Yggdrasil Highway Saga
Chapter 53: Petroglyph
Meanwhile
a thousand or so miles from where Sensie landed.
In the dark of the night in the forsaken wastes of the southwestern united states there lies a Petro-form. There are thousands of such "rock art" formations scattered throughout the continent and more thousands throughout the world. They'd always been there since before living memory of the local peoples.
This one began to glow.....
.......starting as a faint luminosity barely discernible by the naked eye it got brighter and brighter. Had one the resources it might have been instructive to note that vastly greater energies were hinted at in the sub and supra visible spectrum than were visible to the naked eye. The Light was faint at first but then rapidly increased in brightness. Colored light began to trace the shape of a portal. A portal the size of a truck shop door...if not somewhat larger..... began to appear. First nebulously then increasingly bright and brighter and brighter yet....to crescendo, in absolute silence with a strobe of blinding brilliance. It was as intense as the flash from a nuclear device, with no heat, shock nor sound. Almost faster than the eye could follow, a shape emerged from the ray traced portal and sped away across the plains...... accompanied by the sound of a great wind.
The portal vanished like a popped soap bubble....and the Petroform’s glow diminished and went away. Shortly it was as if nothing had happened.
Miles from the speeding shape a convoy carrying military equipment was rumbling down that same highway. It was a hi value convoy and had armed escorts both on land and in the air, it even had satellite surveillance. The instruments of the command truck noted the anomaly.
"We got a massive Electro-Magnetic Pulse behind us Cap'n" said the signals Sargent.
yadda yadda...various Techno-chatter , baffle-gab, mil-speak , as would be expected. then a flight of BlackHawk Helicopters is dispatched to investigate, lethal force is authorized at the flight commander’s discretion
A trio of BullRacks were rolling westbound across US Highway 50 in western Utah. Unknown to them they are between the "anomaly and the convoy. . They were, as usual for cow-haulers, overloaded and speeding. The longer cows were on-board the more weight they lost. The more weight they lost the less the cow-haulers got paid. It was in the best interests of the cow-haulers bank account to absolutely minimize the time interval between loading and unloading. Triple digit speeds helped them achieve that goal. With the war of secession in full swing no one worried about speed limits. The important thing was to get the job done. The beef they were carrying was destined to feed the resistance forces of the Second Republic of Texas.
The rally point was sparks Nevada. This trio was attempting to avoid the interstate and the hellfire missiles of the Government.
This stretch of Highway 50 was conducive to high speeds. As far as one could see in front, and equally far behind, horizon to horizon was flat as a billiard table. The highway was straight as a ruler. Normally there wasn't any traffic. Not this morning.
Moving along at speeds in excess of one hundred and ten miles per hour, spaced about a quarter of a mile apart...the trio was being overtaken
Quickly.
The driver of the rear bull rack first noticed the pursuit in his rear view mirror. He immediately informed his buddies using the CB radio.
"Hey ya'll" he said "...something coming up from behind ...REAL fast...it's gonna pass
" I wonder if it's the dawg" said one of the other drivers..." I heard he might be out....mash your motor...we got zero chance of keeping up with the dawg but he's a hoot. Make him work for it."
So they did....each Peterbilt was powered by tricked out Caterpillar engines which displaced about a thousand cubic inches, and put out over six hundred horse power. Eighteen speed "double over-drive" transmissions and 3.23 "rears" provided a theoretical speed of over one fifty miles per hour. They had no idea how much more...their speedometers "bottomed out" at 120....and they were going faster than that.
The over taking apparition was brightly lit. Other truckers might have thought it was an aircraft the way it skimmed along close to the surface of the highway. These guys knew better. The dawg was out tonight and prowling. It rapidly overhauled them. It was no "chicken truck". It was aerodynamically shaped and had no wheels. It levitated a foot off the ground and there was no engine noise.
Just the wind and an ominous hum.
An observer properly located, say, on one of the Blackhawks vectoring in from the convoy, would have observed the three bull racks, hammer down, engines bellowing , smoke billowing from their twin stacks, screaming across the asphalt going as fast as they could go. Behind them and rapidly overtaking them was another, very odd looking machine which was DECELERATING so as not to pass the trio at too great of a speed. It apparently didn’t want to blow them off the road. Upon catching up to the semi's the apparition strolled past them slowly....if one might consider a hundred and fifty miles to a hundred and eighty miles an hour to be "strolling".
