Desert Penguin Blues

Pierre was dictating as he drove. The little digital voice recorder paused and started with his voice.

There wasn't much else to do.

He was in the middle of the desert, returning from a mission. The sands around him were white. Pierre remembered hearing that they were comprised of pulverized gypsum crystals

He had helped kill 40 people that morning, trying to hide their crimes in the desert.

His cellular communications were out. There was no signal in the wastelands.

He passed his time listening to his own voice. "After the warming period, the climate shifted and the mini ice age we are currently in began." He blinked his eyes. The glare from the sands was blinding. The endless dunes were disorienting.

"Most of central North America is desert now, but not long ago it was fertile basin. We manage to make enough food to feed ourselves, but just barely. That is why population number is so critical." He paused, for dramatic effect. The recording would be broadcast over a school public address system. "That is why we look to you, our children and know that our future lies in your decisions."

Pierre Plinge liked projects like this one. On one hand they helped teach reverence to the young. On the other, they addressed the philosophical heart of his job; they reminded him why he killed the lawless in the desert.

His car went suddenly silent; the steering wheel refused to turn.

He sat for a moment, as the car stopped.

A panic filled his well-groomed mind.

He was stranded in the middle of nowhere.

###

Pierre Plinge hated scavengers.

Two of them were stopped ahead, securing something to their truck. It was an old truck with an extended cab with a rusted bed and patched tires. It looked like it had an old-fashioned gasoline tank, along with a modern ethanol-biomass fuel converter. He wondered where they found the gasoline, if they did.

They saw him walking towards them.

The pitiful truth was that he was happy to see them. Lawless bands roamed the desert. His car was inoperable, many miles behind him. He had no communications. He was running low on water. He wouldn't make it much farther in the desert heat.

They eyed him suspiciously as he approached. One was a muscular African American man; the other was an equally fit Caucasian male.

Pierre was flabby around the middle, and was proud of the distinction that bore. He was well fed, while they probably barely survived the desert.

He flashed the badge, to make sure they knew they had to obey him. "I'm Pierre Plinge," he introduced.

"An Observer." One man noted.

"You're a long way from a killing field, or a desk." The other added.

"My vehicle broke down. I need a ride back to the city. I'm commandeering your vehicle."

"Your lucky day, then," the black man noted. "Finding us here. Desert gets hotter as the day gets longer, and you aren't carrying enough water."

"I didn't intend to get stranded."

"You always carry enough water in the desert." The white man scolded.

"Let's get going." Pierre commanded.

"We're waiting for our partner." The white man informed. "She's picking up a piece of scrap we saw as we drove by."

Pierre nodded. He looked at the truck, crudely stenciled with their company name: "Estuary." A strange name, he thought, for a desert-based business.

The men had names sewn onto their shirts. The African American man, "Edward." The white man, "Ellison."

"Emma is back." Edward reported.

"Into the cab, G-man." Ellison said.

Pierre took the seat behind the driver. It looked the cleanest. He watched outside, as a lithe figure emerged over the dunes.

A girl, perhaps 17, appeared, carrying a large hollow plastic penguin. The sort that used to be used as a lawn ornament. She was impossible to classify quickly. Blonde hair, dark skin, Asian eyes. She wore rings at every knuckle on her fingers, the gemstones reflecting the overwhelming sunlight.

She looked critically at Pierre, while securing the giant penguin model in the bed of the truck.

"Serendipitous find?" Pierre asked, as she sat down next to him. Her partners climbed into the truck cab, closing doors.

"Saw it sitting in the desert. Scrap is scrap." She said.

"I like your rings. Bonuses?" he asked. She wore three to four rings per finger, all of them real precious metals and gemstones, some very expensive. Pierre counted. There were thirty-seven rings in all.

"We can keep what we want," she recounted. "You know the law."

"I'm not a regulatory agent," he assured her.

"Yeah ¿ and you don't know any, either."

Pierre retreated from the conversation. He was accustomed to the fear his position inspired.

The truck was moving, and he was able to feign an interest in the passing landscape. Dune upon dune, expanse of white sand drifting into white sane. The truck smelled of sweat and dust. A scavenger smell.

