This Trans Horror Novel Terrified Me
Skip to Part 3 Chapter II for the death of JK Rowling
Hello to the apocalypse! At Queer History, we break down queer media and interview queer people (and allies) leaving a lasting positive impact. Today, we’re breaking down every chapter of the trans horror novel Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, in which a virus has ravaged the earth. But this time, there’s a special twist.
In Manhunt, the author answers an oft-ignored question in post-apocalyptic worldbuilding: how does your society handle hormone therapy?
A review from The Los Angeles Review of Books says:
“Felker-Martin’s horror novel cunningly weaves trans determinism, war, and trauma together in an effort to locate joy, empathy, and pleasure in a world on fire… Felker-Martin’s critical eye manifests gleefully in her fiction as she dares you to turn away but compels you to keep looking.
Through gruesome bodily description, sharp emotional intuition, and searing sociopolitical criticism, Manhunt is horrifying, at times titillating, and even hilarious — but most importantly, it thrills at every turn… It not only displays a mastery of horror’s conventions, but it also tears open the rich (and ripe) possibilities of trans horror for the world to see.”
SETUP
World building:
Beth and Fran, friends before T-Day and now best friends depending on each other, make their way to the coast. T-Day changed the world, with the estrophaga “t. rex” virus spreading rapidly across the globe. The virus ravaged the world by turning anyone with testosterone above a certain level into the kind of zombie-like monster you’d encounter in 28 Days Later or The Last of Us.
By affecting anyone with testosterone above a certain level—enough testosterone in your system to put out a crop of back hair—the virus doesn’t just affect men. The virus affects cis women with high testosterone (such as those with polycystic ovarian syndrome/PCOS), just as it affects trans, non-binary, and intersex people with high testosterone.
The testosterone blocker spironolactone is mostly useless now, ruined by sunlight, water, or oxidization. So trans women use licorice root, spearmint tea, or black cohosh to block T.
The TERFs—trans exclusionary radical feminists (think JK Rowling)— will do awful things to any trans woman they encounter. To them, trans women are vectors, men in disguise who will turn into raging beasts if they ever lose access to hormone blockers.
The local group of TERFs in Boston are merciless.
While most of the local group of TERFs travel on foot, their leader Teach—aka Queen TERF—rides a motorcycle.
While nowhere is free from the infected, the coast is at least a little free.
The casual cry of infected people sounds like the deep chuff tigers make to warn each other off.
Now let’s get to the story.
Characters:
Fran, a trans woman
Beth, a trans woman, savvy with a bow and arrow
Robbie, a trans man who has been on his own for a long time, savvy with a rifle
Indi, a medical expert who helps Fran and Beth process and refine meds and hormones
Ramona, a TERF under Teach’s command
PART 1: Misandry
Chapter I: XX
POV Character: Fran
Fran and Beth are headed to the New England coast, where it should be safer thanks to the infected not doing so well trying to cross water.
Using a bow and carbon-fiber arrow, Fran and Beth kill a man turned by the virus. They harvest his organs for the bits they use to make hormone blockers and estrogen. Fran worries what would happen to her if they ever ran out of the means to make spiro and E.
As if to remind her how bad things really are, they next encounter a squad of TERFs—what Beth calls “chromosome crusaders.” Beth can’t believe their luck, both good and bad. She pulls back an arrow and prepares to assassinate this group’s leader, a 40-something woman named Teach with an XX tattooed on her forehead.
Fran’s body is in a kind of hyper-aroused state, and she experiences intrusive sexual fantasies about Teach and other TERFs in the group.
Chapter II: Crotch Rocket
POV Character: Beth
Beth misses and hits a random girl who was standing behind Teach. Fran and Beth run, with both sustaining injuries from arrows shot by the TERFs.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Endurance is a finite resource, and Fran feels tired and hopeless. And then Teach rides a motorcycle to the top of a hill and opens fire with a sub-machine gun.
The sound, however, draws a crowd of infected men, which is enough of a diversion for Fran and Beth to escape.
Once safely away, Fran helps stitch up Beth’s wounds.
Chapter III: The Prize Drawer
World building:
Beth was a high school track-and-field dropout.
Fran was a pre-med fuckup.
There are sometimes dentists here and there who survived the plague, but when it comes to a medical specialist, you need to have something worth trading, and you need to trust them not to turn two trans women over to the TERFs.
POV Character: Fran
Fran has a long-running injury: a broken tooth. Beth plans to perform impromptu surgery tomorrow and take it out.
Fran is feeling even more tired. So tired she even feels weary of Bethany.
The two eat the testicles they harvested from the infected man. Harvested testicles have proven to be a great source of estrogen.
The next day, Beth pulls out Fran’s broken tooth with pliers. As a reward for enduring the surgery, Beth offers her a mini Snickers bar (Fran’s favorite).
In the fugue of pain from the surgery, Fran has desperate dreams and remembers that eight years ago—before the plague—she’d been very close to having gender-affirming facial surgery. Very close, she thinks, to being a girl.
But she wasn’t going to get bottom surgery, which would have meant that when T-day hit, she would have had such high testosterone that she’d have turned into one of the infected. It’s an awful trade, but it’s the one she got served.
They hide in an abandoned van, where they see the squad of TERFs drive past, headed north.
Chapter IV: CHAD
World building:
CHAD: slang for infected men
POV Character: Beth
Fran says that she heard that the TERFs went to Boston, breaking down doors and dragging trans women into the street. To the TERFs, trans women are the same as infected men. Just time bombs waiting to kill you.
Beth wonders if the infected men are still self-aware. Do they remember their families? Their lives? Or are they happy being free to rape, kill, eat, piss, shit wherever they please? Maybe this world is what they always wanted.
Beth and Fran make camp on the roof of a rest stop. They pull the ladder up after themselves. The infected are stupid but can still climb.
While Fran sleeps, Beth contemplates this new world…and whether she can spare time for a shave. This is wonderfully affirming in that Beth discards caring whether anyone else will care. A shave would make her feel better, and so she deserves it.
Her rumination is interrupted by a herd of infected men chasing down, catching, and slaughtering a desperate deer.
The next morning, she drops from the roof while Fran is still sleeping. She attempts to shave but is attacked by an infected man. When it seems she has lost and is going to get killed, Fran rescues her with a brick to the Chad’s head.
Chapter V: Not All Men
POV Character: Robbie
Robbie uses a rifle to kill a horde of infected men. Most automatic firearms are seized up and useless at this point, but weapons built around WW2 can be refurbished and made functional.
