The Star Wagon

Leslie hopped in his truck and made the five minute drive back to his yurt. His lawn, at first glance, looked like any native Vermonter’s. It had what looked like the carcasses of four vehicles playing the part of lawn ornaments. This had a long and noble tradition in Kingston, and you weren’t really considered a contributing member of polite society if you didn’t have a parts car or two ready and willing to donate a windshield wiper motor or a transmission at any given time.

This was a concept wholly and openly disdained by people who weren’t born in the Green Mountain State. When moving from a large metropolitan area and attempting to ruralize themselves, newcomers came with a lot of preconceived notions as to what life in Vermont would be like. This would typically involve the liberal application of flannel and the husbandry of various shades of Labrador Retrievers. Their yards were for nothing but grass. Grass to be mowed and tended to. Acres of the stuff, with absolutely no purpose other than being grass. Leslie suspected that these people had a compulsion to create a monoculture in their yards as a demonstration of their dominion over the planet.

Leslie actually used his lawn. It was home to a diverse population of various wildflowers, invasive species including dandelions which he found to be plucky and aesthetically pleasing, and the bodies of the automobile collection that he had amassed over the last few years. It was like his garage. Cars were designed to be outdoor creatures and he left them to their own devices in that regard.

Of course, this time of year, his collection of cars resembled a neat line of snowdrifts. Beneath these drifts, waiting for their opportunity to scream down the backroads of Kingston were the following makes and models: 1998 Subaru Impreza RS coupe, a 1992 Lancia Delta HF Integrale, a 1987 Nissan Maxima, and a 1991 Mitsubishi Delica Star Wagon Chamonix Edition.

The Impreza and the Delta were pure rally cars. Both of them were equally light in body and irresponsibly powerful. The sort of acceleration, cornering, and braking that these cars were capable of could cause the unprepared driver to enter a sort of twilight state without the proper breathing techniques. The kind of thing a fighter jet pilot might employ while pulling eight Gs to foil the radar of a heat seeking missile.

The Maxima just kind of looked cool to him. It was the kind of car that a cocaine dealer would have driven in 1987. It had digital readouts everywhere that information could be displayed. Other relevant information about the state of the car that couldn’t be conveyed through the instrument cluster was taken in audibly through a convenient robotic voice. This let the operator know if the door was open, or the windshield wiper fluid was low. At the time it was manufactured, this was the height of technological luxury. Now, it functioned as a retrofuturist novelty. A vision of a future that never was.

The Delica Starwagon was probably the most useful of the vehicles that he had at his disposal. The only reason that he didn’t use it every day was that he couldn’t fit a sheet of plywood in the back easily. It was basically a van, so to fit a sheet of plywood, he would have to do some seat removal. His truck served this purpose quite nicely and he didn’t mind throwing dirt and chains in the back of it. The Delica did not fit this use case, as the application of dirt to the back passenger area of the Delica would probably render Leslie emotionally fragile and irrecoverably remorseful.

It was supposed to be a shoebox on wheels, but due to its short wheelbase, its nose and ass hung out aggressively over the road. Protecting this exposed nose was a brushguard that could take a direct hit from an oak tree. Aesthetically, it occupied a strange area in the mind. It was a minivan, which was a wussy thing to drive around, but it was also undeniably feral in its styling. It had the sort of styling that would elicit calls of “Hell yeah, brother,” from random middle aged men in the way a pro wrestler would say it. These calls would come unbidden to their lips, completely reflexive and beyond their control. This dichotomy spoke to Leslie on a visceral level. This was a vehicle that was underestimated by almost all who beheld it.

The Delica was superbly balanced. The turbo diesel powerplant that drove this four wheel drive off road micro behemoth, was centrally located. Meaning that instead of your vehicle being nose heavy or tailheavy, you could balance the Delica on the head of a pin, making it as nimble as the belly gun of a B-17. If it had to be compared to an airplane though, it would be the A-10 lightning that would fit the bill. The A-10 was basically a utilitarian set of wings and a tail that made the GAU-8/A gatling gun able to fly around and deliver 6,500 rounds of 30mm shells per minute anywhere that was in desperate need of destruction. The Delica was a set of wheels that delivered its diesel motor to mountaintops and high desert plains.

Because of its Japanese heritage, the Delica would normally be a right hand drive vehicle. This would mean that Leslie would have to drive standard with his left hand. Leslie was normally up for this sort of challenge, but due to the nature of the driving he undertook in the Delica, he had opted to reconfigure it to a left hand drive setup when he had printed it out originally. Confusing fifth gear and reverse in an adverse driving situation could have suboptimal consequences.

Leslie spent about fifteen minutes excavating the shell of the delica and readying it for the transfer of the vehicle emulator. The emulator was a rather robust piece of kit, but the transfer operation was designed for a more controlled environment and the whole thing could be a bit ticklish if certain variables weren’t controlled for. Such as a few feet of snow, or the end of the world.

The transfer went as planned and he spent another fifteen minutes or so warming up the shell of the Delica. It had been at sub zero temperatures for at least a month and Leslie wanted to take the opportunity to squeeze every bit of warmth into his life while he still could. In the intervening quarter of an hour, he retreated to his yurt and packed all of his belongings into a backpack.

He traveled light by design. If something didn’t fit into his backpack, he got rid of it. Unless it was a piece of infrastructure like a car or a woodstove. He had a deer rifle that didn’t fit in his backpack, but that was technically infrastructural, so it had stayed with him throughout the years. He opted to bring this with him, in a just in case sort of capacity. This was a gun designed to kill things with four legs. It could be used on bipeds in a pinch, but Leslie didn’t foresee using it in that fashion. It would be far more useful as a deterrent, or a tacit implication of violence to come. He had never killed anyone, and didn’t plan on changing that fact anytime soon. These seemed to be ethically dynamic times, so it was better to be looking at a gun than looking for one in his opinion.

He also did a transfer of semi-important junk from his truck to the Delica. Tools, and general handyman detritus that he tried not to go anywhere without. The sword that contained the soul of Mr. Drake was included in this category. After a couple of final checks that everything was jam up and jelly tight, he got in the Delica and headed north.