A stringy-haired, small-breasted, asthenic young woman wearing a "Save the Males" tee shirt ushered Deb and Vanessa to their seats. Vanessa looked over the crowd and it looked to her much like any other gathering of People for the Ethical Treatment of Males or PET’M. Along with the scattering casually dressed college students, a larger number of prosperous-looking, well-dressed, well-groomed women of various ages sat and chatted amicably as they waited to listen to the much-anticipated scheduled speaker.

Quite a stir arose when one more elegantly dressed woman swept into the room in her chic ankle-length man-skin coat. Voices buzzed. Chagrinned at the immediate hostile response that she elicited, she smiled apologetically and expressed her sincere regret at having caused such distress. Then she pointed out the unmistakable PET’M stamp, attesting that the skins were harvested from males older than 18 years by the most humane and scientifically advanced methods. Her critics were silenced. However, in her heart, she suspected that jealousy, as much as concern for the possible maltreatment of males, had evoked the angry mutterings.

Vanessa thought that the woman might have done still better by simply leaving her damned coat at home. More suitable occasions certainly existed. However, Vanessa admitted to her own ambivalence. Who could own such a lovely thing and not wear it on every possible opportunity? Despite her ethical reservations, Vanessa herself relished the sensuous feel of the finely tanned leather, the graceful lines of the beautiful tailoring, and the even jealous stares that the costly garment elicited. She’d have to win the lottery to buy a coat like that.

Tonight, everyone was talking about the scheduled speaker. Professor Jones, a young researcher from the University, was to present her controversial claim that males experienced pain just like people did. Everyone knew that despite a number of behaviors that mimicked females’ response to pain, adult males just didn’t perceive pain normally. The most cursory knowledge of the recently ended Patriarchal Age gave ample credibility to that certainty.

Popular textbooks posited and popular wisdom proclaimed that the 'testosterone storm’ that inaugurated puberty caused permanent brain damage and blunted the normal perception of pain seen in females and male children. The Professor subjected paralyzed males to various conventionally painful stimuli and mapped their cerebral responses with electroencephalography and positron emission tomography. Despite her extensive laboratory observations, no main-stream journal would publish her findings. Some questioned her selection of a control population - prepubertal males. Others argued that a physiological response to pain was quite different from the cognitive perception of pain. All agreed that such sensationalistic, unlikely data, all-be-it derived extensive experiments, let alone her somewhat strident conclusions, were so contradictory to the work of so many distinguished investigators that they must be flawed, even if all her errors were not always obviously apparent.

A move had been made to deny her access to test subjects through the University Committee for Protection of Male Research Subjects. Only a desperate appeal by the Faculty Senate on the grounds of academic freedom had saved her. However, her work was very expensive. Her test subjects had to be replaced after so many experiments and new subjects were expensive. What she recovered by from their sale, did not cover one-half the cost of new subjects. Once her current grant ran out, nothing could save her, except perhaps financial support from an organization like PET’M.

Just like any other PET’M meeting, very few males were present. Many males considered PET’M’s opposition to the Hunt unmanly and a certain sign that a male knew that he himself was not good enough to survive. Males, they argued, who found themselves signed over to the ranches and abattoirs for the government bounty, had fallen obviously from grace in the eyes of their own families for some transgression or other and likely deserved their fate, as terrible as it seemed.

More charitably, Vanessa attributed the male gender’s curious indifference in the principal organization that sought to improve its lot to its very tenuous status in the eyes of the authorities. The slightest misdeed or even undue public prominence might lead to revocation of citizenship status and a one-way trip to the abattoir. The stakes were too high for even casual displays of political activism, let alone public zeal for a revolutionary cause. The very few males present wore their somber hued caftans and kept largely silent.

Surprisingly to everyone, the Professor’s lecture had been rescheduled unannounced. Tonight’s unscheduled speaker was a male - once he would have once been called a man. Deb had called Vanessa at the last moment and urged her forcefully to attend tonight in particular without fully revealing the entire secret. Vanessa was glad that she had come.

His true name was a secret. He called himself, Mr. X. Mr. X seemed totally unaware of his peril or else he was aware of it and just didn’t care. He spoke with obvious conviction and with considerable charisma. Systematically, graphically, and at length, he catalogued the nation’s egregious injustices to males and motivated even Vanessa to re-examine her life thoroughly. He showed vivid images of the ranches, slaughterhouses, and meat packing plants. He showed the bloody aftermath of the popular Hunt and even a tannery processing male skins.