He thinks briefly on the dysphoria he feels being a person who has periods, but then he remembers how he had to find serenity for the whole thing once the virus made it so he could probably never take testosterone again. Trans men now have to find their masculinity in other ways.
When he returns to his camp, he hears two unidentified women are already there, sifting through his supplies and taking a little for themselves. He picks out features in their appearance that he thinks identify the women as trans.
Despite a desperate loneliness, Robbie remains hidden until the two trans women take what they want and leave.
Chapter VI: Dee Licious
POV Character: Fran
We immediately discover the two trans women were Beth and Fran.
Fran thinks of how quickly “XX” formed as slang for cis women to identify each other, like saying, “I have the right chromosomes.” These cis women embrace an embarrassingly ignorant stance on gender that doesn’t include perfectly normal variations among cis, trans, and intersex people.
Fran wonders if they could make it to California and start fresh, but that would mean leaving behind a third character we haven’t yet met named Indi. She is a cis woman who refines estrogen for them, which they both take and trade with others for resources.
She encounters a herd of goats and is consumed with the need to hold them, pet them, and hopefully feel safe for a moment. Fran’s love language is definitely Touch.
The title of the chapter comes from the legend of a trans woman who, after T-day, de-transitioned so as to live as a Daddy in safety. But the TERFs got to her anyway and hung her.
This is all mixed up with Fran thinking about how well she passes as a woman—and how well Beth doesn’t.
The rumination makes Fran lonely, and she asks Beth if she wants to fuck, though what she really wanted to ask was to be fucked. A subtle difference.
After they do it, Fran lays awake, maudlin, lonely, and yearning for a taste of normal.
Chapter VII: Bowstring
POV Character: Beth
The next morning, Beth and Fran spot a horde of infected men chase after someone. The figure has a rifle and disappears up a tree. And the infected Chads are getting closer to Fran and Beth.
With time running out, Beth needs Fran’s help to restring her crossbow. Beth struggles not to lose her temper with Fran throughout the whole process, because simple instructions about how to fix the crossbow don’t make sense to Fran. But they ultimately do get the crossbow fixed just in time to kill one of the infected men who have found them.
They escape through a house’s attic and onto the roof, where they mount their defense and witness the rifle-owner mounting their own defense from the top of a tree.
When Beth gets separated from Fran, an infected man takes her to the ground and violates her. Before he can finish, Fran rescues her. Beth wishes she were dead so she wouldn’t have to wake up to this again.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
It’s worth noting that while Fran sees Beth as too mannish to pass as a woman, Robbie sees Beth as a woman from the beginning. He sees Beth as big and broad shouldered, but clearly a woman. He sees Fran as what his grandfather would have called “petite.”
Robbie comes upon them as Fran is working quickly to tend to Beth’s injuries. He recognizes the women as the two who stole from him last night.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth wakes up—then realizes she might still be dreaming. She thinks she sees Robbie and Fran having sex. Robbie has a vagina, and Fran has a penis, so they are able to have vaginal penetrative sex.
Beth thinks: I will never look that right with another person.
Chapter VIII: Sleepover
POV Character: Fran
It turns out Fran and Robbie were having sex after all. Monogamy isn’t the default in these post-apocalyptic relationships. Sometimes, the need for release in the face of this bleak world is the most two people can ask from each other.
The next morning, Fran feels the afterglow. But she also feels bad for Beth, who is bleeding from her wounds as she walks.
They enter the city of Seabrook intending to reunite with Indi, the cis woman who helps them make estrogen. On the way, Fran, Beth, and Robbie see a group of TERFs have transformed Town Hall into their sanctuary. This danger remains as they make their way around them to Indi’s house.
Star Wars reference: Fran had heard there was a Gates baby somewhere in Connecticut who kept a big pit full of men in her bunker and fed them anyone who pissed her off, like Jabba the Hutt serving his dancers up raw to the stop-motion monster under his palace.
They arrive at Indi’s house. Indi is a woman of size who criticizes Fran’s medical treatment of Beth’s wounds, then takes Beth into privacy to tend to the wounds left by her violation.
POV Character Switch: Beth
Beth begs Indi to have sex with her, a way to process wounds that are more than skin deep, but Indi insists she rest instead. There is a quiet, deep space between them yearning to be filled.
POV Character Switch: Fran
Fran talks with Indi about leaving Seabrook and moving to a commune, but Indi is not able to make that journey. She is instead taking up Sophie Widdel’s offer to relocate to her bunker palace just outside Exeter. The only price is for Indi to help Sophie get pregnant.
Sophie is a billionaire heiress who was lucky enough to have a huge bunker—called The Screw—with tons of supplies. Living in the bunker would be a huge step up in quality of life, but at what cost?
Indi says she’s leaving for the bunker tomorrow. Fran and Beth are welcome to come with her. But it’s not certain yet whether they’ll go along.
Later, Robbie gives Fran the cold shoulder. Fran rubs Indi’s feet and listens to her advice on how to get Robbie to open up. Robbie was living on his own for a long time. He’ll need Fran to take care of him, at least a little. As it is, Robbie was responding in part to his guilt for getting Fran and Beth caught in a frenzy of infected men.
Fran takes her advice—and wow does it work! Fran has passionate sex with Robbie again.
POV Character Switch: Beth
Beth awakens to the TERFs broadcasting on loudspeakers the message that the world is better off without men. Women can now live free from misogyny and patriarchy. The whole thing makes Beth think of how her aunt’s long-ago transphobic email, referring to Beth as her “nephew” when explaining why she was enforcing strict boundaries with Beth ever being around her kids again.
What scares Beth most aren’t the women shouting bigotry. What scares her most are the cis women who stay silent in the face of transphobia. We all like to think we’d be the first to speak up against Nazis, but it’s easy to fall into silent complicity.
PART TWO: The New Womyn’s Commonwealth
Chapter I: Sicut Patribus, Sit Deus Nobis
World building: the Maryland Womyn’s Legion doesn’t accept non-op trans women, but they do allow protestors outside City Hall to proclaim “trans women are women.”
POV Character: Ramona
Ramona is a member of the Womyn’s Legion.
She and a trans woman named Feather lay together in a home located in the same city we were just in. Scandalous. Ramona wouldn’t want anyone to know she chases trans women.
Ramona has sex with Feather. To people who are cisgender and do not have any noticeable variations to their anatomy, the sex may seem kinky. But for people with normal variations, such as a trans woman who had an orchiectomy but retains their penis, what seems kinky may just be normal vanilla to them.
