Ice Road Trucker
OCTOBER 18, 2015
4:43 PM
Max's ears twitched as he sat at the firehall's kitchen table. He was still trying to get used to the quirks of this body, and the fact that he could 'focus' his hearing was just one of the things that caught him off guard.
What he was hearing was the faltering of the generator's droning noise. No longer was it a steady hum in the background; now it was a kind of a warbling, coughing noise. Before he could fully get to his hooves, the lights in the kitchen dimmed, then went out. The hiss of the HVAC fans dwindled away, and the last sputter of the generator motor almost seemed to echo everywhere.
"All right, then," Max said to himself. He grabbed the flashlight from the table, cradling it in one hoof, as he hopped on the other three towards the apparatus bay. Taking his time in the pre-sunset light, he walked to the semi-truck, detaching the now-useless electrical and air supply lines. Getting in, he set the light down, then turned on the battery switch, spirits buoyed as he was rewarded with a full dash of warning lights.
Once they settled down, he reached down and cranked the ignition switch.
With a cough and a rumble, the 500 horsepower engine (or is it 501 horsepower now?) came to life. He'd already started the truck once over the weekend, to make sure it worked, so there was no need to be nervous, but his heart was still in his throat.
He hopped down to manually open the bay door of the station, pulling on the chain over and over rather than relying on the electric opener. It'd been a tradeoff - he could've run the door up while the generator was still working, but that meant the apparatus bay would have been freezing. The hoof-over-hoof motion wasn't nearly as tiresome as Max thought it would be, so at least he had that going for him.
It took a couple of minutes to roll the sixteen-foot door up all the way. Once it was done, he hurried back to the truck (starting to feel cold now, not wearing any clothing) and climbed aboard, using the tools he'd fashioned to manipulate it into pulling out of the bay.
When the truck was outside the station, he looked in the rearview mirror. Habit made him want to go out and roll the door back down, buttoning up the station as he always did when leaving it. But there was nothing in there left to safeguard. And leaving the door open, along with his tire tracks, would give anyone who did happen to show up, if there was anyone left, an idea where he'd gone - or at the very least, an indication that someone had been here and gone. He owed anyone else who showed up, who made him not the last living thing to leave Prudhoe, at least that much.
He reached over and grabbed the mic for the radio. "Anyone on this channel, this is your last chance. Answer me back. Fire off a flare. Anything. If you can hear me, I'm getting ready to bug out. If you're here and want a ride south, talk to me."
Max sat there on the front drive of the firehall for five more minutes, and then, with no response, hung up the mic, selected Drive on the transmission, and let the big truck start rolling out towards the access to the Haul Road.
Okay, this isn't going too badly, Max mused as he got the rig up to about 40 miles an hour. The snow on the road wasn't cause for concern - the ridges on the road's shoulders helped delineate the gravel highway, and it was flat and relatively straight, with only a few sweeping turns every so often.
Eight-ish hours to Coldfoot, depending on whether or not there's any drifts or crashes. His mind got distracted by the concept of crashes. Would there be any? Had people fled somewhere, or simply vanished? If they'd vanished, what would happen to the vehicles they had been piloting? No, he'd not seen any indication of planes digging holes near the airport, or any suddenly-empty vehicles around town smashing into anything else. It was as if everyone had just disappeared, and either took their vehicles with them, or the vehicles were somehow disappeared as well - either together or separately.
Max lifted up his hooves in front of his face and adopted a peculiar expression. "I'm not saying it was aliens," he joked aloud to himself, "but..."
Passing the Caribou Construction compound, his mind lingered on the animal name in that company title. Would he see any wildlife? Naturally, the north was teeming with creatures - normally. If he saw any, what would happen? Would they run like normal (or, passively watch the truck go by, like 'normal' for some of the tamer beasts)? Or would he be able to stop and question them? After all, if he was a horse, maybe he'd come across a moose that was once a rigger or a trucker.
He shoved those thoughts from his head before he felt too insane, and forced himself back to the concept of scheduling and timelines. Eight hours estimated to the Coldfoot halfway point/rest stop some 240 miles distant. Five PM start time. One AM arrival time. Lovely. At least he could bed down in the warm truck overnight and check the rest stop for people in the morning - unless they heard his truck pull in and came running that night.
By instinct, he reached up for the mic on the company radio - the two-way that was used to communicate with the industry users of the road and the properties around the region. "North Slope Fire Support 30 southbound on the Haul Road, out of Deadhorse," he said without thinking. It was a habit drilled into him and every other driver on the department - users of the road called out their vehicle info and direction, and when available, mileage. It allowed others within radio range to plan for encountering an oncoming rig, and avoid the possibility of a head-on collision.
