Authors: Kameron Hurley
“I want to see my dad!” I shouted.
“Where’s Nan? Nan! Get her to play
a game with you.”
I ran out of the study, my mother’s
familiar call to Nan sounding behind me, long and loud, the way she called the
dogs.
I got to the bedroom door. My hands
just reached the doorknob. I pushed inside.
My father lay in the middle of his
bed, a bulk of a man breathing heavily beneath new bed sheets.
And he was surrounded in people.
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.
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
over 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?”