52 Project #29: The Last Boy (Patreon)

Based on "The Screwfly Solution", by Alice Sheldon writing as James Tiptree Jr. That was a very, very dark story. This one is... *slightly* less dark, but that is not saying much.

***

Roy is very excited, running, practically skipping, ahead on the trail. “Uncle Matt! This is great! I can see the woods up ahead already!”

Matt forces a smile, because he’s very much afraid of how this expedition might end, but he has to try. He has to have hope. “Sure is. Ready to go hunting?”

“You bet!” Roy turns around and flashes Matt a big, heartwarming smile. His face is pocked with acne and he’s late to have lost his last baby tooth; it’s a gap on the upper left side of his face. He looks so young, so boyish. Which he is; he’s thirteen. Thirteen is still a kid. Matt’s sixty; thirteen’s practically a baby to him. They grow up so damn fast. “You think we’ll bag a deer?”

“We might. Or we might bag a goose. Or we might come home empty-handed. The point to hunting is to be quiet and patient, and let nature bring to you whatever it will.”

They hike up to the tree line. This is one of very, very few forest areas that’s still being tended and managed by people. The rocky hiking trail up to the tree line’s been kept clear of scrub; there are bushes and tall grasses on either side of the trail, but nothing on the wide stretch of packed dirt.

From here Matt can look down the side of the mountain, to the acres planted with corn and wheat, the women working in the rows, a couple of men stationed to sit by the road with their guns, watchful for whoever might come by. He knows them both. Good boys. He took Evan out on a hunting trip like this one, ten years ago, and they came home with a deer and a couple of rabbits. Jase was called Lisa back then, and didn’t need to go on a hunting trip like this. The tradition of the hunting trip when you’re thirteen isn’t for the girls, or the gay boys, or the trans kids. Most of them resent that, until they get to be old enough to understand why.

“This is the best,” Roy says. “Just me and you, Uncle Matt. How long has it been since we got to just spend time together, just two men?”

“I think you were 10. We went out to the river and went fishing, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. I didn’t catch anything,” Roy laughs. “You got a couple of fish, though, right?”

“Yeah,” Matt says, smiling as he remembers. “Had to throw ‘em back, though. They were too small.”

“Why don’t we do stuff like that more often, Uncle Matt? Just hang out, without all these stupid girls around?”

Matt sighs. “You have school and I’ve got work; crops don’t grow themselves and we don’t get security by going on vacation.”

“Yeah, but why do we have to even live here? Why don’t we go live somewhere where there’s just men?”

“That’s a little hard to find. There’s not a lot of men around,” Matt points out.

“Because the stupid girls wouldn’t go to them and have their kids,” Roy mutters.

That is a disturbingly misleading viewpoint on what happened, but Matt tries to let it go, for the moment. “Hey. We need to keep quiet now,” he says softly. “If there’s any deer, we don’t want to scare them.”

Roy nods, and the two of them walk quietly into the forest.

***

Roy was such a sweet little boy.

Matt remembers him bringing the pictures he drew to Matt and to his mother – who Matt, despite being called uncle, is not actually related to; Matt is uncle to all the boys he takes under his wing – and being so enthusiastic about showing it to them. He remembers one of the pictures, of himself and Roy holding hands. Another, of Roy holding hands with his mom. Roy hasn’t had anything positive to say to his mother in weeks; he’s been disobeying her, insulting her, calling her stupid and saying he doesn’t have to listen to her because she’s just a woman.

It’s biological. Roy wasn’t raised to even have the concept of men somehow being better than women at anything or for any reason. Most of the boys develop the attitude around puberty, the result of a disease that infected the entire world over a century ago. Many of them get over it. Many don’t. Matt never suffered it at all; it’s linked to heterosexual desire, and Matt knew he was gay ever since he was nine.

He remembers Roy running around with a toy airplane, declaring that when he was grown up he would help restore humanity’s control of the skies, working to bring back the airplanes. He remembers Roy making him lemonade when he was six, cooking him an egg when he was ten. Roy making a card for his mother’s birthday with a big heart on it. Roy asking him what stars were made of.

It’s going to be all right, he tells himself. Evan was a little ass to his mom and his sisters, and it all worked out for him. Lebron actually punched his mom when he was fourteen, and he came through it. Roy’s going to be fine.

