Dale Hutchins: The Most Virile Man Alive

Dale Hutchins was three beers into the evening, and the man on the TV was finally saying what Dale had been saying for years. He wore a good suit and a serious face, and he spoke like a man who had never once been wrong, which was exactly how Dale liked his news. He was explaining, in plain English, exactly who had ruined the country.

Dale agreed with every word.

He sat sunk into his recliner with his beer balanced on the swell of his belly, a Big Mac wrapper crumpled in his lap and a small landfill of fast-food bags and empty Coke cups spread across the carpet around him. At fifty-four, Dale still wore his work tie at home, a dark striped one knotted tight under the collar of his short-sleeved white shirt, with three pens, one red, one blue and one black, lined up in the breast pocket like soldiers. He had left the office at noon that day, claiming a dental emergency. Nobody had argued. Nobody there ever argued with Dale, and that was respect.

"Immigrants," said the man on the TV.

"Damn right," Dale told him.

"Radical feminists. Liberal college professors. The communist left."

"Every one of them." He jabbed his bottle at the screen. "Every single one."

The list went on, and Dale added to it wherever the man ran out of steam. The Democrats, obviously. The Muslims. The woke crowd and their pronouns. His ex-wife, who had walked out of a perfectly good marriage, walked into a courtroom and walked out again with half of everything he owned. The judge who had signed off on it, a smug little man with a gavel, who was probably a Democrat. Dale had never checked. He didn't need to.

"White Christian men my age are the most oppressed group in America," he announced to the empty living room. "And nobody has the guts to say it."

The empty living room had no objections. His kids hadn't called in three months, ever since their mother and her campus friends got into their heads. Katie, with her fancy degree and her fancy opinions, who used to bring him his slippers. Ryan, who used to sit beside him for the games and now sent texts with the word "boundaries" in them. Dale had paid for every semester, every textbook, every overpriced dorm. He had put food on that table for twenty-two years, and this was the thanks he got: a quiet house and a very loud television.

Paying for college had been the biggest mistake of his life.

The doorbell rang.

Dale didn't move. Nobody came to his house anymore except people selling solar panels and Jehovah's Witnesses, and he had a policy about both.

It rang again, twice this time, polite and patient.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered, and rocked himself out of the recliner in three stages, groaning at each one. He tightened his tie out of habit, hitched up his pants, ran a hand over his bald head and down his thick brown beard, and yanked the door open, already halfway into the speech he gave solar panel salesmen.

The speech died in his mouth.

A girl stood on the porch, about his daughter's age, in faded jeans, a green and red plaid flannel jacket and a black crop top that left her midriff bare. A long sheathed sword hung across her back on a worn leather strap, and her wavy light-brown hair was blowing in the wind. Dale's eyes went to the midriff first, the way any red-blooded man's would, and only then climbed to her face, where a pair of steady hazel eyes looked back at him. If she had noticed where he'd looked, she hadn't minded.

She looked a lot calmer than any girl ringing a stranger's doorbell on a Tuesday night had a right to.

"You're early for Halloween, sweetheart," Dale said. "And I'm out of candy."

"Mr. Hutchins?" she said. "My name is Samantha Blair. I'm about to say something that sounds insane, and I need you to hear all of it before you slam that door."

"Then talk fast. My beer's getting warm."

"You're the last living member of a bloodline of mortal vessels." She said it like a preacher reading scripture. "Men born to carry the souls of warriors. Your family goes back a thousand years to a samurai named Yoshi Katadadsu, and you're the only man left who can anchor us. Me and four others. We're called the Samurai Chicks, and we need your help to save the world."

Dale stared at her. He looked at the sword. He looked at the bare midriff, and then at the sword again.

"The what?"

"There's a demon king named Mazoku, and he's coming back. We're the only ones who can stop him, and we can't do it without you."

"Uh huh." Dale squinted. "Is this a church thing? Because I've got a policy about those too."

"I go to church every Sunday, Mr. Hutchins," Samantha said, as if that settled it. "This isn't that."

Dale started to close the door.

She was faster. A hand slid through the narrowing gap and pushed something against his chest, and by reflex he caught it. It was a photograph, brittle and faded to the color of tea. An Asian woman in a 1920s dress stood very straight in front of a painted backdrop, her hair pinned up, her hands folded at her waist.

"That's your great-grandmother," Samantha said through the gap. "Look at her face."

"I'm not looking at..."

He looked.

The woman had his exact scowl. The same furrowed brows, the same downturned mouth, the same look he wore when a waiter got his order wrong. Dale had seen that face in the bathroom mirror every morning for fifty-four years.

"That's a coincidence," he said, but it came out smaller than he meant.

He opened the door a few inches more. Samantha reached back over her shoulder and drew the sword in one smooth motion, the steel whispering out of the sheath. Dale flinched. Then, without quite deciding to, he stepped out onto the porch to get a better look, and the blade flared gold.

It wasn't a trick of the porch light. The whole length of the steel glowed like a coal pulled from a fire, warm light spilling across his face, and a low hum rose from it that he felt in his teeth. When he took a step back, the glow dimmed. When he took a step forward, it climbed again.

"That's proof," Samantha said quietly. "It only does that for you."

The color drained from Dale's face. His eyes went wide with horror and disgust, and he stumbled backward into the doorframe as if she had shown him a spider.

He lifted a hand to his chest, as though checking for a pulse.

"I have Chinese blood?"

Samantha sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Japanese, actually."

"Same fucking thing."

Behind her, out on the dark lawn, four more women stepped out of the shadows in sailor uniforms, their hands resting easily on the hilts of their swords. Dale looked at the swords. He looked at the uniforms. Then, because he wasn't dead, he looked at the skirts.

He looked down at the beer in his hand, which suddenly seemed insufficient, and realized the evening was about to get much worse.