He tried his telephone again. Still no signal.

The scavengers were quiet. Pierre left them to their contemplation. He didn't like them, even though he recognized their duty. There was something unwholesome about free agents, sifting through the things death left behind.

The scavengers helped clear up material belongings. They were especially useful when whole communities died.

Without them the junk would heap up, and recyclables would go underutilized.

The scavengers could keep what they wanted, and sell the rest. If something could be salvaged it was. Nothing could be wasted; that was the mandate of their licenses.

Pierre was many stations higher. He was an Observer, sent to make sure those who should die died, whether they wanted to or not. Otherwise the living would exceed the numbers the world could support.

Resource management, economic policy ¿ everything was planned according to a population number. There was only a small margin for deviation.

His attention was distracted by a mechanical choking noise. The truck shook, and then stopped.

"Shit!" Ellison exclaimed.

"Is it dead?" Edward asked.

"Yes."

"Can you fix it?" Emma asked.

"Yes." Ellison paused, calculating. "But I need some parts."

Edward unbuckled his seat belt. "We have some at base."

"You crazy?" Pierre asked.

"It's a five-mile walk. We can make it before the afternoon sun. If we stay here, we're dead." Edward told him.

Emma opened her door and stepped onto the pavement.

"We have enough water," Edward replied, handing the Observer an insulated bag.

"Probably his bad luck caused the truck to die." Emma said.

"There's no such thing as luck," he reminded her. Superstition, he thought, just like a stupid scavenger to believe in luck.

"You seem to have pretty good luck today, Mister. We have extra water, so you won't die of dehydration." Ellison replied.

Pierre accepted the water. Emma picked her penguin out of the back of the truck.

"You aren't going to carry that, are you?" Pierre asked.

She nodded. "It's not that heavy, and I have straps. It can ride on my back."

"Why bother?"

"It's worth a lot of money. It's for the yard, and only the very rich have those. So they'll pay top dollar for something their neighbors don't have in their yards. I'm not having it stolen."

"I guess it looks light enough."

"It's made of old plastic. There's just a little sand in the base, to keep it from toppling over." She strapped the penguin to a backpack like device, securing it over her shoulders.

Pierre started walking with her, while her companions locked their truck down. She had a point. Very little arable land was available for something as frivolous as a garden. He himself lived in an exclusive high rise, which had a rooftop retreat. A garden stories above the crowded concrete.

Pierre and Emma walked ahead.

Ellison and Edward walked closely together behind them, carefully out of earshot.

"What are we going to do with the G-man?" Ellison asked. "He might see things. Figure things out."

"We couldn't leave him at the truck. I doubt he'd stay behind, anyway. We've been commandeered, remember?"

The quartet walked in the hot sun, the heat rising in waves off the reflective white sands: Three men, and a girl carrying a large plastic penguin, trekking through sifting dunes.

###

The water almost evaporated between the mouth of the water bag and his lips. Pierre hated desert assignments. He wanted to move up in the ranks just to get assigned somewhere more hospitable.

He had been called in the very early morning to a commune. What was it about crazy religion and deserts? He wondered. Those sects that still clandestinely preached individualism seemed drawn to the godforsaken sand.

"You like your work?" Emma asked.

"Yeah, I like my work. Just hate the workspace."

"You don't like the desert?"

"No, I don't."

"That must suck."

He nodded.

There was still limited arable land, preciously guarded. That land was used for expensive agriculture and as a reward for the privileged. That was why the population had to be strictly controlled. Deserts and ice caps did not support much humanity.

"What are you thinking about?" She asked.

"Old man. Would have been 90 years old now. He was a veteran of one of the Arabian Peninsular Wars. I was a witness for the prosecution when they brought him in."

"Those wars were early 21st century, before the great climatic shift." Emma said.

"Before modified ethanol became a viable fuel source. Now that part of the world was just sand and ancient anger." Pierre smiled. "The trial was about 30 years ago, early in my career. He'd be dead by now, anyway."

It was becoming very hot. He felt his skin beginning to burn, even through the intense sunscreen he wore as part of his uniform. I really hate the desert, he thought again.

