The race to apocalypse.
Based on ‘One In Ten’ by FinalStand, adapted into 17 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels.

The Persians marshaled all the nations under the Sun and Stars yet they were defeated by a single idea: Sacrifice, and their inability to appreciate it.
Final Curtain Call
What no one in the Federation knew at that moment was that we were racing for the final curtain call. The W H O knew that something was very wrong, but they were still digging, and desperately hoping they were wrong with what they were looking at. The U N was only learning of the footsteps of doom. They too were praying.
The moment Judas took his thirty pieces of silver he had a date with the end of a rope, he just didn't know it. This time it wasn't the fault of those doctors, jurists and politicians from forty years ago. They had never intended for the extreme efforts of the different societies they were creating to go on forever. They were buying time.
The problem was men stopped publically dying. The next generation of women would never know the flush sexual possibilities of their mothers, but they became comfortable with the system they had inherited. The men who knew what gender equality felt like; were too old to cause many problems and could be safely ignored.
They were still searching for a cure, but no one was hopping mad about it anymore. Infant boys were still dying at an abysmal rate, but in the collective memory of womankind, we always had. They became complacent. The male voice diminished then fell silent. Twenty years ago, when key world leaders learned that the male side of the species was dying out, they had a choice.
If they told the people of the Earth the bad news, the women feared that anarchy would ensue. The world economy would collapse. The civilization their predecessors had fought so hard to keep afloat would go under. It would be the End.
Or, they could make the men soldier on in futility while women waited for a miracle.
They had made a deal with the Devil, but the Devil doesn't deal in Salvation. He gave them twenty years. Old Nick was smiling behind his polite façade. He'd also provided them with the means of killing themselves. I was born a year before the Big Lie was concocted. Another boy, half a world away, was born a year later.
Like me, he had his innocence torn away at an early age. Born on Java in Indonesia, he was kidnapped and sold to the slave trade. He could have ended up anywhere, but fate landed him in the Chinese port of Shanghai. By the age of twenty, prodigious amounts of performance drugs and continuous sex had rendered his mind a shell, a few memories still bouncing around.
Outside of a small family circle in his native land, no one cared about the boy and no one would have known about him if he hadn't died. In the end, they didn't even care about his body or his name. The W H O named him Patient T2 Zero because by the time they found out about him, the only person who might have remembered his name was dead also.
It would be poetic to say he struck back at his tormentors from the grave. In fact, women had stolen away any ability to know what he had done. The fact was that on the Saturday before I moved into my condo, his long laboring T1 antibodies, his reward for surviving infancy, lost their struggle to produce more guardians than naturally degraded.
In those seconds, sometime after the lunchtime clientele returned to work, the most mutated version of the T1 virus ever seen 'woke up.’ The cluster of antivirals that encased it crumbled away. It attacked the first cell it came across. In minutes, that cell became a factory. Inside an hour, the antiviral or viral battle became a rout.
Under normal conditions, the T1 Gender Plague manifested in three days and the male was dead in four more, max. The boy from Indonesia wasn't normal. He was fighting off some influenza that a few patrons had coughed on him. The housekeeper gave him something for that. He was 'profitable' after all. He had been given an injection at the start of flu season, as well.
The boy's blood was a soup of medicinal drugs, aphrodisiacs and performance enhancers. Both his red and white blood cell counts were a wreck from long exposure to these substances. He was fed regularly, they only chained one of his legs to the bed when he was 'working' or sleeping. His throat had hurt so much that he hadn't been eating enough. Besides, his will to continue on was already gone.
He was a prostitute, a sex trade worker, a slab of meat. If you get told that enough times, treated like that enough, it becomes all you know. When was the last time you saw a slab of meat fight to stay in one piece? Around four in the afternoon, the housekeeper came by, allowed him to go to the bathroom and gave him some food to eat.
She wasn't overly concerned about him barely eating. The boy had a good run. He'd much more than made up the cost the 'providers' extorted from her 'community.’ She mused it was a pity they didn't have more Asian boys. They fetched more money. They couldn't be Chinese, of course. The police put you against a wall and shot you for that, so mainly they were Indonesians, Malay, and Africans.
When she shackled the boy back to his pallet for the evening rush, she noticed his pelvic region and cock were enflamed. She checked, the boy was still feverish. She gave him something for the fever and doused his crotch with powder so as not to disturb the clients. Had she been forty-five or older, she might have recognized the onset of the Plague, but she wasn't.
Even then, she could hardly be blamed for not understanding. No adult had died from the Plague in forty years. It was a childhood disease. In a final irony, two kilometers away was a very fine hospital. They would have recognized the ailment and quarantined the boy. He would have died, but the Human Race would not have, yet.
The housekeeper was indifferent to his suffering. She had other boys to take care of before the working class women began flocking in with their hard-earned Yuan. In a final sad reaction to the impending crisis, she dimmed the light in his room so as to not upset the clients with the condition of his genitals.
On Tuesday, as I struggled through the last few hours of my normal life, the boy's was clearly failing. The housekeeper was seeing the local patrolwoman off, with a freebie and the monthly 'allowance' money for the precinct when a junior attendant came running. The Indonesian boy the policewoman had just visited wasn't performing and the client was being noisy.
She was feeling irritable and ill, so she went straight for the 'electrical stimulation aid.’ She soothed the client, jolted the boy's anus until his cock finally responded then left the room. She told the assistant to help her move the boy to the storeroom after the latest patron left. The dying boy was no longer profitable.
She wasn't going to waste the drugs to simply put him down. One day without food or water would do the trick. Besides, she was angry, she felt like crap and her cunt itched. Inside that boy on that Saturday, the T1 inside the boy had become what was known as the T2 and it had made that last, great leap. It was no longer gender specific.
The housekeeper wasn't even Patient T2 One. That distinction fell to a worker at a large electronics factory close by. On Tuesday night, she and some co-workers went out for some drinks after their shift ended. A good friend was heading out into the countryside for a wedding. A man from a nearby village was marrying into her village and she wanted to attend, much to the ribald teasing of her comrades.
On Wednesday morning, a stewardess with Air China stopped by to see her sister who was home sick with the flu. The woman teased her ill sister about going to 'those places.’ The stewardess wanted to make sure her sibling had enough food because the stewardess was going to be gone a while. She had a short hop to Nagasaki, Japan, and then a long one to San Francisco.
There was much she wanted to do in the Federation city, not the least of was spending time with the boyfriend of one of her girlfriends. The first few patients wandered into the doctors' offices and emergency rooms Thursday afternoon and evening. They were treated for the flu outbreak that was currently running its course in the city and sent home.
On Saturday morning, as I was being beaten by Flame at Isobel's party, the first terminal patient was rolled in by ambulance to that very fine hospital. It took them an hour to figure out what was wrong with her. They didn't panic. They called the W H O and Beijing. They went into full quarantine.
As I was plotting out my little 'dowel rebellion', Chinese authorities were hot on the trail of the outbreak. The W H O had just flown a team out of Geneva. The 'community' that ran the brothel was figuring out that the trail led back to them. The housekeeper was dying in her room, alone. Patient T2 Zero had already died and been consumed by the flames per the criminals' protocols.
His ashes went into the river. Along with them went the only known antivirals that had ever killed a T2. That evening, the local precinct raided the brothel and began rounding up the criminal 'communities' members. A third of the policewomen were so sick they wouldn't have come into work if it wasn't for the emergency. In Beijing, the Central government met to discuss the crisis. Containing the outbreak in Shanghai was a pipe dream.
Multiple international ships sailed into and out of the port every hour. There was the river traffic every night and day. Train service linked the entire country with round the clock service. It had an international airport, two regional airports and one military airport. It had a naval base and over a division worth of troops in barracks around the city. Military personnel were always being transferred around.
Their decision was totally logical. They would start shifting 'key personnel' to distant governmental bases slowly as to not attract attention. They would lean on the W H O not make its findings known until they were 'absolutely' certain of what was going on. Once the governmental, restructuring, was underway, they would notify other key communities so they could do like-wise. The word went out of the Security net where one woman saw it then decided to go see her brother.
If you were a poor assembly line worker in Hangchow, you were boned. Not that it mattered too much. As I was making my spastic declaration on Monday morning, my time, they rolled in the first reported male case. He was definitely terminal. His community had done everything within their power, and budget, to keep him alive. Only in the final hour did they relent and bring him in for help. Such was the fear that the government would 'take' their man.
The Chief of Staff at the hospital was 66. Across the dying man from her was the head of the W H O mission who was only 52. The Chinese physician started crying inside her protective suit. She'd been a medical student and later a doctor when the Gender Plague first struck. There was no doubt in her heart. The Reaper had come back for them all.
The W H O doctor had lived through the Gender Plague, but only as a child. Her iron-willed Chinese counterpart was losing it and that vanished all her doubts. She raced as quickly as possible to exit the quarantine area. She had to call Geneva. She had to contact the U N. If drastic measures weren't taken right now, she ran into her Chinese 'Communications' officer.
"The government needed a few hours to 'assess' her data before allowing a general announcement," she told the doctor. The W H O doctor was an expert in her field. So, the Communications officer repeated the same statement. This was a global pandemic. Same statement. Millions were going to die. Same statement. The W H O doctor tried to push by then saw the two soldiers calmly waiting for her.
That 'few hours' turned out to be twenty-four. Tuesday, as valiant, delusional men were getting pummeled all over the Federation, the U N began to meet on the matter. Discreet inquiries were made to the Federation's U N Ambassador about Carabolix-37. An hour after those four men in San Francisco got their asses handed to them over a collection of sticks, six women and one man arrived at a hospital with flu-like symptoms.
All but one knew a certain Chinese stewardess. The last one would later recall she had served the woman at a restaurant. Just over an hour later, the police and paramedics located her in her hotel room. She was too feverish to get out of bed. It wasn't until nightfall in the city that the Federation got the true picture.
The Chinese government was bugging out, jumping ship, getting the hell out of Dodge before the Great Wall fell on their heads. Then the panic in the Capital set in. It wasn't just the Plague. China was a huge 'X' amount of the global economy and in a matter of days they were going belly-up.
Fuck the Plague; dead people didn't eat, work, or vote. Millions of Americans were about to lose their jobs. Any kind of public assistance at this level was a lost cause. Soon there were going to be lots of lonely, hungry, pissed off women looking to lynch somebody. They wouldn't kill doctors and engineers. Doctors were their best hope for staying alive. Engineers kept the lights on.
Lawyers and politicians they could do without, or so it was believed. Pulling a 'China' was no longer possible. Not only would people suspect it after the crowd in Beijing bolted, the Federation didn't have a 'Bunker' strategy anyway. The fact that no one had told the 'little' nations of the Doom on the horizon didn't seem to bother anyone there.
Virtually as an afterthought, the Press Secretary turned to the Presidential Chief of Staff and said, "What about that lunatic on TV this morning?"
It was a clear indicator in the room how bad things were that any of them would consider a man to be the answer to anything that didn't involve stress relief and impregnation.
The President looked to the Attorney General who was thanking her lucky stars that this male idiot had stuck around after making an ass of himself to the Nation.
"I have a team on him right now," she stated confidently.
"Why isn't he in custody?" the Minister of Defense questioned.
"We had him in custody, but let him go," she responded. She was leagues above the city's old Police Commissioner. "There was nothing to hold him on at the time and he's under round the clock surveillance. He's ours when we want him." She looked to the President for the order.
That woman thought about it for a second.
"Ask him," she ordered. "Ask him to come in and help his countrymen and women out in this time of crisis. Be nice."
"If he refuses?" the AG wanted clarification.
"Snatch him, of course," the President directed. "Have Congress declare him a National Treasure as a legal pretext if you must, but bring him in."
"What if this is all a hoax of some kind?" Health and Human Services chimed in.
"Then we claim he is a promising lead, wave him in front of the Europeans so they don't panic too," she smiled. "In two or three days we will have something in place for when the dam bursts, but right now we need calm."
As they were filing out of the room, the AG put the plan in motion. No one liked what they heard.
"Riot? What riot?" the AG blurted out.
"What explosion?"
"Oh my God! Is he among the dead?"
"What do you mean you don't know? Check his bracelet!" The AG gave the President a worried look. "It gave its emergency signal then cut off, did it?" Everyone was looking at the President once more. She was the team's lead striker.
"Well, find him, damn it!" the President snapped. "Find him before his body decomposes, or whatever it is that dead bodies do."
"Madam President," the AG said solemnly. "The men are rioting in the city, hundreds dead including many police officers."
"Hundreds of men? We killed hundreds of men? Oh, shit. Tell me it was a bomb that did it. Please tell me it was the MRA," the President groaned. "How did this happen anyway? How did so many get in one place?"
"It was the M A L rally, Madam President," the National Security Advisor delivered the crushing news.
The M A L was the President's baby. Congress was going to crucify her. Now she started hoping for the Plague to break out soon. That would distract her critics long enough to do, something.
"Madam President, I can have two battalions of air mobile and one battalion of Rangers in the city in three hours," the Minister of Defense pledged.
"We could use this as a pretext to round up the men in the city," the Minister of the Interior suggested. Several voices yelled 'No!.’
"There are 300,000 men in the city. Where do you plan to hold them?" the National Security Advisor reminded them.
"We use Army troops to round them up with support from the police," the DM stated. "We train for this kind of mission all the time."
"There are also 3.8 million women in the city," the National Security Advisor asked. "What do you plan to do about them?"
"We will call out the reserves," the Defense Minister answered confidently.
"Should we call out the reserves in all the M A L cities, just in case?" the NSA persisted.
"Do it," the President said. "This can be a good deception plan for preparing for the Plague outbreaks when they hit." The NSA took a quiet, deep breath. It had taken her twenty long years of crawling through the grime and slime of capital politics to get to this place and time, but with the help of her co-conspirators, she'd made it.
The noose was closing on her. They couldn't put her in the room with that initial research group, but they could put her sister there. She had been a naïve congressional staffer when her sister sat her down and gave the bad news. It had taken her weeks to agree. Once she had, there was no looking back. It was treason without an exit plan.
Putting the Reserves on the streets wasn't to maintain order. It was meant to put as many guns in as many hands as possible when the Big Lie came tumbling down. The NSA was guilty of treason, but the rest of the Cabinet was guilty of genocide. In a way, the genocide bothered her less than the callous disregard it was approached with by the guardians of the public welfare.
Why had it taken weeks for her to decide to join? It wasn't the risk to her career, or the thought of the punishment upon getting caught. It was that they weren't planning to save everyone, or even the majority. No, from the outset, the plan was to save a tiny few. They weren't elitist or supremacist; they were brutally practical.
At a critical point in a population, people stopped being doers and became 'consumers' and in the 'Vanisher' model, they couldn't afford anyone who couldn't pull their own weight. They predicted the world economy would collapse violently without hope of recovery. All their needs and requirement would be met by the group alone.
There were no bulging bank accounts or massive stockpiles of goods and food. Cash would be useless and neither food nor goods in the amount to be useful could be hidden for long. They were avoiding as many traditional human and fugitive models as possible. That being said, they knew this was a long shot. A mythical gamble, but the only shot mankind had left.
Twenty years ago, they had been called romantic idealists and their science ignored. Twenty years ago boys born of husband or wife duos had an infinitesimal greater chance of surviving than boys born of convict (drugged) fathers. It was a tiny enough fraction to ignore. In twenty years of study since then, that fraction had grown noticeably.
Capri had called it a 'love conquers all' plan. It was and it wasn't. The conspirators had gone over all the data, even the W H O study in Kwaziristan. They had found nothing to explain it. Nothing at all. Yet men were living despite all the science that said they shouldn't. At that moment, it became an act of faith.
They weren't abandoning science. Science was telling them the men were making it. The scientists just couldn't see why. The hope became that if they followed through with this project the 'why' would present itself finally, after years of failure to find a cure. They didn't know what they had, but they knew it worked.
It was simply too late to save global society. There were too few men left. The whole marriage thing was about to be moot anyway; rendered obsolete by act of Congress. The National Security Advisor had obtained a lethal dose of muscle relaxants. She had to figure what the last moment of her utility would be.
She had an idea what her captors would do to her before they believed she had nothing worthwhile to tell them and she had already decided to forgo that experience.
Across the globe, GNN was already showing the footage of several Metropolitan policewomen in the Blazer Arena finding a suspicious piece of equipment in the catwalks.
They then put it back after a member of the arena's technical staff told them what it was. It wasn't lost on the commentator that this device was off camera for a minute or that the device was the origin of the explosion as witnessed on multiple live feeds. It also proved that the explosive device didn't actually kill anybody.
Oh, it had started the stampede alright which ended up delivering a thousand casualties, but the bomb itself killed no one. That was left to the men trampling each other and the policewomen turning to deadly force after the struggle for containment became a fight for survival. There were twenty M A L rallies across the nation. Only one was a disaster but it was the only one that mattered as the sun rose the next day.
(Behind the Scenes)
By act of Science I had ceased to be a rarity of one. All seven of my sons were capable of producing the T1I1, the Israel 1, antivirus. Their underdeveloped testes could do it, but weren't. The watch word was puberty. The current scientific consensus was that removing a portion of their sex organs was also unlikely to produce positive results.
Still unknown to the Federation researchers, the Chinese had the answer to the production dilemma and it was coming their way, one infection at a time. If they had, they probably would have started praying. After all, could the T1I1 kill the T2? All the mothers were getting lawyers, and private security. Before long, the Ministry of Justice would start issuing warrants.
In Shanghai, where the first mass burnings of corpses was beginning, a tired hospital worker was touched by a patient in the Dying Ward. It was across the street from the hospital and had been a mall before commandeered by the city. The worker was, in reality, a part-time supply clerk. After being laid off from her textile job, this was the only job she could find.
She'd been given extensive first aid training when she started work a few months ago, so now she was in charge of a whole section of the Dying Ward. People reaching out wasn't all that new to the worker anymore. People were being eaten alive and their fevers were extreme. This one though, her eyes were clear and she asked for water in a weak but steady voice.
The woman was dying, that was certain. She'd been given minimal support for the last, 4 days? The clerk's heart began racing. This was a 'day 2' center. The Plague ran its course in a total of 4 days, so this woman should have died two days ago. The clerk rushed over, took one of the two thermometers for the entire ward and took her charge's temperature. 39 celsius, or 102 fever.
The clerk raced over to the one doctor (a male medical student actually) and dragged him over to the patient. The dying woman had risen to the rank of patient in that attendant's eyes. The doctor examined the patient's body, ignoring her shame, and nearly fell over. The clerk had been quiet so as to not cause an alarm. The doctor yelled for two of the volunteers to grab a stretcher and come running.
These volunteers were women who had decided to help out at the hospital in this crisis because, it seemed the right thing to do. Now they removed the dead women from the Dying Ward and took them to trucks for cremation. It was doing something. They arrived with the stretcher, but the woman still appeared alive. 'We are going to the hospital' he informed them.
That was new. They crossed the street, passed the soldiers and the group walked straight to the Hospital's Chief of Staff's office. Her assistant informed the medical student that the doctor was asleep. 'We have a patient in Day 9' he responded. The assistant nearly tripped over herself running in and rousing her boss.
Ten minutes later, he was happy to be allowed to simply observe the specialists at work. The woman was nearly dead alright. She'd been fighting off the T2 Plague for nine days now. For half that time she'd only had an IV drip to sustain her. Three things made her different. She'd been gifted with a small dose of T2J1 (Java) antivirals.
That could only mean she had sex with that poor, dead boy. Unlike the other patrons, she'd been given enough of his seed to last this long. The second difference was almost a fatal one. She'd been cannibalizing her own body to save her unborn child, who was really nothing more than a lump of tissue at that time. It was good old Mother Nature trying to see the next generation through the womb and into the light of the world.
The final difference, somewhere, the doctors guessed a day and a half earlier, the antivirals hovering around and protecting that little lump of unborn boy realized that the tissue had grown to a sustainable size and they attacked it. It wasn't out of cruelty. It was out of necessity. They were fighting that battle to keep the mother alive, but without the ability to replace their losses, they were succumbing.
Quite frankly, there weren't enough of them and they were dying by the minute while the T2 kept getting stronger. The T2J's needed a factory and the lump of boy was it. A few select cells died and became antiviral factories and the counter-attacked into the mother's body, and they were starting to come out on top.
The swelling was going down, the fever was breaking, plus her heart rate and breathing were steady, if weak. For the team of doctors at their breaking point, this was a breath of fresh air. One was going to live. They also realized that this little boy wasn't going to be saving anyone else for quite some time. Extracting him would most certainly be fatal and provide a onetime dose for only a handful of people.
Instead of keeping thousands of patients alive, they now had to keep one boy alive. They conferred, agreed that they all were of one mind, then separated. The head of the W H O mission had been supplied with her own satellite hook-up this time. She called Geneva then the U N, giving them all the data they had. What she got back was surprising.
They already had a virtual carbon-copy of the T2J antiviral, but they were calling it the T1I1. Apparently there was an adult male in the Federation running around with it. There was also a nasty rumor starting to surface that he'd been killed in a police action in Chicago. The W H O doctor wept silently at her desk. It felt like her gender was trying to commit genocide on themselves.
The Chief of Staff sat down with the battalion commander of the unit assigned to protect the hospital. By disease and fortune, it was a young captain. The Chief of Staff laid out the whole story. The boy wouldn't be saving anyone but himself and his mother for months. Most likely, everyone in the hospital and her unit would be dead by then.
If they harvested the boy, there would go the last, best chance for any of China to survive. She had to tell Beijing before their spies told them. Beijing would demand the mother and boy, she would delay as long as she could. Eventually they would see through her deceptions and then they would come to take him by force. The Chief of Staff wanted to know what the captain was going to do when that happened.
(Back at Home)
"What do you want?" I requested.
"We are here for you, Israel Jensen," the voice answered. I looked to Flame once more.
"What if I don't want to go with you?" I tried to sound brave as I responded. There was a pause.
"We are with Zara," the voice countered.
"There are two of them," Flame whispered. "I can do this."
"Bitch, we are dangling off the edge of a bridge. Have you lo,” I mumbled. "Yeah, you have. Knock yourself out."
"Why isn't she here then?" I inquired.
"She is here," the voice said. I put a hand on Flame's thigh.
"Don't move," I whispered. "They have a sniper."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, pretty much," I nodded.
"I'm tossing you a phone," the voice informed me.
"Toss it to the woman," I pointed. "Her hand-eye coordination is much better." The phone didn't fly high. It actually skidded to a stop less than a half meter away. I looked at Flame who looked at the phone then back at me.
"Bitch, it's right there. Pick it up yourself," she groused.
I picked it up, flipped open the opaque cover and was gifted with the sight of Flame's back with a little red dot centered between her shoulder blades. Flame was looking out over the city. I thought she was bored. After nudging her, she looked over the picture and smiled. She leaned into me. The dot followed. She leaned away and the dot followed.
"Good sniper," she smirked to me. "Okay ladies, you can have him," Flame called out to our visitors.
I typed Hugs Zara.
A few seconds later, I added; ‘Come In.’
Not Ready Yet, came back the response.
‘Please’, I pressed.
I added; ‘You probably can't understand how much that means to me.’
No? I added, in anticipation.
Not yet, came the final word.
The closer woman began backing away. A few meters and on the other side of the roadway, a second woman did the same. I had to wonder about their interest. What rejection would be one too many? Did other men get this much leeway? No, they didn't. They bailed out the first chance they got, yet I was sticking around.
I stood up and followed them for a few meters before stopping. I still had no plan.
"Hum," Flame walked up to my side. "You don't see that every day."
"You are not supposed to see them at all," I confided.
"Do you know what's weird?" Flame tapped me with her gun.
"You still don't want to kill me?" I guessed.
"Yeah, it's freaky-weird," Flame nodded. "Do you think that sniper-chick is still watching us?"
"You are asking my advice about women and guns?" I gasped. "God, we are a fucked-up pair."
"Tons of fun," Flame laughed. "Let me take you home."
"Your home, or my home?" I worried.
"Your home," she snickered. "My clit intimidates you." Now she was giggling.
"Thanks," I smiled. We remounted her bike, put on our helmets and headed into the city.
"I have never said this before, but I'd like to take you someplace, tie you down and make long passionate love to you," I confessed through our helmet links.
"You make passionate love to a lot of women," she countered.
"No, the 'tie you down' part," I clarified. "I don't normally do that."
"What makes me so special, not that I'm not special, but why this?" Flame snorted in amusement.
"There is no way in hell I'm giving you an orgasm when you have ready access to a weapon, or any other means of hurting me," I squeezed her tightly. She was quiet for several minutes.
"Cool," she murmured.
"Yeah, it would be," I agreed.
"Then do I get to kill you?" she perked up.
"No, damn it," I bumped helmets with her. "First I get dressed, then I open the window and then I untie you, hopefully jumping out the window before you get your gun."
"Bitch!" she laughed. "You are going to make me work for it."
"That's what friends are for," I teased.
"Thanks for clearing that up for me, Bitch," she shook with amusement. I couldn't do this with anyone else. Death and killing weren't things I embraced.
I didn't like violence, but I was causing tons of it. I didn't joke about casual violence, except now I was doing it with Flame. I wasn't sure why I liked her. I couldn't pinpoint that factor, or moment that put us in this current setting. She'd beaten me up, beaten me again, then I spasmodically came on to her, came on to her again, and she'd responded.
It wasn't a one-sided relationship. Flame wanted something from me that was equally indescribable. I don't think she'd felt alone before she met me. She hated everyone, so didn't really miss their company. Just like some office functionary, she was going through the motions of life, even if that life was that of a Mob enforcer, thug, and killer.
She wasn't an adrenaline junkie. Her fearlessness had robbed her of that thrill. In the firefight she had not flinched or panicked. I believed she had become completely emotionally detached. Oh, God, I made her laugh. Not in an artificial professional comedian kind of way, but a 'looking at someone and discovering they make you happy' way.
Unintentionally, I had made Flame feel something, anything, and it was tearing her up inside. It wasn't happiness. Flame felt happy when she killed people, or made them cry. Perhaps that was it; I gave her happiness that didn't involve her taking something, be it a life, or sense of security, from another person. That had her confused.
We pulled up to my place in relative silence. What I didn't know was most people, even in their places of work on second shift, or just working late, were glued to their video feeds. Even at the hospital, I had not grasped the magnitude of the carnage. I put the helmet up.
"Take care and no 'Death by Cop'," I patted Flame's shoulder. She opened her face plate.
"I can't die," she grinned. "I haven't killed you yet. Want me to kill you now?"
"I want you to live," I replied softly. She laughed, dropped her visor and sped away. I took the steps to my apartment two at a time. I was tired, but I actually wanted to see some female faces for the first time in forever.
I accessed my door and recalled that Venus had a gun, so I called out.
"It's me." I opened the door and stepped in. All the women, from whatever place they had staked out on my living room floor or furniture were looking, or craning to look at me. Kuiko and Capri had their arms out so that no one grappled me in the entryway.
"Where have you been?" Capri inquired with barely controlled fury.
"I, I had to,” I mumbled.
"Skip you banging that cop in the god damned emergency room and your version of the Gettysburg Address to a room full of ladies in blue who wanted to shoot you, fuck nut Bastard," Capri growled.
Honesty is never the best option. In fact, honesty is the refuge of the unimaginative and thoughtless, or so I've been told.
"Well, you remember that girl with the hand cannon in the shootout this afternoon,” I managed to get out.
Capri put her face in her hands and groaned.
"I got on a bike with her, we rode out to the road construction on the new freeway,” I continued.
"Where on the new freeway?" Venus rumbled.
"That part of the unfinished overpass," I informed them.
"You mean the big, uncompleted bridge, that part of the new freeway?" Venus pressed.
"Yeah. We sat at the end, dangled our feet off the edge and talked for a bit," I tried to make my insane decision sound reasonable.
"Gee, Israel, did she try to kill you, the mobster hitwoman?" Capri muttered.
"Ah, she pointed her gun at me a few times, asked me if I wanted to die a few more times, but she couldn't pull the trigger," I enlightened them. "We talked."
"Israel!" Kuiko squealed at a deafening pitch. "The cop nearly killed you tonight! Wasn't one time enough? Do you want to scare us to death? Do you want to leave us?"
Kuiko freaking out was expected. The look of fear on the rest of their faces was unfathomable to me.
"What am I missing?" I asked. Roni and Angel not being back was starting to worry me.
"Israel, what is the last thing you remember at the Arena?" Aniqua requested.
"Shooting, a lot of it. The cops at the exit with the EMTs arming themselves and heading in. I was listening to the chaos on the radio, but I was really concentrating on escaping. Why?" I looked around the room. Samantha was channel surfing until she found one of the local updates.
Confirmed Dead: 152 Women, 849 Men. Final figures still unavailable.
Oh God, it was the second biggest disaster to overtake male-kind since the last days of the Plague. It was highly unlikely that anything would surpass the Holy City, but Carabas in Brazil had just been supplanted as the second largest slaughter of my gender in 42 years. The most demoralizing piece was the three SWAT snipers on the Arena with their back up weapons going to fully automatic fire at the men below.
During the Gender Plague the countries of the Developing World went three ways. Some, like the Republic of South Africa, clung to their democracy and rode out the storm. Others, like India, went to Emergency Rule and they survived. The last group, like Brazil, tried to walk the middle path and they collapsed. The public didn't know who to trust, so they began looking out for themselves.
Brazil made it into Year 6 when the police in Brasilia rioted. The government called in the closest military units to restore order. The military tried to seize control, the executive branch of government was decapitated and the country went to shit. A few months later, the legislative body set up shop in San Paulo and began reasserting control over the coastal regions.
Their navy had remained loyal through the crisis so not only did the democratic government survive, but the Brazilian export economy didn't wither and die. They grimly persevered for eighteen months until the U N was finally able to cobble together some kind of relief force from the member nations.
On the Brazilian & U N side was that they were organized and well-equipped. The rebels were balkanized and often as much threat to each other as to the central government. Brazil took back their capital and launched an offensive against the largest of the rebel groups. They drove the rebels back to their base at Carabas.
On the eve of the last government offensive the Revolutionary Council met and decided on their final course of action. There were men on the Council. It is said that one objected but the other two agreed. In the last hour before dawn, the rebels rounded up every male still under their control and executed them. The rebels considered it a last act of defiance.
The U N considered them all War Criminals and hunted most of them down. It was the end of old Brazil though. The upper Amazon basin remained lawless even until this day. The government was too afraid that other female groups would do the same thing and the real estate wasn't worth the risk.
The Holy City was a different, and far more horrifying, legacy. Before the Plague, there were places where men not only ruled, but women were barred from any true power. As a result, when the men started dying off, there were no, or not enough, professional women to take their place. The electricity went out, hospitals were overrun and law and order broke down.
The U N was doing triage and if your country couldn't at least limp along, it was abandoned to its fate, unless you had oil. In those bygone days, it was a petroleum driven economy. There were some fucked-up places around the globe that should have bit the dust, except the U N had to keep propping them up, or everything would have broken down.
Human Rights abuses? They would deal with that later. Few women want to talk about exactly what the U N was thinking back then. They kept the engine of civilization turning and they paid for it in blood. Whose blood? The blood of women. See, around Year 8, there just weren't too many men left in these Male Dominated cultures.
Life was horrible, but the men simply wouldn't give up their power. They filled their security forces with whatever men they could lay their hands on. Things got so bad that these powerless women protested. The questionably recruited and poorly trained security forces raped and killed them for their audacity. Massive atrocities were committed.
The U N did nothing, sort of. They covertly began supplying all kinds of aid to the women while publically appealing for mediation. The men were having none of that. It was their God-given country and women had better know their place. Apparently God decided their places was behind a machine gun, rocket launcher, or rifle.
The men still had more plentiful equipment like tanks, artillery, helicopters and planes. What they didn't have were numbers. They couldn't cover everywhere at once. Soon enough the women grabbed and held onto valuable parts of the landscape. The U N recognized their movement and it was payback time.
Every advantage now turned the women's way. If anyone in the U N thought this was a bad idea, they were ignored. The U N was thinking a popular insurgency overthrowing a corrupt, outdated regime. They weren't thinking of thousands and thousands of brutalized rape victims, traumatized and often mutilated suddenly seeing a light at the end of the tunnel of their suffering.
They didn't give a crap about the survival of the U N, Peace, Prosperity and the Human Race. They wanted to silence the demons in their heads forever. They wanted to make sure that they never heard a woman cry out in unanswered, wretched agony ever again. They pushed the men back to the Holy City, their last stand.
Most of the female fighters were relatively sane. They knew what was going on around the globe. They agreed with the U N that certain men, if captured alive, would suffer international justice. Most of the men would spend their lives in permanent detention so that their culture could attempt to rebuild. It was the only rational thing to do.
The fighting was incredibly brutal. Hardcore elements on both sides refused to take, or be taken, prisoner. For seven days the women pressed forward. In the core of the city, the last band of fanatics died to a man. After that, the resistance collapsed. Most of the male army by this time were the scrapings of the barrel.
Old men in their seventies, young boys in their early teens, the ill, the infirmed and the mangled; this was pretty much all that remained of a male culture that had lasted thousands and thousands of years. The U N representatives stepped in, helped sort out the men and prepared to rebuild. Those women mentioned earlier? They weren't done. There were men still alive.
The male army had used a variety of chemical weapons on their female enemies during the conflict and those dissolute women had been gathering up the stockpiles as they were overrun. They rolled into the outdoor prison camps with those weapons, pretending to be a food delivery. The men gathered around and the women detonated themselves, in all the camps.
Those who didn't commit suicide began opening fire on the men who weren't dead, or dying fast enough. Some women fired on those zealots. Other women simply fell down and wept. They couldn't shoot the women who had fought and bled so much for their cause. If the men died, they died as a people. It was an internal conflict they couldn't handle.
Between the battle and the mass murder afterwards nearly 25,000 men died. Fewer than three hundred remained. Today, a Pakistani regiment guards the city. It is still a place of pilgrimage, but it has never been repopulated. It remains pretty much as it was abandoned, forty-one years ago, a silent reminder of all that can go wrong with the human species.
Back to my plight.
"I didn't say or do anything at the Rally, honest," I pleaded to my female companions.
"We know you didn't," Capri grumbled. "That's why you are not on the list."
"List?"
"The arrest list," Venus snapped. "They are using facial recognition to file arrest warrants for all the men who broke the law at the rally. It's over two thousand names long and posted so that all their female friends and neighbors can turn them in."
In the midst of this disaster, what insight did my mind grab on to?
"At least Kenny should be getting out of jail soon," I mumbled. Where in the hell were they going to hold all these people? Hell, how were they going to try all these guys?
"So, what's with the cop?" Venus stared at me intently. "The one you fucked."
"That would be Officer Freya Passey. She's a pagan," I evaded.
"I wonder what her review of you is going to be like," Samantha studied me with conflicting emotions.
"Oh, there's a problem with that," I looked heavenward.
"Problem?" Capri choked. "Do you mean 'problem' as in you snuck off and murdered the Mayor, or something that is remotely fixable?"
I was beginning to question why Capri kept hanging out with me.
"My bracelet is broken," I confessed.
"How did that happen?" Aniqua inquired.
"Have you seen that whole bit with me, on top of Passey, the riot cop, the stun baton hitting my wrist?" I outlined. "That apparently fried it."
The women looked around at each other.
"Oh, thank God," Capri exhaled. "I thought it was something important."
"Damn, Israel, we don't give a crap about your bracelet," Venus groused. "Can I have my sex now?" Capri, Aniqua and Kuiko all pelted her with something.
Kuiko used the commotion to hop up and come my way.
"Hugs?" she smiled hopefully. I opened my arms and she flowed into my embrace. She began breathing deeply my scent and rubbing her cheek against my shirt.
"Damn it," I groaned. Kuiko looked up, concerned.
I tried to turn her around and pull up her shirt.
"No!" she insisted. "You were bad. You weren't thinking of us. You should have come straight home." Kuiko wasn't angry about Passey. She was angry because I had acted without concern for the group, our group.
"I apologize, to all of you," I groaned. "I honestly can't tell you what I was thinking. It, it all changed and they'll never fix it. Men rose up in defiance and they are going to crush us for it, but their brutality doesn't matter anymore."
In a cosmic twist of black humor, the situation had reversed.
For forty years the female regime had been keeping men internally disorganized and obedient. There were a multitude of all-female groups. There were even a good number of non-gender groups, but there were no male-only clubs (unless you included male musical groups). Unlike the cross-cultural men that took public transit with their sticks today, this male group had been uniform.
They were some of the best men could put forward. Not the smartest, richest, best looking, or most famous. No, they were the iconic representation of what all men were supposed to want to be. They played by the rules, got ahead and were living the good life, and they had been gunned down at a meeting the women invited them to.
Robert White had most likely not identified with the man in the chicken processing plant, the microchip production line, the mechanic, or the starving artist, but they had identified with him. In their hearts they knew society wanted us to be like Robert White, pre-massacre. To complete the picture, the doctor, lawyer and banker identified with him too, as one of their own.
The police had still gunned him and hundreds like him down. Males weren't salivating with glee as Robert took out those two water cannons. Most couldn't understand that kind of dire courage. What they felt was horror, horror that he'd been shot in the first place, shot in the gut with his life placed in jeopardy. It was the horror that their sense of security had been shredded and the promises they'd been believing all these years were lies.
Men were uniting in fear, disbelief and outrage. They had been rendered into one mind, 'They have betrayed us.’ On the other side of the aisle, it was the opposite. Women were being torn asunder. What had the police been thinking? Why hadn't they let them leave? Why hadn't the men been punished?
What were the men going to do next? What should they do to protect the men? What should they do to control them? Is my man in danger? Sure, all women knew policewomen carried a sidearm, but they would never use them, right? Well, they had, mostly to defend their lives and those of their partners.
But women didn't care about that. Cops had shot men! It was like China only a hundredfold worse. Women were confused. Society had told them as they grew up that men 'liked' it, that they didn't mind the aggression and most of all, men were safe to be around, docile, though no one would have dared use the word.
"Israel, you did your thing. It was your right," Aniqua stated, "but have some mercy on us. It is damned hard to watch you walk out that door then witness all that madness on TV. We were worried. You called, but you wouldn't come home. No, you had to go into a building full of cops and screw a woman, and then you disappeared again."
"Couldn't you keep in touch?" she persisted. "Did you even think about us?"
"Yes I could have and no, I didn't think about any of you," I confessed. "I was a lousy friend and, I'm going to continue being a lousy friend. Frankly, all of this," I indicated the women in the room, "is a lot for me to take in. Worse, it is necessary for me which makes me resent all of you."
"Huh?" Venus muttered. "In the video you said you liked us."
"I like all of you a whole bunch, but I don't want to," I pleaded. "The last time I took a shower, I was terrified one of you would come in and hurt me. It is not any of you, it is me. When Flame had her huge, fucking pistol barrel pointed into my face tonight I couldn't even muster enough fear to beg for my life."
"Damn," Capri whispered. Kuiko started quietly to shed tears onto my chest.
"Sometimes the desire to live until the next day was all I had to keep me going," I stated. "Even as you gave me your care and affection, you were breaking me down inside. I spent three years learning to avoid and live without women. In a week that had become a futile endeavor."
"I can't live without you even as I know it is going to tear me apart. I want to be free and I want to be alone. I can't have both so I've chosen to be free because that lets me be with all of you," I finished. "I'm going to be a terrible friend and you deserve better than a fucked up guy like me."
"No we don't," Kuiko sniffed. "I don't want anyone else but you."
"I'd sell Kuiko's left tit to make you work right, or righter," Venus sighed. "I'll still take the man I'm here with though over any other I've ever met." Samantha seemed to calm down. Capri was relentless.
"We need to establish a punishment system for you, maybe a denial of sex," Capri grumbled.
"Eek!" Kuiko peeped then shook her head rapidly over my chest. She wasn't happy with that idea, not one bit.
"Capri, just so we are clear," Venus menaced. "Sammy and I are about to kick your ass for even suggesting such a thing."
"Fine, fine," Capri held up her hands. "Let's compromise. Kuiko, punish Israel." Kuiko turned her head sideways, regarding Capri while her ear was listening to my heartbeat. "You know, teach him a lesson." Kuiko's eyes grew wide. She hurriedly help me get her shirt and bra out of the way then stripped of my jacket and shirt.
"Well?" I asked softly. I was wanting to do this more than I initially thought I would. I welcomed the frivolity of the act; the carefree sensuality.
"Put me against the wall and pick me up?" she meeped.
"Is that a question or a command, Mistress Sano?" I teased. It came so easily with her.
"Mistress Sano,” her face blossomed into a smile that seemed to erase the tear-tracks on her cheeks. "I like that. Lift me up, press me against the wall and get to nipple licking!"
I picked her up, pressed her against the wall and began my nipplage.
"Damn it," four women muttered behind me.
"Support your weight with your legs around my hips and your arms on my shoulders," I instructed Kuiko.
She was curious, but obeyed. I released my hold on her ass, brought my hand up to the sides of her breasts the pressed them together. I tongue flicked her now adjacent nipples.
"I warned you I'd get them both next time," I admonished her.
"Mistress Sano approves," Kuiko purred, "approves."
"No, Capri," Venus mocked my lawyer, "you couldn't say 'Venus', could you?"
"Nope," Capri smirked. "You getting pissed off is normal. Kuiko wailing is a noise I can live without."
Capri was a clever girl and way ahead of the game. By foisting Kuiko on me she was reinforcing our congealing dynamic. She would let Kuiko lead the way. No one else had heard her declaration of love for me, so this simply seemed like fun. I had little doubt that she knew this was healing me. She was creating isolation in a crowded room; just Kuiko and me.
I would give the girls sexual fun. It would be a personal relationship that would move me beyond what I did with Officer Passey, I still had to explain that. They were my partners. I wouldn't belittle them with the term 'attachment.’ We were one group, one entity, not some cosmetic appendage or accessory.
In retrospect, Kuiko had been the perfect choice. She was our 'Omega.’ She wasn't the prettiest, the best built, the smartest, or even the most athletic. She was wacky, just a smidge off kilter. The other women, sadly, didn't see her as a threat. Angel was a threat. She was the Alpha. Kuiko though, if Kuiko could get this level of attention, by their thinking, any of them could.
Kuiko was not my Omega. She was my liberator. Before anyone else, she had connected with me. Angel stole my heart, but she still hurt me. Kuiko gave me patience and time. She sensed my frontiers and there she stopped, waiting for me to let her in. I prayed to the Divine that she made it out of this mess with me intact.
I was so caught up in my threads of this Kuiko experience I missed her coming to fruition under my ministrations.
"Israel, I'm, ah, ah, ah ah ah ah ha," she orgasmed. We clung to each other as she slowly regained control of herself. "Thank you," she whispered.
"He made her come, didn't he?" Samantha murmured. "With his lips,"
"Fuck all of you," Venus growled to the room. She stomped off to the shower. The water was running in seconds, the glass door opened then shut. Capri started giggling.
"Don't worry, Israel," Capri snickered. "Forcing Venus to take a cold shower can't be better than sex with you, but until then, it will do nicely."
"I need to change," Kuiko grinned sheepishly at me. Her crotch was soaked.
"Me too," I sighed. My belt and the top of my pants were damp as well. Kuiko and I changed clothes, the cold shower didn't' seem to have done Venus much good and after some consensus building, I was convinced to sleep on the sofa with the ladies around me.
It was much later when I woke up. I hadn't heard Roni, or Angel come in yet but Dimples' FBI was close by again, apparently I was lost and the Attorney General was looking for me,
The fact that my bracelet wasn't talking to the system never came up. Dimples' people didn't get around to it and my sanity kept me from mentioning the fact.
The Federation Government had thought I was dead, but my stunt at the hospital went viral, so they knew I was alive again. Officer Passey was vocally and profusely refusing all attempts at a vaginal swab. Outside, a city-wide curfew was in effect. The Armed Forces Reserves were being called up and the rumor was that regular troops were on the way.
All that left me truly curious about who was knocking at my door an hour before dawn. I activated the TV and nothing happened. It was on but not responding. I began to panic then I recalled the past two days of my life. I got off the sofa and headed for the door.
"Who is it?" Capri and Aniqua asked at the same time.
Samantha and Kuiko were slow wakers. I lightly knocked on my own door then opened it. Sure enough, it was Zara and those two women from the bridge earlier in the night. I silently stepped aside and ushered them in. The middle woman, the one I had talked to on the bridge, had two carrying crates worth of stuff and she went straight to the kitchen.
"Israel," Zara began. "We need some of your blood."
"Okay," I nodded. There was a short pause.
"Shit," the middle woman griped as if she had just lost a bet. The third woman chuckled and removed her ball cap. They all had ball caps, jackets and street attire.
The third woman had short, shockingly white hair. Like Zara and the other woman, she was fit, but with a different quality about her, more agile than tough. The second woman was of the same mold as Zara, quietly competent though she smiled more often, with her raven hair pulled back in a ponytail reaching half way down her back.
I migrated into the kitchen because, while tiny, it wasn't packed with as many women as my living room. The second woman was kneeling beside her two crates, pulling things out and stacking them around her while wearing blue surgical gloves. One of them held my curiosity. It was a 30cm cube. It seemed to be solid plastic except one portal on top and a small open sphere in the middle.
"By the way, I'm Jen, the woman in the kitchen is Brandi and, in case the word hasn't gotten around yet, the last woman is Zara," the white haired woman introduced the new group.
"Who are you with?" I asked her.
"Nasa," she snorted. "That was cool, you figuring it out."
"Frank, let me stick your finger," Brandi requested. I extended a finger her way and it was dutifully pricked. Apparently I was 'Frank.’
"Who are the rest of you with?" Venus prodded. Zara hesitated.
"1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, D," she replied. "Both of us."
I knew who that was because of my studies. By the look on Venus' face, like she'd been hit in the face with a skillet, she knew too. Everyone else seemed clueless.
"Oh," Kuiko popped up, "you shoot people? Just like real soldiers?"
"Yeah Kid," Jen chuckled, "just like real soldiers."
Brandi extracted some of my blood in a miniscule hollow tube. She trimmed that, opened the top of the globe and fitted the tube into a series of rollers. She sealed the tube and then, in stages, the tube descended into the heart of the cube. Brandi switched her attention to the small screen device at her knees.
At first, all it showed was some roughly circular objects, grey and fuzzy around the edges. A few seconds later, red objects, about the same size as the grey ones entered the scene. Brandi grew tense, so I began to massage her shoulders while keeping my eyes on the screen. One of the red, cells, they had to be my blood cells, turned grey and ruptured along the sides.
The grey objects were ruptured, infected blood cells. My blood cells were getting clobbered. One by one they succumbed. Brandi was almost too tense for words. I picked up on her chanting 'come on, come on' as if some sort of encouragement would help in this lopsided fight. I caught sight of the miracle first.
On the edge, one of my blood cells began turning grey then stopped. It was turning red once more. Brandi began muttering 'oh please, oh please, oh please.’ A grey cell began to wither, blacken and die, then another. In seconds a colossal trouncing was in progress. Brandi could barely scroll the screen back fast enough to catch the death of the infected cells. In two minutes, it was over.
To be continued
By FinalStand for Literotica