by James Maxey
Or, maybe not. I’d eaten more than I could count when my stomach started gurgling. I settled onto the moss draping the thickest branch I could find and stretched out. My head ached. And not just my head. My guts felt like I’d been swallowing broken glass. I felt certain I was about to projectile vomit everything I’d gorged on. I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable.
The inevitable turned out to be evitable. I settled into a long, more or less comfortable nap. I didn’t really wake up fully until the sky was awash with stars. I rolled over to sit up, forgetting where I was. I fell, arms flailing, fingers closing around a vine nowhere thick enough to support my weight. It did slow my fall enough that I got my bearings and grabbed onto a bigger branch. I clung to it for several minutes, my heart sounding like the bass thumps of a dance track, OOMP! OOMP! OOMP! OOMP!
As my adrenaline surge faded, I discovered that I actually felt pretty good. Not great, but better than I had since I’d come down off the mountain. My guts had figured out the unfamiliar fruit, sending carbs and vitamins out into my exhausted muscles. My headache was gone, chased away by the gallon or so of fruit juice I’d chugged down. I climbed back to a higher vantage point, blown away by the crisp light of the stars. The night breeze was cool and refreshing. Surprisingly, despite being right above an endless swamp, there were hardly any mosquitoes. Maybe that was due to all the bats. I heard leather wings beating all across the treescape as black outlines flitted across the stars. I felt grateful to them for keeping the bugs under control. I was reborn in their shadows. I swore an oath that from that night forward I would fight crime as… Bat-Ape.
Perhaps not.
The only downside to feeling better physically was that my mind had enough energy to once again activate my emotions. And, man, fuck emotions, especially these. The fear arrived first, simple survival stuff hardwired into my deep nerves. Was I going to get out of this alive? I hadn’t starved to death yet, but how long could I beat the odds and avoid biting into something poisonous or drinking something laced with nasty microbes? My wounds had scabbed over and the maggots seemed to have moved on, but how long before I was infested with some nasty parasite? God knows what diseases the mosquitoes that had already bitten me might carry. Zika, chickunguya, denge… my brain dredged up news reports on all of these, not to mention plain old garden variety malaria. I tried to reassure myself that I had a good constitution. Back at the Butterfly House, I’d never been bothered by flu or colds. One of the docs had speculated that my hybrid biology might be just inhuman enough that common viruses had no molecular foothold in my cells.
I moved on from fear of illness into darker, more troubling dreads. Was Jenny dead? A prisoner? In the absolute best case scenario, she was on the run, hunted by the law, but not exactly welcome in the underworld either, given her past. How could I help her from here? How could I even hope to find her once I got back? I’d been able to move around more or less freely in LA because I was famous. People ran up and asked me for my autograph instead of trying to chase me out of the village with pitchforks and torches. When I did find whatever passed for civilization down here, I was going to be lucky not to get shot. I didn’t speak Spanish. I’d have to fight to survive, hurting innocent people trying to save their families from a monster.
Then the grief kicked in. Reverend Rifle was dead. Elsa had died right before my eyes. And Valentine. Jesus Christ, Val was dead, and I didn’t even know if she’d had a funeral. Who was there to bury her? Would anyone even claim her body? I was her only friend and I’d failed her. Failed her completely.
The guilt came swift on the heels of grief. Everyone close to me, dead or hunted. Maybe I’d saved the world from Technosaur and my mother, but they couldn’t have made their killer virus if I hadn’t helped Technosaur steal the Doom Raptor and destroy half of Manhattan.
Then, from out of nowhere, the shame. I’d betrayed Jenny with Sasha. Doing it the first night while we were out alone in the jungle was bad enough, but what the hell had I done when we’d fought in the darkness under the bunker? I’d known she was crazy, known she’d killed my goddam friends, and still when our genitals started grinding together my body had decided to participate and what had my brain done to stop it? What did my brain ever do? In my personal list of useless organs, my brain had to be a close second behind appendix.
