Leading the song, Rap looked at her group. Even the softest ones had callouses now, but it was going to be some time before she made real fighters out of them. She wondered why women had all buried the instinct to kill. It was those damn babies, she decided: grunt, strain, pain, Baby. Hand a mother a gun and tell her to kill and she will say, After I went to all that trouble? Well if you are going to make sacrifices you are going to have to make sacrifices, she thought, and led them in a chorus of the battle anthem, watching to see just who did and who didn't throw herself into the last chorus, which ended: kill, kill, kill.
Sally was watching the smoke again. Zack said, "I wish you would come away from that window."
She kept looking for longer than he would have liked her to, and when she turned, she said, "Zack, why did you marry me?"
"Couldn't live without you."
"No, really."
"Because I wanted to love you and decorate you and take care of you for the rest of your life."
"Why me?"
"I thought we could be friends for a long time."
"I guess. I didn't mean why did you marry me, I meant, why did you marry me."
He looked into his palms. "I wanted you to take care of me too."
"Is that all?"
He could see she was serious and because she was not going to let go he thought for a minute and said at last, "Nobody wants to die alone."
Down the street, June Goodall's husband, Vic, had called every hospital in the county without results. The police had no reports of middle-aged housewives losing their memory in Sears or getting raped, robbed or poleaxed anywhere within the city limits. The police sergeant said, "Mr. Goodall, we've got more serious things on our minds. These bombings, for one thing, and the leaflets and the rip-offs. Do you know that women have been walking out of supermarkets with full shopping carts without paying a cent?" There seemed to be a thousand cases like June's, and if the department ever got a minute for them it would have to be first come first served.
So Vic languished in his darkening house. He had managed to get the kids off to school by himself the past couple of days. He gave them money for hot lunches, but they were running out of clean clothes and he could not bring himself to sort through those disgusting smelly things in the clothes hamper to run a load of wash. They had run through June's casseroles and they were going to have to start eating out; they would probably go to the Big Beef Plaza tonight, and have pizza tomorrow and chicken the next night and Chinese the next, and if June wasn't back by that time he didn't know what he was going to do because he was at his wits' end. The dishes were piling up in the kitchen and he couldn't understand why everything looked so grimy; he couldn't quite figure out why, but the toilet had begun to smell. One of these days he was going to have to try and get his mother over to clean things up a little. It was annoying, not having any clean underwear. He wished June would come back.
For the fifth straight day, Richard Thompson, Glenda's husband, opened The French Chef to a new recipe and prepared himself an exquisite dinner. Once it was finished he relaxed in the blissful silence. Now that Glenda was gone he was able to keep things the way he liked them; he didn't break his neck on Matchbox racers every time he went to put a little Vivaldi on the record player. It was refreshing not to have to meet Glenda's eyes, where, to his growing dissatisfaction, he perpetually measured himself. Without her demands, without the kids around to distract him, he would be able to finish his monograph on Lyly's Euphues. He might even begin to write his book. Setting aside Glenda's half-finished manuscript with a certain satisfaction, he cleared a space for himself at the desk and tried to begin.
Castrated, he thought half an hour later. Her and her damned career, she has castrated me.
He went to the phone and began calling names on his secret list. For some reason most of them weren't home, but on the fifth call he came up with Jennifer, the biology major who wanted to write poetry, and within minutes the two of them were reaffirming his masculinity on the living room rug, and if a few pages of Glenda's half-finished manuscript got mislaid in the tussle, who was there to protest? If she was going to be off there, farting around in the woods with all those women, she never would get it finished.
In the hills, the number of women had swelled, and it was apparent to Sheena, Ellen and Rap that it was time to stop hit-and-run terrorism and operate on a larger scale. They would mount a final recruiting campaign. Once that was completed, they would be ready to take their first objective. Sheena had decided the Sunnydell Shopping Center would be their base for a weep of the entire country. They were fairly sure retaliation would be slow, and to impede it further, they had prepared an advertising campaign built on the slogan: you wouldn't shoot your mother, would you? As soon as they could, they would co-opt some television equipment and make their first nationwide telecast from Sunnydell. Volunteers would flock in from fifty states and in time the country would be theirs.
There was some difference of opinion as to what they were going to do with it. Rap was advocating a scorched-earth policy; the women would rise like phoenixes from the ashes and build a new nation from the rubble, more or less alone. Sheena raised the idea of an auxiliary made up of male sympathizers. The women would rule, but with men at hand. Margy secretly felt that both Rap and Sheena were too militant; she didn't want things to be completely different, only a little better. Ellen Ferguson wanted to annex all the land surrounding her place. She envisioned it as the capitol city of the new world. The butch sisters wanted special legislation that would outlaw contact, social or sexual, with men, with, perhaps, special provisions for social meetings with their gay brethren. Certain of the straight sisters were made uncomfortable by their association with the butch sisters and wished there were some way the battle could progress without them. At least half of these women wanted their men back, once victory was assured, and the other half were looking into ways of perpetuating the race by means of parthenogenesis, or, at worst, sperm banks and Al techniques. One highly vocal splinter group wanted mandatory sterilization for everybody, and a portion of the lunatic fringe was demanding transsexual operations. Because nobody could agree, the women decided for the time being to skip over the issues and concentrate on the war effort itself.
By this time, word had spread and the volunteers were coming in, so it was easy to ignore issues because logistics were more pressing. It was still warm enough for the extras to bunk in the fields, but winter was coming on and the women were going to have to manage food, shelters and uniforms for an unpredictable number. There had been a temporary windfall when Rap's bunch hijacked a couple of semis filled with frozen dinners and surplus clothes, but Rap and Sheena and the others could sense the hounds of hunger and need not far away and so they worked feverishly to prepare for the invasion. Unless they could take the town by the end of the month, they were lost.
"We won't have to hurt our fathers, will we?" Although she was now an expert marksman and had been placed in charge of a platoon, Patsy was still not at ease with the cause.