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Vanishing Manhood: Part 16

VANISHING MANHOOD: PART 16 THE END OF THE CRUEL PEACE & THE START OF THE DESPERATE WAR. Based on ‘One In Ten’ by FinalStand [https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=1395985&page=submissions]. Listen to the ► Podcast [https://archive.org/download/vanishing-manhood/VanishingManhoodPart16.mp3] at Explicit Novels [https://feeds.feedburner.com/explicitnovels]. https://archive.org/download/vanishing-manhood/16Zara16.jpg [https://archive.org/download/vanishing-manhood/16Zara16.jpg] A frightened Mother Mouse will devour her young; similarly, a frightened culture will devour its future. Roni was still working away while the rest of us were in the man-cave once more. Flame seemed happy taking long pulls on the Wild Cherry and smacking her lips. I wasn't surprised she wasn't worrying about Silent. Her wounded comrade was a reliable pair of guns guarding her back and nothing more. Emotional bonds were contrary to her psychopathic nature. Jethro had been sitting on his 'throne' for fifteen minutes, deep in thought. "I guess it is about time we got those guns," he announced as he stood up. His words captured everyone's attention yet he didn't appear to care. He started walking from the room and the rest of us followed along. The need for guns had brought us here in the first place. His path led us into his walk-in pantry. One wall of shelves rolled out and to the sides on seamless wheels. Beneath that spot was a steel door, a tad over one meter wide and three meters long. It must have been spring-loaded because once Jethro yanked on the hole that only one finger could fit into, the portal swung open and back. Stairs led down into darkness. Jethro turned around and followed them out of sight for several seconds. Then a light came on. The drop looked to be around four meters. Angel went next. A strange level of respect allowed me to go third. Flame was at my back then Kuiko, Venus and Lavender. The floor was grey-painted concrete. The room stretched out five meters in each direction. 80% of the room was covered with stacked crates with a variety of markings on them, a few even in English. Angel was incredibly tense. I didn't know why, but I had a feel for her moods. The other 20% of the room was an immaculate workbench. Considering Jethro's aversion to cleanliness, this was definitely something noteworthy. "What is all this stuff?" Venus asked. "Weapons," Angel preempted the old guy. "This is an awful lot of weapons," Lavender muttered. No one wanted to say it, so I did. "Jethro, you were in the MRA, weren't you?" I tossed out there. I'd told the nation that the MRA was dead and here I was looking at a small armory of illegal weaponry. Jethro had been walking over to the work area. He turned and looked us over. "I'm going to do something I don't normally do," Jethro met each of our gazes. "I'm going to explain myself. Let's pull some assault rifles out of those crates, make sure they in top shape then go upstairs 'cause I am only going to do this once," he stated. "These people don't know how to use firearms," Angel cautioned angrily. "They'll never learn if they don't have one and we are approaching the point where we'll need everyone to be a shooter," he countered. "Let's get to it." And that's what we did. These weapons had been top rate stuff at the start of the 21st century. Now, they weren't quite antiques, only old. The basics of using some sort of explosive substance to propel an object at your target remained the same. In the case of firearms, it was remarkably the same, or so Angel said. Kuiko went straight for the Russian-made Surface-to-Air missile, because she thought that the Cyrillic writing looked pretty. It was one of the few exotic devices. Most were clearly Federation military, or Police issue, undoubtedly stolen from some armory at some point early in Jethro's terrorist career. I was irate that Kuiko looked so cute with a bandolier of ammo packs and an automatic shotgun. Angel insisted that only she and Jethro took loaded firearms upstairs. We could carry the gun and the ammo as long as the ammo wasn't in the gun. Venus argued that this defeated the purpose of having the weapon. Angel countered that if she couldn't load it quickly, she probably shouldn't have it in the first place. I caught Flame bagging up a few boxes of ammunition, but Jethro didn't seem to care so I let it slide. It fell to Flame and me to lug extra rifles and cartridge belts up to the rest of the group, being the strongest, Angel was keeping an eye on Jethro and he was keeping an eye on her. Fifteen minutes later, we had gathered back in the spacious dwelling space of our host. Jethro, on his throne, finished off a glass of Wild Cherry and began his tale: "I was seventeen and in high school when the Gender Plague first broke out. I was quarantined for a month before the Supreme Court decided it was illegal and set us men free. I took the opportunity to enlist in the Navy, the U S Navy, because of the man shortage when I was released. Went through Basic, the Specialist School, I was a Damage