All the boys mean so much to him, but Roy is special… maybe because he’s the most recent one. Matt hasn’t been working with the little boys so much, lately. There’s enough men in the settlement now that the younger men, with more energy, are taking up more of that role. When Matt himself was a child, there were almost no men – Uncle Harry was the only cis man he’d known. Of the boys he grew up with, only Andrew, Tyrone and Jose were still there by the time he was an adult, plus Deandre who was trans and joined them in their late teens. He’d dated all of them except Deandre, who was straight. Ended up eventually with Cole, three years younger than him. Cole had a heart attack six years ago, and after that Matt couldn’t bear to open himself up to any of the new little boys, not without the emotional support of an adult man to share his life with. Roy has been the last one to call him Uncle.

“Uncle!” Roy hisses. “Is that a deer? Over there?”

Matt looks where Roy is pointing. “It could be,” he whispers back. “Let’s see.”

They walk closer, carefully, trying to be quiet. But Roy steps on a branch he doesn’t see. It snaps, and the vague outline that might be a deer startles and runs, proving that yes, it is a deer. Roy pulls out his gun and fires, but misses, predictably.

“Oh, son of a bitch!” Roy swears.

“What have we said about language?” Matt asks mildly.

“Come on, Uncle Matt. I’m not a baby anymore,” Roy protests. “Besides, I said ‘shit’ when I stubbed my toe on a rock on the way up here.”

“Yes, but ‘shit’ is disgusting and everyone makes it. ‘Bitch’ is an insult specifically for women, and calling something a ‘son of a bitch’ when you want to swear at it is basically saying that it’s the fault of mothers if their sons are terrible.”

“Well, who else’s fault would it be? Stupid b – stupid women don’t know anything, but they act like they know everything.”

“I think that’s a little bit of an overgeneralization. I know you’re not getting along with your mother lately—”

“She just makes me so mad. She’s always telling me what to do! Like she knows everything!”

“She is your mother,” Matt says mildly. “And she’s twenty-five years older than you. That does tend to make people know more than you.”

“Yeah, but not her. She really doesn’t know anything. Sometimes I just wanna punch her.”

“That happens to a lot of boys at puberty, but they get over it. By the time you’re twenty-five, you’ll be amazed at how smart your mother has suddenly become.” He smiles at Roy.

Roy glowers. “I don’t think so. Girls are just disgusting. I just want to hang out with men, like you. You’re not a dumbass, Uncle Matt. All the girls are dumbasses, but the guys aren’t.”

“That’s the hormones talking. You’ll get over it.” Matt points at the ground. “Do you see that?”

“No, what?”

“Tracks. For the deer.” Matt crouches down and points them out to Roy. “We can see what direction it went in, now.”

“Oh, yeah! I can see it now!” Roy starts to run, but Matt holds him back by the shoulder.

“Roy. Slow. Patient. Quiet. The deer can run faster than you or me, but it burns more energy doing that. If we walk, we catch up with it, because it’s got to rest. But if it hears us, it’ll run again. So we walk, and we’re quiet.”

“Right. I get it, Uncle Matt.” Roy is much more quiet and careful about where he puts his feet after that.

***

When Roy was eight, Matt walked the fields with him and showed him how to sow corn. They went to the vegetable plots and planted carrots and lima beans. Roy was so proud the day they harvested his carrots, and he got to eat one. Matt took him fishing the first time, that same year.

The little boys are always so sweet, so bright, so full of promise. It hurts so much when they don’t fulfill it.

Please, God, let Roy be all right. Let him get past this.Of course he would. Matt has been training him, teaching him since he was small (but there were others, other boys Matt had loved like his own sons, who he’d trained and taught, and they weren’t around here anymore).

He should have been around more often in the last three years. Roy was heading for puberty and that scared Matt. Still does. He visits the boy often, but Roy is right – they haven’t done anything together, just the two of them, in a long time.

“You ever spend any time with any of the young men? Jase, or Evan, or Fred?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I hang out more with the guys closer to my age. You know any of them? Steve, Paolo, Rafael?”

“Sure, yeah, I know them.”

