The Loudmouth of the Glass Dunes

The sky above the Rub’ al Khali hadn’t been blue since Emperor Trumpy’s final, spray-tanned tantrum in 2026. The Middle East was now a glowing parking lot, and twelve years later the desert had become a hellscape of fused glass and irradiated dunes. The sky hung overhead like a mudhole, and the only law left was simple. Eat, or be eaten.

Boy didn’t remember the old world. He’d been three when the sky caught fire. Whatever name his mother had given him was lost in the ash, along with her, his father, and his older brothers. The wasteland had claimed them one by one through sickness, starvation, and a scrap-metal scimitar to the gut. Now, at fifteen, Boy was a phantom of the dunes, wrapped in tattered, oil-stained keffiyehs, living on roasted rad-scorpions and whatever canned peaches he could pry from the skeletal remains of old-world supermarkets.

He wasn’t entirely alone.

Sitting on a rusted engine block beside him, chewing methodically on a 9mm shell casing, was Dawsha.

Dawsha was a goat. More specifically, a three-year-old brown-and-white mutt that stood no taller than an average housecat. She had large floppy ears, horizontal slit pupils that hinted at an eerie, mutated intelligence, and a belly that was always rumbling. Her name was old Egyptian slang for noise, racket, loudmouth. She had earned it.

“Spit it out, Dawsha,” Boy muttered, his voice a raspy croak from breathing too much silica. “Brass gives you the shits.”

Dawsha paused, looked at him with profound apathy, and swallowed the casing whole.

Boy sighed and wiped the sweat from his dirt-caked forehead. They were hiding in the skeletal remains of a luxury hotel in what used to be Dubai. Below them, the street was a canyon of twisted rebar and shattered, gold-tinted glass.

Then the ground began to vibrate.

A low, guttural thrum rolled through the ruins, the sound of poorly refined guzzoline engines. Boy flattened himself against the concrete floor and yanked Dawsha down by the scruff.

A raiding party was rolling through the canyon.

It was a grotesque caravan of the new world. Three chopped-up Toyota Hiluxes welded onto the chassis of old military hover-transports, transformed into roaring, smoke-belching flying carpets. They were plated in spiked armor, draped with stolen, blood-stained Persian rugs, and crewed by Jinn-Freaks, scavengers warped by fallout, their skin blistered and their eyes wide with chem-fueled madness.

On the lead hover-dhow, chained to the roll cage, was a girl.

She looked about Boy’s age, maybe sixteen. She wore the torn remains of teal silk, and her dark hair whipped wild in the wind. She wasn’t crying. She was spitting blood and venom at the hulking, masked warlord driving the rig. She was a Water Princess, daughter of the warlord who controlled the subterranean aquifers three hundred miles west.

A high-value prize.

Boy wanted nothing to do with it. Rule number one of the glass dunes, look out for your own ass.

Dawsha had other ideas.

The roar of the hover-dhows’ badly muffled V8 engines offended her. She hated loud noises that she didn’t make herself.

The tiny goat wriggled free of Boy’s grip, trotted to the edge of the shattered window, and kicked a loose cinderblock.

It dropped three stories and landed perfectly on the hood of the trailing vehicle.

The caravan slammed to a halt, hovering midair with a screech of repulsor lifts. The Jinn-Freaks looked up.

Six pairs of bloodshot, chem-crazed eyes locked onto Boy.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

“Well, well, well,” yelled one raider, his face half hidden behind a chrome-painted gas mask. He revved a chainsaw. “Look what the sand blew in. A little desert rat. And look at that plump little meat-snack next to him.”

“Leave us alone!” Boy shouted, drawing his only weapon, a sharpened piece of helicopter rotor. “We have nothing!”

“I’m gonna fuckin’ wear your skin, rat!” the raider screamed, leaping from the hover-dhow onto the rubble slope leading up to Boy’s floor. Two others followed, rusted machetes in hand, laughing like maniacs.

Boy backed away, panic icing his veins. He was fast, but he couldn’t take three grown, chem-jacked psychos.

The first raider swung. Boy ducked and the machete sparked off the concrete wall, but the raider’s backhand caught him in the jaw. He hit the ground hard, copper flooding his mouth. A heavy steel-toed boot planted itself on his chest, pinning him in place.

“First,” the raider grinned under his gas mask, “I take your little dog-goat.”

He reached for Dawsha with a scarred, greasy hand.

Boy didn’t yell.

Instead, he jammed his fingers deep into his ears, bit down hard on his tongue, and closed his eyes.

Dawsha didn’t run.

She rose onto her tiny back hooves, tilted her head with horrifying precision, and unhinged her jaw like a desert viper.

Her small mouth opened wide, revealing row after row of serrated, needle-like teeth. She drew in a massive breath, her chest swelling to twice its size, and unleashed a sound that did not belong to this earth.

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

It wasn’t a bleat.

It was a concussive shockwave of pure, localized sound. The air rippled like water.

The blast hit the raider at point-blank range. His chest cavity caved in with the wet crunch of collapsing ribs. The lenses of his gas mask shattered. His eyes burst like overripe grapes. Blood sprayed from his nose and ears as his brain liquefied under the pressure. His body flew backward like a ragdoll, smashing into his two companions and sending all three tumbling into the glass dunes below.

In the street, the shockwave kept tearing the air apart. Windshields on the hover-dhows burst outward in a storm of diamond-bright shrapnel. The warlord at the wheel of the lead rig clawed at his bleeding ears and screamed.

Then Dawsha snapped her jaw shut, swallowed, and let out a tiny, dainty burp.

Boy slowly removed his fingers from his ears, groaning. Even muffled, the ringing inside his skull was brutal.

“Good girl, Dawsha.”

He staggered to his feet and looked down. Two of the hover-dhows had smashed into the concrete median below, their repulsor engines dying in a final cough of black smoke and fire. The lead vehicle had plowed nose-first into the ruins of an old Starbucks.

The warlord lay dead across the hood, impaled on his own steering column.

The Princess, somehow, had survived in the back. Her chains had snapped in the crash, though she was dazed and bleeding from a cut on her forehead. She pulled herself upright, coughing through the smoke, and looked up toward the source of the blast.

Boy stood in the broken window frame. Beside him stood the tiny goat, licking a drop of gore from her muzzle.

The Princess blinked. “Are you two... ghosts?” she shouted, her voice shaking just a little.

“No,” Boy rasped back, his throat dry.

He didn’t want to get involved. But a living Princess meant a reward from the Water Sheikhs, and a reward meant food, ammunition, maybe even a working shower.

Boy looked down at Dawsha. She stared back with her strange horizontal pupils, then went right back to chewing another piece of old-world brass.

The Princess wiped the blood from her lip, grabbed the dead warlord’s chrome-plated submachine gun, and checked the magazine with a satisfying clack. Then she smiled, feral and beautiful in the ruins.

“Yeah,” she said. “And I’m bringing the loudmouth.”

Boy hesitated. He glanced at Dawsha, then back at the Princess. The rotor blade in his hand suddenly felt heavier.

The Princess tilted her head, dark eyes sharp.

“You ever think about starting a war?” she asked.

Dawsha bleated softly.

For the first time in years, Boy smiled.

“Every damn day,” he said.