Manhunt, Chapter I: XX

MANHUNT

Gretchen Felker-Martin

Chapter I: XX

Fran watched the man stoop to drink through her scratched binoculars, squinting in the early afternoon glare. The forest pool, surrounded by skinny pines bare-branched for a good twenty feet under the canopy of needles was dark and brackish, scummed with blooms of vibrant green algae. The man’s matted, filthy hair floated on the surface as he gulped down greedy mouthfuls, tilting his head back to swallow like an alligator horking down a fish. 

They had trouble with swallowing, these things the plague had made out of anyone with enough testosterone in their system to put out a decent crop of back hair. Mostly they ripped their prey apart and gulped the meat down in chunks, or dug up grubs and beetles and whatever roots they could get their gnarled claws on. They’d eat pretty much anything if it came down to it. Fran had seen one choke on a tennis ball one time.

“Well?” asked Beth, kneeling on Fran’s right.

Fran lowered the binoculars. “He’s alone. Can you one-shot him from here?”

Beth was already unlimbering her compound bow. “Sixty yards,” she said quietly, smirking so that the scar at the right corner of her mouth drew taut and pulled at her bottom eyelid until a little crescent of wet pink showed under it. “Which eye you want it through?”

“Don’t be a cunt,” Fran hissed back. “Just do it.”

Beth’s smile widened as she knocked a carbon fiber arrow and drew to the bow’s full extension, the muscles in her long, ropy arms standing out. She squinted along the arrow’s shaft. “Lick my taint,” she whispered, and took the shot. 

The high-tension bowstring twanged. The arrow buzzed through the air like a thirty-inch hornet, its arc carrying it up, up, up into the branches above. The man, sixty yards downslope in a basin choked with years of rust-colored fallen pine needles, looked up from the pool, cracked and scabby skin splitting along fresh fissures to reveal raw pink flesh beneath as its face contorted into a snarl, exposing a mouthful of rotting snaggleteeth under a nose pounded flat and smeared onto the thing’s left cheek by god knows how many breaks.  

It drew a breath and for an instant Fran was sure that it would scream, that it would make that horrible fucking sound she heard ring out in choruses every night the second she dropped into REM. Then the arrow hit, punching through his skull with a distant thunk, and he toppled face-first into the pool and lay there, not moving. A few morning doves cooed angrily from the branches above.

Beth touched her thumb and forefinger together and raised them to her lips, then kissed them and opened her hand and gestured as though to let the kiss take flight, like a cartoon chef just after tasting a perfect sauce. “Bella, bella!” she yelled, spreading her arms wide. “Bellissima!”

Fran laughed in spite of herself, her legs going loose and shaky as adrenaline flooded her system. “God, Beth,” she giggled, picking herself up to follow the taller girl out of their small brake of fiddleheads and chokeberry and down the slope. For a single blessed instant she felt weightless, her nostrils full of the warm cinnamon smell of dead pine needles, her neck and back slick with sweat under her sodden tank top. It felt like summer used to feel, itchy and restless and golden. “You’re such a fucking dumbass.”

                                                                               ♀

Fran opened up his back to either side of his spine and cut his adrenal glands carefully off the tops of his kidneys, then fished his balls out of his rashy scrotum which released a fine mist of stink like a bath bomb infused with rancid pork when she cut it open. She packed his nasty giblets into a rucksack between layers of dry ice wrapped in yellowing newspaper. She tried not to look at the other things growing inside him, at the squirming tumors that flinched from her hunting knife and scalpel, hiding among bones and fleshy membranes like goldfish in the archways and battlements of an aquarium castle.

Birds gathered in the branches overhead as she worked. Crows, mostly, and the wide-winged shadows of turkey vultures sweeping in long, lazy circuits over the forest floor. A red-tailed hawk kept silent watch over the basin and its little surgical tableaux. Beth stood guard nearby, an arrow knocked, her own knife loose in its sheath at her hip. When Fran was done she washed her hands in the pool, dried them on the front of her bloodstained, moth-eaten tank. The dead man stared at her accusingly with one bloodshot golden eye, his face still twisted in a vicious snarl.

“You good?” Beth asked. The shadows were getting longer. The birds would draw attention. No more laughter.

Fran shouldered the rucksack and stood, knees popping after forty-five minutes spent squatting over the dead man’s gaping back. She looked away from his baleful, unseeing gaze, feeling suddenly absurdly guilty. “Yeah. Let’s boogie.”

They scaled the slope in silence, Beth in the lead and Fran following close behind, neither of them looking back as the watchful croaking of the carrion birds became a ravenous cacophony, black wings flogging the hot summer air.

                                                                               ♀

A few miles from where they’d left their bikes at the forest’s edge they paused to drink lukewarm water and wolf down stale protein bars. Fran tried to imagine the taste of fresh biscuits drowning in sausage gravy, rich and buttery and shot through with a smooth, dark tang of smoke. Instead she imagined one of the dead man’s tumors slithering back behind his left lung, its half-formed mouth agape in a wheezing grin.

The plague was as reliable as the atomic fucking clock. First, relentless hunger pangs. Mood swings. Fever. Dermal fissures that wept pus and cloudy blood before scabbing over, bursting, and scabbing again until the skin was nearly an inch thick in places. Delirium. Intense spikes of aggression. Once the initial lava flow of symptoms cooled and hardened into the shrieking, ravenous things that seethed like lice across the entire American supercontinent, the tumors started cooking. Five years in, the biggest three or four cancerous bundles of joy ate their daddy alive from the inside out and went scuttling off to start the whole thing over again.

Out here on the coast the things that had been men were scarcer. They couldn’t swim, so fish held little allure for them, and most of the big game had been killed off years ago. Still, sometimes one caught sight of you and before the echoes of its first scream faded there were thirty of the fucking things pelting after you on all fours through the rotting innards of a Wal-Mart Superstore like a pack of rabid dogs.

And if I ever run out of E I’ll be one of them a few weeks later, and then some other t-girl’s gonna put an arrow through my skull and slice off my balls. Oh well. So sad.

“Let’s boogie,” said Beth through a mouthful of protein bar as she straightened up and brushed crumbs off her threadbare hoodie. Letsh bugey.

“Let’s,” said Fran.

                                                                               ♀

They were almost to the forest’s edge, making good time over level ground between the pines, when Fran heard voices. “Wait,” she hissed to Beth, flattening herself slowly into the sparse underbrush. “Down, get down.”

Beth dropped onto her elbows at her side. “I don’t see anything,” she whispered back. “Are you sure you’re not just a jumpy bitch with clinical paranoia you’ll never get diagnosed because all the psychiatrists are dead or living in, like, Monaco in some really tacky American slum?” 

“Shut the fuck up and follow me. And be quiet.”

They wormed their way forward for a good five minutes, pausing intermittently to listen. Beth’s expression sobered when they both heard a high, scratchy woman’s voice shriek “Oh my GOD!” in a breathless titter. Other voices answered. Fran and Beth squirmed onward until finally, from the relative concealment of a patch of goldenrod growing in a clearing, they saw the TERFs.

They were a hundred yards off, half-hidden by the thinning pines near the forest’s edge. A dozen women, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, a few younger, all jean jackets and torn skinny jeans and undercuts, stood clustered around their bikes where they’d left them leaning up against a rusted metal rack from when this place had been shot through with hiking trails for rich yuppies from Boston who wanted somewhere serene to surround themselves with nature and stargaze and do cayenne and lemon juice cleanses. And blow. 

“Fffffuck,” Beth groaned, rocking smoothly back up onto her haunches and settling into a loose, ready crouch. “It’s the fucking chromosome crusaders.”

Suddenly, the group of girls fell silent and parted as smoothly as a set of drapes. A thin, pale woman of unremarkable height, maybe forty years old, strode through the divided group toward the bikes. She wore fitted black slacks, a crisp white button-up that looked like it had been ironed and starched that morning, and a tight black cardigan hanging open at the front. On her forehead, dead center above the bridge of her pert little ski slope nose, was a stark tattoo: XX. Pussy certified all-natural by the Daughters of the Witches You Couldn’t Burn or whatever Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival bullshit the TERFocracy bowed down to. Fuck.

“We can wait them out,” Fran whispered, chin practically kissing the dirt, hair stuck to her neck with flop sweat. “Worst case is they take our bikes and we walk home. We have enough meds to get us there, I think. It should be fine. It’s probably going to be fine. Hey maybe get down a little more?”

“Oh motherfuck me,” whispered Beth, not even pretending to listen. “That’s Queen TERF. That’s fucking Teach.”

Fran’s eyes widened. She stared at the thin, unsmiling woman currently sorting through the contents of Beth’s bike basket. They called her Teach, she’d heard, because she’d been a psychological consultant at Guantanamo before T-Day hit. She was a medical doctor too, according to rumors they’d heard at the Fort Fisher trading post up near Seabrook when they’d gone down to find a buyer for their excess E. 

The tattooed woman said something that made her retinue laugh. Fran watched her lips move, watched the play of muscles under her smooth face as she smiled. A cold thrill went up her spine. God, you don’t need to have a wet dream about a fucking gender-essentialist neofascist. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, nipping in the bud her imagination’s little spurt of latex tight against pale skin and thighs divided into lickable quarters by garters edged in handmade lace, of a hand on the back of her neck squeezing tighter and tighter until— 

She bit her lip, cutting through the haze, and the world swam back into normalcy. Well, except that Beth was standing up, and she had her bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. The broad-shouldered girl was squinting. It was past noon and the sunlight seemed to be aimed right at them. The shadows were getting long again.

“What are you doing?” Fran hissed, spittle flying through her teeth. Her cock was hard, tenting the front of her stupid cargo shorts, and she was seized suddenly by the absurd fear that the pale woman could see it. “Beth what the fuck are you doing?” 

“Taking care of our roach problem,” said Beth, grinning like a fox with its head through the henhouse door as she knocked an arrow to the bowstring and drew it back level with the unscarred corner of her mouth. “I’m gonna put one through her fucking neck.”