Hot Sand

There weren’t always dragons in the valley, Zip reasoned. Last week there’d been none, and yesterday there’d only been a mother and her...was it a hatchling?

The bicycle's brakes moaned and Zip’s sneakers crunched in the leaves as they came to a stop in the shadow of the tuarts, their lips dry and their palms damp.

The night was quiet except for the roar of cicadas and the occasional pops from the expanse of sand, pale and innocent in the moonlight.

Unoccupied, at least for now.

As Zip dismounted, their bike’s headlamp popped free of the hair-lackey, which had tethered it to the handlebars, flopped into the leaf litter, and went out.

For a second, Zip stared at the black patch of ground where the light had vanished.

It wasn’t a sign.

Yes, it might be the first time the headlamp had failed in five years, but that didn’t mean anything.

It wasn’t the universe screaming at them to abort.

Zip glanced at the still empty sky. The chunk of meat in their backpack pressed cold, wet, and bleeding against their spine.

Before they could lose their nerve, they dashed onto the sands, and towards the massive indent where the mother dragon had lain the day before.

This is a bad idea!

As soon as they stepped onto the sands, heat began to tickle the soft underside of Zip’s feet and the smell of melting rubber wafted through the night.

No one was supposed to cross the hot sands.

There were patrols, a fence, fines, and something about jail time for going within three kilometers of the place, but locals didn’t worry about the warnings. An abandoned, concrete pipe let them come and go with impunity.

In the town of Hot Sands, a name which neighbouring villages insisted suited the inhabitants as being both obvious and easy to spell, there were worse ways to pass the time, or indeed pass on, than sprinting across the town’s namesake, hoping not to get eaten by four tons of migrating, airborne, carnivore, or falling into a sandy sinkhole and burning to death.

Of the two ways to die, everyone agreed that the latter was the worst. A dragon death was a quick death. Plus your name would go on the ‘DBD’ wall: Death by Dragon.

Which was terrible. But also a bit awesome. At least by the suspect standards of Hot Sand’s philosophers, a group of individuals around Zip’s own age who contemplated the cosmos while smoking weed out the front of the bottleo.

And while DBD might be questionably awesome, everyone agreed that burning and drowning in sand would just suck.

Zip imagined how much it would suck as they scrambled across the treacherous ground. They imagined boiling granules rushing into their eyes, ears, nose, and throat, as they sank. Ahead, the curve where the mother reptile had rested, shone in the moonlight.

This is a bad idea!

It was painfully warm inside Zip’s joggers and the scent of burning rubber was everywhere.

This is a bad idea!

The next step they took could end down inside the boiling unforgiving earth.

But they couldn’t turn back.

Hunched over, as if that would make them less likely to be sucked into the furnace beneath, Zip’s feet shushed across the sand, their heartbeat a solid roar in their ears.

Then the silence seemed to deepen. Overhead the empty night sky, strewn with old gods and constellations, was abruptly less unoccupied.

It was as if an unseen observer had played a single, sharp, high note on a violin. The hair on the back of Zip’s neck rose.

They stopped.

Stopping was bad; everyone in town said so and they should know, they were the ones who’d lived.

When you stopped, your feet caught fire.

When you stopped, you tended to look up.

Looking up wasn’t a good idea.

It was in fact, a really bad one.

Zip stopped. Even though their brain demanded they keep running.

A winged shape, the size of a bus, plummeted towards them.

There is a lot of mythical Oogie-boogie about dragons. People used to think they were wise, ancient, creatures, who guarded treasure, breathed fire, and had a fetish for people who hadn’t got around to bonking.

Some of this is true. They do breathe fire, but only nesting females—to keep their eggs warm. They are smart. About as smart as octopi it’s generally believed, though no one knows for certain because the last scientist who’d tried to get a dragon to run through an electrified maze, now occupies a very small urn in Sweden.

They don’t care about treasure, because, surprise, they can’t eat it! And the whole thing about virgins is complete codswallop. Like predators everywhere, dragons don’t share humanity's hang-ups with sex.

They’ll eat anyone.

It turns out, that very little about dragons is mythical at all.

Except for how they showed up through a magic portal about ten years back and no one has a clue how.

It was yesterday, and Zip sat next to their best friend Lack. Lack lived in a small house with a large deck that looked out over Dragon Valley. Lack’s bare feet dangled over the lip of the deck, a glass of lemon cordial next to their hand. Zip perched on the step nearby, sipping water and watching the mother and hatchling drop from the sky to skim across the treeline.

When she reached the edge of the hot sands, the mother flared her wings and dropped almost delicately to the earth.

The two humans tracked the baby dragon as it burrowed, then burst from the sand with ungainly flaps of its wings. The mother ignored it and carved herself a hollow with languid swipes with her talons. When she was satisfied, the dragon settled into the hollow, drew in her wings, and closed her eyes.

The baby attacked its mother’s tail and got whacked for its trouble.

‘How big do you think it is?’ Lack wondered aloud.

From so far away, size wasn’t easy to judge. Zip compared the mother to the trees around her and tried to figure the baby’s length.

‘Bit smaller than your parent’s van,’ they speculated.

‘You reckon?’

Zip shrugged.

‘Want to go check?’

Lack laughed.

‘Maybe you go and let me know,’ they said.

Zip snorted. It was yesterday, and neither they nor Lack were interested in dying, on, above, or in the hot sands.

One of their classmates had been eaten two years back.

The video of Rivi Null being ripped apart by three adolescent dragons, reappeared online every few months, despite their parent’s best efforts to have it removed.

‘Do we have a shift tomorrow?’ Lack asked.

'Six til three,' Zip said.

For a long time, they watched the young dragon play as the sun slowly dropped behind the hills. Eventually, the baby seemed to exhaust itself and crawled in next to its mother, just as the last of the daylight faded from the valley.

‘You staying for tea?’ Lack asked.

Zip wanted to say yes. Even the thought of returning to The House made them want to curl into a ball, but they shook their head. They’d been sleeping on Lack’s couch for the last five nights and felt bad for sponging off them.

‘We don’t mind,’ Lack said, worry crinkling the corners of their eyes. ‘We like having you here.’

‘Nah.’ Zip forced themselves to smile. ‘I better go.’

Before Lack could talk them into staying, Zip stepped off the deck and jogged towards the road.

To their relief Lack didn’t follow.

Back in the good old days, when The House had been a home Zip remembered whinging about the mice in the walls and the fact that they had to share a tiny room with Hirda. They’d complained about the oil heater, which barely heated, and the ceiling fan, which worked as well as a chocolate kettle. In summer, Zip had whinged about having to put frozen bottles of water in the fish tank to keep the axolotl from carking it.

And then their home became The House.

The House was better in some ways, Hirda had moved out and gone to uni, so Zip had a room to themselves. Parent One had started baiting the mice, so they didn’t scuttle around the kitchen at night anymore. Instead, Zip began to find their little bodies in the garden.

One day, not long after The Other Parent left, Zip found one of the poisoned mice twitching convulsively on the back patio. They’d watched as the creature writhed in agony, the poison slowly sapping its life. Then they’d realised what they were doing, and found a shovel. They’d killed the mouse as quickly as they could because no one should have to suffer like that.

You can’t bury a poisoned animal, so Zip had tipped the tiny body into the bin and realised with a morbid lurch that they were jealous of it.

Now, they eased the fly-screen from their bedroom window, lowered it to the ground, and climbed through the opening. They paused, listening for the sounds of discovery but heard nothing but the unending roar of the TV.

The odor of old deodorant and sweat hung around the room stale and cold. Zip tripped over their work uniform, peeled it off their shoe, and sniffed it. It definitely needed washing for tomorrow, but getting to the machine without their parent noticing was impossible.

Maybe if they waited, Parent One would go to sleep.

The door to their bedroom cracked open.

‘Is that you darling?’ the voice was small and fragile.

Zip fought the urge to hold still and pretend they weren’t there. Instead, they forced a smile and strode forward.

‘Hey,’ they said, flicking on the light. ‘How're you feeling?'

The forty-watt bulb showed that the mess was much worse than Zip had assumed and they carefully ushered Parent One into the corridor.

‘I missed you,’ Parent One quavered. ‘I thought you’d be home days ago.’

Zip’s heart twisted.

‘I sent you messages,’ they said. ‘Every night.’

‘I worry about you,’ Parent One sighed.

Zip put their arms around the once strong shoulders and walked their parent to the lounge, where the telly blared about how much better life would be with the Ab-cycle-pro.

They noticed that the fan hung drunkenly from the ceiling and there was a new hole in the wall by the door.

‘Has the other one been back?’ Zip asked, meaning Parent Two.

Parent One looked away.

‘You have to get a restraining order,’ Zip said. ‘Or I will.’

‘They’re still your...’

But Zip left the room, put their fingers in their ears, and slammed their bedroom door. Like they were still ten years old.

When the magic portal opened, flooding the planet with majestic, winged creatures, humanity greeted them warmly: with fifty caliber amour piercing rounds. After panicked world leaders had blown hundreds of dragons out of the sky, an animal behaviourist suggested that maybe this was the wrong approach.

The same animal behaviourist, fuelled on a lifetime of romantic animations and fantasy role-playing games, requested a team to research a way to ride dragons. To general surprise, the request was granted not by an eccentric billionaire, but in a joint venture between the Australian Department of Agriculture and the New Zealand Department of Tourism.

Many people thought this was a bad idea and metaphorically sat back with popcorn to watch.

As the starry-eyed Hiccup-wannabes captured and studied the dragons, it became obvious to everyone but them, that it was zebras all over again.

Zebras can’t be ridden. And this is primarily because zebras are awful: they hate everyone, including each other, and can kick lions to death.

Dragons can’t be ridden. And this is primarily because they’re dragons. They’re the size and weight of a truck, they have a bite scientifically proven to be more powerful than a T-rex, and when they get sick of the tiny monkey on their back, they eat them.

Many dragon-riders died, having never ridden a dragon.

The upside, at least for the dragons, was that scientists had something to get excited about and started a movement to stop the culling. Interestingly, this worked.

For three minutes the world united and watched the new species float amongst the clouds, disrupting aeroplanes, and bringing smiles to the faces of children.

And then the exploitation began.

'This never gets old!’ one of the group crowed, huddled around the phone. A tinny scream emitted from the device, punctuated by a low growl.

Lack ground their teeth and shoved through the group to get to the milk.

By the sounds of things, Stiin and other assorted dropkicks were re-watching the Rivi Null video. The phone emitted a strange ripping sound and a shriek. That was the part where Rivi’s leg had been ripped off—Lack closed their eyes—the memory replaying inside their head.

Fucking Stiin!

There were plenty of better places to be an insensitive arsehole, but the Court of Stiin stood in the middle of the aisle, forcing anyone with a trolley to detour halfway around the store to avoid them.

‘Oi!’ one of them protested when Lack’s elbow took them in the ribs. ‘We’re watching here!’

‘And I’m shopping,’ Lack said, picking up the two-liter bottle and putting it in their basket. As they’d expected, Stiin stepped into their path.

‘How’s life of on the low socio-economic end of the spectrum, Lack?’ Stiin asked, pausing their phone.

‘Better than the entitled middle-class end, Stiin.’ Lack casually put the basket against the smaller person’s chest and pushed. Not hard.

Lack was gangly but tall, and Stiin, who didn’t know how to keep their stance, was forced aside. Lack kept walking. They’d have liked to beat Stiin gently about the head with the two-liter milk bottle but it wouldn’t do any good and it might damage the carton.

‘When do you think you’ll try it?’ Stiin called to Lack’s retreating back.

Lack turned and smirked at them. ‘Go to the Hot Sands and make my fortune?’

‘Must seem tempting,’ the shorter person said. ‘All that cash.’

‘Tell you what, Stiin,’ Lack said, lowering their voice. They closed the distance between them and whispered into the other human’s ear. ‘Come to the Hot Sands tomorrow and bring your phone.’

Stiin leaned in, sneering, but hopeful. Lack lowered their voice further, until all Stiin’s cronies bent towards them, wide-eyed.

‘You might film someone doing something really dumb and get a million views.’

Lack slapped them lightly on the cheek and strode away laughing.

It was later.

The television never rested, but it had finally become the only sound in the house. Zip wished they didn’t need to eat or use the loo or do anything that reminded them that they existed, but they did, and the demands of their bladder dragged them off the grimy sheets and down the hall.

That done, they moved around their tiny bedroom, gathering socks, and underwear, and hauling the sheets off the mattress. They did it automatically, their mind far off. They lugged the pile into the laundry and dropped it on the floor.

A donut of stale towels huddled in the bottom of the washing machine.

Zip remembered putting this load on and heading to work days ago. They picked the moldering items from the machine and dumped them in a basket. From experience, towels might be okay if left in the sun for a while.

They got their load on, then with the basket under one arm, exited via the laundry door. In the dark, they tossed the moldy items onto the line and pegged them inattentively.

Next, Zip went to the kitchen and found exactly the same amount of food as when they’d left.

The bread was gone. But then Zip recalled, that they’d had the last piece before going to work and the familiar guilt rolled over them, followed almost in unison with the old weary anger.

Parent One had money!

They weren’t incapable. Their body was wasted, but that was only because they didn’t eat, or exercise. They just sat there! Pouring energy into the TV and waiting for the Other One to return and break them some more.

As they had thousands of other times, Zip rationalised their parent’s inaction; they’d been through a lot, they needed help and not all injuries were visible.

Zip longed to take Parent One to someone who could help.

But Parent One had refused everything Zip had tried.

Parent One wouldn’t leave the house refused to turn off the TV and talk and refused to exist in any meaningful way. No matter how much Zip tried, they couldn’t find the person Parent One had been when Zip had been a kid. Zip had eventually realised that their parent might never come back, and if they did, it would have to be on their own.

It didn’t make the rage, guilt, grief, or the million other feelings any easier to deal with.

With a sigh, Zip started cooking.

The clock on the microwave read three AM by the time they left the kitchen, the television still roaring in the lounge. On the newly cleaned bench, next to the sink, a note read: "there’s soup in the fridge—please try to eat!"

Impotence, sterility, Cancer, and alopecia are problems that dragon blood cannot cure. The actual list of human ailments that dragon anatomy cannot fix, is illimitable.

The World Health Organisation concluded emphatically that bits of dragon Do Not have magical qualities and cannot cure human maladies.

A portion of the population took this to mean, that the WHO was concealing the truth and had no idea about the mystical properties of the natural world because they paid too much attention to people in laboratories.

So while most people decided to leave Dragons alone, others wanted to carve a little magic for themselves.

Dragon harvesting boomed.

Governments moved slowly against dragon harvesting, unsure if protecting the enormous, property-damaging, people-consuming animals, who also played merry hell with aviation, was in fact beneficial.

Thousands of dragons were butchered and their body parts sold.

Within six months, there were under three thousand dragons left and the cost of a single dragon scale could reach prices of five hundred thousand American dollars.

At present, the only organisation actively protecting Dragons is the animal activist organisation known as Sky Shepard.

‘Your crotch is wet,’ Lack hissed as they pulled on their white coveralls in the change room.

Zip shrugged. There were bags under their eyes and they kept staring off into the distance like they did whenever they’d been back to that toxic hole they called home.

‘It looks like you peed yourself,’ Lack pointed out, trying to get a rise out of their friend. They knew the reason Zip’s uniform was damp. As always, Zip had washed it last night and worn it to work wet. In the warm summer air, the slowest part to dry was always the crotch.

‘Yeah,’ Zip said, dully. ‘I peed myself.’

Lack wanted to shake them.

‘So you’re going to work in a fridge with freezing loins?’

Zip squinted at them.

‘Loins?’

Lack grinned.

‘It’s not just a cut of meat, my friend,’ they said. ‘It means…’

‘I know what it means,’ Zip interrupted with a weak smirk. ‘Thanks for your concern, but me and my loins are fine.’

Lack bundled their hair under the white hairnet.

‘Until they freeze,’ they said and led the way to the meat-packing floor.

If the internal workings of Zip’s mind could be mapped and displayed as a three-dimensional image, it would have looked like a red storm.

Fog banks of exhaustion, towering cumulonimbus clouds of anger, cyclones of hurt and frustration, and lightning flashes of guilt all slammed around the inside of their skull, until they were seeing the real world as if it were at the other end of a long dark tunnel.

One little thought kept niggling.

You could cure your parent.

Zip tried to push the thought away. Part of them knew it wasn’t true.

There was no magic cure for Parent One. You couldn’t drink a potion and fix the aftermath of abuse.

But what about those stories online? The people who’d drunk dragon’s blood and cured their Alzheimer’s?

You can find stories to back any opinion on the internet. Those aren’t true accounts.

But the thought that stuck, even as Zip carved beef from the bone with the quick skill of their knife hand, and dropped red portions expertly on the conveyor belt, was: what if they were?

The sun was low when the workers breached the gate, rowdy and pleased to be done with the day. Volp noticed the scrawny figure lose their tall companion and scan the bus stop.

Volp knew that look.

A slow smile crept across their face and they caught the kid’s eye.

People like Volp existed everywhere. They oozed from the cracks of the world and insinuated their way up the food chain leaving an oily stain of petty cruelty in their wake.

There were files on Volp. Associations. Allegations that were dropped. Arrests that wouldn’t stick. Witnesses who left town, taking broken bones and bruises with them.

And they had a reputation for being in touch with the wrong types of people.

Volp listened as the dumb kid spilled their desperation at their feet. They kept their expression bored, but inside Volp felt the stirrings of excitement. It had been a long while since they’d had another willing fool.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ they said when the kid called Zip had finished.

The crew just called them Captain. There were rumors Captain was ex-military and there were a plethora of stories about them that would have seemed implausible to even Matthew Reilly fans.

Captain confirmed nothing, denied nothing, and occasionally wondered what their crew would think if they knew the truth.

They leaned on the back of Engine’s chair and peered at the screen.

‘What do you think?’ they asked. ‘Actionable?’

‘I think if we don’t intervene we’ll have a dead dragon or pigeon by tomorrow morning,’ Engine said, slurping another mouthful of energy drink. ‘Probably both.’

No one spoke for a moment.

It smelled bad inside Engine’s shipping container, a space that was dark, poorly ventilated, crammed with electronics and littered with take away containers.

Engine was a screen-lit, overweight cliché, but Captain had learned, that clichés were clichés for a reason.

‘We could tell Jal,’ Engine suggested, referring to their unofficial liaison within the department of animal control.

Captain grunted. Contacting Jal was like admitting Sky Shepard couldn’t cope.

And Sky Shepard wasn’t coping.

Volunteer activists with an erratic financial backer were no match for the billion-dollar harvester industry. Hell, Jal and their government mob hadn’t even attempted to stop the harvesters. They focused on seizing criminal funds and keeping the general public’s attention fixated on how dead dragons weren’t such a terrible thing.

Captain rubbed their eyes.

‘It’s a bait and drop,’ they said, referring to the harvester tactic of setting poisoned meat into known dragon rest areas.

‘From this message,’ the tech agreed, ‘I reckon they have a pretty solid pigeon.’

Pigeons were the worst.

Captain could forgive a person for being manipulated, hungry, blackmailed or scared. But most pigeons weren’t.

They were just stupid.

As stupid as their namesake, pigeons were the pawns of the harvester industry who took poisoned meat into restricted areas, baited the dragons, and then died.

Because if the dragons didn’t get them, the harvesters did.

Pigeons were expendable. That was the whole point.

