Mickey walked in, and by walked in I mean kind of duck-waddled in the gap at the far end of the room that used to be a door leading to the entryway. He was holding these two big black plastic bags, the kind folks used to put trash in. They were full of something but I couldn’t tell what. He flopped down on the couch next to me without saying anything. That bastard was unflappable in the heat. He said it was because his mother was from Cuba and his dad was from Nigeria, but if that’s the case he’s the whitest Cubano-Nigerian I’ve ever met. He opened up these bags, and they’re full, totally full of oranges. The really big ones mom used to buy in the gorcery store. It was like he’d brought back a miracle. He looked up and smiled at me, and pulled one out. This thing was big, I mean big like you could barely put your hand around it. He handed it to me, and it was like I was looking at one for the first time. The dimpled skin, like someone had jabbed a sewing needle into it over and over; the rough-but-smooth feel of it in my hands; the smell, oh the smell of that thing, sweet and sharp and bitter all at once. It was amazing.

“Half’s yours.” he said, and that was it. He got up, picked up one of the bags, and left.

After he waddled out of the hole that was the door, I stuck my head in the bag he left behind and just inhaled, heat be damned. But you know what? That bag was cool. Cool! How the hell Mickey managed to keep these things cool all the way back here, I have no idea. I didn’t even notice the orange he gave me was cool to the touch, I was so entranced by the thing. He must have had three dozen or more of these things in the bag. I sat the bag on the couch and laid down on it and went to sleep.

I woke up a bit later and Mickey was back, sans oranges. He was dressed a bit differently this time. I figure he traded some of the oranges for some new clothes and stashed the rest somewhere. I unsuctioned myself from where I was laying on the couch and checked on the precious oranges, which were now not so cool but still in good shape. I pulled one out and started kneading it in my hands, watching Mickey shave. By the time he was finished I had softened up pretty good. I stuck a finger right in the top, where the little button part of the orange is, and started sucking the juice out. I figured the vitamin C should help with the muscle aches but I wasn’t concerned about the medical aspects of citrus at this point. I just kept going until there wasn’t much left in it. I tore the orange open down one side and flipped it inside out so I could start eating the pulp. Mickey was just watching me by now, and I was halfway finished when I noticed him staring.

“Whuh?” I said, mouth full.

“Boss wants to see us, when you’re ready.”

I finished eating. Boss could wait a little bit. I tossed the rind down next to the fire pit in the corner, figuring the dried rind would make a good firestarter. I rummaged around behind the couch for a bra, some pants and a tanktop. Once I’d pulled everything on and got around to pulling my boots on too, Mickey had gone into the other room and found my belt. I never even slept in there while he was away. Just flopped out on the couch and that was it. I’d throw stuff in there from time to time, but that was about it. I buckled the belt on, adjusted the holdster on my hip and we were good to go.

The weather had cooled a bit. It was starting to get breezy, which made me think a cool front was pushing some storms our way. It made all the awnings and flags and everything flap around. It was a nice feeling, knowing that soon the heat would just be gone. Mickey stopped along the way at one of the guys selling toothpaste. The guy gave him a tube; I guess he owed Mickey for some of the oranges. He squeezed a little bit into his mouth and handed it to me. It was one of those little travel tubes, the kind they started making after all that airline drama. I squeezed a bit into my mouth and rolled it around over my teeth with my tongue. It didn’t actually help get our teeth clean but at least now our breath smelled a bit better. Mine smelled like I’d just eaten an orange so that didn’t really matter but Mickey, well, Mickey was on a high-protein diet.

The Boss’ tent was relatively big compared to everyone else’s digs but that didn’t bother anyone. He’s The Boss, after all. I think it was one of those heavy duty camping tents, the kind that held about 12 or 16 people. Inside The Boss liked to keep things cool so he’d ran a cable from the generator like we all did, but he split it once it got into his tent and ran a whole bunch of pedestal fans off it. It didn’t really make things cooler, but it pushed the air around enough so that it didn’t feel like Death Valley in there. When he saw us come in he gave us a big smile. I think Mickey must have given him some of the oranges. He waved at us to sit down so we did. He had all these foldable chairs in his tent. It looked like he raided a camping store, really, which is what he did. It was weird to think that people actually went camping for fun but it was also weird to think that we would ever be in the situation we were in too. The Boss was tooling around on some kind of electronics on his desk and he still had the pliers in his hand, you know the kind with the really narrow tips? Yeah, those. He was flicking them open and closed with one hand. It was one of his nervous habits he did with things when he was excited or anxious. I couldn’t tell which was which at this stage. I didn’t want him to start talking because if he did, that would have meant that he was going to finish talking and that would have meant no more pedestal fan breeze.

