I saw someone watching a crow circling above Old Woman’s Springs Road shortly before my Tesla crashed into the wash on the way home from my eye exam. I stumbled, cursing up a storm, my sunglasses hanging off one ear, when Henderson sprang into action and saved me from stepping on a rattlesnake and guided me over to his girlfriend doing yoga.
“We’d give you a ride home,” Gwen said from her Downward Dog, “but thanks to AI we no longer have jobs or a car.” Her dreadlocks framed her Siberian Husky eyes as she glided into Upward Dog and jumped softly to standing. She walked me over to an abandoned couch. “The reception’s much better here.” She motioned.
I sat down to call AAA when a leather-faced woman named Granny Jan cackled. “Don’t mind me!” she said, showering under a plastic water jug hung from a Joshua tree with rock climbing ropes.
I scooched closer to Gwen, pulling my sandals underneath me and out of the path of a bushy-haired man with a beer belly spilling over his neon green speedo barreling by.
“Do you guys live here?” I stammered, instantly regretting it, knowing I was probably adding insult to injury.
“I used to go to Burning Man.” I wasn’t sure if Gwen was trying to be condescending. “But this is the real Burning Man.” She gestured to the untamed desert. “We live in a moneyless society. We trade and barter and you’d be amazed at the perfectly good food people throw away.” She rubbed her hands. “We made compost toilets, we recycle and,” she motioned towards a shimmering sculpture made out of empty Nespresso pods strung between two trees, “we make art.”
“Aren’t there shelters you can go to or some kind of government assistance?”
“That’s not an option. This is all part of the plan,” she said and I wondered, staring down at my phone, whose plan she was talking about when a giant glob of bird shit plopped onto my head.
“Ah, luck is coming your way!” Gwen clapped. “Many cultures believe it’s a good omen if a bird shits on your head,” she said as a pigeon landed on the arm of the couch. I was busy wiping the mess dribbling down my forehead with my sleeve when AAA called. It was hard to focus with all the commotion while I gave the location of where I had crashed.
“Good girl, Mata Hari,” Gwen cooed as she unwired a plastic tube from the pigeon’s foot.
“I see the eagle has landed.” Henderson said, dropping down on the couch with a dead crow tied to a slingshot slung over his shoulder.
“Circle of life,” he preached. “Crows are birds of prey. They try to kill the messenger.” He nodded to Mata Hari. “But don’t worry, we’ll make sure this guy’s life wasn’t in vain. Gwen makes a great crowq au vin.” He winked. “Stay for dinner?” But it came out more like an order than an invitation.
“I’d love to,” I lied, “but AAA is on their way.”
“That wasn’t AAA,” Henderson said, suddenly formidable in his army pants and Che Guevara t-shirt. “We needed voice verification to be sure you are who we’re looking for.” He summoned all 6 feet 5 of himself up from the couch with the ease of a ninja. “Let’s take a little walk.”
We walked through a maze of Joshua trees, passing a covered area housing a fleet of carrier pigeons. I stopped to unsnag my caftan caught on a cholla bush while Henderson waited impatiently. He took me a little further up near the boulders to a table made out of a shipping pallet and wooden crates for chairs with a small group gathered around it.
“Don’t be scared,” Granny Jan called from her perch on a crate. She was fully clothed now in camouflage pants, Tevas, and a ‘no one for president’ t-shirt in bright red Comic Sans font. “We’re not going to hurt you,” she muttered, more to herself than to me, while she rolled a joint over a map dotted with colored pushpins.
“How’s your Tesla treating you?” The Speedo man asked in a radio announcer’s voice that sounded familiar. He sat next to Granny Jan in a terry cloth spa robe and sipped kombucha. “Sorry about your brakes. Those cars sometimes have a mind of their own.” He chuckled as I realized he was Kevin, the mechanic from the Tesla dealer, who serviced my new car last month.
Henderson pulled a crate underneath him and motioned for me to sit. “It’s time we lay our cards on the table. We need your help, Sharon,” he said, handing me a photo of a mousy woman with a rounded face and thin lips.
“We heard Sharon died in the Palisades fire,” Kevin said, sucking on his cigar.
“What kind of name is Galia?” Granny Jan asked, smirking at my cheek implants. I ran my fingers nervously through my auburn extensions and pursed my Medjool date-sized lips, knowing I’d been found. “Sharon.” Granny Jan leans over the table. “We’re looking for our friend, Blaze.” Her eyes narrowed as she exhaled smoke in my face. “The last time anyone saw her, she was with you and rumor has it she had her head between your legs.”
I hovered out of body just before I fainted and when I woke up, I was on the ground with Gwen crouching above me. “Enough with the interrogation, guys,” she scolded. “You’ve succeeded in scaring the shit out of her.”
“Galia,” said Gwen, massaging my temples, “we don’t give a fuck that you burned your house down and killed off Sharon.” None of us are who we say we are.” She motioned to the group. “My sister Blaze disappeared without a trace the next night after you saw her.”