“Paolo has a dad,” Roy says enviously. “When I grow up I want to be a dad.”

“Well, you’re in luck, because humanity needs more men to be dads,” Matt says. “You can go live where they’re using your donation, if you really want to be a dad, and help to raise the kid you helped make, or you can stay here and help raise the boys as an uncle, and maybe go out and visit the places where they used your donations.”

“How come I can’t stay here and raise a boy here?”

“Genetic variation. If we let human men have sons with their sisters, we get inbreeding. All kinds of diseases. Sending your donations to the other compounds makes us strong and healthy as a species.”

“Did you ever donate, Uncle Matt?”

“Back in my day, if your balls worked you had to donate. We didn’t have enough men. You know old Gran Stacie, she had to donate too. She couldn’t take the hormones to look feminine until there was a safe compound for women to live in and plenty of donations so the human race could keep going.”

“She’s okay, I guess. But the other girls are really stupid and gross.”

Matt stops Roy there. “Hey. You keep saying that. It’s like you’ve forgotten everything we taught you about our history.”

“I remember history,” Roy protests.

“So tell me. Why do we live this way? Why do women live in secure compounds with only a few men? A hundred years ago the world was very different. Tell me how it was, and what changed.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. You do.” Matt sits on the ground, and gestures for Roy to sit across from him. “Come on. Tell Uncle Matt all about it.”

Roy rolls his eyes. “A hundred years ago men and women lived together but then there was a disease and it made the men sick and the sickness made them want to hurt women so they couldn’t live with women anymore, the end,” he says in a rapid sing-song.

“No. That shit doesn’t fly with me, kid, and you know it doesn’t. Tell it to me right.”

Roy sighs. “Okay, okay. So. Back then, women and men lived together all the time and every kid had a dad, and the men still took care of the women but there weren’t a lot of men trying to kill them, just one or two weird ones.”

Matt, being an adult, is aware of how far this is skewed off the truth of what life was like a century ago, but the boys are being raised with no awareness of historical misogyny. Nothing to give the disease any historical justification it can hook onto. They learn more details when they’re proven to be safe. “So far so good.”

“So back then, there was this thing we used to do to kill flies where we made the male flies wanna kill the female flies instead of mate with them.” This is also a distortion of the facts, but Matt lets it go as well. “Then suddenly, men were trying to kill women instead of having sex with them. But it was just the straight men who were affected and they had to have balls. Women weren’t affected even if they had balls, and gay men weren’t affected, and men who didn’t have balls weren’t affected, and men who didn’t want sex even though they had balls weren’t affected, but all the men who had balls and wanted to have sex with women wanted to kill the women. And a lot of the time, little girls or old women that no one wanted to have sex with, because they thought in their heads it was God telling them to kill women or something. They didn’t know the truth.”

“And what was the truth?”

“That it was aliens. They spread the virus around on Earth because they wanted humans to die, just like the flies, so they could take the Earth for themselves. But humans are more complicated than flies. So there were men who were affected too much, who killed little boys because little boys look like little girls, and there were men who weren’t affected as much, who’d killed their wives but they were trying to protect their little girls. And there were men who didn’t have sex with women even if they wanted to because they were trying to honor God or something, and those men could resist wanting to kill, because the wanting to kill thing was related to wanting sex. If they could resist one, sometimes they could resist the other. Plus, all the asexual men and the gay men and the trans men and other kinds of men without balls like castrated men, plus the trans women, who could fake being men so they could stay alive. And there were also a lot of women with guns, too.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, most of the women got killed, and the men who were doing the killing, they didn’t have any kids. But the women who survived, they went into compounds where all the women had guns and they would kill strange men who came near them. And a lot of the kinds of men who didn’t want to kill women would help women get to those compounds. They called them ‘allies.’ You’d have been one if you were alive in those days, Uncle Matt.” This is said proudly. Roy doesn’t realize how much Matt is still called on to be an ally, even today.

“I would have, yes. So how did we get where we are today?”

“A lot of the places were run by women who hated men even before they started killing women, called rads, and the rads were okay with women getting donations from ally men, but if they had boy babies they wanted to send the babies to live with the men or else throw them outside and kill them. And the moms didn’t want to do that and they thought it was stupid. So they made their own compounds and they let ally men live there. And if boys grew up and they didn’t want to kill women, then they were allowed to give donations and be dads. But if they did, then they couldn’t be dads and they couldn’t live there anymore.”

