I can’t help but yawn behind the wheel of the double sized garbage hauler. Been driving for like 16 hours, and I’m almost at the dumping ground. The sun is rising behind me, and my body aches from sitting so long.

But mutie-town finally crests over the horizon.

A sprawling city, with buildings dozens of stories high, and factory smoke stacks spewing their dark grey clouds. To the left of the city is an even more sprawling pile of trash, dumped from every country on the planet. By Protectorate decree, the states on Gorsko are to dump their garbage in one of several of these mutant settlements dotted around the world. It was just bad planning that the nearest settlement to ours is 800 miles away. So guys like me have to drive a truck on a straight highway for over half a day straight. There’s only one rest stop along the way, so it’s eight hours between breaks.

But at least it pays well.

I pull off the highway with the rest of the garbage haulers, then follow the road around the garbage heap until I reach the parking lot. There’re probably a hundred garbage trucks at the lot at any given moment, with trucks coming and going at all times. The back of each hauler is an enclosed bin, and between each column of parking spaces is a track that a large crane rolls across. The staff of the garbage lot come around with those cranes to take the bins, dump their foul cargo in the heap, then attach the now-now empty bin back in your hauler.

I open the door and I’m instantly hit with the fresh scent of layered garbage mixed with burning coal from the nearby forges. I’ve gotten used to it, and I’m a little upset at that.

When I step down off the truck, a group of mutants swarm me.

“Hey!”

“What did you bring?”

“Anything good?”

“Mind if I take a look in the back real quick?”

“I’m looking for a small spring about yey-big.”

“Scrap metal for me! Just 37 oz of pig iron and I can finally finish this project.”

The mutants are only 3-4 feet tall, and are covered head to toe in bulky robes, with a mask. The mask, usually, is solid white, with black markings to create the face. The only difference between male mutants and female mutants is the females draw eyelashes, and sometimes their voices a higher pitched. They jump up and down to grab my attention, but some are sneaking around the back of the truck to try and sneak inside the bin -not that any of them are tall enough to reach the bottom run of the ladder.

This happens every time, and regulation says no. They can’t go rooting through the bin before the lifts get here. They never get out in time, so the lift takes them, dumps them off, and usually these little idiots get buried in trash and garbage. A fitting way for them to go, to be fair.

They never take no for an answer, and usually start kicking me in the shins (shin pads are standard issue for garbage haulers), but I have an excuse today. I take off my watch and dangle it in the air, all their motion stops, and those masks look up at it.

“My watch broke a few days ago. I need it repaired. Can any of you do that?”

They all start jumping to try and grab it out of my hand, or shove each other to get closer.

“Me!”

“Me me me!”

“I can fix it! I specialize in clock repair!”

“Well, I specialize in watch repair, so I’m the perfect choice!”

“I repair everything, hand it over!”

I clear my throat, prompting them to stop. “I just need one of you. I don’t care who. Figure it out yourselves.”

Silently, the crowd of masked mutants organize themselves into two lines. They pair off with their opposite, then pull their small hands out of their robes. Their hands are bound tightly in thick gloves to protect their skin while digging through trash.

They play a single round of rock-paper-scissors, and half the mutants are eliminated. Then the remaining half pair up for another round, and so on until there’s just one girl left.

“Looks like your watch be left in my care, Mr. Deliveryman. I’ll take you to my worskshop.” She speaks with a raspy voice, like she’s smoked for decades, though mutants rarely live longer than 50 years.

She holds out her hand, and I give her a handshake.

She looks down at our hands and freezes. I then remove my hand and place my watch, and it’s like she reactivates. She promptly turns on her heel and heads off towards the city, leaving me to slowly walk after her.

Leaving the lot, we step onto a conveyor belt that takes us all the way to mutie-town. A wonder of engineering, the small legs of a mutant makes it hard for them to travel long distances, and so many of them are missing chunks of their lungs, or had surgery to remove giant, pulsating tumors which also stripped large sections of muscle fiber from their legs. The conveyor belts are necessary to get them to any location further from their house than a block or two. As I ride, mutants hop on and off, with some riding on small, motorized carts full of garbage that they think is treasure. The carts are sized perfectly to fit between the railings, and the cargo containers on the back are enclosed and locked, to keep their fellow mutants from stealing their treasures.

All mutants wear robes and masks similar to the girl. Not all of them are horrifically scarred, but most are, and it’s become a cultural outfit.

The mutant girl holds up my watch up, letting the light hit it just right. She turns it over and over, then bends and tugs the leather band.

“Is it that interesting?”

“Yes,” her voice is just barely audible over the distant sound of a highway and city bustle. “The hands aren’t moving.”

“Yep, it’s broken.”

“Which is interesting! Why is it broken? The outside looks fine, so it must be the internal… stuff. I don’t know the terminology since I’ve never fixed a watch before.”

“You haven’t?” I smile and raise an amused eyebrow. “Should I go back and give it to someone else to fix?”

Keeping her gaze on the watch, she dismissively waves her hand. “Too late, I’d never give up this beauty before it’s as good as new.”

I don’t think she realizes that I’m literally twice her height, and there’s nothing she could do to stop me from taking it back. But oh well, I know she’ll get the job done.

The conveyor belt turns into an escalator wide enough or the carts, and rises to a bridge 40 feet in the air. We’re brought over an ultra-wide highway, with trucks, garbage haulers, and cars zooming by both ways.

They conveyor belt returns to the ground, and we continue towards the outskirts of the city. A residential section where none of the brick buildings reach higher than four stories. The conveyor belts are raised over the streets of the residential district, with the mostly unused roads only wide enough for ambulances or firetrucks to pass through. The belts stop at every intersection, and we have to get off and on each time, passing by other mutants who are going about their daily tasks.

