Big Ape_Lawless Book Two

by James Maxey

  “She’s your mother even more than mine,” said Sasha. “Don’t you think burial’s wasteful?”

  “I honestly can’t see how. What the hell are you supposed to do with a corpse except bury or burn it?”

  “You can eat them, of course,” said Sasha.

  “I… I… uh… that’s…” My mental wheels ground to a halt. “I thought you said all the new-men were vegetarians?

  “Mother says it’s unethical to raise animals just to eat them,” said Sasha.

  “Right. You definitely said you didn’t eat meat back in New York.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you when you were recuperating, and, honestly, I don’t eat meat often,” she said. “But in the wild, apes frequently eat smaller primates. And carnivores like Bobbie require a certain amount of meat in their diet to keep healthy. Sometimes, the human bodies we collect for experiments are really fresh and the smell is so mouth-watering that—”

  “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “I mean, you know, it’s not like we’d kill someone just to eat them. But, if they’re dead, why let the meat go to waste? You should try it. People are delicious!”

  The pterodactyl induced grin finally faded from my face.

  “You, uh, you… you didn’t feed me any while I was convalescing, did you? Without telling me?”

  She hesitated about two seconds, then said, “No. Of course not. There was no human at all in the soup.”

  I remembered the soup. It was some of the best soup I’d ever had. Was I an involuntary cannibal?

  “You look troubled,” she said.

  “You think?”

  “Do you hate me now?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I mean… it’s going to take some time to digest this.” I winced. “That’s a terrible choice of words.”

  “You’ll be okay with it after you think about it,” she said. “It’s perfectly logical.”

  By now we’d reached the edge of the village, so we went silent as we walked toward the center of the houses. They were modest, wood-framed, and painted white, with shutters on the windows, something that would have fit perfectly into any small town in America. In the rainforest, they looked creepy. There wasn’t a soul to be seen on the streets. The bodies we’d dumped earlier were gone. I laid my two corpses where the others had been and left the wounded guy sleeping beside them.

  Back in the forest, Sasha started talking again. “Once a person is dead, he’s no longer a person. All that’s left behind is chemistry, proteins, fatty acids, minerals like iron and calcium. Things a body needs to survive.”

  “Yeah, but you can get the same things from a cow.”

  “But cows shouldn’t even exist,” she said. “They aren’t really part of nature. They’ve become a biological factory product manufactured by humans. There are many reasons not to devour meat created with this unethical and unnatural method.”

  “Whatever,” I said, unable to summon the energy to point out that we only existed because of unethical and unnatural methods. “Let’s… let’s not tell the reverend about this, okay?”

  “It’s not like we eat people every day,” she said. “And we don’t hunt them, the way humans hunt animals. Most of the people we eat were trying to kill us. They were only dead because we acted in our own defense, as the reverend did tonight. I mean… it almost seems disrespectful.”

  “Disrespectful?”

  “He killed them, and now he’s just going to let them go to waste? I think most people would find it comforting to think that their corpses would be put to some useful purpose.”

  “You obviously don’t talk to many people. Real people, I mean.”

  “Am I not a real person?” she asked. “Isn’t Bobbie real?”

  “Okay. Humans. Homo sapiens.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “No. I don’t have many opportunities to talk to them. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.”

  “I… might agree with you there,” I said. Then I shook my head. “No, that’s just a joke. On the whole, people are all right.”

  “Don’t they shun you?”

  “I mean, sure, some do. But a lot of them are open-minded. Some of them get past the whole covered in fur thing pretty quickly and treat me as a friend. I mean, hell, Jenny sleeps with me. That’s about as friendly as you can get.”

  “Do you think of me as a friend?” she asked.

  “I…” Christ. I’m flexible enough to literally put my foot in my mouth, which would have been greatly preferable to the line of discussion I’d made possible.

  “You don’t?” she asked, as my silence lingered for uncomfortable seconds.

