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Part Two, Chapter 8: Generation Z
As Chapter 8 opens, Teach (love her) is lecturing around 200 boys, ages 15-20, from the stage of an outdoor concrete amphitheater. The stage contains a mysterious canvas-draped cage.
“Somewhere between the ages of twelve and thirteen, your pituitary glands shook themselves awake. Your bodies started producing enough testosterone to make you comfortable hosts for the most dangerous, dramatic virus in the history of our species.” Teach ran her tongue over her upper teeth. “So, encouraged by your mothers, you did the only thing you could do. You ate testicles. Clover. The lobes of kidneys. Drank mares’ piss. And you chewed licorice root and drank black cohosh and did everything you could to keep your body from pumping itself full of something worse than death.”
Would any of that actually work? Not that it's any less believable than Beth-as-sex-slave.
Feminazi Teach berates the boys for having penises. Ramona observes the crowd:
Acne and baby fat. Greasy hair and blackheads.
Found the author's latest stand-ins. Hi, Micah!
According to Ramona, boys who leave the lecture will go on a "list."
Just make a list, Molly had told her that morning over trail mix and instant coffee in the ruined lobby of a Marriott. Most of them wise up, check in with our people, take the deal.
What about the rest?
They know the stakes, kid. You want something to be sad about, think what the ones we don’t get do to your sisters.
Teach explains that she will "put . . . down like rabid dogs" any boys who harm a woman or display symptoms of t.rex. Should she...not do that?
Jeering from the audience. Someone shouts, "TERF!" Someone else throws a water bottle. The cage shakes.
What's the "deal" Molly mentioned to Ramona? Teach explains that the boys have the opportunity to join the TERFs' "Maenad Corps," whereupon they will earn new names, hormones, and surgery. Maenad Corps?
maenad, female follower of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus. The word
maenad comes from the Greek
maenades, meaning “mad” or “demented.” During the orgiastic rites of Dionysus, maenads roamed the mountains and forests performing frenzied, ecstatic dances and were believed to be possessed by the god. While under his influence they were supposed to have unusual strength, including the ability to tear animals or people to pieces (the fate met by the mythical hero and poet Orpheus).
They sound fun! Teach introduces the group to one Sergeant Kilroy, Maenad, thick eyebrows and battleship-prow nose, who reminds Ramona of the Greek-or-Iraqi-or-something dude she SWAT-teamed back in Chapter 4.
The TERFS reveal the contents of the cage to the audience: Camilla, a t.rex infested man. Hunched, starving, scarred, muzzled. He throws himself against the cage bars and whines. Maenad Corps isn't looking so bad now.
And then Teach pulls a CRUSTY WET TAMPON from her coat and shows it to the boys.
“Every woman—every real woman—has already bled a thousand times for nothing.” She made a fist, crushing bloody cotton.
“Imagine what we’d do to defend what we love.”
Add "periods" to the list of things the author does not understand. You know he was extra-proud of that scene. Mystery solved re: what's in store for the boys, anyway.
The lecture ends. Ramona, Teach, and Molly drive through Boston. They pass two women who appear to be butchering "a man's carcass." Ramona wonders what man meat tastes like. She should ask Fran.
Chinatown. Teach wants to eat at Hunan Palace (hope she washed her tampon hand!) and Ramona is shitting it because Hunan Palace is:
about two blocks from Feather’s building. How many times had she been in there on her way to their apartment?
Busted! Ramona wonders if the Guantanamo thing is true. (We do not find out if it is true. At least not in this chapter.) Teach gives her coat to an old-lady customer and explains to Ramona that society hates old ladies because they're of no more use to men. I think that's the only thing this book gets right. She vows to treat the elderly "like queens." Teach for President!
Teach asks Ramona to guess why she "wanted Seabrook." It's the beached battleship or whatever the fuck.. She wants the Matriarchy to have "real firepower" on the water. Basically Teach wants to blow shit up, or at least threaten to blow shit up. As women do.
Back at the Screw. POV: Robbie, following up on the mysterious note. He makes his way to the library(!) and meets one Zia:
A trans woman stood under the buzzing fluorescents at the row’s end. She was tall and lean, her head shaved down to black stubble. She wore a long black skirt and a mustard-colored cardigan, and on the back of one dark, long-fingered hand was a tattoo of twining beach roses that wound up past the cuff of her sweater.
