The Scrapyard

The landslide happened at 4 AM. Nobody heard it. It was just dirt and metal and trees falling in the dark. By morning, the road out of Grizzly Gulch was gone.

Ray woke up. He was lying on a pile of old tires. The air smelled like rust and wet dirt. He stood up. He looked at the road. It was covered in a wall of mud and rocks. He walked to the edge. He could see a truck tire half-buried in the mud. That was all.

"Road's out," he said.

Dre came over. He was sixteen, tall, with shoulders that filled out his jacket. He looked at the road. He looked at Ray. He said nothing.

Misty came over. She had short blonde hair and eyes like ice. She looked at the road. She said, "Okay."

Cole came over. He was wearing a nice jacket. A nice watch. He had stolen both from his father. He looked at the road. He took out his wallet and looked at the cash inside. Then he put it away.

Nia came over. She was thirteen. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She put her hand on her stomach. She had known for two weeks. She had not told anyone.

Mouse came over. He was eleven. He was thin. His hair was yellow and sparse. His eyes were always wide.

"There's something out there," Mouse said.

Ray looked at him. "What?"

"In the yard. Deep in the yard. Something moves at night. I heard it."

Dre looked at Mouse. "You heard what?"

"I don't know. It sounds like... dragging. Metal on metal."

Cole said, "It's probably a dog. Stray dogs are everywhere."

Mouse shook his head. "It's bigger than a dog."

Nobody said anything after that. They stood in the cold autumn air and looked at the road and tried to figure out what to do.

There was no cell service. The nearest town was eight miles down the road, and the road was gone. It was mid-October. The first snow was coming. Nobody knew how to make a fire. Nobody knew where the fresh water was.

"We should try to dig through," Cole said.

Cole was the kind of kid who thought problems could be solved with enough effort. His father had taught him that. His father also hit him. Cole did not mention the hitting part.

"With what?" Misty said. "We don't have shovels."

"We have hands," Dre said.

Misty looked at him. She looked at the mud wall. She said, "Your hands are not going to move eight tons of mud."

Dre did not answer.

Ray sat down on an old oil drum. He watched the others. This was his favorite thing to do: watch. When you watch, you don't have to do anything. You just see.

Misty was good at seeing things. Not people. Things. She could look at a pile of scrap metal and find something useful—a bolt, a piece of wire, a shard of glass. She had made a knife out of a piece of steel that was probably part of a car door. She kept it in her boot.

"Let's explore," she said. "See what's in the yard. Find water. Find food."

"Food?" Nia said.

"There might be cans. Old food. People dump stuff here."

"Expired food," Cole said.

"Better than no food," Misty said.

They split into two groups. Dre and Cole went east, toward the old steel mill building. Misty and Ray went west, toward the dumping area where the garbage had been piled for forty years. Nia went with them. Mouse wanted to come. Misty told him to stay with Dre and Cole.

Mouse nodded. He looked disappointed. But he stayed.

Misty, Ray, and Nia walked west. The scrapyard was huge. Maybe fifty acres. Piles of metal reached twenty feet high. Cars, washing machines, tractor parts, rebar, copper wire, sheet metal. Everything someone had ever thrown away. The ground was covered in oil and mud and broken glass.

Misty walked with purpose. She moved between the piles like someone walking through a city. She knew where to step. She knew what to look for.

Ray followed. Nia followed.

After an hour, Misty stopped at a pile of rusted appliances. She dug through a stack of old refrigerators and pulled out a dented can. The label was gone. The can was rusty but intact.

"Food," she said. She rubbed the rust with her thumb. "Probably expired. But canned food lasts a long time."

Nia looked at the can. "I don't know."

"You don't have to eat it," Misty said. "You can trade it."

"Trade it for what?"

"For anything. Water. Firewood. Anything."

Ray looked at the can. He thought about his mother. She was probably dead. Or in rehab. Or in jail. He had stopped caring which. He thought about his father. He did not think about his father.

"Let's keep looking," he said.

They walked deeper into the dumping area. The piles got higher. The smell got worse. Old oil. Rotting wood. Something organic decomposing in a landfill. It was the smell of a place where everything had ended.

