The Desert Stars: Fiction Dabbling

The following fiction is in response to a challenge run by @blockurator, which you can read about here. I've been thinking about this 'farmpunk' genre he'd been posting about and turning it over in my story writing head, and my recent trip to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia got my creative writing juices flowing. I'm not sure I quite nailed the 'farmpunk' genre in the way he wanted us to, but I hope he, and you, enjoy it anyway!

The desert dust, Mish thought, could look a lot like dried blood. Did it taste like blood, too? Pinned between the crushed bulkhead of the Runner and the driver’s seat, she was uncomfortably sideways, and wasn't sure if it was blood that stained her Hard Yakkas or urine. Momentarily panicked, she realised that the cabin was still miraculously sealed, she wriggled frantically, wary of pain. There was a dull ache in her legs which she presumed was a good sign – she was more stuck than pinned. The bloody kangaroos out here – she knew it was only a matter of time before she hit one. That’s why she was paid the danger money, of course.

She checked the dials. The solar panels were still charging the battery banks and would until it got dark. After that, the reserve should keep it running til the morning. That would be enough time for the rescue crews to come up from the coast and find her here. People had survived worse – as long as the Runner’s associated systems were being charged, she’d have clean air at least. One whiff of that outside air and she would be shot if she tried to get back into the City. She’d saved so much, enough to move to the High Gardens, get a job in the bio-dome’s New Farmland. Grow pumpkins, maybe, or corn, if they worked out the water supply a little better. She’d almost done her tour of duty out here, running food supplies from the Newpo’s stations to the rest of them safe in the domes on the Coast. Enough credits to get her into a better life. Perhaps she’d have children, see them grow old too.

She could hear the cry of crows outside the Runner. She knew what they were here for – anything stationary on the highway was potentially a food source. The crows weren’t the the only ones after meat – the huge wedge-tailed eagles came down too with their efficient talons to rip flesh from bone. From her awkward position should could see the ‘roo kicking in the gravel, it’s back broken. It’s ear caught the wind slightly, a macabre sail, catching the red desert light. Saw toothed mountains prickled at the lonely sky. How anyone could choose to be a New Pastoralist? Was it worth a few snatched years under the stars, the touch of rain on your skin?

She wanted to ask the girl and her father on the back seat but she wasn’t sure if they were alive, and couldn’t manage to turn her head to look. She swallowed, fumbled for the water that had been on the seat beside her on the way up, took a swig. ‘You okay?’ she croaked.

‘Yeah, we’re alright. Been trying to wake you.’ the father said. ‘You’ve been out for an hour’. The intercom crackled. There was at least that, a flimsy connection between her and other life, even if it was Newpos. They were voluntary, too, damn fools. Most of the New Pastoralists, or the bastardised ‘new-pos’, were petty thieves, a few murderers, social outcasts. Send to the colonies in the North to work the old cattle stations, supply meat for the city. The term was a romantic one, dreamt up by a government trying to sell it to the masses. They needed the food supplies yet all those farms were sitting empty since the plague. It was only the humans that were affected – seemed the flora and fauna were having a good time of it out there without man to ruin things.

‘There’s nothing we can do but sit tight’ Mish said, mustering some kind of authority, confident that she controlled the outer locks and they couldn’t exit without her. The warning light was flashing. The two sections of the Runner were independently sealed with one switch. Hermetically so. This protected the driver from any contaminants in the back, usually when they released the new-pos at the stations. The door would then seal, the jets would come on, sanitise the back and the Runner would be hers again. On the long runs north, she’d sleep in the back, the moon roof allowing a view of desert stars. But the warning light meant that they were both sharing the same air, and that had her worried. It meant that if she died, they would be stuck in here. If she let them out by pressing the switch for the back door, she’d let in the plague.

Even if she lived, she’d be doomed. Life expectancy after plague exposure was five years, sometimes ten, if you had the genes to fight it. She thought of the pumpkin harvest, neatly stacked. She thought of the candles in the hollowed out gourds and the smiling faces of children distracted by the joviality of seasonal ritual changed irrevocably by the onset of the plague. Yet, how much easier it would be to grow vegetables in the dome than run cattle? To live a good seventy years instead of twenty or thirty?

‘They’ll be coming for us soon.’ She could see their faces now in the rear-view mirror when shr moved her face an inch to the left. ‘That hurt?’ she said to the girl. The ochre tattoo on her cheeks, three striped bars that marked her as new-po, was red as quandong fruit, fresh. The girl shook her head. ‘He make you get it?’ she said. She had so little respect for the volunteers. When they put their hands up to be graziers, farmers, stock workers, they were bound to take their whole families too. Whilst clearly the girl was all he had, still, when he got the ochre marks, that sign of the desert a rite of passage, a transition symbol that said he no longer belonged to the city. With those marks, everyone he passed in those last weeks would know he had weeks to say his goodbyes and gather what he needed to leave forever. She guess the rule about family guaranteed they had nothing to return for – mind you, if they did, they’d be shot on sight from the Hightower lookouts. There were protocols, after all, to stop the plague entering the sterile walls of the city. Same ones for her as the new-pos.

‘No,’ the girl said finally. ‘I wanted to come. It was my idea. You have to let us out now.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ she said. ‘I’m not going to be no new-po’.

‘You have farming people in your history?’ the father asked. He was trying to find an in route, she knew. Create a common bond so she’d do as he wished. He could damn well wait, she thought. When the Runner behind them caught up, they’d be able to do something. Anything. Pry her lose, get her in their cab through a chute used for such emergencies. She reached for the ‘coms, called into the void. Nothing. Perhaps the driver behind had already passed them? As if reading her mind, the father said what she’d feared: ‘They passed us half an hour ago. Thought we were dead, I reckon. Didn’t even slow down. It’ll be weeks before the next convoy’. The Runners always went in threes – she was the middle one. If only she could get the radio to work – they’d come back for her. She kept fiddling with the dials.