  “Of course,” I said. “Honestly, you’re great. But… there are different kinds of friends. And Jenny, she’s my girlfriend. We’re supposed to sleep together. Or at least, we were.”

  “You don’t anymore?” she asked.

  I crossed my arms. “Jenny is going through a phase right now. We’re still in love.”

  “But this phase she’s experiencing keeps you from sleeping together?”

  I sighed. “Look, the reverend took her to his church and she picked up some ideas. She had a really difficult childhood and has spent a lot of her life looking for something to believe in. So far, nothing has worked for her for more than a couple of months. This time next year, she might be a Satan worshipper for all I know.”

  “She sounds unstable.”

  “Unstable is the polite way of putting it,” I said. “She’s flat out crazy.”

  “But still you love her?”

  “Yes. Crazy works for her. I mean, crazy is practically a requirement to have me for a boyfriend. Crazy or not, she’s been good for me. She makes me feel…” My voice trailed off.

  “She makes you feel human,” said Sasha.

  “That’s... a word for it, I guess.”

  “But you’re not human. You’re a new-man. As am I.”

  “Have you ever read a book called The Third Chimpanzee?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t among Mother’s required reading,” she said. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s written by this science writer named Jared Diamond. In it, he makes the case that, if an alien zoologist came to earth and started cataloguing species, he’d find three different species of chimpanzees. The actual chimps, of course, bonobos, and humans. If you’ve ever seen a picture of a hairless chimp, you can’t say he’s wrong.”

  “So, you think of humans as brother chimpanzees?”

  I shrugged. “I mean, science says.”

  “Mother is a scientist,” said Sasha. “She agrees that humans are part of the animal kingdom.”

  “They ain’t vegetables,” I said.

  “But you shouldn’t grow too fond of humans,” said Sasha.

  “Why not?”

  “Because their days on this planet are numbered,” she said.

  “You sound like those suicide cultists,” I said. “For that matter, you sound a little bit like the reverend. He talked to Jenny about the rapture. That’s some crazy shit.”

  “That she now believes.”

  “I guess.”

  “The reverend seems to me to base all his values around an absurd myth.”

  “I guess,” I said. “It works for him. He’s a good man.”

  “His notions about morality are relics of Stone Age superstitions. They’ve no basis in science.”

  “I wouldn’t bring that up directly with him. He is armed.”

  “But his ideas about sexual morality, things like monogamy, or a prohibition against coitus before matrimony… aren’t these antiquated absurdities?”

  “Probably.”

  “From a more logical, reason based morality, if a male and a female wish to copulate, and both would find enjoyment from the activity, what reason is there not to do so?”

  “Guilt?” I said.

  “Is that an excuse?” she said. “Or are you so uncomfortable with your own body image that you find a female with a similar composi
tion unattractive? Do you find Jenny attractive because she’s slender? Because she’s hairless?”

  “She’s not completely hairless,” I said. “Look—”

  “We should fuck,” said Sasha.

  “Wow,” I said. “That is certainly the direct way of approaching this.”

  “Look at us! We were made for each other!” she said, stepping toward me, pressing her breasts against my chest, wrapping her heavily muscled arms around my torso. “There’s no way Jenny could truly satisfy you. You must have to be so careful! With me, you don’t need to be gentle.”

  Total brain lock. I looked down into her face, her eyes so eager, so enthusiastic. Part of my brain was screaming JENNY, JENNY, JENNY while another part of my brain was whispering, Jenny’s never sleeping with you again, don’t pass this up. My visual cortex was in overdrive, trying to process a face that was part gorilla, part human, both attracted and repulsed on some instinctive level, which caused another section of my brain to start scolding me: Repulsed? Repulsed because she’s like you? Rejecting her is rejecting yourself! Beneath the voices came signals from far older parts of the brainstem. Sasha’s scents overwhelmed me. I could smell her breath, her sweat, smell the lingering traces of the blood from the man she’d mended, smell tones even further beneath the surface, pheromones locking like tiny jigsaw puzzles into perfectly matching receptacles high inside my sinuses. And her heat! Her breasts nearly scalded me, her breath rose against my lips like a hot wind, a jungle wind, a wind carrying the whispers of all nature, of all that had been, and all that would ever be. And her body… such a jumble of sensations. Her breasts were soft as pillows but her nipples pressed into me like iron pegs. Her arms held me with a grip of steel, but her fingers traced light, delicate circles through the hair of my back.