“Mickey, thanks for the fruit. They were fantastic. Look, I know you just got back, but I’ve got a job for the two of you. I need you to go out to Parakeet and see what’s going on out there. I keep trying to get Davy on the radio but he’s not answering. He probably tried to fix it and messed it up or something. Take some rifles, go check it out. Tell Davy he can have some oranges next time he’s in town.”

Pretty straightforward, I guess. We didn’t have to kill anybody or take anything form anybody, not that we did a lot of that anyway, but the less the better. Last year we went out to the old dam we put up across the river and a bunch of guys had set up camp there, thinking they could just control the dam. That didn’t end well for them, and not really for us either, because they ended up blowing up the dam anyway. The more we can just get along with folks the better, since there’s less fighting and more fucking, as Mickey would say.

Once we got down to the pier Mickey found the zode that Holly had left there when she got in from Albatross the night before. I checked the fuel while he cast off. It started up smooth enough and once we got out into the open water we’d picked up enough speed that it felt nice. We could see Parakeet in the distance, a little dot of an island. The radio tower that Davy had put up just before the winter stuck up over the treeline, with this big flag waving from it. He found an old state flag and painted something on it. I don’t know what; I just heard about it from Mickey, who said it was ‘something with a dick on it’, as if I hadn’t heard or seen anything worse. We picked up a bit of chop about halfway to the island and looking behind us we could see the thunderclouds start to roll in over town. Every so often there was be a rumble and a far-off flash. I gunned the motor, hoping we could get over to Parakeet and back before the storm really opened up. It looked like it was going to be a big one.

Mickey said something to me but I couldn’t hear him. I thought he was just commenting on something out on the water, but then he pointed out at Parakeet. Now that we were closer I could see that another zode was pulled up at the Parakeet pier, one that wasn’t ours. Ours were all black, and this one was red. Mickey made a motion for me to cut the engine and I did, and we coasted in on the waves all the way up to the pier. Mickey hopped out of the zode and dropped into a crouch like he was some kind of specfor guy. He stepped over to the other side of the pier where the zode was and looked in. He straightened up, and I got the impression that everything was cool.

“Just goddamn Kodiaks again.”

“Kodiaks in a zodiac. That’s pretty funny,” I said, but Mickey wasn’t laughing.

We’ve had trouble with the Kodiaks before. They’re from upcoast, where they have a bunch of islands and coastland just like us. While we named all our islands after birds, they named all theirs after bears. Their main town was called Kodiak, so they were the Kodiaks. We actually had two towns, Cormorant and Albatross. Cormorant is on the shore and Albatross is our biggest island. Holly and a bunch of the others lived on Albatross, but came ashore every so often to pick up stuff. We lived in Cormorant, but we just called it Cor. That made us Cormorants.

I tossed the rope up to Mickey, and he tied us off. I hopped up out onto the pier and looked into the Kodiak zode. There was a bunch of trash scattered about inside, like somebody had been in it for a while. Lots of food wrappers and things like that. The Kodiaks liked to fish out of their zodes (which was ironic, since we were the ones named after a seabird), which meant they were in them a long time. They all had this weird thing about Skittles, too. One of them hijacked a truckload just after everything went to hell and drove it all the way back to Kodiak. That was years ago and they were still eating them. The way Mickey could tell for sure that it was Kodiaks was because of all the Skittles wrappers. I reached back down into our zode and grabbed our rifles. I tossed one to Mickey and slung the other one over my shoulder, and we headed off the pier and into the trees.

Parakeet was a pretty small island, but it was covered in pine trees, so there was plenty of shade. When Davy first decided to set up a listening post out here last year he went through and hacked down a whole bunch of them to make a road, even though we didn’t have any way of getting a vehicle on the island. Even when he ferried the supplies for the radio tower over he had to do it little by little in a zode. He took the trees he cut down and made himself a big log cabin right in the middle of the island, and right next to it was where he put the radio tower. The road leads right through the trees to both of them. It took us maybe two or three minutes to walk through the woods up to the cabin. Davy was sitting on his front step and the Kodiak was with him. He waved to us to come over.

