at the bottom of the mountain thinking it would make the trip shorter. Guess not,” Jeff said.
“Vwhy you vait til now to go to a shelter? Goddamned bots in New York and dem lovely babies don need in dat truck.” Helena seemed concerned about the truck and from her experience she had every reason to be. “Don you know de tings eat trucks!”
“What, eat trucks…” Jeff looked confused. “Hey, you ain’t from around here are you?”
“Da. I fuckin’ live here.”
“Sorry, uh, I’m just uh… tired… lost and…” He yawned and covered his mouth. Then he stretched. “Oh man, and the guy on the C.B. a while ago said…”
“C.B.!” Richard noticed the antenna on the truck. “You been talking on that thing!?”
“Uh, mostly I just listen to it, but I just told this fella that I was lost and nearly out of gas and—”
“Goddamn dummies don listen to de news.” Helena looked at Richard who was already in a sprint to the truck. She followed him, “Right! De babies.”
“Hey! Wait a minute!” Jeff said, startled and angry.
“Miss, you have to get these kids out of this vehicle right now. If you just used that radio they’ll be coming.” He held the rear door open and started unstrapping the screaming and kicking toddler. Jeff ran behind Richard and started to grab him around the neck in a barroom chokehold but Helena poked him pretty hard in the stomach with her club. Jeff let go of Richard’s neck and gasped for air as he fell backwards on his ass.
“Hey!” Sara Jo screamed.
“Lady, you must get out of de damn truck now or dose goddamn tings’ll eat it with you and your babies in it.”
With a hundred thuds and the sound of screeching metal on metal, alien robotic machines attached themselves to the truck like a swarm of angry bees. Helena pulled Sara Jo and Precious through the passenger side doorway of the vehicle just as the seat cushion springs flew through the windshield into the underbelly of a cloud of bots. Metal fragments, plastic, rubber, vinyl, glass, automotive fluids of all sorts, and dirt and leaves were flung around them in a whirlwind of debris and noise. Once, the truck’s horn even honked. The metal from the canned goods popped open and the various foodstuffs contained within them were flung aside as discarded useless waste to the bots. The gooey mess flew around them, splattering everything in the whirlwind’s path.
Richard held the toddler under his bodyweight although the little tyke was kicking, screaming, and biting at him. But he was afraid if the kid got up a piece of flying debris would decapitate the little guy. Helena and Sara Jo used their bodies to shield Precious, who was also screaming the most gut-wrenching screeches. Between the children’s screams and the hellacious noise the bots made destroying the truck, it was difficult to concentrate on anything but holding still. And the horrific sound was something along the lines of crossing an overcrowded preschool at recess with a monster truck rally.
As quickly as the bots had appeared they were flying away. Two of the bots were lagging behind and hovering about two feet above the ground flying sluggishly and waiting for something. They had both gathered enough raw materials from the truck and now were both twinning.
“Helena! Look!” Richard pointed to the twinning probe nearest to her.
Helena rose to her feet quickly, grabbing her club in a homerun hitter’s stance, and knocked the boomerang-shaped probe skittering in a shower of sparks across the ground like a stone skipping on a pond. The boomerang-shaped machine twisted and twirled across the road as it bounced and landed in a briar patch on the far side. She spun and jumped the six feet or so over a pile of truck rubble to the second twinning probe and commenced smashing it.
“Goddamn alien tings coulda killed dese babies!” She bashed it again. That particular bot was for certain dead. “Goddamn it you all to hell!”
The first bot she had batted out of the park was skittering around and around, tangled up in the thick briars on the side of the old logging road and could not seem to break free. She started toward it to pound it some more.
“No! Helena, wait. I want it alive!” Richard grabbed a torn canvas duffle bag and some other material made of nylon that was left over from the remains of Jeff’s tent. Richard rushed across the road, tossing the material in front of him, and tackled the bot, wrapping it in the bag. That didn’t work worth a damn. The bot threw him and the bag head over heels deeper into the briar patch, scratching him from head to toe. “Shit!”
“Hold on, I’ll get it!” Helena grabbed another large piece of the tent material that had been slung out of the bot’s metal-eating whirlwind and she popped it like a bed sheet over the briars and the bot. “Grab de goddamn end!”
Richard forced his way up through the briars ignoring the pain of being cut and pricked by the briars just in time to snag the middle of the light green nylon material with his left hand. He pulled it to him and got purchase with both hands and then rolled over onto it and the wildly spinning bot. Helena fell face first into the back of his head, busting her lip and cussing with every breath. She shook her head twice and raised up pushup style so she could put her knees in the middle of the tent material and on top of the boomerang. She punched at it several times through the material, never once missing a chance to use an obscenity.
“Goddamn fuckin’ sonovabitch ting!” She kicked at it. “It von’t fuckin stop, Richard!”
“Good! Let’s wrap it up more if we can and tie it off to something inside.” He bear-hugged the boomerang and the wad of tent and duffel bag and rolled with it out of the briars. Helena grabbed at the other side when Richard came to a stop. Richard and Helena fought with the bot and it looked to Sara Jo and Jeff like two idiots wrestling a cougar in burlap sack. A cougar might have been easier.
The two held tight to both sides of the wad of bot and nylon and carefully moved toward the entrance to the mine. The propulsion system of the bot even in its damaged state was strong enough to lift both of them off the ground a few feet at a time, but it was no longer strong enough to get away from them. But it tossed them to and fro quite readily and was beating the two of them together, pushing them to their physical limits. Helena cursed some more.
They made it into the mine about thirty feet and tied the bot to the nearest support beam they came to that Richard thought could hold it. He pulled the tent material around the backside of the twelve-by-twelve beam between it and the rock wall of the mine shaft. He looped it through several times and tied it in a large knot. The wad of nylon and canvas material rose upward toward the ceiling of the shaft and pulled the material tight, looking like an odd shaped helium balloon tied off to the post — a helium balloon with a cougar trapped inside it. But it was holding.
Jeff and his family sat huddled together sobbing and hugging one another and trying to shush the infant. They were covered from head to toe in canned goods and radiator water. Fortunately, Jeff had about run out of gasoline or they’d have been covered in that, too. There was little left of his truck but there was a pile of supplies that were dried or powdered goods in plastic or cardboard containers strewn about. And things like pinto beans, creamed corn, baby food from jars, baby formula powder, and various other food stuffs all mixed up.