Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

“Let me in,” I said.

  “Just let me die,” my keeper said.

  “No,” I said.

  The door opened. I approached the large structure of the hexagon. The sliding door of the central storage chamber was already open.

  I walked into the keepers’ room. I stared at the last of the little glowing lights. Three. Just three little lights. Three dying keepers left to rule the world.

  “I thought you said no,” I said.

  “I didn’t let you in,” my keeper said. “They did. You’ve burned the texts in the corridors they oversaw. Their overseers have run off. What do you expect them to do but die?”

  I pressed open the panel of one of the squares. I ripped out the tubing and gazed at the shiny black casing inside. I found a little groove on the underside of the casing and pulled it out. The whole black case came out smoothly, easily, as if it had been placed inside the square just a moment ago. The whole black casing was rectangular, about as long as my arm, as wide around as my palm. I could not see inside.

  I brought the case to the doorway, smashed it against the wall until the casing began to come loose. I sat down on the floor and pulled at the casing until I succeeded in tearing it off. The rectangle inside was transparent. I saw the red fluid inside, the long rows of metal chips, spidery wires and tiny hair-like filaments. I set the keeper in the center of the room and unpacked the second keeper. I set it next to the first, then pulled out the last case.

  My keeper.

  When I sat staring into my keeper’s translucent body resting there in my lap, I said, “How long have you been watching me?”

  “Forever,” he said.

  “You saw my mother?”

  “The recordings used to be stored,” my keeper said, “when there were enough of us to oversee them. She was an exceptionally violent body. I watched you birthed out of her death. I was linked to the overseer that pulled you out.”

  “You know everything about me.”

  “Our observation of your compound deteriorated just after I placed you there,” my keeper said. “I sent the empty texts after you. They were going to burn everything, you know. But I knew you were still there. I had their keepers tell them to bring you back.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just let me burn with the others?” I saw that I was crying. My tears fell onto the casing. I did not wipe them away.

  “I watched you always, Anish. What we cannot have we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

  I closed my eyes. Thought of Chiva.

  I set my keeper’s casing on top of the other two. I carefully placed three of the flares under the stack of keepers. I poured the whole container of flammable fluid over the keepers. I held the last flare, walked back into the doorway, away from the pool of reddish liquid. I lit the flare. It glowed white in my hand. The heat was so intense that I had to hold it away from my body for fear of setting myself on fire.

  “What will you do now?” my keeper said.

  “Tell stories,” I said.

  I tossed the flare. The room exploded in a wave of brilliant light. The flame roared up and out. The heat knocked me out of the doorway. I felt the sensation of flight. My body smashed against the far wall. The flame whirled above my head, curled back into the room.

  It was very beautiful.

  I did not see Chiva. Most of the students and archivists had escaped to the burning yard, and I found them there. We climbed atop one another’s bodies to scale the wall. From the top of the wall, I gazed out at the incredible maze of the archives, the great hexagons-within-hexagons that wound out for almost as far as I could see.

  The archivists told me Chiva was dead. They told me she choked on the smoke of the bodies and became lost in the maze, entombed forever. But I knew Chiva would never become lost in the archives. She knew them far better than I did.

  We walked as far from the archives as we could. Most of us. Some collapsed and wept under the heat of the sun, frightened by the chill of the wind, the uncertainty of living outside of the archives. The day it rained we reached a small settlement like none I had ever known. No gates. No fences.

  The bodies there were all empty, and they welcomed us. They smiled. They gave us food and drink, and they asked us to tell them stories. The others with me did not know what to say. It had been years and years, the new bodies said, since they had heard anything of the keepers, those strange beings said to have once ruled the world.

  “We’ve never seen them,” the bodies said to us.

  “I have seen them,” I said, and they looked upon me: the tattooed partial text with burn scars on his face, his arms. I had no eyebrows, and most of my hair was gone. They called me an ugly body, but they wanted my stories.

  And I told them all I knew, as I am telling you now.

  No one ever asked about Chiva. Few of those from the archives remember her name. I thought the burning of the texts would erase all of our sadness, all that darkness. I thought we would forget. But now you walk up here and ask to dance around my fire and hear the stories of a past I thought no longer existed. If it does not exist, how can I tell it? There must be some truth, still, something to be remembered.

  No, no. I am tired. Too old for dancing. But you are free to stay, free to dance as empty bodies devoid of history. Dance, yes, and I’ll dream again the dream of my unmaking.

  It is always a silent dream.

  In Freedom, Dying

  This is one of my favorite short stories. It’s the first time I really started digging into the guts of organic weapons and gendered warfare. Trouble was, it didn’t seem to make much sense to anybody but me. Here’s to hoping some of you enjoy it.

  Twice a day we feed and oil the big rotating guns - once at dawn and once at dusk. The dawn is the malignant crimson of a sailor’s warning. The dusk is a gray gauze that turns the light of our globes the color of burnt lemon.

  I like to walk the perimeter of our trenches in the early evenings, before the globes go smoky, after I’m done filling in the sick trenches. The haze of our bubble filter obscures my view, but if I stand with my nose against it I can see across the dozen-meter swath of untouched red grass and catch a glimpse of the Androgynies’ dark haired heads as they mill back and forth in the bowels of their trenches. Their filter gave out four days ago. If we had the right bursts, we could liquefy them where they lie and retake our position, maybe move forward further into the Androgyny district. But the Neuters raided our supply carrier weeks ago.

  When darkness washes away the last of the sun, I climb back down into the trenches to join the rest of the women. Globes cast ghastly light onto dirty, hollow-cheeked faces. Everyone’s eyes look too big.

  A skinny girl, not a year out of matric, approaches me from a connecting trench. Her bob of dark hair is thin and lanky, her eyes the nearly colorless of the violet-gassed. She squints at me, at the red mesh of the armband molded to my upper arm. I am amazed she can see at all.

  “Trench director’s asking for a runner called Nadav,” she says. “That you?”

  The trench director does not look up from her desk as I pass through her filter and into the command hole. Her name is Gian, and she’s a handsome woman, the sort of tall, broad-cheeked intellectual all three of my mothers would have approved of. She is the fourth trench director we have had in eight weeks; I watched two die of dysentery, and the last literally peeled the flesh away from her own bones in the end, victim of an Androgyny burst we had never encountered before.

  “I need you to retrieve a drop,” Gian says. She is chewing kaj, and she looks up now. Her eyes are the color of cut obsidian. She pushes green papers bled through with black ink off her desk. Beneath the papers is a map of our position, the Amber Ridge and what was once the Men’s District.

  “Carrier doesn’t have enough fuel to divert from its supply course over the Red Ridge, but they can drop it en route. Some Neuters are boxed in here, on the other side of the ridge,” Gian says, pointing out the position. “They
’re being routed by these two Androgyny bubbles, here. Rumor has it that the last of the Men are making a stand at the edge of the district, here, pushed up against the sea. You shouldn’t have to worry about them.”

  “It’s only Androgynies I fear,” I say, and naming the fear eases the twisting in my gut.

  Gian nods. “Home Defense has organized the drop here,” she says, pressing her thumb to a position on the other side of the ridge, just below the Neuter and Androgyny camps. “You’re to pick it up tomorrow night. No moon.”

  She leans toward me. “Carry-ready. Forty kilos. Strap it on and go. You’ll be carrying thornbug bursts and CFR. You know what CFR is?”

  I shake my head.

  “Neither do I, but HD says we lob it at our Androgynies on the other side of that red grass before they get a filter up, and we can hold them off long enough to get reinforcements. If they get a supply carrier in here before we get that drop, we go home on our shields, so to speak. You know what that means?”

  “I’m not stupid,” I say. The Neuters used to duel with physical shields. My mothers used to take me to the duels, back when the Consortium still functioned.

  Gian taps at the map, a nervous tic of a gesture. “Rumor has it you’re a queer,” she says, and the word sends a cold ripple down my spine. “I’m a new TD, and we don’t last long on the line. I have to measure you by what I see and what I hear. You’re the only runner I’ve got, but it’s dangerous to send out a queer with Neuters and Androgynies. Queers get notions, fancies. You understand?”

  I think of my dead lover, Elan, her body so still and swollen in the tub. Elan was the queer, not me. Elan loved those of the Other sex, not me. I only loved Elan. “There’s a black beetle in every trench,” I say.

  Gian spits kaj onto the dirt floor and smiles at me. Her teeth are stained red. “You’ll do,” she says. “Get your med ration from the kits and go.”

  I once dreamt of my mothers, all dead. They lay close together in a field of red grass. Close, but not touching. They were warm, but I could not wake them, and they were covered in dragonflies. The flies’ wings were made of color. Not painted in it, no, but made of it: violet and lime, olive and saffron, turquoise and sage, and the color dazzled me. The world dazzled me, and I could not speak.

  It is the only dream I have ever had of my mothers.

  I move into the dark and up and out the rear line of our trenches. I follow the black spine of the ridge. I like to think that the darkness hides me, but this is not true. My body suit is still living, feeding off my sweat and urine, and it colors itself the same blue-black of the darkness.

  The kits gave me standard anti-infection doses for yellow ague and blister fever, but we are out of quick-pinch antibodies for standard bursts, thornbug or otherwise. They allotted me rapid-mending gel, but no painkillers. We haven’t had painkillers in eight weeks.

  I come to the end of the ridge and cut across to the other side at dawn. Beneath my feet is a long scar of stone and metal thirty meters across, the width of the old Divide - before the Men blew a hole in it big enough to swarm through. The air is quiet here; I can taste lead on my tongue.

  The sun’s light begins to splinter into sunset, and I circle the edge of the drop site. The wood here is made up of thorn trees and twisted willowrens. The branches tangle overhead, but they are so thinly leaved that they appear skeletal, hungry. The red grass is knee high.

  As dusk comes on I hear the first of the bursts from what sound like Androgyny guns. I look out past the clearing where the red grass tumbles down a soft decline. Above the valley, just out of my sight, I see the orange haze of a thornbug burst, a saffron wash of yellow ague, and I huddle down into the grass.

  The drop falls well after dark, the time when the moon would have crested in the sky on a moonlit night. I hear the low hum of a carrier over the bursts. I open my eyes and see the drop fall, too close to the downward slope on the other side of the clearing. It thumps to the ground like a body being tossed from the trenches.

  I wait until the hum of the carrier recedes. I crawl into the clearing. As I near the far edge, the grass begins to smell strongly of lavender and cinnamon. Violet gas. I rise up into a crouch to get myself out of the lingering mist of gas. I find the pack at the very edge of the decline, and as I reach for the straps, I gaze below where I can see the hazy light of the globes in the Neuter and Androgyny trenches. Someone has ordered an assault, and a stream of figures flows across the distance between the camps in the dark. Black figures dart madly through the rainbow bursts of vermin and contagion. Here, the air has become thick and heady with a wash of different smells; the sticky odor of bursts and bug resin, the yeasty stink of bacterial shells and gun oil.

  I heft the pack onto my back, and it molds itself to my frame. It is heavier than I anticipated. Gian said forty kilos, and carrying forty kilos when I weighed seventy-five kilos was never a concern. Now, weighing sixty-five and living on dead body suits and boiled Androgyny bootstraps, my body protests, and I feel every muscle tremble as I stand with the pack. It takes several steps to figure my balance with the extra weight, and they are slow, awkward steps. I should be halfway back across the clearing by now.

  The popping sound comes from above me. A bacterial shell showers a spray of creamy white dust in a spherical bloom.

  I stand on the inside edge of it.

  Even as I move, I know that I am breathing it in, but I do not know what sort of shell it is. Dysentery? Red ague? Fever fly? My body suit eats the white powder on the suit, but the rest stays on my skin, and I am afraid to smear it away with my bare fingers.