She did have farming people in her history, which is why she was reluctant to take this damn job in the first place. It was that that had cursed everyone in her line since her great, great, great, great father set off in search of good pasture land some two hundred years ago. Drove six horses and a bastard camel hundreds of miles northward before they’d surveyed the land and made it into the wasteland it became for scores of years before they’d learnt to manage the land. This long distant relative had seen a bird he wanted killed, gutted and stuffed to sit on his mantelpiece, pulled the camel to its knees to get out the ammunition, forgot the gun was already loaded. The camel reared and bucked in annoyance and the gun blew off half his face. He lasted the three week journey home and died within three days in his own bed. Despite this disaster, his sons too travelled north, became pastoralists, ran cattle over hundreds of acres, and made their fortune. Until the drought hit and they couldn’t feed the stock. Her great grandmother’s letters to her sister in Perth spoke of the stench of rotting sheep blowing over the station and sticking to the washing. She’d grown up with stories like this, dead and lost children, an uncle who caught his hand in a threshing machine, an aunt dying as she gave birth to a child on a desert track miles from anywhere.

‘No farming history, no.’ She grunted, reaching underneath the seat to try to find the screwdriver set, something she could use to prise the metal off the bulkhead off her so at least she could move, figure out a way out of this mess.

‘WE do.’ Said the girl proudly. ‘My grandmother was the first off the farms when the plague came. You know they willingly gave up their children, even though they’d never see them again? Some of them were just two years old. They wouldn’t have even got the plague til they were twenty or so. I’d rather twenty years being free than stuck under the glass of the dome’. The girl was young, defiant, earnest. She likely had no concept of the gruesomeness of new-po death, the pain in your bones and the blisters on the skin, the coughing up of blood and dust until you were now more and you wished for that artificial glass dome, wished your life would have been otherwise. Wished you were harvesting pumpkins in the Newfarm suburbs. But the girl had the idealism of youth.

‘My grandmother talked about Almerta Station every day of her life. She was 14 when she was forced off her father’s land, made orphan. She used to draw horses on the walls of her apartment, tell me about the wild brumbies.’ The girl traced on the condensation of the cab window, a tiny horse, its head grossly larger than its body.

Mish fought back tears, looking at that horse. Perhaps it was the pain in her legs. But she remembered the stories of the brumbies, the wild horses that they could see through the glass of the dome. As a kid she’d watch them come up to the lake after water in the summer. She used to ask her Mum if she could ride them, but she was so young then and didn’t understand that she’d never even touch a horse let alone ride them – that was a thing of the past. The ochre striped girl on the back seat reminded her of herself, once. She wore tall leather boots pulled over black jeans, a floral dress and a baggy, threadbare woollen jumper. Her eyes were the colour of the green barked eucalyptus, dark after the rains. On the collar of her dress was a badge that declared: ‘FDP” in red, orange and black – the colours of the desert people. The new-pos. The letters, she knew, stood for ‘Free Desert People’, a folk punk band popular amongst the kids. They sung protest songs about the indentured slavery of new-pos and how hypocritical it was that the government sent them to do the dirty work no one else would, and that they were looked down about as sub humans when they were supplying the country with much needed food. They had a good point.

The crackle of the intercom between the two sealed cabins was dusty but audible. Mish would normally play tourists a rundown of the newpo story, sanitised for foreign ears, lying that they had all volunteered for the job, for the good of country.

‘Your I.D says Evans’. The father was stating a fact – the tag swung off the lopsided rear view mirror. She was younger then, the photo taken when she was desperate to leave the city. She didn’t know that the Runner was just an extension of the city, hermetically sealed. There was still the glass between her and the horses and the stars.

‘My granddad knew an Evans. Was with him on the first evac.’. Damn, he was trying hard. There were hundreds of children in those evacuations. The children were immune to the disease – it was only when they hit adulthood that it started to eat them up from the inside. The parents sent their children off willingly, hoping they’d have a better future in the city and never come back to work the land like they did until their deaths. Those early pastoralists knew what was coming, but kept raising stock and working on the big desertponic farms knowing that their work was feeding their children in the cities. The slow travelling of the disease back then ensured by the time it hit south the cities were prepared – huge domes, sealed, desalination plants piping water up from the sea, manufactured air. Almost a life. They could hear birds through the glass, sometimes, the high pitched calls of wedge-tailed eagles. The horses, singing. Her face pressed against the dome. The desert stars.

source - the only photo NOT mine! Isn't she a magnificent beastie?

‘Yeah, he was on the first evacs. Was only ten years old. Spent his life crying for his family’. She used to feel contemptuous of this weakness. Her legs hurt. ‘Is that why you’re back – for family?’

The man looks sideways at his daughter, who does not meet his eye. Did she want to come, or did she kick up a fuss? Sometimes they sedated the family members, but her eyes were clear and bright. She knew what she was in for, alright. Knew that within two years, the plague would be eating her from the inside out. Sometimes they bore children, who were useful because they gave the new-pos a sense of purpose. Something to live for. The second gen new-pos were valuable too as they’d have a least fifteen years in them before the plague got them, and a boy could be put to work young, work the land with his parents. Even children could raise chickens.

‘Do you know what it is to be free?’ he said quietly. ‘All those stories that came down through those generations. My grandfather. Did yours talk about those days? On the stations? Under the stars? With the cattle? Riding horses? Swimming in the springs?’

He knew she was lying. He wanted her to flick that switch. Of course she had farming history. Most of them did. She closed her eyes and heard her grandfather’s voice telling stories of the wild horses, the red gums, the stars.

Her fingers twitched.

---

---