0.5
While the massive column of trucks filled US Route 50 and rolled east, I let my eyes drift to the calendar on the dashboard.
May was already winding down.
It was the calendar Frank had hung there when he delivered the new truck. In the world that calendar still belonged to, the air by now should have been thick with the green smell of early summer. Outside the window, the dawn still hung at minus twenty, cold enough to scrape the inside of the lungs.
Winter had not ended in half a year. A world where even the turning of the seasons had stopped. We had every right to be sick of it — and yet I realized we had already come to accept this endless winter with a kind of quiet composure.
We had survived. And now we were a proper force in our own right, running the roads.
The column of steel the Polaris Union had built left Carson City behind and rolled east without a hitch. Around the time we passed Dayton, a call came in from Jake, orbiting overhead.
Dayton's barren streets fell away behind us in no time, and the column turned for Silver Springs.
Then, far ahead, the silhouettes of the National Guard QRF came into view, drawn up along the shoulder at the agreed point. Strykers, Humvees, gun trucks — their presence on that desolate stretch of highway felt like a lighthouse you could actually trust.
The moment the head of the Union column drew even with them, the officer standing in the Stryker's turret threw us a sharp salute. From the other Humvees and trucks, Guard soldiers waved or pumped clenched fists in a wordless show of support. It was respect, offered to men walking the same road.
Tank, in Truck #1, answered first.
BRAAAMP — BRAAAAMP—!
A long, majestic blast of air horn rolled out, and the thirty-three trucks behind him — Bill, Walter, Slick, Salt Dog, and all the rest — hit their horns and klaxons as one.
HONK!
BRAAAAAAMP—
Honk, honk.
Beep-beep — bweeep!
Horns of every pitch tangled together and poured across the Nevada desert like a symphony played by a vast orchestra of steel.
We left that brief, fierce greeting behind us and settled back into the quiet run east, toward Fallon.
At Fallon, under National Guard control, the column swung right onto US-95 and headed south. Two Strykers and a line of Humvees that had come out from the base to meet us slotted in ahead and behind and took up escort.
US-95 was calm. There did not look to be a force on earth that would try to stop a column of dozens of house-sized trucks shepherded by gun trucks and armor.
When the Union rolled through the gate, more than thirty military containers stood waiting for us in ranked rows. National Guard officers and NCOs came forward and saluted.
I saw no reason to linger at Hawthorne this time. Once a column this size broke apart, putting it back together would cost us hours. I had every trucker stand down where they were, eat a field ration, and get ready to roll again.
On my order, the trucks took on their heavy loads one by one and climbed back onto US-95. The ones that hooked up first fell in behind the lead. The ones that started later passed forward and slotted into their places in line.
Once I saw Truck #33 clear the gate, I fell in behind it.
By the time we rolled through the Fallon checkpoint, the QRF holding at Silver Springs and Jake both reported the road ahead was clear. We ran straight on for Carson City.
The highway was peaceful. Or maybe nothing on it had the nerve to stand in front of a column of steel that size. We didn't stop. We ran all the way in to Carson Camp.
Lieutenant Colonel Gibson had come out himself. He offered his right hand with formal courtesy, and we shook.
Inside the camp, every trailer except the five bound for Tahoe was dropped in neat rows across the lot.
Before long Bill came rolling in with a tanker truck filled to the brim with diesel, a grin spread across his whole face.
"Boss, we already drew our share first."
"Good. Fill the truck tanks. Top off the tankers too."
At Bill's signal the truckers dragged hoses through the dark and started fueling their own rigs. The rush of diesel pouring in sounded, somehow, like our hearts starting to beat again in this broken world, and the look on every trucker's face said the same thing.
Watching them, I felt a sudden, swelling pride — that even among the ashes, we had managed to keep our lives and our identity as truckers.
Finishing the Polaris Union's first haul in one piece meant something particular. It was more than survival. It was the start of building our own order out on the road.
The faces of the men at rest held less fatigue than a kind of hard-earned confidence. A few of them came up to me with thanks that were clumsy and completely sincere.
"Polar Bear, I mean it. Thank you. After the world went to hell I was just sitting around waiting to die... You put me back behind the wheel."
I said nothing.