After the words left his mouth and his hoof released the push-to-talk button, Max realized what he'd done, and reached over to crank the volume up on the radio, listening intently for a reply. Normally there wouldn't be a response to a simple traffic call, unless a friend or colleague heard you and wanted to chat. Today, any other soul was a friend, and Max would gladly talk their ear off.
The radio persisted in silence.
Sighing after a few moments, he replaced the mic on its hang-up clip and directed his attention back to driving.
Dangit, I should have left something to snack on up here, Max chided himself a dozen or so miles down the road. Normally, he drove with a small buffet at hand, passing the time by keeping warm with coffee or hot chocolate, and keeping his blood sugar up with various snacks or things to munch on.
There was no more hot coffee, at least, not until he opened up the kitchen, and all the food stores were packed away in the trailer as well.
He wasn't hungry, he realized, despite not having eaten since lunch. He decided to just do the run, and eat when he got to Coldfoot. It wasn't ideal to eat before getting down to sleep, but it'd have to do.
He'd edged the truck up to 55 on the flat surface. The tires on the truck were relatively new and the snow skiff was blowing off pretty easily, so traction wasn't a worry, and traffic was nonexistent - which was both good and bad, of course.
Like was made famous on various TV "docu-reality" shows, driving on the tundra highways was a pretty low-intensity occupation most of the time. Nudging the steering wheel once or twice every couple of miles was Max's main task - even the speed was being maintained by cruise control for the time being. He knew of drivers who would turn away from the dash and actually work on paperwork or their laptop, or fix a meal in the microwave tucked into the front of the sleeper, but he wasn't one of them. Especially today, when spotting something oncoming might mean he discovered the only other person in the world.
Stop thinking like that, Max told himself. Maybe this is localized. He decided to either prove or knock down that argument by turning on the satellite radio receiver. He managed to get it lit up, and found a way to tap the numbers with the edge of his hoof, keying in 115.
The receiver was silent. It didn't show "searching for signal" - instead, it did indeed say "CNN - OutFront", but no sound was coming out - from front, back, or anywhere.
Pushing a few other presets, nothing was coming through any channel. NASCAR, Comedy Channel, Mariners Baseball - they were all silent.
"That's not optimal," he understated.
He left it on CNN, on the off-chance that whatever apocalypse had ensued was limiting their broadcasts to certain times of the day. Perhaps they would come on once an hour, or a couple of times per day, and give updates to the survivors.
Six o'clock rolled around with no more noise than the diesel chugging away and the tires crunching on the gravel. The only other thing that happened was the sun set, far to Max's right and well south.
He reached down and flicked on the driving lights, silently frowning as he drove on.
"North Slope Fire Support 30, southbound on the Haul Road, three hours outta Deadhorse."
Like the hour before, Max's call was met with silence.
He tossed the radio mic in frustration, letting it dangle from its cord and pendulum back and forth through the cab.
The only good thing that was going on so far was the truck was running well and the road was clear. That last part was both good and bad, as he'd told himself previously. He wondered where the rest of the world had gone. At any time of the day or night, at least a half a dozen trucks should have been going in either direction on the Dawson Highway, and he should have met at least one, even if it was no longer occupied. He was certain the darkness wasn't hiding them, either - he'd have easily seen the tracks leading to an unpiloted rig off the road on the tundra.
As much as he joked about it before, he was wondering if it wasn't so far-fetched that entire semi-trucks could have been abducted lock, stock, and barrel by some kind of external power. Shaking his head, he dismissed the random thought, telling himself he had to focus on the road. He was almost to the halfway point of the Coldfoot rest stop, his halfway point of the trip down to Fairbanks. He was hoping somebody had ended up surviving in Coldfoot like he had in Prudhoe. Even if there was just one person there, that would double the known population of the world.
He wondered if he'd find a person or a horse.
At quarter after ten at night, having driven for over five hours, Max found himself well within the mountainous territory of the Gates of the Arctic National Park. The road was intermittently paved - some sections of hardtop and some of gravel. It occurred to Max that the often-talked-about paving of the whole Haul Road would now never happen. Still, the bits that were tarmac were allowing him to pick up the pace, since there was no other traffic, and no patrols to mandate the 50 MPH speed. On the paved sections, he was daring to get as high as 65, and would push harder if it wasn't for the chance of encountering wildlife standing in the middle of the road. Or even worse, another vehicle.