She sat me up and propped me against a boulder. It was golden hour; the sun was setting and the sky was washed with pinks and purples. Jackrabbits sniffed curiously around an obstacle course made of old tires that looked like it was designed by ISIS.
“Henderson’s into CrossFit!” Gwen saw the terror in my eyes. “I swear that’s all it is.” She laughed while he jumped up and high-stepped through the tires.
“We know you slept with Blaze. She told me all about it the next morning. She was super into you.” Gwen smiled. “My sister was never good with keeping secrets.” She took a plastic container of dried apricots and walnuts from her backpack and set it down on the table.
“The only secret Blaze kept was her real name and where she came from.” Gwen motioned for me to sit. “Growing up she was Chastity.” She laughed gently.
“My parents were into God and Texas.” Gwen nibbled on a walnut. “And in their eyes, ‘Thou shalt not lie with a woman’ should have been the eleventh Commandment. Blaze ran away when she was sixteen. I didn’t hear from her for five years until she called when I graduated high school. She was living in San Francisco and working as a hair stylist at the Vidal Sassoon Academy.”
“She’d freak if she saw your hair now!” Henderson interrupted but Gwen just laughed.
She took a hair tie out of her joggers and tied her dreads back. “She can do whatever she wants with it when we find her. I’ll even let her dye it blonde.” Gwen smiled. “My sister was the best blonde. It was her tagline; she even had it trademarked. She was making over a million dollars a year by the time she was twenty-five and that number doubled each year.”
Heat radiated through my body. “Blaze” sounded like a bullshit name when she contacted me on Tinder. She had bragged about what a successful stylist she had been. I figured it could be true but I also suspected she might be hiding from someone since she was working at Stud Cuts in 29 Palms.
“Money is a drug for some.” Henderson lectured, pacing back and forth. “Once they have more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime, only power gets them high.”
“Blaze thought she wanted power.” Gwen took over. “She accepted a job offer to create the salons and spas for a huge tech company’s campuses around the world but she didn’t last very long: she quit when she saw how their product was damaging young girls and spreading propaganda under the guise of free speech so she gave her resignation.”
Henderson picked up a giant rock and did a set of bicep curls. “I used to be a personal trainer for the company. Blaze sometimes sparred with us and on her last day the owner challenged Blaze to a cage fight.”
“She had him down on the ground in a chokehold in a matter of seconds. ” Granny Jan cackled. “He didn’t know Chastity had taken self-defense from yours truly at the runaway shelter she lived in when she first got to San Francisco.”
“Galia,” said Gwen, holding my hands, “all of us here have had someone we love vanish. We believe that the architects of AI – The Titans, we’ve discovered from our reconnaissance, is what they call themselves – have made them disappear. They are exacting revenge on anyone who might have humiliated or angered them. They are kidnapped and forced to build robots that are the most offensive to the core of who they are in hidden factories around the country as punishment.
“Now we know you have a PhD in library science. We also know you were recruited to set up their secret data centers.” Kevin points to colored pins on the map. “You must have been pretty scared of what they were doing to fake your own death and alter your appearance.”
The muzzle of the gun Henderson holds to my head is cold. “You’re going to help us rescue our friends and bring The Titans down.”
Sometimes your calling finds you.
My mousy brown hair’s grown out and the filler in my lips is gone. No one’s looking for Sharon or Galia. I go by Jet now. My wife Blaze teases, when I’m holding my machine gun, that I look like Patti Hearst. We are both commanders in the Human Liberation Army.
We depend on the bravery of our comrades to blend in as ordinary citizens. They’re regularly jailed, deported, or worse by ICE. They’re beaten with riot clubs and choked by tear gas by the military, who have taken over our streets. Our comrades are fired from their jobs for their social media posts against the regime. They are regularly thrown out of press rooms for asking questions and demanding answers. They are the decoys who allow us to do our rescue missions so we can move undetected.
Our army is everywhere. We’re the desk clerk at your optometrist and your Tesla mechanic. We are yoga teachers and librarians. We are the new chapters of Mary Kay cruising in pink Cadillacs with battle plans hidden in our makeup cases. Years from now our tactical Tupperware parties will be legendary. We’re old school. We are one hundred percent human intelligence. We live off the grid. We don’t use computers. No social media. No credit cards or cellphones. We are fighting the good fight and every day we’re getting closer to freeing the world from destruction.
Laura Bogner is a writer, visual artist, and yoga teacher living in Joshua Tree, California. She has published in Punk Noir Press Magazine, Adad Zine, Space Cowboy Books Podcast, Glendale Weekly, and Los Angeles Press, and she has a piece coming out in Rock and a Hard Place in early 2026. Laura has shown art and performed live readings of her work at Red Light Lit, La Matadora Gallery, Art Queen Gallery, Furstworld, The Palms, Stories, Books & Cafe, and Skylight Books.
Urban Pigs Press 
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