Woman Scorned

by Fritz, K. Edwin

  Drink up, he thought. I’m sorry all you’ll get is grass juice, but it’s better than nothing. His mouth suddenly salivated, and for a second he swore he could smell the sweet tang of a freshly peeled orange.

  He watched the mosquito with fascination, even a bit of pride, and realized he could now pinpoint the tingle exactly where he and snout touched.

  Amazing, he thought. I’m giving blood to another living creature. I might be dead in a day, and this mosquito will live on because of my gift of life.

  He thought of the bloodstain on his thigh, then, and frowned.

  I’m not supposed to be here, he thought, or feel this. This isn’t a place that supports the circle of life. This is a place of endings.

  But his training told him the old lie that said otherwise.

  And if you can prove yourself still good after all that, Rhonda’s ghostly voice reminded him, you go home.

  He thought about his “training” and the rules of the island.

  It’s supposed to be an education, he thought. But first we’re tortured into submission, then we’re stripped of our memories and reborn from a blank slate. And out here we’re hunted. They call it a test, and they said that only the guilty get caught and only the righteous survive. But I’ve seen good men die and bad men survive.

  The tingle on his hand intensified.

  “They’re hypocrites,” he mumbled to the mosquito. “They never send any of us home. And that’s because this island isn’t about ‘education’, but revenge. I’m not supposed to enjoy any little part of my life like this. Not the mosquito, not the cloud game, and not remembering my brother or any other part of my life. I’m supposed to live in terror until they decide to kill me.”

  The little speech lifted his senses. It was a revelation, of sorts, though the instant he said the words he realized he had known it all from the beginning.

  “Why did I lie to myself?” he asked. The mosquito didn’t answer. It only continued taking his blood.

  “They’re no better than I was,” he said. “In fact, they’re far worse. But how are we supposed to beat them? They have all the power, all the control.”

  The mosquito still didn’t answer, but it did finally stop sucking. It pulled its snout away and quickly flew off. Obe knew its belly was full, and he envied it. A second later, he felt the itch.

  I enjoyed that, he thought. I was part of something larger than myself. And that’s what the women don’t want. I can beat them, but only if I find a way to enjoy my life here on this hellish rock.

  He looked at the bloodstain on his thigh again. Whose blood was it? Had he been a true rapist or murderer? Or had his crime been of a lesser intensity? And did such things matter?

  “I’m guilty too,” he said aloud. But even the mosquito was gone and could not hear him anymore. “So how can I live a life of peace if all I do is hide and run and steal?”

  And suddenly, Obe’s mind remembered the smell and sweet, robust taste of a fresh, ripe tomato, and he realized he had to visit the men in black.

  11

  In the relative seclusion of the island’s black sector, a man who wore a black jumpsuit and black sneakers wandered the empty streets in search of food. He was a man who was referred to by both men and women as only ‘Sta.’ This may or may not have been correct since his island name had been lost to time.

  His hunger waxed and waned much like the tide or the moon or a woman’s courage in difficult times, but he never lost sight of what mattered most. And what mattered most wasn’t food at all, but the sound of impending death.

  The city streets in this sector were utterly empty of life, and noises carried here better than anywhere. Every squealing tire or revved engine echoed against the brick and concrete. Every man’s slapping footstep offered a singular ricochet of sound. But no man truly walked there, and in its empty wilderness no woman truly hunted. Yet on rare occasions each used its maze as a means to an end. The women preferred its shortcut when retrieving kills in the green hills, and the men saw it as the bridge between the world of the women’s island and their true lair which lay in secret even to this day.

  Perhaps once every few weeks, man and woman would happen to meet. Perhaps once every five months, that man was the one who wore black sneakers.

  Today was one of those extraordinary days.

  The man, never lost to but always distracted by his gut, heard the car long before he saw it. His instincts were the strongest of any man who had ever graced the island’s miles, and he stopped and sniffed the air when the sound of death attacked him. Even before the car turned the corner, he was at a full run in the opposite direction. The women saw, of course, and gave full and immediate chase. But the man with the black sneakers was lost to the city’s shadows before the women could even catch a firm glimpse of his fading back. They soon pursued their original task with only the added frustration of another day when their elusive black fish had gotten away.

  Yet even after they had given up, Sta ran and ran and ran.

  His feet, like the wind, swept across the streets in silent rage.

  His legs, like a storm, powered on and through each pounding mile of unused grassland.

  His eyes, like the stars, shot centers of light and acuity across every inch they saw.

  He was a ghost.

  He was a myth.

  And the animal stitched onto his nametag read ‘FALCON’.

  12

  Obe had started his search at his home, his box, his haven, his bridge. But the entire neighborhood surrounding that area of the black sector was still as abandoned as ever. The following day he branched out to the other streets. There was no sign of life. Almost the entire city half of the black sector was like a ghost town.

  When he came across the black grocery alley and the woman-made brick wall that closed off one end, it had felt particularly foreboding. The Family of Blue had made it their place to palaver and socialize, but in the black sector it was more than just empty. It was lifeless. It clearly hadn’t hosted a grocery day for a very long time. Perhaps it never had. He left the place quickly and moved on. In just two days there was nothing left of the city to explore, and he knew the men in black jumpsuits hid somewhere in the hills.