Vanessa shuddered at the gory pictures. She had never hunted herself. In fact, no one in her family had ever hunted. Her mother was a liberal and never had allowed jacques to be served in her home. Once, Vanessa played Hunt with the girls in neighborhood and their joeys. She came home tired but exhilarated. Her mother took an hour to explain the carefully hidden horrors of the real Hunt. She showed Vanessa a CD with graphic images that she had kept from her hither-to because of her tender years.. Vanessa never played Hunt again. Vanessa’s mother served on the local board of PET’M for years and contributed money, tools, and. food for the half-way houses. Vanessa herself had never purchased jacques or male flesh from the butcher. She always refused to eat jaccques when she ate a friend’s house or when her friends went out for hommeburgers.

Once, just once, she had eaten jacques at a sorority dinner. Actually, she had eaten quite a bit of him. He had been very delicious, she found, before she learned what she had done - but she had certainly not slaughtered him herself. She had not butchered him or purchased his flesh from the market. She had even not asked or suggested that jacques be served. In fact, if someone had asked her, she would have expressed her clear preference that jacques not be served. He just tasted so darned good but she never ate jacques again.

She had to confess, though, to a certain weakness with regard to a few - very few - man-skin leather goods that she had purchased without her mother’s knowledge. She could afford no more than a few and she did suffer regular pangs of remorse.

Whenever she enjoyed a boy, she always worried how he would survive in this world where one-half of males were simply consigned for slaughter and the rest subjected to endure three yearly three-day Hunts, starting in their nineteenth year, from which no more than one in ten would survive. Her genuine concern gave each encounter an added poignancy.

The speaker went beyond the usual demands for an end to the horror and went so far to propose that males - men - recover their former dominant position in the world. The current unnatural order was a temporary aberration, he argued, in the ten-thousand year flow of human civilization. Male size and strength and male intelligence made men the natural masters of the world. "Biology is destiny," he concluded. He did not take any questions and left the auditorium promptly for security reasons.

Vanessa listened. She knew that her world owed its peace and safety to the limitation of males to fewer than 10% of the population. However, his romantic words blatantly questioned much that she thought that she knew and believed, She was left her puzzled and confused. She had to admit that she just couldn’t connect the vicious, uncontrollable males in her textbook with the cute joeys and harmless, enticing boys she encountered every day. "Male intelligence" sounded like an oxymoron like "hot ice," but the extreme persecution of males might very well be expected to provoke such obviously exaggerated claims. The world had just painfully emerged from the Patriarchal Age. Did poor Mr. "X" feel that history would grant the dinosaurs a second chance to rule the world too?

He was cute, though, and he communicated powerfully on multiple levels. Vanessa noted the way in which the audience was deeply enthralled, captivated as much by his ineluctably male presence as by the content of his upsetting message. Her sense and her feelings warred with each other. He had a certain raw, primal presence - and many in the audience hung on his every word and gesture. His unbridled masculinity awoke an inchoate tension within her that ached for satisfaction.

Several days later, Deb called and asked her if she wanted to meet Mr. "X" in person. No one knew his true name. Notice was short, because he was always on the move, somehow regularly eluding the authorities.

Vanessa quickly dressed. As she headed for the door, she suddenly remembered that she had pulled on her best man-skin boots and her favorite man-skin vest from her closet simply by reflex. She caught herself just as she closed the door of her apartment, stopped, took a deep breath, and cursed her thoughtlessness. She went back inside and changed into her tennis shoes and sweater.

Deb picked her up and on the ride to the meeting place told her that she and her friends had been observing Vanessa for months. After tonight, Vanessa was no longer an outsider, she was welcome to join the first circle of the secret organization. Deb revealed that her 'nom de guerre’ was "Honey Bee." PET’M really did sponsor the fabled sanctuaries where a small number of boys and adult males hid out from the hunt and the abattoirs. The sites of these facilities were a carefully guarded secret - known only to the inner circle leadership of PET’M and their existence was adamantly denied to all outsiders.

Vanessa was thrilled. She now needed to choose her pseudonym also. She wondered if she were deserving of the honor. She herself had eaten jacques - just once - and thoroughly enjoyed him. She really treasured her few authentic man-skin items. Even tonight, she simply forgot and wore her man-skin belt. She hoped that Mr. 'X’ wouldn’t mind. She hoped that he might not even notice. She felt far from revolutionary purity, even if she were now aflame with revolutionary zeal. Vanessa looked at her man-skin belt and said, "Call me Vanity." Deb laughed gently and comforted her. She even suggested that Vanessa or now Vanity’s public conformity might serve to make her an even more effective agent. A number of their activists adapted public personas to deflect suspicion. Vanessa should not be seen picketing the abattoir, Lauren’s Market or the "L’Apone’s, the fabulous leather store. She had bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

Mr. "X’s" aide, Minerva, greeted them at the door. They found "X" lounging with three young men - identified as Number 1, Number 2 - he made a face - and Number 3 or more formally Eleven, Seventy-two, and Forty-three, after the final two digits of the registration numbers tattooed behind their left ears.

Mr. "X" was even more charismatic in person than he had been at the podium. He said once more that the present order was unnatural - against nature. Males or men, he called them were larger and stronger and better in mathematics. Nature clearly meant for men to rule, he insisted. Biology is destiny, he insisted.

Vanessa could forgive him a bit of zeal. What she had really had in mind was a rather kinder, more moderate world where males and people or men and women were judged as individuals, and lived in peace with mutual respect and with neither personal nor organized violence. She knew that she was some kind of starry-eyed idealist and she had to indulge him his revolutionary excesses. Revolutions were hard to modulate. You really can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Her first mission was little more than a prank. She left a bag of dog poop with a "Save the Males" flyer in the meat display at Lauren’s Market.

Her second mission was a bit more involved and dangerous. She put on surgical latex gloves and was handed a squirt gun with washable red paint. She was to walk by the front of L’Apone Leathers and spray a likely victim in her newly purchased man-skin coat. Full-length man-skin coats were terribly expensive and Minerva assured her that the paint was meant only as a symbol and was completely washable.

On her first walk north along Wittig Avenue, Vanessa chanced upon no likely victim. She walked three blocks further north, then three blocks west and six blocks south aound Mary Daly Place before turning east again. She checked her watch and prayed that Deb or Honey Bee was still waiting for her in the alley as planned.

On her second pass, a tall, distinguished looking woman in an ankle-length manskin coat emerged from L’Apone’s with her arms loaded with packages. Vanessa came up behind her, looked around quickly, and squirted her with red paint. Vanessa sped up and kept walking. She didn’t look back. Rather, she quickly peeled off the surgeon’s glove, dropped them and the squirt gun in a bag that Deb had placed in a trah container, and kept walking. A third collaborator would pick up the bag and incinerate it.

The woman was oblivious for a long moment, but then she finally turned around. Vanessa had already reached the alley where Honey Bee was parked when she first heard the woman scream. She still didn’t turn back to look, although she would have loved to see her face. She jumped into her friend’s car and the two promptly sped off. Eight blocks later, she switched to Minerva’s car and Minerva drove her to where her car was parked. No one was in pursuit. On the way home, she heard about the incident on the radio. The woman was interviewed and she was crying and hysterical. Vanessa almost laughed, but then surprised herself with a flash of empathy for the woman’s obviously sincere feelings of outrage.

Her doubts soon vanished when she met with Deb. As they watched the TV report with growing glee, Vanessa’s emerging ambivalence was extinguished and her feelings of righteousness brightly rekindled by Deb’s unsullied enthusiasm. No one had a clue who had been responsible for this latest outrage. Only then, Vanessa saw a dab of red paint on her jacket and tried her hardest to get it out. Deb tried too and neither could get it out. "It’s an old jacket," Vanessa reassured her friend. "It doesn’t really matter."

Number Two had a job in an upscale brothel. No one was at all suspicious when he entertained an ever-changing string of women plus a substantial number of regulars through the afternoon and early evening. The management appreciated his productivity. At most, the other boys begrudged him his word-of-mouth popularity as much as they respected the three rings that showed that he had survived the Hunt.

Vanessa met with him weekly, even though it strained her pocketbook. She had to pay to keep up appearances even though she visited him primarily to carry messages between Deb’s cell and Mr. X and Minerva. As long as she paid, she might as well enjoy his services - to keep up appearances, she explained to Deb.

He was very good at what he did. She lay prone on the table, closed her eyes, and relaxed. He straddled her thighs while his strong hands did wonders for her tired shoulders and back. No one had ever tongued her anus so skillfully.

When she could, she donated tools and food to the PET"M program herself for training through rehabilitation. In private, with Deb and Minerva, she celebrated the raid on the University that freed two dozen males locked away for various research projects. The raiders had obviously skipped Prof. Jones’ jack pen, which hadn’t endeared the embattled Professor to her already hostile colleagues. In public, Vanessa went out of her way to express her reservations against such lawless shenanigans.

The raid on Bennett Industries was a major affair. Bennett Industries owned a series of ranches and abattoirs across the country -slaughtering tens of thousands of males each year. They had begun a program where home-reared jacks might be brought to market with no middle person. College sororities, in particular, often used their excess food to fatten a half dozen or so males for slaughter. The males fulfilled other functions too. Ironically, Bennett Industries used a portion of its profits for a scholarship program for males who had survived three Hunts and needed a year or two of catch-up before they could join the people already in college. A masked Mr. "X" held the single security guard at gun point while Minerva, Vanessa, Honey Bee, One and Three vandalized a building that they believed was deserted.

Suddenly Minerva and Vanessa heard screams and crying behind a door down the hall whose glass read "Scholarship Office." Weapons ready, they burst through the door to find Number Three standing triumphantly over a grandmotherly woman who sat on the floor moaning and rocking back and forth. Three grinned and hitched up his pants. He showed them the woman’s torn panties like a trophy. The frenzied woman clutched the remnants of her torn clothes about her and sung some sort of lullaby, apparently unaware of anything going on around her.

"I think she loves me," Three proclaimed proudly.

"You fucking ass-hole," Minerva responded. I think she’s certainly seen you and seen us too. With that, she put her pistol to the woman’s head and pulled the trigger. The woman’s head shattered into a dozen bloody pieces and the three freedom fighters raced to the rendezvous point to meet Honey Bee, X, One, and Three. Vanessa almost threw up. She hadn’t wanted to kill anyone.

"Is the guard secure?" Minerva asked.

"Don’t worry about the guard." X answered grimly. "I took care of her!"

"You just tied her up, right?" Vanessa asked.

X nodded yes and led them into the night.

As Kim Donnelley marched through the silence of the night with the heavily armed platoon along the primitive dirt track that served as the sanctuary’s major access road, her initial excitement faded and slowly gave way to a gnawing dread. She was much more at home in her office at the Gender Bureau, juggling e-mails and manipulating data bases. She had always had tremendous respect for the women who volunteered to be soldiers and defend their country and their way of life, but she had never chosen to be one of them. Fortunately, since the Revolution, neither their country nor their way of life needed much in the way of defending. Tonight’s mission was certainly an anomaly against a predictable routine of colorful parades and ceremonial guard duty for the soldiers. Kim had jumped at the chance to serve as an observer on this raid. Despite her rigorous program of jogging and tennis, tension and fatigue were slowly eroding her bountiful youthful energy and enthusiasm.

Personally, Kim had had little to do with the damned creatures. She certainly didn’t hate them. She had had no brothers. Any number of cute, little joeys lived and played in her neighborhood. They came in quite handy when she and her friends wanted to play Hunt, but somehow they quietly disappeared with the onset of puberty. She had never thought much about it.

She knew that adult males were larger than most people - some twice her 50 kg or more, very strong- much stronger than most women, and very violent. Hanging in the back cooler at Lauren’s Market they looked huge, when she bothered to look. Chronicles of males’ unspeakable evils filled her DVD’s in school. In the bad old days, murdering, raping males had made every woman feel afraid for her children and herself - every day. A woman could not leave her home without considering her safety and in reality home offered little refuge. Males had threatened civilization and the very existence of the human race itself with their love of war and destruction. Images of their eagerness for violence and bloody atrocities populated her nightmares as a child as well as her CRT screen. Sometimes, when she was small, she awoke and saw them in them lurking in the shadows of her darkened room and only her granny’s warm hugs and lullabies could comfort her.

That time was in the past. Luckily, women were intelligent. Some said that human civilization itself was women’s desperate response to male size and alacrity for violence.

Once when she was small, her mother brought home a jack she and her friends had had taken in the Hunt. In all innocence, little Kim thought that he was really cute. Washed up and lying prone on the kitchen table, she was impressed with the mere size of him and the humorous expression on his slack-jawed face. His tongue had flopped comically from his half-open mouth. Tentatively, she had squeezed the bulky, angular muscles of his shoulders, flanks, and buttocks. He didn’t look particularly human. He was hairy and cold to the touch. The feel of him made her want to scratch. He had been gutted and his carcass lay open from groin to neck. His male parts were nowhere in evidence. She wanted to ask about his male parts but she was just too shy. Her juvenile mind just couldn’t link the creature lying there before her with the neatly wrapped packages of meat that her mother brought home from the market.

She loved the out of doors and when she was old enough, she hunted with her mother. She would never forget her first jack. Towards the end of a seemingly endless, unfruitful day, she suddenly had a fair shot and took it. The jack looked up and saw her, then turned and ran. Somehow, he looked indignant - she was annoying him. In retrospect, it now seemed humorous. She honestly thought that he was mocking her. She ran after him, thinking she had missed, but then he collapsed with her arrow protruding from his chest. He was a beauty- a one-ringed buck in his second hunt and he was hers. Once certain that he was too weak to resist, her mother encouraged her to kneel beside him. Despite the bloody froth that bubbled from lips, Kim covered his mouth with her own and squeezed shut his nose. With all his fading strength, he tried to dislodge her and breathe. He was still stronger than she might have guessed but she would not be moved. In an ironic parody of a kiss, she claimed his last breath and captured his soul. Kim felt like a queen or maybe even a goddess.

Her mother helped her gut him. Kim’s face was streaked with his blood, but despite her usual fastidiousness, she just didn’t care. Her mother showed her how to open his scrotum and extract his testicles. She cleaned them from their adhering membranes and washed them thoroughly. Then they roasted them over an open fire on sharpened sticks while the carcass cooled. Seared on the outside, the testicles 'popped’ when the inside juices boiled and stretched their fibrous coverings. Kim had eaten hers too hastily and burned her mouth. The marvelous flavor exploded on her tongue, even as the hot, greasy juices ran down her chin, mixed with her saliva. Then they skinned and butchered him. Even giving away packages of jacques to their friends and neighbors, their freezer was loaded. She remembered fondly that he had been extra-ordinarily delicious. Her mother laughed and accused her of female sentimentality.

Later, she and her best friend, Alison, had shared their first boy at the club. Alison, sat astride his hips and his hot, thick member, mysteriously enlarged and hard, disappeared into her sex. Eyes closed, Alison pressed him against her and moaned. Curious, Kim felt where Alison’s engorged labia engulfed his penis, then slid her hand lower on the barrel, now slick with Alison’s juices. Kim’s straining fingers could barely encompass his girth. Kim moved her hand lower still and cradled his heavy scrotum. She was aware of her own arousal, a growing dampness between her thighs. Suddenly, the boy moaned. For a second, Kim thought that she might have hurt him but then she realized the truth. Gently, she continued her explorations. She pinched his fat balls through the skin of his scrotal sac and suddenly recalled that day on the Hunt. Her mouth salivated and she didn’t know whether she was hungrier or hornier. She wasn’t horny for long.

She had trained long and hard for tonight. When she left the helicopter, she was anxious, even eager to put in practice something of what she had learned and show that she fully deserved the others’ confidence. She wore her bulky body armor under her stealth cape and carried her heavy pack without complaint. She gave thanks for her conditioning and for the cool of night. All of her exertion had increased her appetite. The poor reporter from KPFX and her camerawoman were huffing and puffing already.

There were always a few who didn’t understand the importance of their work. Only by restriction of male numbers to less than 10% of the adult population had the world been freed from its history replete with violence and destruction. Kim worried that KPFX might turn this important mission into another free "info-mercial" for PET’M - People for the Ethical Treatment of Males. Males are cute, she agreed, thinking both of her Timmy and the jacks laid out on her kitchen table.

Timmy, her favorite boy at the Retreat, was really different. He worked in the hair salon. When he shampooed her hair, his long fingers kneaded her scalp tirelessly. She would close her eyes and simply bask in the sensation. All tension fled. From time to time, her hand might 'accidentally’ brush his warm skin. His naked body was cut and lean. She gently fondled his male parts that had given her so much pleasure. His cock was literally a tool. He had been surgically augmented with some sort of mechanical device that made him adjustable, as thick as she wanted him and she could even make him vibrate. He could touch her soul with his tongue. Then she thought of the new boy who passed out towels in the locker room. If you wanted an hour with him, you had to book an appointment two months in advance.

Too many too easily forgot the evils that males had done in the world. Too many forgot the millennia of needless suffering that had gotten them all to this point in history. Males had a place in her world. Others thought that they might be totally eliminated or reduced from one in ten to one in one thousand. Sentimentality aside, she was not about to allow anyone to turn back the clock.

Kim put everything out of her mind and took comfort from the soldiers’ easy camaraderie. She relished the radiated warmth of their living bodies, the hushed sounds of their quiet breathing, the subdued shuffle of their booted feet on the forest floor, and the white frost of their misting breaths in the cold, moist, moon-lit night air. They reached their position undetected with time to spare and had to wait once more hour for the chosen time - one hour before dawn. Time remained for a cold, tasteless meal of pasty field rations. Some things never changed.

The compound’s structures - you really couldn’t call them buildings - were grouped roughly in a rectangle and buried three quarters underground, making them almost invisible on the ground and totally invisible from the air. The beasts lived primitively, without electricity and rarely with fire. Kathy’s and Michelle’s squads would take them from behind. Ashley’s squad held back in reserve. Kim would stay with Caitlin’s squad and walk right through their front door and into their parlor. Everyone pulled on her battle helmet.

At the appointed time, her squad blew the compound’s gate on the south, the other two squads waited an eternal forty-five seconds. The male beasts’ guards rushed out to meet the invaders, firing their makeshift firearms wildly, followed by the rest as they stumbled from their quarters reaching for their crude weapons, still half asleep. Awake, alert, and carefully deployed to make the most of cover, Kim and her squad fired their laser-sited submachine guns, firing in small bursts to prevent overheating. Even so, their barrels glowed dully from the heat. They threw their concussion grenades. Kathy’s squad and Michelle’s squads took them from the flanks as planned. When all resistance ceased, they began an inch by inch search of every structure and every underground bunker.

Kim’s shoulder still hurt where the heavy slug slammed into her. Caitlin had asked her to hang back and let the professionals do their jobs and search the bunker. Kim should have listened. Instead, she took the thoughtful warning as a challenge and barged ahead. Caitlin shot the mother-abandoned bastard as soon as he shot Kim. Kim cursed the unknown woman who had given the damned, motherless jack, the damned motherless gun. Women’s unending sentimentality was now more a threat to civilization than the fiercest, cruelest male. Her body armor had stopped the bullet’s penetration and absorbed most of its impact, but she still bore a painful red and purple bruise over her left breast. The male had no body armor and nothing moderated the bullet that tore into his body.

At least, Kim was excused from the many chores that remained. Pairs of women carried the torn and broken bodies from the compound and from the woods around the compound, stripped them naked, and laid them out on their backs in rows in the yard. The harsh angles of their heavy muscularity, their oversized hands and feet, and their general hairiness made them look distinctly something other than human. In the light of morning, the beasts looked somewhat less frightening than Kim imagined. They were somewhat shorter than the eight feet of her nightmares. They were hairier than people, but they varied considerably in their degree of hirsutism. Her Timmy was completely depiliated. Michelle went from one end to the other, collecting their left ears where their registration numbers had been tattooed.

Between their legs hung the unmistakable evidence of their masculinity. Once, male genitals had been the proud symbol of male power and dominance. A male could intimidate a dozen healthy, conventionally sane women simply by threatening to expose himself. Now, male genitals were recognized as ineluctable proof of male vulnerability. Kim looked at them a shook her head. Even with males reduced to one tenth of the adult population, most still weren’t worth fucking A large helicopter landed on the hastily cleared pad, just minutes before Ashley’s squad emerged from the woods with a gang of ill-clad joeys. A small tractor emerged to help with the job of burying the bodies. Seeing joeys in any sort of clothes at all was so unusual that it was almost comical. The soldiers also escorted a disheveled woman, who screamed horrible threats interspersed with equally trying bouts of pathetic weeping. She pulled mightily at the handcuffs that secured her wrists behind her back but to no avail. The soldiers had to drag her. Finally, Ashley found a piece of duct tap - the greatest invention of the Patriarchal Age - and quieted her down. The helicopter crew bundled her onto the chopper quickly, despite her frantic struggles.