Finally came the anger. Snarling, biting, spitting thoughts, targeting my own pathetic weakness and stupidity. But then my screaming thoughts started shouting that I hadn’t killed Val, or Elsa, or the rev. There were forces at work here bigger than me, forces that were playing with my life. I hadn’t voluntarily checked into the Butterfly House, I’d arrived unconscious and handcuffed. And when I’d finally been brave enough to talk about the Butterfly House, people I thought were my friends suddenly got all murdery. The most respected superheroes in the world silently supported this program, dudes like Golden Victory, Anyman, and She-Devil. Big guns. Big heroes. Bigger hypocrites. If they believed in the Butterfly House, why keep it secret? Why kill Val in order to silence her? Because, even if they hadn’t personally killed her, they had to have something to do with her death. It couldn’t be pure coincidence.
I rose, fists clenched. I gave another Tarzan scream, beating my chest. The jungle night had roared with bugs and frogs, but as my voice trailed off it went utterly silent. I breathed heavily, my nostrils flaring. I was going to beat the jungle. Then I was going to single-handedly beat the goddamned Lawful fucking Legion.
But, first, the jungle. I sighed as I studied the apparently endless sea of leaves spread out before me. This was going to take forever. I needed to get a move on. But first, breakfast. While I’d slumbered, fruit bats and countless bugs had nearly stripped the limbs bare, but I still managed to collect a handful of ripe fruit that were more or less intact. They tasted good, but I now had enough mental power to distinguish the finer shades of my remaining hunger. Carbs would keep me going a little while, but I needed protein. I could eat bugs, I guessed, but I’d also happily eat a bird or a lizard raw if I could get my hands on one. As I thought this, I spotted a single black and gray snake slinking out among the leaves. Should I grab it? Poisonous snakes, if memory served, had heads like arrows. This snake’s head was triangular, but would I call it an arrow? Maybe? Screw it. I wasn’t yet hungry enough to risk it.
I took off across the canopy at a brisker pace than I’d managed the day before. I was developing a better eye for what branches I could trust and getting a handle on the fine art of throwing my weight around, making the trees sway to help close the gaps to the next tree. I didn’t have any way of figuring out how far I was travelling per hour with any precision, but I felt like I was moving at least twice as fast as I had the first day.
Around noon, I caught a familiar scent. I tilted my head back and took a deep breath. Fruit! Ripe fruit, teasing around the fine edges of the breeze. I grew still, filtering through all the bird caws and insect buzzing, the hummingbird hums and the countless creaks and groans of limbs swaying gently in the breeze.
There. Just on the edge of hearing, the hoots and screeches of monkeys. I set off in their direction, certain it would lead me to another feast. I crossed a score of treetops, maybe more, before I saw them. The fruit tree was occupied by the monkeys I’d seen yesterday, now joined by a second species of much smaller monkeys, dark black, with thinner tails. The two monkey clans weren’t on friendly terms. The males of the larger species would growl and charge and the small monkeys would scatter. Then the small monkeys would regroup and charge in mass toward one of the larger monkeys that had gotten too far away from his brothers, who would turn tail and head back to the safety of numbers. With all the skirmishing, it looked like the fruit was barely being touched.
I leapt until I was only one tree away from the nearest monkeys and rose up, doing my Tarzan act once again, fangs bared. Now both tribes ran in unison. I swayed my tree across the gap, leaping onto a fruit laden branch that sagged beneath my weight, carrying me down to a
sturdier perch. Along the way I snagged two big ripe and juicy golden orbs. They were harder than the one’s I’d eaten yesterday, mostly intact, with just a touch of mouth-puckering bitterness.
I noticed one of the big monkeys still perched on a branch above me, screaming a string of monkey curses in my direction. I bared my teeth and growled at him. He got quiet, studying me closely. I jumped to a higher branch. He flinched, but held his ground. At this point, I noticed the monkey’s face was completely covered in bright red juice. Then I spotted the slender black form stuck in the crook of the branch next to him. I pulled myself up onto a branch nearer to him. He gave one more scream then leapt away. I climbed to where he’d been perched and found the broken body of one of the smaller monkeys. Like a tiny prop in a horror film, the top of its head was torn open, the skull split, the gray pink goo inside dripping out.
I’d known that monkeys sometimes ate smaller monkeys, but the shock of witnessing it felt primal. In the jungle, human rules and values had no meaning at all. I remembered the disgust I’d felt when Sasha had casually told me of eating dead humans.
Now, I looked at this dead monkey and felt hunger. It was meat, fresh meat. My mouth watered at the scent of blood. I picked it up and twisted what was left of the head until it tore free. I threw it away without looking at it. I was breaking a lot of internal taboos to eat this thing. It was going to be easier if I didn’t have to look at its face.
