Posted by Veronika Kill-O-Matic on October 18, 2000 at 12:46:49:

Contrary to expectation, Earth without men was not the Planet of the Women. It was the Planet of the Rats. Everyone made that joke, in the first years after the Virus.

The day we got to Hamburg, Anya's hometown, two and a half years after we came down from the mountain village, she found her decrepit mother sitting at home watching TV, munching on a pack of nuts as if nothing had happened. By then I was tired of watching Anya cry, so I cut out for a walk along the river. I had eaten the impossible for that girl, saved her from death many times, and already I silently toyed with the idea of killing her for it, as easily as I had killed a dozen others for her. She often saw this in my eyes, which was a turn-on for both of us, and sometimes the prelude to my fucking her like a rapist.

I had loved her so, those weeks in the mountains, before and after the Virus. My first love, my only love. Why did she want to leave? Why did all the dead men matter more than us? When we climbed down into India - that's where it turned out our mountain village was - I was seething. She was stupid to want to go. There was nothing down there she wanted to see. It was my music, yes. But after missing the demise of men, I wasn't in a rush to watch their bodies rot. She didn't love me, that was all, not then, if she ever did. Not after she saw the ravens feeding on the dead villagers. Which was my fault, right, because I had not told her that while she was sick I watched the end of the world on TV. She held it against me, as though my hatred had wished the Virus into existence. Today I might have kept her up there as my slave and beat her some more, until she learned to like it.

As of this afternoon that was ancient history. Anya was in Hamburg. Mission accomplished. Somehow they had packs of filter cigarettes left over in Germany then, still, and we had got a couple on the way up. I lit a weak stick of something in a green pack called f6, at least three years stale, and I felt wonderful. Then I lit a joint. Let history rain or shine, there would always be plenty of that. It was a rare spring day. For the first time since the Virus, I got that happy city feeling, when everyone looks forward to their bright new life that has just begun. For once it didn't bother me that the city smelled of shit, and that most of the street traffic consisted of rat columns on tours of pillage.

I came upon a square where there was some commotion and people packing on to four buses. When I asked, they told me in English that a dead Norwegian oil tanker had been spotted on the horizon off a beach on the North Sea, and they were getting volunteers to go help stop it from crashing. Maybe even retrieve the oil. I thought they had the radar on again in Germany, but I guess they missed this one.

I hopped on for the ride. The smiles I got! Damn, the German women were good looking. I asked myself why I had fixated for so long on just one. They all had those fuzzy lisp accents, with z's instead of s's. It was easy to fall in love. They asked me where I was from. I wondered that myself. I told them I was from New York. No, they said. Really? I had to laugh.

We saw the fiasco from the hills above the sea, long before the bus came to a stop. The supertanker was cracked up a mile off the beach, both ends sticking out and still sinking, and a front of black carpet moving towards us with the waves. A dozen smaller ships were poking around. I imagined a self-proclaimed captain on a tugboat bridge, thumbing through the German Army's looseleaf manual of emergency procedures for oil spills. I was used to this kind of thing, we all were. The only weird touch was the distant sound of animal squeals, which was getting louder.

As everyone and their retarded grandmother knows, different kinds of rats have a gestation period of three to four months and produce up to seven litters a year, each containing 6 to 22 young. Oh, the things we never imagined would be important, back in the sandbox.

By then, maybe sixteen buses of women had come in from different places for the show, and about four hundred of us assembled on the beach, an army in leather jackets with our hands in our pockets, shivering in the sea wind. I was a slow learner on the German, but it was finally dawning on me that we were about to defend the coast from the D-Day of the Rats.

What the fuck had they been eating on an oil tanker, two years and more, after they'd finished off the crew and provisions? Each other, I suppose. I guess their population peaked at a level high enough for hundreds of thousands to survive as they fed off their own tribe. Looked like half a million of them. They were slicked black and wailing that their home had cracked up on the rocks. Sad, if you see it their way. But they could swim, and they were gathering into one big wedge a half-mile across, looking to open a bridgehead.

It was hard not to think of it that way. Today I can laugh that we wanted to kill a bunch of oily rodents that were going to wheeze to death on the sand anyway. But in those days, the sight of a rat army served to banish any hint of reason among women. Most everybody had spent two years living with the terror that the Virus was killing us, too. Everyone was croaking. If they weren't coughing up blood and burning with fever, they were killing themselves like it was a sport, or really more like shopping: so, honey, shall we take the rope, the shotgun, the Drano? Casual suicides. The more adventurous killed each other. Of course, the big death was just conventional epidemics, offing the old women mostly, what with all the cadavers rotting and the rats taking over the grain stores - and the fields, and the forests, and the shopping malls.