So much heartbreak, so much agony, skimmed over so neatly and briefly. Mothers pleading with their baby boys, grown to young men, not to do this, before the boy killed the mother… or the mother killed the boy, in self-defense. Entire compounds of women lost because some mother couldn’t bear to kill her son, so she locked him away instead… and he got out. Boys with the compulsion to kill sent to live with the femicidal men, only to be killed themselves, because there were no boys among the men anymore and the young boys were more feminine than anything the killer men had seen in years, by then. Or castrated, so that they would theoretically be safe to stay, except humans were complex and some of them retained the femicidal compulsion even in the absence of testicles, and the horror of boys everyone thought were safe suddenly murdering their sisters. Gay boys in love, their hearts shattered when their love interest proved to have enough interest in women that he became a killer.

They’re more careful now. Things like that don’t happen anymore.

“And the killer men thought that the aliens were like messengers from God or something, but the women and the ally men killed a lot of aliens. And when lots of aliens were dead, they realized that their plan to get Earth for themselves by making the humans die out from killing all the women wasn’t going to work, because humans are complicated. So we guess they changed their minds, because they left and no one has seen them since.”

“And that’s a good thing. We lost a lot of people when the aliens were willing to fight back in self-defense. If they’d had the stomach for it, they might have won, and humanity might have been wiped out. But, we assume, they weren’t willing to die to take our planet; they’d been trying to kill us off so they could have all the bounties of the Earth without doing any damage from removing us. If you try to settle in swampland and you try to kill all the mosquitoes, and instead the mosquitoes start killing you back, maybe you go find somewhere else to live.” Or maybe you come back, later, with a new plan… but humanity has collectively decided that, while it’s important to try to have contingencies for that possibility, it’s more important to rebuild humanity and reclaim what was lost. Matt worries about that, but it’s not something he can do anything about.

“You think they’re ever going to come back, Uncle Matt?”

Maybe. “No. We kicked their butts hard enough I’m pretty sure they’re gone forever. But they left us with this giant mess to clean up.” He sighs. “This stuff you’re feeling about how girls are stupid and irritating and you can’t stand being around them? That says, you’re in puberty and you’re going to grow up to be attracted to girls. Maybe guys too, but definitely girls. And the virus is waking up in you, trying to turn your desire for girls into hatred, but it doesn’t have to win. A lot of guys make it through this stage no problem, and never hurt anyone.”

“It doesn’t feel like a virus. It feels like they’re stupid and boring and gross and I hate them.”

“Of course it does. If it felt like a virus, the men a hundred years ago would have figured it out before they killed most of the women. It messes with your emotions, Roy. It takes feelings that are natural and normal, and twists them around. But if you understand that, then you don’t have to let it win.”

“Okay,” Roy said, and rocks backward, looking around him. “Can we go hunt for the deer now?”

“Sure, kid.” Matt gets to his feet. “We’re done here. You remember what they taught you about controlling your anger?”

“Yeah. Take deep breaths, take a step back from the situation, walk away if you hafta.”

“Right,” Matt says. “Let’s get a move on. That deer won’t shoot itself.”

***

They amble along through the woods. Another deer makes itself known, and Roy takes another shot, but misses. “Dammit! I was sureI had that shot!”

“I thought you did too,” Matt says. “But they move fast. You gotta be able to sneak up on them and shoot before they hear you coming.”

“Can you do that, Uncle Matt?”

“Used to. I’m older now; wouldn’t be surprised if the deer could hear the creak in my bones.” He grins.

And then they circle around a big rock, and there’s a girl.

She’s a teenager, about Roy’s age, maybe a little older. “Hi!” she says cheerfully. “I wasn’t expecting to run into anyone from around here! You’re from the compound down the mountain, right?”

Roy’s face twists into visible disgust, and he backs away. “That’s right,” Matt says calmly. “I’m Matt, and this is Roy.”