Emma glanced back towards the two men, trailing them. She kept Pierre's mind busy. "So, what about the man?"

"He led a community, preached opposition to the population regulations. He said he believed in individuals, not governments. He'd forgotten who'd signed his paychecks." Pierre paused. "He had been in Qatar, said he'd heard a radio mufti, telling the population that the individual was subservient to their culture. He didn't like any system that suggested personal rights weren't indispensable. ¿Good of the one more important than good of the many' crap. I remembered him today when I raided a commune."

She became very quiet.

Pierre smiled. He enjoyed the fear he saw in her eyes, as she contemplated the nearly limitless police powers he enjoyed.

He looked back at the two men, then at Emma. "I thought scavenger units were usually family."

She shielded her eyes from the sun. The reflected light made even her youthful skin look blotchy. "Not always," she replied.

Pierre eyed them critically. There was a similarity about them, not withstanding their racial distinctions.

Their eyes were similar, he realized, Oriental in shape. Siblings, he thought. The girl is the youngest, a good 15 years younger than her fairer brother.

Three children went against sustainable repopulation laws. They must have had different mothers, one father.

One child per woman. That would be the only way they would have survived. The only way the community would have welcomed them. Every child a wanted child, not only by family, but also by society.

If he gained any evidence that any of them were the offspring of unapproved birth, he could kill them here and now.

There was a small rocky outcrop in the desert, the sands shifted to reveal a little piece of desperate scrub and shade.

"Let's stop here, rehydrate." Edward called out.

Emma and Pierre retired into the rare shade. The girl took the penguin lawn ornament off of her back. Ellison and Edward joined them.

"So, you're family?" Pierre asked.

"We're half-siblings," Edward said. He could sense the interrogation.

Pierre nodded. "And you live, here in the desert?"

"We have claims, staked throughout. No one else wants this territory. I'm surprised we weren't called to clean up your site this morning." Emma replied.

"It was a commune." Pierre said. "They were illegal, so everything escheated to the state. Nothing for you profiteers."

Emma quaffed a mouthful of water.

There was a rustle in the sand, and Pierre jumped back, pulling out his gun.

A sand viper peered up at him, tongue flickering wildly.

Pierre aimed.

Emma swung forward quickly and pushed his hand away.

He turned quickly and re-aimed the weapon at her. "No one touches an agent!" he proclaimed fiercely.

"You don't need to kill it." she said, staring at the gun. "It's just a snake. It doesn't use any resources we do. It's just trying to stay out of the sun."

"Hey, G-man, you're just thirsty. Put the gun away." Edward soothed. He approached carefully, with a small vial in his hands. "Take a sip of aqua. Desert sun can make us all jumpy."

Pierre needed them to get him out of the desert alive. He returned the gun to its holster. "You're not dead because you're helping me," he informed her.

Edward offered the man the small vial of water infused with nutrients. Pierre drank the aqua down. The wrinkles on his forehead relaxed.

Emma placed a few drops of water into her hand, her palm forming a little cup. She carefully maneuvered her hand in front of the reptile.

The snake slithered up to the water and drank the precious drops in. Quenched, it retreated into the shadows.

"It's not a protected animal," Pierre scolded.

"All the more reason its needs protection." She put the penguin back on her back, securing the straps.

They walked back into the desert, Pierre keeping up with Emma. Pierre noted her undisciplined mind.

If he determined that she was a threat to the peace, Pierre had a mandate to kill her. Spare the world another mouth to feed. Another set of lungs consuming oxygen. Another source of waste. A node of dissention.

He might have the opportunity to shoot her after all.

###

Pierre stepped carefully in the sands, following the path forged by the girl with the penguin statue.

The desert was populated with religious nuts, rebels, and outlaws. They didn't seem to mess with each other much. All of them seemed to content to hide out in the desert, thinking they were beyond obedience to the law. As if the desert itself was an aegis against authority.

The commune he had raided called itself the Salt Colony. He didn't understand the name, and he didn't care to.

There were 10 women in the colony and 11 kids. Simple math, there should have been only 10 children, maximum. One per each woman, her right to bear a child.

Pierre and the rest of the squad had shot the men of the colony first, then the women. Pierre had personally lined them up.

