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Vanishing Manhood: Part 17
Vanishing Manhood:
Part 17
The end of the cruel Peace & the start of the desperate War.
Based on ‘One In Ten’ by FinalStand. Listen to the
► Podcast at Explicit Novels.
A
frightened Mother Mouse will devour her young; similarly, a frightened culture
will devour its future.
It wasn't like a magic force field bubble protected us until
our 16th birthday. I couldn't recall all the times after I was 13 some woman
asked me, or my Mother, when my 16th birthday would be. Back then, I didn't
think much about it. In hindsight, those women were wondering when I would
become legally sexually vulnerable. In way too many cases, women with access to
teenage boys didn't wait.
Even if they did,
"It was my Aunt," Barabbas confessed. "She
and her boss."
You would think a sixteen, or seventeen, year old guy
getting to sleep with a Milf would be a trip. It could be. For the boys with
better developed empathy, you started to realize a woman you trusted was using
your sexuality for their own advancement. Then you began feeling like a whore.
"She got me a job, but I quit after four months, you
know,” he trailed off.
"Yeah," I sighed sympathetically.
"Yeah," Lowry snorted, "when the rest decided
you should be putting out for free."
"That was completely unnecessary," I glared at
him.
"But true," he defied me.
"True," Barabbas agreed with a familiar degree of
rejection.
"Mom flipped out when she figured out what Tamara; my
sister; was doing," Pierre picked up his tale. "I was seventeen by
that time. She helped pay for my college." We assumed the 'she' was his
sister; the one who pimped him out.
"I hit one once," Lowry bragged. I found that
somewhat difficult to believe.
"What happened?" Pierre asked.
"She kicked my ass," he chuckled.
"Ex-military Reservist. Beat me like I had a cock." I read somewhere
in the old days it was more common to say 'like a little bitch.’ Now it was
'like I had a cock' because they didn't like teaching men to be 'too violent'
aka how to defend ourselves.
No one else felt like inquiring, so Barabbas did the deed.
"Go to the cops?"
"For what?" he shook his head. "I threw the
first punch, and the second. Fucking Bitch. We both looked pretty rough, but I
lost."
Another pause.
"What was it like to hit one with your stick?"
Lowry shot me a look.
"Good, damn good, and stupid. I mean, I could have
ended up like you with a crowd of women on a subway kicking and stomping on me
and I would have ended up in jail too," I related. "Still, it felt
good, just to tell one to keep her hands to herself, ya know?" I got nods
all around. We were all young, healthy and relatively handsome.
"Yeah, you could have gotten your ass kicked,"
Barabbas reminded me.
"In fact, one of the major reasons I didn't, gave me
the pistol I'm carrying," I twitched it slightly. "The first time
they came for me, I asked them, the Vanishers, to wait, and they did."
"Why in the fuck
would you do that?" Lowry blurted out, shocked and skeptical.
"At the time, I didn't trust them since I figured they
were nothing more than another bunch of women telling me what to do. I wanted
to use them to escape. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life serving them
if it meant the same fucked-up
existence I was currently living," I shared the enlightenment.
"What changed your mind?" Pierre's eyes lit up.
"I figured out their prime motivation, the nature of
the conspiracy and that I had no rational chance to escape them," I
answered. "Every angle I was figuring out, they had
figured out years ago. On the plus side, their core philosophy requires them to
engage men as equals for both biological and social reasons, which means they
are the best game in town. In case you missed it, the Vanishers didn't 'vanish'
me. I escaped on my own. They have agreed to join forces with my group; no
lie."
"Your group has a lot of girls," Lowry drolly
noted.
"Lowry, exactly how was I going to recruit any
male to my cause without dropping the entire Metropolitan G E D
(Gender Enforcement Division) on me?"
"Flyers?" Barabbas joked softly.
"He's got a point," Pierre rallied to my cause.
"As far as any of you have confessed, none of us had any guy, or girl,
friends. It is why we were selected."
"Okay, fine. Now what?" Lowry conceded to the
consensus.
"We wake up tomorrow working toward equality," I
huffed. "We are all going to have to learn to fight and shoot because the
entire group is going to be in danger for some time to come. Society, as in
Global Society, is going to come crashing down. And that means anarchy,
lawlessness and barbarism before it violently spasms off into extinction."
