The Devil's Been Busy Read online

  The man beat his chest, his impressive junk jiggling with the movement. It must have felt nice, because he did it again, leaning over his beer-belly to watch his genitals wave in the air.

  “You can stop that now. Tell me what happened. Why are you naked?”

  The man bared his teeth, turned, and showed me his hairy butt.

  “That’s disgusting and totally unnecessary. Do you speak English?”

  The man turned around, his face long and sad. He rubbed his face with his hands and swayed back and forth on his feet, not speaking. He ran his hands over his body and held out his arms.

  He was trying to communicate with me, but either he didn’t or couldn’t speak. “Rocko?” I asked.

  His face lit up with joy, and he bounced up and down with pleasure that I’d guessed his name. “Okay, big guy, let’s go inside and see what we can see.” I passed Rocko, who let out a grunt-grunt sound and grabbed my ass.

  “No! That is not okay. Bad touch.”

  The entire primate enclosure was trashed. The glass fronts of the cages were either destroyed or cracked. The other inhabitants—the chimps, the macaques, and the baboons—must have been evacuated through the back doors, which were all open. Or, at least I hoped so, because otherwise we needed to wrassle up a barrel of monkeys.

  The viewing area was no better. Tables turned upside down, chairs broken, even the snack bar was ransacked. The largest cage was decimated, and I toed through the remains until I found a metal plate. I picked it up by a corner.

  Rocko, Mountain Gorilla, Care and feeding provide by Friends of the Zoo.

  “So, you were bitten by a were-gorilla and turned into a human? That’s one for the books. I had no idea that could happen.” Rocko moved closer to me, letting out a quiet hoo-hoo’ing sound.

  “Hey! Personal space. Back up.”

  Instead, Rocko moved closer and pawed at my hair. “I don’t need grooming. Wait! What was that you just ate? I don’t have bugs. Oh no, do I have lice? Oh, God, no lice, please. I can’t take it again. The nit combs, the shampoos, the multiple rounds of treatment, and taking off work because they aren’t allowed back to school when everyone knows the Smiths send their kids anyway, even when they’re scratching.” My voice escalated in pitch as I screeched the last, the tendons on my neck taught and visible.

  No, I wasn’t bitter.

  He combed through my hair again, gentle and methodical. I stood still and let him search, sighing in relief when he didn’t eat anything else. Go gorilla! Most thorough lice check ever. The zoo could rent him out to every elementary school in the state.

  My gorilla-man friend stayed within arm’s reach of me whichever way I went. I was looking for a weapon of some kind. That’s when I discovered that gorillas love rubber tubing. The black tubing was about two or three feet long and an inch thick, and it was everywhere. Rocko hooted in happiness as he saw a piece twisted into a knot. He picked it up and banged it against an upturned table, watching it hit and spring back with a huge smile on his face.

  I grabbed a nice long section that wove through some slats in one of the cages, untwisted it, and flicked it like a whip, grinning from ear-to-ear when it made a sharp cracking sound in the air.

  Rocko held his rubber tubing toy in one hand while he used the other to retrieve an orange from the floor. The fruit basket from whence it came was upside down, and the fruit, slightly more bruised than normal, lay on the floor. He snagged the orange, opened his mouth to take a big bite, peel and all, when a tiny monkey arm snatched it out of his hands. He and I both looked up and saw a collection of skinny little black-masked monkeys sitting on the girders above. One was eating his purloined orange with glee, and, on seeing Rocko’s shock, turned to show the gorilla-man his butt, farting a stream of air that nearly blinded me.

  Even blind, I couldn’t miss the most remarkable thing. The monkey’s balls were bright blue. The entire monkey was tan with black and a little white except for the gonads, which were as blue as the sky. I stared open-mouthed, wondering if the monkey was hard up or if this was normal. He was certainly acting perky, and the troupe chittered at us in the most condescending manner.

  Crash! Boom! The blue-balled monkeys sped off. Rocko and I jumped at the noise, which came from the animal keepers’ and veterinarians’ supply area. I pulled my sleeve over my hand to give it some protection and grabbed a sharp piece of glass from the wreckage on the floor. Rocko copied me. I shoved mine into my sweatshirt pocket. Naked Rocko was stumped by that one.

  “No, no, big guy. No glass for you.” I leaned in to take the glass from him but stopped when he stood his full height and stomped on the ground, screeching and hooting.

  “Alright. Rocko wants sharp glass, Rocko gets sharp glass. Don’t apes use tools, anyway? Or is that chimpanzees? Whatever, just don’t hurt yourself.”

  Rocko grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me behind him, the silverback in him taking charge. Although he looked like a big hairy construction worker, he was a gorilla in a man suit. I considered my options and decided that if the silverback wanted to go first, I’d let him. Probably couldn’t stop him anyway, but I was worried. He was a victim in all of this, and that made me mad.

  The two of us moved forward “hunting wabbits” style and peered through a broken doorframe to see what had caused the racket.

  I imagined that a were-gorilla would be big. I mean, gorillas are sizeable animals. I didn’t expect this, however. Rocko curled his lower lip under and let out a low, menacing growl that made me glad he was on my side. I patted his arm in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.

  The were-gorilla was approximately twelve feet tall, maybe more. Hard to say. I gave it a good estimate and finally decided that if he stood in a pool’s diving area, his head would be well above water. His chest was proportionately broad, and his hands were the size of serving platters. He was eating, and had been eating for a while, if the mass of slimy detritus around him was any signal.

  I pulled back. Rocko pulled back, too. I hesitated. Rocko hesitated right along with me.

  I exhaled and said, “I’m going in.” Rocko exhaled, too, which let loose a waft of noxiousness. I shifted my eyes to his face. “What the hell do you eat?” Rocko wrinkled his nose for a moment, and then pointed to the corner to a pile of fruit, leaves, and bamboo shoots.

  “You pushed all of the bananas to the side. Don’t like bananas?” Rocko stuck his tongue out. “Hum. Good to know. Animal Planet got it wrong.”

  I peeked around the corner and suddenly experienced an epiphany. He’s a were-gorilla. I could talk to him. Were-animals were usually sentient.

  I slipped out from behind the doorframe and stood under the metal overhang that protected the food and supplies. Rocko lumbered out after me and put his body between mine and what had been, and hopefully still was, Dr. Alupo, primatologist.

  I shoved my way around Rocko, to which he grunted his displeasure but I ignored him. “Dr. Alupo! My name is Jess Friedman, and I’d like to talk with you.”

  Alupo turned, training his eyes on me like one would an annoying gnat.

  “A girl? They sent a girl to stop me?” His voice was guttural, but understandable. And, as much I hated to admit it, his point was valid. He outweighed me by at least a thousand pounds.

  “Not to stop you.” I paused. “Okay, yes, to stop you. But not by force. I’m here to talk. We seem to have some miscommunication here. You’ve turned a gorilla into a man, sort of, and ruined the entire enclosure…”

  Alupo opened his mouth, revealing gigantic pointy teeth and screamed the scream of the damned. My hair blew back, and I stumbled from the force of it. Rocko wrapped his arm around my waist and held onto the doorframe.

  “Thanks for the assist, big guy,” I whispered. I was so shocked that I didn’t even mind that Rocko held me to his naked body and seemed to like it, by all available evidence.

  I pushed my way out of the embrace and yelled as loud as possible. “So, I guess you’re saying you don’t want t
o talk?”

  “I like who I am now, tiny, weak, putrid human girl. I’m strong now. Invincible!”

  “I’m not putrid. I smell fine.” I sniffed my underarm to be sure. All good. “You know that the longer you stay in that form, the more likely you are to lose your humanity, right? Soon, you’ll just be a hormonally overactive gorilla. Large for your size, but unintelligent.”

  Rocko smacked my arm.

  I bowed my head in shame. “I’m sorry. Sincerely, Rocko.”

  “Let me amend,” I yelled to Alupo. “You won’t be able to read, write, do math, all of the academic-y things that get you tenure. Hard to use a computer with fingers like the ones you’re sporting. And, no doubt about it, your nude modeling days are over.”

  Alupo’s nostrils flared as he bent his head to be equal height with mine, reminding me of a pissed-off guard dog deciding if you were friend or foe. I stumbled, but managed to strike out with the rubber tubing, smacking the bad boy on the nose. He yelped and backed up. I attacked, whipping his toes with the tubing, chortling with each smack of the rubber on his feet.