A little two-year-old had run after his mother, grabbing onto her leg. Pierre had pulled the tow-headed brat off, pushing him away. The child had run out again, screaming "Mama! Mama!" She reached for her baby, and Pierre shot her.

An underling held onto the child, while they killed the other women. It turned out two of them were pregnant. That would have been 13 brats, he thought.

Pierre had spit onto the desert sand, the moist spittle evaporating almost instantly under the blaring sun. Then he shot the troublesome little boy, still crying over the bloodied corpse of his dead mother. The gunshots resounded across the arid landscape.

The 10 children remaining would be relocated to the city, adopted into better-behaved families unable to bear their own biological child. There the children would be taught proper reverence.

It was an innate need, Pierre thought, the need to revere something. To be obedient to it. That energy just needed to be properly channeled.

The scavengers stumbled towards a large bank of Barkhan dunes.

Edward motioned to a space of eroded earth, beneath a sturdy rock pedestal. "You guys can wait in the shade," he suggested. "I'll go get the tools. No sense wasting any more energy in the heat. It's getting hotter. And we still have to walk back to the truck."

Pierre shook his head. "No. I'll go with you. And the girl." He gestured towards Emma, wrestling the plastic penguin off of her back.

"I can stay here," she suggested. "The penguin is getting heavy."

"You said you'd be alright," Pierre reminded her. "And we all go. I want to see your scavenger's nest up close."

"There's nothing to see," Edward replied. "Just stuff collected from suicides, accidents, other sites. Just junk, needing to be cleaned up before we try to sell it."

Pierre pulled out his gun, pointed it at Emma. "I thank you for the help and all, but my curiosity is now in an official capacity. I want to see your base."

Ellison scowled, nodded to Emma.

She picked up the penguin, holding it before her. Her many rings resplendent in the intensifying sunlight.

They walked solemnly up the windward face of an oversized dune, following the direction of the wind blown sand.

"We're nearly there," Ellison reported, attempting to put the agent more at ease.

Pierre motioned them forward with the gun. They sidestepped down the slip face of the dune.

Pierre's sight fell upon on their base.

It was larger than he had anticipated, arranged into a neat geometric order. Four large square buildings, neatly sitting in a grid with four equal quadrants. It was an obscene amount of space for three scavengers.

Pierre looked at the northwest corner of the base, where lines of yard statues were arranged in neat, ordered rows. They filled every description: Animals, gnomes, angels, and windmills. Made of plastic, resin, and stone. Sitting underneath the hot, searing sun.

Pierre pushed them forward, giving directions with his weapon.

They entered the base compound quietly, Edward going into the ground floor of the southeastern building. Pierre followed him, pushing Emma before him.

The large open space was full of tools and workbenches. Edward picked up a metal box, beginning to fill it with the accouterments of repair.

Pierre looked sternly at Emma. "Why do you keep so many lawn ornaments?" he asked. It seemed a misplaced luxury, in the middle of the abandoned desert. "I thought you said you sold them."

"Some are broken," she offered. "The better ones get top dollar. I repair the others as I can. I store them here until I can fix them up and find a buyer."

Pierre grunted, looking around. There was a workbench near him, with two portraits on it. They were family portraits. The woman was the same in each, an Asian American. She sat next to a Caucasian husband in the first photograph, a small boy resting on her lap. In the second she posed with an African American husband. The small boy from the first photograph was bigger, standing next to a little toddler with melanin-rich skin. A tiny, newborn little girl nestled in the woman's strong, gentle arms.

Pierre smirked. One woman, one child. Two of them were his to kill. He knew which one he wanted to kill first.

He pointed the gun at Emma. "I observe that you are not a legal person," he said slyly.

Emma did not look at him with the fear he was used to. Her amber eyes burned into his.

Edward froze, watching the agent carefully. He wrapped his hand around a heavy wrench.

Pierre motioned the girl outside. She followed the orders that flowed from the tip of the agent's gun.

Pierre stood with her outside the building, the sun burning high in the cloudless sky.

Emma looked straight at him, unwavering. Defiant.

He pointed the gun, readying his shot.

