A CONVOY OF two dozen tractor-trailer trucks came rumbling off the interstate.
Pumping their hissing air brakes, they pulled into the parking lot ringing the grassy patch, which was dotted with picnic tables.
All twenty-four were Macks. All twenty-four had the same shiny chrome hood ornament: the tough, muscular bulldog poised to pounce.
I backed up a foot or two. I needed time to assess my situation.
The idling trucks, lined up in parking slots, more or less formed a semicircle of hot, thrumming steel in front of me. Behind me, I could hear a small stream gurgling through a ravine. If I ran across the open field and into the woods (again), the enormous trucks wouldn’t be able to chase after me. They weren’t what you might call “off road vehicles.” They couldn’t roll over me and crush my bones like that Mack truck back in Kentucky had.
I was about to make a beeline for the tree line when I heard The Prayer’s disembodied, high-pitched voice echoing through the night. The beast was roaring louder than the thundering din of twenty-four diesel-powered engines.
“RELEASE THE DOGS!”
I expected rear cargo doors to roll up so twenty-four packs of braying, barking bloodhounds could come storming out of the big rigs.
I wasn’t expecting a total transformation.
Every single trailer jackknifed up on its front and rear axles and morphed into a giant, muscle-rippled metal bulldog. The twenty-four trucks were turning themselves into twenty-four ginormous hood ornaments. Each powerful chrome beast had to weigh forty tons. They were forty feet long, fifteen feet wide, maybe twenty feet tall. Thick folds of shiny skin drooping down around their snubbed muzzles made them look angry at the world—or maybe just at me.
And these giant bulldogs had teeth.
Pointy steel bulldog teeth.
“SIC HIM!” screeched Number 1.
The giant dogs sprang up from their haunches and charged after me, their jagged metal paws clawing huge divots into the asphalt and chewing up sod like the teeth on a backhoe bucket.
I raced for the ravine.
Little known fact: Bulldogs were first used in Jolly Olde England for a bloody sport called bull baiting. A bull would be staked in the center of a ring. Bulldogs would be sent in to seize the bull by the nose (a bull’s most tender part) and not let go.
Guess I was supposed to play the part of the bull.
Four of the gargantuan dogs broke off from the pack and leaped across the ravine in one easy stride on my right. Another four did the same on my left.
The Earth quaked when they landed.
The other sixteen beasts were snarling behind me. Silvery drool slobbered out of their jowls like liquid mercury from a shattered thermometer. Their job, clearly, was to run me through the brambles and bushes, and send me skidding down a slippery slope to the bottom of the ravine.
I was being hunted. Driven to ground, as they say in the fox and hound set.
I splashed across the shallow, rock-strewn creek at the bottom of the gulley and scrambled up the far side.
When I reached the top, the eight wide-shouldered brutes that had broken off from the pack were waiting for me.
The sixteen behind me bellowed and howled.
“TAKE HIM DOWN!” screeched The Prayer.
Eager to please its master, the leader of the Mack pack snarled in reply and leaped right at me.