Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: C.W. McCall – Convoy

The Convoy. One thousand and one trucks constantly in motion across America’s roads and highways, unstoppable, living outside its laws. All Caleb wants to do with his life is join them but first he’s got to get on board and convince the truckers to let him stay.

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If Caleb put his ear to the ground, he imagined he’d hear them coming. Like the rhythm of distant trains carried down a length of rail. Vibrations from a stampede of strange and giant beasts. Down by the highway, he could see people gathering with signs and supplies to watch The Convoy go past. They looked like a crowd gathering for a parade, with folding chairs and picnic hampers full of snacks.

As if Caleb needed more confirmation, the music faded on his battery powered radio and the voice of the DJ took over. “Fox on the Run, brand new song rocketing up the charts from The Sweet you just heard there. And if you’re in and around Prairie, you’re going to want to stay off of those roads. I’m getting reports The Convoy is through Tulsa and heading your way. You don’t want to get in the way of those bumpers, no sir! Stay out of their way and watch those truckers roll.”

Caleb turned and took off across the bluff. He didn’t have far to go to reach the fence that cut along the back of the trailer park. He slipped through a gap that had been there as long as he could remember. The weeds growing around the gap were trodden into a matted carpet.

Carrying his radio, Caleb burst into their doublewide then immediately slowed and crept across the carpet. His mom sprawled facedown on the couch. She was unlikely to wake up for anything. Even if The Convoy came smashing through the wall of their trailer she probably wouldn’t rouse but at this stage he didn’t want to take any chances. Her end of the couch was surrounded by a drift of empty beer cans and other trash.

At twelve years old, Caleb straddled the border between child and man. At least according to his mother he did. She’d already started pushing him to worry less about school and making friends and more about finding a job. He’d seen his older siblings become old and embittered before they turned eighteen as mom pressured them to bring home money and to take care of their younger brothers and sisters. Meanwhile, she got drunk on the couch all day and went out all night to try to find another absentee father for their next half-sibling.

Caleb was determined that wouldn’t be him. He didn’t want an ordinary life. He wanted something amazing. Moving to the room he shared with several of his brothers, stuffed with mattresses and stacks of clothing, he reached under the frame of the room’s only actual bed. A battered blue backpack slid out of the dusty recess. He had no real privacy and had needed to gather the contents of the bag over several days in secret, stuffing it with clothing and a few books and mementos. There were even some cans of food that he’d managed to sneak in case he needed them. He shoved his radio into the bag as well.

Leaving through the living room with the bag on his shoulder, Caleb hesitated. Although he wasn’t sure if she would care, he’d written a note for his sleeping mom to explain where he’d gone and why. He pulled the folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and smoothed out its creases. After a few moments, he dropped it on the table in front of her and left. She didn’t stir.

As Caleb slipped back through the fence and headed toward the highway, there was something heightened in the air. A distant hum created by the sound of hundreds of engines moving in unison and thousands of wheels drumming against asphalt. A haze from their heat and exhaust thickened the horizon. He ran for a point along the highway that he’d picked out weeks ago, bag bouncing on his shoulders.

No one was quite sure how The Convoy began. As a protest of course, that was known for certain, but as a protest against what? The national maximum speed limit, the cost of gas, the hours that long haul drivers were forced to work to make their runs. The draft, the president, half a dozen other issues depending on who you were talking to. Probably they were all true to some extent. It wasn’t planned. It started as a small thing, three trucks, then six, and then a dozen and soon hundreds, all gathering into a single, monstrous, unstoppable mass as they thundered across the country from the West Coast all the way to the Jersey Shore. It evolved from a single protest into the greatest counter culture movement the United States had ever seen. Living on the veins and arteries of its highways and roads but completely outside of its laws, inviolable and unstoppable.

The Convoy inspired protest songs and legends and movies and fields of academic study. Even a short lived TV show where a former detective turned trucker and his orangutan partner solved mysteries and murders aboard the perpetually moving miniature city, mostly depicted by a series of interior trailer shots and bad green screens where the actors rocked back and forth on their feet a lot.

A freeway sign sat before a slight bend in the highway where The Convoy would have to slow ever so slightly. No different from a million other freeway signs across America. Above a certain height there were rungs up the side of its pole. A narrow balcony ran along the front of the vast green sign. Caleb considered it from the ground. It looked taller than he remembered but he was hardly going to be stopped at the first obstacle.