“My name’s Jennifer!” Jennifer has dark, wavy hair and tanned white-person skin. She’s wearing cutoff shorts, sneakers that have been patched many, many times – there are no companies that make goods from the old world like sneakers anymore – and a short-sleeved blue buttondown shirt that’s been tied up under her breasts to show her midriff, and opened in the front far enough to see her cleavage. When Matt was young, women were advised not to wear anything that could be arousing, because if they ran into a killer male, their life might depend on how much he was not turned on. By now, though, so many of the killer males are dead, and with women outnumbering men by three to one, the women and girls dress in whatever they want. It was never a good strategy for dealing with the killer males anyway; too many of them were willing to kill women dressed in nun robes, so it plainly had nothing to do with revealing clothes. There are numerous large lumps in her front pockets, which could be rocks, or animal bones, or any number of things.

Matt’s gay and far too old to see teenagers as anything other than young kids, but Roy is plainly very uncomfortable with Jennifer’s state of exposure. “What are you doing here?!” he half-shouts, angrily, at her.

“I’m from a compound on the other side of the mountain, and I hiked up here to try to collect mushrooms,” Jennifer says, her voice just a little bit too loud.

“Well, we’re hunting, so I’d like it if you could be a little quieter,” Matt says. “Don’t want to scare the deer.”

“Ooh! Hunting sounds fun! Can I join you?”

“No,” Roy says, loudly.

“Oh, come on!” Jennifer pouts. “I’ll be quiet!”

Matt takes in Roy’s trembling hands, the whiteness of his lips. Terror, or rage, or both. Roy’s expected to control himself no matter what the circumstances, but Matt… really doesn’t want to push him. Not now, when he’s so fragile. “Sorry, Jennifer, but Roy and I really came out for some uncle-nephew time. Maybe you can join us another time, but not now.”

Her eyebrows go up. “Huh,” she says. “Okay! I know a lot of guys like to go hunting with their dads or uncles when they’re thirteen. You’re thirteen, right?” This is directed to Roy.

“None of your business!” Roy snarls.

“Yeah, he’s thirteen,” Matt says tiredly. “Nice meeting you, Jennifer. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

“And maybe we won’t,” Roy mutters. He and Matt hike up the trail, away from Jennifer. “Good riddance.”

“I want you to think about this anger you’re feeling. It’s really out of proportion to the situation, isn’t it?”

Roy sighs. “Uncle Ma-att, I just wanna go hunting with you! I don’t wanna talk about my feelings!”

“Sure, but it’s safest for everyone if you do. What’re you supposed to do when you feel really angry?”

“I already took a step back from the situation! I told her to go away!”

“Didn’t hear any deep breaths,” Matt says.

Roy manages to deeply breathe sarcastically. It’s an impressive trick. Matt would never have thought it possible to breathein a sarcastic way. Most of it’s with body language and facial expression, but there’s definitely a sarcastic note in the breath itself. “Now can we go find a deer?”

“Maybe we’d have better luck setting up a snare to trap rabbits.”

Roy’s whole body sags. “I wanted to bring home venison, Uncle Matt! Nobody cares if you bring home a rabbit!”

“All right,” Matt says mildly. “We’ll keep going.”

***

The forest is full of sound. Birds chirp and call. Squirrels and other animals rustle in the branches and bushes. Many of the sounds go silent as Matt and Roy approach, but not all. They come up into a clearing, someplace where someone, long ago, had a concrete pad. Most of it’s broken and destroyed, but there’s enough of it that even after a hundred years, the forest hasn’t completely taken it back.

And then there is the deer, quietly grazing on the other side of the clearing.

Matt whispers to Roy as he points it out. “Quiet, now.”

Roy nods. There’s a broken half-wall part of the way through the clearing, blocking the deer’s view of them if they go low. Matt and Roy crawl toward it. Once they’re behind it, Roy pokes his head up, very slightly, following Matt’s hand signals. He lifts his rifle. Quietly. The deer doesn’t stir.

Matt hears a tiny click. His eyes go wide and his blood runs cold.

Jennifer comes bounding into the clearing behind them. “Hi, guys! Didn’t think I’d run into—”

The deer leaps and runs off. Roy spins around, utter rage in his face, and screams, “You stupid bitch!”

“Roy, don’t—” Matt tries to grab Roy, tries to pull him down, throw off his aim, but it’s too late. The gun goes off, twice. Splotches of red explode on Jennifer’s chest, and she falls backward, twisting as she does so she lands on her front. Red oozes out from underneath her.

Roy drops the gun from fingers suddenly dead white and shaking. “I – I didn’t mean to – I was so angry--”

Wounds where the red had blossomed on Jennifer would be fatal; she’d bleed out almost immediately, and the quantity of red seeping out from under her body suggests that that’s what happened. It looks like a strike to the aorta, or the heart itself, maybe. Matt cannot stop himself. “No, no, no—”

“I’m sorry!” Roy screams. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry—”

Matt gets hold of himself. “Roy. Roy, come here. Come here, son.” He means it as an endearment – Roy is neither his literal son, nor has he raised the boy as a father – but it’s real as well. Roy is like a son to him. All of them have been, and he loves Roy so much, and his heart is shattering.

Roy collapses in his arms, sobbing. Matt holds the boy tightly with one arm. “It’s not your fault, Roy, it’s not,” he tells the crying child, tears welling in his own eyes. “It’s the virus. I know you didn’t mean to. I know you’re a good boy.”

“I’m so sorry—I just got so mad, and the gun was in my hand—”

“I know,” Matt says, as the boy’s wet face presses against his shoulder. “I know. I love you so much, Roy, you know that?”

“I love you too, Uncle Matt,” Roy says into Matt’s shirt, still sobbing, and a sob escapes from Matt’s chest as well as he raises his pistol with the arm that isn’t holding his nephew, his child, his son, the little boy who trusts him and loves him, and as Roy cries against his chest and cannot see what he’s doing with his other hand, he lifts the pistol to Roy’s temple, awkwardly, being sure not to touch him with it, and fires.

The sobs stop. After a moment they start again, but they’re only Matt’s.

Jennifer gets up. “I’m sorry, Matt,” she says quietly.

“Get the fuck out of my face,” Matt snarls. “You provokedhim! I told you to back off! I told you we weren’t having you join us!”

“I have to do my job,” Jennifer says wearily, and there is no longer any mistaking her for a teenager, despite the expertly applied makeup on her face. She’s short, she looks young, and with the right makeup none of the boys ever guess she’s not a teenage girl. There’s red all over her shorts, soaking her legs and belly, from where the bags of fake blood in her pockets burst, and splotches of red over her heart and her liver. The paint pellets look horrifically real; they even smell like blood.

No, wait, that’s probably Roy’s blood he’s smelling.

"Fuck your job.” Matt holds his little boy in his arms, with both arms now that he doesn’t need one free anymore. “You pushed him. If we’d just given him a little more time – a little more training—”

“And who might he have killed while you were giving him a little more time? His mom? One of the girls his age?”

“He wouldn’t have had a gun!—"

“He could have had a rock. Or a steak knife. Or a baseball bat. I’m so sorry, Matt, but—”

“If you say ‘that’s the law’ or ‘those are the rules’ to me, I will hit you,” Matt snaps. “Not because you’re a woman, but because you’re a piece of shit.”

She sighs. “I know you’re distraught. It’s horrible, having to do this—”

“You didn’t even know him!” Matt screams. “You didn’t watch him when he was little, you didn’t teach him to tie his shoes, you didn’t play airplane with him – you didn’t—”

“I had a son,” Jennifer says sharply. “Don’t tell me I don’t know how much it hurts, when we have to—I was 16 when I had my son. It was six years ago that – that he took his test, at thirteen, and he failed it.”

“There’ve been so many,” Matt whispers. So many little boys. Slightly less than half of them pass; that’s why the ratio of women to men is around 2:1. He was so, so relieved when Blake turned out to be a girl and took the name Cassandra, twelve years ago; the trans kids are immune to the violent impulses. He’d known that Cassandra wouldn’t have to face the test, that he’d never have to take her on a hunting trip she might never return from. So relieved when Joe, eight years ago, reported himself gay at eleven and then showed no sign of aggression toward his mother or sister or any girls his own age.

But all the others. All the others, he’d loved, and they’d loved him, and trusted him, and he took them up the mountain on a hunting trip… with a gun that could only shoot paint pellets and blanks, and the paint pellets only after the bait’s radio transmitter came into range and switched it on.

