Brutal Women (6 page)

Telle flips on the tube and
reroutes us. We have six more days in the field, but the reroute gets us two
more. Ro puts us on cut rations.

The girls whine about water all
night. All but the broad-shouldered one. She has a tangle of curly hair, always
hangs her head over. Kep starts calling her Doll.

“What we calling the other one?”
Telle says.

The third one, the skinniest girl,
with a face smeared purple with bruises, holds her arms over herself, bobs her
head. I have a boy back home, he bobs his head like that when things get tense.
Says he’s thinking too much.

“Call her Wonder,” I say.

The girls slow us down. There are
bugs to eat, but the girls keep retching them up.

Kep’s on scout next day, comes in,
says there’s a village a click south. “Maybe two or three dozen bags,” she
says. “Mostly boys.”

Ro gives the nod. “Stock up on
water. Be good.”

We push. Luce switches out scout
with Kep. Kep paces me. Telle’s still on girl detail. Ro’s taking up the rear.

Kep and I hit dirt first. We scare a
group of scraggly girls and kids in one of the bug farms on the edge of the
village. The girls slosh up onto the banks of the ponds. I see the roiling
forms of giant madillo bugs churning through the muddy water. Some of the girls
grab stones as they disappear into the bush, but nobody throws any. They’ll
hide and wait. Ro tells us to be careful now, look for trips. Don’t go in the
water.

When we get into the spread of the
village, a bunch of girls are there. They’re darting back and forth. Carrying
stones. A couple have razor bugs mounted on long poles.

Telle’s got the language down,
tries some bargaining, but they won’t have it. Some stones fly. Kep sprays a
couple of the closest throwers. They screech. Their skin starts melting off.
Telle shouts out again that we want water, a roof.

They send somebody out, some old
woman. She brings two boys with her, skinny, sticky things no better than the
ones in Pekoi proper. She kneels down, and the boys kneel down next to her. She
holds out their hands to us.

Telle says we have to take them.
It’s a cease fire offering. I tell her water’s better.

Ro grunts, grabs the boys’ hands.
“A roof,” she says, “water.”

They put us up in the old woman’s
hut, a circular mud pit layered over in thatch. Telle turns on the tube. Ro takes
up the food they bring in. We stash the boys in a corner and tell them to shut
up. The hut’s pretty small, and there’s a lot of us. It’s too crowded. Ro puts
Kep and Luce and me outside, tells us to watch point.

Kep squats down against the house,
pulls out her cards. I don’t like the air we’re getting off the locals. They’re
too used to muscle.

There’s a boy watching from the
doorway of one of the far huts. He’s seven or eight, old enough to be trouble,
young enough not to be much trouble. He comes out of the doorway, takes a
couple steps forward. I’m keeping an eye as we lop cards. Luce stares the kid
straight in the face. He waves at her. Kep adjusts her gun on her shoulder.

Luce yells out at him in the local.
Her accent is bad. “You stay there! Stay or we shoot. Understand?”

The boy goes still. His eyes are
wide. He’s looking past us.

I look at Kep. She’s at the corner
of the hut. I can’t see around it.

I yell, “Kep!”

Kep unshoulders her gun, flops on
the ground. She fires around the corner without looking.

Luce is up. I dart around the other
side of the hut. I hear the girls inside, screeching. I pace all the way
around, duck out and see what Kep hit. There’s a couple screamers. A boy and a
woman, maybe his older sister. Their faces are pretty smeared. Black holes for
mouths and eyes, flesh running off bone, no noses. They’re wiping off their own
faces with their hands.

I do a quick sweep. There are half
a dozen people out. More coming up from the other end of the village. They’ve
got stones. Somebody’s got a writhing basket. Flesh beetles.

“Hold!” I yell. I only know a
couple words in local. I got that one down.

But they don’t hold. They start
screaming. Somebody throw a stone.

Luce sprays the nearest two. They
go down.

There’s a girl up on a roof. I see
her throw, but she’s so far off, I don’t think she can hit anything.

But her aim is good. Kep goes down,
struck right between the eyes. I run toward her. The crowd screeches.

I can hear Ro’s voice somewhere
behind me.

“Move back!” Luce says, and yanks me
away from Kep. I can’t shoulder my gun and grab Kep. I’ll lose point on the
hostiles.

“Cover me,” I say.

The girl with the basket dumps her
beetles.