Control Technician which meant I was a fireman, then a second outbreak happened. I was quarantined for three months this time. I got out and was assigned to the destroyer Michael A. Mansoor. During the Relief of Athens, we all damn near died. Of the eighteen men and women in Damage Control, only me and one other rating enlistee survived. My officer, an ensign, stayed behind to make sure the forward ammunition storage was secure. Our Chief Petty Officer had us seal the ensign in. We saved the ship long enough for the crew to be pulled off. The Mansoor exploded. We were never able to locate her body. She was some R O T C kid who was only with us four months. I never knew her first name until the ceremony after it was all over. She may have been the bravest human being I've ever known. After that, I served aboard the Little Rock working anti-piracy in the Philippines and Indonesia. Since I took part in some land action during that tour, the Navy, I hate using the term Federation, reassigned me to Shore Patrol duty. I took police training and everything. I did another tour aboard the Little Rock the following year then they dragged me off when Congress decided that men couldn't be given combat assignments. Seven months later, they discharged me and thousands of other men as part of a down-sizing program. Unfortunately, the same act of Congress that exited me from the Navy also forbid me joining the fire, or police departments. A buddy of mine was able to find me work in a machine shop where I learned the craft of welding. After that, I was a good boy. I dated, joined a motorcycle club and built up a nice life. When the Gender Inequality Act was passed I was more annoyed than angry. All that changed when I was twenty-nine. See, I had some male friends who joined up with a group called Male Awakening. They were a group devoted to the repeal of the G I A through political means. Things including publically supporting male-friendly candidates and working against G I A-supporters through boycotts and the like. I was rolled up in an FBI sting and those ladies informed me that they'd make those charges go away if I agreed to go inside and spy on Male Awakening. They knew I was friends with those guys. I told them to fuck off, fought the charges and beat their trumped up bullshit. By the time I cleared up my legal troubles, they took the M A down anyway. It seems their Treasurer took off with their funds after leaving some financial irregularities. That was a total load of crap because they never caught that guy, but they did manage to put away most of the group's leadership. A few months later, I ran across one of my buddies who had asked me to join Male Awakening. He'd heard about my troubles and over a few beers, he hinted that the fight wasn't over. This time I bought in. This incarnation didn't have a name. We weren't public. We dug up dirt on corrupt female officials by any means necessary. We destroyed the careers of the worst oppressors of men. Violence wasn't our aim yet we armed ourselves for what we knew would be a harsh crackdown. We operated in small cells, but I knew we had lawyers, judges and even a few Congresswomen on our side. Since we had bracelets by that time, we used women to communicate between cells. Our cell received word of the major Federation sweep, a day before it happened. We were able to move most of our material stashes to new locations before they fell on us. The Writs of Exclusion were abominations. No one ratted me out. For weeks I sweated bullets every time I saw a cop car, a mysterious unmarked car, or heard a siren. After a few months, I began searching for other survivors. We came together in secrecy, united in our fury. The Federation had broken every law and covenant so we agreed that waging a guerilla war was our only option. A week later I bagged my first cop. Put a bullet under her left eye at 80 meters. She was dead before she hit the ground and it felt good. They, the Federation, had murdered my country and now they were paying. Three days later, I waited for a Federation agent to walk out on her porch to see her little girl off to school. I walked up, told the little girl her mother was a whore and put nine slugs into that whore's body and I felt just fine about that too." "No," squeaked Kuiko. "That is the way it was," Jethro gave Kuiko a paternal look. "Those women came at me with every dirty trick they could come up with to take away my freedom and I put them in the grave for it." "You murdered people," Angel growled. "Fuck you, Cop. The Gender Inequality Act was passed by women to enslave men. No man ever voted on it," Jethro snarled. "Men tried to use the system so you cheated. Boohoo that your bosses didn't figure out our only option left was violent resistance." "I killed seventeen government officials and my only regret is I didn't kill more. Not one was a fair fight. Kuiko, I killed that bitch in front of her daughter because I wanted her buddies to come around and see the anguish on that little girl's face. I wanted them to worry about their own daughters. I wanted them to know they were at war." "You are a murdering