The sex is interrupted by a call for Ramona to report to City Hall ASAP.
Ramona passes by Major Molly Lang, who can tell Ramona just came from a potentially kinky interlude. She tells Ramona she’d better not have been with “that thing” again, referring to the trans woman Feather. Ramona lies and says nope, her having sex with Feather in the past was a mistake she won’t repeat.
As Ramona heads to meet with Teach, we learn Ramona was with Teach in the opening chapters, when Beth shot the arrow that missed Teach and hit a different girl instead.
When Ramona meets with Teach, we learn she joined the Legion after her mother died (eaten by her own sons). Ramona was inspired by seeing Teach speak, so she joined Captain Rodham’s platoon. Would that be a reference to Hillary Rodham dropping the last name Clinton after Bill was infected?
Teach informs Ramona that she is being assigned a new command. Ramona worries that eventually, she’ll be found out as a traitor who loves having sex with the trans woman Feather.
Quotes:
“Shoulder to shoulder,” she said, almost automatically. “That’s the only way the sisterhood survives. Ma’am.”
Chapter II: The Brat
POV Character: Fran
Fran, Beth, Robbie, and Indi arrive at the bunker-turned-underground palace that promises to be their new home. This place has modern luxuries, like running water, electricity, even a movie theater. After they enter through large blast doors, Sophie Widdel welcomes them in by saying, “This is going to be so much fun!”
Sophie is the heiress who runs the bunker. She maintains authority because the bunker storage can only be unlocked through her eyeball and handprint.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie feels terrified. It’s been so long since he was around any people. He could easily leave and be let go. A huge part of him wants that to happen, but another part is falling hard for Fran.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Everyone is shown to separate rooms. Fran and Robbie whisper in the hallway, just quietly enough that Beth, in her bedroom, can’t hear what they’re saying.
As Beth falls asleep, she wonders just how safe they are here.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi discusses the future with Sophie, agreeing to provide processed estrogen for over seventy women in this bunker town. In exchange, Indi, Fran, Beth, and Robbie will be permitted to live in The Screw—that’s the name given to this bunker palace. The bunker is supplemented by the labor of a community encampment living just outside its walls.
Sophie introduces them to her right-hand woman, Dorothy, aka Doe.
The whole time she’s talking to Sophie, Indi feels the pain of her knees, the sweat from her journey, and she wishes she could be alone for solitary comfort, but she presses on so they’ll see her as strong and persistent.
Sophie reveals that she lost her parents first when her dad became infected, then when her mother killed herself, unable to bear the loss. Now Sophie, barely twenty, is the heiress to this bunker known as The Screw.
Sophie will let Indi and her chosen family stay, but only if Indi helps her get pregnant soon. She leads Indi to a captured infected man, who will be the source of the sperm she’ll use. Sophie keeps him like a pet. She has domesticated him enough for him to rub his muzzled face against her hand, but there’s no denying how dangerous keeping him here is for everyone.
Pop culture references: Redwall!
Quote: “That’s not a problem,” said Indi. Her knees ached and a hot, tight knot of pain was growing in the small of her back, but if she sat now they would remember her like that forever: weak. Soft. So she stood, and smiled through it. She had a whole drawer full of different smiles for when she needed them.
Don’t sit. Don’t eat. Her back felt as though someone had knotted ribbons of barbed wire around her spine. She’d forgotten to use talcum powder before leaving Seabrook and her thighs were chafing, sweat caught between them and under the lowermost roll of her belly. She wished she was alone, free to lean naked against a work surface and let the dry, cool recycled air that blew in through the theater’s vents run over her.
Chapter III: Never Have I Ever
POV Character: Fran
Fran cooks breakfast with an assortment of available foods she hasn’t seen in two years.
The chapter title comes from the characters playing the game Never Have I Ever, in which Robbie admits he once set someone’s house on fire, and everyone admits they’ve prayed to God.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Drunk after the events, Robbie dreams of a memory in which his family took him to church and lay hands on him to expel the demon they believed was causing him to be trans. He played along but secretly prayed that God would make him a man.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi thinks about what it will take for Sophie to get pregnant from an infected man she keeps like a pet. She wonders what she’s gotten them into.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Intersex characters are a part of this worldbuilding. A character Fran refers to as “Penn State” tells her that they will want to build a new trade line with Seabrook to provide the medication that keeps their children and people with polycystic ovarian syndrome/PCOS from going feral from the virus. While lots of people who have PCOS are not intersex, a large portion of people who have PCOS are intersex.
As part of Fran’s intake, Penn State fills out a form in which she ticks off that Fran is “F.” A woman. Which sends a jolt of euphoria through Fran. People might suspect she is trans, but the official word will be that she is a woman. Trans women are women.
At one point, Fran remembers her younger self pre-transition. She does not deadname herself. The text refers to herself as [redacted].
Chapter IV: Safe Space
POV Character: Beth
The story moves forward enough in time for Beth’s wounds to have healed into a slight limp that should also fade.
To pull her weight living in The Screw, Beth works farm shift with a girl named Meg. In a sudden moment of impulsive bravery, Beth kisses her and finds the kiss returned. Could this place actually be good for them?
Switch POV Character: Ramona
It’s a good thing Fran and Beth left when they did, because Ramona leads her platoon through a house of trans women. They capture them, line them up, and take aim to shoot them. One girl struggles to pull the trigger. With Major Molly Lane close by and watching, Ramona pushes through and convinces the girl to FIRE.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth worries about their place in this society. Herself and other non-op trans girls who some see as testosterone time bombs. At any point, they could get sick and turn. She remembers how badly that worked out for her five years ago. But for the moment, she is safe and invited to talk to the head of farm work.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
In the bar that served for the establishing shot of Cheers, Ramona dances the night away and receives the “XX” tattoo the Legion says declares her to be a real woman.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth had a sexual encounter with Meg, but now she regrets it, because Meg had second thoughts and now doesn’t want anything to do with Beth. The rejection makes Beth feel intense dysphoria, as though it confirms she’s not a real woman. Robbie attempts to counsel her through it, saying that sometimes another person is just hurting. Getting rejected because the other person is in pain doesn’t make you a bad person.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona heads to see a trans sex worker named Feather, and that does not go well. Feather knows Ramona led a squad to kill a bunch of trans women. Feather is a trans woman. She tells Ramona not to come here like this again. Ramona tells her to shut up.
Pop Culture References: Gordan Ramsay, Netrunner, Magic: the Gatherine, Donna Tartt novels, Cheers (the literal bar where they filmed in Boston!), Courtney Love, Indigo Girls
Quotes:
It was actually good that the world had ended, because now no one could make her play Settlers of Catan.