Luce sprays her. But the beetles
are out. They swarm. Hunched, dark figures, big as my palms. I fall back from
Kep, and the bugs overtake her. Kep jerks.

I duck to reach for her flailing
arm. One of the bugs jumps on my hand. I try and smash it, but the pincers get
me between thumb and forefinger, right through my slick. The bug starts pumping
yellowish fluid.

Luce keeps dragging me back.

Ro’s up behind me now. She rips off
the bug, takes a hunk of my flesh with it. Pain jolts up my arm.

Ro’s got her gun out. “Jian, take
girl watch. Telle, get out here! I need a translator!”

I hump back around to the front. Telle’s
already heading my way. I take watch on the girls. They’re huddled in the
entryway, clinging to each other. Doll is starting to cry.

We’re boxed in. We’ve got hostiles
all around. I can see a half dozen more coming up from the ponds. They’re
running. There’s more screaming around the other side. Ro’s shouting --

“Spray! Take them out!”

And when the ones from the pond get
close enough, I take them out. Their hands are empty, but Kep’s dead, and Ro’s
giving the watch. We’re the muscle. Not the brains.

I can’t hear the girls anymore,
because everyone else is screaming. I slip a knife out of my boot and go and
cut the ones I sprayed. Shut them up. I’ve got my slick on, so the spray stays
off me. Their heads are just big globs of goo now.

Luce is running toward me. I’m
standing over a half dozen bodies. I wonder how many more hostiles we’ve got
left.

“Orders?” I say.

“Telle’s it!” she yells. “Ro’s
down.”

“Down?”

“Down!”

I stare past Luce. Telle’s humping
back. There’s a heap of oozing bodies behind her. She’s got Ro’s gun.

“The fuck?” I say.

“She’s down,” Telle says.

“The fuck you mean she’s down?” I
say.

“Let’s go. Let’s get these bags and
go,” Telle says. She grabs Wonder by the arm, tries to yank her up. The whole
lot of them are clinging so tight that when Wonder moves, they move too.

I do a quick count, look for
movement. There’s the heap Telle and Luce left behind, the heap where Ro and
Kep are. I can just see something flickering on a far roof. What have they got
left? Kids and kittens?

“I said we’re up!” Telle says.

Luce and I share a look. “Luce, run
point!” I say, because I can’t grab the girls and aim my gun. I’m stronger than
Luce, but she’s a better shot.

I look back again, at Ro and Kep
and the bodies. I can’t even tell one from the other.

“Move!” Telle says.

I grab hold of Maul. She bites at
my slick, so I throw her over my shoulder. She goes limp, and we move. Luce
paces ahead. She sprays anything that moves. Boys, chickens, bugs. She sprays
out a path, and there’s nothing left living behind us.

We make it to the bug ponds. Maul
twists suddenly, so sudden I think she’s having a fit. I lose my grip, and she
goes over, rolls into the water with a splash.

Luce twists toward the pond, aims
her gun at the water.

“Luce, point!” I say, because I’ve
got my own gun out now. She’s moved off point.

Wonder and Doll are crying.

I try to switch my gun setting low,
but it’s been jammed since the last city.

“Go get her!” Telle says. She’s got
the other two by the hair. Some of it’s come out in her hands.

“Fuck you,” I say, because she
isn’t Ro, but Ro’s dead. And that leaves her.

The girls’ sobs are turning to
keening. I can’t see a ripple in the dark water.

Luce sets off a spray ahead of us.
“I got movement!”

“What are you shooting at, dogs?” I
yell.

Telle hits my shoulder with the
butt of her gun. I nearly lose my balance, nearly go over.

But Telle had to let go of the
girls to do it. Doll’s crawling away. Wonder’s almost on her feet.

Telle grabs Wonder by the hair.
This time, a big hunk of her hair comes away, leaves a bloody scalp. Wonder
screeches.

I stumble forward. These bags of
sludge are going to come apart. They’re going to come apart and vomit on us,
hock up a thousand hours of organic tailoring.

I grab Doll by the ankle, pull her
toward me. She bites at my slick. Her teeth don’t go through. I put my hands
around her throat and squeeze. And squeeze. She flails, like Kep flailed, only
her face is turning gray.

Telle’s with Wonder. Luce is
yelling something.

Doll finally goes still. I let her
go limp. I stand up. Telle’s standing over Wonder. Wonder’s curled up into a
ball. I take my knife out of my boot.