Placed sporadically around are elevators wide enough for a group of mutants and their carts to reach the sidewalks below.

“My workshop is over here,” she says, stepping onto an elevator.

“Alright,” I have to bend over a little to step inside. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“My name?” She doesn’t turn her head away from my watch. “Uh… my name was… Tik? I think? Tek? Tak? Something like that.”

“I’ll call you Tak then.”

“Sure.” The elevator reaches the sidewalk, and she steps out, eyes still locked on my watch.

“I’m Arno. A zweihorn, as you can see.” I reach up and tap my right horn with my knuckles, which creates a solid knock that’s just barely audible over the hustle and bustle of mutie-town. My horns start just above the space between my eyebrows and temples, then sweep backwards, protecting the top of my head and ending in two dull points four inches behind my skull. The compact structure of my horns lets me easily sit in a car for hours, with no risk of bashing them through the windows, or scraping the ceiling. They’re why I get paid a lot of money to drive a garbage hauler.

“Okay.” She stops walking for a second, looks up from my watch, then turns around. Her home is a few houses back. A brick building of three stories, with a wooden door on the right side, and a metal, sliding garage door on the left. A uniform design seen everywhere in the residential areas.

Tak opens the door and slips inside, not bothering to hold it open for me as her guest.

Every building is the same in mutie-town, her first floor proves that I know exactly what I’m dealing with. There are two rooms on the first floor. Tak’s bedroom is a small, sectioned off area placed on the back right wall. The door to her bedroom is open, so I see there’s just enough room for her bed, a mutant-sized dresser, and I see she keeps it tidy.

The rest of the first floor is dominated by storage space. Tall metal shelves placed tightly together, lining the walls, and forming isles so narrow that I have to turn sideways to shimmy through. Each shelf is my height, and has unmarked boxes full of parts or equipment. As with how every mutant organizes, Tak’s shelves are coordinated via parts. One shelf might be dedicated to screws, with each box full of screws of a particular size, and then one box full of screwdrivers. Another shelf would be dedicated to nails, or washer, or tubes.

Everything in the room has been scavenged from the garbage dump, usually from an abandoned piece of machinery that she broke down for spare parts.

I grab one box and pull it out of the shelf, the bits inside rustling and clanging against each other. It’s full of gears no bigger than my thumbnail, each perfectly polished and free of dust. She must go through each of these shelves often, making sure the parts are maintained.

“Hey! Hey hey hey!” She snaps as she rushes back to me, “don’t touch that! I have valuable…” she turns her masked head to look at the box for a moment, “stuff in there! I don’t want your giant, oafish hands damaging them.”

“Sorry.” I push it back into place.

“…Turn it more, so the front of the box is flush with the edge of the shelf.” I do so. “Good.” Tak turns around and walks to her workspace.

Following her, she reaches a mutant-sized desk placed to the right of the bedroom door. The desktop is clean and organized, with each item in a specific spot, and there’s a rubbery pad laid in the center. She gently sets my watch in the center, then walks inside her room.

“I gotta get ready, sit down if you’d like.”

There’s a human-sized chair to the left of the door, so I sit there. Since the door is still open, I get a clear view of what she’s doing.

Tak starts by taking her mask off, setting it on a special stand on the cabinet next to her bed, then she pulls down her bulky hood. The gloves come of next, folded and placed neatly on hooks under her mask.

She’s actually not bad looking, for a mutant. Bald, with random tufts of hair on her head, but she’s clearly done her job of keeping the random patches trimmed down. She’s pale, as to be expected, and the patchwork of surgery scars almost blend in with her skin. Though I still notice the wide, barbed-wire-esq scar tissue crisscrossing her cranium and face. Her face is small, but less like a child’s, and more like a scaled down 30-something year old woman, with wrinkles, and tired bags under her eyes.

Tak doesn’t have a nose, or rather it was surgically removed long ago, leaving only two nostril holes. Her first act to make herself presentable is to take a fake nose from her cabinet, colored pale like her skin with a similarly-colored strap. She pulls the strap back, fits her head inside, and secures her fake nose in place. Next, she takes a blonde wig from another drawer in her cabinet, then puts the shoulder length, straight hair on her bald head like a cap. Finally, Tak’s left eye is gone, there’s just an empty hole with a loose eyelid. She takes a glass eye, polishes it a little, then pops it in the eyehole, blinking and looking in a mirror until it’s set correctly. The glass eye’s pupil is a light purple, while her real eye is a faded, cloudy grey.

Given the blonde hair and purple eye, she seems to be imitating an elysian. Elysians do a lot of charity work for the mutants, so she probably interacted with one in the past, or was given this set by them.

But with that, Tak leaves the bedroom, walks to her desk, pulls out the child-sized chair, and sits down. She starts working on my watch, but stops for a moment and looks at me. “Looking at me doesn’t make you want to vomit, does it?”

“No.”

“Oh okay.” She turns back to her desk, taking a screw driver placed neatly in the corner so she can start dismantling it piece by piece.

“About how long will this take?”

“Dunno.” Each piece she removes is carefully placed on the table pad. It’s organized in accordance with how it all fits together, so she’s figuring out how the thing works before she figures out what’s broken. “Oooh,” she leans in closer, “that’s interesting.”

“What is?”

She doesn’t answer.

I huff and lean back in the padded chair, stretching my legs and resting my hands on my belly. I just finished driving 16 hours, and mutants don’t mind if you take a nap while waiting for their repairs. She’ll either wake me up when she’s done, or she’ll forget about me and leave my watch in some bin.

It doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep.