Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  Nkosi was there, and the girls with their bottle caps, and the boys from downstairs, and many, many more. Tall men in suits and blue work jumpsuits, and women wearing shawls over broad shoulders and babies with heads so small I could fit them in my hands, and there were teenage girls there, toyi-toying - singing and dancing and clapping their hands. An old man sat smoking in a corner, wreathed in the heady sweet smell of dagga smoke.

  “Dad! Dad!” I cried, and crawled up onto the end of my father’s bed. His face was very, very white, and his eyes were wide open, staring. I saw that there were long bandages wrapped around his arms. I saw dark blood seeping through.

  I shook him, “See the people, dad!” I said. “I told you they were here! Make them go away, dad. You have to save our country!”

  “Everything’s burning,” my father murmured.

  Now I was crying because I was so scared, scared my father couldn’t make the people go away. “Tell me what to do,” I said. “I’ll make them go away. Just tell me what to do.”

  My mother pushed into the room and started to yell at me. I opened my mouth to tell her about the people, but she just walked right through them, strode over the girls and their bottle caps and the circle of girls toyi-toying. She did not see the babies or the women or the men in their suits, or the old man smoking dagga in the corner.

  “What are you doing here, you horrible girl!” my mother said. She grabbed me by the arm and jerked me off the bed. I tumbled onto the floor and fell against an old woman wearing a black dress. She wore a church hat and carried a small black purse, and she said something to me in Afrikaans that I was too frightened to understand.

  “Dad brought ghosts!” I cried. “There are ghosts all over the house!”

  My mother slapped me. I burst into new tears.

  My father died that night.

  The doctor said it was a heart attack. No one talked about the bandages on my father’s arms. No one talked about the ghosts. Mother said that she would punish me if I ever mentioned them again. I asked Nan if she was going to leave. She said she wanted to, but she loved me too much. She didn’t want to leave me with the ghosts.

  I got used to the ghosts after awhile. They never got old. They never told new stories. They stayed the same, and I grew up. Nan voted in the elections in 1994, and came home and sang to me as I helped her with dinner.

  My mother got old and died too soon. I think she really could see the ghosts, but she pretended not to. I think they drove her crazy.

  But to me, the ghosts became a part of the house. Inseparable from the garden, the stoep, the stove, the big washing sink. The girls still play at the foot of my bed with their bottle caps. Nan says she keeps the men with suits company, and talks with Nkosi in the garden. The football boys watch television with us at night. The old man smokes dagga in the corner of my parents’ old room.

  These are my father’s ghosts, but it is me who keeps them company. Me and Nan, because it is not my house anymore, and it is not my country. It is our house, our country, and we are all finding our places in it, carving out our own corners.

  I am not afraid of the ghosts anymore. But I still hold onto them. Hold tight. I do what my father could not - I hold onto his ghosts, and by holding them, maybe one day I will set them free. And free us all.

  Wonder Maul Doll

  Give a woman a gun, and the power dynamics change. It’s not so much that I started out writing with the explicit goal of writing fiction that treated men and women equally (the “f” word), or even skewed the dynamics to matriarchy on occasion (which were always violent, too – you can’t oppress half of the world and have a peaceful society, no matter which half you’re oppressing. Sorry). It’s that I started writing stories I wanted to read. Gritty, brutal stories about screwed up people who also happened to be women. This story first appeared in From the Trenches: An SF War Anthology in 2006. In 2009, it was “reprinted” in EscapePod and reached a whole new audience of angry science fiction fans who felt I was gory for gory’s sake and moaned and groaned about what had happened to their happy-go-lucky Golden Age SF. “Where’s my cozy white guys rule the world stories?” they cried.

  These chicks ate it.

  We’d set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We’re all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

  We’re swapping off some boy in a backwater push the locals cleared out for us. We’re sitting around a low table. I pass off another card to Kep. Luce swaps out a suit. She has to sit on one leg to lean over the table. It’s hot in the low room, so humid that moths clutter around our feet, too heavy to fly.

  The boy’s making little mewling sounds again. Somebody should shut him up, but not me. This is my hand. I’m ahead.

  Ro’s got her feet up on the chair next to me, head lolled back, eyes closed. She’s sweating like a cold glass.

  Telle finishes up behind the curtain. She took her time with the boy, the kid. Not a kid, I guess. Looks young, too skinny. They’re all pale as maggots, here, built like stick figures. She pushes into a seat next to Kep, flicks on the radio tube. It flickers blue-green, vomits up a misty shot of President Nabirye talking trash.

  “Turn that up,” Ro says. She passes me some sen. Her teeth are stained red.

  The boy stumbles past the curtain. He’s a little roughed up. Ro throws some money at him.

  Kep crowns my king. I steal an ace.

  The boy clutches at the money in the mud; moths’ wings come away on his hands. There must be something Ro doesn’t like, cause she stands and roughs him up some. He starts squealing.

  Elections back home are in a month. President Nabirye’s nattering about foreign policy in Pekoi. President says we’ll be home in six weeks. Three of our squads just got hashed by a handful of local boys and teenage girls.

  “They don’t pull us out soon, and they’ll ship be shipping us home in bags,” Telle says. “Nabirye won’t be in that seat in six weeks.”

  “Nabirye can eat shit,” Kep says.

  Ro cuffs her. “Watch the yapping.” She sits down and starts polishing her boots.

  The boy on the floor isn’t moving.

  We’ve been here nine months looking for treaty violations, organic dumps. Bags of human sludge.

  We haven’t found a fucking thing.

  There’s nothing dangerous in Pekoi.

  Ro has me and Kep on point. Kep’s all right, a talker, doesn’t keep the tube on all the damn time like Telle. We’re checking out another field the brains sent us out to sniff. Running fire drills, Ro calls it. We’re mucking through half-filled ditches, cutting open suspect corpses, raiding contagion shelters.

  “So,” Kep says, “sister says, I want to marry her like in the books. Like, for love. A pauper. Mother Mai says –”

  “Fuck you?” I suggest.

  “Yeha, yeah. Mother Mai says, you marry for business. It’s in the Bible.”

  “Is that truth?”

  “Yeah. Book of Theclai. Page eighteen. Line ninety-five.”

  “Thou shalt eat fish?” I say, wondering if we’re talking about the same book.

  “Hold!” Ro yells from behind us.

  Kep and I drop to our bellies in the high grass. We’re slathered in bug secretions, but it doesn’t keep them away. I can feel bugs boring up under my slick. Yellow and black ticks, hoar ticks, pill ticks. I’ll spend all night burning them out.

  “Did you see anything?” Kep says.

  “Nah,” I say. I crunch a bug in my teeth.

  Somebody pokes at Kep. Kep nearly sets off a spray. I pivot onto my back, raise my gun. It’s just Ro. I flop back ove
r onto my belly. Ro stays crouched.

  “We’re twenty paces,” Ro says.

  “I don’t see nothing,” Kep says.

  “Telle and Luce are running scout,” Ro says. “Hold.”

  We wait. The bugs really start to swarm.

  “Clear!” Telle’s voice, loud.

  “Up,” Ro says.

  Kep and I pace at a half-crouch, our eyes just above the line of the grass. I can see Luce and Telle at the base of a rocky rise overhung in widow’s drape and black morvern. They’ve uncovered a gaping black mouth.

  I come up along Telle. Kep flanks Luce.

  “Light,” Ro says.

  Telle snaps a globe off her vest and flicks the release, tosses the globe into the darkness. The globe throws off white light.

  Ro points us in. “Kep, Jian,” she says.

  Kep and I slip into the tunnel. We have to crouch. The floor’s smooth. The globe stops rolling at a bend in the corridor. I hear a scuttling sound, like cockroaches.

  Kep raises a fist. We stop. Kep kicks the globe around the turn. The globe cracks against the far wall. Something moves.

  Kep goes down on one knee. I aim over her head, into the bowl of the stone room. The globe leaves no shadows, so I see them. Hunkered against the stone, clinging to each other, quaking like boats at tide: Pekoi’s stashed organics. Their treaty violation. Nabirye might get her seat yet.

  “Live!” Kep yells. “Telle!”

  The three girls on the floor start crying. They try to bury their heads in their skinny arms. There’s no fat on them. I could break all their bones in my bare hands.

  Telle thumps in, does a count. “Haul them out!” she says. “I called it in. They want them live.”

  “The fuck?” Kep says.

  So we haul them out, live.

  They come kicking and biting, but they’re spent by the time they hit air. The littlest one is the fiercest, all teeth and eyes.

  Ro looks them over. She’s holding Telle’s tube. I hear the tinny voice buzzing from Central. Ro clicks the tube off, tosses it to Telle.

  The girls start babbling. They’re naked, and their accents are bad, but they know what we’re saying. They’re feeding us some story about hiding from bursts. Dead families, bloated bodies. They say they’re not tailored, not dangerous. They don’t know anything about organic sludge. I’ve heard it from every bag. And every bag opens up the same.

  “Shut up,” Telle says. She steps in, butts the biggest one in the face with her gun.

  The little one leaps on Telle and starts tearing at her slick.

  Kep and Luce and I drag the girl off. Telle binds the girl’s hands, trusses up the other two with plastic wire.

  We string them together and make for Central. We’re a long way from Central.

  We don’t talk about that.

  “So Mother Mai says –”

  “Fuck Mother Mai,” I say.

  Telle’s got watch over the girls. They’re huddled around a big cicada tree. Ro’s poking at the fire beetles in the stove. Dusk is heavy. The lavender sky goes deep purple, then black. It’s like being smothered.

  “Mother Mai says, what you gonna do with a womb anyway? It gonna chew your meat for you?” Kep’s sitting up on the fallen tree behind me, wiping down her gun. She’s got a globe up there, set low. The light’s orange, like bad urine.

  One of the girls is bleeding, the little one. It’s been three cities since I seen a woman bleed. I forgot that some still do it. Telle’s still got a grudge against that girl. She’s started calling her Maul.

  “So my sister has it put back in. Nip and tuck,” Kep says. “You know what happens?”

  Luce is pulling off the heads of powder bugs. She keeps dropping them on me. I pound at her ankles. She kicks away.

  “Nothing happens!” Kep says. “She doesn’t even bleed, cause she’s got implants, of course. I thought she’d be crying all the time. Like a boy. No. It’s social, my sister says, makes boys so screwed up.”

  “Your sister should run for a seat,” I say. “She sounds like a bleeding heart. Her and all the bleeding hearts can run the whole damn world from the seat. Start wearing their wombs like trophies.”

  “Yeah,” Kep says. She spits sen on her cleaning rag. “Yeah.”

  Ro yells at Luce and tells her to run a perimeter sweep. Ro kicks me and makes me heat up the pot. I take some over to Telle and the girls. The little one, Maul, bares her teeth at me, but she takes the food in, takes it so fast she vomits it up. One of the others, this big, broad-shouldered mutt, just looks at the pot like she’s never seen food before. She goggles at me like a kid. When she looks at me, I hear that boy. The mewling one.

  We move at light, after delousing. The girls are sweating too much. Losing too much water. All that uncovered skin. No slicks. They drink too much.

  Luce is running scout. She circles at midday, when we’re sitting out the worst of the heat.

  “Off track,” Luce says. “They put up a ward over the road.”

  Ro spits sen. “Our road?”

  “Yeha.”

  “Pekoi doesn’t want us coming back in,” I say.

  “Or they’re just doing road work,” Ro says. “Don’t think they’re savvy. We reroute. Telle?”

  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 o
f 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.