Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

There didn’t seem to be any openings for a mouth or a tail. Trent wondered if the leg holes doubled as mouths, or if the shells opened up somehow when they were grazing. Assuming they grazed. The rock camouflage and the slow crawl could be for sneaking up on other animals—and then what?

He looked at the arrow in his hand, and then at the mobile rock. Not camouflage; protection. These guys had sacrificed mobility for armor against aerial attack.

He glanced skyward again. No more birds yet, but if these guys had evolved armor to protect themselves, then the birds had to be fairly common.

“Oh no,” Donna said suddenly, putting a hand to her mouth.

“What?”

“You trapped two of them under the tires!”

He had. He went around to the front of the pickup, half expecting to see that they were making a break for it like their buddies, but the tires had scrunched them into the dirt hard enough to keep them put.

“You’ve got to let them go,” Donna said.

“Yeah, I guess I should.” He could find real rocks to block the truck with. But when he tried to nudge the live ones out from under the tires, they were wedged too tight to move.

“I’ll have to back it off of ’em,” he said, going around to the driver’s side. He opened the door, but the other tire was still in the seat, so he pulled that out and laid it on the ground, then climbed up into the cab, put the pickup in reverse, released the brake, and fed power to the motors. The gauge read empty, but there was still a little juice. The left rear wheel spun freely until he switched in the anti-slip traction control, and that fed all the power to the front wheels instead. The pickup didn’t even budge, so he fed it a little more power, and suddenly the front wheels spun, spitting both rocks out to tumble down the slope like loose bowling balls.

He let off the power and put on the emergency brake again, then climbed back down to the ground. “Damn,” he said to Donna. “I don’t know if I did ’em any favor.”

“They would have died if you’d kept them trapped under the tires.” She looked over at the other rocks, still flopping softly away from them. “They must overbalance once in a while on their own. I’ll bet they’re designed to take a roll down a hill without hurting themselves.”

“Hope so.” Trent looked at the tire on the ground, then at the empty hub it had come off of. “I’d kind of like to go after the other tire before something tries to poke holes in it or eat it or something, but I’m not too thrilled about the idea of hauling it back up here. What do you say I mount this one and we just coast downhill until we find the other one?”

“Can we drive with just three tires?”

“Downhill, we can. All the weight will be on the front.”

“Okay, I guess. There’s no particular reason to stay here.”

Trent looked up into the sky. There was another bird, still a long ways off, but gliding toward them. “You can say that again,” he said.

With the rear tire in place, the pickup leaned forward at an alarming angle. Trent buckled himself in and made sure Donna was belted tight, too. At this slant it would be easy to slip forward and whack their heads on the dashboard, and if Trent lost control and the pickup rolled, he wanted to make damned sure they both staved inside.

“Ready?” he asked.

She grinned at him. “Go for it, cowboy.”

He shook his head. Why she trusted him so much, he would never know. He sure didn’t trust himself to get them down in one piece, not off a slope this dizzying, with one tire missing and precious little power to get them out of a jam. He had to raise up in his seat to see the ground in front of them. They’d driven down hills this steep before, but only for a couple hundred feet before they leveled off. This one looked like it went on forever.

It wasn’t going to get any easier by waiting. He released the emergency brake and eased off the foot brake, and the pickup rolled forward. There was a moment of free acceleration, then the motors’ regenerative braking system kicked in and the pickup slowed as if it had hit a patch of glue. The cab rocked forward and slewed to the left. The tires on that side were both about half flat, which made the ride even mushier than usual, but it actually helped their traction, for which Trent was grateful. The motors and the foot brake could keep the tires from turning, but only traction could keep them from skidding. He eased his foot off the brake until the pickup was creeping downhill at just a couple of miles an hour, and concentrated on not running over any of the armored rock-creatures.

“We need a name for those rock guys,” he said, swerving a little to the left to miss one. The pickup tipped backward and to the right, the bare hub briefly kissing the ground before he pressed harder on the brake, bringing the front down again. They bounced on the low tire and skidded a few feet before the anti-lock brakes took over and brought the pickup to a shuddering stop.

“Yow!” Donna said, gripping the Jesus bar, then she giggled and said, “Thrill a minute. How about creepers?”

“Hmm. Maybe. That sounds more like a bug to me, though.” Trent let off the brake and steered gently to the light to avoid a tree about thirty feet downslope.

“Or floppers,” Donna said. “That’s more how they move.”

“That doesn’t sound slow enough. How about bunkers, because they’re armored. Or tanks because they’re both armored and mobile.”

She made a face. “Too military. How about snailstones?”

“Too… I don’t know.” He had almost said “Too plain,” but that wasn’t it. Besides, snails definitely called up the right image.

“What do the French call those snails they eat?” he asked.

“Escargot,” she said.

“Right. So these could be escar-don’t-go. Or don’t-go-very-fast.”

“Oh, sure. I can just imagine you about to trip over one, and me shouting ‘Hey, watch out for that escar-don’t-go-very—never mind.’ ”

As they approached the tree, Trent saw that there were dozens of arrows in the ground all around it. He glanced up to see if there was a bird up there, but didn’t see any. He didn’t see any dead animals with arrows through them, either. It looked more as if the tree had just dropped a bunch of branches.

“Oh, right,” Trent said. “The rocks. Or the tire. When they hit the trunk, it shook the tree, and the arrows that were loosest fell out.”

Donna looked out at the thicket of newly planted seedlings around the trees base and said, “That makes sense. I hope the tire isn’t full of arrows when we find it.”

“Me too.”

Trent tried a gentler turn to the left to aim them straight downhill again, and this time the pickup stayed on its front and left-rear wheels.

“Snail rocks,” he said, thinking aloud. “Slow rocks. Slow granite. Slow… what?”

“Slow motion?”

“Or just slo-mos.”

“Yeah! Slo-mos. I like that. So what do you call a group of ’em?”

He dodged one, cutting it close so the pickup wouldn’t tip, imagining the surprised creature running away at top speed for minutes after they passed, and making it about five feet in all that time. “A delay?” he said.

“A delay of slo-mos,” Donna said. “Yeah, that works.”

“So what about the birds? What do we call them?”

“Cupids, of course.”

“Of course.”

He slowed to examine some black marks about ten feet up the trunk of another tree. Tire marks? Maybe. There were certainly enough arrows on the ground at its base. The tuft atop the tree looked about half bare.

Donna said, “And a group of them could be a cherubim.”

“Hmm,” Trent said.