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.
“Don’t like that?”
“It’s kind of clumsy.”
She thought about it for a few seconds while Trent eased them around a fallen log. “How about a valentine?”
“Perfect.” Just then he saw a glint of something silver downslope to the right. “Hey, is that it?”
Donna looked to see where he was pointing, then squinted. “I don’t know. Could be.” She got the binoculars out of their case and focused on the shiny object, and said, “Yeah, that’s it!”
“Hot damn.” Trent aimed for it, letting off the brake a little in his eagerness to make his four-wheeler truly a four-wheeler again. They jounced over a rock—a real one, judging by its jagged shape—and teetered a moment on the right-front and left-rear tires, but Trent hit the brake again and brought the pickup back under control. He wanted to roll down on his wheels, not on the roll bar.
The runaway had come to rest in a thicket of brush reminiscent of the stuff that clogged the streams on On-nescu. It didn’t have orange sap, though, or thorns. Trent parked the truck a few feet away, checked cautiously for anything moving in the sky or on the ground, then climbed out while Donna covered him with the pistol. He picked up a fist-sized rock and pitched it into the thicket next to the tire, and was happy to see that the branches didn’t writhe like tentacles or anything, so he tried a cautious step up on the trunk that had been bent over by the tire’s impact. It held his weight, so he leaned forward and grabbed the tire and pulled it out of the branches. The sidewalls were scraped up from hitting rocks and trees on the way down, but it didn’t look like anything had actually punctured it. Either the arrows weren’t sharp enough to penetrate rubber, or the tire had bounced out of their way before they had time to fall to the ground.
It only took a couple of minutes to mount it to the hub. He had to borrow a nut from one of the other wheels, which left only one wheel with all five nuts left, but that wouldn’t matter for off-roading. Trent put the jack and lug wrench away, piled back into the cab, and rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. He had his pickup back. It was beat to hell and almost out of juice, but it was whole again.
“All right,” he said happily, “let’s find us a place to call home for a while.”