They traveled through the night, and Mercy woke the next morning as the truck jostled over a roughening road.
Through clouds of swirling, ochre dust that already suffocated the early morning air, Mercy spied thin spires rising from the horizon. They stretched higher as the truck neared them, and it was not long before their peaks vanished in the smog that hovered over the land. Mercy first thought she approached a city teeming with towers, but only the single roadway approached the shapes still rising from the land. Mercy watched as the spires shifted into rougher shapes. Their lines were haggard. None looked level or plumb. The truck drew closer, and she could see how each spire was a tall pile of stacked refuse. I-beams twisted with rebar held the shapes. The spires appeared to waver in the dust, upraised talons of some herd of giants buried beneath the orange ground. The spires crowded her vision as the truck entered their shadows, the dust so thick that it caked the windshield and dimmed the sunlight like a veil.
A horn blared somewhere within the dust enveloping the truck, jarring Mercy from her ruminations upon the tall towers. She squinted in the passenger side rear view mirror and saw the dim glow of truck headlights stretch in a long line behind her. She peered through the windshield and couldn’t count the taillights that extended in line in front of them. Trucks crowded the roadway and moved slowly through the field of towers, and Mercy recognized that they too were crowded with the detritus of the outside world, her mind realizing that those trucks carried the blocks that stretched the spires so high.
“Is this the end of the line?” Mercy asked.
The driver surprised Mercy by nodding instead of grunting.
The truck slowly moved deeper in the teetering shadows. Mercy began to recognize household items in the stacks: jutting barbeque grills, loveseat cushions, stoves, washers and dryers. Glass from a thousand mirrors and windshields glimmered a weak twinkle of orange. Exercise equipment rotted in the rust. Baby strollers lay listlessly on their side.
The road narrowed the deeper the truck moved into the shadows. Mercy sensed a vibration working through the truck before she heard the low, grumble of machinery. The dust reluctantly revealed the source of such power. The truck was nearly on top of the swinging shape before Mercy recognized the iron skeleton. A massive crane, as high as the towers around her, swiveled in the windshield’s view. Smoke bellowed from its base, thickening the pall already cast by so much dirt and rust.
Mercy’s eyes widened as a shadow passed over them and a wide magnet drifted into her sight. The magnet’s momentum stilled above the salvage carried by a truck a couple places ahead of them in the line. The truck shuddered as the magnet lowered onto its bed; and for a moment, Mercy thought the entire truck would rise into the air to find a spot so high atop the piles of scrap. But only its contents clung to the magnet as the crane lifted away from bed.
The crane began another turn with a new salvo of belching, black smog. Mercy closed her eyes. The space between the stacks was too narrow. The rust and dust hung to heavily in the air. Such smog did not afford whoever operated the crane enough vision to manipulate the magnet’s sway in such narrow spaces. Mercy shuddered as she imagined the crane slamming into a junk tower, beginning a domino effect that would bury her alive beneath slag and tin.
But the sky did not fall. Mercy reopened her eyes and watched, spellbound, as the crane turned to another pile and dumped salvage onto the stack without crashing the salvage yard upon them before swaying the magnet to the next bed brimming with refuse.
“What becomes of any of it?” Mercy asked as her eyes followed the crane.
Again, the driver only grunted.
“Does it all just stack up then? Is this just the end of it all?”
The driver continued to ignore Mercy.
Mercy glared at him. Her patience emptied. Her legs cramped. Her bladder threatened rebellion.
Mercy kicked the door open, but her dramatic flair made no impression upon the driver. She offered her own grunt as she dropped to the ground and felt the fall’s distance wrench her ankles and throb her knees. Horns blared at her audacity. Dust inched into her into her pink scarf and irritated her sunburned neck. She turned towards the crane and felt something bite at the back of her hand, the quick pain flashing alarms in her mind. Did a pack of dogs guard the salvage yard? Could the trucks see her through the heavy dust? Could the crane? Had she chosen her doom by foolishly exiting the vehicle?
“Heaven grant me mercy.”
Mercy twirled into an old man’s scarred face missing an eye. The stranger clasped her arm.
“You must be careful in the yard,” the man’s voice sounded strangled by peanut butter, “or you will cut yourself. You can bleed if you move too quickly.”
Mercy stammered and coughed in the dust. “How do you know my name?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said my name.”
The old man scratched his scarred chin with a scarred finger. “A name?”
Mercy nodded. “Yes. A name.”
“I can’t remember.” The old man’s remaining eye filled with tears, and it looked away as if ashamed. “I don’t know anymore. But Brandon might. He might be able to remind me.”
The old man shuffled ahead a few steps into the dust, pausing a moment to beckon Mercy to follow him. Mercy noticed her hand was bleeding, the cut testimony that the old man’s caution was well-founded. Mercy decided she would follow one more stranger. They walked towards the direction of the crane’s rumble, and Mercy could hardly hear her thoughts.