"We have lived our lives effectively as slaves, though
no woman inside that house will admit it truly in their hearts. For the first
time in our lives, we can change our futures. I'm sure if we surrender to
whomever kills the others, they will enslave us once more and leave us with far
fewer illusions about our status. Or, we can chose to fight and, if worst comes
to worst, die free. I'm not going back to what I was. That means I will need to
learn how to survive; and that means fighting. Not because I hate women, but
because there are several I love and respect and I don't want to let them down,
as their equal."
"Tonight, think about what I've told you. Tomorrow
morning, I hope you join up with us," I concluded my 'pep talk.’
"And if we don't?" Lowry stared defiantly.
"That is something you are free to do too," I
shrugged. "I'm not going to tell you what to do. Let's go back inside. It
is late."
We'd almost made it back when Lowry put a hand on my
shoulder.
"Can I see the gun now?"
"This thing? Like this?" I half-turned, made eye
contact then flick my eyes down to the pistol then back to him again.
"Yeah."
"Have you ever handled a loaded firearm before?" I
requested.
"Yeah, plenty of times, in my dreams," he mocked
me.
"You are a moron," I felt my blood simmering.
"This isn't a game, this (the pistol) isn't a toy, and you have
not been paying attention." I put both hands on the pistol,
removed the magazine then removed the chambered bullet. Lastly, ass-first, I
handed him the empty pistol with my left hand while keeping the ammunition in
my right.
"Moron, huh?" he chuckled. "Gonna give me the
bullets?"
"No, no, I'm not going to give you the bullets because
you don't know what you are doing. Unlike you, I actually have had a firearm
lesson. More to the point, I won't give you a loaded firearm because I think
I've stressed the lady, or ladies, watching over us right now enough for one night."
"Huh?" Lowry and Barabbas echoed. Pierre looked
around.
"Wes didn't keep us inside to play '20 Questions' for
her own amusement. She kept us occupied so her other teammate, or teammates,
could move to this side of the house, so they could watch over us while giving
you three the delusion we were alone. They are professionals in camouflage gear
with night-vision goggles, so unless they had to move rapidly through the
underbrush, we weren't likely to detect them."
"I played along because I felt it was necessary for you
three to open up a little bit. Life is only going to get tougher over the next
few months. None of us want to have a chat with heavily armed women staring
over our shoulders, so I took us outside where it would appear we were alone,"
I explained.
"You lied to us," Lowry snipped.
"No. My words were true. What I did was allow you to
deceive yourself as to our level of security and amount of company. I did what
I did for the good of the group, regardless of gender, Gentlemen. It is how we
all need to start thinking. Something else you might want to think about is:
everyone I love is with me here today. A good number of people who decided
getting in my way was a good thing aren't even alive anymore. I will gladly
embrace any one of you as brothers. If you are an obstacle, I will fucking see you gone, one way or another;
clear?"
"We are guys," Lowry insisted smugly. Old
thinking: women protected men.
"I; don't; care," I glared back. "You may be
a sperm-shooter, but inside me is the only surefire cure for the Gender Plague.
I repeat: people I love, and there are several, are all alive today because I
cared and took an active hand in their survival. My enemies are mostly dead.
Being a man will save you from the women in there. It won't save you from
me."
"You'd kill us?" Pierre whispered.
"Pierre, my Mother died over a year ago. Where are your
Mother and Sister? You don't give a damn about a single fucking human being and yet you expect me to
trust you? Why?" I challenged him. "I've already proved to multiple
people I can reach beyond my shell and give a fuck.
Until you rejoin the Human Race, I value the rest of those battling alongside
me far more than you, or anyone else regardless of whether they have a penis,
or a vagina. I'm not going to snap your neck, stab, or shoot you. I'm simply
not going to bother trying to save you. The World is doing a bang-up job of
killing the rest of Humanity off, without my assistance."
"I really ought to punch you," Lowry threatened.
"Give it your best shot," I took a step toward
him. That wasn't what he, or I, was expecting. I put down my poor judgment and
combative demeanor to exhaustion.
"Don't, guys," Barabbas interceded.
"You are an Asshole," Lowry snarled.
"And you are consistently ignoring reality," I
snapped back. "For instance, we are not alone out here, plus we are also
at the door." I knocked once. The door swung open to reveal a rather
attentive and unhappy Wes Prince. I handed her the bullet and magazine.
"You were listening in?" Lowry turned his anger on
her. Wes' eyes went from me, to him, out into the darkness then back to me,
though her words were to Lowry.
"Yes. Of course I was listening in. I wouldn't call him
an Asshole. I'd go for Smart-ass." To me, "Do you enjoy being
annoyingly correct?"
"No. I'd be ecstatic to realize I was completely wrong
about everything and had lapsed into a mad delusion," I related, my own
anger seeping away. "Being right means I have to keep appreciating and
respecting you and your compatriots and taking responsibility for my own clumsy
contributions to our current situation, which I don't want to do. I want to go
to bed."
"Come on in and go to bed then," she softened. She
made a slight hand gesture. "My pistol, please, Mr. Pritchard?" she
requested of Lowry. Grudgingly he gave her the firearm. She stepped aside.
Lowry went first, Barabbas second. Pierre gasped slightly because as he went up
the steps he noticed the two Vanishers coming toward us from outside, the ones
I had predicted to be watching us.
I went in after Pierre. Wes followed along. Capri and Kuiko
were waiting. The lights had already been dimmed throughout most of the rest of
the dwelling.
"Who were those other two guys?" Wes stopped me.
"Sergeant Major Daly was a Marine N C O and improv poet
renowned for his battlefield musings. His most famous philosophical insight
into the fighting spirit of men came in World War One. In his words "Come
on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" He also
won two Medals of Honor, so he must have had some talent."
"Company Sergeant-Major John Robert Osborn was a
Canadian; that was the country which now makes up the northern third of our
current Federation; who found himself misplaced on the island of Hong Kong in
late 1941; him, a handful of lads from Winnipeg and a shitload more Japanese.
He and the Japanese ended up in a game of grenade tag,”
"Grenade tag?" one of my two 'silent' guardians
interrupted.
"Yes, grenade tag. Apparently in the olden days,
grenades didn't airburst, or explode on impact. You pulled a pin and threw it
at the enemy, then waited for the fuse to burn out and the grenade to go
'Boom!.’ Quick, brave, and or stupid people could grab that grenade and toss it
back. In some cases, one grenade might make two, or three trips before
detonating."
"Anyway, the Japanese were so very rudely throwing
grenades into the position he and his Winnipeg Grenadiers were defending, so he
kept returning them. After eight and a half hours of such fun, he came across
one he couldn't toss back in time. He covered it with his body to shield his
comrades from the blast, dying instantly. The British Empire gave him something
called the Victoria Cross for his actions. He was the first Canadian in World
War Two to receive it."
"Why do you know such stuff?" she grinned.
"Oh, I'm Scar and this is Nat," she indicated the third member of the
Wes-Scar-Nat Vanisher trio.
"I considered myself a coward, so I read a lot about
brave men. I was kind of hoping to figure out how I could be brave myself, one
day," I disclosed.
"Mission success," the third one smiled. "Go
to bed."
I gathered up Capri and Kuiko and did as instructed. As I
rested my head on the pillow, lights out and my mind gratefully shutting down.
"Less impressive sex, Bitch," Capri teased.
"No," I groaned.
"They definitely think you've got the 'sexy',"
Kuiko enlightened me.
"Can we please just go to sleep?" I begged.
Capri rolled onto her side, back to me, gave me a bump in
the hip with her ass, then moved away a tiny bit. Kuiko wiggled close, kissed
me lightly on the cheek, and then did the same. Unconsciousness took me before
any other worries could steal my much needed slumber.
The Larger World:
As I struggled for sleep a second time, events unfolding in
three different places around the Globe (Asia, the City and the Capitol) would
impact my fate.
Asia:
First; the brutal agony still going on as the Sun
disappeared over the horizon wasn't over when I woke up the next morning. It
was largely misunderstood for some time afterwards, but was referred to as; the
Battle for Shanghai.
Five Chinese regular force divisions fought the garrison
division of Shanghai, its 'reserve' division, hastily gathered volunteer female
formations and a hodge-podge of ancillary forces the United Nations could throw
into the fray. The goal for both sides was to seize a mother and her unborn
child. Within them were the only other active resistant viral factory killing
the T2 Gender Plague. By the time I woke up, both sides were sure the other
side had killed them both, pretty much insuring the extinction of all sentient
life in Eurasia.
I say 'Eurasia' because by dusk of the previous day, the
Federation knew for sure I, the other source of a cure for the T2, was still
alive and kicking, as were my sons. My sons held a nebulous promise for a
future date. I was of immediate importance since my adult body could produce
enough antivirals to protect tens of thousands of people on a relatively
continuous basis, or so it was projected.
With, or without the mother and child, China was done for.
Japan and Korea were rapidly circling the drain. North of China, the Plague was
racing across Siberian Russia. Central Asia had never really recovered from the
first round of the Gender Plague all those years ago so, now off the beaten
path, would be longer in dying. India had too many outbreaks to even dream of
containment. Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the Levant Republic all had reported
cases as well.
Europe:
Beyond the Urals, the Europeans were grappling with the
looming fear of a global economic collapse along with the Specter of Death
though 48 hours into the crisis, there were no cases to report yet. Civil order
was teetering. Several nations had either closed their borders, or were
considering doing so. Women began hording food, and men.
Africa:
South of the Mediterranean was more doom, gloom and
gathering dark clouds. There were outbreaks in Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town and
Addis Abba. The North African Republic closed its border and even shot down a
commercial airliner which refused to return to Egyptian airspace. Their biggest
immediate problem was they didn't produce nearly enough food to feed
themselves. Starvation fears trumped unemployment. The pandemic trumped both.
Mid Atlantic:
Various islands like the Azores, Bermuda and Canaries became
Quarantine Zones; Plague free for the time being yet suffering from glaring
economic dependencies.
Southeast Asia, Australia, & Oceana:
Australia and New Zealand were in total lockdown mode;
nothing in and nothing out. A combination of cool relations with the rest of
the United Nations and the evacuation of much of Oceania after the Plague;
Round #1; had left those two nations surprisingly self-sufficient. Theirs was a
problem of numbers, or their lack thereof.
You see, forty-seven years ago, the government of Myanmar
collapsed as their armed forces disintegrated and rebel factions tore the
country apart. The anarchy spilled over the borders to eastern India,
Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam over the next eighteen months.
China, Indonesia and India did what they could to stem the tide, but they had a
host of homegrown problems themselves.
That summer and fall, Southeast Asia experienced seven
category 5 typhoons with winds exceeding 13 miles per hour. Two, back to back,
stomped all over the Philippines. There was never a complete accounting of the
lives lost. The resulting economic crisis broke the Philippine's back.
Indonesia, struggling with the disruptions in trade, an
influx of refugees and internal strife, had a military coup. More discord.
Somehow Malaysia found itself allying with the civilian government. The Free
City of Singapore was overrun, looted and virtually destroyed by the warring
factions. In the midst of this carnage, the tidal wave of human misery was
building to devastating proportions. In an act of either extreme callousness,
or desperate self-preservation, Australia closed its borders and sealed them
with lethal force exercised by their air and naval forces; no refugees allowed.
In a final indignity, thirty-eight years ago, two years
after the last gasp of the first Gender Plague, a major earthquake hit
Indonesia causing serious destruction and the worse tsunami on record. By that
time, only the northern islands of the Philippines had started rebuilding.
Indonesia and Malaysia existed as separate, multiple, mutually-hostile,
competing city-states and they were the 'good news' of Southeast Asia. All too
often, the recovery of the various former nations threatened to bring China and
India into conflict, so such efforts were shelved.
Move the clock forward to the present day and there was no
political entity north of Australia remotely strong enough to retard the
upcoming Global landslide into oblivion. Collectively those Asians knew Death
was radiating out of China and they had to do 'something' and all too often,
something meant getting on a boat, or a plane, heading south, to Australia, or,
if you had the capability, to New Zealand.
Unlike the disorderly mobs of two generations ago, some of
those 'refugees' had the firepower to 'fight' their way to freedom or safety. A
U N taskforce had been in the area suppressing piracy days earlier (it was now
racing toward Shanghai) and every major metropolis had its own marine
paramilitary. They were all island-nat
View all episodes
By Steamy StoriesVanishing Manhood:
Part 17
The end of the cruel Peace & the start of the desperate War.
Based on ‘One In Ten’ by FinalStand. Listen to the
► Podcast at Explicit Novels.
A
frightened Mother Mouse will devour her young; similarly, a frightened culture
will devour its future.
It wasn't like a magic force field bubble protected us until
our 16th birthday. I couldn't recall all the times after I was 13 some woman
asked me, or my Mother, when my 16th birthday would be. Back then, I didn't
think much about it. In hindsight, those women were wondering when I would
become legally sexually vulnerable. In way too many cases, women with access to
teenage boys didn't wait.
Even if they did,
"It was my Aunt," Barabbas confessed. "She
and her boss."
You would think a sixteen, or seventeen, year old guy
getting to sleep with a Milf would be a trip. It could be. For the boys with
better developed empathy, you started to realize a woman you trusted was using
your sexuality for their own advancement. Then you began feeling like a whore.
"She got me a job, but I quit after four months, you
know,” he trailed off.
"Yeah," I sighed sympathetically.
"Yeah," Lowry snorted, "when the rest decided
you should be putting out for free."
"That was completely unnecessary," I glared at
him.
"But true," he defied me.
"True," Barabbas agreed with a familiar degree of
rejection.
"Mom flipped out when she figured out what Tamara; my
sister; was doing," Pierre picked up his tale. "I was seventeen by
that time. She helped pay for my college." We assumed the 'she' was his
sister; the one who pimped him out.
"I hit one once," Lowry bragged. I found that
somewhat difficult to believe.
"What happened?" Pierre asked.
"She kicked my ass," he chuckled.
"Ex-military Reservist. Beat me like I had a cock." I read somewhere
in the old days it was more common to say 'like a little bitch.’ Now it was
'like I had a cock' because they didn't like teaching men to be 'too violent'
aka how to defend ourselves.
No one else felt like inquiring, so Barabbas did the deed.
"Go to the cops?"
"For what?" he shook his head. "I threw the
first punch, and the second. Fucking Bitch. We both looked pretty rough, but I
lost."
Another pause.
"What was it like to hit one with your stick?"
Lowry shot me a look.
"Good, damn good, and stupid. I mean, I could have
ended up like you with a crowd of women on a subway kicking and stomping on me
and I would have ended up in jail too," I related. "Still, it felt
good, just to tell one to keep her hands to herself, ya know?" I got nods
all around. We were all young, healthy and relatively handsome.
"Yeah, you could have gotten your ass kicked,"
Barabbas reminded me.
"In fact, one of the major reasons I didn't, gave me
the pistol I'm carrying," I twitched it slightly. "The first time
they came for me, I asked them, the Vanishers, to wait, and they did."
"Why in the fuck
would you do that?" Lowry blurted out, shocked and skeptical.
"At the time, I didn't trust them since I figured they
were nothing more than another bunch of women telling me what to do. I wanted
to use them to escape. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life serving them
if it meant the same fucked-up
existence I was currently living," I shared the enlightenment.
"What changed your mind?" Pierre's eyes lit up.
"I figured out their prime motivation, the nature of
the conspiracy and that I had no rational chance to escape them," I
answered. "Every angle I was figuring out, they had
figured out years ago. On the plus side, their core philosophy requires them to
engage men as equals for both biological and social reasons, which means they
are the best game in town. In case you missed it, the Vanishers didn't 'vanish'
me. I escaped on my own. They have agreed to join forces with my group; no
lie."
"Your group has a lot of girls," Lowry drolly
noted.
"Lowry, exactly how was I going to recruit any
male to my cause without dropping the entire Metropolitan G E D
(Gender Enforcement Division) on me?"
"Flyers?" Barabbas joked softly.
"He's got a point," Pierre rallied to my cause.
"As far as any of you have confessed, none of us had any guy, or girl,
friends. It is why we were selected."
"Okay, fine. Now what?" Lowry conceded to the
consensus.
"We wake up tomorrow working toward equality," I
huffed. "We are all going to have to learn to fight and shoot because the
entire group is going to be in danger for some time to come. Society, as in
Global Society, is going to come crashing down. And that means anarchy,
lawlessness and barbarism before it violently spasms off into extinction."
"We have lived our lives effectively as slaves, though
no woman inside that house will admit it truly in their hearts. For the first
time in our lives, we can change our futures. I'm sure if we surrender to
whomever kills the others, they will enslave us once more and leave us with far
fewer illusions about our status. Or, we can chose to fight and, if worst comes
to worst, die free. I'm not going back to what I was. That means I will need to
learn how to survive; and that means fighting. Not because I hate women, but
because there are several I love and respect and I don't want to let them down,
as their equal."
"Tonight, think about what I've told you. Tomorrow
morning, I hope you join up with us," I concluded my 'pep talk.’
"And if we don't?" Lowry stared defiantly.
"That is something you are free to do too," I
shrugged. "I'm not going to tell you what to do. Let's go back inside. It
is late."
We'd almost made it back when Lowry put a hand on my
shoulder.
"Can I see the gun now?"
"This thing? Like this?" I half-turned, made eye
contact then flick my eyes down to the pistol then back to him again.
"Yeah."
"Have you ever handled a loaded firearm before?" I
requested.
"Yeah, plenty of times, in my dreams," he mocked
me.
"You are a moron," I felt my blood simmering.
"This isn't a game, this (the pistol) isn't a toy, and you have
not been paying attention." I put both hands on the pistol,
removed the magazine then removed the chambered bullet. Lastly, ass-first, I
handed him the empty pistol with my left hand while keeping the ammunition in
my right.
"Moron, huh?" he chuckled. "Gonna give me the
bullets?"
"No, no, I'm not going to give you the bullets because
you don't know what you are doing. Unlike you, I actually have had a firearm
lesson. More to the point, I won't give you a loaded firearm because I think
I've stressed the lady, or ladies, watching over us right now enough for one night."
"Huh?" Lowry and Barabbas echoed. Pierre looked
around.
"Wes didn't keep us inside to play '20 Questions' for
her own amusement. She kept us occupied so her other teammate, or teammates,
could move to this side of the house, so they could watch over us while giving
you three the delusion we were alone. They are professionals in camouflage gear
with night-vision goggles, so unless they had to move rapidly through the
underbrush, we weren't likely to detect them."
"I played along because I felt it was necessary for you
three to open up a little bit. Life is only going to get tougher over the next
few months. None of us want to have a chat with heavily armed women staring
over our shoulders, so I took us outside where it would appear we were alone,"
I explained.
"You lied to us," Lowry snipped.
"No. My words were true. What I did was allow you to
deceive yourself as to our level of security and amount of company. I did what
I did for the good of the group, regardless of gender, Gentlemen. It is how we
all need to start thinking. Something else you might want to think about is:
everyone I love is with me here today. A good number of people who decided
getting in my way was a good thing aren't even alive anymore. I will gladly
embrace any one of you as brothers. If you are an obstacle, I will fucking see you gone, one way or another;
clear?"
"We are guys," Lowry insisted smugly. Old
thinking: women protected men.
"I; don't; care," I glared back. "You may be
a sperm-shooter, but inside me is the only surefire cure for the Gender Plague.
I repeat: people I love, and there are several, are all alive today because I
cared and took an active hand in their survival. My enemies are mostly dead.
Being a man will save you from the women in there. It won't save you from
me."
"You'd kill us?" Pierre whispered.
"Pierre, my Mother died over a year ago. Where are your
Mother and Sister? You don't give a damn about a single fucking human being and yet you expect me to
trust you? Why?" I challenged him. "I've already proved to multiple
people I can reach beyond my shell and give a fuck.
Until you rejoin the Human Race, I value the rest of those battling alongside
me far more than you, or anyone else regardless of whether they have a penis,
or a vagina. I'm not going to snap your neck, stab, or shoot you. I'm simply
not going to bother trying to save you. The World is doing a bang-up job of
killing the rest of Humanity off, without my assistance."
"I really ought to punch you," Lowry threatened.
"Give it your best shot," I took a step toward
him. That wasn't what he, or I, was expecting. I put down my poor judgment and
combative demeanor to exhaustion.
"Don't, guys," Barabbas interceded.
"You are an Asshole," Lowry snarled.