"I've driven trucks my whole life. Without this, I'd have been nothing but a useless old man."
The next morning, the five Tahoe Branch trucks under Gears rolled out first. They would drop Tahoe's five containers, then gather up the Nisku Crew and the Anderson family still waiting there and bring them in to Carson Camp.
A short message from Frank had already come in. We didn't rest. With the remaining twenty-eight trucks we turned east again for the second haul.
The way we moved on the road was visibly different from the day before. Matthews and the TSP detachment, and the National Guard controlling traffic for us at every crossing, had started to lock in like a single machine. The Polaris Union emblem painted on the hoods and doors felt less like a logo than a pass.
When we reached the Fallon checkpoint where Route 50 met US-95, a National Guard second lieutenant came toward us waving.
"You've been working hard, Polar Bear! We put coffee on if you'd like a cup!"
I took the warm cup from his hands and thought that the Guard no longer saw Union trucks as contracted labor. They saw us as comrades. Brothers-in-arms, even.
After a short rest at the Fallon checkpoint the column ran south again on US-95 toward Hawthorne, and Jake patched through something I hadn't expected.
I gave a short acknowledgment and put my attention back on the road. By the time we rolled into Hawthorne, the containers waiting for us were staged as cleanly as the day before.
We hooked freight without a pause and turned again for Carson City. Everything was running exactly to plan.
The return was mostly clean as well. Whenever Jake spotted an unidentified column nosing in from a side road, a National Guard checkpoint or the QRF locked down the traffic. Because of that, we never even had to stop at the crossings.
And through two straight days of long-haul running, not a single person said anything that sounded like a jinx. Everyone was serious in every moment, prepared past the point of reason. It was enough to remind me that the people riding with me were the ones who had survived this far.
When we came back into the Carson City camp after the second haul, the military containers we had moved stood piled in front of the warehouse like a mountain. From a certain angle they looked like a small fortress. They were war materiel, but to my eye they looked, somehow, like a tower of plenty we had raised with our own sweat, and I was proud of it.
The long day stretched out, the sun went down, and darkness settled in. Familiar headlight beams appeared at the camp gate.
Under escort from Humvees sent out of Tahoe, Dave's battered pickup was the first through, and for a moment I was back in Canada — a night at a rest stop, waiting for him to catch up, when I had gotten out alone.
Behind Dave's pickup and the caravan came Mike, Frank, Raven, and our trailers, nose to tail. The boiler-fitted dry van hung solidly off the back of Bulldog's truck, and Gears' rig held the end of the column.
Wolf and I ran out and waved hard at the people who had come so far.
Dave, Frank, and Mike piled out of their vehicles and came running. Wolf's tail was going so fast it nearly disappeared, circling them in a frenzy of welcome.
"God, I missed you, pal!"
Dave threw his arms around me and nearly shouted it.
"We've only been apart a few days."
I tossed it off, gruff with embarrassment, and Frank grinned beside him.
"This guy didn't go a single day without talking about you. 'I wonder what our Chan's up to right now,' he'd say."
In the warmth of laughter and reunion, we were whole again.
Where we stood — the trucks and trailers ranked across Carson Camp — it looked like a camp raised by a nomad tribe of the road.
While we were still taking in the joy of it, Lieutenant Colonel Gibson finished his inventory of the munitions and walked over. He didn't waste time on a preamble.
"You've done good work, Polar Bear."
"We're grateful for the National Guard's support."
"Even after this run, though, it looks like the work isn't going to stop."
"Sir? You mean after we've already hauled all hundred and twenty-eight?"
"That's right."
"Don't tell me you're planning to move the entire depot."
Gibson laughed out loud at the half-joke.
"Ha! Don't be ridiculous. Hawthorne's ammo bunkers — we call them igloos — come in medium and large. A medium bunker holds about six or seven containers' worth. A large one holds ten to fifteen."
"Ah..."
For a moment I had nothing to say. Zero point five percent. Everything we had risked our lives to move was a speck off the side of a mountain.
Gibson went on as if that were the most natural thing in the world.
"Which is why I'm saying this, Polar Bear. Next time I'll need you to move something that actually matters. Something big, heavy, and very special."
"What kind of something?"
"We'll talk about that when the time comes."