Trucks

The story's nameless narrator and a handful of strangers find themselves trapped together in a freeway truck stop diner after semi-trailers and other large trucks are suddenly brought to independent life by an unknown force and proceed to gruesomely kill every human in sight. As the story begins, a salesman named Snodgrass cracks under the strain, attempts to flee across the stop's parking lot and is knocked into a drainage ditch, taking hours to die. The situation worsens when the diner's power goes out, and the narrator's attempt to collect any available drinking water ends in near-disaster, but then a note of hope appears when the trucks begin to run out of gas. An enormous semi-truck noses up to the diner and demands, via morse code blasts from its horn, that the humans start pumping fuel. The narrator is out-voted when he suggests they comply with this, and a bulldozer arrives and proceeds to attack the diner. The narrator and a teenager named Jerry destroy the dozer with improvised Molotov cocktails, but the diner is half-destroyed and Jerry is killed. The remaining three humans surrender and, taking turns, start pumping the gas into the mile-long string of waiting trucks. As he toils, the narrator thinks that perhaps this will last only until the trucks rust and fall apart, but he then has a grim vision of forced assembly lines churning out new generations of trucks, and the entire world flattened out and remade in its new masters' image. The story ends as a pair of planes fly overhead, and the author laments that they probably are unmanned.

To be completed...