The thing was light, maybe two pounds. I dug my nails under the already torn flesh of the neck and started peeling. The skin came off with disturbing ease, though I had to use my teeth to bite off the hands and feet. I spat them out and tossed the bloodied fur away, then shook out the guts and tore them free. I was left with what looked like a tiny anatomy doll, all pink and gray and white, the muscles bound up in a translucent sheath of silvery membrane. I twisted one of the meaty thighs, breaking the bones that held it to the hip. I kept twisting, blood oozing through my fingers. In another minute, I’d worked the leg free. I stared at it. It was bigger than a chicken leg, smaller than a turkey leg, and an unappealing shade of brown now that I’d squeezed out so much blood. It smelled like raw steak, or maybe more like a raw pork chop. If I could have thrown it onto a grill for ten minutes, I wouldn’t have had a second thought about eating it.
I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and brought it to my lips. It wasn’t easy to chew. There wasn’t a lot of fat, and this monkey had obviously used its legs every day of its life. It was tough and sinewy and seemed to get bigger in my mouth the longer I worked on it. Like the small fish I’d eaten, taste proved bland. Not flavorless. It had kind of a musky, slightly cheesy taste unlike any meat I’d ever eaten before, but the taste was subtle. I guess I’d gotten used to every bite of meat I’d eaten in the civilized world being doused with salt.
I finished off the thigh meat after ten minutes of chewing and still felt hungry. I’d passed through the disgust barrier by this point, and figured it was pointless to waste any meat I could pull off the thing. I started on the tail, dug into the arms, worked at the meat on the chest and back and ribs. Finally, I felt full, and threw what was left of the corpse away.
I leaned back against the tree trunk and looked at my gore-encrusted hands. My face had to be a mess. I’d just eaten a fucking monkey.
And liked it.
I was an animal.
Here was the final proof. I belonged in the jungle. I’d thought of myself as unnatural, thought I didn’t belong out here in the wild. Now, I was perched in a tree with a belly full of raw meat, feeling more or less at home. My body was made for this landscape. Could I ever feel comfortable in civilization again? Had I crossed a line? Was the last vestige of my ability to think of myself as human gone for good?
I didn’t know. I was too full of monkey to think. I was back to primitive needs, and the first thing I needed was to get the blood off my fur since it was drawing flies. Looking down through the branches, I could see the swamp water glistening far below. Time for a bath.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Deeper Shadows
AS I SCRAMBLED down from the canopy, abundant sunlight lit the water. I stopped at the midpoint of my descent and stared, trying to make sense of why so much sun was getting through, before realizing that the swamp had turned into a river again. The main channel cut through the forest to my left barely a fifty feet away, wide, deep, and treeless.
I grabbed a sturdy vine and swung my way to a closer tree, climbing among the thick branches until I reached the edge of the channel. The water looked deep, moving lazily, ruddy in color. I jumped out as far as I could, landing with a splash. I swam into the center of the river, letting it wash off the blood and sweat and muck that encrusted me. I stretched out on my back with my arms spread wide and floated, letting the river carry me, soaking in sunlight. I wondered if I could float all the way to the sea. Then I heard a splash not too far away. I didn’t see anything, but my mind filled with pictures of caimans, anacondas, and piranhas.
In the river, I didn’t like my position on the food chain. I headed for the shallow, swampy water that ran under the trees. Once again, every fallen log looked like a potential predator. Every vine in the shadows looked like a snake.
As I reached a tree that looked particularly climbable, a moving shadow caught my eye. I turned my head, trying to puzzle out the shape I’d spotted in the interplay of light and darkness. Maybe it had only been my imagination?
My nostrils twitched. It wasn’t my imagination. I smelled something. A faint hint of sweat drifted through the air. Human sweat.
I stood motionless, quieting my breath, concentrating as I studied the visual chaos of the swamp. Suddenly, I saw twin glints of light, human eyes, and quickly my brain unraveled the puzzle before me. No more than thirty feet in front of me was a man, brown skinned, wearing only a loincloth. He was short and skinny, though a muscular, chiseled skinny. His straight black hair was trimmed in a bowl cut. He had a leather cord around his neck adorned with what I guessed to be caiman teeth. A single red parrot feather was tucked into his hair above his ear. Dark, tribal tattoos covered his wrists and ankles.
