The day after: An apocalyptic morning (134 page)

              "Of course," Jessica said, once the noise died down, "the punishment that he receives if found guilty should be both appropriate, and severe enough so that those who come after will think twice about such things. Hanging is simply not good enough for him. I think that they very thing that he threatened us with so many times should be his sentence."

              Again, no vote was needed. The approval was obvious.

              Earlier in the day the rest of the men in the supply room had been moved out, leaving Barnes by himself. He was still as naked as he had been when he'd been forced from his bed early that morning and still fastened to the same wooden chair, although the ropes had been replaced with a set of handcuffs at some point. Unable to make his way to a bathroom, Barnes had both urinated and defecated upon himself for lack of any other option. He smelled horrible and looked worse.

              How had this happened? he kept asking himself. How had the ignorant bitches in town managed to outsmart the highly trained and equipped militia teams left to police them? Granted, the women had the overwhelming strength in numbers, but the men had had the guns. How had unarmed women taken men with guns?

              It was bewildering to him, completely unfathomable, as if a law of physics had been broken somehow. Like the rest of the men in town, he had complete confidence in the fact that the returning militia would easily re-capture the town and put things back to the way they were supposed to be. But what would happen in the meantime? What would become of the men - particularly himself - that had been left behind?

              He would never find out the fates of the other men, but he soon found out his own fate.

              At 5:30 that afternoon, just as the light was fading from the sky, the door to his storage room was opened and four women, all of them armed with automatic weapons, came in. The leader of the group was Maddie Livingston, whose husband had been in charge of all of the security details.

              "Jesus Christ, you stink," Maddie told him, leveling her weapon at him. "And you have a small dick too. No surprise there."

              "Are you ready to give this up?" Barnes asked toughly, although he could plainly see that they weren't.

              "Here's how ready we are, Barnes," she said. She stepped forward towards him and swung the butt end of her rifle at his head. It struck him in the left temple hard enough to break open a cut and send a spray of blood out into the air. While fireworks exploded in his vision, his chair was knocked over, landing him in the puddle of his own urine. Blood poured from his head out onto the floor.

              "Goddamn, that felt good," Maddie smiled. She looked at her three companions. "Uncuff him from the chair and then cuff his hands back behind his back again."

              "What are you going to do?" Barnes, still trying to clear his head from the blow, asked weakly.

              "We're going to court, baby," she said, aiming her rifle at his lower body. "Now don't try anything funny or I'll blow that little dick right off of you."

              He didn't try anything funny. He was uncuffed from the back of the chair and then quickly re-cuffed police fashion, hands behind his back. The steel bracelets were wrenched brutally tight. Two of the women, their rifles now over their shoulders, their hands wearing latex gloves to keep from touching his filth, roughly jerked him to his feet.

              "Come on," Maddie said. "It's showtime."

              He was dragged out of the high school building into the dark, rainy night. He tried to talk once, to tell them that they wouldn't get away with this, but before the first syllable left his mouth, Maddie's rifle butt swung again, this time striking him squarely in the testicles. He emitted an almost bovine scream of pain and doubled over. Vomit, which mostly consisted of stomach acid, sprayed from his mouth.

              "Walk, asshole, or you'll get another one," Maddie told him.

              He walked, assisted by the gloved hands pulling him along by his biceps. He was led out onto the football field where all of the lights had been turned on and all of the seats were filled with the women in town. His feet squelched wetly through the mud that the field had become. Cries of hatred and death threats immediately began to come from the crowd once he was visible to them. He saw that Jessica, the Garden Hill bitch he had once debriefed at length, was standing behind the podium; his podium.

              "Put him in the chair," she said, looking at him in a cocky, arrogant manner.

              Maddie's women set him down - not terribly gently - in a card-table chair next to the podium.

              What followed was a trial of sorts, about as fair and impartial of a trial as... well... as he used to give women accused of trying to escape. He was given no defense council of any kind. He was not allowed to speak on his own behalf. The entire thing consisted of Jessica and two of his wives describing every crime that he had ever committed in their presence. His wives - whom he had always assumed to be loyal to him (after all, they had special privileges) seemed to take particular pleasure in describing everything from statements he'd made in their presence about controlling the women to his actual sexual shortcomings.

              "Did you ever consent to sexual relations with this man?" Jessica, serving as judge and prosecuting attorney all in one, enquired at one point.

              Gloria, the wife in question, actually scoffed at this. She was a beautiful redhead who had once been Miss Placer County. "As if I would every let this little wimpy piece of shit into me by choice," she said. "Not that he ever hurt me that bad. As you can see, his dick looks a little like a golf pencil."

              Derisive laughter met this comment and Barnes began to sense that he was in serious trouble.

              The trial (for lack of a better term) went on for less than twenty minutes. In the end, Barnes was found guilty of all charges.

              "The town has spoken, Barnes," Jessica said, giving a signal to a few women that were hovering just out of sight. "Now punishment will be passed."

              "Don't I get to speak on my behalf?" Barnes asked, not even wanting to contemplate what these women had in mind.

              The answer to this question was not verbal. It consisted of another blow to the forehead by Maddie's M-16, a blow that opened a fresh cut and sent him thunking to the ground.

              Two women picked him up and dragged him over to the scaffold where women had been hanged in the past. Barnes actually felt a sense of relief that they had chosen this method of execution for him. After all, it was apparent that he was about to die and hanging was actually one of the quickest methods.

