Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  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.

  Genderbending At the Madhattered

  “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 th
em. 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.”

  Rule always ordered the drinks: mandalas straight up, sprins over ice, four tonic and tarls . . . and then he’d order drinks for the rest of us.

  By the end of the night, we were always drunk, and Margin would be slumped over in the seat next to mine, wearing a blue tunic or pink tutu and enough makeup to paint a landscape. Margin would blubber about the latest love he or she had lost that night, Page and Nib would be yelling about whose turn it was to be male in their ongoing adolescent opera, and Rule would be wearing a dress, illegally. Around two hours till dawn, when the perpetually sexed couples were going home to baths and babies and picket-fenced houses, we’d start to talk photographs. History. We would start talking about who we were, who we wanted to be.

  Those were the worst nights.

  But I need to tell you what I did outside the Madhattered, before Liquid Sunshine and the end of adolescence. Before perpetualism, complacency, adulthood.

  Photographs form our historical memory, our past. The image of our forebears, sexed in the ideal of their vision upon our discovered landscape of sand and stone, is our starting point: they upon the black shores, wrapped in lingering sea-fog, posed among amber forests, recording our landscape as significantly as the record of their own existence; back when the landscape was still significant. Each of us is remembered in the same way. Photographers, through photos, prove our existence. Mine. Yours. Ours.

  I’m one of those photographers. I help document every mature citizen who’s formulated a sense of gendered identity. In little towns like Tansy and Burdock in the north, most people are photographed male; that’s the perpetual gender they chose, the one the government ordains they’re recorded in. You’re stuck with perpetualism until you’ve dried up your breeding potential. Some change back afterwards—many do before I come to town—but really, it doesn’t much matter after the photograph; whatever you’ve chosen as your twenty-year perpetual sex is the one you’ll be remembered by, the one that forms your perpetual identity for posterity. In a little town south of Tansy called Grass, I once waited four weeks—a whole season—for half the elder population to shift itself back to female so I could capture the images of themselves they were bound by law to portray for posterity. All those perpetuals, adults, so certain of who they were, where they belonged. I envied them: their unchanging core of identity, their sense of themselves as a part of our historical present, permanently recorded for our future.

  After I met Sunshine, I called every night I spent in those tiny towns, and every night Sunshine laughed and said, “Cue, have them send you home. I’ll remind you who you are.”

  But the Historiographical Society has its own agenda, both now and then, and by the time I got back to the city, high summer was usually over, the leaves were turning lavender, and I’d almost forgotten those peculiar things about Sunshine that fascinated me from the start.

  When I first met Sunshine, I had my imager set up outside a couple of storefronts in a backward little town called Sage. Some neuter youths were throwing stones at the windows of one of the tuck shops, and I wanted to bring a copy of the photograph back to the city and put it into the Sage collection in the archives. I was going to call it “Violence Outside the Window,” which I thought was quite clever. We’re normally not allowed to photograph underage neuters. They’re not considered a part of historical memory until after they’ve chosen a perpetual gender. In this case, however, the town elders had had trouble with these neuters vandalizing storefronts, and they employed me to provide the artifact with which to procure compensation from the neuters’ families.

  After I’d snapped a few images, the neuters caught sight of me at the end of the street. They started throwing stones at me. I panicked, looped my imager around my neck, left the tripod, and ducked into the first door along the street that opened for me— and tumbled into a thin blond man giving a seasonal presentation on sex mutation theory to a room full of prostitutes. The man and I crumpled onto the maroon carpet in a tangle of arms and legs. I got a mouthful of his hair, my imager banged into his groin, and he punched me so hard he gave me a black eye.

  The imager didn’t break, and Sunshine wasn’t really hurt, but he spent the next three weeks being female out of spite. I asked her to lunch to make up for it. She said she didn’t like to eat in public because her last partner was from Thosaline, and Thosalines considered eating in public aesthetically unappealing.

  We settled on iced water. I had a citrus in mine.

  Sunshine gestured with her slender hands when she spoke. Her voice was soft, and she was very open, articulate. She was the only person I’d ever met whose mannerisms remained the same no matter their sex. Sunshine still looked me directly in the eye when male, and used the same effeminate gestures. His laugh still came out a girlish giggle. Sunshine’s indifference to gender prescriptions unnerved even my friends.

  I loved Sunshine for it.

  Sunshine was slim and straight-hipped, even when female. The government had recommended she become perpetually male, as bearing children would likely kill someone with hips like hers. Because of that, he hadn’t had any identity issues since he was a neuter. I always envied her that. She worked as a social health worker and disease counselor for the city University, which explained his lecture at the brothel in Sage. He practiced yoga and knew jujitsu.

  Sunshine asked for my call number at the end of our iced-water date. She said she wanted to get a copy of the prints when they were done.

  I didn’t get back to the city for another two weeks after that, and then I spent four days locked up in my flat waiting for her to call. I drank a lot of citrus-flavored water. Margin and Rule called me three times, concerned about my mental state.

  “She’s a small-town flirt,” Margin said. “I’ve met a thousand like them. Get off the floor. Come meet us at the Madhattered.”

  But I didn’t go. And Sunshine called. When she asked me out for dinner (attempting to get over her previous lover’s aversions), I spent the next three days trying to decide which sex I should show up as. An hour before I was to meet Sunshine, I made a hysterical call to Rule asking for advice.

  “Listen,” he said, “anyone the social authorities are going to tag as perpetually male’s going to want to spend a night with a male. Might help some in making up for that twenty years of perpetual pairing with a woman he’s got ahead of him. Government’s got their dirty fingers in everything.”

  So I met Sunshine as a male, and we ate a little, and talked a lot. I never ran out of things to say to him. We had both studied political theory and both had an aversion to Revisionism, Rule’s political party of choice.

  Sunshine took me back to his flat. Inside, bright washe
s of color lined the walls—paintings.

  “You want a drink?” Sunshine asked.

  I nodded. He brought me back a tonic and tarl from the coldbox as I looked over the paintings.

  “You did these?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  The paintings were a wash of bright colors—orange, magenta, crimson, neon yellow, turquoise, vermilion, lavender. In one of them, a pair of figures of indeterminate sex danced and embraced. A frame of words bound them, too small to read. Another canvas portrayed the form of a sexed male wearing gendered female clothing, and a sexed female wearing gendered male clothing. The script border read, “They say love has a bitter taste. But what matter? What matter? I have tasted you. Love is bittersweet.”

  I studied Sunshine with new eyes—the thin, yellow-haired man beside me. These were caustic paintings. Anti-government. Anti-gender prescription. Rule had told me what they did to people who created work like this.

  “You could be bound for painting these,” I said.

  He sipped his drink, still staring at the “love is bittersweet” painting.

  “I wanted to show you,” he said, “in case you thought I was too revolutionary to associate with.” He had a smatter of freckles across the fair skin of his nose and cheeks. I wanted to touch him.

  “It’s just one more thing to like,” I said.

  Sunshine kissed me.

  I spent the night.

  Margin told me I must be in love.

  We huddled over our table at the Madhattered. I spilled everything. Nib and Page were babbling about their lesbian sexuality course at Book’s School of Sexuality. They were having trouble remaining dually female for consecutive days; too much like perpetuality, they said. Margin wore a tutu and red heels, but I wasn’t so certain she was totally female-sexed that night. Rule’s politics were catching.

  “I don’t want to be in love,” I told Margin. “Love is as changeable as sex.”

  Margin rolled her (his?) eyes. “What, you think it’s just about the sex? It’s never just about the sex. Maybe for the queers and the perpetuals, but not for us. Too much variety. Why choose one over another, if not for love?”