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I liked how @umami's milk did this and I plan to go back and edit it into any previous chapters also. I'm thinking of adding a link to each chapter's review in the OP as we go so people can navigate directly to them if they so desire. Formatting is as essential to an experience as is form.
Welcome back everyone! Your flattery continues to fuel me. After a grueling 24-hour emergency therapy session I am back and ready for more of
Manhunt. My thanks to
@umami's milk for taking care of Chapter 4 for me. I realize it is wrong to stifle your enthusiasm for this horrible work so I won't pitch a socialized-female fit about it. Maybe moving forward we could create a list of volunteers who'd like to be assigned a chapter to spork? There's no reason we shouldn't be civilized about this. If you would like to be assigned a chapter, please PM me and I will make sure there are no duplicates. I want each and every one of you special little Chromosome Crusaders to get the maximum amount of Winner emotes possible so that you're able to feed your families. Plus this is more work than I anticipated and I actually do have irl responsibilities and people that depend on me (yes I am bragging).
With that bit of house keeping over with, let's jump back into the world of
Manhunt. Today we are meeting our first trans man!
Chapter 5: Not All Men
Robbie knew a lot about how to fight someone bigger than yourself. The first and best way to do it was to avoid them completely, to never be where they could find you, to give them no reason to realize you existed at all.
This is the most trans man sentence I have ever read, possibly.
We're jumping POVs now and getting through a bit of slogging-paced exposition about Robbie before we get back to anything resembling plot.
In his sophomore year of high school, he’d donned a burlap sack with cut-out eyeholes for a hood and caught Dane Kimball, the football captain, on a stretch of empty dirt road between school and home. He’d walked right up to Kimball and fired a nail gun eight times into his hand and arm.
Whoa Robbie, what the fuck bro!??? A NAIL GUN. Right off the bat, I have several problems.
Firstly: Cordless nail guns are expensive by high school sophomore standards. Google seems to suggest a range from $89 on upwards of $200 for one. Unless Robbie was working or blew all her Christmas money at Lowe's, she definitely stole this nail gun but then she'd also have to steal the battery to power it and the mental picture of a Tumblr Aiden waiting a day until the battery was charged to go assault someone is just laughable to me.
Secondly: That's it. That's the end of the anecdote meant to establish how cool and badass Robbie is. No mention of the IMMEDIATE CRIMINAL CONSEQUENCES for such a violent assault. In the author's mind, a trans man should be able to permanently main another 15 year old over being misgendered or whatever the fuck with zero consequences because a trans man, like a trans woman, is a morally unimpeachable paragon of enlightened virtue. If Robbie hurt someone, it was because she HAD to, and she should face no real world consequences for it. Like how TRAs try to say that punching TERFs is fine because it is preemptive defense
against VIOLENCE.
We are 5 pages too deep for anyone to accuse me of overthinking this so don't @ me about it.
Dane had kept away from Anna and her friends after that.
Are we supposed to know who Anna is? Or is GFM misgendering her OWN trans man character so soon into her first appearance in the book?
It was the same with what the cis men had turned into. You had to kill them before they knew you were there, preferably during the scant two or three hours a day they spent asleep, or else when they were eating, or at a watering hole. Ideally you found one of their caves and just rolled in a Sheetrock bucket full of gasoline with a burning rag stuffed through a hole in the lid.
Here we get a little bit more information about the zombies and their habits. They apparently run in packs and sleep all together in caves.
I had to Google "sheetrock" bucket. It seems like it's just a regular 5 gallon bucket with a lid. Is it an East Coast thing to call them "sheetrock buckets"? I've only ever referred to buckets of that size and shape as a 5 gallon bucket, or Home Depot bucket if they're orange. I'm at the point with this author that I assume every specific detail he includes in this book is probably incorrect but that doesn't mean I assume I'm correct about everything by default. See, for example, the time upthread where I said "they watched the sun set over the East Coast" or something similar like a goddamn idiot embarrassing myself in front of all of you. Anyone in here a drywaller Kiwi?