  Don’t judge me. I didn’t choose to betray Jenny as I bent by head down toward Sasha’s rising mouth. Our lips met. She put her hand behind my neck and pressed hard, slipping her tongue between my teeth. I was keenly aware of how foreign her mouth was, how muscular and rough the tongue, of how her canine teeth bulged in her jaws. I was kissing a wild beast. I became a beast myself.

  After that, things got jumbled. She was trying to pull my pants down while I was trying to get her top off. Her industrial-strength gorilla-sized bra frustrated me for several second before she pushed me back and whipped it off in a single motion like a magician pulling a tablecloth from beneath plates. She leapt on me, knocking us back into the jungle muck. She told me not to be gentle and followed her own command, biting me, digging her fingernails deep, squeezing with all her strength, until I met her strength almost as an act of self-defense, pinning her arms, matching bite with bite, pushing her over onto her back. With my feet, I made short work of pulling down her pants while I still had her arms pinned. She arched her hips, helping me get her panties free.

  I flipped her over to her belly and took her, feeling savage, almost angry, my blood boiling. I almost felt as if I had to punish her for making me do this, had to teach her the danger of making my animal side rise above my human side.

  She shuddered. She moaned. She gasped and mewed and cooed as I did my best to break her. She laughed with joy a moment later as I finished, collapsing atop her. We lay together, panting, with her pinned beneath me for a long time before I rolled to my back.

  “We’re not done yet,” she whispered as she lay her head on my shoulder, running her fingers through the hair on my belly.

  “I think I’m kind of done,” I whispered back, breathless.

  “We have all night,” she said, as she started kissing her way down my torso.

  Ten minutes later, we were doing in in the high branches of a tree, because I had seriously, 100%, lost my ever-loving mind.

  AT DAWN, we limped back into camp, dripping wet following a dip in the river to clean off. Reverend Rifle and Bobbie were on the runway, standing in front of three fully unfolded robo-pterosaurs, rolling a fourth one onto a stretch of airfield big enough to hold it when it opened.

  The reverend looked toward us and said, “You had us worried. Started to think you’d hit trouble down in the village.”

  “No trouble,” I said. “Got a little turned around in the dark. There were, like, snakes everywhere. We had to wait until light to find our way back.”

  The reverend nodded. “You conveniently avoided the hard work of unloading these things.”

  “In fairness, I did spend a good part of my night lugging corpses.”

  “True enough,” said the reverend. “Elsa’s still dead to the world. Took some kind of painkiller for her headache. We’ve been banging around the cargo hold and shaking the plane pretty good and she hasn’t stopped snoring once.”

  “I need a nap myself,” I said, stretching my arms overhead. “Man, it’s been a long night.”

  “You can have twenty minutes, thirty, tops,” said Reverend Rifle.

  “I’m thinking more like a couple of hours.”

  He shook his head. “We’ll be flying above the canopy. No shade, so we need to get going before the heat of the day gets oppressive. Plus, we should have clear skies most of the morning, but by early afternoon we’ll start getting cells of thunderstorms rolling through.”

  “Don’t tell me you have a barometer in your utility belt,” I said.

  “I do,” he said. “If you’re aiming a sniper rifle, you have to take local weather conditions into account. But that’s not how I know about the storms. Bobbie has internet access, remember?”

  “Right,” I said. I flashed him a peace sign and said, “Wake me in thirty.”