“To a world without cocks, and the cunts who’ll get us there.”
Chapter V: Daddy Issues
POV Character: Fran
It is six weeks later.
Fran, a good swimmer, joins a bunch of other girls for a dip in the bunker’s pool. She is briefly haunted by the memory of doing so before T-day, when she was younger and still seen as a boy. But then she looks around at the group of women and feels safe. She wonders whether being here means the run for safety and simple existence is finally over.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi prepares her lab with the help of an assistant. Corinne, an aide to Sophie, questions Indi why she hasn’t yet moved forward helping Sophie get pregnant. Indi explains that if they were implanting an embryo, things would be easy regardless of the baby’s sex or chromosomal makeup. But with her getting pregnant from an already-infected man, the baby will always come out as XY and will always eat its way out of the mother.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran rides with a second person along the coast to a location where they will talk with the city council. Fran worries what will happen to her if anyone finds out she is trans. Especially now that the TERFs are taking up more space. If having a certain set of chromosomes is a dealbreaker for these people, it’s only a matter of time before they find out she is a woman with a variation they refuse to accept as legitimate.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie rides through the city in an armored truck with three others, all of them holding guns. He sees trans people and wonders why he’s not out here with them instead of in the bunker. He has deep feelings for Fran, but he doesn’t trust his decision to live with them in The Screw.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth is filled with horror and dysphoria. She wasn’t rotated to a different farm shift. She’s been rotated into a role as a sex worker. She asked to be assigned to something like the kitchen. Instead, she is at this place’s version of a brothel. She will dress as a man and pretend to be a “daddy” for eager cisgender women.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie rides with a group of people out manhunting (Houston, we have a title). They are doing what Fran and Beth did at the opening of the book, hunting men and dissecting them for their balls and kidneys, the organs used to block T and make E.
Robbie feels out of place not just from his background as a trans man, but because he is an indigenous man. His father was Taos Pueblo. Robbie feels the pressure not just to be perceived as a man, but to be perceived as a white woman’s version of a man. In another life, he might have come to the surrounding forests and been taught a different shape of masculinity.
Robbie wonders, as he makes a fresh kill, what happened to the last doctor who Indi has replaced.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran arrives at the Shaw house, where the council holds meetings with inquirers. Fran expected to see TERFs in town. She expected to see them with the council. But she freezes when she sees Ramona, one of the TERFs who attacked them at the opening of the novel.
Pop culture references: Mad Men
Chapter VI: Dirty Work
POV Character: Indi
Indi now begins a terrifying part of getting Sophie pregnant. Sophie wants the sperm from her captured man. And since no one is going to have sex with the thing…
Indi’s jerks the man off while he’s hopefully tranquilized enough not to wake up and kill her. For a moment, Indi feels guilty and ashamed, wondering if what she did is the same as rape.
Switch POV Character: Fran
While Fran listens to her people negotiate with the council to exchange food for estrogen, she worries like hell that Ramona will recognize her. So far, it doesn’t happen. Two guesses how Fran’s body responds to the fear once back with Robbie.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Proving her worth and established place at the bunker as a doctor, Indi removes a woman’s appendix. In conversation with the woman helping her perform the surgery, she learns that the previous doctor died after getting sick.
Chapter VII: The Cradle of Beauty
POV Character: Beth
To prove her own place at the bunker palace, Beth serves in her role as a Daddy. She’s not having a good time. She reminds herself this is just a job. A way to avoid getting killed by the TERFs, aka the Knights of JK Rowling. It doesn’t mean she isn’t a woman.
Later at dinner with Fran and Robbie, we learn Beth is lying to them. She tells them she’s working in the kitchen. She can’t bear to admit she’s now a sex worker pretending to be a “daddy” for cis girls. The most she can do is shed a few quickly silenced tears.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie and Fran have passionate sex. Afterward, Fran tells him about seeing Ramona at the city council meeting. Robbie becomes angry and concerned that Fran is taking a needless risk if it puts her in front of the Knights of JK Rowling/TERFs. Fran says nah, they won’t clock her as trans. Half of them look more like a man than her.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran visits Sophie, who has enough resources for them to have electricity and a video game system to play Mario Kart.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie goes with Beth to the outskirts of town. Along the way, he discusses his frustration with Fran. They’re not even technically in a relationship—they haven’t had “the talk.” But he’s worried about what to do given their honeymoon period is ending and they’re fighting.
Beth’s only advice—based on being friends and sometimes lovers with Fran for years—is to either break up with her or just let her do what she wants. If he makes Fran look at herself, she won’t love Robbie anymore.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran notes that Sophie’s bed and bedroom is a palace unto itself, an emporium of luxury and comfort.
Sophie asks Fran to eat her out, and Fran complies, wishing she could in a sense suck out the femininity from Sophie into herself and change her genitals into a mirror image of Sophie’s.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie returns to an empty room and understands Fran isn’t going to come back tonight. Is this confirmation that he’s destined to be alone? That he’s better off staying emotionally isolated?
But while alone, he discovers a folded piece of paper in his pocket, presumably left by someone in the city. It says for him to meet them at midnight tomorrow. “Come alone.”
Switch POV Character: Fran
Sophie offers to bring over a surgeon who will perform bottom surgery on Fran.
Fran accepts, in return agreeing to have penetrative sex with Sophie. This is a big deal because Sophie already asked Fran if she ever “topped.” Fran said no, but now with the promise of surgery, she makes a compromise.
Pop culture references: Mario Kart, Lana Del Rey, Mitski, One Direction
Chapter VIII: Generation Z
POV Character: Ramona
Ramona watches as Teach delivers a sermon to the city of Seabrook about the evils of men, masculinity, and patriarchy. She tells them that if trans or intersex, nothing will ever make them into a real woman. They are just time bombs waiting to kill more women.
But if they will ally themselves with the Maenad Corps, Teach will have her people give the trans women hormones and surgery to fully aid their transition. Note that Teach says this will bring them as close as they can come to real womanhood, but for Teach, these will never be real women.
A few people leave in protest, then a LOT leave when Teach brings out a caged trans woman who was eventually infected.
