by Hugh Howey
“So you’re a man,” I said. “You’re not just playing queer, you’re a man.”
More hedging. “Well, legally I—”
“You’re playing!” I almost shouted. I almost didn’t care who heard me. I was shaking, I couldn’t see straight. “You’re a fucking—yeah, you know what? I grew up in this. I was playing with—fuck you. Fuck you! You want to know what it’s really like?”
John got a look like she’d worked something out.
I hated that look. Straight up hated it.
“I know what—” John said, or started to say. I ran right over her. Couldn’t stop, and Christos, I wanted to.
“Ever since I was a kid. Sold my dolls on my parents’ net accounts. Thought I’d be able to get this toy gun—they forced me into a dress once and I nearly tore their eyes out, clawed up my mom’s face so bad, and every day I was sick when someone looked at my chugs or called me ma’am, and you’re fucking—”
You’re a pretender, some sick trans-v playing in women’s clothing. I wanted to say that. Didn’t even care it was the same shit people used to fling at me.
“I was a boy,” I spat out. “I had some chromosome problem but I knew what I was. This isn’t a joke.”
“It’s not a joke for me,” John said.
“No, it’s a goddamn disguise,” I said, leaned over, and puked again.
John put her hand on my back and I shoved her away. I didn’t want to be touched. I spent my whole life up until the GAT and the surgery and the moving halfway across the country to Baxon having people say I’d grow out of this, like I’d grow out of my skin, be a normal girl, settle down with a normal guy, take those hands all over me, take him crawling on top of me, take him feeling better than me, stronger than me, like I’d take the whole five-course meal of what my life was supposed to look like and feel like and be shoved down my mouth the moment I was spewed out into the world, when some doctor looked between my legs and laid down the law on me. John’s little card with her GAT score meant nothing on all that.
There’s a word for that. Dysphoria. I got my chugs lopped off, got my own little card that got me into the City Guard with the rest of the boys, got a good haircut and remedial hormones and that all helped, but not enough. The damn rev had a point: I got to be a guy because I took a test and it said I got into enough fights, played enough sports, had enough right interests and few enough wrong ones. I got to be a guy because some white-collar jackhole stamped and signed a form. I never would’ve got to be a guy just because I was a guy.
John was quiet when I was done spewing. Then she said, “The only way I could’ve gotten this job was by acting, every day, like I was something I wasn’t.”
The only way I got this job was by arguing my whole life I was who I was.
“Do you think it makes sense?” John asked.
“Yeah, funny thing is, no one ever asked me.”
John was quiet. Then she said, “I hate it.”
I looked at her. Didn’t know what she meant.
“You can feel it,” John said. “How they look at you.”
I grimaced. “Yeah,” I agreed. “How it goes sliding over you. Like they just look, and—”
“And it’s not even—it’s a look that says ‘I know what you are,’” John said. “Like they’ve figured you out.”
“And you can’t say no. You can’t—”
“You just want to say, that’s not me!”
I turned my head to look at her. Him. I looked at him. “Why do you put up with this shit?” I said. “Just get another goddamn job.”
He watched me with blank hazel eyes. “Why didn’t you just wear the goddamn dress?”
I twisted around and punched him.
I split his lip on his teeth. If I hadn’t been wearing gloves I’d’ve split my knuckle on his teeth. He jerked back and spat blood, and gave me the kind of look people give bad wiring.
After a while, I said, “Sorry.”
John wiped a glob of blood off his lips. “I had brothers,” he said. “I’ll survive.”
“I meant—” I waved a hand. “Sorry for the other stuff. Pulling you out of the queue.”
John was quiet for a moment. “You were just doing your job.”
“So was the guy who said I wasn’t man enough to be in the army.” I ground my fingernails into my fist. “I just—this is shit, what they make us do.”
Wasn’t much to say, after that.
I closed my eyes and tried to keep the headache down. John got up and walked to the window, looked out at the alley and the street. Then I heard him take breath in.
“Someone’s coming.”
I opened my eyes. “That our boys?”
John was standing way too still, and his shoulders came up toward his ears. “No,” he said.
Revs.
I pulled myself up on the windowsill, and John grabbed my arm to keep me standing. I couldn’t see—headache made it hard—but John said, “There. Three, coming for the front entrance.”
Where they’d find Isaac. They’d find that dead rev. They’d look and wonder where their hostages got to, and they’d come up here to plan. I cussed and reached for the window, and John stopped my hand.
“Are you going to make it down?”
I didn’t look out. Figured that if I went with my eyes closed, I wouldn’t lose it. “We have a choice?”
“You get sick on the stairs and they’ll hear you,” John said. “We’ll be easy marks in that alley. We can find somewhere to hide, let the guard flush them out.”
I groaned. “Where, like the girls’ bathroom?”
John shrugged. “Good as anywhere.”
He got me under the arm and we went to the door, quiet as possible. We slipped through, just as quiet, and someone yelled “Hey!” from the stairs.
John hadn’t seen the first bunch of revs to come home.
There was maybe a second where the rev just saw John’s dress, and most people leave medical types alone. Never know when one might save your bacon, even if you are on the wrong side. Then he saw me, though, and the one thing the revs hated as much as appointed officials was City Guard.
He probably put together who’d shot his pal, too.
Pride might get me killed, but twitchy kept me alive. I shot from the hip, literally, didn’t kill the guy but came close, and the other revs started shouting downstairs.
I remember thinking something about high ground. I remember my helmet fitting too tight, watching myself like a live-action movie, like I was outside my head, stumbling down the stairs and crashing down under cover behind the pulp books. I shot one guy in the chest because I don’t think he believed what was happening—damn revs talk big, but most are just city boys, low on the masc score, lower than me—and then it was on.
By the time I hit the registers I was skidding on adrenaline. Yeah, so I had stupid ideas about action and heroism, like every kid who wanted to be in the army. Thought I’d be a big hero, mowing down hostiles and never taking a hit, lighting up a cig with a big grin. Instead I was sick to my stomach and my heart was pounding too fast; I thought I’d wig out any second. The way my hands were shaking, I can’t believe I shot anyone, but I must’ve, sometime in between the shelves knocking over and the displays getting torn apart over me. I fought those revs until my magazine was empty, not that it took more than a minute at that, and that’s when the boys in uniform came and rescued me.
I CAN’T REMEMBER the trip back to Camp Save Big. I know I didn’t make it on my own power. Mostly I remember the bit before I woke up, swimming in that big back-of-the-eyelid river, up and down until I broke the surface.
Didn’t wake in any proper hospital. This was where they put the special projects, I guess. I could feel a catheter in, and my stomach dropped three feet. All I could think was Shit. All I could think was, Cover blown. People aren’t in the habit of asking after your privates unless they knew you took a reassessment, and I’d been liking that no one here knew. No one asks to see your licens
e if you pass yourself off. If you don’t have chugs or a damn beard. Or a goddamn head injury that makes them stick a catheter in.
I bit down hard, and made fists hard, and held on to nothing until I heard a door open and a guy’s voice say “Hey,” beside me.
Look up and there was John, and he reached over to take my pulse. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m your attending. I told them you might like a private room, and they gave you this one—you being the hero of the hour.”
I looked around at shelves shoved into a corner, a few warehouse pallets stacked in another corner, and decided it had been a crappy back room before becoming my crappy suite. Then what he said hit me. “Wait there. Hero?”
“Hero of the battle of Fresh Food Mart,” John said. “Save the day. Get the girl. You know, if you want her.”
I gave him a funny look, and he burst out laughing.
“Christos, not me!”
I laughed, too. “Think I’m Agatha’s type?”
He reached down and patted my shoulder, and the funny thing was, I didn’t mind. Like, maybe it didn’t matter to his thinking that I got no bits—just like he got no girliness. We both had our dirty little secrets.
