The Power(90)
The subject is: how many men do we really need? Think it over, they say. Men are dangerous. Men commit the great majority of crimes. Men are less intelligent, less diligent, less hard-working, their brains are in their muscles and their pricks. Men are more likely to suffer from diseases and they are a drain on the resources of the country. Of course we need them to have babies, but how many do we need for that? Not as many as women. Good, clean, obedient men, of course there will always be a place for those. But how many is that? Maybe one in ten.
You can’t be serious, Kristen, is that really what they’re saying? I’m afraid it is, Matt. She puts a gentle hand on his knee. And of course they’re not talking about great guys like you, but that is the message of some extremist websites. That’s why the NorthStar girls need more authority; we’ve got to protect ourselves against these people. Matt nods, his face sombre. I blame those men’s rights people; they’re so extreme, they’ve provoked this kind of response. But now we have to protect ourselves. He breaks into a smile. And after the break, I’ll be learning some fun self-defence moves you can practise at home. But first, the weather on the ones.
Even here, even after all Tunde has seen, he can’t really believe that this country is trying to kill most of its men. But he knows that these things have happened before. These things are always happening. The list of crimes punishable by death has grown longer. A newspaper announcement from a week-old paper suggests that ‘surly refusal to obey on three separate occasions’ will now be punished by ‘work detail’. There are women here in the camp caring for eight or ten men who all huddle around her, vying for her approval, desperate to please, terrified of what might happen if she removed her name from their papers. Roxy could leave the camp at any time, but Tunde is alone here.
On their third night in the camp, Roxy wakes a few moments before the first tang and crackle of the power blows the lamps strung along the central pathway of the camp. She must have heard something. Or just felt it, the way the nylon is humming. The power in the air. She opens her eyes and blinks. The old instincts are still strong in her; she has not lost them, at least.
She kicks Tunde’s metal-frame bed.
‘Wake up.’
He’s tangled half in and half out of the sleeping bag. He pushes the cover off him, and he’s almost naked there. Distracting, even now.
‘What?’ he says; then, hopefully, ‘Helicopter?’
‘Don’t you wish,’ she says. ‘Someone’s attacking us.’
And then he’s wide awake, pulling on his jeans and fleece.
There’s the smashing sound of glass and metal.
‘Stay low to the ground,’ she says, ‘and, if you can, run into the woods and climb a tree.’
And then someone puts her hand to the central generator and summons all the power that is in her body and sends it hurtling through the machine and the low lights burst into sparks and glass filaments all around the camp and the darkness becomes absolute.
Roxy hauls up the back of the tent, where it always leaked anyway, through the rotten stitching, and Tunde bellies out, starts for the forest. She should follow him. She will, in a moment. But she pulls on a dark jacket with a deep hood, wraps a scarf around her face. She’ll keep to the shadows, work her way around to the north; that’ll be the safest route out, anyway. She wants to see what’s going on. As if she could still turn anything to her will.
Around her there are already screams and shouts. She’s lucky that her tent wasn’t on the edge of the camp. Some are burning there already, probably with the people still inside, and there’s the sweet stench of petrol. It will be several minutes yet until everyone in this camp even knows what’s happening, and that it is not an accident or a generator fire. Through the tents, by the red glow of the fire, she glimpses a short, squat woman setting a flame with the spark from her hands. The flash lights her face white for an instant. Roxy knows the look on her face; she’s seen it before. The kind of face her dad would have said was a bad bet for business. Never keep someone on a job who likes it too much. She knows when she sees the single flash of that gleeful and hungry face that they’re not here to raid for what they can find. They’re not here for anything that can be given.
They start by rounding up the young men. They go tent to tent, pulling them down or setting them on fire so the occupants have to run out or burn. They’re not neat about it, not methodical. They’re looking for any halfway-decent-looking young men. She was right to send Tunde into the forest. A wife, or perhaps a sister, tries to stop them from taking the pale-skinned, curly-haired man who’s with her. She fights off two of them with precise and well-timed jolts to the chin and the temple. They overwhelm her easily, and kill her with a particular brutality. One of them grabs the woman by the hair and the other delivers a bolt directly through the woman’s eyes. Finger and thumb pressed against her eyeballs, the very liquid of them scrambled to a milky white. Even Roxy has to look away for a moment.
She backs further into the forest, climbs a tree hand-over-hand, using a loop of rope to help her. By the time she’s found a criss-cross place where three branches meet, they have turned their attention to the man.
He will not stop screaming. Two of the women take him by the throat and send a paralysis into his spine. One squats on top of him. She pulls off his trousers. He is not unconscious. His eyes are wide and glistening. He is struggling for breath. Another of the men tries to rush forward to help him and gets a crack to the temple for his trouble.