Captain hated them. Without pigeons, harvesting could be prevented. Without pigeons, harvesters would have to import weapons capable of taking down a massive winged target. Weapons were generally easier to track than the common ingredients found in a dragon bait.

‘Should we collect the pigeon?’ Engine asked. ‘And switch the bait?’

Collecting a pigeon was expensive for Sky Shepard and they generally gained nothing for it. Pigeons didn’t have any information, because they were ignorant cannon fodder. Jal’s team could do the collection of course, but there was a good chance the dragon would be poisoned in the process.

Dragons weren’t the Government’s priority.

And yesterday, Captain had found the butchered remains of an hour old hatchling in a nesting site Sky Shepard had thought protected. The screams of its distraught mother were still ringing in their brain.

Humans weren’t Captain’s favourite people today.

‘Switch the bait,’ Captain said. ‘Fuck the pigeon.’

Lack got the message at nine PM, which didn’t leave them a lot of time. Cursing, they slipped from the house, taking the three kilos of raw meat they’d swiped from the abattoir for this reason, with them.

One of the siblings yelled something unintelligible, so Lack yelled something back as they wheeled their bike down the drive.

It was a perfect night, they decided as their bicycle thrummed downhill. The moon made the bitumen a ghostly trail between the shadowed eucalypts and the air was warm and still.

Ten minutes later, they reached the welcome sign at the south entrance to the town. Fifty meters into the scrub was an old fridge, exactly where Captain had said it would be.

Lack approached warily. If harvesters were waiting, then Lack was worse than dead. This was, Capitan always told them, incredibly dangerous work, but when Lack’s nervous hand found the handle and yanked the door open, only the smell of blood and creek water greeted them. No harvester waiting in the night to carve a message into their belly and leave them to die.

In a moment Lack had swapped the meat in the fridge with their own and grinned. The dragon who ate this “bait” wouldn’t die. Courtesy of Lack, Secret Sky Shepard!

They checked their watch. Shit! They had ten minutes to clear the area. Captain was firm on that point. Lack was not to hang around hoping to catch the Pigeon. Sky Shepard’s, Captain said, are too valuable to die doing stupid things they weren’t trained for.

Lack took their leader’s words to heart.

‘Done,’ the message read.

Captain scowled at the phone. This would be the last time they’d be able to use Lack. The youth had saved four dragons from harvesters in the last twelve months, but tonight was well and truly pushing their luck.

The kid had a family.

A dark part of Captain wondered if the horrific murder of an entire family might make the general public take an interest in harvesters.

They pushed the thought away.

That was the way the enemy thought. Generate enough fear and the whole world did what you wanted.

Captain slid the phone into their pocket and settled down against the tree to wait. The Pigeon would be along presently.

There weren’t often people in the valley, but tonight there were three.

Zip stood transfixed, feet burning, the smell of their melting sneakers filling their nostrils, as a massive shape plummeted towards them.

On the edge of the sands, Captain forced themselves to witness the tiny form, standing alone on the naked earth as the dragon dived.

On the western edge of the sands, another figure felt their face stretch into a grin. They were about to film the best Death By Dragon ever!

Captain felt their legs start running before their brain could intercede. Some nurturing instinct rose up from its dormant huddle and hijacked their feet. Suddenly they were twenty meters into the sands, waving their arms and screaming while the sensible part cursed them for a fool.

The dragon twitched in the air.

Like any predator, dragons liked docile prey and disliked surprises jumping up out at them during dinner.

The massive creature turned its plummet into a swoop. Instead of snatching the human from the ground, it whooshed overhead with the sound of a gale, raising a sand storm in its wake.

Zip threw themselves flat. Heat scorching their hands and belly.

‘RUN!’ A voice roared from the other side of the sands.

On burning soles, Zip obeyed.

It would have been better if Zip had died, Stiin knew. A near-death was never as good as the real thing. Still, the clip would get Stiin’s channel a million hits, easy! The shots of the dragon were good, but Stiin also had a close-up of the idiot distracting it. That heroism angle might even be better than the usual DBD. Viewers like variety.

Their heart singing with anticipation, Stiin posted the clip.