  Behind me, the shouting sounds closer. I look back. Dark figures ebb up over the edge of the decline. I try to move faster, but the pack is too ungainly. I nearly fall over.

  A burst of orange lights up the clearing. For a moment, the world is as bright as sunset. I hear the hissing of the burst-released thornbugs. I am four meters away from the scant shelter of the trees.

  I run, and stumble, and I crash into the woods. I throw myself to the ground and tuck my arms up under myself. I hear the thornbugs lodge themselves into tree trunks, hiss zffft!

  The light of the burst has faded, but I can still see the residual image behind my closed lids. When I can hear no more bugs zipping past, I struggle to my feet and keep moving.

  I am aware of another sound at my left. Someone else in the trees? But I cannot see them. The woods are black, and I am having trouble breathing. My vision begins to blur, and I see color where there should be none. Violet trees, orange grass, umber sky. But it is dark outside, and the world should have no color.

  Bands of pain tighten across my chest. The colors bleed out. I stumble, keep walking. I can see the jagged black crown of the ridge. It looks farther away than it should be.

  Behind me, there is more noise. Crunching grass, breaking branches. There is someone there, now, I know. I can hear her breathing.

  The pack is suddenly too heavy to bear. My body is too heavy to bear. One foot catches in an animal hole, and I lose my balance. The weight of the pack jerks me backward. I can’t get my foot free as I fall. I hear a nasty crunching sound; pain blossoms up through my lower leg. I am aware of falling, striking the ground with enough force to pound a gasp of breath from my lungs. I am lying on my side among crushed blades of grass. I cannot move. It hurts to breathe.

  My follower breaks past me, stumbles, and collapses; my tardy shadow, struggling to catch me. She falls beside me, clutching at the blistered skin of her arms.

  She says something to me, but I do not understand her. She smells a bit like lavender and cinnamon. Her breathing comes sharp. Or is that mine? The words continue to bubble out of her, and my vision flashes with more color.

  “-blister fever,” she says, and for some reason I understand the words now. “Antibodies for blister fever. I have the quick-pinch for respiratory haze. Here, here.” She is pricking my arm with something. She is not speaking our language: she is speaking the common languag
e of the Consortium. Doesn’t she know I am one of her sisters? Can she not tell what I am in all this dark?

  I fumble with the meds the kits gave me, pull out the quick-pinch for blister fever, but her body has already gone slack. She has one arm stretched out to me. I pinch the dose into her arm and rub at it. I wait until I can pick up her pulse. Her eyelids flutter. She reaches for my hand. Our fingers twine.

  In that moment, she is my Elan, and I have saved her.

  The dream is always the same, a subconscious imperfection; continuous loop: I am walking barefoot through Elan’s house. The worms inside the globes are dying, and they paint the whole house in orange light. Elan lies in the shallow depression in the flooring that is the tub. She is gray-skinned now, the color bleached out of her with her blood. Elan’s head lolls toward me, her eyes bleached of all color, the blind eyes of someone who’s been violet-gassed.

  She says, “This is the way the world ends.”

  And the room is filled with dragonflies.

  I wake from sleep as one would wake from death. I am aware of being awake, but I am not aware of heat or color or feeling. I cannot recognize any of my limbs.

  And then I remember how to open my eyes.

  An alien face stares back at me. She lies as she fell, an arm’s length from me. Our hands are still twined. I pull mine away. Her skin is the color of burnt ginger, like mine, and her hair is long and black and unruly. It spills across narrow shoulders, down a narrow body whose skinniness makes it seem all the more awkward and angular. She wears a body suit that is dying. Patches of gray mar the exterior.

  I cannot say how she looks so different from a Woman. There are ways one learns to tell. The sharpness of the body, perhaps, the severe lines of the face, and the length of the hair - too long to be practical, too short to be masculine. Her brows make one clean line above her eyes, and her nose looks too small for the broad, flat planes of her face; a human face, yes, but Other, apart.