From his bag, Caleb produced a length of rope attached to a makeshift grappling hook. He’d built the hook himself from some pieces of dismembered lawn furniture. Swinging it over his head, after a couple of tosses he snared the lowest rung of the ladder.

A few knots of people watched from nearby. None of them intervened to stop the scrappy twelve-year-old as he shimmed and clambered up the pole. If anything, they probably assumed that Caleb was just looking for a unique vantage point to watch The Convoy go by. Some of them likely wished they’d thought of it themselves. By the time he reached the rungs, Caleb’s arms were already complaining and his hands felt chafed. Getting a hold on the first two rungs felt like a relief. He hauled himself up and got the rungs under his feet as well then untangled his grappling hook.

A thin breeze whispered across the balcony of the freeway sign as Caleb made his way along it. He looked down and felt a lurch in his stomach. Swallowing, he lifted his head and fixed on a point on the horizon. A few people cheered in the crowd below, shouting encouragement or warnings. Caleb wasn’t too worried about the local cops or ‘Smokeys’ in Convoy parlance. They’d be too busy monitoring the roads to worry about some kid climbing a freeway sign until The Convoy had passed. He spooled up the rope and kept it wrapped around his left arm.

The haze in the air increased in the near distance. Looking straight down the highway, Caleb got a sense of motion. The stampede of rubber and metal. The Convoy. On occasion, winged shapes billowed into the air like kites snatched by the breeze. They swooped and snapped then settled back into nests amidst the unglimpsed trucks.

“They’re coming!” someone yelled in the crowd below.

No longer imagined, vibrations made their way through the ground. A growing quiver that caused clouds of dust to become unsettled and rise above the surrounding hills. On Caleb’s narrow platform, bits of metal started to rattle. He shifted on the grating.

One thousand and one trucks strong, The Convoy hurtled into view. Chewing up the highway and spitting it out behind them. The cheer of the crowd was lost to a vast wall of noise that crashed down before the vehicles like a tidal wave. The air shifted, becoming thick and metallic with the exhalations and heat of their engines.

Caleb, from on high, stared in awe. First came the front doors, the leading vehicles of The Convoy, ready to confront any and all potential dangers and keep The Convoy moving no matter what. The largest, heaviest, most impressive trucks, they filled the four lanes of highway directly beneath Caleb. Their cabins had been reinforced with monster plates of makeshift armour. Apocalyptic cowcatchers angled forward, capable of tearing through obstacles and tossing lesser vehicles aside like toys. Their drivers watched the road from behind narrow slits scarred by bullets fired by Smokeys and the National Guard. Like all the drivers, they would drive and sleep and live in shifts. The trailers of the lead trucks were weighed down by the heaviest equipment and supplies to add momentum to any blow inflicted by those armoured plows and tremendously powerful engines. Travelling in their wake were reinforcements and replacements that would swap out the front doors from time to time.

Below, one of the drivers sounded their horn and then all of them did so. The dull roar nearly knocked Caleb off his sign. He felt fragile structures inside his ear canals shaking themselves to bits, until he thought they would start to bleed. A grin slashed his face through the pain and animal terror as he flattened against the sign. The front doors rumbled by and carried the vast, snaking, steel and chrome and multicoloured and hot and broken and ever-rolling body of The Convoy beneath him.

Peterbilts and bulldogs and 18-wheelers, flatbeds and reefers and bobtails, bull haulers, freightshakers, even a few stolen and repurposed green machines. Caleb could stay exactly where he was and watch a whole world roll by underneath him like one of the astronauts in orbit. They shook the earth with their passage. They swallowed the highway. They were unstoppable, a roaring river of machines and drivers and life. Battered and worn down by constant motion and occasional brushes with law enforcement or other obstacles. Stripped for weight, disassembled and reassembled without ever stopping, scarred and patched with makeshift repairs. Enhanced and decorated and turned into living art.

Overwhelmed by the initial wave and the vast, neverending sea of small details, Caleb began to pick out the ways in which the trucks had been transformed from a collection of disparate vehicles into a single, moving entity. Narrow bridges swung between some of the trucks and trailers. Rope bridges or bridges attached to lengths of chain so they could sway or dip or straighten rather than breaking as small adjustments caused the vehicles to pull away from one another or draw closer throughout the natural rhythm of the journey. Some trucks had makeshift bridges that could be extended while in use and retracted when not. Trailers had been turned into homes, doors cut in their roofs and windows in their sides, or they had other common uses. A white trailer was daubed with crosses of bright red paint to mark it as a rolling hospital, with ‘MEATWAGON’ scrawled on the side. A kiddie car, a yellow school bus, connected by rope bridges to two other vehicles, had become a rolling schoolhouse. Colourful handprints and drawings covered the windows but he could see glimpses of makeshift desks arranged along the bench seats. Some rows of trailers were linked together by ropes and chains and drawn by a single truck like a train engine pulling ranks of carriages. All of them had been stripped for weight.