It got very hairy, that evening on the beach. Yeah, right, no human can kill Veronika Kill-O-Matic, I knew, but when I saw rats start to gang up on the odd stray lass who broke off our group, and bring her down - she and they shrieking death as one - I thought we were all done.

No one ran. We didn't care.

The oil was coming in thick, but it's not easy to light up crude oil mixed with seawater. When it looked the worst - the sun had disappeared - more buses arrived and the first gas tanker-truck drove up. Word went around that dozens more were coming, and helicopters arrived, and someone passed around hundreds of boots and industrial working pants made of some thick rubbery stuff. We were organized after all!

We hemmed in their perimeter, carrying torches and clubs, shot flares to confuse them. They were creeping and shivering themselves, and though we didn't think of it that way, I can see now we were staging a ritual, a big auto-da-fé. We were the real rat horde, instinctively doing the right thing. The rats had taken over the sand from the waves up to the first brush, so that it was all rat-oil mass, and we were convinced they would move to break out any second.

Around midnight we had pumped the gas from the last of the tanker trucks as far and wide as we could. I kept reminding myself not to light a cigarette. Finally we started backing up with fast-beating hearts because the call had gone up to light up the beach. We sighed as one. Would it catch?

It caught. Presto, two miles of rat inferno, and finally fire stretching over the sea all the way out to the tanker. The squealing! The warmth rushing at us! Glorious! We began to shriek. We shrieked and shrieked. We had a roasted rat feast. Such orgies, that night. I saw more than one idiot jump into the fire in her joy.

Women had changed, since the Virus. The stink, the dirt, the apathy. All that death, the loverboys and overlords and rare brothers gone. The little boys. And the end of childbirth. No skin off my teeth, but to most sisters the world was lost. Who among them, before the Virus, could have had a thought like this: "Why should we care what happens when we're dead? Why should we care that there is no younger generation to succeed us?"

The majority saw children as their life, and serving men, and these crutches were gone. They lacked a center, their hearts were missing.

No Internet, either. I really missed that. :--(

On the other hand, any inhibitions about death - and sex, luckily - were stripped away. Back then the order of the day was fucking, killing, and starving. I couldn't have invented a better world if I had tried, except I entered it carrying True Love on my back.

Let's not forget the religious angle. Most of the big old churches had enough apocalypse in them to mutate into new forms, but God the Merciful was deader than dinosaurs. For equally obvious reasons, fertility goddesses were depressed, though they looked like a good long-term play. It didn't take a month for the new Pope to set up shop in Rome and start proclaiming the coming Virgin Birth. A no-brainer.

Predictably, most of the sheep traffic set off for goddesses of doom. I don't have to tell you that these were my personal favorites. I especially had a weakness for the gothic versions. You had revivals in names that hadn't seen business since the fall of Babylon. The great whore Ishtar, Anath the Virgin Warrior, lion-headed Sekhmet, Eris and her daughter Oblivion, and Lilith, who was Adam's first wife and had brains enough to cut out on him, forcing Jehovah to make Eve. Her specialty was to feast on Adam's children. All of them and a hundred others were thrown into a big sex-and-death salad of fear and faith.

Right after we left the mountains, I wished I had known all the Hindu variants, Kali Etcetera, those were fascinating with all the heads they had, but I couldn't even pronounce one name straight, and in every village Anya and I ran into they spoke a different language. India was a mess when we saw it, all dirt and very sentimental wailing, quite peacable by comparison to what was coming up actually. I wouldn't go back there, though today it's supposed to be some kind of sunny agrarian paradise. Asia's breadbasket. Those women know how to farm.

Wherever we showed, it took about three minutes before everyone saw me as some kind of awesome warrior-priestess. One thing I have never let on to anyone was that my only lasting faith was the atheism inculcated at the elementary school in our microdistrict in Moscow.

This one short fat bitch, raven-black hair, somewhere in the Iranian outback, about six months after the Virus, she had got this bug that she was was Namtar, demon of death, daughter of Ereshkigal. She had learned good English in her high school and one night she started calling at me from the shadows, inviting me to leave the fireside and come get killed by her in a nearby train station. I thought this was funny, until she started preaching to her folks in Persian that I was a demon or something myself. Finally she figured out the trick and threw a rock at Anya. So I took up her invitation, and broke her neck after a minute's uneven struggle on the eastbound tracks, which I understood was where she wanted it. Anya, as usual when I had combat, wet her pants.