  Unlike when he was starving, the lack of human contact became troubling. Only twice, when he snuck past the thick white perimeter line to beg food from some green, did Obe speak to another man, and his need for finding the men in black kept these meetings short. Even the cars seemed to strangely avoid him. He heard their constant presence in the distance, and once he’d glimpsed the black one zoom past on its own search for men, but he was never discovered, never chased. The enforced solitude haunted him, and he began to learn that his banishment had other levels of punishment beyond starvation.

  Searching the undeveloped half of the black sector proved more difficult than Obe had expected. For one thing, there was more vegetation than he was used to. He was constantly finding small groves of trees that seemed likely place for the men in black to hide, but he had yet to see even a single one of them or any signs of their having been there. They were like ghosts: invisible, intangible, and seeming to make contact only in their own time and place.

  Though he had only met two men who wore black, and though he was sure there were others, Obe was beginning to wonder just how many. In green sector well over a hundred men- perhaps even closer to two hundred- constantly roamed and ran through the streets and hills. In blue sector, he thought, that number was dropped to, what… seventy? Sixty?

  It seemed more and more that the men in black couldn’t number more than a dozen or two or he’d surely have come across at least one sign of them in the days he’d been searching.

  On the sixth day, or rather during the deep night of his sixth day of searching, Obe was on the black sector’s western coast, heading north with the cliffs and the ocean’s constant roar accompanying him to his left. Thus far it had been no different from any previous day. There were more trees, more hills, more v
ast expanses of gray rock, and yet more infinite water that mocked him one crash of waves at a time. He had been plodding along, noticing how the cliff’s edge had such a clean, sharp edge to it when he stopped, distracted. When the wind had died down just then, he could have sworn he had heard something.

  He strained to hear the noise again, hoping it would come again. But the crashing water below slammed over and over and he damned it. Where had that sound come from?

  Then, far sooner than he had expected, it came again and he could not mistake its infectious, beautiful aroma. It was the sound of a man’s laughter, loud and clear over the waves, for a single second of pure bliss. Obe looked in that direction. It had come from up ahead, perhaps a hundred feet. He ran there and stopped just short of falling over a sudden drop in the earth.

  In front of him was a large gap in the land. It stretched a hundred feet across or more. It started at the ocean where the cliffs curved inward and reached a thousand feet inland. Obe gaped at the huge cut. It was a long, thin gulf of some kind right there in the side of the island. And, as impossible as it seemed, the laughter had come from inside it.

  He knelt at the edge, sending a stream of silt into the abyss, and looked down. The cliffs dropped two hundred feet to a pool of softly rippling water below. The ocean’s formidable strength reached the first dozen feet into the gulf, still white-capping the waves. But as the bay stretched inland, the undulating waves shortened, the foam and curls of frothy water ceased, and eventually the mighty sea could only shiver as it reached farther and farther in.

  He looked for a ledge, a cave, a set of ancient, stone stairs. But the cliff walls were solid rock and sheer to the water far below. Not even vines grew up its surface. There was nothing other than rocks and waves.

  He began walking along the cliff’s edge and scoured the opposite wall with a keenness of eye that refused to be keen enough. He moved quickly with his growing excitement, yet was mindful of the great drop a single stumble could cause.

  “I know I heard someone,” he said. “God dammit, where are you?”

  He moved all along the cliff’s edge, still seeing nowhere a laughing man could hide. The sound did not come again, and doubt began to fester in his mind.

  Hearing things, Mr. ‘C’?

  He ignored the incessant voice in his head and welcomed the incessant susurration of his lips. “Lining lining,” he mumbled. “Silver lining.” He looked to the land around him thinking the sound had perhaps been carried strangely by the wind. There was still nothing. No hollows. No thickets of bush or trees. The area was a barren rock, devoid of all life. And yet he felt like life was somehow nearby.

  The two opposing cliffs had been gradually coming together, but here at the last fifty feet they angled sharply toward one another and met at a gap no more than two feet across.

  Obe reached this meeting point and moved over to the northern side of the gulf in a single step. He turned around and was now looking at the southern cliff where the full moon bathed its light across the jagged surface.

  He followed the meandering cliff edge, constantly and anxiously approaching the ocean and still listening with a straining ear. Then, more than halfway to the ocean, he noticed a soft, off-color reflection on a spot far down by the water’s edge. He stopped, knelt, and stared at it.

  The entire rock wall was a dark, mottled gray, highlighted only by the lighter shimmers of silver and white from the moon’s gentle luminosity. But there, so far down it was within range of the ever-attacking sea spray was a calming, orange glow that slowly danced against the stones of ash and slag.

  “Fire,” Obe mumbled in awe. “How in the hell did he make fire?”

  Then the sound of laughter came again, this time seeming to cut through the wind and waves in its boisterous, raucous joy. And Obe’s eyes lit up as his heart pounded again. He had heard not one, but many voices.