That'd be the happiest wreck I'd ever have, he told himself, even though it would probably cause enough damage to the truck to put it off the road, at least temporarily. He shuddered at the thought of ruining the only vehicle he knew was operating on the entire road, with no one to come rescue him.
Glancing at his fuel gauge, he saw that he still had over three-quarters in the primary tank, and of course the auxiliary was still full. Everything appeared to be in good shape. The air reservoirs were holding, temps were in the green, and he was making good time.
He leaned back and stretched, feeling joints in strange places responding to his motions, reminding him of why he was undertaking the journey in the first place. Reaching up and flipping down the visor, he looked at the creature in the mirror, casting his slate-colored eyes over it.
I didn't even keep my own eye color, he realized. I was transplanted into some alien mini-horse fully and completely. Nobody would recognize me even if I could find someone I knew.
That line of thinking drew him to his family. Mom and Dad in Clearwater, and sister June with her family in Galveston... were they alive?
Max's eyes darted to the truck's satellite phone, sitting idle in its cradle on the dash.
If they didn't vanish, they'll definitely excuse a call this late. It was already past one in the morning in Florida. He took up a pen to poke the number pad, dialing from memory. One, seven two seven...
Obediently the phone system placed the call, buoying his spirits, but the unanswered ringing tone from the other end dashed them just as quickly.
He let it ring until it stopped, then stabbed the pen into the 'end' button and let it fall to the floor, rolling to the passenger side.
He didn't even bother trying to dial Texas.
Eight minutes after midnight, Max grabbed for the haul radio once again. Keeping to his routine was going to ensure he stayed awake.
"North Slope Support 30, southbound on the Haul Road, 7... seven hours out of Deadhorse."
Silence reigned as it had every other time he'd tried that.
Sighing, he realized he wasn't tired, but was definitely bored. He'd been up all day and all night, and wasn't sure how or why he was still able to function, especially with missing his evening meal. The truck was doing just as fine as he was.
Maybe I'm a cyborg, he wondered. Some deranged fool planted the mind of a human into a 3/8 scale horse body and set it free on the desolate tundra.
Shaking his head for the millionth time to demand that he keep his focus, he almost missed an important landmark whiz by on his right.
The... the campground? he wondered. If that really was the campground, then that means...
Sure enough, around the curve a couple miles down the road, he could see reflections in his headlights, reflections of the signs posted at roadside to indicate the Coldfoot turnoff and the DOT station.
He didn't have the energy to hoot and holler. Instead, he just slowed down, signaled (by habit, smiling a little at the realization), and turned left into the Coldfoot access road.
The darkness was total here, save for his own truck's lights. All the generators must have run dry here as well.
But hopefully someone was here, surviving like he did in Prudhoe, and had just shut everything off to save power. Right?
The way he chose to find out was to reach up - having to stand up fully on the seat - and grab the cord for the air horn, pulling down and holding it in place. Fifteen seconds later, he finally released it, and listened to the blatting sound echo off the trees and hills surrounding the camp.
No lights turned on in the camp, or the store, or any of the four trucks parked (turned off, or run out of fuel) in the lot.
He reached up to try again, but had a better idea, and moved his hoof to another control. Flipping it, he saw spangles of red and white bounce and collide against one another all around him, as the truck's emergency lighting strobed to life.
Reaching down to the center console, he got a knob under his hoof and managed to twist it, turning on the siren as well. Now the fire truck was wailing and flashing like it was charging down the road to an emergency. Surely anybody around would be unable to sleep through that.
Two minutes later, after cycling through all the siren sound patterns he had to choose from, he shut the lights and siren off and gave a frustrated sigh once more.
Max waited another fifteen minutes sitting in the dark in the deserted compound before he retired to the sleeper cab, leaving the truck running for warmth.
OCTOBER 19
11:38AM
Max woke with a start. Coming to in an unfamiliar location always threw him off. Doing so in an unfamiliar form was just as jarring, though he was starting to get used to it. And that, in itself, gave him reason for pause.
The truck was still running, the cab nice and toasty warm. The dash said the temperature outside was a balmy twenty-four degrees, which made him grimace a little. He had to go out and see if anybody was around, and in this weather, he'd have to get dressed to do it.
Wriggling around on his back on the bunk, he cursed and swore as he tried to get into the fire bunker gear again. How is it possible that some things can be done just fine with hooves and others are damn near impossible??
Eventually, he got suited up, and climbed down from the cab. There was no great accumulation of snow here, just cold frosty ground, so it was a little easier to move around.
