18 Wheels of Science Fiction: A Long Haul Into the Fantastic (2018) by Eric Miller ed

Author:Eric Miller ed [ed, Eric Miller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Time Books
Published: 2018-10-30T07:00:00+00:00

“Jesus Christ, is it cold,” Sid said, warming his hands. Sometimes he’d talk to himself to pass the time. The interstate ahead was a gray cut through endless white, the snow falling as gentle as ash from a campfire. Red demon eyes stared back at him from the truck he followed—one truck after the other after the other—and then blinking yellow as the line of semis began to ascend. He turned on his hazards as well. No use passing in this storm.

Seven hundred miles to go, he told himself, looking at the GPS. Middle of nowhere. North America’s crown. The damn forever-melting arctic circle, or somewhere close.

He badly wanted a cigarette; not a vape pen, but real smoke. Illegal smoke. It was unlawful to even possess while transporting flammables.

Smoking, was it illegal in Canada too, like in most of the U.S. states?

He knew smoking would warm him, the thought of holding the cancer stick sending a shiver down his spine, making him feel even colder, if that were possible. The heater in the cabin was cranked to HIGH, the fan full-blast.

Sid brought the pen to his lips, inhaled, and watched the LED at the end glow like fake ember, but nothing drew out of the device. He always smoked what he carried, for some reason, so this round it was frankincense, which tasted and smelled a little better than the lavender. He’d take a puff every time his hands shook, and after a while they’d tremble less. The stuff worked, all of it. But nothing drew out this time….

Clogged, he discovered; the hole at the mouth end was congested with a whitish-yellow substance, like sap. Frankincense is sap, he told himself. He’d read how the stuff was harvested for public consumption, somewhere overseas, and how they’d scrape the trees like bears and let the trees bleed out, how the syrupy liquid reacted to air and solidified. The frankincense was simply doing what it was designed by nature to do when exposed outside the bark; oxygen must have caused the stuff to re-solidify, like the trees scabbing over to protect themselves from further bleeding.

Sid put the truck in AUTO-DRIVE and released the wheel. His rig was designed, even in snow, to understand the lines of the road, to travel onward with minimal human interaction, around curves, to accelerate, to decelerate, to brake completely to a stop and then start again, to adapt to other vehicles on the road. Trucks could virtually link together, like train cars, maintaining safe distances. Man would eventually no longer be needed for transportation, but until then, he milked the opportunity. His job. His life. The open road, and other drivers—his home, his family.

His truck determined Sid had been following a little too closely to the rig ahead of him, and decelerated to the “proper” distance, and then accelerated until maintaining the same speed.

Sid used the break from the hypnotic road to turn in his seat, to give the vape pen his undivided attention; he scraped what he could from the mouth end and tried again.

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