“Tell you what, though. That’s got to be worth three points masculine on the GAT.”
“Not unless they hand me a medal over it.” I groaned. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather get treatment than none and I was glad that my head didn’t hurt, but I wanted out of that bed, out of that hospital gown that fell down between my legs, out of just lying there helpless and feeling exposed to the world. John looked at his fingers.
“Not fair, is it?”
Yeah, and we both knew without asking. “Shit deal,” I said. “So what do we do?”
John shrugged. “Keep going,” he said. “Things have to change sometime.”
I looked at him. “You sound like a rev.” That talk about things changing, how unjust it all was. Hell, I guess I sounded like one, too, in my head, but I knew I wasn’t, and I don’t think John was either. Just two guys in bad positions.
“Yeah, well. They’re wrong about a lot, but they’re not wrong about this.” John shrugged, and stood up. “I’ve got patients. You’re gonna be fine.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck on your rounds.”
He went, and I lay back and listened to the painkillers swirling in my veins. The door pulled open, and I didn’t hear it shut. I looked.
“If I have any say in it, I’ll get you that medal,” John said.
The door swung closed behind him.
WHERE THE WOMEN GO
MADELEINE ROUX
WHEN THEY WERE young they stood side by side in the mirror, two identical, gangly kids with sunburned noses and long dark hair. Scrub of the face. Brush of the teeth. Katie would put her hair up in a messy tail and Simon would leave his long, a bit greasy. Her elbows were sharp, and she’d use them like knives in his ribs to get her share of the mirror. Then they were out the door, together, off to school, and so alike sometimes even their dad mixed them up from a distance.
It seemed to change overnight. Simon couldn’t remember what day it was exactly, but it was sudden. Instantaneous. The reasons were obvious, maybe, and right there in front of his face, but still it confused him. Katie would get up earlier, spend more time on her hair. There was lip gloss now after the teeth brushing. He scowled at her in the mirror, because something had flipped right under his nose and that bothered him.
No more sharp little elbows in his ribs, no more familiar bruises left behind from their ongoing war for the mirror.
Simon still scowled at his reflection every morning, harder now because Katie was gone altogether. She was only maybe thirty minutes down the road, but for how it felt she might as well have been on the moon.
One day she just didn’t come home from school. Sixteen years old and vanished. But Simon knew where she was. Everyone did. In a way, he had known she would go like all the others. Katie was soft and friendly and kind. A follower. He knew she would go as soon as the women started leaving their homes, their jobs, their families… They all went to one spot in the middle of nowhere. Well, not nowhere. To him it was Didi Wright’s land. When Didi first showed up to take over that ranch five years ago Simon’s dad wouldn’t shut up about “Didi Wright being Didi Wrong for that place.” He thought he was a real crackup with that one.
Katie and Simon had winced in unison. Christ, Dad.
Simon winced again now, clutching a break-action rifle to his chest, his dad pacing a groove into the floor of the verandah. It was a hot day, dry and windy, and Simon’s mouth felt gritty with dust. He squinted into the distance, in the general direction of Didi Wright’s land. A helicopter sped overhead, loud enough to drown out his father’s voice. He wondered where the bloody things were coming from. Nanutarra Station was the closest thing passing for civilization, but he didn’t think they had any helicopters there. The choppers had been going over day and night, some of them news, some of them military. It was strange turning on the TV or the radio to hear nothing but male voices come out. The talking heads on Sky News looked spooked. They read off the teleprompters in a fog, droning on, their eyes big and haunted.
Nobody in the family had slept in days, and it was becoming obvious. His brothers Johnny and Davis looked knackered, with bags under their eyes deep enough to hold stones. His dad never quit pacing and slept, or tried to, with his gun in the bed.