              But when the noose was looped around the chain of his handcuffs instead of his neck, he realized that he was not going to get off so easy.

              "What are you doing?" he asked.

              "We're passing sentence," said Maddie, who was in charge. "But we have a few things to do first."

              "What?" he said, near hysteria now.

              No one answered him.

              "It has been suggested," said Jessica, speaking through the public address microphone once again, "that we should help ourselves to a small memento of this occasion before the sentence is carried out. This will be something that we can put in a future museum as a sacred object, as a reminder of this troubled time. I, as your newly elected leader, agree wholeheartedly both with this notion and with the object in question. I will leave the collection of this object to the woman that suffered the most under this monster, Gloria Ferguson."

              "Thank you," Gloria said, a wicked smile upon her face. She raised up a butcher knife and showed it to the crowd, eliciting cheers of approval.

              "What are you going to do with that?" Barnes screamed, already having a pretty good idea.

              "Not much," Gloria said, stepping towards him.

              While four other women held him in place, Gloria grasped his wilted penis and testicles in one of her hands.

              "No!" he screamed, trying desperately to struggle.

              "Yes," Gloria said, bringing the knife down.

              It took nearly a minute, a minute that seemed to go on for an hour to Barnes. The pain as she sawed through his penis and scrotum was incredible, easily the most horrid thing he'd ever experienced. He felt blood running down his legs, felt waves of agony shooting up and down them. He could not bring himself to look at his demasculination.

              Finally, with a final few sweeps of the knife, the deed was done. Gloria held his bloody penis and testicles aloft in her left hand, the dripping knife in the right. The crowd scream in orgasmic ecstasy.

              "Let this pitiful objection live forever as a symbol of male infamy!" Gloria screamed, not using the loudspeaker but with her voice loud enough for everyone to hear anyway.

              Barnes was now panting in pain and fear, feeling the emptiness below, feeling the blood pattering onto his feet. He now wanted to die, wanted it to be over.

              "And now," Jessica said, "the rest of the sentence will be carried out. "Release the scaffold!"

              A woman pulled the lever that released the trap door, dropping Barnes down three feet before the rope jerked him to a halt. His arms were forced upward by the weight of him, instantly dislocating both arms from the shoulder joint. He screamed again as fresh pain went shooting through his body. Slowly, he swung back and forth, his feet five feet off the ground.

              "Douse him," Jessica said next.

              A bucket full of liquid was poured over his body, running down his chest, his back, trailing down to his legs. None of it, not a single drop, landed on his face or his head. The sharp, rich smell of it told him instantly what it was. It was gasoline.

              "No!" he pleaded. "No no no nooooooo!"

              "Yes," said Maddie, who held a red freeway flare in her hands. She pulled the cap off of it and used it to strike the end against. It flared to life with a bright red glow and a whiff of burning. She handed it to Gloria. "Would you care to do the honors?" she asked her.

              "Gladly," Gloria said, taking the hissing flare.

              Gloria had a flare (as it were) for the dramatic. She held it aloft for a moment, causing the cheers of the crowd and further screams from Barnes. Finally, winding up like a pitcher, she tossed it at her former husband, striking him directly in the chest.

              Barnes felt it strike and then suddenly he was burning as the gasoline flared to life, moving both upward and downward. Intense, barely imaginable pain seared through every nerve ending as the fire engulfed him from shoulders to feet, blackening his skin, making it tighten and contract. The pain lasted forever, for an eternity before the hot gasses entering his lungs finally, blessedly brought him to the final unconsciousness.

              Part 17

              "Brad, this shit is fuckin' crazy. I can't fuckin' take it anymore," said Private Rodney Lexington, one of the most junior members of the Placer County Militia. He was talking to his best friend, Brad Zachary, also a private and also a junior member. The two men had grown up together in Grass Valley and had been captured together there when the militia took that particular town. They had been assigned to entirely different platoons within the militia at the beginning of the march but the high rate of casualties had forced much reorganization and they were now both assigned to Colby's platoon, though in different squads.

              It was just before sunrise on January 20, the seventh night of their march. The two twenty year olds were in the process of dragging one of the latest victims of the ambushing helicopter from Garden Hill away from the main group. The corpse they hauled had once been corporal Staleworth. He had taken three slugs in the stomach and one in the hip during the strafing run, wounding him severely enough so that a fifth bullet, this one to the head, had been required to end his suffering. As had become customary in the last few days on the trail, Staleworth had supplied the lethal bullet himself, using his own handgun. It was perverse but it had somehow evolved as the final test of manhood that wounded men perform the deed themselves. Those that did it were considered heroic; those that did not (therefore forcing a sergeant or a lieutenant to do it for him) were considered pussies.

              Both of the young privates dragged Staleworth by an armpit with one arm while holding a flashlight before them with the other. Both had their duty weapons - semi-automatic AK-47s - over their shoulders. They kept their lights trained in front of them, not looking at their package.

              "This shit just ain't right," Zachary said as they reached a small area around the back side of a pile of fallen pine trees. "I mean, we don't even bury them. We just leave them here for the fuckin animals to eat."

              "And they'll do the same to us," Lexington said solemnly as he let go of the body. "If we get killed out here, they'll do the same to us. They'll give us a fuckin pistol to shoot ourselves with and then drag us off into the trees."