Nia stopped. She put her hand on her stomach again.

"You okay?" Ray asked.

Nia nodded. "Just... tired."

They found a stream. Small but flowing. Clear. Nia knelt and drank. Ray drank. Misty did not drink. She was looking at something in the water.

"Fish," she said. She pointed. Small fish, maybe four inches long, swimming in a pool near the bank. "We could catch those."

"How?" Ray asked.

Misty looked around. She picked up a piece of wire. She bent it. She shaped it into a hook. She attached it to a strip of cloth from her sleeve.

"A line," she said. "We need bait. But we can try."

Ray watched her work. He liked watching her work. She made things out of nothing. That was her talent. She took broken things and made them useful.

He wondered if she could do that with people.

They spent the rest of the afternoon catching fish and gathering firewood. Misty caught three fish. Cole and Dre came back empty-handed—they had found the steel mill building locked and had spent the time trying to pick the lock. It was a heavy door. They had not succeeded.

"That crane up there," Cole said, pointing at the giant rusted起重机 that dominated the center of the yard. "We could use that. Mirror on top. Signal the road."

"Whose mirror?" Misty asked.

Cole pulled a small mirror from his pocket. "My father's. It's in his car. I took it."

Misty looked at him. "You stole your father's car too?"

Cole's face tightened. "I took everything I could."

That night, they made a fire. It was not a good fire. It smoked more than it burned. But it was fire. Misty sat near it and sharpened her knife on a stone. Dre sat beside her and stared into the flames. Ray sat a little further away. Cole sat across from Nia, who was trying not to cry.

"My dad isn't a bad man," Cole said suddenly.

Nobody answered.

"He's just... not easy to be around."

Dre looked at him. "My dad drinks. He hits my mom. Sometimes me. You think your dad's bad?"

Cole looked at the fire. "I don't know."

Misty said, "My last foster home—the couple I was with—they had a cat. When the man hit me, the cat would hide under the table. I used to leave food for it. In case he ran."

She paused. She sharpened her knife. She sharpened it some more.

"My name's Ray."

Nobody had asked his name. He had just said it. That was his way. When something important needed to be said, he just said it.

Nobody asked why. Nobody asked what it meant.

Mouse ran in from the east at 2 AM.

He was breathing hard. His eyes were wide. His hands were shaking.

"It's gone," he said.

" What's gone?" Dre asked, sitting up.

"My shoe," Mouse said. "It was by the oil drum. Now it's gone. And there's something... there's something in the deep yard. I saw it."

"What did you see?" Misty asked.

Mouse shook his head. He could not speak. He just shook his head and sat down and pulled his knees to his chest.

Ray looked at the oil drum. Mouse's shoe had been there. He had seen it. It was a small brown shoe, the left one. He had noticed it because Mouse only had one shoe—a hand-me-down from a cousin that didn't fit right. The other shoe was newer, bought by Mouse's grandmother from a thrift store.

Ray stood up. He walked to the oil drum. The shoe was gone. In its place, on the dirt, was a footprint. Large. Bare foot. No shoe print.

He looked at the others. They were watching him.

"Someone took it," he said.

"Who?" Dre asked.

Ray shook his head. He did not know. He did not know a lot of things. He knew that the footprint was bare. He knew that it was large. He knew that it was facing the deep yard, as though whoever had taken the shoe had been looking at it when they took it.

He sat down. He went back to the fire. He stared into the flames.

In the morning, they found Mouse's other shoe by the eastern boundary of the yard. It was placed neatly on top of a pile of scrap metal, like someone had put it there. Not dropped. Not lost. Placed.

Ray looked at the shoe. He looked at the deep yard. He looked at the footprint that was no longer visible—the morning rain had washed it away.

He敲了敲旁边的油桶. The sound was dull and deep. Boing. Boing. Boing.

It echoed through the yard. Past the piles of metal. Past the old steel mill. Past the road that was blocked by mud and rocks.

Somewhere far away, a truck passed on the highway. The driver might have heard it. The driver might not have.

Ray knocked again.

Boing.

The sound faded into the scrapyard. The scrapyard did not answer.

Author Note & Copyright: