Hall of the Penguin Emperor, Part I
In which the Majorellian endures a celestial encounter in the wasteland
I.
He wedged a toothpick in his mouth and squinted out at the Butterscotch Desert. In front of him, the sky blanketed an expanse of striped buttes and ragged cottonwood. Succulents needled the blacktop while a scorched wind—stinking of roadkill—kicked siltstone onto his sneakers.
Orion, the Majorellian, gnawed his toothpick and withdrew for a moment, listening to the highway stripes hiss like meat on a cast iron skillet.
His car was kaput. Vultures had already begun to circle. It was fifty miles to the nearest town, and he was three hours behind schedule. Things weren’t going well.
He was a tall man composed entirely of sharp angles. Scars bore deep into his face; a five o’clock shadow inked his silhouette; and a windbreaker, covered in pins and patches, slouched from his shoulders with its sleeves pushed up to the elbows. A ruby red pipe wrench dangled from a carabiner hooked to his belt loops. There was nothing gentle about him.
His car, a pug-faced Skyline Vista, let out a moan and sank deeper into the side of the road. Orion fumbled for its release latch and popped its hood to reveal the chicken-fried engine. Steam rose through the lattice of corroded machinery, stinging his eyes, smearing his skin.
The Majorellian wanted to scream. He was a driver, not a mechanic. Fixing a junked station wagon was above his pay grade—or below it. Either way, it wasn’t his job. He growled and drove his boot into the fender, but the Vista merely jostled like a lump of milk pudding.
Irene, his pet squid from the eighth dimension, roused from her nap in the passenger seat. She yawned and stretched her tentacles, shaking off a midday grog. “Well?” she asked, cranking down the window. “How’s it going?”
“Take a guess.”
She glanced at the dashboard. “So those tiny lights actually mean something.”
“You’re not helping.”
The squid draped a tentacle from the car, its suckers leafing half-moon perforations in the doorframe. She gave a sarcastic snort. “Look at the bright side: At least we’ll die with a tan.”
“Still not helping.”
“What would you like me to do? Call a tow?”
Orion replied with a grunt. He unclasped the wrench from his hip and got to work on the engine. In this case, “work” meant whacking various knobs and nozzles until something good happened.
Irene sank back into her seat and retrieved a dog-eared Freud omnibus from the glovebox. She brushed some sand from its yellowed pages, reams of psychobabble scrawled across the dense tome. “Fantastic,” she grumbled, flipping to a new chapter. “All this for a stupid train.”
The train in question—a mint-condition 1965 Kingston Commander—lay in the back, wrapped in bubble wrap and stuffed in an old shoebox.
Two weeks earlier, the Ebarhard Railroad Society had acquired the locomotive from a flea market on the Sixteen Isles. But when the directors at the Van Alderberg Ministry of Miniatures had discovered their rivals had located the holy grail of toy trains, they had hired Orion to swipe it from a lockbox at Ebarhard headquarters.
A weird assignment, sure.
But a gig’s a gig.
And up until now, the job had gone smoothly. All Orion had to do was deliver the stolen Commander to the Van Alderberg offices in Tangelo City and catch the next flight off Threeport Island. A bum engine and two hundred miles of ragged road were all that separated him from a one way trip to someplace better.
II.
Forty minutes later, Orion stepped away from his cooked Vista and wiped his brow. The sun inched higher in the sky as a mosquito needled the back of his neck, sweat spreading dripping from his shirt. He went for a fresh toothpick and watched Irene leaf through her paperback omnibus in the passenger seat. The desert glistened against a constellation of blue and violet freckles on her slimy skin.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Does that book of yours say anything about auto maintenance?”
“Symbolically, perhaps.”
“Ugh. Piece of junk.”
“Excuse me?” The squid snapped up. “I’ll have you know that Freud is a vital entry to the metamodern canon.”
“I was talking about the car.”
Irene muttered something and returned to her book.
Just then, the ripple of a Moog theramin carried over the plateau. Orion lowered his wrench and scanned his surroundings, listening as needles quivered in the cactus trees.
“You hear that?”
The noise grew louder.
Irene saw something in the distance and shrunk from the windshield. “Heads up.”
While it was common knowledge that the Butterscotch Desert was flying saucer country, Orion had never seen one up close. The chrome disc, no larger than a checkerboard, warbled towards them on the highway. A tennis ball flailed atop its antenna, and breathless purrs rose from a levitation box in its observation cabin.
Irene scuttled to the back of the car. “As if today couldn’t get any worse…”
There was a crackle of electricity, and a radiant beam blasted downwind. Orion dove to the ground. The ray zipped past, smashing into the side of his Skyline Vista. Irene screamed while the car vaulted through the the desert and landed upside-down in the lee of a highway sign.
The Majorellian bounded to his feet, tightening his grip on the wrench as the saucer descended. Digging his sneakers into the dirt, he swung and clanged his weapon against its electroplated frame. The ship hurled backwards and emitted a detuned blorp, swaying like a deranged piñata. It fired another shot.
The pavement exploded—a blinding flash—and Orion was airborne. For the briefest moment, he locked eyes with an overhead vulture as he drifted over the highway and landed in a ditch.