He was standing in a dugout canoe, holding a long pole with one hand. In his other hand he had something dark and brown. I focused on the shape, and realized he was carrying a dead monkey, a member of the larger species I’d seen.
I could tell from his eyes that he saw me but his expression was unreadable. Was I a monster? Some jungle spirit? Or a future meal, the biggest damn monkey he’d ever catch in his life?
We stood with our eyes locked for what felt like an hour. In the end, he made the first move, and that move was to pretend he no longer cared about me. He carefully placed the monkey in the floor of his canoe and took the pole with both hands. Slowly he glided away, into the deeper shadows.
I let out a long, slow, breath. Then I laughed. I laughed some more. How stupid. How stupid it was that I’d ever worried about whether or not I was an animal or a man. Of course I was an animal. Isn’t everyone?
FOR THE NEXT three days, I stayed close to the river. The swamp gave way to sandy banks. My diet took on more variety as I mastered the canopy. I found other wild fruit, including some I recognized, like small but juicy mangos. I decided to ape the hummingbirds and tried my hand at drinking nectar from flowers, which wasn’t a terribly efficient way to get little hits of sugar water, but still tasty. For protein, I got good at spotting these big brown grasshoppers hiding in nooks in the bark. Technically, I don’t think they were grasshoppers since there wasn’t a blade of grass anywhere around. They weren’t the worse thing I’d ever put into my mouth by a longshot, and were easy to catch once I learned to see past their camouflage. I probably ate two pounds a day.
On the morning of the next day, I slept well past dawn. I woke to a strange sound, stretching my arms to get my blood flowing as I tried to remember where I’d heard the sound before. It wasn’t a hummingbird, it was too deep and guttural. It was too steady to be a monkey
hooting. My eyes opened wide. A motorcycle! It sounded like a motorcycle coming from the direction of the river! Was there a road on the other side I hadn’t seen?
I clambered into one of the riverside trees. It wasn’t a motorcycle, but a small, green aluminum boat with an outboard motor. A short brown guy who could have been the swamp-man’s cousin was alone in the boat, seated at the back, steering the motor with one hand. He had a big oily cigar dangling from his lips, was pot-bellied, and wore a t-shirt that said Washington Redskins and a John Deer ball cap.
I jumped from my branch, falling earthward, grabbing vines at the last second to break my fall. I ran out onto the sandy bank, waving my arms and shouting, “Hey! Hey!” The outboard motor must have drowned out my shouts, because he was only about a hundred feet away when he finally saw me. I could see instantly that he wasn’t as cool-headed about my appearance as his cousin had been. The next thing I knew he was on his feet, aiming a big ass double-barreled shot gun in my direction. BOOM! He let loose with both barrels.
I winced as buckshot peppered my flesh. The force of the shot knocked him off balance. He fell backward, disappearing into the water. The now unguided boat banked sharply toward the shore, coming to rest a few yards upstream.
On the far side of the river, I saw the guy climb onto the bank. He took one look back at me, then vanished into the woods with cartoonish speed.
“I’m going to borrow your boat!” I called out. “Thanks!”
I pushed the boat into the current and jumped in. The motor had stalled out when the propeller hit the sandy bottom next to the shore. I started it up again with a single yank of the pull rope. I steered into the middle channel, then took an inventory of what my benefactor had left behind. A classic style metal lunch box, the sort that construction workers carry, held a freaking spam sandwich made with a greasy biscuit. I tore into it, groaning with pleasure as I swallowed. There was the salt I’d been craving. The lunch box also held a sad looking banana and a small paper bag full of peanuts still in the shell. I made short work of the banana and started tearing through the peanuts when I spotted the two glass jugs tucked under the middle seat of the boat. I pulled them out. Both were heavy with fluid. I unscrewed the caps and sniffed. Gasoline in the first one. In the second… water. I eyed it suspiciously. I’d been living off juice for days without getting sick. Did I want to risk my stomach on water of unknown origin? My brain said no, but my body said yes, and before I could argue with myself I’d drank at least a quart. Objectively, it was pretty terrible water, sulfurous, leaving me belching the scent of rotten eggs. But, at that moment, it was the best water I’d had in maybe a week. I had nothing to complain about.
