The collarless stray sat roadside, watching traffic, tongue loose, big teeth smiling into the darkness.\u00a0 One of the big robot trucks went by, filled with animal smells.\u00a0 The stray watched it pass into the darkness, trailing lights behind it as it went.\u00a0 The moon rode clouds West and the stray could see the motion.<\/p>\n
Somewhere not too far away, an insect landed on a piece of tin, chiming it.\u00a0 An ear lifted, rotated and returns to idle.<\/p>\n
There was another machine on the road.\u00a0 Looked normal, but lacked headlights, and sounded wrong.\u00a0 The engines were running normally, but the tuning was missing the usually harmonic hum.\u00a0 Didn’t anticipate the hill until the speed dropped, and then overcompensated by revving suddenly.\u00a0 Animals acted like that, but vehicles didn’t.\u00a0 Machines didn’t.\u00a0 This vehicle had an animal driving it.<\/p>\n
The stray stood and looked down the valley at the car as it rounded another corner, and then started loping towards the freeway.\u00a0 The sprint across the last 75 yards took three strides.\u00a0 The impact was quiet, but the rooster-tail of sparks from the dragging rear end of the vehicle screamed into the hills and harmonized with the echo.<\/p>\n
As per the rules, the stray pulled the animal from the sandy hillside the car had burrowed into.\u00a0 Checked vitals, and attempted to identify which medical carrier it was affiliated with.\u00a0 No tracker on ‘fid.\u00a0 Cauterized the cheekbone cut with the small onboard first aid torch, applied transdermal sleep agent, and then deployed a foil blanket with a red cross symbol at each corner.<\/p>\n
After a moment, the moon skated past the clouds once again, and all six hundred pounds of the stray began to purr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The collarless stray sat roadside, watching traffic, tongue loose, big teeth smiling into the darkness.\u00a0 One of the big robot trucks went by, filled with animal smells.\u00a0 The stray watched it pass into the darkness, trailing lights behind it as it went.\u00a0 The moon rode clouds West and the stray could see the motion. Somewhere […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87614883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-not-really"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87614883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87615035,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614883\/revisions\/87615035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87614883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87614883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87614883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}