With The Convoy came the sky pirates. While many celebrated the inhabitants of The Convoy like heroes, Caleb included, they lived on more than just generosity. Their presence was a shakedown. If towns and cities didn’t set out fresh caches of food and fuel when the trucks arrived then they would circle back and surround them and throw them into chaos. Since The Convoy didn’t stop though, they had to collect their supplies on the run. Heavy stuff, like tankers of fuel, trucks would hook up and keep rolling. For other supplies, there were the sky pirates.

Caleb watched one of the pirates take to the air, still in the distance. A parachute blossomed behind the man. At the speeds they were travelling, it filled with wind and yanked him off his feet in an instant. If it wasn’t for a cord clipped to the harness around his chest, he would have been hurled free of The Convoy and far away into the sky like a dandelion seed.

The truck with the sky pirate hurtled toward Caleb. With expert twists on his ropes, the man steered his heavily patched chute so it was flying alongside the highway. Feet trailed over the heads of the crowd. Dangling between the pirate’s legs was a massive hook, blunted at the tip, a tool not a weapon. With sudden swiftness, the sky pirate dived. Waiting for him was a basket of tribute, food and other supplies all roped together in a bundle two or three times as big as the man himself. With pinpoint accuracy, he threaded his hook through a loop on top of the bundle shaped like the handle of a picnic basket. The chute billowed and hauled the package into the air. Immediately, those on the truck started winching the sky pirate and his prize back toward the trailer from which he’d emerged.

Caleb slammed himself against the freeway sign. The sky pirate’s cord foreshortened revolution by revolution as his team desperately worked the crank. He passed just beneath the sign, missing it by only seconds, the material of the parachute rippling under Caleb’s sneakers. Up and down the line, more sky pirates and their teams collected packages. The trucks and their grids of bridges teemed with activity.

The back half of The Convoy was dominated by rolling farms. Livestock trucks had been transformed into portable barns. Cows and goats and trailers stuffed with squawking chickens. The reek from one of the trucks hauling pigs nearly knocked Caleb off his sign. A bunch of flatbeds and other trailers had been layered in stolen soil and now grew heavy with vegetable gardens and patches of greenery under the open sky. This would be his best chance. As he’d planned, his only chance.

Caleb fed the grappling hook through gaps in the grate underfoot and made sure it was anchored. He straightened with his back to the highway, trying to hide what he was doing. More horns echoed. He worried they might find a way to stop him if they saw what he was planning. Looping the rope around his fists, he pulled it taunt until the fibres burned.

Scanning the highway, Caleb saw the body of The Convoy stretching on and on. He spotted an approaching truck and knew immediately it was the one. It looked like a flatbed but with two levels instead of one. A car transport, the kind usually seen with rows of smaller vehicles stacked one on top of the other behind the truck itself. But this transport had dumped its cargo, reinforced its twin flatbeds, and covered itself into soil and vegetable gardens. A small, battered apple tree even grew directly above the truck’s cabin. The dual layers raised it higher than the other flatbeds. The gardens, he hoped, meant a soft landing. The truck was travelling in the leftmost lane and would pass directly beneath him. It was now or never.

Caleb couldn’t do the math in his head, it had never been his best subject at school. He estimated The Convoy was travelling at around sixty miles per hour. They would slow as they approached the bend. A few seconds to make the drop from the sign to the truck. His heart thundered in his chest. His mouth went dry. He thought of his mother, dead drunk in their trailer. His brothers and sisters and friends. What they would say about him if he didn’t make it. What he would become if he didn’t try.

The car transport closed the distance, the tree jostling above its cabin. At what Caleb estimated was the optimum moment, he leapt. Time slowed. The rope trailed behind him and snapped straight. Like a pendulum, he plummeted on the end of it. His palms burned. He saw the face of the car transport’s driver contorted in surprise. Light glared off surrounding windshields and chrome. The branches of the apple tree rustled underfoot. Swinging, he wasn’t sure he matched the speed of The Convoy but he at least approached it. A leap of faith, he let go and let the rope slither through his hands.