  “Take that, you overgrown ape! Bet that stings! Turn back to human and let’s settle this. No one else has to get hurt.”

  Alupo swung an arm, batting me about fifty feet. I survived because I made a soft landing in a pile of crap. Literally.

  “Ugh! That hurt.” I slid further into the muck so that my pants and the back of my shirt were covered in monkey manure. The goo sucked me down like quicksand, and I couldn’t extricate my right foot at all. My body was bruised head-to-toe, and while I felt okay now, I was going to pay for it big time later.

  “What is it you want?” I shouted, leaving my boot where it was but pulling so that at least my foot came with me.

  “A little acknowledgment, that’s all, maybe a Nobel Prize in biology. I trekked through mountains, climbed trees, lived through multiple episodes of Montezuma’s revenge, and even survived a bout of Dengue fever to make this discovery. And what happened when I wrote it up? Ridicule!”

  “That’s terrible. I’m very sorry for you, but the human mind is trained to ignore things it can’t explain. It’s amazing what our brains will do to explain away something bizarre.”

  I was worried about Rocko, who was beating his chest and roaring. Before I could stop him, he charged Alupo, throwing his considerable body weight, coupled with good momentum, at Alupo’s leg.

  Alupo shook him off without a second’s thought and kept eating, talking with his mouth full, spitting food in the air, and letting it dribble down his body. He sneered, more food squishing out between his incisors to plop on the ground.

  “I had evidence and witnesses, although the other scientists with me on that day denied that it happened. We saw him. We saw a man change into a gorilla right in front of us!” Alupo growled. “After being rejected by the entire science community, I went back into the jungle and hunted for that man for six months.”

  I ran toward Rocko and executed a second base slide through the discarded and half-eaten food. Pretty sure the orange stuff was cantaloupe. Hoped the orange stuff was cantaloupe. Poor Rocko’s head was weaving back and forth and his eyes were glassy. I practically saw birdies flying round his cranium. I grabbed Rocko’s massive arm and pulled with all my strength. We slid a few feet, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move Rocko by myself.

  I talked at Alupo to buy time. “How did you convince him to bite you?”

  “Ah! Good question. Hold on a moment.” Alupo opened a jar of peanut butter, shoved two fingers in, and scooped out a mouthful. “Mmslsmmmm garf.”

  “Chew, then swallow, please. Talking with your mouth full is rude, and I can’t understand you anyway.”

  He swallowed and burped. “Sorry. As I was saying, and as you guessed, he wouldn’t voluntarily bite me, but I tricked him. I followed him until the next full moon, watched him change, and then shot him with my rifle. In his pain and rage, he didn’t have control. I placed my bicep in his mouth, shoved my finger into the gunshot wound for added incentive, and voila!”

  “He bit you.”

  “Umhummm. Wasn’t sure I’d live through it, but here I am, making a scene, getting TV time.” He gestured at the sky where helicopters circled above. “I’m living my true self.”

  “Oh, don’t use that line. There are real people out there doing the hard work of living their true selves, and you took a dangerous shortcut. You’re living a lie, and it will be a short lie because you need to change back.”

  “I’ll title my lecture ‘Gorilla from the Inside Out,’” he said, shoving a dozen apples down his gullet. “I’ll be famous. The most famous primatologist in the world and no one will laugh at me.”

  While the good doctor was glorying in his imaginary fame, I was trying to rouse Rocko. “Rocko, get up,” I begged. “I can’t move you. Come on. Can you sit up, not even stand, just sit?” Rocko stirred and made a groggy attempt to sit up.

  I continued talking to Alupo. “I get it. You feel rejected, and that’s made you want to hurt those that hurt you. What made you become a primatologist in the first place?”

  “My dad was one, and my mom was a primate veterinarian. I wanted to be a circus clown, but that wasn’t acceptable in my family. No! It had to be science or nothing. Do you know that I was accepted to Clown College and everything?”

  “I don’t think that made it on your CV.”

  “Anyway,” Alupo said, shoving heads of lettuce in his yapper, “I was on safari with them half the year anyway, so eventually I let gravitational pull take over and did what was easiest. I followed in their footsteps.”

  “I’m sure they were proud of you.” I placed my hands under Rocko’s shoulders and heaved. We got another few feet.