That girl was maybe sixteen, back then. She had one of the serene death faces, no contortions. I hate killing young ones. Today the youngest child on the planet is ten years old. The next morning I had to shoot her stupid sister and a couple of their friends, too, and we got the fuck out of there as fast as our boots would carry us.

Spent that winter snowed in, in the fucking Kurdish mountains with a bunch of bony hard ones who were all precious and solemn and asexually superior, because the Virus had started in their neighborhood. At least they were hospitable and they weren't psychos, and that flat bread kept you going.

The next summer was the one with the Greek girls in that village we got blown into when we were stupid enough to try sailing the Aegean. God, that was paradise. They were so practical and nonchalant about everything, always lounging around smoking and trading sardonic stories about their former men, when they weren't cooking beans. Stayed there for six months. But Anya had to go on, and though I thought I loved that Vagelitsa girl, I had to follow her.

A lot of roads were cleared and you could hitch for miles at a stretch. When we got to Germany I thought it was over, we'd go straight to mom in Hamburg. But it turns out Anya knew all these relatives and people from universities she'd attended in the south, and she just had to find out if they were alive. So we spent a few months wandering from town to town for tearful reunions, and shocked visits to graves, and long speeches about the horrors. She never asked me about New York, though I guess I can't put that on her rap sheet of emotional crimes, since she knew I wasn't worried about anyone there. I never saw my mother again.

We had reached our foggy little Mecca and I helped make some more history, that day on the North Sea beach. The rat burn was a turning point, a legend. As though purpose had been restored to the female race. I salute my German sisters, who got gnawed and burned on that beach. They were the martyrs of the Rat War. Word spread the inspiration, suddenly everyone was organized again, and for the next two years all Europe and Asia was swept up in concentrated rat slaughters, until those little bastards were beaten back into the sewers where they belong.

Well, except for the ones here, in front of Grauzone. Still plenty of rats around, of course. But when they see a woman coming, they flee, like they did before the Virus.

On the steering wheel I feel my fingers tapping a Russian rhyme about two little girls in the forest glade. In about thirty seconds my motor skills will be restored.

After a month or so in Hamburg, we got the news from America. Oh, we'd seen the TV broadcasts, of course. The Americans had their shit together, they had satellites back online within six months after the Virus. America had, as always, found her own proud, nutcase course.

Two unique factors were in play. First, the old debates there about women in the military had been settled, definitively, to the favor of the women. After the men got swept up, the United States was the only country on the planet left with an organized army. Three hundred thousand of them, and within eighteen months they had recruited five million more. In Germany we used to joke it was a good thing all the carriers and most of the warplanes had been lost, and the Southwest was a semi-impenetrable radioactive belt. Otherwise they might have gone after Mexico.

But I don't believe that. Even now, a female Hitler is exceedingly rare. I'm the closest thing to it I know, and still miles off. Though I can relate to his frustration about art school.

How many women are really into nukes, battle plans? The logistics, maybe, but do they get off on the anonymous thrust of a missile? That much about the old feminist utopias was true. Female violence is personal. I quote again from our departed master: "All women have a fink streak in them, to a greater or lesser degree, but it stems from a lifetime of living among men." In a few more years we will know if that last, hopeful bit is really true.

So anyway, what the U.S. girls got was not Hitlerina but President Reno, broadcasting her weekly Messages of Hope to the World. The repression seemed to be strictly domestic, though there were undertones. America was rebuilding itself, and it would help everyone else rebuild themselves. America would put out the fires for everyone and bring them back into the future. Best of all, America was working on resurrecting men. So, I wondered. Where did they have any sperm with Y-chromosomes, even if they had saved a sperm bank? And - shudder - did they have a vaccine, too?

No one had a clue what was really going on there. The only thing the outside got was the broadcasts, and if any emissaries were sent, then no one I knew had ever heard about it. We found out, though, about a month after we got to Hamburg. Turns out that during all the propaganda speeches an insurrection was germinating among the Army Girls. They were all getting The Little Purple Book and learning it by heart. As it happened, I knew most of it by heart myself.

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex." Valerie Solanas. Author of the SCUM Manifesto, founder and until her death in 1988 sole member of the Society for Cutting Up Men. "In a sane society the male would trot along obediently after the female. The male is docile and easily led, easily subjected to the domination of any female who cares to dominate him. But this is not a sane society, and most women are not even dimly aware of where they're at in relation to men."

Solanas wasn't on the syllabus of that one Women's Studies course I took freshman year, but I picked her up and read her alongside Betty Friedan. Hilarious stuff. "To be sure he's a 'Man,' the male must see to it that the female be clearly a 'Woman,' the opposite of a 'Man,' that is; the female must act like a faggot." Very wise, I thought. My soulmate. "For the kid to want approval it must respect Daddy, and, being garbage, Daddy can make sure that he is respected only by remaining aloof, by distantness, by acting on the precept 'familiarity breeds contempt,' which is, of course, true, if one is contemptible." I was sure her father was a lot like mine.