"And you are consistently ignoring reality," I
snapped back. "For instance, we are not alone out here, plus we are also
at the door." I knocked once. The door swung open to reveal a rather
attentive and unhappy Wes Prince. I handed her the bullet and magazine.
"You were listening in?" Lowry turned his anger on
her. Wes' eyes went from me, to him, out into the darkness then back to me,
though her words were to Lowry.
"Yes. Of course I was listening in. I wouldn't call him
an Asshole. I'd go for Smart-ass." To me, "Do you enjoy being
annoyingly correct?"
"No. I'd be ecstatic to realize I was completely wrong
about everything and had lapsed into a mad delusion," I related, my own
anger seeping away. "Being right means I have to keep appreciating and
respecting you and your compatriots and taking responsibility for my own clumsy
contributions to our current situation, which I don't want to do. I want to go
to bed."
"Come on in and go to bed then," she softened. She
made a slight hand gesture. "My pistol, please, Mr. Pritchard?" she
requested of Lowry. Grudgingly he gave her the firearm. She stepped aside.
Lowry went first, Barabbas second. Pierre gasped slightly because as he went up
the steps he noticed the two Vanishers coming toward us from outside, the ones
I had predicted to be watching us.
I went in after Pierre. Wes followed along. Capri and Kuiko
were waiting. The lights had already been dimmed throughout most of the rest of
the dwelling.
"Who were those other two guys?" Wes stopped me.
"Sergeant Major Daly was a Marine N C O and improv poet
renowned for his battlefield musings. His most famous philosophical insight
into the fighting spirit of men came in World War One. In his words "Come
on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" He also
won two Medals of Honor, so he must have had some talent."
"Company Sergeant-Major John Robert Osborn was a
Canadian; that was the country which now makes up the northern third of our
current Federation; who found himself misplaced on the island of Hong Kong in
late 1941; him, a handful of lads from Winnipeg and a shitload more Japanese.
He and the Japanese ended up in a game of grenade tag,”
"Grenade tag?" one of my two 'silent' guardians
interrupted.
"Yes, grenade tag. Apparently in the olden days,
grenades didn't airburst, or explode on impact. You pulled a pin and threw it
at the enemy, then waited for the fuse to burn out and the grenade to go
'Boom!.’ Quick, brave, and or stupid people could grab that grenade and toss it
back. In some cases, one grenade might make two, or three trips before
detonating."
"Anyway, the Japanese were so very rudely throwing
grenades into the position he and his Winnipeg Grenadiers were defending, so he
kept returning them. After eight and a half hours of such fun, he came across
one he couldn't toss back in time. He covered it with his body to shield his
comrades from the blast, dying instantly. The British Empire gave him something
called the Victoria Cross for his actions. He was the first Canadian in World
War Two to receive it."
"Why do you know such stuff?" she grinned.
"Oh, I'm Scar and this is Nat," she indicated the third member of the
Wes-Scar-Nat Vanisher trio.
"I considered myself a coward, so I read a lot about
brave men. I was kind of hoping to figure out how I could be brave myself, one
day," I disclosed.
"Mission success," the third one smiled. "Go
to bed."
I gathered up Capri and Kuiko and did as instructed. As I
rested my head on the pillow, lights out and my mind gratefully shutting down.
"Less impressive sex, Bitch," Capri teased.
"No," I groaned.
"They definitely think you've got the 'sexy',"
Kuiko enlightened me.
"Can we please just go to sleep?" I begged.
Capri rolled onto her side, back to me, gave me a bump in
the hip with her ass, then moved away a tiny bit. Kuiko wiggled close, kissed
me lightly on the cheek, and then did the same. Unconsciousness took me before
any other worries could steal my much needed slumber.
The Larger World:
As I struggled for sleep a second time, events unfolding in
three different places around the Globe (Asia, the City and the Capitol) would
impact my fate.
Asia:
First; the brutal agony still going on as the Sun
disappeared over the horizon wasn't over when I woke up the next morning. It
was largely misunderstood for some time afterwards, but was referred to as; the
Battle for Shanghai.