  “No, they weren’t proud,” Alupo responded, and I could have sworn there were tears in his eyes. “I made the mistake of staring a troupe leader, a silverback, directly in the eyes, and it was all the team could do to get out of there in time without any of us losing our heads. We lost all our equipment and our records. Plus, the troupe never let us near them again. Five years of patient habituation, and I blew it with a look.”

  “I can see why you’d be resentful of something like that.” I checked Rocko’s eyes to see if the pupils were dilated.

  “What I want to know, and this is a purely scientific question, primatologist to monster hunter, how are you avoiding the change? It’s daytime. You should be changing back.”

  Alupo’s grin was the most gruesome thing I’d seen in a long time. “Well,” he said, munching a pint of strawberries, “I realized that the change takes energy.” He waited for me to put the rest together.

  I smacked my forehead. “I got it. That’s why you’re constantly eating. You need fuel to maintain the change.”

  “Got it in one. Luckily, I have a big appetite. Hey! Thieves!”

  The blue-balled monkeys formed a chain, tail to arm, and dropped down to steal a bunch of grapes from the were-gorilla, who had been about to drop them in his maw. They showed no fear of the monstrosity and, in fact, twittered and chirped like they thought this game was a lot of fun. They dropped to his back, head, and front, crawling all over him like ants at a picnic. The larger ones distracted the were-gorilla while the sneakier, smaller ones, went after the food.

  “Damn vervets!” Alupo yelled. He smacked at them with his Frisbee hands, but the monkeys were dexterous speed demons, and he couldn’t catch a single one. I, for my part, thanked them for the distraction.

  “Rocko, come on. I know what to do now.” Rocko blinked at me a few times but finally he struggled to his feet, shaky and unstable. I let him stand there a moment to get his bearings, but one moment was all we had.

  Alupo kicked at his tiny vervet tormentors and missed me by inches. “Run, run, Rocko,” I urged.

  “Scat!” Alupo waived his arms in the air, trying to catch the trickster vervets. I shoved Rocko away, then ran in the opposite direction, toward Alupo, and sliced at the wer
e-gorilla’s Achilles tendon with my pointy glass shard. The first cut was shallow, just a graze along the skin, but it must have hurt. Alupo roared, and seeing the opening, I snuck in a second time and sawed away in the same location, dancing and skipping out of the way of his hands and feet, working at it until blood sprayed into the air and fountained to the ground.

  Losing an Achilles tendon would slow him down—heck, it would slow anyone down—but I needed even more time. That’s when I saw them.

  A hose and fire sprinklers. A little-known fact about gorillas is that they hate the rain. They can’t swim and in real-life just sit there, letting the rain sluice down their bodies while they pout in total misery. I slid to a stop, dropped my rubber tubing, and unwound the hose. “Grab this, Rocko.” Rocko stayed close, despite my earlier requests for him to run. He snagged the hose and hauled it in front of him, swallowing at the sight of the oncoming one-legged, hemorrhaging were-gorilla, but the courageous gorilla-man didn’t budge an inch. I turned on the water full blast. “Hold on tight, Rocko!”

  The hose was industrial size and had the power to go with it. I guess if you’re using it to clean out gorilla cages, you needed some force behind the flow. Rocko recoiled at the blast but braced himself, kept his body behind it, and aimed the water straight at Alupo.

  “Good job, Rocko,” I yelled. I pointed at the dung. “Spray the crap pile!” Rocko screwed his face up, not understanding. I was several feet away, hauling a box over so I could reach the fire alarm, so I did the only thing I could think of. I squatted, squeezing my face in concentration in an imitation of pooping. Say what you will, it worked. Light dawned in the gorilla man’s eyes, and he chuffed-chuffed, baring his teeth. He sprayed the poopy mountain and hooted as the pile dissolved into a swirling swamp of excretory discharge. Yeah, it looked, and smelled, as bad as it sounds.

  The were-gorilla wrinkled his nose and fled-hopped in the other direction, growling in a way that sounded more gorilla-like than before. He couldn’t escape the water, though, as I flicked on the fire alarm and the sprinklers, high-grade and huge, and created a rainstorm on a sunny day. The were-gorilla stopped and gave into instinct. He sat, miserable and motionless, as gorillas in the wild do, the water droplets falling on his shoulders while the whorl of fecal feculence pooled around his body and got into his bleeding cut. I could only hope for a virulent infection.