Roy would never have bagged a deer with that gun. But if he hadn’t shot Jennifer, if he’d controlled himself and proved he could overcome his femicidal impulses, Matt would have “discovered” that there was no ammo in it, and given Roy a different gun, and then they could have had a real deer hunt. Like Evan, ten years ago. Like Jamal, five years ago. Like LeBron… how long ago had LeBron even been?

He’d already decided he wouldn’t take on any new little boys, after Cole died. Roy was the last one, the last child to shepherd to adulthood, the last he had to test. “God,” he cries, holding the little boy he’s just killed in his arms. “Why couldn’t you have let me have the last one? Why didn’t you give him the strength to overcome it?” He rocks the body back and forth. “Why did you let any of this happen? Why do you make us have to kill our sons?”

“God’s got nothing to do with this,” Jennifer says softly. “This is evil. If God allowed such evil as this to exist, then She’s not worth worshipping, and if She can’t stop it, then there’s no point in blaming her. It was the aliens.”

The aliens his ancestors drove off planet, who he’ll never have a chance to fight, or get revenge on. There’s no one he can blame who’s here. He understands the system, he understands the necessity. Little boys who try to commit femicide once don’t have the control to stop themselves from doing it again, and if it’s not the bait with her paint bags in her shorts and the radio transmitter to make the gun fire paint pellets, it’ll be a girl or women who really dies because the boy will have a real weapon. They can’tlet the femicides live among them, and they can’t send them away to live with the few bands of roving femicidal men that still exist… the only reasonthose still exist was that once upon a time, femicidal sons were turned out into the wilderness. Where they could grow up to be bandits who invaded compounds, stole the food, and murdered the women. The men, too, because the men would defend the compound, but the women they’d hunt and kill for fun.

He would never have wanted a future like that for Roy. But he didn’t want this, either.

“I’m… I’m going to go. I’ll radio the compound and let them know the results of the test.”

“You do that,” Matt says bitterly. He knows his anger isn’t fair. He knows his attempt to drive Jennifer off, put off the test at the last minute and get her to come back another day so Roy could maybe develop stronger self-control first, was wrong. He knows it could have resulted in Roy murdering someone he loves. Loved. But how much better is it that Matt had to murder someone he loves? Why do they need to kill the teen boys to protect the women? Oh, he knows why, he signed on for this job years ago because he knew why, he’s seen what happened when a boy grew into a killer and turned on the women he knew. But why has God or Fate or Allah or whatever the fuck is up there listening to human prayers allowed this? Why is this horrible thing something that they are forced to do?

After what seems like hours, crying and holding Roy’s body and whispering how sorry he is, he’s finally out of tears. He looks down at his pistol. Cole’s dead six years on now, and there’s no man in his bed waiting for him, back home. There’s no little boy he’s working with, and there will never be one again. Is there anyone to care if he lives or dies, now? What if he ate a bullet, right now, so he could stop seeing Roy and Jason and Manuel and little Matt, named for him and he still shot him in the head while the boy was bent over the bait’s body, and all the others, all the boys who loved and trusted him, and failed the test he brought them into? Was there any good reason not to?

…there were the boys who’d lived. Adults now, all of them, but they loved and respected him as their old uncle, and they still were willing to spend time with him, sometimes. There were the girls, who yelled “Mister Matt! Mister Matt!” when they saw him and crowded around him, showing off their accomplishments, and he’d never have to take any of them up the mountain. There are trans boys who just figured it out, and need an older man to mentor them and teach them how to be a man, and none of them will ever need to go up the mountain either. There are the gay boys who want to talk to him about boyfriends, and how to date a guy, and how sex works, and all the other things gay boys need to know.

He can still help the children. But he’s never going to take on a little boy as his nephew again.

After a few more moments, he picks up Roy’s rifle, which can’t fall into the wrong hands, and his own pistol, and slings them into the holsters he has for them, on his belt or on his back. Then he picks Roy up and cradles him. A fireman’s carry would be easier, especially with the long hike down the mountain, but he wants to give his boy’s body as much dignity as he can. He won’t sling Roy over his shoulder like a flour sack. He’ll carry the dead weight of the boy down the mountain, and then he’ll carry it for the rest of his life.