He looked like he was baked, both literally and figuratively. He was bright red, like what the lobsters from the bay look like after we boil them up. He looked sleepy, which along with the roach in his fingers made us realize that he’d been smoking up with the Kodiak. They grow a lot of weed in Kodiak, so it wasn’t surprising that the Kodiak brought some with her. It was equally unsurprising that Davy jumped at the chance to get high. The guy was a hippie, born at the intersection of a cliche and a bad stereotype. He was a real peacenik, even though he was born after the big hippie movement. He was the kind of guy who went to protest marches, boycotted the big brands like Starbucks and Apple, ate organic, and smoked a hell of a lot of weed. Pretty granola, in other words.

“Hey guys,” Davy said, “what’s shakin’?”

Mickey sat down on the step next to him and took a pull off the roach. I gave a little nod in the Kodiak’s direction.

“Hey Davy,” I said, “who’s your friend?”

“Oh, man,” Davy said, “you should see the bag this lady brought me. Primo Kodiak Red, man.”

Mickey let out a little puff and gave the roach back to Davy, who promptly ate it.

“Jesus, where’d you get this stuff?”, Mickey asked.

Davy gestured with his hands. “Like I said, man, this fine lady brought me a big ol’ bag.”

“Hey Davy,” I said again, “who’s your friend?”

“Oh, that’s Lyssa. She came over to use our radio, but it’s busted, so we figured we’d just sit out and soak up some sunshine.”

“Not so much sun any more, Davy.” Mickey pointed through the gap in the trees to the clouds that were rolling our way.

“Oh, man. What a drag.”

I was starting to get a little impatient. I didn’t want to have to take the zode back in the middle of a storm.

“What do you mean ‘busted’? What’s wrong with it?”

Davy stood up and arched backwards.

“Oh, man. I gotta get in shape. Do some runs around the island. Yeah, so I blew a bunch of caps on my main board last night. I think I had a spike in my relay off the generator. Gotta get some parts and fix it, you know? Hey, you wanna come in? You guys will get soaked out here, man.”

It was clear that we were on ‘Davy time’ now, which meant things usually happened a bit of a slower pace than everywhere else. Resigned to the fact that we were probably going to have to ride out the storm here after all, I made a motion to Micket to go inside. It was much cooler in the cabin. Mickey made a beeline for Davy’s fridge while the Kodiak and I flopped out on his couch. It was a nice little place that Davy had set up here. He salvaged a lot of bits and pieces to make it work, so you had to give him that. He even had a game console gathering dust under his TV. You don’t see many of those these days.

Mickey came back to the couch with a handful of brews from Tony’s operation back in Cor. For some folks the war was the best thing to happen to them. Tony was one of those guys. Tony was a good guy, and made a pretty good beer. It’s pretty much all he did at this point, even though back Before it was more or less just a hobby. We popped open the beers and settled in. We sat there for a while, drinking beer, before I asked the question that we were all thinking.

“So, Lyssa,” I started, “what do you need our radio for?”

She looked at me for a moment before answering.

“We heard there was a doctor at Woodchuck, out on the Cape. We wanted to get in touch. Some of our guys are pretty sick. But since your radio’s busted, I guess that’s not an option.”

Mickey and I looked at each other. I swear Mickey actually shuffled a little away from Lyssa. Mickey was quiet ever since we got to the island. He liked to let me do the talking. He said it was because he liked the sound of my voice, but I knew it was because he tended to say what was on his mind a lot, and that got him into trouble sometimes. I mean, I’m not much better, but at least I can dress it up in a way that’s not going to hurt as much in the morning.

“Sick how?”, I said, “Bad food?”

“No. They went out onto one of our islands, Blackbear? They were checking on some game traps. There were some farm animals that were left there when the war began, and when they got out they bred. We trap them every now and then. You know, a bit of a treat.”

Like a truckload of Skittles wasn’t enough of a treat.

“What does that have to do with your guys? Did they get sick from the animals?”

“Oh, man. You better hope your dudes don’t have any of that anthrax, man. That’s stuff’s bad news,” Davy said.