Just now, with no fuel on hand and nothing else to occupy his time, he was sitting halfway up a thirty-foot maple in the crotch of two thick branches with a sour apple gumball in his mouth, a rifle across his lap, and sixteen hundred rounds of ammunition neatly slotted into the cubby holes of a vinyl laundry organizer he’d hung from a higher limb.
1600 rounds. 1600 ROUNDS. Do we have any gun spergs that wanna freak out about how much this would WEIGH and how unlikely it is that a born woman would be able to haul this up a tree? "Rifle" isn't specific enough a descriptor to be able to determine a caliber but I will come back and stick it here if GFM every gets more specific.
Robbie here is posted up in a tree, hunting zombies with a dead dog covered in his feminine piss as bait. Just making sure we're all on the same page as to what's happening in this scene.
Near one o’clock he eased pressure onto the rifle’s trigger on his exhale, just like he’d watched his grandfather do a hundred times shooting crows in the pumpkin field.
Poor Grandpappy. I hope he died before Robbie started trooning out. Everyone let's shoot a crow in his honor today.
Don't really, I like crows and they eat yellowjackets so really everyone should be showering them in shinies and treats. But that's my own personal uninformed soapbox.
The rifle bucked against his shoulder. The thing in the clearing gave a funny sideways leap, half its head blown off and sticky black coral ridges of brain showing through the shattered skull, and then collapsed facedown, legs kicking spasmodically at the dirt and dead pine needles.
Can you blow a man's head off like this with a .22 bullet? Probably not, right? Just trying to nail down a caliber on the 1600 rounds of ammo Robbie has strung up in a tree.
Also, for a MANLY MAN Robbie should have already known how to DIY a suppressor out of an oil filter. She's just going to attract attention shooting fish in a barrel this loudly. Why is she traveling with all her ammunition? What if the TERFs show up? Won't they just take it from her? She really should be carrying only what she can reasonably use in a day and have the rest of it stashed somewhere safe. Why is she so bad at this?
Screams rose up in the distance. Robbie worked the rifle’s bolt to chamber a new round. Most automatic firearms were seized up and useless at this point, and repairing them was outside his wheelhouse, but anything they’d used in World War II you could break down, grease, and put back together in working order in a few short hours.
See what I told you about attracting attention?
Also, my theory at this point is that Robbie is the safe outlet for any masculine impulses or ideas the author has. I kind of doubt that WWII firearms would be EASIER to maintain than something newer but that's just me being a dumb bleeder, I suppose. I can say that I've had the pleasure of holding (and firing) several WWII era rifles since I am related to a collector, and those bitches are HEAVY. If I had to choose between lugging around something possibly 70-80 years old that weighed a ton and NOT doing that? I'd choose not. I held a gun that definitely saw action and it was almost too heavy to hold straight to aim. And it was loud as fuck.
Tldr, Robbie's stupid, reckless, and absolutely just the mouthpiece for Gretchen Felker-Martin's manly interests.
It made him think of his last summer on the farm and, for some reason, of the night his grandfather, uneasy, not understanding, but with love, had shaved his head at his request with a pair of ancient clippers.
If that’s what you want, tiger.
Wow Robbie, you made your GRANDPA shave off your feminine hair? You cunt.
His cramps were coming back and he badly needed a new pad. For a moment he felt a twinge of dysphoria, a sense that someone might have heard his thoughts and sneered at them.
Of course our manly man Robbie is ON HER PERIOD. Also, ew. Change your pad, Robbie.
But now I'm wondering. If she pissed on the dead dog to attract the zombies with the estrogen in her urine, wouldn't her menstrual discharge also be attracting them? I mean, idk what if any hormonal contents would be in menstrual blood but I can ASSUME.
It felt like half-remembering a funny dream to think back on how insecure he’d been, how he’d pissed and moaned at Tess over every picture she took of him (too feminine) and every time she put her arm around his waist (emphasizing that I’m smaller than you is fucking transphobic).