Ellison lunged out of the shadows of the building, grabbing the gun before Pierre pulled back the trigger.

"I am an agent!" Pierre screamed, "I'll kill you next ¿ for assaulting a government agent. They'll give me a medal for killing you!"

Ellison gained the advantage, propped the muzzle of the gun under Pierre's chin, and helped Pierre's forefinger choke down the trigger.

The shot exploded into the quiet, unhearing valley.

Blood and brain matter sprayed against the building as a fine raspberry mist.

Pierre's body slumped to the ground, the skin and hair crudely slammed off his skull by the bullet's exit. His eyes remained in their sockets, grotesquely large.

Edward stood at the doorway, surveying the scene.

"We need to clean up, before the blood dries and sets." He looked down at the Pierre's remains. "We'll take the body out to the wadi. Make sure we collect the shell casing. We need it for the scene."

Ellison shook himself off. "Do you think that will be enough?"

Edward hugged Emma. "The desert air will mummify him. It'll look like he chose suicide over dying in the desert. That's if anyone bothers to look."

"His car is still on the road."

"A car he abandoned." Edward reminded his half-brother. "Come on, we have to repair our own hunk of junk. Then we'll move his car into the desert. The sands will swallow it." He paused, thinking. "No one in the city bothers about the dying or the missing; death is exalted there. Even if anyone found him, a mid-management G-man blowing his brains out in a godforsaken dry wash isn't going to have anyone asking why."

"He would have been the first to appreciate that," Emma said.

###

Edward and Ellison disposed the body in a distant wadi and drove back to the scavenger's nest.

Emma looked over the expanse of sand.

The others who lived with them would be back soon, after nightfall. They would come back from the shadow of the old fault line, where they had located a little fertile oasis. The oasis bore fresh water that consistently bubbled in the deflation hollow. That supported fruit growing in a little orchard. Figs and sweet desert dates flourished.

No one suspected how many people were in the desert; the satellites never bothered to swing overhead. They were more concerned with guarding the arable land and protecting the borders from invasion.

Ellison and Edward brought in the things they had scoured from the pantries of the dead in the truck: Bread, canned meats, and powdered milk for the babies.

Emma took the penguin out to the neat rows at the northwest corner of the colony. She sat calmly on the ground, and pushed away the hot sand. The cool hidden soil revealed itself. She took a small spade, and dug a hole.

She toppled the penguin over, unscrewing the base. Inside there were fistfuls of little sealed plastic bags. Each was filled with ashes: Ashes and a small slip of paper with a name written on it. Sometimes, if the handwriting was small enough, there was even a short epitaph. Or a flower, drawn by a child.

She handled the ashes lovingly, gently placing them into the cool earth that lay beneath the searing sands. She started to sing, a lone hierophant whose voice was nearly lost in the desert winds.

This is what Emma and her colony did for hidden communities, bound together by their irreverence for the contrived lawfulness of the affluent cities.

It was the most dangerous of all missions: burying the dead. With land at its premium, burial was strictly forbidden. All remains were to be cremated, then scattered. It was a vigorously enforced law.

Scattering the ashes left the earth nothing to remind it that its clay had been made magnificent.

I nearly died myself today, she thought. My own ashes would have been lost.

No such luck had smiled upon the Salt Colony. The agents had killed them.

She knew the agents would have burned the bodies.

Edward and Ellison were going to the remains of the colony, to collect the ashes, and bring back whatever the agents had left behind.

The agents would not have found the hidden stores of spices and salt, the things the Salt colony provided. Now someone else would have to assume those responsibilities.

Emma started to cry, abstract thoughts no longer able to guard her emotions. Her tears evaporated before they fell down her face.

She grabbed fistfuls of sand, letting the grains run between her bejeweled fingers.

She thought of the Observer, his body providing food for animals that were not protected by his laws. Not served by reverence, not saved by obedience, she thought. And every scavenger knew that it is not saved by death, but by life.

She could hear Ellison beginning to hum on his harmonica, and Edward pick up his banjo. Their music began to fill the air.

Edward called out to her, and she went back to her home, to wash the graveside dirt from underneath her fingernails.

She knew why they were in the desert.

Only the truth mattered there.