Afterward, Ramona rides with Teach into town. When they stop to have lunch, Teach tells her that going forward, she reveals the real reason she brought her Legion of TERFs to Seabrook. Her plan is to build a trade empire and fortress around this coast city, where authority on the water can give them authority over the world.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie meets the person who left the note in the library stacks. Their name is Zia. They reveal to Robbie that they asked to meet because Beth isn’t working out as a daddy and is going to be sold to a chain gang.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona has just finished having sex with the trans girl Feather, but they get into a fight that leaves Ramona reminding Feather that they have no real future together. Feather hurts Ramona where it hurts, accusing Ramona of having once had sex with men. It’s a double-sided insult, saying that Ramona is not a Gold Star Lesbian both because she has had sex with cisgender men, as well as having sex with the trans women that TERFs declare are secretly just men.
Feather leaves and accepts she’s no longer welcome at the brothel.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi gets visited by a woman named Doe, who tells Indi they’ll have the medical equipment Indi needs as soon as they strip a series of clinics. Doe tells Indi it’s time to go see Sophie again.
Indie wonders whether this is worth it. Would they let Fran and Beth stay if Indi left? She’s pretty sure they wouldn’t.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran tells Robbie that she doesn’t believe Beth will really be sold to a chain gang. She thinks—mirroring Indi’s concern—that they’re only allowed to be here because of Indi. But rather than convince Fran that they’d sell Beth, she thinks instead someone would try to trick them into leaving on their own.
Robbie doesn’t buy it. He really believes some terrible things are happening here. He provokes Fran to at least consider what Sophie would do if men got into the camp.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi discovers Sophie already used the infected man to impregnate test subjects. A lot of them are now in the process of being eaten alive from the inside out. Sophie invites Indi to help who she can, and Indi slaps her.
Things could suddenly all fall apart. Slapping the spoiled heiress brat tends to bring consequences.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona returns to Feather and apologizes. They make up with sex, but peace is a long way off. Feather wounds Ramona with one word, calling her “daddy.”
Pop culture references: New Moon (referred to as the Mormon lady’s vampire story)
Quotes: The rest was mostly young adult stuff, too, the kind of thing he’d read before the end of the world took all the appeal out of stories about beautiful teenagers being brave or hugging fascists until they turned good.
Chapter IX: Freon
POV Character: Fran
Fran rides with Nam-Joo down the coast, wondering at Robbie’s question.
What would Sophie do if men got into the camp?
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie hopes the person knocking on his door is Beth, but it’s a girl named Sam. She’s here with security to ask Robbie to help them raid a clinic.
Robbie can’t be sure, but he assumes the worst. He’s guessing they found out he’s been conspiring with Zia. He has a nightmarish vision of them taking him into the woods for punishment.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran continues down the coast with Nam-Joo, where they see a group of women working hard to disassemble and salvage parts from ships and machines.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth is off duty at the brothel, so she’s surprised when a woman named Sylvie knocks on her door. Sylvie says there’s a freon leak and they need to evacuate the building.
Fear is in the air, and Beth infers that this is a lie. And the only reason to lie is the worst-case scenario. Beth believes they’re rounding up all the trans women in the brothel and taking them outside to kill them.
Beth attacks Sylvie first, but someone comes to help Sylvie. Beth gets knocked out.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie is helping Sam and a group of others raid clinics. They’re well on their way, encountering occasional obstacles that force their patience, such as a swarm of men crossing through their path.
Robbie assumes they mean to hurt him, so he’s strategizing how to get Doe’s gun and fight his way free. But he makes his move too late and escapes only because a feral man crashes in and jumps onto Doe.
Robbie escapes.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Eleven women died, but one of them did give birth to a girl. So now Indi is extracting embryos from Sophie, wondering if this is really worth the cost of it all.
Switch POV Character: Fran
While Nam-Joo negotiates the trade and security agreement, Fran thinks longingly about the newfound promise of surgery. She will feel whole if that happens. She may never have to worry or go hungry again.
Could this be as good as it seems?
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie makes it out of the clinic and to the empty van, thinking yes, he’s going to escape! He made it! But he turns around and sees Doe has a gun leveled at him. He takes his chance and charges her as the gun goes off.
Chapter X: Neutered and Exempted
POV Character: Beth
Beth wakes up alive, but now she’s trapped in a bus with the other women who were, as promised, sold to a chain gang.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona becomes the woman who says nothing. She falls into silent complicity when TERFs drag out women from the brothel where Feather works. The TERFs judge and then shoot them one by one. With a quiet horror, Ramona says nothing when they drag out and kill Feather.
Ramona then meets with Teach, who gives a startling speech on why fascism will save womankind. She also lets Ramona know that she was aware Ramona was sleeping with Feather. Yikes! But Teach dismisses it, saying everyone gets unclean urges—and the reader will remember that Fran also began the story having irrational sex fantasies about Teach and Ramona.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth is almost certainly going to die. She’s taken away from the van and to where she assumes will be the place she is killed—but Robbie rushes in and saves Beth.
What is he doing here? How did he find her? The story has skipped that part but is going to reveal what happened.
Robbie tells Beth how he was found out and almost got killed in the clinic raid.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
A brief flashback showing how Robbie escaped Doe. The gun went off and hit Robbie in the shoulder. The two fought until Robbie won, leaving Doe outside with her gun to defend herself against a swarm of incoming men. Rather than face an insurmountable swarm, Doe chose to shoot herself.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Robbie and Beth return to the bus, which has been liberated thanks to Zia and her group of insurgents.
Robbie’s plan is to return and free Indi to come with them. However good things might seem, Robbie now knows only danger waits for them in Seabrook.
Quotes:
Teach sniffed. “Some of the Matriarchs are stuck in an obsolete paradigm of government. They still think in terms of territory. Ownership. Masculine thinking. But the world has changed, Pierce.” Her pen scratched in the silence. “Power now is a fluid thing. It comes from understanding. From nurturing. The mistake we made before the plague was to rely on print media and academic discourse—insular, sterile parts in the machinery of human society. Things in which most women rightly evince little interest.
“Our sisterhood, what we’re building here and up the coast, will outlive every lecture series, every textbook. We’re making a womb, the strongest thing there is, and once we’ve solved the fertility problem it will carry our new world. A world without rape. Without wife beaters. Without borders or nations or races. A world where women, after a hundred thousand years of terror, can be safe.”
And
“You know she came to see me a few times,” Beth rasped, spitting bloody mucus. “Got herself a little daddy fix. What a fucking ass she had. I mean I guess you’ve got it, too, but I can see the appeal. You two ever, you know, I don’t have my hands free, but you remember Game of Thrones, right?”