The sun blasted behind his father’s whip-thin frame as he made his way back and forth across the porch. He had always been wiry, a long streak of pelican shit, but now it looked like a stiff breeze could blow him over. Two bouts with skin cancer hadn’t turned him onto sunscreen, his only concession a floppy fisherman’s hat that was yellowed and fraying.
Johnny and Davis hunched over their guns on the edge of the verandah. They had always been big, meaty boys, but now they too seemed ravaged. Either Simon was imagining things or Johnny’s sweat-stained tee was hanging looser. Simon squinted past his father, watching the helicopters disappear over the ragged tree line at the edge of their property. Katie was somewhere beyond those trees.
“Ya reckon she walked?”
Simon hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud until his father grunted and spat, arcing a gob of spit over the railing and into the dust.
“Walked nothin’,” he muttered. “She was taken. They took her, anyone who says different is talking out their arse.”
“Dunno,” Simon said with a shrug, still fixated on those gently swaying trees. “On TV it looks like they’re all buggering off on their own, eh? No one forcing them.”
“Bullshit,” his father roared, rounding on Simon. He braced for a smack, but it didn’t come. “Not our Katie,” the old rancher said, softer. “She wouldn’t do that to me.”
“It’s the government.” Davis had always been the stupid one, but he was really going for it lately. Simon glared. “S’gotta be.”
“Watch the news once or twice,” Simon shot back. “Even the Prime Minister doesn’t know shit. Nobody does.”
“They just lie.” Davis had a low voice, and he always spoke slowly, like he was figuring out each word just before he said it, but it took a little too long. “Right, Dad? They just lie.”
Simon wished he could go deaf. They had gone ’round and ’round on this ever since Katie left. In the wake of her disappearance, when the panic lifted and all that was left was confusion, they had nothing to do with themselves but speculate. Simon had stopped eating at the dinner table with them. All the useless talk just gave him headaches.
He fidgeted with his gun, looking down at it. He hadn’t used it much lately, only some target practice to keep sharp and a few rats that’d gotten into the shed and made a mess. Something about holding the gun now didn’t feel right. He knew what his dad was planning, and where he wanted to go, and all of the sudden it dawned on Simon that maybe this gun and the bullets inside it would be turned on people. Women. He shivered.
“What’
s the matter with you?” Davis muttered. He had a heavy brow and shaggy brown hair that he was constantly shaking out of his face.
“Nothing,” Simon replied, lifting his head. Everything.
“Well that’s it then, Dad, isn’t it?” Davis was being stupid again. What did that even mean? But the older boy stood, putting his rifle over his shoulder like he was some tough guy soldier from the movies. “We gotta do it.”
“We gotta,” his dad echoed.
His father’s name was Francis. The boys used to joke about it in private. He did not look like a Francis. He went by Frank, of course, but when their mother was still alive she called him Francis now and then. Usually on Christmas. It didn’t sound weird when their mum said it; somehow it had been sweet coming out of her mouth.
Simon missed her then, and he wished she was there to tell them what to do. Not that Frank would listen, but still. Or would she be gone like Katie, too? All the women were leaving, going to Didi Wright’s property. There were rumors about a strange light in her fields and that all the women were gathering there. The news had to blur lots of the coverage because tons of the women were starkers.
“We gotta do it,” Frank said with a growl. “No choice, really.”
He finally stopped pacing and turned down the verandah steps, taking them slow and heavy, as if he had a boulder strapped to his back. Simon didn’t like it. He didn’t want to follow; he wanted to go back inside and sit on the couch with all the dogs, get surrounded by their familiar dusty, oily scent and prop his feet up on the apple crates they used as a coffee table, and watch the TV for hours, just watch and watch, back on the vigil for Katie, determined to find her among all the naked blurry shapes in the field.
But his brothers were following Frank, trooping down the steps and falling in line. The old ute was already in the drive, once black but now more or less tan from the caked-on dust and mud. He could hear the dogs behind him in the house whining. They knew something was wrong, just like Simon did, and he trusted them more than he ever trusted Frank or his dumb brothers.