First he checked the three semis and one straight truck (box van) parked in the lot. All were empty, at least of people or horses - two of the semis had oilfield equipment on flatbeds, and one was empty. The straight truck contained drums of motor and gear oil, power steering and brake fluid, and other items for servicing trucks and heavy equipment. He'd have to come back and pick through that later, taking what he needed.
Next he tried the Coldfoot Truckers' Cafe. It was unlocked, but as he'd expected, the power was off and so everything inside was frozen. Some of the formerly liquid items had burst their containers, leaving a chunky, slushy mess.
"Hello?!" he called from the door. "Fire department!" This last bit was a habit from his work, and it just slipped out.
There was stubbornly no response.
Still, he wandered through the building, trying to stay out of the puddles and icy gunk - he had no idea how or if he could clean sticky stuff out of hooves. The cafe, gift shop, store, even the bathrooms - everything was empty.
Going back outside, he peeked at the post office, but it was locked and looked like it hadn't been touched in months. Across the lot he headed, going for the Slate Creek Inn.
Calling it a hotel was probably a bit much, but it was what counted as lodging in this part of the world. It was an old construction trailer (or two) partitioned off into several rooms.
The door opened outward, and it took several tries to get the knob to turn in the cold weather. When he finally wrenched the door open, he found it just as cold inside. "Hello?!" he hollered once again. "Anyone in here?"
Again nothing answered him but silence.
He went up and down the hallways, checking doors for heat, but for the mere presence of it - not like he would normally have done as a firefighter, testing for a fire behind the door and avoiding opening any that showed those signs. Today, if a room felt even a tiny bit warm, he'd have bashed down the door with nary a second thought.
It was pointless; if anybody had been in the inn, they were gone now - either vanished, or moved on as he did from Prudhoe.
I should've left a note, he realized, far too late. The rolled-up door on the station was a sign that he had been there, but an actual sign with indication of who he was and where he'd gone would have been that much better. Glancing at his hooves, he thought, I wonder if I can even write still, with these stupid things.
Outside the inn, another parking lot sat with several smaller vehicles he'd missed the night before as he'd come in. Four pickup trucks, a small handful of all-wheel-drive station wagons and SUVs, a road grader, and of all things, an RV. All were unoccupied.
I guess that's it, then, Max decided, dejectedly walking back towards his truck. He climbed aboard, repositioning it to the fuel pumps, and tried to figure out how he was going to make this work.
He'd decided that he was going to take fuel at every place he stopped, since he had no idea where or when he'd be able to top off or how long he'd have to go 'til the next stop. However, the power being out to the compound made it tricky to get anything out of the pumps at all.
Dismounting once more, he rolled up the trailer compartment where the big generator lived, and tugged on the end of the large extension cable stored there on a reel. It free-spooled easily, part of it piling in a jumble at his hooves.
I guess there's no other way to do this.
He grabbed the cable just beyond the outlet box in his jaw, and started walking towards the tank farm. He was measuring paces in his head until he realized his stride probably didn't match up with what it used to be, so he abandoned that and decided to just stop either when he got to what he needed to plug in, or when the cable ran out. Hopefully the latter wouldn't happen, as he had no desire to be yanked like a dog at the end of his chain - especially since it would be his teeth that suffered from the impact.
Luckily, the distance was less than 200 feet, and he set the junction box down with cable to spare. Now the only thing preventing him from powering the fuel pumps was a locked gate around the tank farm.
He went back to the truck and found a crowbar, taking it back to the gate and slipping it in between the arms of the shackle, and resting his forehooves on the other end of the bar. This was a fairly simple trick of physics, to break the shackle, but it usually required quite a bit of force, so he reared back and stomped on the end of the crowbar for all he was worth.
PING!
"Jesus!" he yelled, ducking for cover as the padlock shank, the hasp bolt it was put through, and the eyelets on the gate frame all shattered at once, flying in random directions. He wasn't hurt, but could have been.
Must've been weakened by the cold, he thought to himself. Locks didn't usually grenade into a zillion pieces like that. He shrugged, picked up the junction box, and dragged it to the pump controller.
Half an hour later, through trial and error, he had the pump controller alive and talking to the pumps. They weren't on speaking terms with the cash register in the cafe, but that wasn't particularly pertinent. He didn't have his credit card with him, anyway.
Squeezing the trigger on the pump nozzle was the hardest part of the rest of the activity - until he figured to use the crowbar as a lever again. This time, he was much more careful and gentle, and the pump obediently delivered a couple hundred gallons of diesel.
He topped off the tank for the generator as well, and then unplugged everything and buttoned the truck back up. Climbing into the cab, he got rid of the turnout gear and hung it in the sleeper to dry, musing about how he felt more comfortable not wearing any clothes in this form. Looking at the dash, he realized it was four-thirty in the afternoon.