“Don’t cut her!” Telle says.

But I cut her anyway, because Telle
can test and bag a corpse better than a live fish, and Ro and Kep are dead.

Wonder bleeds, more than I thought
she would. I keep her between my legs, hold her still. She jerks a little. Her
eyes go glassy.

I let her go, wipe my knife. “Tag
and bag her,” I say. “Central gets their proof. They just won’t be live.”

Telle’s staring at me. Luce’s still
got her gun trained on the trees. I stare out at the water.

Telle rips off her test pack and
starts cutting open Wonder’s warm body. Wonder jerks some more.

I crouch, point my gun at the pond,
and wait. Maul’s body finally comes up, floating face down. Telle’s hands are
elbow-deep in Wonder’s corpse.

I chew some sen. “You gonna fish
her out?” I ask Luce, but Luce hasn’t seen the body yet. One of the big bugs
grabs hold of it again, hauls it back under.

Telle sits back on her heels. She
wipes her hands on her slick. She stands up. She looks blank.

“What?” I say.

“Body’s clean,” she says.

“Clean?” I say.

“There’s nothing in there,” Telle
says. “They weren’t organics.”

“Check the other one,” I say.

“I don’t need to --”

I point my gun at her. “Check the
other one.”

Luce licks her lips.

Telle guts the other one. She
cracks open the ribcage. The body shudders. She digs around for awhile. Her
hands come out bloody. No sludge. Clean. She looks up at me.

“Clean,” she says.

“Now what?” Luce says.

“We burn them,” I say.

They don’t have a better idea. So
we burn them. And they burn. Like good little girls, my little Wonder, Maul,
Doll. They burn.

I chew some more sen. Telle flicks
on the tube.

There’s nothing dangerous in Pekoi.

We ship out three weeks later.
We’ve got a new first, and a new flank. We’re the last squad to take off, so we
get to see it. It’s Telle who’s on the tube, Telle who says,

“We’re clear.”

They drop fire on Pekoi. Pekoi
burns. Just like anything else.

The brains say Pekoi is too
dangerous to the civilized world. Doesn’t matter what the muscle says, what the
muscle did. It’s all about the brains, in the end. What they thought they saw.
What they thought they knew.

Telle’s got the tube up by her ear.
I’m watching the city burn.

“You hear it?” Telle asks our
first.

Our first shakes her head.

“Eighty percent of the districts
reporting. Nabirye’s leading fifty-six to forty.”

Luce is wiping moths’ wings off her
boots, smearing dusty color on her cheeks. She laughs and laughs.

Nabirye flies us to another city.

“The Madhattered” was, I
believe, the name of a bar in one of fellow Clarionite Andy Scott’s workshop
stories. I loved the name so much that I vowed to use it in a story one day. In
2004, I got my chance when Strange Horizons Magazine published Genderbending at
the Madhattered, probably the only magazine that would ever take a weird little
story like this. Turns out I can write about painters afterall – so long as
they’re gender/sex morphing ones. This is also, possibly, the closest I will
ever come to writing a romance with a “happy” ending. Or at least a romance
about two people who don’t totally annihilate each other. You’ve been warned.

My friends are cyclical, like the
eight seasons—always changing, always the same. I never believed this. About
them. About myself. I didn’t like politics.

I photograph the perpetually
gendered in little rural towns outside the city, towns with names like Ash and
Beech and Coriander. After half a year of churning along muddy rails, knocking
on knotty doors tied with twine; after half a hundred debates with operators
about misdirected calls, charges, disconnected or nonexistent lines; after all
that, all I wanted was to be back in the city, drinking at the Madhattered,
thinking about anything but politics.

My friends kept tabs on when I’d be
in; we’d meet at the Madhattered thirteen hours till dawn. Nib and Page were
always there first, always arguing: debates about heterosexist dogma, or who
could drink the most tarls without compromising gender propriety. Margin would
drink mandalas and tell me it was barbaric that there was actually a country
where drinking processed food was taboo.

Rule showed up the same every
night, of course. He’d walk in, tall and straight-hipped, denouncing social
authorities and gender prescription. He’d come in with his beard plucked
because the government wouldn’t let him get it surgically eradicated. His wish
for smooth cheeks fell outside his gender prescriptions, especially since he
was queer. “Nothing personal,” Rule told me the first time we met, when I asked
him to be female for the night, and he admitted to his inability to alter sex.
“Just born that way.”