The world flashed in every direction. Up was down, chaos swallowed him in light and movement. Caleb slammed hard against dirt. Mismatched momentum tossed him. For a terrifying moment, Caleb was sure he was going to be thrown straight over the side of the trailer. He hit dirt again, cratering it, and rolled end over end. Bushels of plant life were thrown into the air.

Clouds moved swiftly overhead as Caleb stared straight up at the sky. It felt like he was lying on solid ground but he could feel the hard vibrations of the truck’s engine and wheels underneath him. He had made it, he was really aboard The Convoy.

“Hey, this is my daddy’s rig!” a voice interrupted Caleb’s thoughts. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Caleb looked up and brushed dirt out of his hair. Another boy stood near the apple tree at the head of the transport, having made his way up from below. He appeared about twelve, the same age as Caleb, but tall and strapping for his age. He dressed in hand-me-downs, jeans rolled up at the cuffs, sleeves folded back on his baggy shirt, boots a little too big and too loose.

The boy started forward and Caleb scrambled to his feet. He stumbled a little, unfamiliar with the feeling of the truck moving beneath him. Beyond the gardens of the car transport, The Convoy carried him past the border of Prairie and onto the open road. Caleb shoved the bag off his shoulder and recovered his footing.

“Wait, wait!” Caleb held up his open hands.

“Look at what you did!” The boy gestured at the garden where Caleb had landed.

The boy lunged, trying to grab Caleb. Aware of the side of the transport behind him, Caleb jumped away from him. There were no barriers down the sides of the transport, just a drop to the racing asphalt below. Caleb spun toward the back of the transport. The boy was more surefooted but missed as he made another grab.

“I want to join you!” Caleb said. “I’m sorry about the plants!”

Beyond the tail of the car transport, another truck followed close behind. Caleb could see a pair of women gaping through their bug-splattered windshield. The boy grabbed Caleb and pulled him to the ‘ground’. The two of them wrestled in the dirt. Caleb had fought with friends of his, rolling around on the playground at school, but never like this. He didn’t know what exactly the other boy wanted from him. For all he knew, he could be planning on throwing Caleb straight over the side of the truck and onto the highway. He could be fighting for his life.

The boy, stronger and more experienced, flipped Caleb onto his stomach. He pulled Caleb’s wrist and tried to pin his arm behind his back. With desperation, Caleb threw his head backward. The top of his skull mashed into his opponent’s face. Dazed, the other boy released his grip.

Caleb wriggled free and kicked. Blood covered the other boy’s upper lip, pouring from his nose. When Caleb’s foot hit him, he tumbled backward. Too late Caleb realised that the blow would send him toward the very tail end of the truck. It sloped down at the end into a ramp, no barrier, just the highway left behind them. The truck with the two women followed close behind. Anything that fell off the car transport, and anybody, would be chewed up by their wheels only seconds later. The other boy realised his fate at the last second. His eyes went wide with terror. One hand cupped his bleeding nose while the other snatched out, finding nothing to grab onto.

Caleb shot forward and grabbed the boy’s outstretched hand. The boy’s weight yanked at his arm. For a moment, it felt as if he would drag Caleb down with him and they’d simply tumble to the unforgiving asphalt together. But Caleb dug in his heels, pushing through the dirt and catching on something hard. He arrested the other boy’s fall and for a long moment they just hung there, arms outstretched, finding their balance.

Caleb hauled the other boy up again and they both scooted away from the tail before collapsing into the dirt. All the fight seemed to have gone out of the other kid and he just mopped at his nose until it stopped bleeding, breathing heavily.

“Thanks,” the boy said eventually.

“Don’t mention it,” Caleb said. “I’m sorry about landing on your dad’s garden.”

“I’m Ricky.”

“Caleb.”

A heavy hand fell on Caleb’s shoulder. He looked back into the sun beaten face of a tall and rawboned man. Wind tore at his t-shirt and shoulder-length hair. Caleb thought for a moment that it must be Ricky’s father but realised a bridge had been sent across the gap from a nearby truck while he and Ricky were recovering from their fight.

“Where did you come from?” the man asked.

Caleb pointed vaguely in the air. “From up there?”

“He jumped from a sign, we saw it. Was about the craziest dang thing I ever seen,” Ricky said.

“How old are you, kid?”

“I’m twelve,” Caleb said.

The tall man carried a walkie talkie on his belt. It was a big and bulky unit with a whip of an antenna. Unclipping the walkie, he raised it to his face.

“Rubber Duck, this is Big Chief, come on, Rubber Duck. Looks like we’ve got us a stowaway, twelve years old, over.”

After a few moments of hesitation, another voice crackled on the other end of the walkie. “Mercy sakes alive, where’d we pick up this stray?”

“Back in Prairie, apparently jumped from a freeway sign onto Johnny Appleseed’s truck, over.”

“That must have taken some guts. Take them to church, figure out what to do with them there, over and out.”

Big Chief clipped the walkie back onto his belt and gestured Caleb to his feet. “Come on then.”

“I’ll come too! Just let me talk to my daddy,” Ricky said.

As Ricky returned to the front of the car transport, Big Chief steered Caleb to the plank bridge attached to the next truck over. It had no handrails and looked far too narrow. The foot of it shifted with minor adjustments in speed and distance between the two vehicles. Caleb’s heart hammered. Big Chief prodded him to cross first. Highway asphalt blurred below. Caleb’s legs felt weak as he crossed, rubbery, threatening to give way and drop him to his death. The trucker followed close behind him though, probably ready to grab him if he fell.

They followed a twisting path across trucks and bridges that swayed and snapped. Up and down along the spine of half a dozen fuel tanks linked together like train carriages. While none of the crossings were anywhere near as scary as the moment Caleb had to jump off the freeway sign, the concentration and constant tension made it increasingly difficult to handle. Ricky caught up with them after speaking with his dad, moving across the bridges and trucks as easily as a mountain goat.

Finally, they came to the church. It looked like it had begun life as a lime green microbus with crosses and religious messages painted up and down its sides. It had been picked up and mounted on the back of a much larger flatbed though, its wheels removed, and then expanded using raw lumber and sheets of aluminium siding into a more traditional-looking church. Its steeple was hinged, capable of folding down so it could pass under low bridges and through tunnels. Inside were ranks of simple benches, a pulpit, and a crucified Jesus with a hubcap for a halo. Big Chief was joined by several other adults. People who made decisions around this section of The Convoy, Caleb assumed, including a reverend with hair halfway down his back.

“You want to tell us just what the hell you were thinking, kid?” Big Chief asked.

“I wanted to join you!” Caleb said. “I thought everyone was free to join The Convoy if they wanted to?”

“Sure, but generally they do so by driving and linking up with our tail though.”

“I’m not old enough.”

“And that’s exactly the problem. We’re going to have to get someone to loop around and drop you off before you get missed.”

“No one’s going to miss me! My mom, she’s drunk all the time. My older brothers and sisters, well, they just see me as another mouth to feed.”

“We can’t get a reputation for going from town to town, snatching kids.”

“I left a note! I told them I was running away, that I’d get in touch from somewhere down the road,” Caleb said.

“Why’d you want to join us?”

“I wanted to find a place where I belonged, I guess. A place where I could be a part of something bigger. Back at home, I could have a life but it was always going to be small. I couldn’t choose to be nothing back home, this is different, this is something I really wanted! To see America! To see the world!”

Caleb told them more about his home life. About his mom and his siblings and their trailer. About school and his friends and his little town. How he’d seen and read everything about The Convoy and how badly he wanted to be a part of them. When he was done, Big Chief and the others conferred.

“You’ve got a lot of passion, kid,” Big Chief said. “But everyone has to pull their own load around these parts. You don’t have a vehicle, you’ll need someone to sponsor you.”

“We’ll do it”! Ricky piped up. “I already talked to my daddy, we can take him on as a farmhand. He saved my back there, I owe it to him.”

“Well then.” Big Chief grinned and offered Caleb one of his big hands. “Let them truckers roll.”

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Sean: This has got to be the closest thing to just straight fan fiction for a song that I’ve done for Mixtape. More than just inspired, it’s got to be a straight up alternative universe of the song’s events or something. Lot of references as I’m sure you caught! Oh well, not like I’m making any money off of these.

I’m a huge sucker for moving cities, especially those made out of a whole bunch of disparate parts. Like ‘The Raft’ in Snow Crash, or the city of Armada in The Scar by China Miéville, so fucking cool. Obviously there’s the moving cities of the Mortal Engines series. Actually, it was a love for this trope that inspired The Birth of Cities which was the first story in a world I’m still writing some stuff for right now. Novel stuff, not short stories, although maybe short stories too!

Next Track: Dolly Parton – Jolene