“Thanks, Davy,” I said.

“No problem, man. Gotta keep you folks informed, you know?”

Lyssa drained her bottle of beer and continued.

“Best I can tell is that they came back from Blackbear fine, but then yesterday they both started to get really sick. Headaches, throwing up, that kind of thing. We figured it was pretty serious so we were hoping we could get in touch with that doc over in Woodchuck. But your radio’s busted, so I guess we’re going to have to drive over and get him ourselves.”

“Davy”, I said, “what will you need to fix the radio?”

“Oh, man. Maybe a half dozen car stereos would do the trick. Old, new, it’s all good. Get me those, and I’ll get your radio singing as good as new, man.”

Lyssa stood up as if to leave.

“Hey, Davy, you know we have that junkyard over in Kodiak, right? I could pull some radios out of the wrecks over there and bring them back tomorrow. Does that work for you?”

“Yeah, that’d be righteous.”

After Lyssa left we all just sat there for a bit. This whole situation just didn’t sit right with me, and I think Mickey could tell.

“Let me guess.” he said, “You’re wondering why she waited until now to ask for our help?”

“Yeah,” I said, “It would have been quicker for her to drive her guys down to Woodchuck. They would have been to the doc and back by now. Something just doesn’t seem right about this whole situation.”

Thunder burbled outside and the rain started to come down hard and fast.

Kemet and Kush are fractious lovers. They lie there together, at the water’s edge, on a rich blanket of midnight. Kemet watches the River Khem, and dangles one toe in the water lazily. Kush looks to Kemet, her soulful bister eyes deep with emotion. Kemet glances back at her and props his strong body up on one arm, his coffee skin bronzing in the midday sun.

He asks, “Why do we never get along?”

“Because you try to command me,” she says, a sense of defiance in her voice, “and I always refuse.”

“But in our hearts we always return to each other.”

“Yes, because you are strong, and I am wise, and we need each other.”

Kemet laughs, a hearty, raucous laugh. He kisses Kush on the forehead, her mahogany skin soft beneath his lips.

“What news do you have for me this day, my love?” he asks of her.

She strokes her bare belly. “I am with child, a willful and wild son of the desert.”

Kemet smiles, and then frowns.

“He will face many hardships.”

Kush gazes at her belly.

“I will bathe him in blood and honey and oil, and he will be cleansed in the waters of the River. He will feast on the barley and the emmer, the food of our peoples. I will teach him obeisance to Ra and Horus and Osiris, and you will instruct him in the ways of the Scarab. With him will go the jackals and crocodiles to forever be by his side.”

Kush looks up at Kemet again.

“Do not worry, my love. Our son is strong. May he always be so.”

It’s an allegory, Hafsah tells me. She sits there on my lap, playing with her hair and taking long pulls off a hookah on the table. She was expensive, not like all the other hensattis in this particular watering hole. I didn’t want to bed the woman. I just needed company. I’ve been in the desert a long time. It would be … improper of me to do so anyway. Scarabs aren’t meant to get friendly with the locals. It’s not our job. We’re the law, so we have to be impartial.

Hafsah fingers the golden scarab badge on my chest. A glance from me and she stops. She knows better than to mess with the symbol of a lawman’s authority.

It’s an allegory. Kemet, the pragmatic northern nation that hugs the western shore of the River Khem, gets portrayed as a strong male because Kemet’s always been the aggressor. Kush, the southern nation on the eastern bank of the Khem, is known as an intellectual powerhouse, but as an armed nation its not particularly strong. For hundreds of years, maybe over a thousand, Kemet and Kush have alternately warred and allied, fought and made up. Fractious lovers.

The door to the bar swings open, and the hot desert air sweeps in, bringing scents and sounds from the souq beyond. It’s him. Banoub, the Scarab-turned-outlaw. The man who wants my head.

Kemet and Kush are at peace now, brought together by the gods as a lasting union. The last war was pretty awful. It’s the first time that they’ve really had full armies go at each other, guns blazing. I saw action fighting for Kush, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the color of my skin. That was a while ago, though. Now, I’m a lawman in the new western frontier. A Scarab, they call us, because of the badge we wear. We’re technically appointed by the temples, which is why you get Scarabs who sometimes have silver badges, or obsidian badges, or whatever. Different temples, different gods, same job. You make your glyph on the papers, you get issued your badge and your Khepet .45, and off you go.

