Ellie waits in nervous anticipation for the mission to begin.

the only useful things I’d found in the Council Depot, apart from ignition keys, were these safety helmets. I’d but one on and chucked six more in the truck. They probably wouldn’t stop a bullet, but they might make the difference between death and just permanent brain damage.

…

…well, okay, she’s just being scared and grasping at straws, but you’re already on thin ice, book.

So Ellie is driving the bulldozer down the street, although she keeps calling it a truck, and she picks up the other kids as they’re…just standing outside waiting. Man, for Baker Street being ‘crawling with soldiers,’ they sure are standing out in the open pretty easy.

They get Lee into the bucket of the bulldozer and Robyn piles into the cab with Ellie just before soldiers arrive, and said soldiers immediately start shooting, because of course they do.

And apparently in Australia construction equipment is bulletproof, because the bullets really do just ‘bounce’ off. At least the windows do get shot out, but I guess truck doors are all heavily armored or something.

(Fun tidbit, the doors on uparmored HMMWVs are ridiculously heavy and hard to manage and take special hinges and latch mechanisms and oddly enough closing them is the hardest part. I’ve had so many fucking armored doors just pop open while I’m driving because they’re so heavy they broke the latch.) (But sure, your truck door stops bullets, sure.)

We were going backwards way too fast though.

Bulldozers go faster in reverse than forward. I mean, not really a problem here since she mentions going ‘too’ fast, I just wanted to point that out.

Ellie continually calls it a ‘truck,’ though, which…even going by all construction vehicles with a scoop attached, I still can’t find one that could reasonably be called a truck. And she drives it like a truck (i.e., there’s a steering wheel) which means it has to have wheels instead of tracks. And the only wheeled bulldozers I can find are tiny. Which makes sense (if it was just laying around a small city, maybe it was for a minor project), but where is Robyn supposed to fit in this thing?

Either no one on this project looked up bulldozers, or I haven’t spent enough time looking up bulldozers and I’m missing something, either of which I’d believe, really.

I spun the wheel even more sharply and the wheels on the left hand side left the ground.

You’re…in a bulldozer… how… but… the speed you’d need… I just…

I’m kind of flabbergasted that, of everything going on in this book, it’s a bulldozer that gives me the most trouble. This should not be so trippy.

One more bullet hit us as we went around; it flew so close to me that it made a breeze against my skin, then shattered the side window.

So the whole reason they went with this plan is because bullets would ‘bounce off’ the bulldozer, but also they aren’t immune to bullets, but also they get away anyway just because?

If you’re just going to author-fiat your way out of getting hit by anything, just throw them in a pickup truck.

We smashed into it [another car] bloody hard and ran right over the top of it.

BULLDOZERS AREN’T TANKS. (And even a tank would just push the jeep.)

Which you seem to realize when you have it almost rollover, but then forget again at random, jesus we’re getting to Divergent-doesn’t-know-guns levels “doing whatever” here. Like, literally every single line in this escape scene is “not how this works,” but in a different way. Near as I can tell, this book thinks that a bulldozer is an uparmor HMMWV, with monster truck wheels, but with normal windows, and also a bucket on the front. So, just some Frankenstein’s monster of whatever ups the tension. Basically.

I tried the lights on high beam but nothing happened: it seemed that we only had parking lights left.

*head**desk**head**desk*

So to be fair I looked back at the last chapter, and when they were planning Homer said ‘bulldozer’ and Robyn said ‘One of those trucks with the shovel in front.’ And then there’s no further description. Ever. Anywhere. So maybe this is not a real bulldozer, but some uparmored, monster-truck-wheeled vehicle with a scoop grafted onto the front, IDK, Australia’s a weird place, maybe those exist there. Google didn’t net me anything except snow plows, but what does google know.

Jesus, this thing is cool. Okay, neither here nor there (and def not in the book), but palette cleansed, back to Ellie and her magic truck.

We roared through a stop sign, doing 95 k’s.

Even though Ellie’s truck is clearly magic, I still like my two-story-house-bulldozer better.

hit the brakes with everything I had. I used the handbrake as well as the foot brake.

You no longer have a bulldozer; you have a very awkward paperweight.

I mean, this is iffy on a normal truck, but all that armor and the scoop and the monster wheels are adding some pretty extreme weight, which puts a lot of strain on the engine, which…yeah, paperweight.

But slamming on the break means the chase vehicle behind them slams into them and…spins off the road? Magic truck. Another chase vehicle shoots out their tires, which make these officially the worst monster truck tires ever.

Robyn was looking through the little rear window.

‘What’s in the back here?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t look.’

‘Well there’s something there. How do you operate the tipper?’

‘That blue lever I think.’ Robyn grabbed it and heaved it down. The second car was now trying to pass us. I was swerving all over the road to prevent him, a process made easier by the punctured tyres. Then something did start pouring out of the back, with a slow sliding noise. I still don’t know what it was, gravel or mud or something.

…so this is a dump truck? With a scoop?

Anything else you want to throw on this magical construction vehicle that can Do It All?

Well, they finally get to their meeting point, where Homer is there with a station wagon. They transfer out of the Magic Truck Of All Construction and speed away into the night.

They head for the house of some guy named Chris, because Homer knows where that family keeps the keys so they can switch cars. They take Chris’s car, sink the other one in a river so it won’t be found, and then…Chris! He’s actually hiding out on the property and not captured with the others.

For a week he’d had no contact with anyone, just watched from a tree, and later the piggery, as patrol after patrol came through the property. The first group had taken all the cash and jewellery;

But. WHY?

Like, looting, okay, I get that.

But you’re an invading army short on supplies because you had to come in fast and light and all you take is MONEY? The money of the country you’re invading? The money of the country that, if you win, will be useless, and if you lose you won’t be around to spend it?

Take the useful supplies, pocket a few jewels if you’re already in there anyway because why not, but why would ‘money and jewelry’ be your FIRST round of looting? You can’t spend any of it!

Chris is a skinny computer nerd pot head, and he tells his story. His parents are on an overseas trip, and he didn’t go to the showgrounds because it’s not his bag. So he didn’t notice anything amiss until the next day, when the power went out and he couldn’t reach anyone by phone. He tried to walk around to the neighbors/into town and found things out about the same way Ellie and her group did.

Chris gets in the car with the rest of them and they head back to Ellie’s house to hook up with the rest of the group.