Wow, that took all day, he realized. He wasn't up for another evening-to-midnight drive, so he decided to stay parked at Coldfoot for another night. He moved the truck away from the pumps (mainly out of habit) and shut it down as he had the night before, except for what was necessary to keep him comfortable in the cab. He also took the opportunity to shuffle around some of the supplies, bringing emergency clothing and some foodstuffs up into the cab, and then remembered the oils and lubricants he planned to steal - no, liberate - from the other truck. Once all was said and done, it was after 6 PM, and it was dark.
I should check for one of those elastic headlamps in the store before I take off in the morning, he thought as he worked with solely the headlights of his truck providing illumination. He added it to his mental checklist and bedded down for the night.
OCTOBER 20
6:06 AM
This time, Max woke slowly and early. The latter was probably due to the fact he'd gone to bed shortly after sunset, almost twelve hours previous. He idly wondered what kind of sleep cycle miniature horses needed. He'd heard once that giraffes only slept a couple of hours out of every 24, and wondered for the first time if that applied to other animals as well.
He'd wait for the sun to rise before he took off for Fairbanks. Even with a seven-hour drive - and this one was likely to take the full seven, with twisty, windy turns through the mountains - that would put him in the city decently before sunset, and allow him to cast around for survivors.
He whiled away the nearly three hours to come by having a breakfast of saltine crackers and a couple of juice boxes taken from the 'rehab' kit - a food basket designed to provide sustenance to firefighters when they were taking a break after working hard at a fire or emergency scene.
He almost reached for his phone to instinctively check the day's weather, and remembered abruptly that there was no more Weather Underground. Well, maybe the automated stations would be still reporting, if the Internet was still a thing. But power out meant computers were down, and cellphone tower sites were down, and that was the end of that.
No more Facebook, he said to himself with a chuckle. I won't shed a tear for the Farmville and Candy Crush requests I'm never going to see again.
Youtube videos will never increment by one more viewer, ever again, he thought, frowning as the realization hit him.
Google has been searched for the last time.
The Twitter failwhale is up, permanently.
Reddit is down.
He had a facetious mind's-eye view of himself going into a mental blue-screen-of-death from that last one. Then, he shrugged it off, and sighed.
Just after nine o'clock in the morning, he returned to the truck with several bags of items he'd appropriated from the store in the cafe. No sense in leaving any of this behind if nobody is here to use it. In it was snack food, a few unbroken drinks, packages of batteries, flashlights and headlamps, and various other pieces of kit that might prove useful.
Getting back in the truck, he closed it up, took a few moments to get warm again, and then reached for the radio mic.
"If anyone can hear this, this is North Slope Fire Rescue, Support 30, parked in Coldfoot. I'm leaving here for Fairbanks in 15 minutes. If you are out there and want a ride, call me." He paused. "If you're out there and don't want a ride, call me." 'Cause I have a hell of a piece of news to hit you with, since you must've been out in the bush for 5 months. "Just ... call back. Support 30 over."
As he expected, there was no reply.
Max put the truck in gear, spun the steering wheel all the way around (getting better at handling it with hooves, every second) to do a U-turn in the yard, and drove out towards the Dawson Highway, and turned south.
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I keep waiting for some of the more dangerous wildlife to make an appearance during one of his pit stops.
What constitutes dangerous? Bear (close to if not already in hibernation though)? Skunk? Hungry elk? Confused and upset former human?
6329758 A hungry fox or raccoon?
DON'T PANIC
This reads wonderfully and I already like Max. Great atmosphere, great roadmovie feeling, great description of the rapid and somewhat unsettling acclimatization to the pony body.
And he almost got himself boltshot due to his own earth pony strength. Good going Max.
On edit: found the perfect soundtrack for this. The Mass Effect 2 galaxy map theme on endless repeat. Has just the right kind of otherworldly feeling for an endless road through a silent tundra.
cdn.meme.am/instances/250x250/56058982.jpg
I'd have a bird about not being able to search google or download off of youtube anymore, but then again, I DO have music and info on the my computer. Twitter is something I never had, nor is Reddit.
I short: easy come, easy go.
6329758
... meh. I'd say none of them. Just back away slowly from the bear, same with the skunk, just stay away from the elk, and stay calm and reasonable when talking with the human.
I'll admit, my first thought when I read that was "That's really warm for there to still be snow on the ground." Then I realized it was in freedomburger units. Still, that's only around -8C, which is quite a nice winter temperature.