He stands there, unmoving. Nobody says anything. A little nudge and Hafsah is off my lap. My hand drifts down to my side, but I don’t get up. My other hand goes to the hookah on the table. He waits a moment, and then the moment he steps down into the bar, I’m up. He dodges the hookah, and it smashes black water on the far wall. One of the hensattis screams. He reaches. I reach. We draw.

A long, long time ago, the bedouins lived out here. We drove them off thinking we could civilize the place. It helps that they found gold out here too. Places back east didn’t have much. Kemet’s got this reputation for having a lot, but that’s the wonders of recent memory. It all came from out here. Sometimes, you get a joker who thinks he can throw his weight around and rule from the barrel of a Khepet, but it’s all because of gold. It always is.

The smell of gunsmoke fills the air. There’s a second or two before I realize what’s happened. Hafsah grabs me and pats me down. I have one less hole than the other guy. He’s slumped back in the doorway to the bar. I walk over and give him a nudge with my boot. He doesn’t move. I walk back over to the table and grab my hat. I reach into my pocket and pull out a roll of temple notes. I peel off a note for Hafsah and stuff the roll back in my pocket. I grab my hat. You can never forget your hat.

Sometimes you have to work with other Scarabs. It’s a necessity out here. Bandits and outlaws form gangs, so we need to as well. Sometimes we need to pick up a bedouin guide, and that’s okay. Sometimes they don’t speak the language, but they understand barley beer well enough. Sometimes we have to pull in an academic from Kush or some kind of city-type from Kemet. That’s okay too. If they can handle a gun and a horse, we can deputize them, make them ‘Little Scarabs’ as we call them (‘bugs’ if you don’t like us). It’s a hard life, and dangerous too. But it’s worth it.

I tear down the WANTED papyrus of Banoub from the wall before I leave.

The concourse is quiet, at least at this end. As I make my way to Gate 16 and freedom, I pass the TGI Fridays they put in last spring. It’s sparsely populated by businessmen and busboys, the dawn light slashing through the windows in broad orange bands. I have a moment where I regret hitting Starbucks, my stomach now hungering for something more substantial, but the sensation soon passes. The bar at the end of the Fridays is full already – or perhaps it never emptied.

I find my gate and take a seat in an empty row. This is America in microcosm; everybody is on their way to somewhere else. People are phantoms here, except when they’re filling a seat or losing a wallet. Somebody has left the detritus of their brief respite on the chairs opposite me. My face stares out from the folded D Section of the New York Times. It’s a bad photo, unflattering, in the washed out tone that passes for black and white at the Times. I grab the remnants of that august periodical and deep-six it in the nearby trashcan. My heart races. I’m actually scared. By 10am, the whole country (or at least that part that reads the Times) will see that blank expression in the Times Book Review.

A couple sits down opposite me, where the paper was. They’re young and old, big and small. The older one, a man, sucks on his coffee while the girl pecks away on her phone, an opening salvo of a constant barrage of text messages interrupted only by the dead air armistice of intercontinental flight. I get a dead stare from the man and I shift my gaze, casting around for something, anything to which I can switch my attention.

I settle on an elderly woman fighting to open a bottle of pills. There’s a man next to her on his cell phone; faced with the internecine battle between senior citizen and pharmaceuticals, he turns away. There’s a crack, a sound of maracas, and a shower of COX-2 inhibitors. The man on the cell phone, in an apparent mix of surprise and annoyance, kills the call and helps the octogenarian gather her pills. It’s then that I realize that this man is with her, in body if not in gentle attentions.

A woman’s voice echoes from the tannoy paging my flight. As one, the throng of people safely ensconced in their 2’ x 2’ comfort zones rise as one, as if an impassioned call for national service had gone out. Then there’s the slow shuffle to the gate as everybody realizes that no, they won’t get to go first, and that little slice of the American Dream dies inside. People forget this, like they forget to drive in the first snow.One at a time, we shuffle past the gate attendant, blank stares and averted glances as we press our boarding passes into her hand and she reciprocates with regurgitated platitudes. There’s that momentary feeling of liberation, and then as you go around the bend in the skybridge there’s the plane and the sinking disappointment of voluntary captivity, and one by one, we file on board like human cargo.