  EPILOGUE

  Elton woke slowly, so very slowly. He couldn’t see right and something was different. Was he still on the demon lady’s metal table? No. He wasn’t tied down at all. And it smelled different and sounded different too.

  Something brown tried to focus in his eyes. He blinked and the thing turned into a telephone pole. He was outside then. The demon lady had let him go after all. She had only been warning him when she said the pretty girl with the nice legs-

  The Feather!

  -was going to kill him. He understood the message, even if he wasn’t so smart. He wasn’t to take another angel. Not now and not ever. If he did, the demon lady would come back.

  He pushed off the ground and saw that his ankle was chained to the pole.

  Tied down after all, he thought. Aloud he said, “Uh oh.” From behind him several voices laughed. He turned and saw a group of women watching him. They were all wearing shirts of single colors. Some of them wore blue, some of them wore black, and some of them wore green. The demon lady wasn’t there, though. She had been wearing white. He remembered because he thought she might get her white shirt dirty if she hit him in the ear again.

  Then things went really really wrong. The women formed a big circle around him.

  It’s a gladiator game! Elton thought. He knew all about gladiators. They were slaves, usually, and they were tied to poles and made to fight lions and bulls. But he didn’t see any wild beasts, at least not yet.

  Then the demon lady came out from the nearby building along with a small gang of other women. Or, at least they looked like women. But Elton knew they were really demons, too. They didn’t even hide it well. Women didn’t look like that. Only demons had big muscles like on T.V. Every one of them had white shirts on, he saw, and some had little colored armbands. The colors were blue, black, and green. Were the regular women demons then, too?

  No, he decided. Not yet. They’re learning how to become demons.

  When one last woman came out of the building, he saw instantly it was the Feather. The demon lady didn’t lie, he thought. She means to punish me with the little stick in her hand.

  He turned to face her and took a couple steps toward her. She didn’t look so tough, he decided, even if she was a demon somewhere deep inside.

  He didn’t feel his leg jerk at the end of its chain, nor would he have cared if he had. The Feather was only a little demon, after all, and if he could kill an angel by accident, certainly he could kill a demon on purpose.

  They fought then, and the Feather demon stabbed his hand and slashed his head. It hurt, and the pain made him angry, but knocking her to the ground had been simple enough, and choking her had been very nice.

  He didn’t remember talking to her. He didn’t remember saying he had only wanted to love her. He only remembered feeling his hard on grow and his demon take over and watching her face grow still. He wanted to fuck her, of course. Because choking her was so very exciting, after all. But she was a demon, too, and he didn’t think fucking a demon would be very smart.

  He didn’t see the biggest demon lady of all come to him, and he didn’t feel what she did to his neck. He only knew that the last thing he saw was the Feather’s demon face so still and so beautiful. Just before he blacked out, Elton saw she wasn’t a demon after all, but another angel he wanted to love forever.

  When he woke, he was chained to a wooden table in a real basement, and he knew instantly that he should not have killed her.

  “Hello, pig,” a voice said. He turned and saw the first demon lady and two others. They were the biggest ones of all, and they looked very angry.

  “Is it time to be punished?” he asked.

  They didn’t say. They only smiled their terrible demon smiles and began to step toward him.

  I’m in for it now, he thought. I think this is gonna hurt. And despite his real fear, he found himself sexually aroused anyway. He realized then that his own demon wasn’t gone after all and he was certainly still alive.

  Unless they’re here to take it from me, he thought. One of the demon ladies pulled a tiny little triangle of a knife from
her pocket and twisted it slowly in the glint of the lone light bulb.

  Yes, he thought. That would be nice. To live without my need. I hope they get it all. Really really.

  The conclusion to

  the Man Hunt trilogy

  is told in

  K. Edwin Fritz’s

  BATTLE OF THE SEXES

  Man Hunt, Book III

  An early scene from that book follows.

  Battle of the Sexes, Man Hunt Book III

  Chapter 1

  The Cave Men

  Obe watched the flickering orange light with a sense of awe he hadn’t felt in years. Its hypnotic dance against the distant wall of rock seemed impossible to his porous, abused mind.

  Fire, he thought again. How in the hell did they get fire?

  The men who had made that beautiful glow had also made a beautiful sound. It was laughter that had attracted him to their position, and it, too, seemed almost impossible on this hellish island of punishment and pain. Yet he had heard them as clearly as the crash of another great wave. They were down there, somewhere. They were hiding inside an opening in the cliff far down by the ocean’s undulating swells. They were hiding inside a cave.

  In the moonlit darkness he could see its yawning mouth framed by the colors of ash and bathed in the colors of dawn. It was a haunting image, wrought with power and rage, but it was peaceful, too, for it spoke of love, camaraderie, and joy.

  Somehow, this young man who had lost so much had finally been rewarded with a true discovery. He had found the men who wore black.

  “I have to get down there,” he mumbled.

  But how? his mind challenged.

  It was the same voice of opposition that insisted his name was “Obe.” The same presence that vowed his very existence was worthless, contaminated, and impure.