Jennie and Mandie, having grown up on a ranch, managed the three dozen joeys with a casual confidence. They herded the seemingly unordered gang quite neatly into the rear of the helicopter. The feral joeys would be flying back to Boise today, governor’s orders, but the platoon would have complete their search of the site and camp out in the woods tonight. Word spread quickly and no one was very pleased. Cold field rations were featured on the menu for lunch and Kim and the others feared that dinner would be no better.

Kathy’s squad was harvesting the testicles. Kathy squatted between one male’s legs and sawed off his ball-sac with her Janie knife. Adeptly, she inverted the skin over her fist, and scraped it clean of all adherent flesh. When she was done, she handed it to the reporter as a souvenir. Then she let the camera woman choose her own souvenir. Their erstwhile owners hardly had any more need of them. She deposited the testicles in her mess kit with many others. Kim had already taken the ball-sac of the male who shot her. It would serve to accent her harrowing tale of this eventful night and morning.

The jacks in the courtyard were so shot up, they were hardly worth skinning and not worth butchering. Abdominal wounds that leaked foul intestinal contents had spoiled many. Their bodies were so riddled with bullets that their flesh smelled of cordite. A girl might even break a tooth on one of the many bullets that lodged in their broken carcasses - even if she were careful. There was nothing to be done but bury them. Kim smiled at the way hunger diverted her thoughts.

Ashley spoke briefly with the Lieutenant, then turned and grinned broadly. She held up 2 fingers. Ashley, long Mandie and Jennie’s friend and now their squad leader, had worked on Mandie’s mother’s ranch as a teenager. Jennie acknowledged her sign and grabbed the last joey on her side by the hair while Mandie grabbed the last joey on her side. The chopper’s hatch closed. Mandie and Jennie ducked to avoid its whirling blades. As soon as they were clear, the chopper lurched and rose unsteadily from the ground. It stabilized, then rose quickly in the sky.

Mandie and Jennie dragged the two joeys, kicking and screaming, a ways into the woods, just out of sight. Kim could hear the joeys crying and pleading piteously. It was all very unpleasant to think about. Ashley unsheathed her Janie knife and set off after them.

On the good side, prospects for dinner were now looking up. Kim was relieved that she couldn’t see the cute little buggers when Ashley cut their throats, one after the other. However, she could hear them squeal and that caused her real if momentary distress. She knew that some people just couldn’t bring themselves to eat garcon, the flesh of joeys as jacques was the flesh of jacks. Kim was glad that she had tasted well-prepared garcon well before she had given much thought to what she was eating. The little buggers really were just too cute, but garcon was one of her favorites. She hoped that someone removed their heads before they were served. That made it all so much easier.

While Ashley and Mandie gutted and skinned them, Jennie came back to get help to start a fire and find a long, straight stick that was thick enough that it might serve as a skewer. While an older jack would likely roast up to tough and chewy, a young, tender joey, freshly killed, would roast up just perfectly. Soon, two trussed, headless carcasses were turning slowly over a smoldering fire, while Jennie watched for flames that threatened to damage the delicate meat. Without their heads, the carcasses no longer resembled anything human. Lunch might be cold field rations, but dinner would be better.

Megan’s squad captured a single jack alive and uninjured. A vigorous interrogation revealed little. The poor bugger knew next to nothing and the Lieutenant soon gave up. She gave him over to the squad. In seconds, they stripped him naked and tied him belly-down over a wooden saw horse. His arms and legs were widely spread and securely tied the horse’s legs. He made all sorts of babbling sounds until Megan found an extra piece of duct tape to cover his mouth too and stop his irritating noise.

The women took turns posing for photographs with his exposed ass. He pulled frantically at his bonds to no avail Bethany bet Samantha that Samantha couldn’t make him spurt in three minutes. Sammie spit on her hands and went to work. He was hard in a second, but she just couldn’t make him ejaculate. Bethany checked her watch and counted down the final 30 seconds outloud. Sammie was getting nowhere. In frustration, she jammed a finger up his butt. The poor bugger moved so hard that he almost tipped over the sawhorse but he still didn’t come. .