Looking out his window each trucker saw , as they were each passed, a vehicle unlike anything they had ever before seen...and they were veteran drivers of many years. They'd heard of him though. It was the dawg. Road rumor and driver legend had it that the dawg truck prowled the desert.
Visible thru the passenger side window of the high speed monster....swear to gawd...there appeared to be a humanoid with the head of a bulldog.....an Old English Bulldog.. It was serenely looking out it's window at the slower trucks as they were passed. ...it was wearing an eye patch, a derby hat ...and smoking a cigar.
As each trucker was passed the driver hollered, hooted and yelled...and blew his air horn. The dawg waved, with one finger as it sped by. It was hilarious. The truckers were laughing so hard they could barely stay on the highway.
When the monster wagon passed the trio of straining bull racks....and was a safe distance ahead.... it accelerated.
RAPIDLY.
Within minutes is was out of sight ...over the horizon....with a flight of Blackhawks screaming after it
"That was cute" said the driver of the alien machine...who...in a bad light...might pass as human until his bulldog head and face became visible.
"Ain't it just?" growled the other bulldog smoking his cigar. "gotta do something on this run to keep from going crazy."
" Too late. " said the driver. ".... past that point"
" Up your nose with rubber hose, puppy." the cigar smoker told him.“uh oh"
"In times like this Uh-oh is not helpful" said the bulldog driving the machine.
"local aircraft....they see us and are approaching" said the passenger..
"Uh Oh works in this case " said the driver... scanning his instruments.
"There went the neighborhood" said the passenger.
"Yeah...gitting crowded for sure..." said the driver.
“How you on their electronics? " asked the driver...can you control them?'
"you kidding me? ...piece of cake" the passenger said.
The driver got a positively evil grin on his face..." just what I wanted to hear...let's have some fun"
The first lead black hawks buzzed them. The bull dawg leans out the window and shoots at the helicopter with a six gun, and hits it. A big old suction cup arrow sticks to the windshield of the lead helicopter. A sign unfurls, oddly enough unaffected by the slipstream with the word printed on it.
BANG!
That seriously annoys the zoomies. The helicopter shoots missiles at the monster truck...oddly enough the missiles loose lock and run out of control....more oddly their com trails are sky writing great obscenities in the air...before detonating...... dawg shoots another helicopter with another suction cup projectile...this one with a sign on it. that is much more obscene than the last.
These types of incidents continue. The Blackhawk squadron...laboring a little bit to keep up with the speeding monster truck...try their best to destroy it.
The monster truck shows zero sign of being in any danger and is contemptuous and mocking of their efforts. It's playing with them.
...but makes to attempt to harm them....
.......suddenly they are approaching the convoy like a base ball approaching a bedroom window...
The old trucker hated being up this early. He normally didn't get up until AFTER sunrise. But he was in a convoy. He normally ran alone but the company he worked for made him an offer that he could NOT refuse...but he half-wished he had....Damn Co-driver. The convoy was in a big hurry to get to the customer. The convoy was running hard and running 24/7. They'd just hit the road again from a brief fuel stop. They had their own tankers. The customer wanted his cargo in the worst possible way. There was, after all, a war on.
The old trucker had kicked that damn ya-hoo of a co driver OUT at the fuel stop. Had about enough of him...he would drive the rest of the way alone. It wasn’t like he had to worry about DOT logs or hours of service regulations any longer...not with a war on.
Checking his rear view mirror from time to time as he normally did the old trucker noticed a speck far, far behind him. Just about at the horizon. The rest of the convoy seemed oblivious.
The speck grew at fantastic speeds, growing enormous and passing......almost grazing the Old Man’s Rig.
..........and a tunnel opened in front of him, of them........
.......and the monster Leviathan roared into the tunnel at hundreds of miles per hour...and the heavy haul KenWorth was pretty much sucked in along with it....the old man at the steering wheel of the Kenworth was fighting for all he was worth to keep the Kenworth from overturning...
.........the tunnel shut soundlessly.
The BlackHawk squadron buzzed the convoy...everything looked normal. No damage.
Except that one truck was missing.
Great post, I like your post, I will follow every post you
thank you.
I knew you wrote some stuff, but this is the first chapter I've read. I'm drawn in now and making some attempts with some free time to start from the beginning. Thanks for your work. Can't wait to see what happened to that one missing truck.
stay tuned.
I HAVE written 'some stuff'...over the last year.
I intend to start reposting some of my earlier works.
Like your post
Nice work dude!