Pop culture references: Game of Thrones
Chapter XI: Off-Duty
POV Character: Fran
Fran is at a lively party at Seabrook’s best sea-side restaurant. Captain Viv—a TERF—invites Fran to dance. As if to prove Teach’s point that everyone gets urges, Fran can’t stop herself from fantasizing about sex with this TERF. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go too far.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie, Zia, and the rest of the group are sneaking back into the city by using Doe’s van and pretending they’re Doe and her crew.
As Robbie, Zia, and the crew return to the city through the blast doors, Robbie can’t help but wonder if he’s neglected the neediest people.
Quote: How many times had he turned away from the unease he felt at seeing these wan, starving people in their shabby tents, telling himself there was nothing he could do, that he was just one person in a larger system, the same way he’d watched Ferguson and Standing Rock and thought, Well, what can I do?
The quiet turns to carnage as the guards realize it’s not Doe and her crew in the van, it’s Robbie and Zia, whose onslaught wipes out the guards and leaves them ready to continue into the city.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona feels a subtle shame over letting Feather die like that. She’s still processing it when she finds a girl making out with Fran. And suddenly she remembers where she first saw Fran—at the beginning of the story when the two trans girls ran from them.
Switch POV Character: Indi
After slapping Sophie, Indi knows she’s on thin ice. She’s worried what consequences have already gone to Fran, Beth, and Robbie. She gives Sophie an injection, knowing she’ll die if this process doesn’t get Sophie pregnant.
A guard interrupts them to announce Robbie, Zia, and their crew killed the guards at the gate and are making their way in this direction, toward the Screw.
While Sophie argues with a guard about what to do for defense, a woman named Mariana grabs Indi, revealing herself as a spy to help Indi escape—before Sophie’s infected man is set loose into the room.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie and Zia make their way further toward the Screw. The next step is to get Sophie, the only person whose handprint and eyeball open up the storage.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi is with Mariana in the bathroom, listening to Sophie’s now-freed infected man come after her. They listen to him rape and then begin to eat her. Mariana removes a hidden gun from in the bathroom.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Thanks to Robbie and Zia’s onslaught on the town and the Screw, Beth is reunited with Indi.
Indi feels overwhelmed with guilt over her mistake nearly getting everyone killed. Beth reassures her that everything is fine. They’re going to be okay.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Staying hidden, Ramona watches Viv make out with Fran. Ramona assumes that Viv doesn’t know Fran is trans, otherwise she would only be kissing her like this to play with Fran like a toy.
Until now, Ramona has stepped aside whenever a trans girl is in trouble. What will happen this time?
Viv reaches between Fran’s legs—and suddenly understands that Fran is trans. She takes out her gun to kill Fran. Without thinking, Ramona rushes forward, slices Viv’s neck, and tells Fran to get out of here.
Pop culture references: Elton John, Tony Danza, Pride & Prejudice, Kiera Knightly, Love Actually, GoldenEye
Part III: TERF War
Chapter I: Lighthouse
POV Character: Fran
Fran runs to the Screw, where she is met by Robbie, who tells her everything that has happened since last seeing her.
Robbie hates to say it, but he warned her. He told her something like this would happen. Fran starts to apologize. Robbie says save it for later.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth rides with Robbie and Fran out of town. She thinks how horrifying things were when this all started. She thinks how as good as things seemed for a minute, things never truly stopped being so horrifying and violent.
For a moment, Beth wishes she’d been killed so this was all over for her.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran has complex feelings about being reunited with Robbie. She assumes that she ran into him so conveniently because he meant to find her, to save her. But Robbie, angry, says that’s not true. It was just a coincidence. He was going to send someone in tomorrow to find her.
And that feels like rejection for Fran.
But for Robbie, it feels like righteous judgment. Who is Fran to disagree? She feels shame but agrees that she turned a blind eye to what was right in front of her. All it took was the promise of her surgical transition for her to close her eyes and look the other way. She became a member of silent complicity.
They arrive at the north hook of New Castle Island. They make camp near a lighthouse.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona talks with Teach, praying she believes her lie about how Viv died and Fran got free. It seems so, because Teach promotes Ramona to Captain and tells her she’s in charge of hunting down the people who did this.
Pop culture references: Nancy Pelosi, Ivanka Trump
Chapter II: The Beautiful People
POV Character: Robbie
The first and second night at the lighthouse, Robbie keeps avoiding Fran. He can’t forget what happened with Doe and then at the Screw. He can’t help but feel like he’s betrayed himself yet again, doing the co-dependent thing where he knows someone or a group of people aren’t good for him, but he rushes into enmeshment with them anyway, hoping beyond hope that this time they make him feel whole.
Zia urges Robbie to consider staying. Do what needs to be done to put this behind him.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth goes to Indi’s room and apologizes for all she’s done chasing Fran. She thought that if she could get Fran to love her, that would make her feel whole. But she sees now that was foolish. She sees now that the person she loves is Indi, and she’ll go wherever Indi goes. As the payoff to the intimacy hinted at between Beth and Indi in the beginning of the story, Indi responds with a deep kiss leading to more.
Quote: She stammered to a halt, unable to meet Indi’s eyes, unable to think anything but that she’d broken the rule. She’d offered herself as though someone might want her, as though she didn’t have to wait to be asked before her touch transmuted from invasion to caress. And then Indi’s arms were around her and she was falling back into the tangled sheets and blankets under the other woman’s soft, enveloping weight. Indi’s lips found hers.
Switch POV Character: Fran
At a circle of firelight, Fran listens to a couple of people argue whether Steve Martin survived the apocalypse. One of them claims to have seen him uninfected in a shopping mart six months ago.
Zia one-ups Fran by telling the story of what happened to JK Rowling. See the quotes below for the details of her death after T-day.
Fran and Robbie take each other’s hands and seem to make up. Perhaps Robbie will stay after all.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi remembers her ex-husband, how she compromised herself in order to be with him, and then how he finally got infected. She put him out of his misery with an overdose of morphine before he turned completely.
Pop culture references: Bilbo Baggins, Steve Martin
The Death of JK Rowling:
Zia leaned forward into the firelight, grinning evilly. “Fuck Steve Martin. Have the new girls heard what happened to the Harry Potter lady?” Most of the women around the fire groaned, though a few straightened up attentively…
“Okay, so, first off she ended up being a crazy TERF, like, super intense. When the news about t. rex started, she hired a bunch of woman contractors—remember Blackwater, those sickos in Iraq? She had them all up at her castle in Scotland with a bunch of her rich girlfriends and they were all drinking wine, kissing her ass, planning out how to rebuild society. They had their sons, husbands, whatever, in some kind of hermetically sealed guest house she’d had built special in case of germ warfare or something.”