Kim took a turn. She got two fingers in, then three fingers. The damned bugger didn’t come. Bethany got her whole fist up his butt, but everyone said that she had a small hand. Then someone called that dinner was ready and the jack was left to himself, hanging there while the women washed up.

Someone found a heavy frying pan, butter, lemons, and ground pepper among the males’ supplies. Soon the testicles - city oysters - were sizzling in the butter and seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon.

Mandie carved the joeys with practiced skill. Her heavy bladed Janie knife served very adequately. Even without elaborate preparation or exquisite sauces, the joeys were finger licking good. Everyone had plenty to eat and little went to waste. Sammie went to see if their prisoner might be hungry. Kim herself was full. Her hunger was forgotten but she stripped the tender flesh from one more tasty rib with her teeth. Kim was glad that the Age of Terror had finally ended and the world was now a much less violent place.

Vanessa joined Minerva at the sidewalk café. Minerva, looked up and smiled. "Please sit down! With your lottery winnings, I’ll even let you pick up the tab. I wish you were there when I bought my man-skin purse. I might have weaseled that out of you too. She ordered from the top of the menu, the delicious jacques bourguignon. She claimed that her public behavior confused the authorities.

"No problem, Minerva, you’d do the same for me," Vanessa smiled. You know, Minerva," Vanessa was very pleased with her win of one the smaller prizes and not the 'jackpot,’ but several things bothered her still. She really wanted to get information and avoid a confrontation. "I saw the other day where the news said that the security guard at Bennett Enterprises was found shot. She didn’t suffocate or die of a heart attack like X said." Minerva kept her face in her newspaper and didn’t look up. "The papers lie sometimes," she said quickly and kept her nose in the paper. Then she saw the headline and she stopped. She read quickly and turned the pages rapidly, only glancing at the graphic photo’s for an instant but pouring over the newspaper account of the raid on the sanctuary in Idaho minutely.

"What about that old woman Three...fucked?...raped?" Vanessa asked when she finally recalled the unfamiliar word tap-dancing the tip of her tongue. Vanessa didn’t add that Minerva had shot her.

"Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs." Minerva quipped grimly with no evident remorse. She kept reading.

People lie too, Vanessa thought.

"You know, they really can’t help it." Minerva pushed ahead, but kept reading. Biology is destiny! Can’t keep a good man down. You heard that one?" Things hadn’t turning out at all like Vanessa had hoped at the beginning. Perhaps, biology was destiny, after all.

"Now, what about this raid on the sanctuary in Idaho?" It was Minerva’s turn to ask. "Now, how many died there?" "What raid?" Vanessa asked, feigning ignorance. "What happened?" The waitress brought a large platter of 1 centimeter cubes of jacques, with various fruit salsas and chutneys, and a pot of hot olive oil, sitting over a candle.

"Says here today - quoting unnamed sources - of course - that a sanctuary in Idaho was betrayed by the leadership of the resistance looking for public sympathy or pursuing some internal power struggle. "Can you believe it? She asked, but didn’t really want an answer. "Some fifty jacks and two dozen joeys were taken."

"I guess that’s why the price of garcon was down at Lauren’s Market. I saw it as I walked by - supply and demand." Vanessa replied as she picked up a long handled fondue fork and speared a succulent cube of fillet of jacques. The tender flesh hissed and sputtered in the hot olive oil. "The price was down 9 a pound and I didn’t know why." Minervas stopped reading and speared her own chunk of jacques. Cooking absorbed all of the women’s attention and conversation ceased.

Soon the outside was seared and the center still red and juicy, the way Vanessa liked it. She dipped it in the mango salsa and brought it to her mouth. Delicious. One had to keep up appearances.

The hand drill that she had donated looked quite ordinary too. After a 30 day delay the radio beacon switched on and enabled the authorities to locate the sanctuary. One really had to keep up appearances. Soon a second cube of meat was sizzling in the oil.

The Gender Control Officer had given her a lottery ticket and told her that she had a pleasant surprise coming if things worked out. The surprise was pleasant and all her friends wondered how someone who bought so few lottery tickets could possibly win - even a secondary prize. Good luck, she explained. Soon, her new manskin coat- with its PET’M stamp of approval - would be ready too. Whatever would her mother say?