The library has a copy of
New Moon. Robbie helps Zia reshelve. Zia is paranoid about cameras. He warns Robbie that Doe watches cameras, can read lips. Lights flicker, dim, and die. Zia hisses:
"It’s just that your friend isn’t working out as a daddy, so I think they’re going to sell her to a chain gang.”
The ladies of the Screw don't like spit-lube and tears? Too bad for ol' Beth!
POV: Ramona again, lacing up her boots after more gross sex with Feather. They bicker. Ramona denies having had sex with "men" even though she's had sex involving plenty of "cock."
More bickering. Feather is a "fat fucking parasite" and Ramona is a "fucking Nazi." Ramona improbably puts her fist through the wall. Sure she does.
Ramona screeches at some trannies on her way out the door. One tells her not to come back. Then Ramona trips on her shoelace and falls down the stairs.
POV: Indi, in the lab.
I should burn this whole place to the ground, thought Indi. I should poison that girl and all her little soldiers and her rich, beautiful friends, and that man in the pit. None of this is worth a place to live and a few creature comforts. Fresh butter. A good mattress. She gnawed at her left pinky nail, worrying a sliver of thin keratin loose. If I left, would they let the others stay?
Oh, fuck her. Let's recap: pre-bunker, Indi was making ball-distilled estrogen. Post-bunker, Indi is making ball-distilled estrogen on a larger scale. Boo hoo. Yes, she jerked off a zombie. But isn't figuring out how to reproduce despite the t.rex virus a good thing? When the alternative is Beth and Fran? Those Y-chromosomes have to come from somewhere.
Enter Doe, smoking. Indi bitches about that too. Good news: they've found the specialized equipment Indi needs! Indi would rather think about how fat she feels. Also, she's been summoned, by Sophie.
POV: Fran. Robbie's just told him about the chain-gang thing. Fran is doubtful; maybe Zia just wants them out? Robbie goes full SJW. Fran is still doubtful. That or he's thinking about the amhole Sophie promised him and doesn't want to rock the boat. Traitor! Robbie storms out. Boring!
POV: Indi, answering Sophie's summons.
“It’s not, like, a huge deal.” Sophie pushed her glasses up her nose with a finger manicured in glittering gold. “Just a few women in labor.”
Wait, who?
Sophie drew her onward through an airlock bracketed by curtains of heavy strips of black rubber and into a long, low-ceilinged space lined with narrow cots. In each of the cots lay a woman, all of them heavily pregnant. There were close to twenty of them, Indi guessed, and about a third were soaked in sweat and thrashing violently, held down only by canvas straps and guards in ponchos.
Haha, Sophie, you crazy bitch.
Indi hit her. She knew even as her palm met the girl’s cheek and rocked her little head back like a speed bag that it was a mistake, that it might be the last one she ever made, but that didn’t keep her from following up with the back of her hand before Doe and a short, thick-bodied guard wrestled her away, wrenching her arms behind her back.
The author has definitely never fantasized about hitting a woman in this manner. (He totally has.)
Sophie, bleeding from the face and crying, just wanted to see if Mackenzie could make a girl, DUH.
“I’m trying to start a family, and this is from before you were here. How was I supposed to know about your tests and your micro-thing?”
One of the pregnant women shrieks, thrashes, bleeds.
“Come on, you fuckin’ whale,” Doe growled in Indi’s ear as she steered her away from Sophie and toward the nearest cot. Toward the wide eyed, shivering teenager whose sweat and water had already soaked the sheets.
“Go save a life.”
POV: Ramona again. Flowers in hand. She's at Feather's place to apologize.
She lurched forward and pressed her cheek against their belly, left bare by their sequined cami. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed into their warm, familiar skin with its mingled smell of weed and cum and milk. “I’m sorry. You’re the only good thing in my life.”
People in this book spend an awful lot of time smelling like semen, MICAH.
Feather doesn't want flowers or apologies; he wants to get tied up and bang. Fair enough. Ramona inserts a spitty finger somewhere (we are not told where, thank Christ) but is "cut...to the quick" when Feather calls her "Daddy." Which is apparently a Big Deal somehow, because that's how the chapter ends.
To recap: Hitler Eunuchs, crusty tampon, Chinese food, battleship, Beth sold to chain gang, bickering, rape-baby maternity ward, Daddy.