scumbag," Roni snapped. "I disagree," Flame shook her head. "You are morons if you think he should have called out every freaking target and said 'hey, I know you have all the back-up in the world and I'm alone so I'm giving you ample warning that I'm going to try and kill you.’" "You are a psycho," Aniqua pointed out. "It figures you would agree with him." "He didn't have a choice," Samantha intervened. Her speaking so decisively was almost as stunning as her words themselves. "Having a gun might not have saved Israel against the Aurora Slasher, but it might have discouraged those sorority students." "The politics of payback," Flame laughed. "Jethro might sound like some sadistic bastard to the rest of you; not to me. His tactics are sound and they work. Kill enough cops and women stop joining the force. The authorities either crack down harder, bringing more over to your cause, or they concede to some of your demands." "It is how a very small force fights a much larger adversary," Flame concluded. "That's still cold blooded murder," Angel reiterated. I didn't know what to think. Jethro butchered defenseless women. The President doomed millions. I admired what Zara did except it was some of the same things that Jethro did, yet she was a soldier and he was a terrorist. "There is no resolution to this argument," I spoke clearly and loud. "Short of violence to silence the opposition, there is nothing we can do to rectify the past now. Jethro, why did you stop being a member of the MRA?" "Spokane," Jethro answered. "I had no problem with killing cops and Feds, and intimidating their families. They were part of the problem." "Those high school girls though, that made no sense to me. We weren't at war with the female gender; we were at war with the government and their policy of enslavement. Killing random kids was wrong and I wouldn't be associated with it. I talked this over with my cell, they disagreed and I told them that if I saw any of them again, I'd kill them," Jethro clarified. "I had several caches only I knew about. I waited a few months then moved up to the city, slowly bringing everything up here as I had the time. A year and a half later, my old buddy was caught up in a traffic stop, shot it out with the cops and was killed. From stuff they found on his body, he rolled up the rest of the gang, but the other members didn't know my real name." "The G E D came out and talked with me. They kept an eye on me for a few years. I behaved and grew old so they eventually went sniffing elsewhere. We wouldn't be here now if I hadn't gone drinking with Kuiko and let slip about my gun stash," Jethro smiled at my little friend. "I knew she'd never betray me, and she hasn't." "Now I've got a front row seat to the End of the World so I get one last chance to make a difference," he said. Yeah, this old guy wanted to go down in a hail of gunfire, no doubt about it. "Good for you, you butcher," Roni glared. "I won't do this." "I signed on to make a difference," she continued, "not to hang out with cold-blooded killers. I'm out of here. Is anyone with me?" Aniqua stood up. Venus seriously hesitated before joining them. Venus was looking right at me. Angel's eyes were boring holes into me as well. "Israel?" Angel inquired. I could go with them. I could stay. I could beg them to stay. I could stay silent and let events drag me along. My mind was playing Jinga with the vortex of intellectual input and buzz saw emotions that were boiling forth. "Angel, Roni, Venus and Aniqua sit back down," I stood and stated. It took them a varying number of seconds to realize I was Not pleading. "Israel, you don't get to decide that for us," Roni replied evenly. "We let you go to the Arena last night. This time, we get to choose and we are leaving. If you are the man I hope you are, you will come with us." "At the same time you're pressuring me to give more to the group despite my misgivings, Roni, you are giving less?" I countered. She started to protest. I raised my hand for a reprieve. "Hear me out," I continued. "It isn't that simple. I am not questioning your moral quandary about working with people too comfortable with taking human life. It is very real and I feel it. The difference is that you would rather be right and dead than alive at any cost. You've never had to make that call before, but I have and I'm alive to tell you that you are wrong, Roni." "You are dead wrong because dead does nothing. The living can always come back and make something better. Hell, that's what my life has been about the past week and a half. The rest of you are neophytes going into this. I'm not. I know exactly what it takes morally to survive. Don't make me follow any of you out that door. I love each and every one of you." "I do love you, but am I obligated to jump off a cliff for you? I respect your choice to choose suicide. It would be wrong of me to rob you of that freedom. Please don't try to make this about affection, compassion, or loyalty though. It is a matter of life and death. Roni, you are trying to kill me, which I'm okay with. I resent you killing Angel, Aniqua and Venus," I stressed. "That's