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Cold wind whisked the furry caterpillars of sleep. Twin spears of light probed the ink of the desert night and left no trace. Snippets of electric guitar slipped into the vortex of white noise, then whipped out of the open window into the void. Hugging the yellow line as I skirted a sandblasted granite buttress, surging suddenly as the V8 crested the grade, I burst onto an alien outpost on a rogue planet.
Shimmering blue green across an alkali lake, steel towers jetted plumes of steam through the mercury glare into the desert night. My engine fell silent and the music hushed as Trona pulled us out of the darkness toward towering heaps of slag. A No Vacancy sign slued about a rusted pole in the winter wind. A burned out diner caught tatters of paper in the twisted wire of the doorway, while across the highway, the shuttered Burger King awaited its fate. Yellow gray dust swirled out of the gutters as I passed. I saw not a single human being nor even a tree as my white ship glided inexorably toward the quivering maw of giant conveyors. Arc light strobes left sunspot flares on my retina, and a dull throbbing croaked out of the earth through my bones. Gravity hauled against my jaw, and my spine creaked. I startled as the engine roared to life, and as I leaned hard on the wheel, the tires finally bit into the gravel and growled. The truck bolted beyond the gauntlet of metal fences, past the jumbled graveyard of tortured cars, back into the sanctuary of moonless desolation.
Trona does not casually relinquish its captives. Asphalt snakes slithered across the tarmac, writhing hypnotically as I pressed the pedal into the floor. Shards of glass glinted in the blackness, a large bush flashed across the hood, and lava boulders menaced the narrow roadway. Beyond the ghost town of Ballarat the road turned to rutted gravel, and the frantic whine of rubber against baked stone relented. The truck geared down to climb the winding wash while the Panamints cast a charcoal silhouette against the galaxies in the northeastern sky. High above, the ancient scorpion rotated imperceptibly toward the dawn.
Wells Shoemaker, Winemaker