This is a story I wrote several years ago with high hopes it would become an iconic film with trucks as the stars. It is in the little known " Soft-■■■■-Sci-Fi with lorries " genre. I have left out a lot of the gratuitous ■■■ scenes as I know Trucknet doesn’t like ■■■■. Please feel free to comment and give suggestions on how the storyline could be enhanced.
Truckers versus Aliens. Chapter One.
Neil sat, nursing his third cup of coffee, in the Tim Horton’s coffee shop at the north end of the shopping mall in The Pas, Manitoba. He was looking at a dark blue Volvo D13 tractor unit; his tractor unit. Two weeks on the road as an owner/operator and they had all been dry roads; his pride and joy still shone like new.
Then his spirits sank as a red Ford Focus parked between him and his truck; blocking the view. They immediately rose as two good-looking Chinese women got out of the car. Neil watched them as they made their way into the coffee shop, used the washroom, drank coffee and ate a sandwich before returning to the car and heading north. He admired their trim figures in tight fitting jeans and fur trimmed bomber jackets. Little did he know that, within a fortnight, Neil would be spooning one of those bodies and eating black hair.
It was another two hours before Neil was joined by fellow British Owner/Operators in Canada: John and Tony. All three were contracted to Gerry’s Hauling of Winnipeg, a flat-deck trailer specialist that sent loads all over the USA and Canada. Their latest job was for three trucks to take redundant mining equipment from a closing mine, north of The Pas, to a newly opened mine in Quebec.
Neil was not a natural leader of men but as he had loaded machinery from the old Can-Ore mine before; he led the convoy of three Volvos to their destination, two hours north on snow-covered dirt roads. The loading appointment was for eight o’clock in the morning; they decided to camp out on the doorstep as the first snows of Winter blew in from the Artic.
Geoff, the old security guard, recognized Neil as soon as they arrived. The shy Geordie had been given an underground tour by Geoff and returned with souvenir lumps of ore.
“I’m expecting an important phone call from my brother in Holland, but if your buddies want to go down and take a look around; you can give them the tour, eh? Neil.” offered Geoff.
So with hard hats fitted with lamps and a few garbled safety instructions they entered the small lift and the three truckers descended two thousand feet into the worn out nickel mine.
Meanwhile, the red Ford Focus had arrived at the old Hegarty Mine; fifty miles east of the Can-Ore mine, as the crow flies. Laura Lee was a doctor of medicine from Hong Kong; her younger sister, Anna Lee was a massage therapist, raised in Hong Kong, but now living in Vancouver. They were in search of their middle sister, Sue Lee, who had come to Canada after hooking up on the China-Love dating site. Sue Lee’s Internet arranged pairing had been to a Mr. Denis Hegarty, owner of the Hegarty Mine.
Laura and Anna had not seen or heard nothing from their sister since Anna had put Sue on a Winnipeg bound plane at Vancouver Airport. That was eighteen months ago and they were now at the end of a trans-continental journey to find out what happened to Sue.
The Hegarty family had owned the silver mine for generations but it had been sixty years since it had been worked economically. Denis Hegarty’s father had never done anything with it and when he died his son moved a travel trailer onto the claim and started to mine as a one-man operation. Lack of a work-ethic and heavy drinking stopped any mining progress until the arrival of Sue Lee at Winnipeg Airport.
After a couple of nights in an airport hotel, Sue Lee was transported to northern Manitoba and set to work as a hard-rock mining slave. Sue was entombed for days at a time in the mine, fed only on production of wagons loaded with ore. Her only time above ground was when she was taken to the travel trailer, showered and used as a ■■■ object on the whim of her master. Hegarty had often wondered if anybody would come looking for Sue, so he was prepared. Two Chinese-looking women turning up on his doorstep was a dead give-away.
“Sue has gone into the mine shaft looking for the cat, she loves that cat,” said Denis as he guided the women towards a steel-doored opening in the rock face.
“Sue, surprise, someone to see you,” he shouted sweetly. He held the steel door open, ushered the women inside and then slammed it shut behind them.
It was mixed emotions for the three sisters, re-united at last but now locked up with no-one to rescue them. Fearing that Hegarty would soon turn off the generator, cutting the lights, Sue led her two sisters to a lower part of the mine where it was warmer and where she had her sleeping quarters. They chatted into the night, amazed that Hegarty didn’t turn off the power. But the brute was probably trying to work out how he could utilize his extra man-power: err-woman-power.
When the drivers at the bottom of the Can-Ore mine could not make contact with Geoff, the security guard, they were slightly worried. When the lift would not work and the lights went off; they were really worried. Neil led them to the Emergency Safety Chamber by the light of their hard-hat lamps. There, they found food rations, water, a first-aid kit and a hot-line to the surface; which did not work. This would be their home for the next three days as they waited in vain for the mine to be repowered.
Laura, Sue and Anna were in a very similar predicament; deep underground, with no means of escape. Hegarty paid no attention to their banging on the steel door. The women presumed he had gone into town for supplies. They took this chance to chisel away at the rock surrounding the door; surviving on the food that Sue had stashed away and water that dripped from the roof of the mine. It was three days before the constant chipping with hand tools loosened the steel door-frame; giving enough room for Anna to squeeze through and open it from the outside. Three dirty, bedraggled women appeared into the daylight to find the lifeless frozen body of Denis Hegarty lying outside his travel trailer. They showered in the trailer, ate their first good meal in days and left the mine in the red Ford Focus. Laura and Anna had done what they set out to do; they had rescued Sue and were taking her home.
The lift shaft was the obvious means of escape for the three drivers but it wasn’t until the third day that John Hooper forced open the hatch in the ceiling of the lift and found the steel ladder that stretched two thousand feet to the surface. Not an easy climb to safety, but the three drivers were all pretty fit from working on flat decks with all its tarping and strapping. In the control room, they found Geoff, the old security guard, lying dead from an apparent heart attack; his body frozen solid by the minus 20 degree C Arctic blast that had descended while they were underground. The Canadian Winter had kicked in but thankfully all the trucks started, but with nobody on site and unable to make contact with the outside world; still empty, the trio headed back to The Pas in order to report Geoff’s death and contact Despatch for instructions. The roads were now snow covered with no visible wheel tracks; they saw no other vehicle for fifty miles until a red Ford Focus shot out from a side road and slid into the ditch just in front of the lead Volvo.
“You were sitting at the next table in Tim Horton’s; the other day," exclaimed Neil as the three Chinese women scrambled out of the wrecked car.
“Sorry, you guys all look alike to me," replied Anna Lee as she brushed the snow off her jeans.
“Suppose you gals will be needing a lift into The Pas?" enquired John in his broad Yorkshire accent.
“Yes, please wait while we get our luggage from the car." answered Laura Lee, before all three women began rattling on in their native tongue.
Without any hesitation the six paired into the three couples that would stay together: Neil, the shortest man, with Anna, the shortest woman: John with Laura the doctor, and Tony, the tallest guy, with Sue, the tall, muscular miner. At this time, none of them knew that this chance encounter on a snow-swept Canadian road would be so significant for the future of the human race.
To be continued…