fucked up reasoning," Roni fought back. "Those two get off on killing other people. They enjoy it. Why can't you see that they are just as likely to get you killed as keep you alive?" "I will agree with you that Flame gets off on watching people suffer and die," I nodded. "It is the way she is. I don't know Jethro so I'm not ready to make a judgment call on him." "I do know that both of them have exquisite weapon skills and I'm pretty sure we are going to need them before we are truly free," I explained. "I would prefer an all-male super commando squad who had passed every psychological test ever made. That doesn't appear to be on the menu, so I'm willing to hold on to whatever resources are available." "So you are willing to risk all our lives for the sake of expediency," Angel glared. "Absolutely," I shot right back. "In case no one is paying attention, I am not in some government facility helping working on some kind of serum to fight the new plague. In case you missed it, everyone here agreed with my decision to flee instead." "Roni, Angel, you do realize that young lady who saved me this morning is going to die, right? I could have insisted she come with us. I could have given her the cure. I didn't. None of you asked me to even after I told the whole globe of an unstoppable wave of death coming for everyone. I'm not asking you to take responsibility for my decision because it was mine." "I'm begging you; understand that it isn't the end of morality to stay. When the madness ends, you need to decide if we will still be worthy of continuing on. You'll no longer be part of that equation if you go now," I declared. "Are we supposed to ignore that he was a terrorist and she is a homicidal maniac?" Aniqua said. "I'm not homicidal," Flame grinned. "I'm a psychotic sociopath. I don't randomly kill people. I do it with malice of forethought." Jethro didn't show a desire to defend himself. "Israel, Flame almost killed you last night," Venus pointed out. "Why would you stick around?" Why was I sticking around? "Israel, don't do this," Angel said. "You promised me you would stop running into danger." "Angel, why do you have to be right and I have to be wrong?" I sighed. "Because those two are dangerous criminals," Roni answered. Didn't Roni understand that I was a far more callous killer than either of those 'criminals' and I didn't have to lift a finger, or look at a single grave? BEFORE THE CURTAIN CALL Shortly after nine-thirty that night, the awaited and feared seismic event happened in China. A few minutes past sunrise over Hong Kong the rains broke and a fleet of helicopters and V T O Ls (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) were heard over the city. Helicopters were not unknown in this center of wealth and commerce. Well over a hundred all coming in at once was noteworthy. For many of the citizens of the city, it had been a restless night. After midnight, police sirens had been wailing all over the city. Some even heard gunfire. What they didn't know was that for the past four hours, private security forces working for the most prominent communities and some special police units had raided the middle class communities of the city and stolen their men. They forced the men into protective suits and hustled them back to the high-rises that sheltered the most 'important' people. This was an outrage that they could not get away with, had China still functioned normally. A new order based on brutal social cannibalism was taking place. The rich were taking their vassals and their new 'acquisitions' to their estates far from the population centers. This was supposed to be a gradual process except late yesterday afternoon the other Great Families learned that one of their own had their first reported case of this new 'flu.’ They could wait no longer. They would have preferred to flee under the cover of darkness, but rain and the danger of so many helicopters and V T O Ls moving around forced them to postpone until first light. You didn't have to be a connoisseur of conspiracy theories to figure out what was going on. Men had been stolen and now the rich were bugging out of town in one big hurry. Late Friday, the 'flu' began to appear in the population in a big way. The workers in the hospital were afraid, not fearful, afraid. The councilwoman from one of the poorest districts called the Head of the City Council, no answer. She called one of her colleagues from one of the richest districts, no answer. She was a savvy polit

30 de jun de 2026 - 1 h 0 min

Vanishing Manhood: Part 12

VANISHING MANHOOD: PART 12 THE RACE TO APOCALYPSE. Based on ‘One In Ten’ by FinalStand [https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=1395985&page=submissions]. Listen to the ► Podcast [https://archive.org/download/vanishing-manhood/VanishingManhoodPart12.mp3] at Explicit Novels [https://feeds.feedburner.com/explicitnovels]. https://archive.org/download/vanishing-manhood/12Venus12.jpg [https://archive.org/download/vanishing-manhood/12Venus12.jpg] The Persians marshalled 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.

26 de jun de 2026 - 1 h 0 min