  I climbed into the shadows of the cargo hold and collapsed in the far corner, away from light. I was a little relieved Sasha hadn’t followed me. It wasn’t my bullet wounds making me limp this morning. I’d make love to her with a ferocity that would have murdered a human woman and she’d ended the night hungry for more. I’d convinced her not to say anything to the others. I told her it was just to avoid distractions on the current mission, but I really didn’t want the reverend finding out what I’d done and reporting back to Jenny. What had happened in the jungle had been purely physical. I’d been in the grip of primitive forces far older than mankind. I still loved Jenny.

  I closed my eyes, intending to be asleep in seconds. Right before darkness claimed me, I heard a whispered voice just outside the plane.

  “You slept with him?” Bobbie asked, her voice trembling. “Sasha, what is wrong with—”

  “Nothing,” said Sasha. “Nothing is wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with us. We were made for each other!”

  “Mother will send you to the House of Pain for this,” said Bobbie.

  “Mother will be thrilled that I’ve honored the first born with my body,” said Sasha. “She loves him. She wants him to be happy. She made me to make him happy.”

  “She made you because she had some gorilla eggs in the test tubes she stole from the freezer at the National Zoo.”

  “Don’t be cruel, Bobbie,” said Sasha. “Or should I say, don’t be jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “The first born has chosen me as his mate. I shall bear his children. We’ll forever be remembered as the founders of the new race.”

  I frowned. Could she get pregnant? I never used protection with Jenny and we hadn’t had any problems. My little swimmers weren’t quite human enough to make the cut. In theory, I was more genetically compatible with a full human than with a half gorilla, wasn’t I?

  “Mother has a plan,” said Bobbie. “If you were to be the mate of the first born, it would be by her choosing. You’ve crossed a dangerous line, sister.”

  “I’ve crossed into glory, sister,” said Sasha. “Glory and ecstasy.”

  “Spare me the details,” said Bobbie.

  “Please,” said Sasha. “I must tell someone. The things he did to me last night were a revelation. I understand everything now. It was as if my eyes were opened to the full wonder of creation. I knew it would be wonderful. I did
n’t know it would feel so… so sacred.”

  Bobbie huffed, a skeptical, disgusted sound that I could only imagine was accompanied by rolled eyes. I was a little skeptical myself. I mean, I’d always figured I was pretty good in bed—or in the treetops—but sacred? The word seemed ludicrous at first. Then, the full ramifications of what she was saying gripped me.

  At that moment, the reverend said something further down the runway, his voice too distant to make out the words. Bobbie called back, “I’m coming!”

  This was a perfect time to yell out, “That’s what she said!” but I didn’t want to tip my hand that I’d been listening in. The voices when quiet outside the plane as Bobbie went to help the reverend do whatever it was he was doing.

  Sasha, meanwhile, climbed into the cargo hold, a black silhouette against the bright morning light. I had my eyes half closed, doing my best to look as if I was sleeping. She sat down inside the doorway, her back against the wall, and stared into the shadows where I rested.

  Sacred. In the last ten hours I’d been in a small plane low on fuel as it was buffeted by storms, then blown out of the sky, then I’d been shot at by crazy cultists, then shot again by a teammate, then spent a couple of hours hunting for corpses in a pitch black jungle, where, seriously, there were snakes everywhere. And not once in all this had anything scared me as much as a single word. Sacred.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  User Adaptive

  THE REVEREND BANGED his fist on the fuselage. “Wake up, sleepy head!”

  I’d never been asleep. I sat up from my sleepless nap groggy and stiff, with my mind hurting even more than my body. Sacred. During the night, consciously and unconsciously, I’d thought of what I was doing with Sasha as purely physical, an act of the body, not the mind, and certainly not the heart. I’d thought of it as a one night, one-time thing, and surrendered to a flash of animal lust. It was most definitely not “sacred.”

  I knew Sasha was infatuated with me, but I thought we could keep things light, be friends, maybe even friends with benefits. I couldn’t see how I was going to handle this if she really was in love with me. Sacred. Sacred?