“So, they get exactly one day into their girl-power retreat and then it turns out one of the friends has PCOS and doesn’t know it. She flips in the middle of the night and starts ripping into the other guests before someone knocks over a lamp or something. I guess they’d been stockpiling diesel and kerosene.” Zia mimed an explosion with her hands, fists coming together before unfurling into spread palms. “Anyway, the Blackwater bitches who survived the blast looted what was left of the place and bugged out. Left everyone else to burn alive, and finally the whole castle collapsed. Real Masque of the Red Death shit.”
Fran imagined the beams of that old castle coming down on her, crushing her body like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca because she wouldn’t let go of a dream of a woman who couldn’t be loved, or touched, or known. She imagined the heat searing her skin. The breathless moment of impact. Everyone around the fire sat silent, as though thinking the same thing.
“What happened to the men in the guest house?” asked Indi, accepting the joint from Steph and taking a dainty little hit.
“Oh, the locks and air filters all seized up when the castle’s generators blew,” said Zia. “They must have suffocated, but a girl I met who came over on the Saffron Spirit from Aberdeen a few years ago said when she and her friends went to pick the place over, they heard something scratching at the walls from the inside.”
Chapter III: Natural Woman
POV Character: Beth
Beth’s heart races when Zia invites them to stay, but on one condition: they help them kill TERFs. Fran worries how they’d make any ground. Aren’t there, like, 20,000 people in the Legion?
But Zia wants something different from Fran. She wants Fran to contact Ramona and see if she’ll help, especially now that Ramona is in charge of the Legion’s work in Seabrook. Fran has to hope Ramona is ready to pick a side.
Zia says Ramona was promoted because she’s also a chaser. Teach is using Ramona’s self-loathing as motivation to be even more brutal. That’s why Ramona was put in charge of cleansing every piece of land from here to Seabrook to be free of trans people.
Beth and Robbie offer to fight with Zia’s insurgents, who go by the name Fort Dykers.
Beth grips Indi’s hand to let her know she’ll never leave her. For the first time, here with Indi and all of the other girls, she feels sisterhood.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi is now solidly enough in a relationship with Beth to worry how she’ll ultimately hurt Beth beyond repair. She insists to herself that she, Beth, Fran, and Robbie are safe. They can depend on each other.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Proving what Teach believes about her, Ramona becomes hostile toward her staff when one asks whether they should really be celebrating the slaughter of trans women. Do it, sure. But celebrate it?
The fight is interrupted by a visitor for Ramona: it’s Fran.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth is invited to help code the computer system for the ship to wreck itself. The story does not yet specify where the ship will crash.
Chapter IV: Elephant
POV Character: Ramona
Ramona feels rage—then lust—when Fran asks her to join their cause. Ramona is not just a chaser of trans girls, but a chaser of the most forbidden in her home.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie cuts through a squad of TERFs and helps liberate a truck of trans women.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth helps mow through another squad of TERFs. The TERFs fight back until one of the women screams, which draws so many infected men that they’re quickly overrun.
Beth and Robbie are very good at hunting TERFs.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Ramona massages Fran’s prostate until she, despite the danger, has an orgasm. Ramona agrees to help Fran.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi is settling into her new position as doctor for the liberated people under Zia. She is now planning how they’ll get through winter with enough testicles and kidneys to keep, as well as scheduling when the boys will be close enough to puberty that an orchiectomy is the best way to prevent them from getting infected.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth and Zia come across an escaped elephant. They think no one will believe them.
Pop culture references, Spider-Man, Kraven the Hunter
Chapter V: Radical Consent
POV Character: Fran
Fran confesses to Indi that she didn’t want Ramona to do that to her, but she’d been terrified if she said no, Ramona would turn her in.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona wakes from a feverish wet dream. She can’t believe what she’s doing. Helping Fran? She’s going to get herself killed.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth eats a delicious meal with Dani. They’re falling for each other in a casual, open-ended way. Dani rushes off back to work, referring to them and Beth together as “Bricks laying bricks.”
A brick is a term meaning a trans person who will never pass. The stereotype is taken a step further by saying “bricks laying bricks,” which means a brick is only compatible with another brick.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Three weeks later and Ramona is full of even more confused guilt. And just as Teach promised, she uses that self-loathing to push herself to keep approving the death of trans women and the women who love them.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie isn’t feeling at home here. When he learns the Legion has taken prisoners, he wants to go rescue them, but Zia tells him anyone who tries to fight the government will just die. Robbie feels alone again, telling himself: It was never going to last.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona interrogates a prisoner. She tells the prisoner that helping trans women is unforgiveable. The prisoner says she tried to help the trans women because going after them would just be doing the same shit men had been doing to women.
Ramona insists they are men, but we know she’s having serious doubts about this. She’s so close to admitting that trans women are women. She’s close to picking a side.
Chapter VI: COCHLIOMYIA HOMINIVORAX
POV Character: Indi
A memorial service for a girl who died during the assault.
Indi realizes she loves Beth, even though she didn’t really like her when they first met three years ago. Indi is one person whose love we can trust, but will Beth return her love?
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona’s guilt continues to build. Teach tortures a girl who is accused of being a tranny lover. Ramona’s fear is equal to her guilt. She worries this tortured girl will soon be her.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Zia gives a rousing speech saying anyone is free to leave, but she wants everyone to stay, fight, and kill all the TERFs.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi speculates where the virus came from. Whether it was manmade or a sickness dropped from the stars by aliens. Whoever did it, she feels humanity may not survive.
Quotes:
There’ll be no one to sketch us if this place doesn’t win, she thought as one by one the Fort Dykers shared their anecdotes and memories. This will be it, and pocket by pocket the rest of us will follow until it’s just the Cisterhood forcing little boys into their little crossdresser Hitler Youth and finding reasons to accuse each other of masculine-coded behavior. They’ll win, and they won’t even like it.
Chapter VII: Galbraith
POV Character: Robbie
Robbie, Beth, and the rest of the Fort Dykers are huddled around a table. Robbie believes he will do whatever it takes to make sure Beth and Indi continue to be safe and happy.
Switch POV Character: Indi
To prove that point, Indi is having glorious sex with Beth. There may be more between them after all.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Robbie admits to Fran that years ago, he had a trans girlfriend. They holed up in a cabin, but then discovered the trans girl’s spiro wasn’t working. So he had to suffer through losing her to the infection. He tells Fran he never thought he’d have another friend like her. He tells Fran, “Thanks for asking me to stay.”
