Destroyer of Worlds
"Trucks", techno-horror, Oppenheimer, and the race towards death
Good evening.
More like good night in my part of the world. If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club and a newish section of Kindling that has brought me a lot of joy in these past few months. We’re smack dab in the middle (or are we?) of King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. Tonight we talk “Trucks”, but if you’d like to join in next week, you can pick up a copy and read “Sometimes They Come Back.”
I really enjoyed this story. It was distinctly King, and King at his best if you ask me. He’s at home in dystopia, particularly when it’s at the hands of man’s own creation. A virus released by the military in The Stand, the demon possessed laundry press personified in “The Mangler”, the slime monster from two weeks ago in “Gray Matter.” The characters, the action, the press for survival. It’s all a win for me.
The fear we all have, a theme we find not only in King's horror, but in much of the techno-horror of the last fifty years, personified in zombies created through viruses and now AI gone awry. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.
But King does a good job of bringing it home. His blue collar background steers him clear of complicated science fiction narratives (he skips the periodic table and all the things I don’t understand about biology). Instead, he brings us machines, those common and necessary to our modern, everyday life.
He seems to have an affinity for automobiles in particular, the idea that they could gain consciousness and come alive, not unlike the industrial laundry press in our earlier story, “The Mangler.” In Trucks, he skips the ancient possession tie-in (no loss there) and aims for a more action-packed, science fiction story.
The idea isn't new: humans become slaves to their machines. As I type this, I've spent hours of today refreshing social media and email, looking for who knows what notification, lost in a sea of binary come to life on the computer screen. I say all that to say, he isn't far off, not about the reality that we’re tied to our tech.
We all know that's true, don't we? That in the end our advancements may very well be the end of us? We sense it, encapsulate it in story, set it as a warning sign: DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. (Do people play Monopoly anymore? If not, this reference will be lost on you. Let's just say, it means exactly what it sounds like, namely, STOP.)
Do we ever listen?
I saw Oppenheimer earlier this year, and I'd venture that we generally don't. The scientists that spend their lives trying to close Pandora's Box do so at their own peril, risk becoming villains at the end of the story. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The pace at which we advance feels automatic, as if the technology wants to exist. That is the exact sentiment that King captures here.
It begins at a truck stop.
A small group of travelers, a salesman, a truck driver, a kid and his girlfriend, the cook and our narrator are gathered around trying to make contact on a radio. All they get is static. Outside, the low rumble of semi-truck engines, and the scene of a horrific accident.
At the entrance to the truck stop’s turnaround, there was a blasted Cadillac. Its owner stared out of the star-shattered windshield like a gutted fish. Horn rimmed glasses hung from one ear.
Halfway across the lot from it lay the body of a girl in a pink dress. She had jumped from the Caddy when she saw it wasn’t going to make it. She had hit running but never had a chance. She was the worst, even though she was face down. There were flies around her in clouds.
Bam! Just like that, we know she’s been dead long enough for flies to gather. We know that whatever killed her and the Cadillac owner, it had to be violent. Quick. A nervous salesman, Snodgrass, is itching to get out of the stop. The others are trying desperately to talk him down, but it’s of no use. He springs out, tearing loose from our narrator’s grip, and sprinting across the gravel outside.
And that’s when we see. The trucks lunge after him. He turns to look back, trips, and rights himself too late. Snodgrass is a goner, thrown into the drainage ditch by a huge truck that nearly jack-knifes into the ditch itself. The others watch in horror, one girl screaming, the trucker squeezing his glass so hard it breaks. Because there is no driver in the truck. Not in any of them.
Our stranded survivors all escaped runaway Greyhounds, semi-trucks and rigs, somehow driven to kill at the drop of a hat.
“What would do it?” The trucker was worrying. “Electrical storms in the atmosphere? Nuclear testing? What?”
“Maybe they’re mad,” I said.
They fiddle around with the juke box and a cigarette machine, count food supplies to see how long they’ve got before the siege gets the best of them.
“We made them!” the girl cried out with sudden wretchedness. “They can’t!”
The power goes out not long after. Plans for a monthlong stay in the truck stop cooking hamburgers and passing the time listening to Fogerty go out the window. Now the food situation is down to days. The water, a week at most. The pump needs electricity. They fill up buckets and bottles of water, venturing outside to fill up from the toilets, only accessible along the side of the building. They nearly lose their lives doing so. Outside the trucks pace and prowl, some leaving and others coming.
Our narrator falls asleep.