Being reminded of the material reality of your body's size in relation to that of another human is a hate crime. You heard it here first, folks.
Robbie's decided to call it a day and head home with whatever remains of that 1600 rounds and his enormous WWII rifle. As she walks back to her campsite, she reminisces on what I assume to be her conveniently timed top surgery and makes a mental list of the other trans men she knows.
That venal, frightened voice inside him had shriveled up and died five years ago while he’d sat drugged in his adjustable hospital bed, chest numb and eyes bleary, watching the world burn on TV and trying not to cry because if the doctors on the news were right he’d never be able to take T again and his entire family was going to die.
Of course Robbie thought first to mourn for the fact that she couldn't take testosterone anymore. The whole world is collapsing, half its population is descending into a horrible, degenerated state against their will, but sure. Pour one out for sad little Robbie and her testosterone. The narcissism sickens me.
Now he was the only man he knew. There were others; he’d met one on the outskirts of Manchester a year or so ago, a scruffy man in his forties or fifties named Reggie who’d been at the low point in his dose cycle when the plague hit
What does this "low point in his dose cycle" mean? Do trans men cycle testosterone?
he guessed fresh trans men still came out sometimes. People who hadn’t known before the plague or who’d been closeted. They were out there, making their own manhood in the wreckage of the world.
*BAHAHAHAHAHAHHAGHAGJHSFDKJAHERPFIUOAWHEDH*
Transgender bullshit is culture bound. If you think anyone would ever come out as trans AGAIN after an apocalypse like the one described in this book you're huffing too much glue. Open a window, go outside, and once the headache clears think about how insane this assertion really is.
Uh oh! There are uninvited visitors at Robbie's campsite when she returns!
It was a rough voice, high and strained with a hint of crackling vocal fry and a pronounced Boston accent.
The reply—which came from
somewhere near his tent—was sweeter, milder.
From the way these two voices are described I can already tell they belong to Fran and Beth. Big LOLs at Fran still trying to make his voice sound more feminine even in the midst of the world ending. If you haven't, head over to ErinInTheMorn's thread and find a video of him talking. I imagine Fran speaking like how he imagines a 12 year old girl sounds, to the best of his ability, and that's how I'm going to read his voice in my head for the remainder of this novel.
“... telling you, whoever lives here has more than she needs. Who the fuck’s gonna hunt us down over some mushrooms and dried fish?”
Fucking communists.
She couldn’t have taken much, and he had a safety week built in. He could fish the river, gather late berries, maybe bake acorn bread if he could find eggs.
The irony is not lost on me that the two BRAVE AND STUNNING WOMEN are raiding campsites for food while the MANLIEST MAN TO EVER MAN is capable of gathering and hunting to feed himself.
She had a gap between her two front teeth and a blood-crusted gauze pad plastered to one cheek. A scar tugged at the other corner of her mouth, which was soft and round in sharp contrast with the long-jawed weight of her features. Her blunt, choppy bangs were plastered to her forehead.
Physical description of Beth for any fan artists out there.
Robbie could see her now, silhouetted in the moonlight. Trans, but he could only tell by the very slight swelling of her Adam’s apple. With her long, straight nose and narrow jaw—a mandible shave, maybe?—she looked sad and waifish. Hunched. Elbows drawn in.
Physical description of Fran for any fan artists out there. Served with a side of transphobia. I thought we could never tell, Gretchen? I thought you walked among us undetected?
Robbie thought of the day the spiro had run out. He thought of the basement and the rusted lock and the handgun buried somewhere in the woods outside of Durham.
Which flavor of insane takes spiro again? I can't keep track of their laundry list of drugs.
He thought of those things and watched, and waited, and didn’t move until the sound of the women’s footsteps faded into the soft, humid stillness of the night.
So brave. Just what a man would do: watch his campsite get raided while hiding silently in the bushes.
This is where our chapter ends. Robbie cowering and Beth/Fran walking away with their stolen goods. Tune in next time to find out if our three brave heroes will join forces as the world's wokest power throuple.