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona is horrified seeing that Teach has prepared a nearly unstoppable battleship she will use to destroy the rebels.
Chapter VIII: Moral Mandate
POV Character: Robbie
Robbie and the rest are holed up in the fort when a swarm of men come toward them. Robbie and others shoot them from the top of the fort’s wall. But then big vehicles are sent like missiles—no one inside, the accelerator held down with a brick and the driving wheel locked in place—through the men and toward the fort. The trucks crash into the wall, leaving a way open for the men and the TERFs.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Ramona is on the ship with Teach. The ship fires its guns at the fort and it’s AWFUL carnage.
Ramona feels ashamed. She keeps asking: Who am I?
Until now, she hasn’t picked a side. If she doesn’t do something, there won’t be a second side to choose.
Switch POV Character: Fran
The ship fires and blows apart the wall. Fran pulls an injured girl to safety.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth tries to survive the attack, too. She sees Fran pulling the injured girl. She feels the raw power as the ship out there blasts another hole through the fort’s walls. She worries whether Indi is okay.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
But as the onslaught continues, there is suddenly hope.
Teach is manning the offense when a girl jumps over the side of the boat. But why would she jump? For safety?
And suddenly Teach understands—someone has sabotaged the ship. The girl jumped to avoid the explosion. A big part of the ship explodes.
Ramona feels confused again. She knew this was going to happen, and then she let it happen. She’s close to deciding which side she’s truly on.
Pop culture references: Ride of the Valkyries
Chapter IX: Deadname
POV Character: Ramona
Fifty or sixty people out of one hundred and twenty survive the ship’s explosion. Ramona is ready to make a decision. Teach is still on the ship. Teach is now vulnerable. Ramona takes out a gun and points it at the back of Teach’s head.
She’ll pull the trigger in 3, 2, 1—
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth finds Indi alive and helping Fran provide medical help to an injured girl.
Beth takes up a weapon and goes outside to meet the infected men and TERFs coming through the breaks in the fort’s wall.
Switch POV Character: Ramona
Unfortunately, Teach is ready for Ramona. They fight. Teach shoots Ramona twice—once in the stomach, once in the leg. So Ramona charges her and takes her over the side of the ship.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie makes his way through the inside of the fort, a scene of blood and carnage. Violence is everywhere.
Switch POV Character: Fran
Fran goes to help an injured girl and pull her inside so Indi can give her medical attention.
But then Teach enters the room, gun ready, and Fran fears the worst is about to happen.
Teach fires a rain of bullets.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi provides medical attention to whoever she can, but it seems overwhelming. How long can this last?
Switch POV Character: Fran
Beth finds Fran, but it’s too late. Teach shot Fran all to hell and back.
Fran feels something loose in her stomach that shouldn’t be loose. She’s dying.
As she breathes her last, she watches the TERFs scramble to escape. In the clarity of death, Fran thinks that these TERFs are just men. They’re just men.
Switch POV Character: Teach
Teach is driven by rage, especially when she comes across Robbie. She changes out her gun’s banana clip and takes aim to kill Robbie. She clips his arm, but then Robbie turns with his own weapon: a nail gun.
One nail after another slams into Teach.
Teach thinks she can still get out of this. And with the thought of escape, she thinks back on all of the trans people throughout her life that she’s helped expose and destroy. Even before T-day, she had a brother who revealed they were actually her sister. Teach thinks back on that with more transphobia.
And then she thinks of the sad deaths—for her at least—of all the TERFs around her.
She believes she will win. She can still make this work.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Except Beth finds Teach, raises her crossbow, and fires an arrow through Teach’s mouth. She kicks Teach to make sure she dies and stays dead.
A final moment of horror comes as Teach looks up at her, only one good eye left, and she says, “Brandon.”
That was Beth’s deadname. And even as Teach dies, Beth can’t help but wonder: How did she know Beth’s deadname? But then she recalls what happened in the first chapter. They took a shot at Teach, missed, and in the chaos, Beth dropped her wallet. Ever since then, Teach knew Beth’s deadname. And now with Teach’s last breath, she uses it to hurt Beth.
Never change, Teach. Never change.
Epilogue: Garland
POV Character: Beth
Beth falls asleep that night full of grief for the losses of the day, especially the loss of her friend Fran.
Switch POV Character: Robbie
Robbie holds Fran’s dead hand. She’s under a sheet someone kindly placed over her body. He thinks how Fran asked him whether he was going to stay. He thinks how now, he doesn’t want to leave.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth visits Ramona, who somehow survived her wounds, including a hole in her head that has now begun to heal over.
Ramona begs Beth to let her stay here with them. She believes it’s peaceful. It would have made Feather happy to be here.
But Beth doesn’t care what Ramona sacrificed in order to get to this moment. She doesn’t want her here. She doesn’t want Ramona anywhere near them.
Switch POV Character: Indi
Indi removes the bullets from Fran’s body, talking to the dead girl so as to ease the suffering of preparing Fran’s body for burial. It’s a terrible loss.
Switch POV Character: Beth
Beth and Robbie bury Fran. It turns out Robbie is leaving after all, but not because he’s shutting himself off to the world again. Being with Fran and Beth taught him the meaning of love and belonging. And so he is headed to New Mexico to see if any of his family origin survived. He’d like to see them again.
Once Robbie is gone beyond a speck on the horizon, Beth sits in the unfilled grave with Fran’s body. Just for now, she thinks on her most treasured memories of Fran. Just for now, she still has her fear of the future and what’s to come, but she still has this moment. A chance to say goodbye to Fran, the girl who was always beautiful and beloved by Beth.
Links and Stuff
The Future Is Bloody: On Gretchen Felker-Martin’s “Manhunt” | LA Review of Books
In 'Manhunt,' a virus turns anyone with enough testosterone into a feral beast | NPR
Book Review: ‘Manhunt’ | What Is Quinn Reading?
Testosterone Poisoning: Manhunt | TOR.com
Book Review: MANHUNT | Seize the Press
Review: MANHUNT | Equal Opportunity Reader
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt is more human than its critics (interview with author) | The Fader
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s ‘Manhunt’ Is a New Kind of Horror Novel | Shondaland
Gretchen Felker-Martin on “Manhunt,” Martyrdom, and the Unimportance of Being Valid (Interview) | AutoStraddle
Manhunt Fan Art | Neon Jawbone
More Manhunt Fan Art | MyVariantCover