Five Chinese regular force divisions fought the garrison
division of Shanghai, its 'reserve' division, hastily gathered volunteer female
formations and a hodge-podge of ancillary forces the United Nations could throw
into the fray. The goal for both sides was to seize a mother and her unborn
child. Within them were the only other active resistant viral factory killing
the T2 Gender Plague. By the time I woke up, both sides were sure the other
side had killed them both, pretty much insuring the extinction of all sentient
life in Eurasia.
I say 'Eurasia' because by dusk of the previous day, the
Federation knew for sure I, the other source of a cure for the T2, was still
alive and kicking, as were my sons. My sons held a nebulous promise for a
future date. I was of immediate importance since my adult body could produce
enough antivirals to protect tens of thousands of people on a relatively
continuous basis, or so it was projected.
With, or without the mother and child, China was done for.
Japan and Korea were rapidly circling the drain. North of China, the Plague was
racing across Siberian Russia. Central Asia had never really recovered from the
first round of the Gender Plague all those years ago so, now off the beaten
path, would be longer in dying. India had too many outbreaks to even dream of
containment. Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the Levant Republic all had reported
cases as well.
Europe:
Beyond the Urals, the Europeans were grappling with the
looming fear of a global economic collapse along with the Specter of Death
though 48 hours into the crisis, there were no cases to report yet. Civil order
was teetering. Several nations had either closed their borders, or were
considering doing so. Women began hording food, and men.
Africa:
South of the Mediterranean was more doom, gloom and
gathering dark clouds. There were outbreaks in Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town and
Addis Abba. The North African Republic closed its border and even shot down a
commercial airliner which refused to return to Egyptian airspace. Their biggest
immediate problem was they didn't produce nearly enough food to feed
themselves. Starvation fears trumped unemployment. The pandemic trumped both.
Mid Atlantic:
Various islands like the Azores, Bermuda and Canaries became
Quarantine Zones; Plague free for the time being yet suffering from glaring
economic dependencies.
Southeast Asia, Australia, & Oceana:
Australia and New Zealand were in total lockdown mode;
nothing in and nothing out. A combination of cool relations with the rest of
the United Nations and the evacuation of much of Oceania after the Plague;
Round #1; had left those two nations surprisingly self-sufficient. Theirs was a
problem of numbers, or their lack thereof.
You see, forty-seven years ago, the government of Myanmar
collapsed as their armed forces disintegrated and rebel factions tore the
country apart. The anarchy spilled over the borders to eastern India,
Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam over the next eighteen months.
China, Indonesia and India did what they could to stem the tide, but they had a
host of homegrown problems themselves.
That summer and fall, Southeast Asia experienced seven
category 5 typhoons with winds exceeding 13 miles per hour. Two, back to back,
stomped all over the Philippines. There was never a complete accounting of the
lives lost. The resulting economic crisis broke the Philippine's back.
Indonesia, struggling with the disruptions in trade, an
influx of refugees and internal strife, had a military coup. More discord.
Somehow Malaysia found itself allying with the civilian government. The Free
City of Singapore was overrun, looted and virtually destroyed by the warring
factions. In the midst of this carnage, the tidal wave of human misery was
building to devastating proportions. In an act of either extreme callousness,
or desperate self-preservation, Australia closed its borders and sealed them
with lethal force exercised by their air and naval forces; no refugees allowed.
In a final indignity, thirty-eight years ago, two years
after the last gasp of the first Gender Plague, a major earthquake hit
Indonesia causing serious destruction and the worse tsunami on record. By that
time, only the northern islands of the Philippines had started rebuilding.
Indonesia and Malaysia existed as separate, multiple, mutually-hostile,
competing city-states and they were the 'good news' of Southeast Asia. All too
often, the recovery of the various former nations threatened to bring China and
India into conflict, so such efforts were shelved.
Move the clock forward to the present day and there was no
political entity north of Australia remotely strong enough to retard the
upcoming Global landslide into oblivion. Collectively those Asians knew Death
was radiating out of China and they had to do 'something' and all too often,
something meant getting on a boat, or a plane, heading south, to Australia, or,
if you had the capability, to New Zealand.
Unlike the disorderly mobs of two generations ago, some of
those 'refugees' had the firepower to 'fight' their way to freedom or safety. A
U N taskforce had been in the area suppressing piracy days earlier (it was now
racing toward Shanghai) and every major metropolis had its own marine
paramilitary. They were all island-nat