Avalanche Alley!

It had rained for three days.

Three whole days. Rain drummed on the Garage roof. It ran down the big doors in wiggly lines. It turned the street outside into one long, shiny puddle.

Inside, six monster trucks were very, very bored.

“Watch THIS!” said Bounce.

Bounce was the littlest truck in the Garage: round, yellow, checkered in green, and perched on four giant springs. His springs squished down and glowed yellow. SPROIIING! Up he went. Down he came. And the floor, which was wet, did not care one bit.

His tires skidded. He spun around once. He spun around twice. He slid all the way across the Garage and into the tire rack.

WHUMP!

Spare tires bounced everywhere. One rolled around in a big wobbly circle and flopped over.

“Why is the floor so SLIPPERY?” said Bounce, from under a tire.

“Because it’s wet, Bounce,” said Smash. She was the widest truck in the Garage, all purple paint and silver armor, with a cute skull-and-crossbones on both her doors. She didn’t even look up from oiling her chain in its tray.

“Wet floors are RUDE!”

The big doors rumbled open, and in rolled Mudslide.

Somewhere under all that mud, Mudslide was green. Rain dripped off his snorkel and his roof rack. The Garage’s little washing brush took one look at him and rolled back into its corner.

(His puddle arrived with him, as usual. For once, everybody knew why.)

“Rain’s been heavy, dudes,” Mudslide said slowly. “The creeks are up. The trails are soup. It’s gnarly out there.”

“Three DAYS,” said Nitro. He was a long blue wedge of a truck, with white lightning bolts and a spoiler as big as a door. He was doing laps around the lifts, because Nitro could not sit still. “I haven’t been on the Speed Strip in three days. My engine’s forgetting how to be fast.”

Big Stomp watched them all from beside the Launch Ramp. He was the leader of the crew, big and square and red, with orange flames on his sides. Secretly, he wasn’t bored at all. He liked rainy days. Everybody home. Everybody safe.

Then the Command Screen flashed red.

BEEP BEEP BEEP.

Then it flashed red again.

“Double red,” said Torque. “That means emergency.”

Torque was the orange truck with the black-and-yellow hazard stripes and the crane arm tucked behind her cab. Whenever anything happened, she was already at the screen.

A picture came up from the weather camera on Canyon Ridge. It showed a steep, narrow valley of red rock, with a brown river rushing along the bottom. Little stones were bouncing down one side of it. Then bigger ones.

“Avalanche Alley,” said Torque.

That was what everybody in Rumble City called the steep upper valley of Canyon Ridge. After a lot of rain, the rocks up there got loose. An avalanche is when a huge pile of snow or rock comes sliding down a mountain, all at once. Most avalanches are snow. In Avalanche Alley, they were rock.

While they watched, the whole side of the valley let go.

It slid. It tumbled. Rocks as big as trucks bounced down the slope and splashed into the river. On and on they came, until the rumbling stopped and the dust drifted away in the rain.

The river had stopped. A great heap of broken rock lay right across it, like a wall. And behind the wall, the brown water was spreading out, wider and wider.

“That’s a dam,” said Torque quietly. “And that’s a lake. A lake that wasn’t there two minutes ago.”

She made the picture bigger. At the bottom of the rock heap, thin jets of water squirted out of the cracks.

“And the dam is cracking.”

Even Nitro stopped doing laps.

Big Stomp did not shout “LET’S CRUSH IT!” He had no idea what “it” was yet. He was learning to wait until he did.

“Crew,” he said. “Everybody’s going.”

Nitro’s headlights went wide. “Everybody? Me TOO?”

Nitro had been left behind before. More than once.

“You too,” said Big Stomp. “This one’s going to take all six of us.”