He’s awakened by Snodgrass, the salesman, screaming for help from the ditch where he was thrown. Alive and broken. Alone.
I didn’t have to see him. I could imagine it all too well. Snodgrass lying half in and half out of the drainage ditch, back and legs broken, carefully-pressed suit caked with mud, white, gasping face turned up to the indifferent moon…
Snodgrass cries for a long time, but eventually he stops, and the stranded travelers sleep.
At dawn some hope comes.
The trucker notices that one of the big trucks has run out of gas, but the revelation that survival is merely a waiting game is short-lived. One of the mack trucks starts to honk its horn, the sound so loud it rattles the inside of the truck stop, forces our protagonists to cover their ears. The boy recognizes a pattern, morse code, and writes down what the truck is saying.
ATTENTION.
They realize the trucks want them to help, to come out and pump gas since they can’t do it themselves. An argument ensues. A bulldozer sits ready and facing the stop.
“You want to be their slaves? That’s what it’ll come to. You want to spend the rest of your life changin’ oil filters every time one of those … things blasts its horn? Not me.” He looked out the window. “Let them starve.”
Twenty minutes go by, but destruction comes. The bulldozer roars to life, gunning for the little truck stop, and crashing into the front wall just as the people duck behind the counter.
The Cat reversed and got ready for another charge. New nicks in its blade glittered and heliographed in the sun. It lurched forward with a bellowing roar and this time it took down the main support to the left of what had been the window. That section of the roof fell in with a grinding crash. Plaster dust billowed up.
They make molotov cocktails out of oil drums and ketchup bottles, stuffing scraps of shirt into the top to try and thwart the inevitable destruction, and they succeed, but not without losing the boy and the trucker. Finally, cornered and beaten, the narrator gives in, and makes his way to a gas pump. He starts filling, only stopping to grab the nozzle of a tanker there to fill up more gas when it runs out.
I went over, took it, flipped up the feeder plate on the first tank, and attached the hose. The truck began to pump. The stench of petroleum sank into me—the same stink that the dinosaurs must have died smelling as they went down into the tar pits. I filled the other two tanks and went back to work.
His hands blister, and he starts to feel faint, when the counterman comes to take his place.
We end with the girl asleep, the counterman at five hours of filling, and our narrator staring into a life doomed to serve the machines.
We could run, maybe. It would be easy to make the drainage ditch now, the way they’re stacked up. Run through the fields, through the marshy places where trucks would bog down like mastodons and go—
—back to the caves.
Drawing pictures in charcoal. This is the moon god. This is a tree. This is a Mack semi overwhelming a hunter.
But even that thought is beaten back by the reality of trucks built for rough terrain, the bull dozers and pavers that will raze the forests and turn all the world to pavement. He sees lines of blue collar auto workers, giving their lives to survive, not even for the paycheck.
The counterman is staggering a little now. He’s an old bastard too. I’ve got to wake the girl.
Two planes are leaving silver contrails etched across the darkening eastern horizon.
I wish I could believe there are people in them.
What a stellar ending.
I think I can say that this is my favorite of the collection so far. The loss of autonomy to the machine—becoming a victim to your own creation—all of it hits so close to home. I imagine those same planes he watches flying in the sky, and picture the WWII bombers flying over Europe. I wonder how many people looked up, or listened from bomb shelters, and wondered what it was we had done. What our best minds and hands had made.
It makes the words Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita ring in my mind tonight.
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
And now, to you readers. What did you think? Were you surprised a story named “Trucks” could be so powerful? (I was.)
Are you a fan of techno-horror (horror focused on a fear of technology for those who don’t know)? If you are, do you have any recommendations? I have a feeling this sub-genre might be my next fiction obsession…
I think this is a great example of King doing his ensemble pieces/characters extremely well. He manages to give each character their own weight in such a relatively short space.
I wrote in an earlier post that I've read Night Shift many times over the years. Now I must confess, I've always skipped over "Trucks". I do not like this story. Never made it past the first few paragraphs (I did force myself to read it yesterday). Difficult to articulate exactly why, but I'll give it my best shot. It's not the ludicrous premise. At least half the stories in this collection are just as bizarre if not more so. It doesn't stop me from enjoying them. Come to think of it, I've never read Christine either. Sai King is always swinging for the fences, usually with good result. I guess, I just don't dig the whole murderous machines trope (unless said machines were actively designed for murder, then I can enjoy). Chock it up to a failure of imagination on my part, I suppose. Another great review though Shaina! Always a pleasure to read your take.