Posted by Veronika Kill-O-Matic on October 17, 2000 at 17:07:14:

Toward the evening of the sixth day I ran into a herd of yaks. They looked domestic and there was no sign of a herder. I was half-expecting that. Anya I had slung over my shoulder. She was blue and feverish, heavy as a yak herself. I followed the herd downhill. Over another ridge there was, finally, a village. About thirty-five huts in a little bowl valley, surrounded by ridges. Like a fortress.

Everything there was freshly abandoned. Two, three days before. Not a soul, just a few dead and starving animals in enclosures. I didn't exhaust myself yelling for anyone. I stashed Anya somewhere and checked it out. No lights, no road for cars, no telephones in sight. Back of one of the huts there were three dead men rotting. Someone had wrapped them in shrouds, then apparently ran off. Suddenly. Vultures were at work.

That settled it. I had no doubts about what was happening, and I didn't feel like searching for more bodies.

I carried her to the biggest place, a simple wooden house with a flat slanting roof. It was the only one with a second floor. Six medium-ransacked rooms. No bodies. I tucked Anya into a bed of stacked quilts and started playing nurse, peeled those stinking clothes off of her, improvised a bedpan. The rancid water and food I scavenged didn't look too promising. A week later I slaughtered and roasted a yak, a hard and long battle. I figured out how to smoke the leftovers.

But that first night in the village I wasn't hungry. I had never felt stronger. Invincible. It was the eighth or ninth day of the Plague. My absent hosts, apparently the richest peasants around, had a satellite dish in the back. I found oil and matches and got some wicker lamps going. In the biggest room, which looked like it was meant to seat two dozen people on pillows along the walls, there was a bicycle generator with a big battery for the TV. I powered it up.

My benefactor had recorded settings for five hundred programs. Out of these I found about thirty channels still broadcasting. The down button on the remote didn't work. To get back to the last channel I had to keep pushing up, up, up, five hundred clicks. I peddled my thighs into raw meat. I cycled around the world with my thumb. I watched five, six hours a day, and two, three more at night. During breaks I spoon-fed water into my semi-comatose Anya. I slept intermittently, on my side along her back, trying to give her a spark of the thrill that filled me. Listening, making sure she was still breathing.

The news divisions were on shoestring. Every microphone, every camera seemed to tremble. The pictures kept failing. The reporters were always running. They were mostly incoherent and looked like they hadn't changed or washed in days. I saw two anchormen drop dead over their teleprompter, one in Japanese. I saw a telex girl promote herself to White House correspondant.

The androcidal pathogen. No one knew jack shit about it. No one had isolated it for sure. Incubation time and mode of transmission were unknown. It was the wind, of course, the rain, anyone breathing, coughs and sneezes, the coin of the realm, used newspapers, shared keyboards, steering wheels, old rags, cutlery. The hint of moisture was a breeding ground.

The cradle of civilization. They said that over and over, as though it could be undone. They said the Virus first broke out in northern Iraq. That narrowed the suspects down to the Pentagon, Little Saddam II, and every other country and terrorist in the world with a biological weapons program. By the time I tuned in, men had been rendered extinct in Central Asia, India and North Africa. The Virus was mopping up Indonesia and the Chinese coast, northern Europe, Siberia, West Africa.

In most of those places the men died while still in shock and denial, so there was less chaos than what came next. But the North and South American cities were just starting to report large numbers of cases. I couldn't get an Australian channel. I couldn't get an Indian one either. There was talk of billionaires flying to Easter Island. Warplanes kept falling from the sky.

I watched America watching its own last stand. It made sense that the show should end there. The President raged and threatened to nuke everybody if someone didn't confess right away. His term ended eleven hours later, and the next President was sworn in. By then all the remaining men knew they were dead.

The Virus works like a timebomb. There are no symptoms. It reaches a saturation point, then melts every Y chromosome in the body. Takes anything from a few minutes to twelve hours. The subject feels weak, lies down, dies. No pain. No visible signs.

Once that much was clear, every man had the chance to confront his true soul. One day all of us will be just as dead. In the cosmic scheme no life has higher value than another, and I don't doubt that for a few men the Plague was a moment of great spiritual transcendance. Perhaps it was even worth it in their eyes, as they made peace with mama universe. I wish poor Dirk had known in advance.

I missed all of the Plague, which made me very angry as I watched it on TV. But those who saw it, those few who can describe it, tell me most guys turned out to be sweethearts, all pose and defense gone, their emotions finally free. Maybe my informants are just sentimental. Nowadays everyone's sentimental about men. Except for me.

The true homicidals numbered no more than one in five, maybe a lot less. Most of them were determined not to leave any women behind. Others were dumb and hateful enough to try to settle their outstanding racial issues. But the Virus was taking care of that.

Once the killing started, once gangs of women-killers arose, there was no way to tell the difference between them and the impromptu defense committees. Fear took care of the rest. Everyone started shooting at everyone else.

A few really devious fellows specialized in sacking sperm banks. If not my seed, they said, then nobody's! They did an excellent job.

A studio got stormed by troops. The country looked like Colombia. They herded everyone to center stage and shot and slaughtered them with garottes, then ended up killing most of each other. No one cut off the signal. Hours later it was still there. Every street on the TV was filled with bodies, bodies, fires, shouts and smoke.

On the second day of the Plague, when it looked containable, the U.S. military had suspended air traffic and sealed off the cities. When the men started dying there, as everything dissolved, a lot of firepower split off, or otherwise fell into enemy hands. New York and Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Dubuque and Little Rock, fuck all I know. They went up in flames.

The stubborn last reporters crouched low on rooftops and whispered into their mikes. Every day there were less channels. By the third day of my pedaling, there were no males left in sight of the cameras, although plenty seemed to still be in action. I saw a reporter get creamed by a shell, amid a mass of overturned cars on Sixth Avenue. The camera itself was just out of range. The shell was a dud. It pulped her.

On the morning of the thirteenth day of the Plague, the sixth day of me watching it on TV, the American channels blacked out. I found out later that Houston and San Diego had been nuked. It was years before any kind of power grid ran there again. And then there were only six channels left, worldwide. Three of these were in Italy. I think they belonged to the same company. One was in Fiji. All six started playing classical music over scenes of local flowers.

The next day Anya sat up for about ten minutes. She composed three coherent sentences. "Who are you?" I told her I was her mother. She started remembering everything. "Where is this?" I told her it looked like a village that had been abandoned years ago. Lost in the mountains somewhere.

She asked for bread. I fed her a few spoonfuls of rice I'd found. She went back to sleep. Then I went out and killed the yak.

I knew the fires were raging everywhere still, and there were three and a half billion bodies rotting in the streets. Who were the technicians, the engineers, heavy vehicle drivers, machine operators, paramedics, firemen, doctors? Who knew how to work the water systems, the dams, the power, the phones, the chemical plants? In some countries there would be women in those jobs. But even there, everywhere, overwhelmingly, it was men.

I was in no rush to return. For a week I kept it all to myself. Anya went from death-yellow sheen to a mellow purple with veins. She was happy to hear any lie I told her. Most of the time she slept. I watched as her lover's glow slowly reemerged, and I lay beside her, making my orgasms. It was like we'd landed in Shangrila, a tolerable purgatory. No questions asked. Like we had never heard of Dirk and the Sherpas. I don't think she even saw the bicycle.

She put her head in my lap and I stroked her hair, telling her bedtime stories and legends I'd read about witches in Europe and Babylon, and women pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny against the might of the English Navy. It was my sorry way of getting her ready for the inevitable. For her it would be a horror. She started gnawing at the yak meat, which you could chew for hours. It didn't kill her. On the third day after she sat up, she made it to the door. She sat on the sill for half an hour, looking at the sky. Then she went back to bed.

That night was long. I found a shovel, wrapped a cloth around my face, and buried the three rotting, mostly eaten men in a shallow ditch, beating back the vermin. Where the hell were the women of this village? I knew now that it had been foolhardy not to explore. A very bad start for Veronika Kill-O-Matic. A demon possessed me. I scoured the village. I entered every house. In one I found a little boy. My heart broke.

I buried him. Of that I will not speak, no one speaks of that. It's the only taboo, the only horror left. I returned to bed as the last stars blinked out to the rosy-fingered dawn.

The next days I was exhausted, I felt feverish myself. We made lazy love, hours side by side, breathing into each other, captured in the smell, too tired to roll over. We had gone weeks without a bath and fought off the fleas. We dozed and woke back up into love. She would cry afterwards, thinking she was crying only for Dirk, and our two Sherpas, bless them, and the terror of being nowhere and alone.

One day Anya got up before me, and walked around the village. When she returned I knew our time was up. I was too tired to fight it. The day passed in a hateful silence. Gnawing on slices of yak was getting tiresome.

I heard her screams from a distance, at the end of my dream the next morning. For a moment I felt my own weight against the hardness of the quilts. Then I flew up in fury, flew out the door.

I had been so fat. When did I turn Olympic? When did I start careening against the sides of cliffs and shooting forth like a pinball from a bumper?

She was still screaming, and running up towards me when I saw her. We smashed into each other like errant planets and spun around three times before coming to a halt. She couldn't stop shrieking. "The burn! The people! You can't!" I had seen her like this before, on the mountain. She was about to bolt in no particular direction.

I flashed my most merciless eyes and shot out an order in a low and iron voice. "Not again!" She swallowed hard and fell silent, hyperventilating.

"Show me," I said.

She started shrieking again. I held tight to her elbows, stood like a column as she flapped, and stared down her terror. This went on for a while. Finally she motioned downhill.

"Sit!" I commanded. "Wait." I pushed her elbows away. She fell on her ass, legs stretched, hands folded obediently at her crotch. Crying, pouting almost, trying to look away from the world.

I walked in the direction Anya pointed. There were boulders on either side of the trail. The slope rose steeply from the one on the right, and fell off from the left. Vultures shot out and in between the rocks. Behind the left boulder was a broad level clearing. In the center of the clearing, a black hill rose, flapping a thousand vulture wings as it fed on itself.

An altar of large stones had been set up in a big circle. Within that rose a hill of charred flesh and blackened bone. A pyramid, a cathedral, built two weeks before, now advanced in its decay, gaseous and deflating. No human form to distinguish.

I looked with all my might. I saw how it had been. The base of the hill was made of dead men, with traces of the death shrouds in which they had been wrapped. The vault was of the women, who had arrayed the men's bodies, shoulder to shoulder. And who then went into the fire, to claw and climb each other in death.

Did they jump? Did fanatics among them push the rest, and then jump themselves? Were they pushed by a third force that then departed, perhaps by the men of another village who had realized what had happened and tried to slaughter their own women? I will never know. I don't want to know. The boy was worse. The boy was worse. This is not the first pile of burned bodies I will see. I repeat that, and stand fast against the stench. The boy was as bad as it will ever get. I am fire, I cannot burn. I am air, I cannot melt. I am rock, I cannot turn to stone. I am water, I cannot drown.

I see another village further down the trail, and a dirt road for cars below that. I turn back to Anya, who waits where I left her. Gently I guide her back to the house. I tell her about what I watched on TV while she slept. I get back on the bicycle and cycle for her. There are no channels left. I tell her not to cry. She must be hard-hearted. She must live. Anya obeys.

The next day we scavenge the village for supplies. The morning after that we leave. We must pass the hill of the dead. I order her not to look. She keeps her head buried in my arms as we walk past.

We descend to Planet XX.