Trucks (short story)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Trucks is a short story by Stephen King. It was first published in Cavalier magazine in 1973, and later included in King's 1978 anthology collection Night Shift.

The story details the plight of a group of strangers who are trapped together in a roadside diner, after semi-trailers and other large trucks are suddenly brought to independent life by an unknown force and proceed to gruesomely kill every human in sight. The humans are able to fight off the trucks for a time, but in the end the diner is half-destroyed, and the few survivors are forced to pump gas to keep the trucks running. As he does this, the nameless narrator has a grim vision of a future world remade in its new masters' image.

[edit] Movie adaptations

The story has been adapted twice for the cinema, in 1986 with the King-directed Maximum Overdrive and again in 1997 as the TV movie Trucks, which is a somewhat more faithful adaptation.