Shaking off a headache, he snatched his wrench and fled. Behind him, the saucer prodded the landscape with pops of radiation. He snaked through the chaos to a nearby tree and bounded off its trunk, grabbing the edge of the whirling disc.
The saucer churned its levitators, trying to remain aloft as Orion clawed his way onto its dome. He raised his wrench to the heavens and brought it down—hard. The ship gave a radio screech. Orion struck again and again, leaving heavy dents in its frame. Behest him, the top plates bent inwards to reveal a morass of alien circuitry. The saucer, in response, tilted down and fired into the earth, blowing itself sky-high.
Orion flew from its dome. The desert slid sideways.
The Majorellian slammed into the ground, the oxygen, all at once, evaporating from his chest. Disoriented, he reached a shaking hand for his pipe wrench. Numbness spread through every inch of his body, and his pulse thumped against his temples. Through it, he could still hear Irene shrieking in the crumpled Vista.
Light flickered over the soil.
Orion rolled on his back and watched the flying saucer cast its long shadow over the desert. A corona of energy expanded around its antenna, strong enough to bury him in a smoldering pit.
He shielded his face and waited for blistering death, until—
A click sounded.
A rocket roiled from the highway, colliding with the airship. In a blinding flash, the saucer collapsed into a clockwork fireball, and an explosion shook the desert to the mantle. Orion shielded himself as bits of shrapnel pecked his windbreaker.
Silence.
The UFO was gone.
He lowered his arm and shifted back to the highway, waiting for the smoke to clear and reveal who—or what—remained.
III.
Aa slender woman stood in the middle of the road with a bazooka balanced on the crook of her neck, smoke draining from its stovepipe. She wore mismatched tennis shoes—one blue, one green—and a canvas romper with a string cinched at the hip; and her face was obscured by an oversized polar bear mask, its fur faded from life adrift in the highlands. A motorbike stood beside her on the road with some loose possessions thrown in its sidecar.
Orion clamped the wrench to his carabiner and nodded. “Some contraption you’ve got there.”
“These are the dead lands,” the woman said, her voice muffled by the mask. “What’re you doing out here?”
“Passing through is all.”
“You’re not welcome.”
“Noted.”
Orion turned from the woman and knelt beside his Skyline Vista. He clamped his hands on the roof and heaved, flipping the car flipped upright.
Irene hopped out through the shattered windshield. “Are we dead yet?”
“Not quite,” Orion said.
He reached into the car and rummaged through a hodgepodge of suitcases and fast food wrappers. His shoebox lay beneath the driver’s seat, its cardboard smeared with an assortment of melted M&Ms. He flipped it open to find the stolen Kingston Commander—unharmed—nestled peacefully in its bubble wrapped shell.
The stranger motioned to Irene. “What the hell is that thing?”
“That thing has a name,” the squid hissed, offering a prompt curtsy. “Irenithoos J. Ragadoob. Charmed.”
“I call her Irene.” Orion scooped his partner from the dirt and placed her on his shoulder. “We’re due south for Tangelo.”
The woman swiveled between him and the cephalopodian companion. “I’m warning you… both of you… You’re not welcome.”
“I heard you the first time, lady.” Orion brushed past the stranger and marched down the road.
She called after him.
“You’ll never reach Tangelo City on foot. The saucers will pick you both dry before the next exit.”
Irene perked up. “Is that true?”
Orion kept walking.
The stranger let out a huff and loaded her bazooka into her sidecar. “Suit yourself. Give it an hour—you’ll be up to your chin in chrome.”
The squid trembled. “Hey… uh… maybe we should listen.”
Orion slowed and peered back at the woman. “Alright, I’ll bite. Any suggestions?”
“Seems I’m headed your way. There’s plenty of room in my sidecar. I could give you a hand… that is, if you make it worth my while.”
“Name your price.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“What, then?”
She rested her arms on the motorbike’s handlebars. “I’ve got some people looking for me. Bad people. If they find me, I could use an extra pair of fists. Or tentacles.”
“Leave me out of this,” Irene said.
Orion considered the offer. Inter-dimensional squids notwithstanding, he preferred traveling alone. But the stranger was right: Even if he managed to out-duel the coming onslaught of UFOs and whatever else the cosmos threw at him, Tangelo City was still hundreds of miles off. That’s to say nothing of the unrelenting heat, the sickening fever that had now settled upon the landscape. They’d be vulture meat by sundown.
He sized up the woman. “What’s your name?”
She drew a keyring from her pocket and kickstarted the engine. Smog swept up from the motorbike’s exhaust, casting a filthy aura over her bloated mask. “Delores Tango,” she said. “Happy to meet you.”
Orion regarded the motorbike—lockjaw on wheels. Sand and rust stripped the paint from its body, and a patch, colored with tartan stripes, concealed a rip in the front tire. “Patchwork” was the operative term here: The bike had been scavenged from parts of other vehicles. It looked like it could fly to pieces the second they took off. Regardless, that pile of ragged bolts and steel was his best bet.
The Majorellian came forward and extended his hand. “Alright,” he said. “We’ll take the sidecar. Let’s get moving.”