Everyone thought she was completely serious, though. Yeah, she shot Andy Warhol, big deal. What kind of fish is that? Only proves my point, that a woman can dream or even plan genocide, but even the rare case who overcomes the inhibitions that hold back the psycho in her will never get past the joy of killing individually. Her manifesto was her wet dream, perhaps a sophisticated satire, like Johnathan Swift calling on the English to eat Irish babies. I was her biggest fan, though the movie version was kind of lame.

Anyway, now that the male sex really was destroyed, the late Valerie was being revealed to the masses as the true prophet of all time. And who could argue with that?

First wind we got of anything was the day when the Europeans, and everyone else in the world with electricity, after their daily rat hunt, switched on their tellies on schedule to see President Reno and stock footage of flowing fields of grain and Baptists at church.

Instead they got the State of the SCUM Address, Live From the Purple House, delivered by the First Valerie, who called herself Monica True, but whom I immediately recognized as Demetra Papadopoulos, this red-headed Greek and Spanish chick, very stylish, who I knew at NYU before I dropped out.

If I ever considered blowing myself up, in all those years, it was that moment. What an opportunist! When I knew her, she was busy fucking her way up to the Chairman of the Art Department. Now she was Supreme Commander of the Cunt Army, pitching the Word of Valerie to the First Sex Confederacy of the American Slack Revolution.

"The conflict, therefore," Demetra quoted Valerie in that speech, "is not between females and males, but between SCUM - dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, freewheeling arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this 'society' and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer - and nice, passive, accepting, 'cultivated,' polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy's Girls, who can't cope with the unknown, who want to continue to wallow in the sewer that is, at least familiar, who want to hang back with the apes, who feel secure only with Big Daddy standing by..."

For a few moments I listened to Demetra, as she declared war on Daddy's girls.

"SHIT!" I started yelling. "She's the biggest Daddy's girl I ever knew! Daddy paid for her crashed car!" I wanted to kick her face in on the TV. The German babes I was bunking down with tried to get me to shut up so they could hear Demetra rave, instead of me.

They didn't get it. They thought it was the long-awaited return of American Entertainment, the bastard daughter of Hulk Hogan and Madonna come to relieve them of their boredom. And I was saying, "That's me! That's me, goddamnit!" If I hadn't been in Nepal, if I hadn't been lugging Anya's ass down the Silk Road for two years and been in New York when the Virus hit, I would be the first Valerie! Me, Veronika Kill-O-Matic! If Anya had been in that room, I would have garrotted her and her crippled old lady on the spot.

Instead, a week later, I was on the Titanic 157. In those days, all ships attempting the Atlantic passage were called Titanic. I had to admit, the Virus had done wonders for everyone's sense of humor.

Now the next six years, before the Revolution soured, those were wild. I won't get into that now, I'm saving it for Veronika II. Suffice to say it soured, like all the other Revolutions, and I had to haul my ass back to Germany something fast. Jesa Christ is in charge of the States now, and I really don't want to even think about her.

I next found work as the architect of the Cologne gangster scene, which has really been the happiest and most productive project I ever worked on, until yesterday, when Lisa broke the peace I'd arranged. That stupid alcoholic bitch, I had constructed our crew as a blind killer squad held together by her sexual attraction, and Eva's, and mine. It was supposed to be my endless orgy, punctuated by killing whenever that made sense for the company as a whole. Why else bring Anya into it, who can't shoot and still throws like a girl? Instead they went and rained all that napalm down on the Ehrenfeld Furies, the ones who really kept the organization running. Lisa can't run a fucking city. If I wasn't here, any moron could see she and her crew will just keep blowing everyone away, until they get blown away themselves, and that will be that. We could have had a new fucking Feudal Empire, with us as the princes, and now this.

Enough of this goddamn exposition! According to the most realistic estimates I've seen, world population is down to 1.8 billion females and is expected to level off at 1.6 by the time parthenogenesis is feasible, widespread, and actually matching the death rate, in eight years time. That death rate is about to have a minor gap up. I am here. Outside Grauzone. Still in this little car. The first rush of Thread has worn off. I am the bloody live wire. I can't complain, no one has had the life I've had. And tonight is curtain up on my greatest performance. I've done a lot of shit, but I never took on twelve clones of my own personality in a gunfight at close range. My labia quiver at the prospect.